RONALD HAYMAN
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same time, both in thought and expression, he was repeating rhythms
and symmetries found in the Bible and in Cabalistic writings, and he
was influenced by Hassidic ideas about the value intrinsic to language.
His struggle for faith was a struggle to salvage his existence even if
his body was beyond repair. "Believing means: releasing what's
indestructible, in the self, or better: releasing the self, or better: being
indestructible, or better: being." He was reading the periodical
Der
Jude (The Jew)
and taking pleasure in its antimaterialism. One writer
called the Bible sacramental and the world excremental. We are
separated from God, wrote Kafka, on two sides: by the Fall and by the
Tree of Life. Paradise remains intact and immune to the curse laid on
mankind. This was why "Human judgment of human actions is true
and futile-first true and then futile."
In Kafka's last three years (1921-1924) the imagery of ghosts and
spirits became recurrent in his writing. He seemed to be unaware of
how much sediment the Yiddish plays had left in his imagination, and
while the Hassidic tales and the Cabala were invaluable to his fiction,
they had also dragged him back into premodern premises. Writing
about his illness, Kafka often used transcendental language,
suggesting-at least half seriously-that scientific concepts made the
malaise harder
to
cure than the idea of possession did. Was it not still
an open question whether weakness caused evil spirits to invade the
body or whether "weakness and illness are already a stage in posses–
sion, the preparation of the human body as a bed for unclean spirits
to
copulate in"? At the same time he was thinking of himself as being
personally assaulted by God. In his diaries God is never mentioned by
name, but on the 10th or II th of February, 1922, he wrote, "New attack
by G." A few sentences later, reversing the image, he equates God not
with the enemy but with the general who is leading the despairing
multitudes through mountain passes no one else can find in the snow.
The central joke in Kafka's much misunderstood story "Investiga–
tions of a Dog" is the satire on human presumption in expecting to
arrive at a complete understanding of reality. The implication is that
we are as blind to the presence of supernatural forces as the dog is to
human intervention in canine affairs.
It
seems to him that food appears
from above as a direct result of such activities as passing water on the
earth to nourish it, scratching it, barking incantations. Whether
willfully or voluntarily blind to humanity, he cannot see the laps
underneath lap dogs-to him they appear to be hovering in the air–
and he's mystified by the dogs who have been trained
to
perform in a
Clrcus.
Kafka's compulsion to leave so much work unfinished was partly
