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LESLIE A. FIEDLER
depends on his providing for them the good dreams they cannot dream
for themselves, and therapeutically explaining away the bad dreams
they cannot keep from dreaming.
And this means that the archetypal Jewish Son, in whatever
Mizraim
he finds himself, performs not only the function of the
artist but also of the Doctor. My Son the Artist, my Son the Doc–
tor-it is the latter which the tradition especially celebrates, the bad
jokes recall in mockery; but in the tradition, the two--artist and
doctor-are finally, essentially one. In life, however, they may be,
for all their affinities, split into separate persons, distinct and even
hostile: in our own era, for instance, Sigmund Freud, on the one
hand, and Franz Kafka, on the other, which is to say, the Healer and
the Patient he could not have healed, since he is another, an alterna–
tive version of himself. The voice which cries, "Physician, heal thy–
self!" speaks always in irony rather than hope. Yet both Healer and
Patient are, in some sense, or at least aspire to become, Joseph.
How eminently appropriate, then, that Kafka (first notable Jew–
ish Dreamer of a cultural period in which the Jews of the Western
world were to thrive like Joseph in Egypt; but also to be subject to
such terror as the descendants of Joseph later suffered at the hands
of a Pharaoh who knew him not) should have called his fictional
surrogate, his most memorable protagonist, by the mythological name
of Joseph. This time around, however, Joseph is specified a little,
becoming-with the addition of the author's own final initial–
Joseph
K.,
a new Joseph sufficient unto his day. This Joseph, at any
rate, along with the fable through which he moves, embodied for
two or three generations of writers to follow (real Jews and imaginary
ones, Americans and Europeans, white men and black) not only a
relevant dream-vision of terror, but also the techniques for rendering
that dream in the form that Freud had meanwhile taught us was
most truly dreamlike: with a nighttime illogic, at once pellucid
and dark, and a brand of wit capable of revealing our most arcane
desires.
Yet despite the borrowed name of his surrogate-hero, Kafka
could no longer imagine a Happy Ending for either that character or
himself; since he no longer dreamed himself the Beloved of his father,
but an outcast, unworthy and rejected. In what has become perhaps
the best-known, since it is, surely, the most available, of his stories,
