520
PARTISAN REVIEW
purely spiritual in which matter is altogether eliminated." Burnham
must be praised for not dragging the term "mysticism" into the dis–
cussion, a word that is currently reeling under as great a load of arbitrarily
discarded meanings as the word "democracy." Nevertheless he ends up
by accusing Kafka of a mystic doctrine of pure spirit, known as "gnostic–
ism" in Christian times, elements of which appear even in Paul, although
under control of prophetic and Christian ideas. You can become a
mystic for one of two reasons, out of hatred for the world or out of a
natural spiritual avocation-for love of pure spirit, in other words.
Burnham sets himself the task of finding either of these two things
in Kafka, and I do not think he has succeeded or even begun to succeed.
First, the evidence for Kafka's hatred of life. Burnham writes,
"This means then, that Kafka makes no attempt to imitate, or display,
the material, the natural world. . .. "All he means is that Kafka has
abandoned the naturalistic attempt to present the fullness of life in
its continuum. Kafka's interest is
in
precisely "the connective tissue"
that Burnham claims he dissolves. The naturalist novelists thought of
the connective tissue as the sequence of natural contingencies. Since
they had an atomistic and roughly Lockean view of human mind, cor–
responding to the collapse of intellectual disciplines in the nineteenth
century, they conceived of the continuum as outside of mind. James
was educated in this tradition and we find strong evidence of the Flau–
bert-Turgenev continuous-description method in an early novel like
The Bostonians.
Later in his life, James more and more scrapped this
ideal in favor of a moral crux, but never scrapped it to any extent com–
parable to Kafka. Kafka saw the continuum entirely in mind and the
"natural" sequence of his stories is the sequence of the mind's attempts
to make a rationally coherent scheme of existence. That is why we
are finding today, as Burnham writes, that " ... the condition of Kafka's
hero is not in the least fantastic or peculiar. It is exactly and literally
the human condition." That is, it is the condition of the rationalist, and
the very irrationality of it, the perpetual sensation of falling away,
is due to the heat of Kafka's rational ideals combined with his intel–
lectual honesty. I am waiting for some word on Kafka from the Thomist
critics, Winters and Maritain, because he is closest to them in his spirit
and most damaging to them in his conclusions.
Since only so much of the material world as is essential to locate a
spiritual reality is necessary to Kafka's art, that is all he gives us. But
he does emphatically give us that much. He does describe faces, tex–
tures, "nature," character, etc., very minutely when that is necessary. We
learn about Josephine's size, color, mannerisms, strength of voice, the
quality of her talent, and so on. Kafka's object not being to tell a
"story" about Josephine, to trace a phase of her development, that is,
