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PARTISAN REVIEW
with Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic in London in the mid-thirties,
drew quite consciously on depth psychology, especially in the trilogy.
In Kafka's proto-Beckettian story "The Burrow," the mole-like hero
describes in great detail an underground maze it has constructed, partly by
smashing its own forehead against the earth. Like so many of Beckett's
heroes, the animal is a recluse who keeps doing inventories of his posses–
sions-his prize item.s being not hats and sticks, as in Beckett, but food
stores. Like Josephine the Singer and the Hunger Artist, he is about to dis–
appear. This disappearance will come about when his adversary-around
whom his thoughts continuously circle-and he come face to face. Here
is how the hero imagines what he may do to his antagonist in the final
fight to the death: "I might in my blind rage leap on him, maul him, tear
the flesh from his bones, destroy him, drink his blood and fling his corpse
among the rest of my spoil." The level of violence here-uncharacteristi–
cally strong for Kafka-testifies to the extremity of the predicament in
which Kafka's mole-like alter ego is trapped. In real life Kafka was fasci–
nated with moles, which surface repeatedly in his letters, as was Beckett,
who once observed of himself: "I am like a mole in a tlllmel."
Kafka evidently completed his "Burrow," but the ending was lost. We
can only speculate as to whether that missing ending came close to the per–
fect lament about death that Kafka envisages in his diaries: "my lament is
as perfect as can be, nor does it suddenly break off, as is likely to be the case
with a real lament, but dies beautifully and purely away." Like "The
Burrow" and
The Castle
in the restored text of the critical edition,
Malone
Dies
tapers off, with the twin deaths of Malone and his shadowy Ur-self
never there he will never
never anything
there
any more
Like many of his characters, Beckett himself occasionally confessed to
the feeling that he had never been properly born. Kafka, too, was burdened
by the thought that he had never truly lived. He could be speaking of
Beckett just as much as of himself when he writes in a letter to Brod,
"Such a writer is continually staging a scene: He dies (or rather he does
not live) and continually mourns himself. From this springs a terrible fear
of death...he has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived."
Kafka's vision of the twin deaths of his writerly self and of his biographi–
cal persona resembles that of Beckett's Malone: "Of course the writer in
