KAFKA AND THE DREAM
55
will strengthen the analogy to dreaming. Similarly, by abandoning
the patterns of everyday speech, the writer can introduce phrasing
and rhythms which recall the fluidity and merging forms of uncon–
scious thought processes. Such a radical departure from the spoken
language can include words themselves. The dream can be taken
as a model for bold invention and license in language. For although
it "speaks no language," it represents the word in visual forms and
symbols which both mask and unmask the language of waking life
and reveal the infinitely ramified structure of meaning. The writer
who takes this license of the dream for himself can achieve dimen–
sions of meaning and a richness of allusion unparalleled in everyday
speech. It is unnecessary to add that these experiments upon the
language demand such powerful gifts of imagination in a writer that
they have only rarely produced important results.
This writing which bends the language, changes its order, its
accustomed phrasing and usage, can achieve many effects of its own
in the representation of unconscious mental processes, but it cannot
achieve the effect of the uncanny or cause the reader to experience
the dream-like narrative as a dream. We stand outside of the dream
in reacting to this writing; certain sensory effects of the dream are
induced in us, but we are not deluded. Our knowledge that this is
unreal or that this is a dream is not even momentarily destroyed. This
is because the distortions of language have already stamped the ex–
perience as unreal.
It
is analogous to a situation described by Freud
in his essay on "The Uncanny." He demonstrates that the feeling
which we describe as uncanny is always dependent in fiction or in
life upon the appearance of unreal events as real, but when, as in
fairy tales, the setting and the frankly animistic character of the events
depart from the world of reality from the start, the feeling of un–
canniness cannot be obtained. In the fairy tale or any fictional form
that by its setting or form of presentation states its unreal character,
the reader
willingly
participates in the delusion. In producing the
experience of the uncanny in fiction, the writer must take care to
exclude his reader's judgment and criticism and cause him to partici–
pate in the fictional delusion without a moment's reflection or the
exercise of consciousness.
1
1 For another treatment of the "uncanny" in Kafka's wntmg, see M. B.
Hecht, "Uncanniness, Yearning and Franz Kafka's Works,"
Imago,
April 1952.
