DREAMERS
343
Metamorphosis,
his
Joseph protagonist becomes a vermin in his
father's eyes. And we are left with the question: how did the lovely
boy in his coat of many colors turn into a loathsome insect, the
adviser at the royal ear into a baffled quester, an outsider barred
forever from the Courts of the Mighty? But the answer to this ques–
tion Kafka's own works, whatever difficult pleasure or stimulating
example they may provide, do not themselves render up--not even
the private and agonized "Letter to My Fath,er"; nor that final story,
in which Joseph is altered in sex, demoted to Josephine, the Song–
stress; and the relation of the mouse-artist to the Mice-Nation (i.e.,
the Jews) is treated with uncustomary explicitness: "But the people,
quietly, without showing any disappointment ... can absolutely only
make gifts, never receive them, not even from Josephine. . . . She is
a tiny episode in the eternal history of our people, and our people
will get over the loss."
No, if we would really discover what went wrong with Kafka's
relationship to his own father, which is to say, to Israel itself (he
who never mentioned the word "Jew" in his published work) which
that father represented, or more generally to his inherited past, to
his–
tory and myth- we must tum back to another Master of Dreams:
the Doctor who preceded and survived the Artist: a latter-day
Baal-ha-chalamoth
(in the sense this time of interpreter rather than
dreamer), Sigmund Freud, or better,
Doctor
Freud. Only at this
moment, as we pass into a regime of rulers who know not Joseph,
have we begun to outgrow our own dependence on that Healer, to
learn to see him stripped of his clinical pretenses and assimilated to
the ancient myth.
And mythologically speaking, he is, of course, an
alter ego
of
Franz Kafka-or more precisely, of Joseph K.-one who, like the
Biblical Joseph and his namesake, descended into the abyss of ridicule
and shame for the sake of his vision; then was lifted up and ac–
claimed a culture-hero: a Savior of the non-Jewish world which had
begun by maligning and rejecting him. Certainly, it is as a solver of
dreams that Freud first attracted public notice, with that book born
just as the twentieth century was being born,
The Interpretation of
Dreams.
Like an artist, he himself tells us--though the comparison
did not occur to him- he was granted in that hook an unearned il–
lumination, on which he was to draw for the rest of
his
days. "In-
