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PARTISAN RJEVIEW
IV
Even as a child, Kafka "found all the outward forms of the
Jewish religion ludicrous" (Kate Flores). He was contemptuous of
the "few trifling rituals" (his words) observed by his father. Though
affianced for years to a girl who loved him, he did not marry. In
later life, when friends were trying to bring him back to Judaism, he
was repelled by the elaborate Chassidic rites. He became a strict
vegetarian, abstaining even from fish. In his writings, we have seen,
the causal, material world dissolves. Physical reality he declares to
be evil, altogether evil. "The martyrs do not underestimate the body;
they cause it to be elevated on the cross.... What we call the physical
world is the evil in the spiritual one." The physical loathesomeness of
the insect Gregor Samsa is pointed enough. Sexual intercourse, when
it is referred to at all, is presented brutally by Kafka-the barmaid
on the dirty floor behind the bar.
These symptoms, from both life and work, could be multiplied.
They can be explained psychologically. From another point of view,
they show Kafka to belong to the ever-recurring tradition of Mani–
chaeism (even the vegetarianism was a rule of the original Mani–
chaeans). His world is split by the absolute Manichaean: division into
Good and Evil, which is identified with the division between Light
and Darkness, Spirit and Matter ("In a light that is fierce and
strong one can see the world dissolve").
As
with all Manichaeans,
the ambivalence remains: he longs for Matter, for the evil natural
social world, at the same time that he denies it; he is appalled by
Spirit even while he must seek it absolutely.
Kafka takes from Judaism and Protestantism not by any means
at random, but just what will reinforce the underlying Manichaeism:
not the ritual (a manifestation of Darkness and Evil), but the un–
nameable God of Whom no (material) image can be made; the ut–
terly spiritual Being of Protestantism, whose creatures must break
the statues and the stained-glass windows.
All sensuous pleasures are all-evil, Mani declared. The Perfect,
the Manichaean Elect, must wholly deny the world-deny the state,
the family, marriage, the body, matter.
As
a Manichaean, Kafka's aim must be to create an art that
is purely spiritual,
in
which matter is altogether eliminated.
Manichaeism, however,
is
a heresy, perhaps the great heresy. I
do not mean a heresy only in a formal theological sense, but a hl!man
heresy. From the human standpoint, the purely spiritual is nothing.
