190
PARTISAN R!EVIEW
the long paragraphs which are too barely stripped of usual human
concerns.
At the literal level, it is as if Kafka pours on the body of the
world a kind of acid, which dissolves all the connective tissue, leaving
only the discrete elements of an organism. He then selects from
among the elements according to an arbitrary will of his own, and
re-unites these by ligaments spun out of his own spirit. The laws,
therefore, of the world as we normally know it, do not, or need
not hold. The relations of space, time, causality, identity, the divisions
between dream and waking, reality and illusion, all the categories
through which we stabilize-and thus also in part hide-the flux
of experience are dissolved, or distorted. The ego's "reality principle"
is suspended.
In the new world, so created, a journey between two villages
(A Common Confusion)
can take ten minutes one day, ten hours
the next morning, and one second in the afternoon. Bouncing balls
(Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor)
can attach themselves, like a little
dog, to a master. A mouse singer can worry over her relations with
her people
(!
osephine, the Songstress),
a man's father can will him
a half-cat-half-lamb
(A Sport),
and the dead can rise
(The Hunter
Gracchus
or
The Married .Couple).
Laws of gravity need not apply
(as for the attendants in
The Castle,
or the floating dogs in
Investi–
gations of a Dog);
bridges can turn to look over their shoulders
(The Bridge).
When, in that world, a man changes into a bug
(as in
Metamorphosis),
or a rodent (or is it a rodent?) debates
internally, with the logical rigor of a rationalist metaphysician, the
strategies of his defense (as in
The Burrow),
it does not seem accurate
to discount what is happening by immediately interpreting in terms
of fable, fantasy, or illusion. I remember reading somewhere once
about a Patagonian tribe the adults of which on occasion were parrots.
Anthropologists, trying to explain this, had interpreted by saying
that the natives "felt like" parrots or imagined that "their souls en–
tered into parrots" or something of the sort. However, these explana–
tions seem to have had no relevance to what the natives meant, which
was just that they were parrots. The requirements of the rules by
which we carve from the flux what we accept as the real world do not
permit a man, overnight, to become an insect, or time to lengthen
abruptly or contract. But these rules do not apply, or apply only in
part, to the Kafkan world, just as the rules by which common sense
organizes visual experience do not apply, or apply only in part, to
the deliberately created visible reality of a cubist painting.
