50
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
Kafka knew the world of the dream better than the rest of
us, he was not indebted to Freud but to his personal suffering. He
called himself, at last, "a citizen of this other world." He was not
like the rest of us, the nocturnal visitors, who are favored on return
with a merciful amnesia or dim recall. He had taken up his ghostly
residence there, and habituation had given his eyes a special kind
of night vision so that the forms and events of the dream which or–
dinary dreamers call uncertain and indistinct were tangible and real,
capable of description in fine detail. Even the texts of his own dreams,
recorded in his notebooks, are remarkable for the recall of detail and
the visual preciseness.
The danger in such intimacy with the dream world is that the
connections to the other world may be lost, and this danger was real
and known to Kafka. His writing was the bridge, the connection be–
tween the two worlds; it was the strongest of the bonds which united
him with the real world. And the writings themselves told the same
story of the danger, or the failure, or the impossibility of human
connections.
He wrote his biography in his symbolism of lost connections–
the intercepted letters, the interrupted coitus, the telephones with the
connections to nowhere. There is the indescribable loneliness and
sadness of the little train in "The Railroad of Kalda" which makes
its way into the frozen interior of Russia and regularly comes to its
end in the middle of the wilderness, never to reach its destination.
It is a train without mission, bearing a tiny freight and a few pas–
sengers in the course of the year, running its course between nowhere
and nowhere. At the train stop the company's agent dwells in soli–
tude in an abandoned wooden shed, in despair of life and afraid
of death. The Kalda story, too, is unfinished. No man can write
the end of his autobiography.
These symbols of lost connections, like all powerful symbols
(and unlike those symbols which are plucked cheaply from dream
books), are highly stratified and rich in latent meaning. They speak
of the failures in human connections and communication which are
recurrent motifs in Kafka's writing and his life. The wretched rail–
road of Kalda, once conceived by its owners in a surge of capitalist
daring and hope, has come to nothing, a toy train chugging its way
through vast space to its absurd and melancholy end
in
the wastes.
