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PARTISAN REVIEW
serve a purpose, however. It makes sense of Kafka, it makes him
palatable, while concealing the actuality, brutal and intimate, of the
stories. It helps us forget the way it feels to read them.
"Disinheritance" and "alienation" suggest rather abstract work of lit–
tle emotional power. In fact Kafka's fiction evokes powerful feel-
ings - not only of loneliness and sadness but often of terror and
disgust. Stories such as "The Metamorphosis" or "In the Penal Col-
ony" or "Jackals and Arabs" are threatening, nauseating, invasive.
The experience they present seems utterly new and unknown and
I
yet familiar and somehow shameful, as though merely by reading
one has been led into some guilty admission.
Kafka's great originality is not, obviously, his presentation of
the ideas of Schopenhauer, but something entirely different. He
wrote in his journal, "My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner
life has thrust all other matters into the background." He discovered
a way of representing that inner life in art more directly than ever
before. The "inner life" - of dream images, wishes and fears,
memories and fantasies, sexual preoccupations - is always present
in literature, even behind the most solid and circumstantial realism
or the most objective and classical style. In Kafka's work, however, it
is not really behind anything; it is itself the subject. Only in myth
and fairy tale do we find elsewhere such cruel and luminous images
from the unconscious, but with Kafka they acquire a biting edge of
modern knowingness.
What Kafka' meant by "inner life" is very close to Freud's con–
ception of unconscious and preconscious mental life. Kafka wanted
not to analyze this world but only to explore and dramatize it, to ex–
press its power. How deliberately did he enter the realm of the un–
conscious? In the journal entry for the morning after he completed
"The Judgment," he wrote "thoughts about Freud, of course." Of
course: he was a sophisticated modern intellectual; he read Freud
and made use in his own way of what he read , Years later in a letter
to MilenaJesenska he wrote of the therapeutic side of psychoanalysis
that it was "a hopeless error" (a skepticism Freud also expressed in
his darker moments). It is by definition impossible that Kafka
understood fully the unconscious material that floated up into his
thoughts and his work. His preoccupation with it does not imply ra–
tional understanding; it may even imply the contrary,
He was trapped and paralyzed in this fascination with his inner
world. He could not marry and found a family, could not leave
home, sometimes could not sleep or eat, and worst of all, often could
