BOOKS
WELL-INTENTIONED/ WELL-EQUIPPED
THE FROZEN SEA: A Study of Franz Kofko. By Charles Neider. Oxford.
$3.50.
RAGE FOR ORDER: Essays in Criticism. By Austin Warren. University of
Chicago Press. $3 .00.
ON THE ILIAD. By Rachel Bespoloff. Translated -by Mory McCorthy.
Bollingen Series. Pantheon. $2.50.
THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, Broce.
$3.00.
THE COMMON READER AND THE SECOND COMMON READER. By
Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, Broce. $4.00.
Charles Neider's book on Kafka begins most encouragingly. For
its first few chapters I thought that here at last was a sensible treatment
of Kafka, a biographical interpretation based on the soundest of evi–
dence: obvious correspondences between private life and public per–
formance. These opening chapters establish the dominance of the father–
image in much of Kafka's writing, by intelligent use of biographical
data and analysis of the novels and tales in the light of the "Letter to
My Father" which Max Brod cites in his life of Kafka. This approach
was at least a change from the theological ax-grinding that has charac–
terized a good deal of Kafka criticism, revealing so much about the
mental states of some of his readers and so little about the writer: a
tendency against which a reaction seems to be setting in, if one may
judge from Neider's book, Austin Warren's essay on Kafka in
Rage
for Order,
and a recent essay by Eliseo Vivas in the
Kenyon Review.
But, alas, the absence of salvationism in Neider's treatment apparently
left a vacuum which he chose to fill with Freud: the search for God
is replaced by a search for the unconscious. The last three chapters
of his book, in which he expounds and defends this psychoanalytical
interpretation of
The Castle
and
The Trial,
were admirably reviewed,
no doubt unawares, by Vivas in a sentence of his article: "Psychoanalytic
criticism is seldom practiced by properly trained therapists for their pur–
poses; it is, as a rule, written by amateur psychoanalysts whose insensi–
bility to the aesthetic values and indifference to the philosophic content
587
