Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard Read Free Book Online

baskets to keep away mosquitoes, and the
moetotolo
had to squeeze into the girl’s basket and perform without making any noise. The whole family slept in one room, and if the
moetotolo
was discovered, he would be severely beaten.
    I too became a
moetotolo
, performing under duress. Feeling like a killer, explosive as a rocket, enormous, I recoiled my passions back into my own body. My desire rebounded with such an impact that I feared for my own heart.

7
    I t may have been the German professors at the New School who put the idea in my head—I don’t know—but, for whatever reason, I decided to be psychoanalyzed. In New York City in 1946, there was an inevitability about psychoanalysis. It was like having to take the subway to get anywhere. Psychoanalysis was in the air, like humidity, or smoke. You could almost smell it. The whole establishment had moved to New York in a counterinvasion, a German Marshall Plan.
    The war had been a bad dream that we wanted to analyze now. It was as if we had been unconscious for three or four years. Once the war was over, we began making private treaties with ourselves. We demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender from life, or to it. There was a feeling that we had forgotten how to live, that the requirements would be different now. Also, I still had some of the money from my black-market dealings in Tokyo. It was found money, so Ithought I would spend it in the black market of personality.
    Most people went into analysis because they were unhappy—or at least they thought they were. Yet as far as I knew, I was not unhappy. In fact, it appeared to me that I had just about everything I wanted. But I was like an immigrant who goes from a poor country to a rich one and can’t quite believe in his new prosperity. I distrusted my happiness—it seemed too easy and I was afraid it might be simply a failure of consciousness. My imagination itched and I had nothing to scratch.
    Could it be, I asked myself, that I was happy under false pretenses? Or that I was mistaking sheer youthfulness, pure energy, for happiness?
    There was something else, too, almost too vague to describe, like a shadow on my happiness. I was aware of something like static in my head, a sense that some part of me was resisting, or proceeding under protest. There was a dissonant hum or crackle, a whispering in my molecules. My nerves—I suppose it was my nerves—gave off a high, faint whirring, like the sound that billions of insects make in the tropics at night. It was a disturbance as remote as grinding your teeth in your sleep. Or it was as if my brain had something stuck in its teeth. It may have been merely the friction of consciousness, but I chose to see it as a symptom.
    It reminded me, this whirring, of the sound of an AC-DC converter. A lot of the tenement apartments in the Village had these converters, because the buildings were originally on direct current and they’d never been changed over. Since most appliances ran on alternating current, you had to get a converter, a machine aboutthe size of a hatbox. You could pick up a secondhand one for about thirty-five dollars.
    The trouble with them was that they made a noise, not a loud noise but a penetrating one. People put their converters in closets, but you could still hear them whirring or grinding in there. I used to think of the sound they made as the complaint of cheap apartments, like Lorca’s “pain of kitchens.” The static or whirring in my head was the sound of my converter. But what was I trying to convert? And how could I bring it out of the closet?
    One night after class I spoke to Dr. Fromm. I asked him to recommend an analyst, hoping he would take me himself. But he didn’t; he sent me instead to Ernest Schachtel, who taught a course in Rorschach interpretation at the New School.
    Dr. Schachtel looked like Paul Klee—or at least like a photograph I had seen of him. It pleased me to imagine I was about to be analyzed by Paul Klee.