348
PARTISAN REVIEW
at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about
to receive a prize, the worst student ro e ... from his dirty desk
in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the
whole class burst out laughing.
This is how Kafka concludes his parable about Abraham:
And perhaps, he had made no mistake at all, his name really was
called, it having been the teacher's intention to make the
rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for
the worst one.
Kafka surely knew Kierkegaard's "Panegyric upon Abraham" in
Fear and Trembling.
For Kierkegaard, the patriarch is not a tragic
hero; he "is eit her a murderer or a believer." Abraham knows no
doubt. Like Tertulian's
credo quia absurdum,
Abraham has faith "by
virtue of the absurd," as Kierkegaard puts it. But what is faith for
Kafka? "Faith like a gu illotine," writes Kafka in the 83rd aphorism in
Rdfections,
"as heavy, as light."
"Faith like a gui llotine..." seems
to
be the most Kierke–
gaard ian line of a ll Kafka wrote. Once again , this aphorism,
translated into a picture, made concrete, loses its metaphysical
meaning. Faith like a gu illotine is a trial that ends in execution .
. . .but one of the partners was already at K.'s throat, while the
other thrust the knife deep into hi s heart and turned it there
twice. With failing eyes
K.
could sti ll see the two of them
immediately before him , cheek lean ing against cheek, watching
the final act.
"Faith like a guillotine, so heavy, so li ght."
v
Eli ade and many historians of religion use the term
tremendum
to
designate mystical experiences.
Tremendum
is the sudden
apprehension of God's presence and of the approach of death.
Tremendum
is en li ghtenment full of dread and exhil arat ion. In
K afka's world, of this mystical
tremendum,
on ly the
horrendum
remains. Faith like a guill otine. For anthropologists, the sacred and
the impure are closely related; they belong to the same prohibited
zone a nd are marked by the same taboo, even though their signs are
reversed or, at any rate, reversible. Both the sacred and the impure
