‘My life consists of this subterranean threat. If it stops, I’ll stop too. It’s my way of taking part in life. If it stops, I’ll give up living as easily and naturally as a dying man closes his eyes.’

When life comes to him only as emanations of fear, it is important that this fear should be accurately observed: it is the material for his work and hope. He either gives up or goes on. Kafka goes on. His fear, he tells Milena, is ‘fear extended to everything, fear of the greatest as well as the smallest, fear, convulsive fear of pronouncing a word’. If there is hope, it is here, in its apparent opposite. One must give praise in spite of everything, said Rilke; and by praise the poet meant unqualified acceptance of the material of life, however frightful or inexplicable. Truth cannot be found through omission or editing. In spite of everything, Kafka remains the curious observer: ‘You forget, Milena, that we are standing side by side, watching this creature on the ground which is me.’

The importance of these letters, apart from their evocative brilliance as human documents, is that here Kafka reveals exactly what he is transposing into the fictional skin called The Castle. In his fiction he is always talking about himself. He told Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged before he met Milena, that she had no cause to be jealous of the novel he was then writing (the book later called Amerika). ‘The novel is me,’ he said. ‘I am my stories.’

Several entries in Kafka’s diaries and notebooks show what a fascination the ancient myths had for him. Kafka’s fictional writings often seem like modern legends or folk-tales about fear. This is no accident. The myth is a legend whose survival tells us it has enduring implications for the human mind. Here events may seem impossible, but they linger in the deepest recesses of consciousness, pure fabrications – that is, fabrications recognizably pure. We are attracted outside reason to these clear statements which are simple with a simplicity beyond our formulation of truth and therefore inexplicable. These gods, messengers, impossible animals, impossible transformations (Daphne into laurel tree, Arethusa into fountain of fresh water) are fantasy made precise, but fantasy related to a conviction of truth. It is organic fantasy. If these are attempts to probe the mystery which is the relationship of the individual to his world, the images must seem to the rational mind remote and unreal. But they are not attempts to ‘probe’ the mystery, they are attempts to present it, to give us a picture, to organize instinct into form, to explain by not explaining – which is the essence of poetry and the justification for art.

In the same way, Kafka’s stories are not explanations but pictures. His heroes submit and endure. He writes and rewrites his versions of ancient legends, clearly looking for some meaning to connect them with his own experience. He has no difficulty in seeing himself, this creature writhing on the ground, as a modern Prometheus tormented by eagles tearing at his vitals which never cease to grow. The legend of Prometheus is one Kafka rewrote for his own satisfaction – still writing about himself. The conclusion of his version is that ‘the legend tries to explain the inexplicable’. As he has said to Milena, he himself is always trying to explain something which is inexplicable.