522
PARTISAN REVIEW
in
The Trial
with Fraulein Biirstner and Leni, both of which are en–
joyed and warmly presented.
If
it is the somewhat factitious warmth
of the erotic dream and comes under the rubric of sin, that is not to
say that Kafka "loathed" it. There is in Kafka, as in Mann, a strain of
bourgeois nostalgia. He never lost his respect for the virtues of "norm–
alcy" and speaks in his 1917 diary of "the joy of living the life of the
normal healthy man." This is surely not the Manichaean longing for
the fire-purification, nor for the paradoxical depths. "I actually envy all
marital happiness in its infinitely varied forms." Is this the voice of
Augustine?
There are, of course, enough traces of the light-dark, good-evil
dualism in Kafka to make Burnham's point sound reasonable. The
trouble with using a term out of a remote era in Christian history is
the amount of quite new and different data involved. We cannot blink
the fact that Kafka had no greater an involvement with spirit than
Mann, that his attitude toward art is in fact almost identical with
Mann's. It is the ambivalence of the bourgeois who thinks he has lost
his nerve and is thrown into a world of philosophical and theological
speculation alien to his nature. Kafka wanted to live as his century
lived. The following sentence from his diaries of 1921 should be con–
clusive evidence. "He who does not master life while alive must use one
hand somehow to ward off his despair over his fate-that is done very
imperfectly-but with his other hand he may record what he sees
beneath the wreckage.... "
Kafka's problem in his personal life was not the polarity of matter
and spirit but, if it must be labeled by a venerable medieval term, the sin
of acedia-"weariness, boredom, regret"- as he writes in the diaries.
"Only very rarely have I put behind me this borderland between solitude
and community." When he did put this state behind him momentarily,
it was to return to the "normal" pleasures. In 1922 he writes, "The
infinite, deep, warm, liberating joy of sitting near the crib of one's
child, facing its mother."
The unhappiness of Kafka is a very much more deep and complex
question than any simple set of traditional dualities, a situation more
close to our lives than we want to admit. It is the fear of malfunction
in an age when there is almost nothing to support the disintegrating
individual. It is the situation of the writer who is honest enough to face
that disintegration in all its solitary horror and who, because he has
hoped so much, himself aids the disintegration. The writer is literally
driven into intellectual and spiritual disciplines that are alien to him.
"Without ancestors, without marriage, without progeny, with an un–
bridled desire for ancestors, marriage, and progeny." This intimate an–
guish pf his diaries reveals what his preoccupations were. One might be
justified in seeing him as the type of the stripped, traditionless man,
