S4
PARTISAN REVIEW
The effect of this passage, the immediate sense of the nightmare,
is achieved not by its contents alone, not by the stove monster, but
by the prose treatment. It is the conventional narration, the factual,
ordinary rendering of this event which produces the effect of the un–
canny. This is entirely in accord with the psychological mechanism
in the experience of the uncanny by which unreal events are per–
ceived as real, the inanimate is animated, and the delusion or dream
obtains conviction. Kafka demonstrates by this technique that the
quality of uncanniness which we attribute to the dream and the de–
lusion is not a property of the dream itself or of unconscious exper–
ience; it belongs to the ego, the representative of consciousness and
reality, and is produced when a repressed idea is given illusory con–
firmation by an event in consciousness with the effect of momen–
tarily breaking off the ego's contact with reality.
Now since the uncanny is not a quality of the dream itself, but
derives from an impairment of an ego faculty, that of reality testing,
a narrative which attempts to simulate the experience of dreaming
or to evoke the "uncanniness" of the dream must deceive the critical
and judging faculties of the ego through a prose which apparently
sustains logic and belief at the same time that it affirms the delusion.
The ideal prose for this treatment is everyday speech, a factual nar–
ration in simple declarative sentences. The narration of events and
visions from a night-world in the ordinary, accustomed prose of
waking life produces exactly that sense of dissolving reason which
makes reality a dream and the dream a reality, in essence the quality
of uncanniness.
Let us consider whether the same effect could be achieved
through an experiment upon the language itself and the mode of
narration. Now a prose which attempts to evoke the experience of
dreaming by borrowing the method of the dream work must break
up the structure of speech in order to bring it into a primitive system
of thought. Syntax has no place in primary mental processes, and
such a narrative needs to free itself from the order and restriction
of language, yet cannot abandon it completely for functional reasons.
Meaning will suffer through this treatment, of course, but this is a
dimension of mind which is cut off from the higher mental faculties,
has no reason of its own, no order or coherence, and for many pur–
poses of the writer the obscurity and ambiguity of this liberated prose
