Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind
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Kafka is writing about his body as if it were an object in the external world quite separate from himself. It is of course true that all human beings are capable of temporary detachment of this kind, and this is particularly true of intellectuals. Indeed, conceptual thought demands this degree of abstraction. However, even dedicated scholars generally find that, after a spell of concentrated work, they abandon their books and return to the life of the senses, to identification with the body. Kafka and others like him seem habitually more alienated than this. This alienation, in Kafka’s case, was not related to his later ill health. Although Kafka died of laryngeal and pulmonary tuberculosis in 1924, his first hemoptysis did not occur until August 1917. We cannot be sure when the disease took sufficient hold to interfere with his general health and vitality, but it certainly did not do so in his early years. Although, throughout his life, Kafka was concerned about his physical health and suffered from all manner of psychosomatic symptoms, he was able to swim, to row, and to go for long hikes in the country when he was in his twenties. His feeling of physical inferiority dated from childhood, and was emotionally determined, not based upon reality. A well-known photograph of Kafka, taken when he was about five, shows him as a skinny, frightened waif. Although a later portrait, taken at the age of eleven, shows a handsome boy who might justifiably have been proud of his looks, it is evidently the earlier image which impressed itself upon his mind, and which persisted, unmodified by later developments. There is a good example in his early fragment of a novel, Wedding Preparations in the Country, which demonstrates that Kafka was familiar with the experience of being dissociated from his body. Raban is hesitating about whether or not to travel to the country to meet his fiancée:
And besides, can’t I do it the way I always used to as a child in matters that were dangerous? I don’t even need to go to the country myself, it isn’t necessary. I’ll send my clothed body. If it staggers out of the door of my room, the staggering will not indicate fear, but its nothingness. Nor is it a sign of excitement if it stumbles on the stairs, if it travels into the country, sobbing as it goes, and there eats its supper in tears. For I myself am meanwhile lying in my bed, smoothly covered over with the yellow-brown blanket, exposed to the breeze that is wafted through that seldom-aired room.15
The dissociation between his body and what Raban feels as himself could scarcely be more complete. Later, Raban interestingly anticipates “Metamorphosis” by fantasizing that, as he lies in bed, he assumes the shape of a big beetle.
We all start life as helpless infants, totally dependent upon, and at the mercy of, those who are supposed to care for us. Some people, of whom Kafka was one, never grow out of this stage of helplessness. Those who are alienated from the body cannot feel the potentialities of the body. Their inner picture of themselves as powerless persists even though they become grown men and women who could, if they had a realistic notion of their own powers, stand up for themselves.
Melanie Klein postulated that the human infant, because of its early helplessness, reacts to frustration as if it were persecution and fears its own destruction by the powerful persons on whom it depends. According to her account, the infant, and especially the neglected infant, harbors within itself intensely destructive impulses which it tends to attribute to (project upon) those who care for it. In later life, any kind of suffering is liable to resuscitate these early feelings and is therefore conceived as an attack upon the self. This account, improbable as it may seem at first sight, is certainly borne out by Kafka’s self-scrutiny. In a letter to Max Brod he wrote:
If for example—this is purely an example—if my stomach hurts, it is no longer really my stomach but something that is basically indistinguishable from a stranger who has taken it into his head to club me. But that is so with everything. I am nothing but a mass of spikes going through me; if I try to defend myself and use force, the spikes only press in the deeper.16
It is by no means certain, and in any case unprovable, that all infants suffer the persecutory fears that Melanie Klein postulates. Even if they do so, the majority of infants pass through this “paranoid-schizoid” stage to one in which they can trust others, and in which the expectation of loving care outweighs the anxieties consequent upon being helpless. A minority, like Kafka, do not. How far this is dependent upon the quality of care actually given to the infant, and how far it is the consequence of inherited differences in constitution, is impossible to say; but it is certainly the case that the circumstances of Kafka’s infancy were somewhat unfavorable. We know that very soon after Kafka’s birth, his mother was summoned back to work in his father’s shop, and that the nurse to whom he was first entrusted was replaced by another within a year or two. We know, from his own account, that Kafka never felt he saw enough of his mother, and that he never became reconciled to her absence. In his diary for October 24, 1911 Kafka recalls that when he was ill as a child, his mother would come back from the business to look after him, and that this was comforting. He wishes that he was ill enough to have to go to bed in order to recapture that experience.17 Even by the standards of the day, Kafka saw uncommonly little of his parents during infancy. In addition, his childhood was unsettled by five moves of home: one before he was two years old, another seven months later, and a third when he was about four years old, in 1877. Two further moves occurred, in 1888 and 1889. Another disturbing factor was the deaths of both his younger brothers. One, born in 1885, when Kafka was two, died less than two years later, of measles. A second brother, born in 1887, survived for only six months. These factors alone are certainly not enough to account for Kafka’s persistent ontological insecurity, but may have contributed something toward it. What appears certain is that Kafka carried with him into adult life the sense of being at the mercy of other people and events; of being a victim, rather than of being someone who could act upon the world by exercising his own volition. This seems to me to be a theme which runs through nearly everything that he wrote, perhaps reaching its acme in The Trial.
Once I knew a man who graphically illustrated similar feelings. He drew a picture of a circle surrounded by arrows, all of which pointed inward toward the center. He himself was the circle; the arrows represented the hostile impingement of the actual world upon him, against which he felt himself to be defenseless.
Another man, whose lack of early maternal care could be proven, remained terrified of any situation in which he was helpless in the hands of others. The notion of having to submit to a surgical operation, for example, so frightened him that he said he would prefer to die rather than to submit to such an ordeal.
We live in a world in which thousands of people find themselves, in reality, in the hands of malignant persecutors. It has often been suggested that Kafka was prescient in anticipating the horrors of the concentration camps, in which Milena and three of his sisters died. I do not believe this. What Kafka was able to do, in a way equaled by no one else, was to articulate fears which lurk in the recesses of the mind in all of us, but which, in the ordinary course of events, only become manifest in those whom we label “psychiatric patients.”
Together with the fear of being injured or annihilated goes the fear of being ignored, or treated as being of no account. Swift, writing of Gulliver in the hands of the giants of Brobdingnag, records, “That which gave me the most Uneasiness among those Maids of Honour, when my Nurse carried me to visit them, was to see them use me without any Manner of Ceremony like a Creature who has no sort of Consequence.”18
To gain a sense of one’s own validity as a person, one has to be treated as actually being there, as counting for something. In his “Letter to His Father,” Kafka writes of this “sense of nothingness that often dominates me,”19 which, he says; comes largely from his father’s influence. He recalls with particular horror an occasion on which, when he was whimpering for water at night, his father picked him up and left him outside on the balcony: “Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ul
timate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out on to the pavlatche [balcony], and that therefore I was a mere nothing for him.”20 For Kafka, this particular incident seems to have been of immense significance. It may be compared with the experience of the seven-year-old Proust, who never forgot that, because she was entertaining a guest at dinner, his mother once failed to give him her usual goodnight kiss. George Painter, author of the standard biography of Proust, refers to this incident as the most important event in Proust’s life, because “it told him that love is doomed and happiness does not exist.”21
The importance of both incidents is, of course, not their actual occurrence, but what they epitomize in the lives of these great writers. Proust’s Weltanschauung is dominated by the impossibility of love, Kafka’s by the sense of helplessness.
To be treated as if one hardly existed, as if one counted for nothing, is to live in a world in which, since power is in the hands of others, there is no way of predicting what is going to happen. Although the human infant is entirely dependent upon those who care for him, he is equipped with means for indicating his needs. If those needs are met in a way that is rational and considerate, he will grow up to conceive of the world as likely to be rational and considerate. Thus, if he is fed when he is hungry, allowed to sleep when he is tired, played with when he is lively, and cleaned when he is wet and dirty, there will appear to be a firm connection between what goes on in the external world and what he himself is feeling. But suppose that the infant’s feelings are not considered; that he is fed when adults happen to think of it; that he is kept awake when he wishes to sleep, and put down to sleep when he wishes to be played with; that he is picked up and moved around at the whim of adults, without reference to his protests. For such a child the world will seem incomprehensible and unpredictable. Because what actually happens is unrelated to his feelings, it will appear to him that the world is ruled by capricious giants whom he cannot influence. Moreover, one can see that such a dislocation between the inner and outer worlds of the child must lead to an intensified preoccupation with fantasy and a sense of despair. If one can neither understand the world nor gain any satisfaction for one’s needs from it, one is bound to be driven in upon oneself.
The capriciousness and unpredictability of authority is a central theme in both The Trial and The Castle. Even the giants make a brief appearance when, in The Trial, Josef K. listens to the manufacturer and the deputy manager discussing the former’s business scheme: “Then, as the two of them leaned against his desk, and the manufacturer set out to win the newcomer’s approval for his scheme, it seemed to K. as if two giants of enormous size were bargaining above his head for himself.”22 This is surely a child’s-eye view. Cannot most of us recall our parents, or other adults, discussing what should be done with us, perhaps to which school we should be sent, as if we had no say in the matter, as if we hardly existed?
I do not believe or suggest that Kafka’s treatment by his father entirely accounted for the way in which he viewed authority, nor did Kafka himself think so. But his “Letter to His Father” does illustrate the fact that injudicious handling can damage sensitive natures. Hermann Kafka seems to have been a dogmatic, hearty bully who could tolerate no disagreement with his views, and who was subject to fits of rage which terrified his son. In addition he was inconsistent. He insisted on good table manners but was constantly infringing his own injunctions. Even if he himself had no firm opinion about a particular subject, he would confidently assert that anyone who did so was wrong. Hermann Kafka sounds as if he belonged to that not inconsiderable number of persons who can only maintain their own self-esteem by putting others down. It is an effective technique for undermining the sensitive and those who cannot stand up for themselves. Kafka wrote:
You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively, but in every respect, and finally there was no-one left but yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on their ideas.23
In a later passage Kafka writes:
Hence the world was for me divided into three parts: one in which I, the slave, lived under the laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with: then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and with annoyance about their not being obeyed: and finally a third world where everyone else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey. I was continually in disgrace, either I obeyed your orders, and that was a disgrace, for they applied after all only to me, or I was defiant, and that too was a disgrace, for how could I presume to defy you, or I could not obey because for instance I had not your strength, your appetite or your skill, in spite of which you expected it of me as a matter of course; this was of course the greatest disgrace of all.24
A triple bind, therefore, in which the child, whatever he did, was always in the wrong. It is not surprising that Kafka writes to his father, “I had lost my self-confidence where you were concerned, and in its place had acquired a boundless sense of guilt.”25
Kafka’s complaint to his father that he, the slave, lived under laws which existed for him alone, is expressed in the parable “Before the Law,” told by the priest to K. in the penultimate chapter of The Trial. It will be recalled that a countryman seeks access to the Law through a door which is always open, but which is guarded by a doorkeeper who will not allow the countryman in. After many years of importunate waiting, the countryman is near his end. He complains: “‘Everyone strives to reach the law … so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?’ The doorkeeper … roars in his ear: ‘No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. Now I am going to shut it.’”26
Just as “The Law” is forever inaccessible, so “the Laws” can never be known. In one of his short fragments, “The Problem of Our Laws,” Kafka writes, “Our Laws are not generally known; they are kept secret by the small group of nobles who rule us.”27 He goes on to speculate that it is possible that no body of Law really exists; that “the Law is whatever the nobles do.”28 The parallel with Kafka’s view of his father as a tyrant whose domination was based upon his person and not on reason is inescapable.
The Trial also illustrates what Kafka called his “boundless sense of guilt.” In the novel, K. is arrested without having done anything wrong. His guilt is taken for granted. As one of the warders who arrests him tells him, the high authorities who order his arrest are well informed about the reasons: “The authorities … never go hunting for crime in the populace, but, as the Law decrees, are drawn towards the guilty and must then send out us warders. That is the Law. How could there be a mistake in that?”29
K.’s crime is never specified, in spite of the fact that he is finally executed by stabbing. It does not need to be spelled out. In one passage, K. says: “It is a matter of countless subtleties in which the Court is lost sight of. And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up.”30
It is, I think, evident that K.’s sense of guilt is existential. No crime need be named, since he feels that it is a crime for him to be alive at all. It is a feeling which children who think of themselves as always in the wrong not infrequently develop. If guilt is boundless, if nothing the child does is ever right, and if he has no way of finding out what would be right, he cannot develop any confidence in himself as an authentic person with a separate identity. Earlier, I quoted R. D. Laing’s example of a patient who had to withdraw from an argument because he felt that his very existence was threatened. If one has always felt oneself to be in the wrong, and then tries to assert one’s separate existence by gently putting forward an opinion of one’s own, anyone who rides roughshod over that opinion is a threat to th
at separate existence. It is not surprising that people whose childhood experience was like that of Kafka tend to withdraw into an ivory tower of isolation where interaction with others cannot threaten them.
That K.’s crime is his very existence is confirmed in the passage in which Kafka describes the impossibility of K. ever being able to complete a plea which could be presented to the Court in support of his case:
One did not need to have a timid and fearful nature to be easily persuaded that the completion of this plea was a sheer impossibility. Not because of laziness or constructive malice, which could only affect the advocate, but because to meet an unknown accusation, not to mention other possible charges arising out of it, the whole of one’s life would have to be passed in review, down to the smallest actions and accidents, clearly formulated and examined from every angle.31
This is one passage in which Kafka really does seem to anticipate the techniques of interrogation employed by both the Russian and Chinese interrogators when they wish to obtain confessions. When a person is arrested, a warrant may be produced and read, but the prisoner’s supposed crimes are never specified. After a period of total isolation, the interrogation begins. The interrogator assumes that the prisoner is undoubtedly guilty and acts as though all his crimes are known to the authorities. The prisoner is told that there is no hope for him unless he makes a full confession. The whole of his past life is reviewed, and, in many instances, the prisoner is required to write a detailed autobiography which may have to be corrected over and over again. Most people have some feelings of guilt connected with past episodes in their lives, and religious people, especially, often have a deep sense of sin. It is not difficult for Communist interrogators to make use of this, and to link real or imagined transgressions with so-called “crimes against the people” which the prisoner becomes ready to confess.