Vol. 23 No. 1 1956 - page 66

66
PARTISAN REVIEW
mental production is then altered accordingly so that the fantasy
seems dead, unreal.
Now this is a quality which appears very strongly in Kafka's
writings. Think of the torture in "In the Penal Colony," the scene,
"The Whippers," in
The Trial.
The detachment which accompanies
these descriptions is the mental quality of the writer who admitted
these awful visions into consciousness by making them silent, by an–
esthetizing the vital parts. Only in this way could he confront his
specters without dread. Kafka's people, the people of his stories, are
the product of this emotional isolation. They do not live; they imitate
the living. They are human abstractions and abstractions of human
qualities exactly as dream people are. We could never believe in
Kafka's people if we did not take them as dream people and accept
Kafka's world as a dream world.
From these ideas on the defenses against affect which Kafka
employed in his writing, I think I can also deduce the reasons why so
many of his stories are unfinished. Frequently Kafka's stories and
sketches break off at the critical moment as a dream breaks off when
a signal of danger occurs. It seems probable to me that at those points
in Kafka's stories where a strong emotion threatens to break through
the defenses, the story breaks off. We never find out what it was that
the student Kette was about to do or say at the critical point in the
Messner-Kette story. The story breaks off just as the dream breaks
off and this may be for the same reasons.
IV
In this example we see how the story takes up the problem
of the dream, how the latent dream thoughts are transformed in the
waking state and worked into a new composition. The story stands in
the same relationship to the dream as a dreamer's waking associations
to his dream and its elements can be regarded as associations to the
dream. There is this difference, of course: ordinarily when a man pur–
sues his thoughts in relationship to a dream, these thoughts, if they
are free associations, will emerge in a formless, chaotic stream. Now
Kafka does bind these disordered elements together in a narrative,
but the narrative is as indifferent to the conventions of story telling as
is the manifest dream. The comparison between these two should
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