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PARTISAN REVIEW
her endless photographs, by which we may consider that he charted
the obsessive totemization of understanding, for Kafka had told
J anouch "that nothing can be so deceiving as a photograph" because
truth as an affair of the heart can be secured only through art. The
photographs he loved (and his library contained many books of pho–
tographs and magazines which specialized in photographic docu–
ments) were means of collateralizing dreams and dream language,
confirming to him that the reality beyond the old Prague of his dwel–
ling place was as near, as violent, as threatening and decayed as the
one at hand. He was a devotee not only of photographs but of film .
When told that there was a cinema in a working-class quarter of
Prague named Cinema of the Blind
(Bio Slepcu)
he is said by J anouch
to have laughed "louder than I ever heard him before or since. " "Ev–
ery cinema should be called that," he said . "Their flickering images
blind people to the real ."
That the real constituted the true horror- and that to Kafka his
own evocation of horror
was
the reality - is illustrated by the ques–
tion Kafka is said one morning to have asked his neighbor, Karl
Thieberger, the father of his friend and Hebrew teacher: "What have
you to say about the dreadful things going on in our house?" Kafka
was alluding to his story,
The Metamorphosis ,
which he had just
finished, but his question was not asked , as one of us might ask it, to
prompt the pleasure of revealing the existence of a new work , but
rather (as all testified to the question and its transmission throughout
the small circle of Prague Jewish writers) that Kafka might express
his certainty that the events of his tale were true, that no fiction had
been invented , but a dream had been transcribed without the inter–
mediation of familiar devices of the sanity of the writer. Indeed the
goings-on in the Kafka house were so dreadful- unspeakable - that
Kafka begged his publisher to leave the cover drawing an open door
into darkness. Kafka thus admitted the doom in his own house,
about him in the city (which all his metaphors addressed as a city of
the night), and about him in the continent and the world .
The old city was transformed before Kafka's eyes from the de–
cayed remnants of the ancient ghetto to a well-accoutered commer–
cial district where his father established offices in an old palace and
where Kafka lived virtually all of his life. Every city story of Kafka's
details without names, situates without identification, makes precise
without historical verification . The city is conjured as in a dream
and with that particularity out of which dream language is formed,
conspicuously concrete , but with the absence of documentation that
