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PARTISAN REVIEW
the wall. . .. Hanging against the wall in front of me in its final
agony, it rigidly stretched out its claws in what seemed to be an
unnatural way; they were like small hands reaching out to you.
If
the author is identified with one party here, it is not with the rat
but with the first-person narrator, the "I" who spears the rat and con–
templates its "final agony" in a strangely detached tone.
Erich Heller, in his introduction to
Letters to Felice,
presents a vi–
sion of Kafka as idealized as Canetti's. Heller rejects vehemently any
psychoanalytic attempt to understand this agonizingly ambivalent
courtship:
In this century it is certainly too much to expect that these letters
will inspire some readers to study the poetry of the minnesingers
rather than to recite Freudian theorems....
For explanation he alludes instead to Kafka's references to hav–
ing received a "command" to torment himself, which Heller evi–
dently means for the reader to take quite literally:
A command from heaven: to feel this in a world that serves its
citizens with very different, and apparently more dependable,
information about the discomfort of their souls - might this not
justify a little the misfortune of this love: Even, perhaps, justify
the misery that Kafka must have caused Felice?
Here Kafka has become a medieval minnesinger and saint, directly
in touch with heaven, which has licensed him to torture Felice, a
mere ordinary human being.
In Heller's own book on Kafka, having rejected psychoanalysis
as reductive, he imposes everywhere a philosophical interpretation
based on Schopenhauer. Thus the sin that gives rise to the sense of
guilt in Kafka is once and for all explained:
... the first and fundamental design of "The Judgment" or "The
Metamorphosis" or "In the Penal Colony" is unequivocally
Schopenhauerian: to be an individual is a culpable encroach–
ment upon the peace of nonbeing, or at least of not being an in–
dividual.
Although philosophical elements are certainly present in his
work, Kafka is not exactly a philosophical writer- he is too tightly
