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superstitious: he wanted to stop short of activating its potential. "We
can't escape the ghosts we release into the world," he told Gustav
Janouch. "Again and again evil returns to its point of departure. " The
same anxiety, no doubt, lay behind his instru ctions to Brod that all his
writing must be destroyed . Dora Dymant tes tifies: "Time and again he
said to me, 'I wonder if I've escaped the ghosts' .... He wanted to burn
everything he'd written in order to free his soul from these 'ghosts.'
What he really wanted to write was to come afterwards, only after he
had gained his 'liberty.' "
As Kafka says in one version-not finally used-of the opening to
The Castle,
"I've a difficult task in front of me, and I've dedicated my
whole life to it. I do this gladly, without asking for pity from anyone.
But because it's all I have-the task I mean-I ruthlessly reject any–
thing that may distract me. I tell you, I can be mad in my ruthless–
ness. " This may be too explicit, but a more decisive reason for
suppressing it was that it points too revealingly at the correspondence
between K.'s task and Kafka's. K.'s obsession about penetrating the
castle reflects Kafka's relentless determination to go wherever his
writing led him, to colonize as much as he could of the world inside his
head, even if it meant defying the God who did not want him to write.
His task involved him in besieging the forbidden cas tle, making contact
with the Absolute, confronting the unconfrontable, looking God in the
face and then doing his best to break the Second Commandment by con–
structing a graven image. He must defy all the doorkeepers.
In
his last story "Josefine the Singer, or the Mouse People," the
main focus is social. The narrator 's primary interes t is in the relation–
ship between the prima donna and the people; one of Kafka's under ly–
ing concerns is with his own relationship with the Jewish people and
Jewish culture. The mouse people is described as " nearly always on the
move, scuttling to and fro for reasons that often aren 't clear," and also
as "not only childish but in some respects prematurely old, childhood
and old age don 't come to us as to others." Many of Kafka 's Jewish
contemporaries had also been deprived of a normal childhood and a
normal maturity. But his links with the J ewish people were more
negative than he would have liked; given respite from harassment, the
mice dream "as if they could stretch and relax in the great warm bed of
the community."
The mouse people had "always, somehow or other saved itself,
though not without sacrifices which fill historical researchers with
horror. " (Who but Kafka could have compared Jews and mice so
