Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind Page 8
In Kafka’s world, just as in a Communist state, there is no real possibility of acquittal. In The Trial, the painter Titorelli, whose aid K. seeks because he has access to the Judges whose portraits he paints, tells him the position. Even if K. is acquitted and allowed to walk out of the Court a free man, he is only
… ostensibly free, or more exactly, provisionally free. For the Judges of the lowest grade, to whom my acquaintances belong, haven’t the power to grant a final acquittal, that power is reserved for the highest Court of all, which is quite inaccessible to you, to me, and to all of us. What the prospects are up there we do not know, and, I may say, do not even want to know.32
So the charge which may be temporarily lifted from K.’s shoulders may be laid upon him again at any time.
I suppose that, for most people, the sexual act is an important means of self-affirmation. Although it can be argued that sexual intercourse is impersonal, since it is designed by nature for the propagation of the species, the majority of people do not experience it in this way. Nor does the fact that many people feel a temporary loss of identity in merging with the beloved contradict their prior or simultaneous experience that, in sexual intercourse, they are expressing the essence of their physical and spiritual nature. But this way of affirming his identity as a man was barred to Kafka, at least initially. Kafka’s first sexual experience was with a shopgirl, soon after his twentieth birthday. In a letter he wrote to Milena seventeen years later, he recalled that
… at the hotel the girl in all innocence made a tiny repulsive gesture (not worth mentioning), had uttered a trifling obscenity (not worth mentioning), but the memory remained—I knew at that moment that I would never forget it and simultaneously I knew or thought I knew that this repulsiveness and smut, though outwardly not necessarily, was inwardly, however, very necessarily connected with the whole thing, and that just this repulsiveness and obscenity (whose little symptom had only been her tiny gesture, her trifling word) had drawn me with such terrible power into this hotel which otherwise I would have avoided with all my remaining strength.33
Max Brod records that “in later years he steered clear of dalliance, looked at the erotic side of life only from the most serious angle, and never told a dirty story or even stood for one being told in his presence. That is to say, he never protested against one; it simply would not have occurred to anyone to tell one in his presence.”34
Although in the last year of his life Kafka was able to move in with Dora Dymant and, one hopes, became able to enjoy some of the rewards of physical closeness, he refers to the step of actually living with her as “a reckless move which can only be compared to some great historical event, like Napoleon’s Russian campaign.”35
As everyone familiar with Kafka’s life knows, Kafka did from time to time have actual sexual involvements and, according to Max Brod, fathered a son of whose existence he remained ignorant. But, right up to, and including, his relationship with Milena, he thought of sex and himself as “dirty.” Marthe Robert, in her recently translated book, Franz Kafka’s Loneliness, interprets Kafka’s vacillation about women in standard Oedipal terms.36 She supposes that Kafka was unable to venture on marriage because, for him, all women were mothers, and sexual intercourse was therefore incestuous. This is a superficial interpretation which shows no appreciation of the terrible dilemma which Kafka, and others like him, actually face. Before his terminal relationship with Dora Dymant, Kafka’s two most important relationships with women were with Felice Bauer and with Milena Jesenská. Kafka contrived to keep these relationships almost entirely epistolary. During the five years of his relationship with Felice, the couple met no more than nine or ten times, often for no more than an hour or two. The same pattern was repeated, though for a shorter time, with Milena. Kafka perfectly exemplifies the schizoid dilemma: a desperate need for love nullified by an equally desperate fear of actual proximity.
In his letters to Felice, Kafka constantly abuses himself; says that he would be impossible to live with; that he is quite unable to manage life; that he is a hopeless person. This pattern of confessional self-abasement is repeated in the letters to Milena, to whom he also sent his diaries. There are people who feel themselves compelled to behave particularly badly with, and toward, those they love. They seem to be seeking something which they feel they never had: an unconditional love which accepts the very worst in themselves without rejection. Kafka, in these distressing letters, is seeking a total acceptance which demands nothing in return; the kind of love which a mother may be expected to offer her newborn baby who, although squalling, incontinent, and totally unaware of anyone else’s needs, is nevertheless entitled to a loving acceptance of a kind which it will never again experience. This kind of total demand is made by psychiatric patients in analysis who have been deprived or neglected in early childhood, and especially by those who have had to learn, too early in life, that love is a reward for compliance rather than a gift which is freely given. Kafka is looking for a relationship in which he is not required to adapt to the other person, since, all his life, he has tended to lose his sense of identity by never asserting himself and by striving to comply with the demands of the other.
After Felice has accepted his proposal of marriage in June 1913, Kafka writes letters in which he demands to know everything about her life, down to the smallest detail: what she is wearing, how she spends her time, what her room is like, whom she sees, what she eats. These obsessive inquiries can be interpreted in more than one way. To know exactly what the beloved is doing, every moment of the day, is reassuring. Even if she is too far away for actual control to be exercised, as was true of Felice, she is, in imagination, pinned down, potentially accessible at any moment. One can guess that, had they ever lived together, Kafka would have infuriated her by demanding to know, as anxious, insecure spouses often do, when she was going out, when she would be back, and so on. And such inquiries would not have been pathological jealousy, though this may be a part of the picture, but rather the intense anxiety of the small child whose very existence depends upon his mother’s actual presence.
Another way of looking at Kafka’s anxious inquiries is to realize that, by knowing every detail about the life of the girl to whom he was writing, he would be able to give reality to a person who, because he saw her so seldom, remained largely a figure of his imagination. This is a technique employed by some novelists, who lend their characters verisimilitude by inventing for them all manner of details of dress, habits, and surroundings, so that they end by knowing exactly how a particular character would behave in any situation demanded by the plot of the novel. By not becoming actually, physically involved with the women he loved, Kafka was better able to make them into denizens of his inner, imaginative world, the only world in which he felt he could cope with them.
At the same time, Kafka’s anxiety makes almost impossible demands. He used to carry Felice’s letters around with him, saying that they gave him continuous support and made him feel better and more competent. If she fails to reply at once, he is absolutely desolate:
Has there ever been, Felice, in the last three months, a single day on which you have not had news from me? You see, there hasn’t been such a day. But today, Tuesday, you leave me entirely without news; since four o’clock on Sunday I know nothing about you; until tomorrow’s delivery that will be no less than sixty-six hours, filled in my mind with every alternating good and bad contingency.37
This absolute, total dependency, this aching, unassuageable need is combined with a fearful anxiety about what would happen if she were actually there:
You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write (I can’t do much anyway), but in that case, I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself in excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind—for ev
eryone wants to live as long as he is alive—even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing. Writing that springs from the surface of existence—when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up—is nothing and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one is writing, why even night is not night enough.38
Kafka’s anxiety is twofold. On the one hand, probably rightly, he feels that his need is so great that no one could possibly meet it; or, if any woman were to attempt to meet it, he fears that she would be drained and ultimately destroyed in the process. On the other hand, if she were to be with him, his independence, his identity, and therefore his capacity to write would be annihilated.
Kafka’s anxiety in the presence of other people made him diffident to the point of self-effacement. Once, when visiting Max Brod, he woke up the latter’s father. “Instead of apologizing, he said, in an indescribably gentle way, raising a hand as if to calm him and walking softly on tiptoe through the room, ‘Please look on me as a dream.’”39
It is characteristic of such a man that he should prefer Nature cures to conventional medicine, and, for long periods, be vegetarian. In an aquarium he was heard addressing the fish: “Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don’t eat you any more.”40 He drank no alcohol, tea, or coffee, and never smoked. It is also characteristic that he should plan an idealist “Guild of Workmen without Possessions” in which members were not to be allowed money or valuables, but only the minimum of clothing and books and materials necessary for work. Everything else in this Utopia was to belong to the poor.
Self-effacement and self-denial of this kind is the very opposite stance from the joyous affirmation of one’s own identity to which I referred earlier. Kafka’s anxiety not only made him reluctant to compete, but also made him almost too acutely aware of what the other person was feeling. Overadaptation to the other means loss of the self as a separate entity. Only in the silent watches of the night, when Kafka was entirely alone, could he get in touch with his innermost depths and be really and truly himself.
In his penultimate letter to Felice, written after he knew that he had tuberculosis, he demonstrates that his wish to please is not really based on concern for what others are feeling, but upon his own wish to be accepted and to gain love. It is a remarkable piece of insight:
When I examine my ultimate aim, it shows that I do not actually strive to be good, to answer to a supreme tribunal. Very much the opposite. I strive to know the entire human and animal community, to recognize their fundamental preferences, desires, and moral ideas, to reduce them to simple rules, and as quickly as possible to adopt these rules so as to be pleasing to everyone. Indeed (here comes the inconsistency), to become so pleasing that in the end I might openly act out my inherent baseness before the eyes of the world without forfeiting its love—the only sinner not to be roasted. In short, my only concern is the human tribunal, and I would like to deceive even this, and what’s more without actual deception.41
Everyone who tries to suppress all aggression and self-assertion pays a price for doing so: “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.” It is no surprise that Kafka, the gentle ascetic, is haunted by horrific sado-masochistic fantasies: “… that I lie stretched out on the floor, sliced up like a roast, and with my hand am slowly pushing a slice of the meat towards a dog in the corner.”42
Torture, violence, flagellation are recurrent themes in both Kafka’s diaries and his fiction. But beyond and beneath the suffering, there is also a glimmer of hope. On March 13, 1915, he writes in his diary, “Occasionally the feeling of an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time the conviction of its necessity and of the existence of a goal to which one makes one’s way by undergoing every kind of unhappiness.”43
In that most terrifying of all his stories, “In the Penal Settlement,” we can get an idea of what that goal really is. When the officer in charge is explaining how the apparatus of torture and execution really works, he points out that it is so designed that the victim under the harrow does not die until twelve hours have passed. However, after the needles have been inscribing their message of judgment into the victim’s flesh for about six hours, a change comes over him:
But how quiet the man grows at the sixth hour. Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the harrow with him. Nothing more happens after that, the man only begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds.44
The most striking sentence in this extract is surely that in which the officer refers to his temptation to get under the harrow with the victim. Perhaps, if a man suffers enough, as he nears death, he will finally attain enlightenment: at last understand what law it is that he has transgressed, and come to terms with the guilt which is so deeply inscribed that it is an inescapable part of his physical being. When, near the end of the story, the officer does replace the condemned man, the machine goes wrong. The officer is deprived of enlightenment because he is killed prematurely and has not therefore suffered for long enough.
How is it that long endurance of suffering can bring enlightenment? Only, perhaps, when we do not try to avoid it.
Wordsworth, in his ode “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” regrets the passing of the child’s pristine vision of the world:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
But Wordsworth also recognizes that creativity has its origin in early childhood and that it is vital to preserve what links we can with what is past:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing …45
From what Kafka wrote, in his diaries, in his letters, and in his fiction, we may surmise that it was Hell rather than Heaven which lay about him in his infancy, and the hounds of Hell continued to pursue him. But Kafka realized that, for him, as for Wordsworth, the link with his childhood must be preserved. Most of us paper over our miseries with a variety of defensive devices. We put on masks; we pretend that what is important does not matter; we betray ourselves and therefore we betray others; we twist and turn, pose and pretend, drink, fornicate, and try to forget. This why we so often end up stereotyped and sterile.
Kafka, until nearly the end of his life, was tempted by suicide. Like Georg Bendemann in “The Judgement,” he was drawn to obey his father’s injunction that he had no right to exist. But Kafka, the man with no identity, forever ironic, gentle, self-effacing, was, in his inner world, courageous, uncompromising, ruthlessly honest. If his fate was to live under the harrow, that was where he had to be, and he was not going to wriggle out from it. As a writer, he not only did not flinch, but discovered his real identity. In a letter to Felice written in August 1913, he complains of the inaccuracies of a graphologist to whom she has evidently shown his writing. The graphologist has attributed “artistic interests” to him. Kafka writes: “Even ‘artistic interests’ is not true; in fact, of all the erroneous statements, that is the most erroneous. I have no literary interest, but am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else.”46
The self which he felt had been crushed in childhood, and which he feared would be crushed again by anyone who came too close to him, triumphantly asserts its uniqueness on the page; and we should not recognize and celebrate that uniqueness if Kafka had emancipated himself from suffering instead of laying hold upon it.
Kafka’s fear of the external world, of involvement with others, and of the loss o
f his own identity, made him seek writing as a retreat. Writing was the only way which he could be entirely himself, and yet still preserve lines of communication. Schizophrenics protect themselves in similar fashion. They retreat into an inner world in which they achieve all manner of wonderful things in spite of the machinations of their enemies and their perpetual fear of being engulfed and overwhelmed. Those who feel powerless in the external world commonly develop a compensatory inner world in which they are omnipotent; in which the hard facts of reality are denied and replaced by psychotic fantasies in which the subject is all-important and possessed of magical powers. Jung quotes a striking example of a schizophrenic who told him that the world was his picture book: he had only to turn the pages to see a new vision.47 Kafka was no stranger to omnipotence of thought. In his early story “Description of a Struggle,” he writes of a traveler who flattens out a steep road, causes an enormously high mountain to rise, and forgets to let the moon come up.48 Kafka also exhibited a paranoid side to his nature. In December 1917 he wrote to Max Brod about the mice who were invading his bedroom:
My reaction towards the mice is one of sheer terror. To analyze its source would be the task of the psychoanalyst, which I am not. Certainly, this fear, like an insect phobia, is connected with the unexpected, uninvited, inescapable, more or less silent, persistent, secret aims of these creatures, with the sense that they have riddled the surrounding walls through and through with their tunnels and are lurking within, that the night is theirs, that because of their nocturnal existence and their tininess they are so remote from us and thus outside our power.49
Kafka was not psychotic; but I believe that it was his writing which prevented him from retreating into a world of psychotic fantasy. For writing is a means of communication, and therefore a means of retaining contact with others, albeit at a distance. Indeed, for people of Kafka’s temperament, the gift of being able to write is an ideal way of expressing oneself, since it does not involve direct contact with others. Writing also serves another function for those plagued with horrors. Kafka told Janouch that writing “The Judgement” had exorcised a specter. So writing was not only a way of affirming his identity without direct involvement, but also a form of abreaction, of laying ghosts by confronting them and pinning them down in words. Kafka perfectly illustrates the fact that, for some people, writing, or some other form of imaginative activity, is a way of survival. I agree with Erich Heller, who writes of Kafka: “Of course, this is a disposition akin to madness, separated from it only by writing table, an imagination capable of holding together what appears to have an irresistible tendency to fall apart, and an intelligence of supreme integrity.”50