“Let’s play some games, shall we?” Dr. Hittner said.
Out of the vest pocket of his tweed suit he produced a little plastic globe on a metal chain. He showed it to David; then he pulled on the chain and the globe came apart into eight or nine pieces of different colors. “Watch closely, now, while I put it back together,” said Dr. Hittner. His thick fingers expertly reassembled the globe. Then he pulled it apart again and shoved it across the desk toward David. “Your turn. Can you put it back together too?”
David remembered that the doctor had started by taking the E-shaped white piece and fitting the D-shaped blue piece into one of its grooves. Then had come the yellow piece, but David didn’t recall what to do with it; he sat there a moment, puzzled, until Dr. Hittner obligingly flashed him a mental image of the proper manipulation. David did it and the rest was easy. A couple of times he got stuck, but he was always able to pull the answer out of the doctor’s mind. Why does he think he’s testing me, David wondered, if he keeps giving me so many hints? What’s he proving? When the globe was intact David handed it back. “Would you like to keep it?” Dr. Hittner asked.
“I don’t need it,” David said. But he pocketed it anyway.
They played a few more games. There was one with little cards about the size of playing cards, with drawings of animals and birds and trees and houses on them; David was supposed to arrange them so that they told a story, and then tell the doctor what the story was. He scattered them at random on the desk and made up a story as he went along. “The duck goes into the forest, you see, and he meets a wolf, so he turns into a frog and jumps over the wolf right into the elephant’s mouth, only he escapes out of the elephant’s tushie and falls into a lake, and when he comes out he sees the pretty princess here, who says come home and I’ll give you gingerbread, but he can read her mind and he sees that she’s really a wicked witch, who—” Another game involved slips of paper that had big blue ink-blots on them. “Do any of these shapes remind you of real things?” the doctor asked. “Yes,” David said, “this is an elephant, see, his tail is here and here all crumpled up, and this is his tushie, and this is where he makes pee-pee.” He had already discovered that Dr. Hittner became very interested when he talked about tushies or pee-pee, so he gave the doctor plenty to be interested about, finding such things in every ink-blot picture. This seemed a very silly game to David, but apparently it was important to Dr. Hittner, who scribbled notes on everything David was saying. David studied Dr. Hittner’s mind while the psychiatrist wrote things down. Most of the words he picked up were incomprehensible, but he did recognize a few, the grown-up terms for the parts of the body that David’s mother had taught him: penis, vulva, buttocks, rectum, things like that. Obviously Dr. Hittner liked those words a great deal, so David began to use them. “This is a picture of an eagle that’s picking up a little sheep and flying away with it. This is the eagle’s penis, down here, and over here is the sheep’s rectum. And in the next one there’s a man and a woman, and they’re both naked, and the man is trying to put his penis inside the woman’s vulva only it won’t fit, and—” David watched the fountain pen flying over the paper. He grinned at Dr. Hittner and turned to the next ink-blot.
Next they played word games. The doctor spoke a word and asked David to say the first word that came into his head. David found it more amusing to say the first word that came into Dr. Hittner’s head. It took only a fraction of a second to pick it up, and Dr. Hittner didn’t seem to notice what was going on. The game went like this:
“Father.”
“Penis.”
“Mother.”
“Bed.”
“Baby.”
“Dead.”
“Water.”
“Belly.”
“Tunnel.”
“Shovel.”
“Coffin.”
“Mother.”
Were those the right words to say? Who was the winner in this game? Why did Dr. Hittner seem so upset?
Finally they stopped playing games and simply talked. “You’re a very bright little boy,” Dr. Hittner said. “I don’t have to worry about spoiling you by telling you that, because you know it already. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I just want to play and read a lot of books and swim.”
“But how will you earn a living?”
“I’ll get money from people when I need it.”
“If you find out how, I hope you’ll tell me the secret,” the doctor said. “Are you happy here in school?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The teachers are too strict. The work is too dumb. The children don’t like me.”
“Do you ever wonder why they don’t like you?”
“Because I’m smarter than they are,” David said. “Because I—” Ooops. Almost said it. Because I can see what they’re thinking. Mustn’t ever tell anyone that. Dr. Hittner was waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Because I make a lot of trouble in class.”
“And why do you do that, David?”
“I don’t know. It gives me something to do, I guess.”
“Maybe if you didn’t make so much trouble, people would like you more. Don’t you want people to like you?”
“I don’t care. I don’t need it.”
“Everybody needs friends, David.”
“I’ve got friends.”
“Mrs. Fleischer says you don’t have very many, and that you hit them a lot and make them unhappy. Why do you hit your friends?”
“Because I don’t like them. Because they’re dumb.”
“Then they aren’t really friends, if that’s how you feel about them.”
Shrugging, David said, “I can get along without them. I have fun just being by myself.”
“Are you happy at home?”
“I guess so.”
“You love your mommy and daddy?”
A pause. A feeling of great tension coming out of the doctor’s mind. This is an important question. Give the right answer, David. Give him the answer he wants.
“Yes,” David said.
“Do you ever wish you had a baby brother or sister?”
No hesitation now. “No.”
“Really, no? You like being all alone?”
David nodded. “The afternoons are the best time. When I’m home from school and there’s nobody around. Am I going to have a baby brother or sister?”
Chuckles from the doctor. “I’m sure I don’t know. That would be up to your mommy and daddy, wouldn’t it?”
“You won’t tell them to get one for me, will you? I mean, you might say to them that it would be good for me to have one, and then they’d go and get one, but I really don’t want—” I’m in trouble, David realized suddenly.
“What makes you think I’d tell your parents it would be good for you to have a baby brother or sister?” the doctor asked quietly, not smiling now at all.
“I don’t know. It was just an idea.” Which I found inside your head, doctor. And now I want to get out of here. I don’t want to talk to you any more. “Hey, your name isn’t really Hittner, is it? With an n? I bet I know your real name. Heil!”
THREE.
I never could send my thoughts into anybody else’s head. Even when the power was strongest in me, I couldn’t transmit. I could only receive. Maybe there are people around who do have that power, who can transmit thoughts even to those who don’t have any special receiving gift, but I wasn’t ever one of them. So right there I was condemned to be society’s ugliest toad, the eavesdropper, the voyeur. Old English proverb: He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. Yes. In those years when I was particularly eager to communicate with people, I’d work up fearful sweats trying to plant my thoughts in them. I’d sit in a classroom staring at the back of some girl’s head, and I’d think hard at her: Hello, Annie, this is David Selig calling, do you read me? Do you read me? I love you, Annie. Over. O
ver and out. But Annie never read me, and the currents of her mind would roll on like a placid river, undisturbed by the existence of David Selig.
No way, then, for me to speak to other minds, only to spy on them. The way the power manifests itself in me has always been highly variable. I never had much conscious control over it, other than being able to stop down the intensity of input and to do a certain amount of fine tuning; basically I had to take whatever came drifting in. Most often I would pick up a person’s surface thoughts, his subvocalizations of the things he’s just about to say. These would come to me in a clear conversational manner, exactly as though he had said them, except the tone of voice was different, it was plainly not a tone produced by the vocal apparatus. I don’t remember any period even in my childhood when I confused spoken communication with mental communication. This ability to read surface thoughts has been fairly consistent throughout: I still can anticipate verbal statements more often than not, especially when I’m with someone who has the habit of rehearsing what he intends to say.
I could also and to some extent still can anticipate immediate intentions, such as the decision to throw a short right jab to the jaw. My way of knowing such things varies. I might pick up a coherent inner verbal statement—I’m now going to throw a short right jab to his jaw—or, if the power happens to be working on deeper levels that day, I may simply pick up a series of non-verbal instructions to the muscles, which add up in a fraction of a second to the process of bringing the right arm up for a short jab to the jaw. Call it body language on the telepathic wavelength.
Another thing I’ve been able to do, though never consistently, is tune in to the deepest layers of the mind—where the soul lives, if you will. Where the consciousness lies bathed in a murky soup of indistinct unconscious phenomena. Here lurk hopes, fears, perceptions, purposes, passions, memories, philosophical positions, moral policies, hungers, sorrows, the whole ragbag accumulation of events and attitudes that defines the private self. Ordinarily some of this bleeds through to me even when the most superficial mental contact is established: I can’t help getting a certain amount of information about the coloration of the soul. But occasionally—hardly ever, now—I fasten my hooks into the real stuff, the whole person. There’s ecstasy in that. There’s an electrifying sense of contact. Coupled, of course, with a stabbing, numbing sense of guilt, because of the totality of my voyeurism: how much more of a peeping tom can a person be? Incidentally, the soul speaks a universal language. When I look into the mind of Mrs. Esperanza Dominguez, say, and I get a gabble of Spanish out of it, I don’t really know what she’s thinking, because I don’t understand very much Spanish. But if I were to get into the depths of her soul I’d have complete comprehension of anything I picked up. The mind may think in Spanish or Basque or Hungarian or Finnish, but the soul thinks in a languageless language accessible to any prying sneaking freak who comes along to peer at its mysteries.
No matter. It’s all going from me now.
FOUR.
Paul F. Bruno
Comp Lit 18, Prof. Schmitz
October 15, 1976
The Novels of Kafka
In the nightmare world of The Trial and The Castle, only one thing is certain: that the central figure, significantly known by the initial K, is doomed to frustration. All else is dreamlike and unsure; courtrooms spring up in tenements, mysterious warders devour one’s breakfast, a man thought to be Sordini is actually Sortini. The central fact is certain, though: K will fail in his attempt to attain grace.
The two novels have the same theme and approximately the same basic structure. In both, K seeks for grace and is led to the final realization that it is to be withheld from him. (The Castle is unfinished, but its conclusion seems plain.) Kafka brings his heroes into involvement with their situations in opposite ways: in The Trial, Joseph K. is passive until he is jolted into the action of the book by the unexpected arrival of the two warders; in The Castle, K is first shown as an active character making efforts on his own behalf to reach the mysterious Castle. To be sure, though, he has originally been summoned by the Castle; the action did not originate in himself, and thus he began as as passive a character as Joseph K. The distinction is that The Trial opens at a point earlier in the time-stream of the action—at the earliest possible point, in fact. The Castle follows more closely the ancient rule of beginning in medias res, with K already summoned and trying to reach the Castle.
Both books get off to rapid starts. Joseph K. is arrested in the very first sentence of The Trial, and his counterpart K arrives at what he thinks is going to be the last stop before the Castle on the first page of that novel. From there, both K’s struggle futilely toward their goals (in The Castle, simply to get to the top of the hill; in The Trial, first to understand the nature of his guilt, and then, despairing of this, to achieve acquittal without understanding). Both actually get farther from their goals with each succeeding action. The Trial reaches its peak in the wonderful Cathedral scene, quite likely the most terrifying single sequence in any of Kafka’s work, in which K is given to realize that he is guilty and can never be acquitted; the chapter that follows, describing K’s execution, is little more than an anticlimactic appendage. The Castle, less complete than The Trial, lacks the counterpart of the Cathedral scene (perhaps Kafka was unable to devise one?) and thus is artistically less satisfying than the shorter, more intense, more tightly constructed Trial.
Despite their surface artlessness, both novels appear to be built on the fundamental three-part structure of the tragic rhythm, labeled by the critic Kenneth Burke as “purpose, passion, perception.” The Trial follows this scheme with greater success than does the incomplete Castle; the purpose, to achieve acquittal, is demonstrated through as harrowing a passion as any fictional hero has undergone. Finally, when Joseph K. has been reduced from his original defiant, self-confident attitude to a fearful, timid state of mind, and he is obviously ready to capitulate to the forces of the Court, the time is at hand for the final moment of perception.
The agent used to bring him to the scene of the climax is a classically Kafkaesque figure—the mysterious “Italian colleague who was on his first visit to the town and had influential connexions that made him important to the Bank.” The theme that runs through all of Kafka’s work, the impossibility of human communication, is repeated here: though Joseph has spent half the night studying Italian in preparation for the visit, and is half asleep in consequence, the stranger speaks an unknown southern dialect which Joseph cannot understand. Then—a crowning comic touch—the stranger shifts to French, but his French is just as difficult to follow, and his bushy mustache foils Joseph’s attempts at lip-reading.
Once he reaches the Cathedral, which he has been asked to show to the Italian (who, as we are not surprised to find, never keeps the date), the tension mounts. Joseph wanders through the building, which is empty, dark, cold, lit only by candles flickering far in the distance, while night inexplicably begins fast to fall outside. Then the priest calls to him, and relates the allegory of the Doorkeeper. It is only when the story is ended that we realize we did not at all understand it; far from being the simple tale it had originally seemed to be, it reveals itself as complex and difficult. Joseph and the priest discuss the story at great length, in the manner of a pair of rabbinical scholars disputing a point in the Talmud. Slowly its implications sink in, and we and Joseph see that the light streaming from the door to the Law will not be visible for him until it is too late.
Structurally the novel is over right here. Joseph has received the final perception that acquittal is impossible; his guilt is established, and he is not yet to receive grace. His quest is ended. The final element of the tragic rhythm, the perception that ends the passion, has been reached.
We know that Kafka planned further chapters showing the progress of Joseph’s trial through various later stages, ending in his execution. Kafka’s biographer Max Brod says the book could have been prolonged infinitely. This is true, of course; it is
inherent in the nature of Joseph K.’s guilt that he could never get to the highest Court, just as the other K could wander for all time without ever reaching the Castle. But structurally the novel ends in the Cathedral; the rest of what Kafka intended would not have added anything essential to Joseph’s self-knowledge. The Cathedral scene shows us what we have known since page one: that there is no acquittal. The action concludes with that perception.
The Castle, a much longer and more loosely constructed book, lacks the power of The Trial. It rambles. The passion of K is much less clearly defined, and K is a less consistent character, not as interesting psychologically as he is in The Trial. Whereas in the earlier book he takes active charge of his case as soon as he realizes his danger, in The Castle he quickly becomes the victim of the bureaucracy. The transit of character in The Trial is from early passivity to activity back to passive resignation after the epiphany in the Cathedral. In The Castle K undergoes no such clearcut changes; he is an active character as the novel opens, but soon is lost in the nightmare maze of the village below the Castle, and sinks deeper and deeper into degradation. Joseph K. is almost an heroic character, while K of The Castle is merely a pathetic one.