KAFKA AND TH E DREAM
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dream. When the events of the dream or of inner life are reproduced
/
in the world of reality, we are inclined to endow both the dream and
the dreamer with magical and divine qualities. The events of our re-
cent history have appeared to us like the full-scale performance of
Kafka's tormented dreams. The peril to our reason has given a sign–
ificance to Kafka's writings which, we must grant, was not altogether
his intention.
Kafka appears, finally, as a crippled writer, a man in whom the
disease and the art were united in a kind of morbid love so that neither
could set the other free.
"Die Kunst ist fur den Kunstler ein Leid,
durch das er sich fur ein neues Leid befreit,"
he said. His writing rep–
resented, among other things, an attempt to free himself from neurotic
suffering, to repeat and to relive it in order to conquer it. But behind
each door with Kafka there was another door, as in the imagery of
the legend "Before the Law." An unending chain of events led back–
ward into earliest times, and the conquest of danger and of suffer–
ing was a succession of battles in which a new enemy grew in the
spot of the last one vanquished, and the new enemy was only a rep–
lica of the one who came before.
The disease which produced extraordinary dreams exerted its
morbid influence on the creative process as well. The striving for
synthesis, for integration and harmony which are the marks of a
healthy ego and a healthy art are lacking in Kafka's life and in his
writings. The conflict is weak in Kafka's stories because the ego is
submissive; the unequal forces within the Kafka psyche create no
tension within the reader, only a fraternal sadness, an identification
between a writer and reader which takes place in the most solitary
regions of the ego.
