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PARTISAN REVIEW
closest friend when he was twenty, he went on writing in secret for
several years. He had met Brod in 1902 but did not show him any of his
work or even admit that he was writing until about 1906, and Brod
could not remember being allowed to read any of it until 1909.
Not that Kafka was writing entirely for himself in the stories or
entirely for his correspondents in the letters. As with a forty-page letter
to his father, which he never delivered, he compulsively sketched
gestures of communication, only
to
leave them uncompleted. Perhaps
he was writing to the people (and especially to the women) who looked
at him with an indifference he found intolerable. It was too painfully
reminiscent of the childhood in which his mother had had unlimited
time for her husband but almost none for her son. There is a revealing
passage in "Wedding Preparations in the Country" when the narrator,
who is not a writer or involved in storytelling, reflects about how much
easier it is to tell a story about oneself in the third person than in the
first. The word "story" occurs to him when he sees a woman looking at
him or perhaps just looking in his direction.
If
only he could explain
everything to her. "But all the work one does gives one no right to
expect loving treatment from everybody, on the contrary, one's alone,
quite remote, and only an object of curiosity." The non sequitur is
never brought into focus, but the fantasy behind it is that if only the
woman could be made to listen, if only everything could be explained
to her, nothing about him would strike her as odd or unlovable. Later
the same fantasy and the same need would drive Kafka to write over a
quarter of a million words of self-explanation
to
Felice Bauer. Physi–
cally she did not attract him, and most of the time he did not want her
physical presence, but not having her love was almost unbearable.
Perhaps the question "Whom was he writing for?" is a secondary
one. What mattered was to keep writing, even if what he wrote was
never read again, even by himself. Writing was a means of protecting
himself by splitting himself into two halves. One half can go out and
take all the risks, while the other half stays safe and snug, hiding under
the bedclothes. Raban-the name (raven) hints at his relation to Kafka
(kavka
means jackdaw)-can do what Kafka did as a child: "I can send
my body with clothes on.
If
it totters out through the door of my room,
the tottering betrays not fear but its nothingness. Nor is it excitement if
it stumbles on the steps, travels sobbing into the country, and eats its
evening meal there in tears. For I myself am all this time in bed, tucked
up cosily under the yellow-brown blanket. ... For I'm still dreaming."
This is comparable to what, for the schizophrenic, can feel like a
separation between self and body. The real self is held back so violently
