Can AI Do Esoteric Reading?
Deciphering Kafka’s “Great Wall of China”
In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote “The Great Wall of China,” a perfectly distilled conspiracy theory in the form of a short story. Few readers note the conspiracy. Is an AI chatbot up to the task?
Bing Reads Kafka
I asked the AI-powered Bing chat to “Summarize Kafka's ‘The Great Wall of China’ in 200 words more or less”:
The story is narrated by an elderly man who participated in the construction of the Great Wall of China. He reflects on the reasons and methods behind the project, which was built in disjointed segments by different groups of workers. He also reveals some of the secrets and legends surrounding the wall, such as the existence of a hidden message from the emperor and the fate of the first leader of the construction. He questions the meaning and value of the wall, which was supposed to protect China from the northern nomads, but also isolated it from the rest of the world. He wonders if the wall will ever be completed and if it will fulfill its purpose. He concludes by expressing his admiration for the emperor, who he believes has a divine plan for China and humanity.
That’s not entirely accurate. It completely invents “the first leader of the construction” and misinterprets the Emperor’s role, though it captures the basic premise. (More complex prompts led Bing further off-track.)
I then asked Bing to “make an argument in five points that Kafka’s ‘The Great Wall of China’ is a conspiracy theory.” It failed to capture Kafka’s subtleties.
“The narrator of the story is an unreliable witness who admits that he does not have direct or verifiable knowledge of the wall or the emperor, but only hears rumors and legends from other workers and officials. …
This misses Kafka’s subtlety. The narrator worked on the Wall and, while his experience is limited, he does not rely only on “rumors and legends.”
The emperor is a mysterious and distant figure who never communicates with his subjects or shows any interest in their welfare.
This is also off-track. A parable within the story suggests that the Emperor does try to communicate: “The Emperor … has sent a message to you ….” However, the vast palace prevents the messenger from ever delivering any messages. Kafka’s portrayal is of a distant, unknowable Emperor, more a hidden God than a tyrant.
Bing suggests that the Emperor is the driving force behind the wall, adding hallucinatory details about the Emperor that have no basis in the story:
“He [the Emperor] is surrounded by a complex and secretive bureaucracy that controls and manipulates the information and the resources of the empire. … The wall also creates a sense of awe and obedience among the people, who are made to believe that they are part of a grand and divine plan that only the emperor knows and executes. … The wall is a symbol of the emperor’s power and will…. The wall is not subject to any rational or moral criteria, but only to the emperor’s whims and desires. The wall is a manifestation of the emperor’s paranoia and megalomania, which alienates him from his people and reality.
Bing misses is the the key to the story: it is not the Emperor but the “high command” or leadership (“Führerschaft” in the German original) that constructs the wall, and the path to understanding the story is to investigate the real reason behind the wall’s construction. that is ruled out by Bing’s view that,
The wall does not serve any practical or defensive purpose, but only a symbolic and ideological one.
The practical purpose of the wall is the heart of the story.
Esoteric Reading
Kafka’s story isn’t about historical China but a vision of surreal China. He draws on other distorted accounts for literary effect. It is not helpful to ask if Kafka represented cultural realities accurately. We should ask what effects he achieves. These operate on multiple levels.
Esoteric reading of The Great Wall of China involves treating the story as a hostile witness. Hidden meanings are revealed by examining the story closely, probing its incongruities, contrasts, ironies, and contradictions. Just reading it once won’t reveal its depths; understanding it demands critical analysis of techniques and historical connections. (An expert could write a book on related aspects of Kafka.) Here, I offer an esoteric reading to suggest that AI is not (yet?) adept at reading between the lines.
Bing’s performance suggests that current publicly available GPT neural-network models are not up to challenge of esoteric reading. Esoteric reading requires assessing multiple associations that cut across the surface meanings of a text. In principle, AI should be well set up for this, because it is designed to frame meaning in terms of semantic similarity between pieces of text. But it is better at synthesizing a huge bunch of information that it gets out there than it is at digging into finely detailed tensions in here, in a single text. Esoteric reading involves generating and assessing shifting counter-narratives on the fly, constructing a story-within-this-story.
Bing’s performance shows that current GPT models lack the capability for such reading. This task requires assessing complex associations that cut across surface meanings. (Similarly we could ask how a computer might make sense of humour, as Robert Heinlein’s did in his 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). While AI can frame meaning by semantic similarity, it excels more at synthesizing large volumes of general information than analyzing subtle tensions within a single text. Esoteric reading requires a story-within-a-story approach.
Arthur Melzer writes in Philosophy Between the Lines that esoteric reading starts with literal interpretation. We only venture beyond the most obvious reading if problems or contradictions point us there. The surface itself must point you beyond it.” The final line of Kafka’s story hints at this esoteric quality: “… for that reason I shall not proceed any further at this stage with my inquiry into these questions.” Why does the narrator stop suddenly? Why does the narrator stop suddenly, after his wandering, mind-bending tale – a favourite of (perhaps dreamed by) Jorge Luis Borges? What is Kafka’s narrator afraid of revealing?
The narrator’s worry isn’t about the Emperor’s reaction. The Emperor is remote. China is so large that its people “do not know what Emperor is reigning, and there exist doubts regarding even the name of the dynasty. … Similarly our people are but little affected by revolutions in the state or contemporary wars….” The story was written during WWI, and Kafka was well aware of the Russian Revolution.
So, if the Emperor is not in charge, who is? The story’s surface answer is tradition: “a life that is subject to no contemporary law, and attends only to the exhortations and warnings that come to us from olden times.”
The deeper answer, and the story’s conspiratorial aspect, is that the high command is using the wall to step into the gap: a coup is in progress: “when we … had scrutinized the decrees of the high command … [we] discovered that without the high command … our tasks in the great whole would be impossible. … The reason the wall was built is not to protect the country from external threats, nor to obey a command from the Emperor, but for reasons known only to the high command.”
There are two views of religion here. The Emperor is a distant figure of faith, the centre of a traditional mode of religious authority. The high command is hands-on, rational and concrete. Its micromanages the entire nation – for efficiency in construction, of course – and this gives their project a different transcendent quality:
In the office of the command — where it was and who sat there no one whom I have asked knew then or knows now — in that office one may be certain that all human thoughts and desires revolved in a circle, and all human aims and fulfillments in a countercircle. And through the window the reflected splendors of divine worlds fell on the hands of the leaders as they traced their plans. … If I may be allowed to express such ideas about the high command, then I must say that in my opinion the high command has existed from old time, and was not assembled, say, like a gathering of mandarins summoned hastily to discuss somebody's fine dream in a conference as hastily terminated …. Far rather do I believe that the high command has existed from all eternity, and the decision to build the wall likewise.
Kafka’s Conspiracy Theory
Reading Kafka, one discovers that the wall itself is irrelevant; it is the construction process that matters. The title’s literal translation—“During the construction of the Chinese Wall”—raises the real question: what happened during the building process?
Kafka hints that tradition holds the nation together, while the high command uses rational planning to take advantage of this vacuum, creating centralized control through the wall’s construction. The wall is presented as a defense against external threats, but its true purpose lies between the lines.
The justification for the Wall’s odd construction process does not hold water:
the incorruptible observer must hold that the command, if it had seriously desired it, could also have overcome those difficulties that prevented a system of continuous construction. There remains, therefore, nothing but the conclusion that the command deliberately chose the system of piecemeal construction. But the piecemeal construction was only a makeshift and therefore inexpedient. Remains the conclusion that the command willed something inexpedient. Strange conclusion!
What was the deeper, hidden expediency? What was the true purpose of the wall?
The clue lies in a classic technique of esoteric reading: noting textual parallels. The narrator earlier uses words that prefigure the story’s end: “In those days many people … had a secret maxim which ran: Try with all your might to comprehend the decrees of the high command, but only up to a certain point; then avoid further meditation.” The narrator tells us that this “secret maxim … has at most only a restricted relevance for my present essay.” This allows him to ask a daring question: “my inquiry is purely historical … so I may venture to seek for an explanation of the system of piecemeal construction which goes farther than the one that contented people then.”
The explanation, implied by the story, is a conspiracy theory: the Emperor’s rule exists only through the proxy of tradition, and the high command stages a coup through rationalized corporate program that mobilizes and unifies the nation with centralized mechanisms of control. Once these mechanisms are in place – “because so many were trying to join forces as far as they could for the achievement of a single aim” – the high command steps into the power vacuum created by the Emperor’s distance. The wall is presented as a defence against external threats; but its real result is a new centre of power. The narrator stops just when this answer is all but stated. He has come too close to speaking truth to power.
A biblical metaphor strengthens this conspiratorial reading of the story: “in those days things were achieved scarcely inferior to the construction of the Tower of Babel, although as regards divine approval … strongly at variance with that work.” In this new context the biblical tower offers a different lesson: “the Tower of Babel failed to reach its goal … because of the weakness of the foundation. … The Great Wall alone would provide for the first time in the history of mankind a secure foundation for a new Tower of Babel. First the wall, therefore, and then the tower.” The tower – grounded on the wall – is a metaphor for the high command’s domination, gained through its rationalization of China’s productive forces:
How could the wall, which did not form even a circle, but only a sort of quarter- or half-circle, provide the foundation for a tower? That could obviously be meant only in a spiritual sense. But in that case why build the actual wall, which after all was something concrete, the result of the lifelong labor of multitudes of people? And why were there in the book … proposals worked out in detail for mobilizing the people’s energies for the stupendous new work?
Why indeed.
AI Strikes Out?
In this informal test, Bing fell short, as do many human readers. Esoteric interpretations cannot be proven true or false but gain strength through connecting subtle resonances. Because Bing looked only at surface features of the text, it missed these deeper connections.
AI might one day handle esoteric reading. Neural networks excel at pattern recognition but struggle to find coherence within a single text’s internal logic. Right now, AI chat functions return general overviews but are not equipped for the deeper analysis required by esoteric reading. (Try it yourself: can you prompt an AI chat to unravel the conspiracy theory that lies at one of the hearts of Gene Wolfe’s classic The Fifth Head of Cerberus?)
All quotes are from Willa and Edwin Muir’s 1933 translation. A translation by Ian Johnston is available here and here.