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technique of free association. The Proustian image as he describes it leads
away from the realism of the surface to "the true surrealist face of exis–
tence" because its endless pursuit of similitude conducts into "the dream
world in which everything that happens appears not in identical but in
similar guise, opaquely similar to one another." Characteristically and
paradoxically, Benjamin calls this process both a "distortion" and a reve–
lation of the true face of existence. Surrealism had a certain philosophic
authority for him because he regarded with skepticism the coherences and
distinct categories of the superficially accessible world constituted by the
established social order, entrenched power relations, and conventional
mind-sets. Surrealist free association broke down these spurious distinc–
tions and hierarchies and broke through to a perception of startling un–
derlying connectedness. Benjamin strove - ineffectually, I would say - to
integrate this surrealist perspective with his Marxism. Its more natural
affinity is with his attraction to mysticism, for what it amounts to is a
secular, psychologically-based vehicle for the mystic's sense of existence as
an infinite series of cosmic correspondences and for the root mystic per–
ception that true reality is always hidden beneath the veil of all that
merely meets the eye.
Benjamin's notion of a "prehistoric world" in Kafka is rather more
enigmatic. Let me propose that it is a way of defining the weirdly univer–
salizing power of Kafka's parables. If memory in Proust is intensely per–
sonal, the expression of a particular complex of experiences and a particu–
lar
sensibility, it is racial in Kafka. What is at stake in Kafka's writings as
Benjamin understands them is our relation as a culture to our whole evo–
lutionary past. In the first and formative instance, the "we" behind this
"our" is certainly the Jews, who constructed a civilization on the impera–
tive principle oflaw, but the Jews are treated as an exemplary case of hu–
manity at large (hence Kafka's fondness for the Chinese as an image of
traditional society, the distant and exotic that corresponds to the near and
familiar). Kafka's boldness, according to Benjamin, leads him to imagine
the primordial confusion and terror of a world before the law, where ev–
erything is arbitrary, uncanny, unpredictable. Kafka's imagination, as we
know abundandy from the autobiographical documents, stood in absolute
tension with the assimilated world of his own father and in a state of es–
tranged, ambivalent fascination with the world of his forefathers.
Benjamin's notion of the prehistoric is a way of explaining how Kafka
transmuted these specific cultural and biographical circumstances of a
modem German-speaking Jew caught between two realms into fiction
with a peculiarly universal resonance: "To Kafka, the world of his ances–
tors was as unfathomable as the world of realities was important for him,
and we may be sure that, like the totem poles of primitive people, the