68
PARTISAN REVIEW
and the ties to reality is real. This extreme peril to the ego gives rise in
many serious neuroses (and psychoses as well) to creative spells in
which the ego attempts to counteract the loosening of its bonds to real–
ity by energetically recreating aspects of the objective world. (Ernst
Kris develops this psychoanalytic idea in a group of brilliant essays
dealing with the phenomenon of restitution in art.) But the restitutive
function of art is not confined to morbid states, and I feel that I am
doing this psychoanalytic theory an injustice by introducing it in this
context.
In
Kafka's case, however, we need the clinical observations on
restitution in order to explain the function of writing in his neurosis.
Only one who is in great danger of losing the self and the real world
will fear sleep as Kafka did. This explains why Kafka wrote only of
himself. He needed to affirm and reaffirm his uncertain existence in
the real world through creating images of himself, through giving
himself an existence on paper.
In
this way his writing preserved his
ties to reality.
The problem of art and neurosis is often brought in irrelevantly
to the study of a work.
In
Kafka's writing the problem not only is
relevant but intrudes itself into the study of his works. We cannot
understand his writing without understanding him, and this must
be counted as a failure in the work. The ambiguity of his writing
has given rise to a Kafka criticism in which the works have stimu–
lated impressions and fantasies like the ink blots on the Rorschach
test. With the publication in recent years of the Kafka notebooks,
letters, conversations and miscellaneous pieces, Kafka as Mystic,
Kafka as Cabalist, Kafka as Prophet, Kafka as Social Critic, and a
large number of other Kafkas have receded, and we are left to read
Kafka as Joseph K. and as Gregor Sarnsa, a man who has less to say
about the world he lived in than about the world that lived in him.
Kafka offers himself and his disease as a symbol which exer–
cises an extraordinary attraction in our time. For mental illness is the
romantic disease of this age just as tuberculosis was in the past century.
His writing is expiation, atonement, an extreme mortification before
his human judges, and the bond he creates between himself and
his
reader is in part the bond of guilt, of unconscious sin. But this does
not account for his vogue during the past twenty years. The awe and
mysticism which surround the figure of Kafka and his writings bring
to mind those feelings which are aroused in us by a premonitory
