Stanley Corngold

Kafka & sex Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021

On one occasion Kafka composed a strangest inspirations, and they disappear story with a sexual intensity that per- in this ½re and rise up again . . . . It is only in haps no other writer has ever experi- this context that writing can be done, only enced. The story is “,” with this kind of coherence, with such a which Kafka wrote in one go on the eve complete unfolding of the body and the of Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, soul. 1912. He described the event in his diary The story ends with the hero’s leap, the next morning: with gymnastic nimbleness, from a I wrote this story “The Judgment” in a bridge resembling the Charles Bridge single push during the night of the 22nd- into a river resembling the Moldau, obe- 23rd, from ten o’clock until six o’clock in dient to his father’s judgment, which the morning. My legs had grown so stiff sentenced him to death by drowning. from sitting that I could just barely pull The following day, Kafka read the story them out from under the desk. The terri- aloud to a company of friends and rela- ble strain and joy as the story developed in tives and felt the passion again: “Toward front of me, as if I were advancing through the end my hand was moving uncontrol- a body of water. Several times during this lably about and actually before my face. night I carried my own weight on my There were tears in my eyes. The indu- back. How everything can be risked, how bitableness of the story was con½rmed.” a great ½re is ready for everything, for the How might this sort of “indubitable- ness” be illustrated? Kafka’s friend and Stanley Corngold is professor of German and editor, Max Brod, remembered that comparative literature at Princeton University “Franz himself provided three commen- and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Uni- taries to this story, the ½rst in conversa- versity Law School. His numerous publications tion with me. He once said to me, as I include “The Fate of the Self: German Writers recall, quite without provocation, ‘Do and French Theory” (1986), “Borrowed Lives” you know what the concluding sentence (1991), and “Lambent Traces: ” means?’” (It reads, “At this moment the (2004). He is currently at work on a volume en- traf½c going over was nothing titled “Kafka .” short of in½nite.”) “Kafka said, ‘I was thinking here of a strong ejaculation.’” © 2007 by the American Academy of Arts For Kafka, writing, when it went well, & Sciences was fucking, but his remark to Brod ac-

Dædalus Spring 2007 79 Stanley tually channels more than one sexual But Kafka, like a jealous mother, wants Corngold current. In one sense, the process of the pregnancy beyond term. This too, on sex writing the story is the naked metaphor too solid story must not be born, must of fucking: according to his remark, the not break out through the skin of the pa- process ends in an ejaculation. But in a per. It would be stillborn; it must lodge diary entry written early the next year where it has been conceived. –the third commentary to which Brod “The Judgment,” then, represents refers–Kafka raised the stakes of the a leap upward in sexual maturation. metaphor exponentially: “Many emotions carried along in the writing,” the entry of February 11, 1913, February 11, 1913. After correcting proofs Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 continues, “for example, the joy that I of “The Judgment,” I shall write up all shall have something beautiful for Max’s the connections that have dawned on me, Arkadia.” He presents his friend with the as best as I still remember them. This is beautiful baby to which he’s given birth. necessary, because the story came out of Still, the poem as baby is a disturbing me like a regular birth, covered with ½lth metaphor. We have Mallarmé’s account and mucus, and only I have the hand that of an icy, tortured, perfumed night issu- can penetrate to the body of it and the de- ing into the “Don du poème.” There is sire to. Yeats, also stricken, writing in the vein The imagery of penetration persists, but of aut libri aut liberi (“either books or the ejaculation has proved instantly fer- freeborn sons”): tile. In the course of a single night, Kaf- Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake, ka has fertilized the nucleus of a story Although I have come close on forty-nine, and made his words coalesce, grow, and I have no child, I have nothing but a book, force themselves out of him in a violent Nothing but that to prove your blood and thrust. It is a feat even greater than what mine. he had hoped for a year before: Kafka was twenty-nine in 1912. While in If I were ever able to write something large the following twelve years, until his ear- and whole, well shaped from beginning to ly death, he would produce a few small end, then in the end the story would nev- books, he had no children and wrote of- er be able to detach itself from me, and it ten of the anguish of a death without would be possible for me calmly and with true progeny. open eyes, as a blood relation of a healthy story, to hear it read . . . . Ejaculation and birth are the chief At this point, we see him resisting the metaphors of Kafka’s early writing. more frequently heard desire to let the But another motive of great interest story be born. “Go,” wrote Ezra Pound, very likely connects the work of Yom of his “songs,” in “Ité,” in 1913: Kippur eve with a strong ejaculation. In a diary entry in late 1911, the day . . . seek your praise from the young and after Yom Kippur of the year before he from the intolerant, wrote “The Judgment,” Kafka carica- Move among the lovers of perfection tured the Kol Nidre evening service that alone. ushers in the ceremony. “The Altneu Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean Synagogue yesterday. Kol Nidre. Sup- light pressed murmur of the stock market. And take your wounds from it gladly. In the entry, boxes with the inscription:

80 Dædalus Spring 2007 ‘Merciful gifts secretly left assuage the somersaults. From that company I prom- Kafka & sex wrath of the bereft.’” And then he men- ise myself everything that I lack, the or- tions recognizing among the members ganization of my powers, above all, for of the congregation “the family of a which the sort of intensi½cation that is brothel owner.” The brothel is the well- the only possibility for this bachelor on known Salon Suha, the house probably the street is insuf½cient. in question when he wrote the year be- Not all of Kafka’s sexuality was subli- fore, “I passed by the brothel as though mated in literature, but a great deal was past the house of a beloved.” It was in- –and the sublimation was an intense af- dubitably the house he more than passed fair. As a young writer Kafka took Flau- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 by the very night before Kol Nidre 1912; bert for his master in matters of style; his diary says that he spent his evening afterward, he followed stylistic paths of there. his own, like the animal fable and the So, here, if it were necessary, is further ½vefold allegory, which led him past his proof that with Kafka nothing sexual is master and to greater effect. But Kafka simple (in the sense of being unentan- also took Flaubert as a model of one gled with its opposite). There are no true who ‘became’ literature. Kafka’s Ger- opposites in this domain, certainly not man nonce word for this state of being sex with women and sex with literature. is Schriftstellersein: the condition of be- “My antipathy to antitheses is certain,” ing [nothing but] a writer. Kafka noted in his journal that same In the end, he again went past his year; and as if he were besotted with this master in the inventiveness and extrem- very antithesis of sex with women and ity of his claims to be nothing but litera- sex with literature, he wrote of antithe- ture. Evoking the intensity with which ses in an eye-catching way: he cared for writing, he wrote to his ½- Admittedly, [antitheses] generate thor- ancée Felice Bauer, “Not a bent for writ- oughness, fullness, completeness, but only ing, my dearest Felice, not a bent, but like a ½gure on the “wheel of life” [a toy my entire self. A bent can be uprooted with a revolving wheel]; we have chased and crushed. But this is what I am.” In our little idea around the circle. As differ- acquainting her father with his qualities ent as they can be, they also lack nuance; as a future son-in-law, he wrote, “My they grow under one’s hand as if bloated whole being is directed towards litera- by water, beginning with a prospect onto ture; I have followed this direction un- boundlessness and always ending up the swervingly until my thirtieth year, and same medium size. They curl up, cannot the moment I abandon it I cease to live. be straightened, they offer no leads ...... Literature is not one of my interests, I am literature.” He enjoined himself Whatever agent of antithesis could Kaf- to “live as ascetically as possible, more ka have had in mind? And what house ascetically than a bachelor, that is the was Kafka thinking of when he wrote only possible way for me to endure mar- in an early story, in the voice of a hero riage,” before adding the good question, resembling his own: “But she?” Kafka heard the answer ellip- Certainly I stood here obstinately in front tically in Flaubert’s cry to Louise Colet: of the house but just as obstinately I hesi- “I tried to love you and do love you in a tated to go up . . . . I want to leave, want to way that isn’t the way of lovers.” Kafka mount the steps, if necessary, by turning loved Felice, if that is the word, as an

Dædalus Spring 2007 81 Stanley erotic hitching post of sorts. If he could My talent for portraying my dreamlike Corngold on attach his active sexuality to her as his ½- inner life has thrust all matters into the sex ancée, the woman with whom he would background . . . . ” one day share a bed, then that much of Kafka is gripped by his writing-lust, his drive could be cathected, stilled, ap- even as the devil in it decides it must ex- portioned. The rest would be free for the clude another’s body. Is it sex? There is literature that he was. no better analogy for this pleasure than But what would the reality of domestic the reward for service to the devil–this sex be like? Kafka warns Felice elegantly descent to the dark powers, this unshack- by praising to her the poem “In the Dead ling of spirits bound by nature, these du- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 of the Night,” by Yüan Tzu-tsai (1716– bious embraces and whatever else may go 1797), not incidentally quoting a biogra- on below, of which one no longer knows phical comment by Yüan’s editor: “Very anything above ground when one writes talented and precocious, had a brilliant one’s stories in the sunshine. career in the civil service. He was un- commonly versatile both as man and What we are dealing with, then, is a artist.” less than harmless sublimation of the sexual drive. Kafka is a great retheorist Bent over my book in the cold night of sublimation: there is nothing clearly I forgot to go to bed in time. ‘sublime’ about it. How could there be? The perfumes of my gold-embroidered The implications of this metamorphosis quilt are not innocent. Certainly they are not have already evaporated, the ½replace is innocent as soon as the body is involved. extinct. For the body of this man, who was al- My beautiful mistress, who hitherto has ways young–he complained that his struggled face did not age, and in actual fact he to control her wrath, snatches away the was never older than forty-one, when he lamp, died–is, not exceptionally, a furnace of And asks: Do you know how late it is? sexual energies. What happens when The poem made a strong impression on this furnace is made to produce script? Kafka, and he analyzed it relentlessly What sort of script comes out of such in the course of their correspondence. unnatural ½re, “a ½re in which every- Meanwhile, it says very plainly all that thing is consumed and everything rises needs to be said about his unmarriage- up again”? We can expect that that ½re ableness, the undomesticable character will be in some sense banked or angled. of the writing he sought to do. The technical word for this event is ‘per- So this oxymoronic process works as version.’ But this term is only a cipher follows: For Kafka, writing excluded for what remains to be observed in Kaf- regulated heterosexual sex. He feared ka and his work. marriage because he could not spend his nights in bed; he needed at least his If sex is a drive, then the drive must be nights for another sort of “nightwork,” ½gured as originally simple. In such a as he put it. But then again–the oxy- state it is called an instinct, on a par moron advances–this writing thing is with the instinct of self-preservation. peculiarly like lust, and it does take place Of course, such an origin, in the human in bed, beginning with : “What infant, is only a gleam in a metaphysi- will be my fate as a writer is very simple. cian’s (no reader’s) eye. But following

82 Dædalus Spring 2007 the point that Jean Laplanche has no- “When you’re in the throes of this ro- Kafka & sex tably elaborated, the infant’s instinct mantic love, it’s overwhelming, you’re to take milk from the breast is exceeded out of control, you’re irrational.”2 Now from the start by the sexual pleasure it consider the reflections of Kafka’s frère gets from the play of its mouth and ½n- semblable, the dog who contemplates the gers with the breast. Thereafter, both history of his ‘researches’: his visions aims are commingled, and infantile sex- “show at least how far we can get when uality is anaclitic, a drive shored up by we are completely out of our senses (bei an instinct. Neither of these pulsions völligem Außer-sich-sein).” takes its way again in separation from “When rejected,” continues Fisher, the other: ‘feeding’ on the other’s body “some people contemplate . . . suicide. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 in taking pleasure from it is no mere This drive for romantic love can be metaphor. stronger than the will to live.”3 Kafka’s As we see even in Kafka’s sublimated diaries speak often of the suicidal de- –read, scriptive–account of these rela- spair that followed on his being “thrown tions, the sexuality of writing is anaclitic out” of writing. on feeding as well. Consider his fervid “A growing body of literature,” re- desire “to write all my anxiety entirely marks the neurophysiologist Hans out of me, write it into the depths of the Breiter, “puts this intellectual construct paper just as it comes out of the depths of love directly onto the same axis as ho- of me, or write it down in such a way meostatic rewards such as food, warmth, that I could incorporate what I had writ- craving for drugs.”4 The mortal antago- ten into me completely.” nists in “,” one of whom The dramatist Kleist, whom Kafka is an architect-builder, confront one adored, is famous for rhyming, in his another “with a new and different sort Penthesilea, the word Küsse (kisses) with of hunger.” Bisse (bites), as his Amazon queen, mad- In Kafka’s case, we can concede a ly in love with Achilles, proceeds literal- second-order sublimation of the sex- ly to tear him into bite-size pieces: ual drive that substitutes the word, the script, the corpus of the letter for the I did not kiss, but tore him? . . . other’s body. It is not only the schizo- So it was a mistake. Kisses, bites, phrenic who plays with language. Kaf- They sound alike, and those who deeply ka’s play is visible at the level of his top- love ics–his stories, which invariably advert Can reach for one as well as for the other to the writing passion, are sex-besotted . . . . In its voraciousness, the writing in- Intense Romantic Love,” The Journal of Neuro- tensity might very well be correlated physiology (2005) 94: 327–337. with love at its highest pitch: “early- 2 Comment cited in Benedict Carey, “Watch- stage intense romantic love.” To the ing New Love as It Sears the Brain,” New York celebrated essay “Reward, Motivation, Times, May 31, 2005, http://www.nytimes. and Emotion Systems Associated with com/2005/05/31/health/psychology/31love. Early-Stage Intense Romantic Love,”1 html?ex=1154577600&en=45b436a5284b877b Helen Fisher, a coauthor, commented: &ei=5070. 3 Ibid. 1 Arthur Aron et al., “Reward, Motivation, and Emotion Systems Associated with Early-Stage 4 Ibid.

Dædalus Spring 2007 83 Stanley –and at the level of the letter. The tor- There [on the floor with Frieda, in a pud- Corngold dle of beer] hours passed, hours of breath- on ture scene in “,” in sex which the naked prisoner, lying on his ing together, of hearts beating together, belly, is punctuated by rows of needles, hours in which K. again and again had the then by a “graver,” then by a spike driv- feeling that he was going astray or so deep en into his head, includes the incision in a foreign place as no man ever before into his body of unending “ornaments” him, a foreign place [or a foreign woman] –tropes or perversions. “So the genuine in which even the air had no ingredient of script has to be surrounded by many, the air of home, in which one must suffo- many ornaments,” explains the of½cer; cate on foreignness and in whose absurd “the real script encircles the body only allurements one could still do nothing Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 in a narrow belt; the rest of the body is more than go further, go further astray. meant for adornments.” In the course of A remarkable feature of this passage the punishment, the mortal body of the is the reference to “the foreign element” victim is literally abraded by the incised (die Fremde), which evokes ‘Frieda’ nom- letters–and they are “ornaments,” they inally, and hence is this woman: the out- are beautiful. landish foreignness that K. registers is Through all the letters and stories Kaf- his swoon into the spaces of the wom- ka sent to his ½ancée Felice Bauer, he is an’s body. Here, his skills as land survey- at work offering her a verbal body in or (Vermesser) fail him; all that survives place of his actual, unavailable body. It is his insolence (Vermessenheit). The is like the clothed body the hero Raban in woman in this novel is an adjacent plot the story “Wedding Preparations in the but is connected by quite visible threads Country” sends out to get married in, in to the main topic of the all-encompass- lieu of his own body, which remains in ing ministry. How? bed in the form of “a beautiful beetle.” Everything of importance relates to But the verbal body is not opaque–it is the connection to Klamm that K. seeks transparent to a meaning; in this sense, and thence to . (The word for Kafka sublimates his empirical body to ‘connection,’ which abounds in The Cas- a nakedness of breath and light. Writing tle, is Verbindung, which, in certain cog- to erase the text of desire, Kafka grows nates, also refers to a marriage-engage- beautiful. In an early diary entry, he ment.) We know that K. conceives of speaks of this “I”: Frieda as the connector to this higher Already, what protected me seemed to dis- connector. That association comes about solve here in the city. I was beautiful in the when Frieda is summoned to Klamm early days, for this dissolution takes place by letter, the medial form of the sum- as an apotheosis, in which everything that mons that castle authorities issue to girls holds us to life flies away, but even in fly- whom they mean to rape. Frieda, then, ing away illumines us for the last time as the chosen recipient of a letter from with its human light. Klamm, is the metonymy of that em- powering letter, K.’s summons: when Frieda receives K., he receives, as it were, Readers of Kafka’s masterpiece The a letter from Klamm. Castle have always been taken aback by We will, of course, be immediately the scene of K.’s brutal intercourse with reminded of Kafka’s struggle to remain Frieda. connected, and engaged, to Felice Bauer

84 Dædalus Spring 2007 (Frieda Brandenfeld of “The Judgment”) that Kafka is proof against antithesis, we Kafka & sex –who existed for him chiefly as the re- will rightly assume that these joys were cipient of his letters. And, of course, the not unknown to him, but they had to be entire project of becoming engaged to set into rhetorical opposition with litera- Felice was conceived under the plan of ture. furthering his writing, a goal represent- Toward the end of his life, in letters ed in this novel as ‘entering’ the castle– to his lover Milena Jesenská, Kafka dis- the house of writerly being–Schriftsteller- cussed his exceptional relation to music. sein. Kafka was not the least bit innocent On June 14, 1920, he speaks of his being of the notion that the letter to a wom- “completely unmusical,” indeed, of be- an might keep her engaged: “If it were ing “unmusical with a completeness that Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 true,” he wrote to Max Brod, as early I have never before encountered in the as July 1912, “that one could hold (also: whole of my experience.” A second let- become engaged to) girls by means of ter, written a month later, links his un- writing script?” The mingling of script musicality to his writing: “I have a cer- with the woman’s body comes allusive- tain strength, and if one wanted to des- ly to the fore in the idiom of the castle- ignate it briefly and vaguely, it is my be- world: “Of½cial decisions are shy like ing unmusical.” The renunciation of young girls.” The castle is a single entan- music is complete; being unmusical is glement of visible sex with women and the condition of becoming literature, a sex as script. point beautifully con½rmed by the con- Is such script, with its ‘adornments,’ a text of this last-named letter to Milena. kind of music? In an extraordinary diary Kafka has been imagining Milena’s tor- entry, Kafka speaks of his ability “to ring mented eyes from a photograph of her simple, or contrapuntal, or a whole or- he has seen, and he is ½lled with grief. Of chestration of changes on my theme.” this strength (for literature) that lies in Here, we have the association of writing, his being unmusical, he promptly adds: music, and sex, but what have these cat- “But it is not so great that I at any rate egories to do with one another? now can continue writing . . . . A sort of In a famous passage from the diaries, flood of suffering and love takes me and these terms are connected at the outset, carries me away from writing.” This with music and sex in interesting league brings music closer to a type of bodily against writing: “When it became clear consciousness–an involuntary, emo- in my organism that writing was the tion-laden consciousness that murmurs most productive direction for my being through us every day, the perpetual to take, everything rushed in that direc- swash of sentiment and ressentiment, with tion and left empty all those abilities its occasional peaks of longing and falls which were directed toward the joys of of dread. We are brought closer to that sex, eating, drinking, philosophical re- sense of music as a sort of “emotional flection, and above all music.”5 Knowing state like excitement or affection” that Kafka feared. 5 Recent scholarship would favor a revision But what more does music have to do of this translation in light of an illegitimately with sex? Let us ask the question in a editorially inserted comma in the manuscript. provocative modality–sex with men. The text now reads, at the close: “ . . . foremost toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, and In one instance, Kafka accuses himself, the philosophical reflection [performed by] through the mask called “He,” of “burst- music.” ing [with his writing] the chain of the

Dædalus Spring 2007 85 Stanley generations, breaking off for the ½rst be the short form of Schmarotzer, which Corngold on time down into all its depths the music means ‘parasite.’ The word abounds in sex of the world . . . . ” According to learned Kafka’s early writings. But Schmarotzer authority–I speak of Günter Mecke, has a code meaning as well in the gay ar- whose Franz Kafkas offenbares Geheimnis got of Prague German at the ½n de siècle. (Franz Kafka’s Open Secret) is something It means ‘gay,’ with a veneer of the nasti- of a revelation–being “unmusical” be- ness that can mask humorous familiarity longs to the argot of gay sex at the turn when exchanged between members of of the century, meaning “incapable of an ostracized group. heterosexual relations.”6 So there is ‘Schmar’ as gay–and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Kafka’s ½ction is saturated with homo- ‘Wese’? His name may very well be the erotic images, and Mecke is intent on curt form of Gewesener–‘one who has arguing for more than Kafka’s literary been [one].’ One what? ‘A warm broth- homoeroticism–his homosexuality, his er,’ which in the jargon then and now painfully suppressed homosexuality, means a gay man–in this instance, one with the attendant view that his entire who has been gay and now pretends not corpus is a coded elaboration of this pre- to be and has married Julia. So, with a dicament. This can sound like the thesis sort of knife, a knife with a hot, glowing of a crank–some of its elaborations are ‘shaft,’ one warm brother stabs another far-fetched–but as a working hypothe- who has been, in former times, an ‘old sis it is no less fertile in finding the solu- beer buddy,’ and who now for his betray- tions to particular cruxes than other to- al of his kind, according to a certain mad talizing hypotheses, such as Kafka’s Ju- logic, asks to be raped and killed. daism or socialism or Oedipal neurosis. I know no other reading of this story Consider Kafka’s story “A Fratricide,” that makes so much sense. It picks out in which a ½gure by the odd name of its code, although this code must by no Schmar waits to surprise another, pre- means refer to the behavior of the em- sumably his brother of some sort, with pirical person, the writer Kafka. For the a knife into the belly: gay code, while striking, is one of many cultural allegories that Kafka inscribes “Wese!” screams Schmar, standing on in this story. ‘Schmar’ also points to tiptoe, his arm thrust upward, his knife the word Schmarre, a dueling slash, and sharply lowered, “Wese! Julia waits in hence to the tension between German vain!” And into the throat from the right, and Jew in the dueling fraternities of the and into the throat from the left, and a Prague universities. Or, again, ‘Wese’ is third thrust deep into the belly, Schmar the root of German words that signify sticks his knife. Water rats, slit open, pro- ‘rot’ and ‘decay’ and points ahead to the duce a sound like Wese’s. dilapidated castle in the novel of that This is dreadful, and it is dreadful as name–a castle belonging to the depart- well because it is so hard to understand ed Count Westwest. The story mimics ‘Schmar’ and ‘Wese.’ These are not ordi- the rapidity and violence of the new Ex- nary names. Here, Mecke has a sugges- pressionist ½lm, and so it is a medial al- tion dif½cult to resist. ‘Schmar’ would lusion. The homosexual code belongs to a repertoire of cultural codes that ½ll 6 Günter Mecke, Franz Kafkas offenbares each of Kafka’s stories and novels. Geheimnis. Eine Psychopathographie (Munich: The repertoire is vast: Kafka covers Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1982), 76. the codes of his time with uncanny com-

86 Dædalus Spring 2007 prehensiveness; he embraces them and Kafka & sex plays with them, though with a certain wildness and exhilaration, knowing they are meant to be consumed for his pleas- ure. While writing the ½nale of the “The Judgment”–thinking, as Brod reported, “of a strong ejaculation”–Kafka noted, “How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great ½re in which they per- ish and rise up again.” Benno Wagner Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/136/2/79/1829294/daed.2007.136.2.79.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 characterizes this process with quieter words, ½nding in it a feeling for “the risk of the journey, the importance of small differences, oftentimes with laughter.”7 Kafka was aware of his dilettantism, hy- perconscious of the pleasure in the word and in the deed. Writing, for him, was bliss, and because he was a great theorist of writing, he was also a great theorist of sexual pleasure.

7 “‘No One Indicates The Direction’: The Question of Leadership in Kafka’s Later Stories,” Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. and trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 320.

Dædalus Spring 2007 87