56
PARTISAN REVIEW
The authentic dream quality, which Kafka achieves, owes a
large part of its effect to narrative devices which temporarily dissolve
the reader's sensory contact with reality and cause him to fall back
upon archaic forms of thinking. Kafka erases the boundaries between
reality and the dream; his transition from one world to another is as
imperceptible as the moment between waking and sleeping. In much
of Kafka's writing there is this ghostly treading between two worlds,
made all the more sinister by the insubstantial and muted forms of
reality and the electrifying clarity of the delusion and the dream. The
passage from the ordinary event of coming home from the office
and hanging up a coat to the extraordinary vision of a monster occurs
without an interval. In analogy with the dream the interval does not
exist; it is not remarked upon for the same reason that no man knows
the moment he falls asleep, loses this self for the other self in the
dream, or leaves his bed to flee through hollow corridors. In recreat–
ing through the narrative the psychic transition from waking to
dreaming, Kafka brings the reader directly into the dream. He causes
the reader to suspend reason and criticism, to submit to the delusion,
through the simple device of juxtaposing reality and the dream in
agreement with the psychic experience of the emerging dream.
The effect is strengthened when the narrative, as in the stove–
monster sequence, proceeds to treat fantastic events as real in the
same way that events of the dream are experienced as real by the
dreamer. The narrator did not imagine that he saw a monster; he
saw
it; and the description of the monster in fine detail supports the
delusional effect in much the same way that the eye-witnesses of flying
saucers support their delusions through minute descriptions of the
little men, their clothing, and the size and appearance of the craft.
Kafka's use of metaphor must also be considered in a study of
his "dream technique." In the dream a metaphor is represented in
its literal aspect. In the metaphor, for example, it is "as if" Kafka
were a species of vermin; in the story, "Metamorphosis," as in a
dream representation, he
is
a noxious bug. In many places in Kafka's
diaries we can trace the evolution of a story or details of a story from
a metaphor. In the "Letter to My Father," for example, Kafka has
the father answer his reproaches in an imaginary speech in which the
father says, "And there is the fight of the vermin, which not only
bite, but at the same time suck the blood on which they live...."
