48
PARTISAN REVIEW
past week I suffered something very like a breakdown . . . "
" .. . impossible to sleep, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly,
the course of life. The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs
crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the
outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but
that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least
clash in a fearful manner. There are doubtless several reasons for the
wild tempo of the inner process; the most obvious one is introspection,
which will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue
each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in tum
to be pursued by renewed introspection." And later in the same
entry: "The solitude that for the most part has been forced on me,
in part voluntarily sought by me-but what was this if not com–
pulsion too?-is now losing all its ambiguity and approaches its de–
nouement. Where is it leading? The strongest likelihood is, that it
may lead to madness...." Later that month the panic gives way
to melancholy resignation. On January 28 he writes: " ... for I am
now a citizen of this other world, whose relationship to the ordinary
one is the relationship of the wilderness to cultivated land...." And
on the following day he writes: " ... it is only that the attraction
of the human world is so immense, in an instant it can make one
forget everything. Yet the attraction of my world too
is
strong...."
The mental crisis did not end as he feared in madness, but in
disease. This was the year of the onset of Kafka's tuberculosis. He
understood his illness and wrote to Brod, "My head has made an
appointment with my lungs behind my back."
Of the two worlds, Kafka's and "the human world," it was the
first that he knew best. Kafka wrote about himself, his inner exper–
ience, and the struggle with nameless tyrants, the lustful couples
who copulate within the sight of the law, the endless tribunal, the
comic-tragic bureaucrats and corrupt officials--all of these were not
conceived as allegories for his time but were events of inner life.
(His own comments and interpretations of his works repeatedly bear
this out.)
If
his writings achieve the effect of satire and broad social
caricature, it is because the dream is in itself a caricature of life; the
dream is in one sense an allegory. Moreover Kafka knew this and
understood it very well. In a conversation Janouch says to Kafka:
"The
Metamorphosis
is a terrible dream, a terrible conception."
