KAFKA AND THE DREAM
51
This is the parable of Kafka's failure in the eyes of his father. And
the ridiculous railroad, this mockery of men's extravagant hopes and
ambitions, is Kafka's symbol for the failure of his own ambitions,
and for the failure of his lifelong struggle with an unconquerable
opponent, here represented as the vastness of a wilderness which can–
not be spanned by the tiny train, in real life by the figure of a
giant, the father, before whom Kafka remained an insignificant
dwarf as boy and grown man.
It
is the symbol for the unfinished
work, the uncompleted writings. It is the comment on Kafka's re–
ligious views, the failure to reach anything "beyond." And it is the
symbol of biological failure. The little train which is never to reach
its destination speaks eloquently and touchingly of Kafka's sexual
impotence. The little train comes to its end in the middle of the
wilderness, a full day's journey from Kalda, discharges its few pas–
sengers, its small freight, and returns. And the ground of this tiny
settlement was frozen solid, we are told. "I was too weak to conquer
the soil," said the company's agent. "A stubborn soil that was frozen
solid until spring and that even resisted the sharp edge of my new
axe. Whatever seed one sowed in it was lost."
It is a striking fact that Kafka, the "citizen of this other world,"
should have established his human fellowship in his writings through
the fraternity of the dream. He had only the frailest connections with
what he called "the human world," and his life was a tragedy of
lost and broken communications with that world. Yet his literary
genius was most pronounced in his ability to communicate elemental
emotion and primal experience. It is a communication which is direct
and powerful and owes its effect to a profound insight; it is the cre–
ation through the device of the private dream of a world of collective
memory where each man can know his fellow.
II
It is probable that when the current enthusiasm for Kafka
has run its course Kafka will emerge with less stature as a writer but
with undiminished prestige as an innovator in the technique of the
psychological novel. For K afka has brought a thoroughly original
and revolutionary approach to the problem of the representation of
psychic dimensions in literature.
