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Bei der nächsten Zusammenkunft zeigte ich dann Doktor
Kafka meine gebundene Auswahl der [tabloid]
Titelblätter. . . . Ich sagte: "Es ist ein
Bildersalat—bunt und widerspruchsvoll wie das Leben."
Doch Kafka entgegnete kopfschüttelnd: "Nein, das
stimmt nicht. Die Bilder verdecken mehr als sie
enthüllen. Sie gehen nicht in die Tiefe, wo alle
Widersprüche mit einander korrespondieren."
[At our next meeting I proceeded to show Doctor Kafka my
bound selection of (tabloid) title pages. . . . I said,
"It's an image salad—colorful and contradictory like
life itself." Shaking his head Kafka disagreed: "No, that's
not it. The pictures conceal more than they reveal. They
don't penetrate the depths, where all contradictions
correspond with one another."]
—Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit
Kafka
-
Introduction
-
The epigraph cited above has Kafka commenting to his
friend Janouch on the trivial matter of tabloid
sensationalism. What is not trivial is his implicit
allusion to his own deepest mystical experience when he
observes that front-page stories, skimming the surface
of events as they inevitably do, fail to go "in die
Tiefe, wo alle widersprüche mit einander
korrespondieren" ["into the depths where all
contradictions correspond with one another"] (Janouch
136). Kafka knew these inner "depths" directly as
rarefied and blissful states of consciousness, mystical
states, in which even something so fundamental to human
experience as the principle of contradiction, the very
bedrock of logic, was left far behind. I am going to
argue here that this subtle sense of a coincidentia
oppositorum, as an inner sanctum beyond all taint
of resistance or friction, lay at the heart of Kafka's
religious sensibility, and that the latter, in turn,
lay at the heart of his literary sensibility.
-
More specifically, my aim in the following pages is
to identify and examine the particular dynamics of
Kafka's mysticism through an analysis of this principle
of the coincidence of opposites, first as a recurrent
motif in his intellectual life, and then as a thematic
and structural force in several key works of short
fiction. Since the coincidentia, as the
"abstract essence" of dialectical logic, may be said to
subsume all experiential content, it becomes
intrinsically more interesting as form than as content,
and we will thus be examining a variety of Kafka's
coincidentia-generated binaries (e.g.,
conscious/unconscious, freedom/bondage,
wisdom/ignorance), first in a series of short parables
and finally in two of the longer short fictions, "Die
Verwandlung" ["The Metamorphosis"] and "Vor dem Gesetz"
["Before the Law"]. Moreover, since the
coincidentia, understood in the German and
other mystical traditions familiar to Kafka as the
original Oneness of the pairs of opposites, is
precisely what the human mind obscures as it
conceptually bifurcates things in order to "get at
them," we will be focusing especially on those
relatively rare instances in Kafka's fiction in which
the mind of the character or persona goes beyond its
own intrinsic limits. This is in support of the case
for Kafka's mystical insight as a mainspring of his
literary creativity and, more generally, for Kafka as
essentially a spiritual writer, convinced in the end of
the human being's capacity to transcend, however remote
the possibility, the suffering of separation built into
his or her own dualistic consciousness.
-
In addition, along the way and especially in my
"Conclusion," I will suggest how Kafka's mysticism is
best to be regarded in the context of the current
cultural-constructivist approach to his works, an
approach, like poststructuralism generally from which
it derives, tending to cast doubt on Kafka's serious
literary interest in spiritual transcendence.
Essentially, I will argue that there is no need to
impugn the spiritual dimension of the fiction in order
to view it as a conduit of currents (variously
religious, political, materialistic) coursing through
its own culture. In Kafka the spiritual and the
cultural are perfectly compatible—indeed, as I
aim to show, it is part of his literary (and spiritual)
genius to reveal them as such.
-
In summary, then, my aim in the pages that follow is
threefold: 1) to clarify the dynamics of Kafka's
literary mysticism by tracing its core principle, the
coincidentia oppositorum, in a series of
works; 2) this, in order to support the view of Kafka
as primarily a spiritual writer, vis-à-vis
current interpretive trends such as cultural
constructivism which tend to ignore, if not expressly
deny, the transcendental dimension in his work; and 3)
to view the subtle relationship between these two
interpretive approaches in terms of a spiritual paradox
that Kafka himself well appreciated.
-
To be sure, the awareness of an expansive inner
sphere where "the opposites of the world, whose
contradictoriness and conflict make all our
difficulties and troubles" (James 298), could touch and
even freely mingle, was hardly unique to Kafka. The
idea of the coincidentia oppositorum is well
ensconced in the history of German mysticism. As the
great figures of that history tell us, the
coincidentia is that abyssal point in deepest
consciousness whence originate and whither return all
the categorical pairs that presume to organize
experience by bifurcating it (good/evil, true/false,
subject/object, etc.). Eckhart calls it the single Eye
through which God and man view each other and,
elsewhere, "the identity out of the One into the One
and with the One" (qtd. in Ross 270).[1]
In a sermon he waxes ecstatic over his vision of the
purified soul for which "[t]he whole scattered world of
lower things is gathered up to oneness when the soul
climbs up to that life in which there are no opposites"
(Eckhart 173). A century and a half later we have from
Nicholas of Cusa the coining of the Latin phrase
coincidentia oppositorum as a designation for
the trinitarian God in his meditation manual for monks,
De visione Dei. One of the exercises Nicholas
urged on his charges as a way of experiencing the
coincidentia was to stand in a semicircle
facing a wall in whose center hung a picture of Jesus
whose eyes beamed out to meet those of all the viewing
monks simultaneously (Miller 133). Thus the identity of
the one and the many.
-
One can easily trace the ubiquitousness of the idea
among post-Eckhartian mystical and even not so mystical
thinkers from Böhme and Silesius to Herder,
Friedrich Schlegel, and, of course, Hegel.[2]
Nor is the idea uniquely German or even predominantly
Western. One need only consider the ancient Indian
tradition of advaita Vedanta, which views
ultimate reality as "not-two" and suffuses various
permutations of both Hinduism and Buddhism. One of
those permutations would be Zen, which affirms the
fundamental identity of samsara and nirvana, or form
and emptiness, in its revered "Heart Sutra." Indeed,
Zen Buddhism's unique fusion of humor and mystical
paradox is, in its way, "Kafkaesque," and I will not
hesitate in the pages that follow to draw on Zen's
looking-glass logic as I attempt to shed light on some
of the more baffling paradoxes in Kafka's parables.
-
As one of many names for the unio mystica,
the mystical insight par excellence, the
coincidentia seems to be ontologically prior
to any particulars of religious culture. If we view it
as the hub of the wheel to which so many
religious-cultural spokes point, then it seems sound to
argue, with respect to Kafka, that the
coincidentia came first and foremost out of
his own mystical experience and that it therefore
conceptually supersedes (which is not to say
"invalidates") the many frustrating and often confusing
attempts by scholars to identify his mysticism with
particular religions, from Hasidism/Kabbalism (Jofen,
Grözinger) and various admixtures of Judaism and
Gnosticism (Walther, Sokel) to theosophy (Ryan, Sokel)
and, most recently, the Eastern wisdom traditions (Lee,
Whitlark, Ryan). This is a confusion Grözinger
himself acknowledges when he says, for example, in
trying to pin down "a Jewish background to Kafka's
thoughts," "Nor is his [Kafka's] use of biblical topoi
in the aphorisms any more indicative on their own [of
such a background], for they could just as easily have
found their way to Kafka via Christian mystics such as
Meister Eckhardt" (165).
Background
-
Let us begin near the end with Kafka's "Eckermann,"
Gustav Janouch. If the young friend is to be trusted as
a reliable witness to Kafka's thinking-out-loud in his
last years, the idea of the coincidentia was
never far from the latter's thoughts. To wit, Janouch
recreates no fewer than three conversations in which
Kafka portrays life and death as most intimate
antagonists. In one, the older, wiser man attempts to
console the younger, upset over his parents' impending
divorce, with the promise of the new life that is sure
to spring from the ashes of familial strife: "Man
muß hinter dem abgestorbenen Laub, das uns
umraschelt, schon das junge, frische
Frühlingsgrün sehen, sich gedulden und
warten" ["Beneath the dead leaves rustling around us
one must be able to sense already the young, fresh
green of spring, and then be patient and wait"] (252).
The seed of the one is already germinating in the
other. The opposites are always mingling in subtle ways
that escape our notice. Indeed, such dialectical
transformation demands of us nothing less than a
mindful, stoic patience ("Man muß geduldig alles
in sich aufnehmen und wachsen" ["One must patiently
take everything into oneself and let it grow"]), for it
entails the daunting challenge of bursting "[d]ie
Grenzen des ängstlichen Ich" ["the boundaries of
the fearful ego"] (252). Such patience issues, then,
from a deeper self, a self beyond the defensive ego
that keeps the opposites apart. Janouch proceeds to
call this patience
Doktor Kafkas Lebensgrundgesetz, den er mir mit
beharrlicher Nachsicht einzuimpfen versuchte, ein
Grundsatz, von dessen Richtigkeit er mich mit jedem
Wort, jeder Handbewegung, jedem Lächeln und
Blinzeln seiner großen Augen und dem ganzen
langjährigen Dienstaufenthalt in der
Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt
überzeugte.
[Doctor Kafka's life principle, with which he
attempted to inoculate me with persistent care, a
principle of whose validity he convinced me with
every word, every hand gesture, every smile and
squint of his large eyes and with the whole
long-suffering term of service in the Workers'
Accident Insurance Company.] (252)
-
The other two conversations show Kafka in even more
impressive attitudes of spiritual heroism and
accentuate the tendency of the Gespräche,
at the hands of the uncritical devotee, towards
hagiography. In one, Kafka becomes something of a
Nietzschean Übermensch in the sense of
one who has embraced the impossible commandment of
amor fati: "Ich habe zu allem ja gesagt. So
wird das Leid zum Zauber und der Tod—der ist nur
ein Bestandteil des süßen Lebens" ["I have
said yes to everything. Thereby does suffering become
enchantment, and death—that is merely a component
of sweet life"] (237). In the other, he is endorsing
the mystical pronouncements of the Taoist sage, Chuang
Tsi: "Durch das Leben wird nicht der Tod lebendig;
durch das Sterben wird nicht das Leben getötet.
Leben und Tod sind bedingt; sie sind umschlossen von
einem großen Zusammenhang" ["Through life death
is not quickened; through death life is not destroyed.
Life and death condition each other; they are
comprehended by a great connection"]. To which Kafka
appends: "Das ist—glaube ich—das
Grund—und Hauptproblem aller Religion und
Lebensweisheit" ["That is, I believe, the fundamental
and foremost problem of all religion and worldly
wisdom"] (208).
-
Such late-life aperçus, including the
epigraph to this essay, show the continuing prominence
in Kafka's worldview of an essentially mystical idea
probably familiar to him since childhood. To be sure,
particular notions of the coincidentia from
many different cultural quarters did converge over the
years in Kafka's receptive and fecund imagination.
There were, from early on, the miraculous tales of the
old Hasidic holy men whose powers enabled them to
traverse the boundary between life and death with ease,
tales known to Kafka through the Baal Shem collections
of Buber and Peretz and forming part of his
religious-cultural background as a member of the Prague
Jewish community (Jofen 30-31, 42). Then there was the
dialectical thought of German Romanticism and Idealist
philosophy in which Kafka was steeped in his latter
days at the German Gymnasium and again more intensively
at the University of Prague. As Heidsieck so ably
documents, "from late 1902 until the end of 1905 Kafka
attended [as an extra-curricular activity] meetings of
the philosophers' club or Louvre-circle,"
learning a great deal from the core group of the club
made up of "three academic lecturers and several
students from the university's philosophy department"
(5). Kafka's favorite Romantic author was the kindred
troubled soul, Heinrich von Kleist, whose brilliant
essay, "Über das Marionettentheater" ["On the
Marionette Theater"], had cast the
coincidentia in lapsarian-mythic terms of
Paradise Regained: "Mithin . . . müßten wir
wieder von dem Baum der Erkenntnis essen, um in den
Stand der Unschuld zurückzufallen" ["And so . . .
we would have to eat once again from the tree of
knowledge in order to fall back into the condition of
innocence"] (Kleist 127). We can't become innocent
again by "undoing" our self-awareness but we can
transcend the limits of either condition by fusing both
into a higher third. Kafka's twist on this, in the
parable, "Das Kommen des Messias" ["The Coming of the
Messiah"], is the obscure pronouncement, "Der Messias
wird . . . erst einen Tag nach seiner Ankunft kommen"
["The Messiah will . . . not come until one day after
his arrival"] (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen 67;
hereafter H), a dazzling paradox asserting, in effect,
that what is already here cannot "arrive." Time and
eternity, or experience and innocence, coincide!
-
A further academic influence was the course in
philosophical psychology that Kafka took in his senior
year at the Gymnasium. Here he was introduced
to some of the new cognitive research of the Leipzig
experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (Heidsieck
4-5), which led in turn to his preoccupation with the
thought of Wundt's colleague, Gustav Theodor Fechner. A
fascinating blend of mystic and scientist, Fechner had
obsessed for years over the age-old mind-body
conundrum, being driven by it to invent the discipline
of psychophysics which became a milestone in the
measurement of mental processes (Chaplin and Krawiec
36). Fechner's text, Elemente der Psychophysik
(1860), already a classic by the turn of the century,
may well have been used in Kafka's course and would, at
the very least, have been cited by Kafka's professor in
that course, Emil Gschwind, who had studied at Leipzig
under Wundt (Heidsieck 5). The book's importance here
lies in its outlining of a careful series of
experiments applying Ernst Weber's law of the "just
noticeable difference" in physical stimuli (body) to
the measurement of sensory thresholds (mind), leading
to Fechner's final pronouncement that mind and body are
identical (Chaplin and Krawiec 36). We don't know
whether, or how well, Kafka may have appreciated the
scientific underpinnings of Fechner's identity
hypothesis, but it seems safe to assume the mere
assertion by science of the identity of these hoary
philosophical antipodes, along with their broader
extension, Natur and Geist, stirred
his imagination profoundly.
-
It certainly influenced his close friend, the Prague
jurist and moral philosopher, Felix Weltsch, who took
the same psychology course at the Gymnasium,
and whose entire scholarly career, it may fairly be
said, was a relentless pursuit—often with
Kafka—of the question, as Schillemeit puts it,
"wie kommt es überhaupt zu 'Wirkungen' des Geistes
in der Welt der Erscheinungen" ["how it is at all
possible for spirit to have 'effects' on the world of
phenomena"] (168). In several books well known to
Kafka—one of which, Gnade und Freiheit
[Grace and Freedom] (1920), Kafka even
critiqued in galley proofs—Weltsch framed the
coincidentia in terms of a kind of creative
via media, a "Weg der Gnade" ["way of grace"]
or "Weg der Freiheit" ["way of freedom"] (depending on
whether God or man was viewed as the agent of
transformation), as part of his search for a moral
solution to the "Vitalität"-versus-"Geist" or
instinct-versus-free will dichotomy (Schillemeit
169-70). Without exaggeration the influence of
Fechner's identity hypothesis may be said to have
spanned the long years of the Kafka-Weltsch friendship
and beyond, ending with the appearance in 1936 of
Weltsch's socio-political commentary, Wagnis der
Mitte [Risking the Middle Way], and
beginning with Kafka's curt report to Oskar Pollak in a
letter of November, 1903, "Ich lese Fechner, Eckehart"
[I'm reading Fechner and Eckhart"] (Briefe
20). Thus, around the time Kafka and Weltsch were
introduced by Max Brod, Kafka was reading, in tandem, a
modern scientific champion of mind-body identity and
medieval mysticism's most profound exponent of the
coincidentia.[3]
-
No doubt the fullest flowering of this principle in
Kafka's mystical sensibility occurred during 1917-18
when, in the flush of his emancipation from the
insurance agency, he was able to bring an intense
intellectual focus to the task of recording his
paradoxical spiritual insights in aphoristic form in
some eight octavo notebooks. Many of the most
intriguing of these play with the cosmology of
Messianism and the Second Coming, themes rooted in
Kafka's deep familiarity with various popularized
strains of medieval Kabbalism and its contemporary
phase, Hasidism (Grözinger 13-14, 165-78; Jofen;
Walther 38, 113-14). Freethinker that he was, Kafka
traversed Jewish, Christian and Eastern wisdom
traditions, noting parallels, with ease and delight. As
for specific mystical expressions of the
coincidentia oppositorum coming from his own
religion of Judaism, two are especially worthy of
mention. First there was the sixteenth-century
kabbalist Isaac Luria's notion of "tzimtzum," that is,
the primordial kenotic space of Divine contraction out
of which the pairs of opposites constituting the
universe were said to arise. (The visionary thought of
Luria, the Baal Shem Tov of Martin Buber's collection
of Hasidic tales, is often cited by kabbalistic
scholars as a precursor of the Hegelian dialectic.)
Even more important for Kafka's eclectic cosmology,
according to Grözinger, was the mystical theology
of the eighteenth-century Hasidic Maggid (preacher),
Dov Ber, who used the image of the two trees in the
Garden of Eden, an image prominent in Kafka's
aphorisms, to represent the hope of man's ultimate
redemption from the pairs of opposites that dog the
human mind. Thus Grözinger: "Only after man leaves
the material world—or, in the words of the Maggid
. . . [o]nce man comprehends the truth of the Tree of
Life, this other truth [of the Tree of Knowledge] fades
away in the light of the truth of Oneness, of the
elimination of opposites. This is the truth of the Tree
of Life, the eternal truth which is present in the
unity of all being" (171). Grözinger connects
Kafka to these and other kabbalistic traditions through
the latter's associations with Buber and Georg Langer
(also an avid collector of Hasidic tales), and through
"his own studies, through conversations with friends,
and through family life as well as through observations
of Jewish life in Prague, especially in the synagogue"
(4).
-
Many of the aphorisms having to do with the Fall,
suffering and redemption show a progressivist
chiliastic or even quasi-Hegelian structure culminating
in some aspect of the coincidentia
oppositorum, the final freedom promised by man's
release from the prison of the principle of
contradiction. Thus, for example, the above-cited
prophecy, quoted here in full,
Der Messias wird erst kommen, wenn er nicht mehr
nötig sein wird, er wird erst einen Tag nach
seiner Ankunft kommen, er wird nicht am letzten Tag
kommen, sondern am allerletzten
[The Messiah will not come until he is no longer
necessary; he will not come until one day after his
arrival; he will not come on the last day but on the
very last] (H 67)
in which not one but two pairs of opposites,
time/eternity and desire/fulfillment, are brilliantly
conflated, thereby revealing that our very longings and
expectations actually create our illusory sense of
temporal sequence and separation. He will "come" when
he is no longer needed, that is, when our grinding
spiritual hunger ceases to blind us to His eternal
presence. The moment of this cessation, a moment out of
time, is the identity of need and fulfillment. And
since the one versus the many is an antinomy like any
other, when these particular opposites reunite, so do
they all in Messianic epiphany. (In Rinzai Zen, which
takes a spiritual perspective very similar to Kafka's,
it is said that to solve the mu koan, the one typically
assigned as a first meditation exercise to novices, is
to solve all koans.[4])
-
The other Second-Coming prophecy, dated November 30
(1917) in the third notebook, shows, or at least
implies, a similar synthesis of double antinomies (a
coincidence of coincidences) as it looks forward to the
revelation of the identity of God and man and the
oneness of inner and outer worlds "in der symbolischen
Aufzeigung der Auferstehung des Mittlers im einzelnen
Menschen" ["in the symbolic demonstration of the
resurrection of the mediator in the individual"] (H
66). ( I understand Kafka's sense of symbolisch here to
be similar to Goethe's [a means by which one being not
only represents but also participates in another] or
Jung's [a bridge through which opposite shores
connect].) Just as striking are key thematic variations
scattered throughout the aphorisms, such as the
identification of Paradise with this earthly vale of
tears ("[Es ist] möglich, daß wir nicht nur
dauernd im Paradiese bleiben könnten, sondern
tatsächlich dort dauernd sind" ["(It is) not only
possible that we could remain permanently in paradise
but that we actually already are there permanently"] [H
69]) or its subjective correlative, the insistence,
beyond imagining, of the inseparability of suffering
and bliss:
Nur hier ist Leiden Leiden. Nicht so, als ob die,
welche hier leiden, anderswo wegen dieses Leidens
erhöht werden sollen, sondern so, daß das,
was in dieser Welt leiden heißt, in einer
andern Welt, unverändert und nur befreit von
seinem Gegensatz, Seligkeit ist.
[Only here is suffering suffering. Not in the sense
that those who suffer here will, because of this
suffering, be exalted in some other place, but in the
sense that what in this world is called suffering is,
in another world, unchanged and merely liberated from
its opposite, bliss.] (H 80)
This is no different than Novalis's ecstatic
anticipation in the supremely mystical Hymnen an
die Nacht [Hymns to the Night]:
Und jede Pein Wird einst ein Stachel Der Wollust
sein. [And every pain Will be a spur To blissful
gain.] (20)
-
Scholars have, of course, noted this or that aspect
of the picture I am endeavoring to present here more
globally and with a heightened sense of its
significance as a context for Kafka's creativity.
Although he does not specifically locate Kafka within
the German mystical tradition of the coincidentia
oppositorum, Hartmut Binder, for example, does
note the strong tendency in the aphorisms towards the
fusion of contraries: "Die Gegensätze, die, auf
Held und Gegenspieler verteilt, in den Erzählungen
und Romanen die Handlung in Gang bringen, werden in den
Parabeln und Aphorismen zum Paradox
zusammengefaßt. . . . Dieses Zusammenzwingen des
Gegensätzlichen zur Identität ist
charakteristisch für Kafkas Paradoxe" ["The
contraries, as allotted to hero and counterpart, which
in the tales and novels set the plot moving, become in
the parables and aphorisms condensed into paradox. . .
. This fusion of oppositions into identity is
characteristic for Kafka's paradoxes"] (235). Hans
Walther grounds Kafka's Messianic vision "[i]n der
kabbalistischen Literatur des Mittelalters" ["in the
kabbalistic literature of the Middle Ages"] which
conceives the Fall in dialectical terms as the chaotic
proliferation of alienated pairs destined to come
together again: ". . . die Spaltung in Gutes und
Böses, Lebendiges und Totes, Reines und Unreines,
Heiliges und Profanes. . . . In der messianischen
Erlösung werden jedoch mit der gefallenen Welt
auch alle jene Scheidungen, die ihr Wesen ausmachen,
verschwinden" [". . . the split into good and evil,
life and death, pure and impure, sacred and profane. .
. . But in the Messianic redemption the fallen world,
along with all those separations that make up its
being, will disappear"] (113). More pessimistically,
Walter Sokel, in noting the prominence in Kafka's
worldview of the double bind for man (in particular
Jewish humanity) created by the pairs of opposites,
sees him as tending strongly towards a separatistic
Gnostic cosmology, affinities to Kabbalism
notwithstanding. In other words, for Sokel, Kafka is
too strongly attached to the transcendent God of light
to affirm an ultimate reconciliation with Jehovah, "who
is a God of life and its promise on earth" ("Between
Gnosticism and Jehovah" 71). Sokel's signature image
for this view is from the well-known aphorism in
notebook 3 that has man bound by two chains around the
neck which alternately pull him upward toward heaven
and downward toward earth, always against the direction
in which he seeks to move. One wonders what Sokel makes
of the numerous aphorisms that prophesy redemption.
The Fiction
-
Yet, as fascinating as the foregoing sketch of
mingled influences is, these surely were for Kafka no
more than gratifying corroborations of what he already
knew first-hand from his own deepest inner experience;
and it could only have been from such experience, from
the post-spatial pointal abyss of the
coincidentia, that he was writing when he
baited Weltsch in a letter with the indirect question
"ob die Welt aus einem Punkt zu kurieren ist" ["whether
the world can be cured from a single point"]
(Briefe 187).[5]
On at least one occasion, and probably more than that,
this centering or healing effect of the
coincidentia took the form for Kafka of the
experienced identity of the writer with the process of
writing.[6]
This occurred during the night in which he jotted down
the entire text of "Das Urteil" ["The Judgment"] in a
single trance-like sitting. For once he felt he had
fully experienced the elusive condition of pure
writing, "as though the tale had written itself through
him using him only as its medium" (Sokel, "Frozen Sea"
75). Sokel emphasizes Kafka's sense, recorded in his
diary, of the "forward movement of the tale which
carried him along as though in water" (75). This effect
of flow or swimming, analogous to orgasm, is a common
metaphor in mystical literature East and West for the
bliss of the coincidentia.
-
For Kafka writing was from the beginning an almost
instinctive kind of spiritual practice, a way of
breaking through what he called "the frozen sea" of
incessant self-absorbtion to a "total opening of body
and soul" (qtd. in Sokel, "Frozen Sea" 71, 75).[7]
It was Kafka's "royal road" to the creative unconscious
and the deeper states of being. In its best moments it
meant a perfect congruence between his personal will as
writer and the autonomous thrust of the process. It was
in this sense of surrendering the neurotic need to
control the moment to the effortless flow of the
coincidentia that Kafka could describe the
songs in his head in "Die Sirenen" ["The Sirens"] as so
many "verführerische Nachtstimmen" ["seductive
voices of the night"] beckoning him in the evening to
his desk after another dreary day of adjusting claims
(Parables and Paradoxes 92). To the extent
that those voices could on a given evening write
themselves through Kafka, Kafka could experience even
the ghastliest of them, even the sirens with their
hideous claws and sterile wombs, even Gregor Samsa, as
beauty itself: "[S]ie konnten nicht dafür, dass
die Klage so schön klang" ["They couldn't help it
that their lament sounded so beautiful"]
(Parables 92). All images expressive of
Kafka's alienation from the body ("eine fremde
Schweinerei" ["an alien obscenity"] [Briefe
131]), whether his own (Gregor, "Der grüne Drache"
["The Green Dragon"]) or the woman's (the sirens, K.'s
rolling around with Frieda in beer puddles in the inn
of the castle village), would be redeemed through the
mysterious alchemy of the coincidentia. When
the song could sing itself, all would be transformed by
that Beauty that is in no way opposed to ugliness. Only
the mystical notion of such a Beauty reconciles us to
Kafka's otherwise shocking offence to ordinary
sensibility in the conversations with Janouch in which
he twice conflates love with filth: "Die Liebe
schlägt immer Wunden, die eigentlich nie richtig
heilen, da die Liebe immer in Begleitung von Schmutz
erscheint" ["Love always inflicts wounds that never
properly heal, since love always appears in the company
of filth"], and shortly thereafter, "Der Weg zur Liebe
führt immer durch Schmutz und Elend" ["The way to
love always leads through filth and misery"] (239,
242).
-
But not only did the coincidentia "write"
Kafka, he also wrote (about) It—one is
almost tempted to say only (about) It—as
an analysis of much of the short fiction and the
immortal "Verwandlung" makes clear. "Die Zelle ["The
Cell"]," for example, can certainly be read as Kafka's
mystical vision of the identity of conscious and
unconscious mind,[8]
or mind and body:
"Wie bin ich hierhergekommen?" rief ich. Es war
ein mäßig großer, von mildem
elektrischem Licht beleuchteter Saal, dessen
Wände ich abschritt. Es waren zwar einige
Türen vorhanden, öffnete man sie aber, dann
stand man vor einer dunklen glatten Felswand, die
kaum eine Handbreit von der Türschwelle entfernt
war und geradlinig aufwärts und nach beiden
Seiten in unabsehbare Ferne verlief. Hier war kein
ausweg. Nur eine Tür führte in ein
Nebenzimmer, die Aussicht dort war hoffnungsreicher,
aber nicht weniger befremdend als bei den andern
Türen. Man sah in ein Fürstenzimmer, Rot
und Gold herrschte dort vor, es gab dort mehrere
wandhohe Spiegel und einen großen
Glaslüster. Aber das war noch nicht alles.
Ich muß nicht mehr zurück, die Zelle
ist gesprengt, ich bewege mich, ich fühle meinen
Körper.
["How did I get here?" I exclaimed. It was a
moderately large hall, lit by soft electric light,
and I was walking along close to the walls. Although
there were several doors, if one opened them one only
found oneself standing in front of a dark, smooth
rock-face, scarcely a handbreadth beyond the
threshold and extending vertically upwards and
horizontally on both sides, seemingly without any
end. Here was no way out. Only one door led to an
adjoining room, the prospect there was more hopeful,
but no less startling than that behind the other
doors. One looked into a royal apartment, the
prevailing colors were red and gold, there were
several mirrors as high as the ceiling, and a large
glass chandelier. But that was not all.
I do not have to go back again, the cell is burst
open, I move, I feel my body.] (Parables
116-17)
I see this parable as the artistic apotheosis of
Fechner's identity hypothesis. It enacts the
lightning-flash realization by the first-person
narrator of the coincidence of opposites: at first we
have the cell with its two rooms, one lit by a bland
electric light, the other more colorful and lit by a
great glass chandelier. These rooms are, as often in
self-reflective dreams, the conscious and unconscious
minds respectively, the narrator identifying with the
safe but monotonous light of reason or conscious
awareness, for here is where he stands, not daring to
do more than sheepishly peer into the more colorful,
more promising ("hoffnungsreicher") adjacent room. But
he senses that the conscious mind alone will not get
him out of the prison of dualism ("Hier war kein
Ausweg" ["Here was no way out"]), for it is that mind,
with its subject-object structure, that
constitutes the prison. He also senses,
wisely, that a caution-to-the-winds plunge into the
more mysterious, more promising "Fürstenzimmer"
["royal apartment"], though its walls be decked with
great mirrors of self-revelation that are themselves
illuminated and integrated by a Jungian mandala-like
chandelier, will avail him little since there will be
no conscious ego to appreciate all this self-knowledge.
Neither the dualism of consciousness nor the monism of
unconsciousness will free him. There being nothing he
can do, no move he can make, he gives up. And it is
precisely in this giving-up, this total letting-go of
the intent to be free, that freedom
happens—suddenly, effortlessly, mysteriously:
"Ich muß nicht mehr zurück, die Zelle ist
gesprengt, ich bewege mich, ich fühle meinen
Körper" ["I do not have to go back again, the cell
is burst open, I move, I feel my body"]. He is no
longer a consciousness that has an
unconscious, or a mind that has a body; now he
is the body, and, being the body, now
knows it in a way far superior to before.
Liberation is trumpeted in a separate concluding
paragraph as a fait accompli, implying that
the event itself takes place in the silence
between paragraphs, in other words that, as
the coincidentia of conscious and unconscious,
or mind and body, or "before" and "after," it defies
narration which can properly function only by keeping
all these pairs separate. Perhaps that which cannot be
told occurs on the unmentioned threshold between the
rooms, a spatial analog to the temporal silence between
paragraphs.[9]
-
Kafka's familiarity since Gymnasium days
with the psychology of Gustav Fechner bore other fruit
as well. Fechner's careful probing of the gray area
between mind and body in the performance of the
earliest stimulus-response experiments helped Kafka to
crystallize his own independently acquired mystical
understanding of the mind as a dialectical field
generated from the matrix of the coincidentia.
Fechnerian influence is quite apparent in "Der
Wächter" ["The Watchman"] in Kafka's ironic play
with the idea of thresholds of sudden awareness:
Ich überlief den ersten Wächter.
Nachträglich erschrak ich, lief wieder
zurück und sagte dem Wächter: "Ich bin hier
durchgelaufen, während du abgewendet warst." Der
Wächter sah vor sich hin und schwieg. "Ich
hätte es wohl nicht tun sollen", sagte ich. Der
Wächter schwieg noch immer. "Bedeutet dein
Schweigen die Erlaubnis zu passieren?". . .
[I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified,
ran back again and said to the watchman: "I ran
through here while you were looking the other way."
The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. "I
suppose I really oughtn't to have done it," I said.
The watchman still said nothing. "Does your silence
indicate permission to pass?". . . (Parables
80-81)
Here Kafka dramatizes the inverse dialectical
relationship between simple and self-consciousness, the
two ordinary human levels. Spontaneous action, the
proverbial Zen sword stroke, happens when one forgets
the "watcher." But the instant he is remembered,
self-doubt and awkwardness come storming back. Subtly
implied in this Zen "koan" (perhaps through the
Ich-Erzähler [first-person narrator] who
recalls the event) is a matrix from which both states
spring and on which they remain existentially
dependent. (A traditional Zen mondo asks: "When the two
disappear into the one, where does the one go?") Also
implied is a tiny seed of irritation nascent to the
spontaneous state, a seed which, at a certain point in
its growth, will cause the narrated I-persona suddenly
to recall the watcher who abruptly ends the free flow
of action: thus the passage from innocence to
experience, or childhood to adulthood, termed by Lacan
"the mirror phase," a lapsarian image also favored by
Kleist in his masterful "Über das
Marionettentheater." It is from Fechner that Kafka came
to understand the term Schwelle [threshold] in
a psychological sense. As Heidsieck tells us, "Fechner
empirically demonstrated that sensory impressions and
their concomitant feelings require a minimal
(noticeable) intensity to enter into consciousness. He
applied this concept to aesthetics and introduced the
term aesthetic threshold, which Kafka is using
here as well [i.e., in an incidental text discovered by
Max Brod]" (28). Fechner's concept of Schwelle
helped Kafka to grasp intellectually what he knew well
from inner experience, that states of consciousness,
mystical no less than other kinds, are related to one
another in both a "gradual" and "sudden" sense. There
is psychospiritual evolution, perhaps largely
unconscious, towards illumination, climaxed by a sudden
burst of insight; or, as in "Der Wächter," there
is a kind of reverse event: blissful child's play
aborted by the sudden appearance of the Other.
-
We can also infer, through the mini-drama enacted in
"Der Wächter," Kafka's sense that the mystical
state, insofar as it comprehends these discrete lesser
states of mind, is the only escape from the "Zelle"
(two rooms) of dualism. It is not really to be viewed
as the "third" phase of the Romantic-triadic myth of
the Fall, a linear view, but as an apotheosis of the
first two phases, a blending of the best of each: the
seamless joy of spontaneity and the discriminative
power of "difference," a true coincidentia
oppositorum.
-
"Robinson Crusoe" presents another trope for the
putatively split human mind as its own trap, only here
the trap is agoraphobic rather than claustrophobic as
in "Die Zelle":
Hätte Robinson den höchsten oder richtiger
den sichtbarsten Punkt der Insel niemals verlassen,
aus Trost oder Demut oder Furcht oder Unkenntnis oder
Sehnsucht, so wäre er bald zugrunde gegangen; da
er aber ohne Rücksicht auf die Schiffe und ihre
schwachen Fernrohre seine ganze Insel zu erforschen
und ihrer sich zu freuen begann, erhielt er sich am
Leben und wurde in einer allerdings dem Verstand
notwendigen Konsequenz schliesslich doch gefunden.
[Had Robinson Crusoe never left the highest, or more
correctly the most visible point of his island, from
desire for comfort, or timidity, or fear, or
ignorance, or longing, he would soon have perished;
but since without paying any attention to passing
ships and their feeble telescopes he started to
explore the whole island and take pleasure in it, he
managed to keep himself alive and finally was found
after all, by a chain of causality that was, of
course, logically inevitable.] (Parables
184-85)
Robinson is exposed to the dangers lurking behind
every tree of the uncharted island. So at first he
stays visibly perched at its peak, believing, like the
prisoner in "Die Zelle," that remaining within the
relatively safe, overt space of consciousness (here the
upper strata of the mysterious island of self) offers
the best hope of rescue. But he soon begins to suspect
that hope for deliverance from "up here" and "out
there" (compare the blocked exit doors of the blandly
lit room of conscious reason in "Die Zelle") is
delusive and that his best bet is to explore "seine
ganze Insel" ["his entire island"]. And so, no longer
clinging to the safe conscious nor avoiding the
threatening unconscious sphere, Robinson places himself
at the optimal vantage point of any experiential
moment, at the coincidentia oppositorum that
is Self, and begins to enjoy the bracing freedom of the
dialectical swim of the pairs (say, conscious and
unconscious, abandonment and rescue) into and out of
each other. That Kafka is thinking here in terms of the
higher dialectical logic of the coincidentia
that liberates rather than the either-or Aristotelian
sort that binds, is made clear in his closing
characterization of Robinson's rescue as occurring "in
einer allerdings dem Verstand notwendigen Konsequenz"
["by a chain of causality that was, of course,
logically inevitable"]. Since rescue here would seem
anything but "logically inevitable," we take Kafka's
words as a cue to probe beyond the confines of
two-dimensional to the spaciousness of
three-dimensional logic. At that indeterminate moment
when Robinson surrenders utterly to his isolation, he
is rescued—by his True Self, the coincidentia
oppositorum, which by virtue of Its absolute
non-discrimination between abandonment and rescue,
constitutes the only true rescue.
-
Dialectical logic is the logic of the mystic. Its
insight is that the members of any polarity are
existentially interdependent (no abandonment without
rescue, no up without down, etc.). The mystic
experiences this law as applying, not just to interior
linguistic reality (the categories by which the mind
organizes the world), but to exterior physical reality
as well, hence to all phenomena without exception. This
being the case, it dawns on him or her that no
particular thing is ever "real" in and of itself, in
the sense of being an independently existing substance,
but merely acquires a kind of illusory reality by
virtue of its negative attachment to its own
counterpart. (Some such insight, it seems to me, lies
behind the binary emphasis of Saussurean linguistics as
well as the poststructuralist claim that language
cannot refer to anything outside itself.) This
realization brings freedom from "the pairs of opposites
that dog the human mind," as the tradition of Advaita
Vedanta has it. Thus Robinson's "rescue."
-
The mystic in Kafka knew that dialectics promises
emancipation from the separative prison of dualism.
Recall his paradoxical assertion, quoted above, of the
identity of happiness and suffering, the latter
somehow, mysteriously, "unverändert und nur
befreit von seinem Gegensatz" ["unchanged and merely
liberated from its opposite"]. In "Der Kaiser" ["The
Emperor"] Kafka lends depth and nuance to this vision
of an inner dialectical law governing the universe by
claiming that faith in the workings of that law must
not be allowed to preclude doubt, that indeed faith and
doubt are as inextricable as any other pair of
opposites and are themselves a manifestation of the
law. A drop of doubt in a sea of faith is no problem
(and for reasons having nothing to do with quantitative
difference): "Viel Aufsehen machte das natürlich
nicht; wenn die Brandung einen Wassertropfen ans Land
wirft, stört das nicht den ewigen Wellengang des
Meeres, es ist vielmehr von ihm bedingt" ["This,
naturally, did not cause much of a stir; when the surf
flings a drop of water on to the land, that does not
interfere with the eternal rolling of the sea, on the
contrary, it is caused by it"] (Parables
108-09). Faith and doubt define each other. If one can
allow room for both in consciousness, without
phobically trying to get rid of the negative, if one
can, like Robinson, keep faith in the unknown depths of
the mysterious island of self even as fear and doubt
rumble in the belly, one invites rescue by the Source
of all the pairs. That rescue is neither more nor less
than the joyful recognition of that Source as, in the
words of ancient Zen master Hui-neng, one's own "True
Nature."
-
In "Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa" ["The Truth
about Sancho Panza"] the dualism that is transcended in
coincidentia is personified in the characters
of Sancho and the Don, and their particular
relationship casts the issue of self-awareness less in
Freudian (cf. "Die Zelle") than in Jungian pan-mystical
terms of lower ego versus higher Self, or ignorance
versus Wisdom.
Sancho Pansa, der sich übrigen dessen nie
gerühmt hat, gelang es im Laufe der Jahre, durch
Beistellung einer Menge Ritter- und Räuberromane
in den Abend- und Nachtstunden seinen Teufel, dem er
später den Namen Don Quichotte gab, derart von
sich abzulenken, dass dieser dann haltlos die
verrücktesten Taten aufführte, die aber
mangels eines vorbestimmten Gegenstandes, der eben
Sancho Pansa hätte sein sollen, niemandem
schadeten. Sancho Pansa, ein freier Mann, folgte
gleichmütig, vielleicht aus einem gewissen
Verantwortlichkeitsgefühl, dem Don Quichotte auf
seinen Zügen und hatte davon eine grosse und
nützliche Unterhaltung bis an sein Ende.
[Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza
succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a
great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in
the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him
his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his
demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the
maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a
preordained object, which should have been Sancho
Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho
Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his
crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility,
and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to
the end of his days.] (Parables 178-79)
We are told that, over time, Sancho has managed to
free himself from his demon, the proud but deluded
adventurer Quixote, through the practice of reading
romances of chivalry and adventure. In other words, by
studying literary projections of his own egoic craving
for honor, a kind of meditation, Sancho eventually
"catches on" to the conative impulses driving his own
consciousness and, in so doing, transcends them, that
is, awakens to his true Self or higher nature. In
paradoxical terms, that higher nature is a Don who
completely sees through his own posturing and is
therefore able to enjoy it to the hilt: "Sancho Pansa,
ein freier Mann, folgte gleichmütig . . . dem Don
Quichotte auf seinen Zügen und hatte davon eine
grosse und nützliche Unterhaltung bis an sein
Ende" ["A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically
followed Don Quixote on his crusades, . . . and had of
them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of
his days"]. So Kafka is intimating that, once this
"catching on to" oneself occurs, wisdom/Self/Sancho can
finally relax into its own identity with
ignorance/ego/the Don. Since both terms are essentially
empty, mere "signifiers" in current critical parlance,
not a hair's breadth separates them. Zen describes this
emancipated condition as moving freely within one's own
karma and likens it to a dreamer's sudden realization
that he is dreaming. Since he's making it all up
anyway, he may as well enjoy himself (McCort, "Kafka
Koans" 66-67). (In "Die Quelle," ["The Spring"] by
contrast, we have an allegory of the failure of the
persona to awaken to his True Nature: "Da er aber
nichts merkt, kann er nicht trinken" ["But as he
notices nothing he cannot drink"] [Parables
184-85]. Through his depiction of both rare deliverance
and frequent failure in the short fiction, Kafka may be
suggesting that spiritual awakening is a gratuitous
event that occurs independently of the will of the
individual.)
-
Deliverance, it seems to me, is precisely what comes
to Gregor Samsa at the moment of death, not biological
death but that mystical "death before death" or ego
death of which Angelus Silesius speaks in his renowned
epigram (164).[10]
In keeping with our casual allusions to Zen as a frame
of mystical reference, one could describe "Die
Verwandlung" as the narration of the archetypal
struggle with a koan, the koan of identity:
"What am I?" is the question. As with any good
koan, the issue is anything but airy philosophical
speculation. For Gregor it becomes, in the course of
his season in hell, quite literally a matter of life
and death. Dreading the insect and longing for the
human, he eventually finds himself stuck between the
two, paralyzed, or in Kafka's term, "festgenagelt"
["nailed fast" or "crucified"] (Sämtliche
Erzählungen 84) between positive and negative
energies, not unlike the mighty Alexander der
Grosse riveted by his own "Erdenschwere"
(Parables 94; Kafka's intranslatable neologism
meaning literally "earth heaviness"): "Er [Gregor]
machte bald die Entdeckung, daß er sich nun
überhaupt nicht mehr rühren konnte" ["He
(Gregor) soon made the discovery that he could no
longer move at all"] (Sämtliche
Erzählungen 96). When Gregor, in his pathetic
apology to the chief clerk in part one, squeaks, "Ich
bin in der Klemme" ["I'm in a fix"] (SE 66),
he is of course saying far more than he knows at that
point in the narrative and might well have substituted
the Japanese koan for the German
Klemme.
-
This psychospiritual impasse between opposites is
precisely where a good koan grips one, for only when it
becomes crystal clear that all further struggle to
resolve the koanic issue of what one "is" is absurd,
does the issue suddenly resolve itself: Gregor isn't
really anything in particular (or more precisely,
anything more than an arena of struggle between
delusive self-images) because he's everything in
general. He's the whole story! This sudden leap from
part (character in struggle) to whole
(narrator/narration), which is a leap to their identity
resolving the koan of "identity," seems in retrospect
almost predictable from the intimate proximity to
Gregor of the only nominally omniscient narrator from
the beginning.[11]
Once Gregor sees He's behind it all—indeed, that
He is it all—then the compassion for
others heretofore blocked by frantic self-concern can
flow out in unalloyed profusion: "An seine Familie
dachte er mit Rührung und Liebe zurück" ["He
thought back on his family with affection and love"]
(SE 96).
-
Gregor succeeds in awakening to his True Nature, the
coincidentia oppositorum of character and
narrator, or part and whole. He learns that each of us
is both the author and the protagonist of his own
life-drama, each of us both contending with and
identical to the universe of his own experience. This
amounts to a paradoxical identity of bondage and
freedom, implying a higher Freedom that is not in any
way opposed to bondage, indeed that flourishes right in
the midst of bondage. One's True Nature is this Freedom
itself. Gregor's realization of the Freedom that he
is (not "has," a dualistic notion) uncorks the
heretofore bottled-up love of family. (The phrase
"Rührung und Liebe" ["affection and love"] marks
the only occurrence of the word Liebe in the
tale.) He has cracked wide open the very koan whose
solution eludes the parched persona in "Die Quelle."
This wretched Every "Er" ["He"] fails to make Gregor's
leap from part ("ein zweiter Teil aber merkt nichts"
["another part notices nothing"]) to whole ("ein Teil
übersieht das Ganze" ["one part overlooks the
whole"]), unable to crystallize a vague intuition of
their identity: "Ein zweiter Teil . . . hat
höchstens eine Ahnung dessen, daß der erste
Teil alles sieht" ["another part . . . has at most a
divination that the first part sees all"]
(Parables 184-85). As long as he is limited to
the "tunnel vision" of an involved character, he must
remain oblivious to the proximity of the flowing water:
"Er hat Durst und ist von der Quelle nur durch ein
Gebüsch getrennt" ["He is thirsty, and is cut off
from a spring by a mere clump of bushes"]
(Parables 184-85). Only a higher perspective,
revealing to him that he is fundamentally a "One" that
has somehow become two ("zweigeteilt" ["divided against
himself"] [Parables 184-85]), a perspective
enjoyed by Gregor through his "death before death," can
restore him to the integrity that alone would slake his
thirst. The waters of the "Quelle" are, needless to
say, those of spirit, or, in modern parlance,
self-realization.
Conclusion
-
Kafka's sure mystical instincts taught him that
nothing is overcome by resistance and, conversely, that
anything, even contradiction, is overcome by
assimilation. He also knew that this assimilation was
subtle, for it meant dying to one's own sense of
separate selfhood. Even waiting for
fulfillment was merely a form of passive aggression
that reinforced the ego. That's why, in "Vor dem
Gesetz," a hundred, or a thousand, or a million
gatekeepers seem to stand between the man from the
country and the Law whose majesty he seeks. As long as
(the) man continues to see the ultimate authority
dualistically as the Other to which he is subject
rather than monistically as something he is,
there will always be the next gatekeeper.
-
But perhaps we can take his death as merely
allegorical, that is, as the death of a limited, hence
essentially deluded, point of view (like Gregor's
"death before death"), which, by virtue of the
coincidentia oppositorum, marks it as the
commencement of his life in freedom. That would make
the gatekeeper's shutting of the gate both an end and a
beginning, itself a coincidence. From the expansive
vision gained by dying to his sense of separate
selfhood, the man from the country suddenly beholds the
blocked gate to the Law as what in truth it has always
been, a non-barrier, or what Zen calls a
mu-mon-kan or gateless gate. (The
Mumonkan [literally "no-gate barrier"] is a
renowned collection of Chinese koans dating from the
thirteenth century. Even today it remains the "Bible"
of Rinzai Zen spiritual practice. Its koans, like all
effective koans, are designed to bring the student to
the profound realization that all imagined barriers to
Oneness [coincidentia] are just that:
imagined, "gateless gates," projections of the
intrinsically dualistic, and hence delusive, structure
of human consciousness.)[12]
-
Kafka knew the coincidentia oppositorum as
that ineffable, exquisite moment in which what has long
been felt as the confining bane of one's
existence—insect, gatekeeper, cell—is
suddenly known, through the experience of identity with
it, to be freedom itself.[13]
When the man becomes the cell, there
is no cell. When he becomes the Law's
guardian, which amounts ironically to becoming
(realizing) the projected discriminating function of
his own mind, he becomes the Law itself, for, in the
looking-glass logic of mysticism, to become a single
thing experienced as other is to overcome all
otherness.
-
Perhaps the ultimate paradox of this freedom to
which Kafka points is that it bridges even that most
unbridgeable of gaps, that between opposed
interpretations of his works. In light of the
coincidentia, even the cultural constructivism
of, say, a Rolf Goebel and my own mystical or
"transcendent" approach to Kafka become seamlessly
compatible. The coincidentia, as Kafka knew
and expressed it, supersedes all boundaries, not
excluding that between transcendence and immanence, or
Geist and Kultur. Kafka was well
aware (even if some of his current constructivist
critics are not) that spiritual transcendence had
nothing to do with any remote ideal sphere of pure
being, or what Goebel, with reference to "Vor dem
Gesetz," erroneously calls a "künstlerischen
Autonomie- und Reinheitsideal" ["ideal of artistic
autonomy and purity"] ("Verborgener" 42). Rather, it
was to be realized right within the miasma of cultural
constraint, indeed there or nowhere, like the Zen lotus
sprouting up unblemished from the mud. The death of the
man from the country is, mirabile dictu, the
allegorical death of the mind of ignorance, the
gate-erecting mind, which would keep the cultural and
the spiritual, the human and the Divine, apart.
-
It dawns on the man, in allegorical death, that it
is neither possible nor necessary to cast off the
trappings of culture that comprise his conditioned
life, nor need he cross any putative hallowed threshold
to gain the freedom embodied by the Law (a law being
the one thing that is not subject to itself), because
he realizes that freedom is always already the case on
either side of the gate. It is then that gate and
gatekeeper [14]
go "poof!", exposed as the empty phantasms they have
always been.[15]
They are demons of merely apparent separation, one
might say, conjured by the binarizing human mind
(operating at times, such as here and now, in its
literary-critical mode), demons forever subject to
exorcism by the coincidentia oppositorum.
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