58
PARTISAN REVIEW
against sleep and the yearning for sleep were in themselves a repetition
of a lifelong struggle, as if sleep had become the formidable opponent
who could not be conquered and to whom it was dangerous to submit.
In a conversation with Janouch he says, "Perhaps my insomnia only
conceals a great fear of death. Perhaps I am afraid that the soul–
which in sleep leaves me-will never return. Perhaps insomnia
is
only
an all too vivid sense of sin, which is afraid of the possibility of a
sudden judgment. Perhaps insomnia is itself a sin. Perhaps it
is
a
rejection of the natural."
He wrote at night.
«Wenn es nicht diese grauenvollen, schlaflosen
N iichte giibe, so wiirde ich iiberhaupt nicht schreiben. So wird mir
aber immer meine dunkle Einzelhaft bewusst."
But the apparitions
of the dream which he fended off through sleeplessness forced their
way into the fantasies and obsessive thoughts which occupied him at
these times. These fantasies were themselves very close to dream pro–
ductions and were the sources of a number of stories and sketches.
On one occasion Janouch attempts to pin down Kafka on the meaning
of
The Verdict.
Kafka, after some embarrassment, says,
«The Verdict
is the spectre of a night." "What do you mean?"
"It
is a spectre."
"And yet you wrote it," Janouch says. And Kafka replies, "That is
merely the verification, and so the complete exorcism of the spectre."
So that writing for Kafka was also the rite and the magic act for
the subduing of his disturbing visions. In another conversation with
Janouch he allies writing and conjuration:
«Das Schreiben ist eben
eine Art von Geisterbeschworung."
Kafka has left us an extraordinary record for the study of the
relationships between his dreams and dream-like fantasies and his
writings. I am particularly interested in the dream-story sequences
in his diaries which show us how he worked with the materials of
his own dreams. In each of these we see how the problem of the
dream is taken up in the waking state, and how the elements of the
dream are recomposed in the story.
In the example which follows, I employ a method of analysis
which requires some justification to begin with. I am committed, of
course, to the psychoanalytic principle that a dream or an imagina–
tive work cannot be fully analyzed without the associations of the
dreamer or the artist. In these studies of the dream-story sequences,
it can be demonstrated that the elements of the story which are re-
