KAFKA AND THE DREAM
53
Kafka did not trouble himself at all with the mechanical prob–
lems of entering the dream world. He found an easy solution to the
problem of the language barrier. He simply walked through it. His
prose style which Mann described as "a conscientious, curiously ex–
plicit, objective, clean, and correct style" undergoes no distortions,
employs no language tricks, and is perfectly consistent and reasonable
in the reporting of events, real or delusional.
No one has succeeded with this device as Kafka has. -No one
else can evoke the world of the dream with such chilling authen–
ticity. Kafka's so-called "dream technique" springs from a conception
of the dream as a work of art. Kafka explored the aesthetic proper–
ties of the dream. He understood the primary relationship between
unconscious mental processes and the form and composition of the
dream. By taking the dream as his model in his own compositions, he
achieved the perfect formal conditions for the representation of un–
conscious experience. Now this,
in
itself, is not an innovation; experi–
mental writers of this century have turned to this method of compo–
sition repeatedly in the attempt to evoke the qualities of the dream.
But when Kafka unites the structural aspects of the dream with his
narrative technique, his compositions achieve the most extraordinary
effects of the dream itself. This is all the more impressive when we
regard the seeming artlessness, the unambitious character of his nar–
rative technique. It is simply the narration of a dream by a dreamer.
One evening I returned home to my room from the office some–
what later than usual-an acquaintance had detained me below at the
house entrance for a long time- opened the door (my thoughts were
still engrossed by our conversation, which had consisted chiefly of gossip
about people's social standing), hung my overcoat on the hook and
was about to cross over to the washstand when I heard a strange, spas–
modic breathing. I looked up and, on top of the stove that stood deep
in the gloom of the corner, saw something alive. Yellowish glittering
eyes stared at me; large round woman's breasts rested on the shelf of
the stove, on either side beneath the unrecognizable face; the creature
seemed to consist entirely of a mass of soft white flesh; a thick yellowish
tail hung down beside the stove, its tip ceaselessly passing back and
forth over the cracks of the tiles.
The first thing I did was to cross over with long strides and sunken
head-nonsense! nonsense! I kept repeating like a prayer....
