« Allegory, symbol, and mythical fiction—whose extraordinary developments Kafka’s works present to us—are made indispensable by the very nature of his meditation. This meditation oscillates between the two poles of solitude and law, of silence and the common word. It can reach neither one nor the other, and this oscillation is also an attempt to escape oscillation. His thought cannot find rest in the general; yet although it sometimes complains of its madness and confinement, it is not absolute solitude either, for it speaks of this solitude; it is not nonsense, for its meaning is precisely this nonsense; it is not outside the law, for it is its law—this banishment—that already reconciles it.
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As soon as thought encounters the absurd, that encounter signifies the end of the absurd.»
Maurice Blanchot, From Kafka to Kafka, folio, p. 65
If one retains the initial reading as a foundation, and now allows the new indications to act as a shift in perspective, the image begins to function like a visual palimpsest: nothing is cancelled, everything is reconfigured through superimposition.
The plank becomes a boat—but a very particular kind of boat: a frail skiff, long, narrow, unstable, almost impossible. It is no longer a simple passage between two shores, but a precarious craft carried by a wave. A spiral of water, coiling and seeming to unwind endlessly only to collapse, evokes at once the movement of the sea and the fold of time. The boat does not truly progress toward elsewhere; it maintains a fragile balance upon a becoming that is just as fragile. This wave is not a direct threat; it is a condition: without it, the boat would fall into immobility; with it, it remains perpetually on the verge of capsizing.
In this context, the figure of the man subtly changes status. He is no longer the one slipping out of the world, but the one who has sat down on the left side of the boat—on the right, if one changes point of view—accepting an uncomfortable position. The imbalance remains, but it becomes inhabited. The gesture of lifting the hat, head uncovered, ceases to be merely worldly; it takes on the value of an unveiling. To uncover oneself here is not only to greet; it is to consent to exposure. The man relinquishes a symbolic protection at the very moment he makes himself vulnerable on an unstable craft. The gesture remains ambiguous. It is at once politeness, offering, recognition, or voluntary stripping-away. The image allows these meanings to coexist without deciding among them.
The blue dog, held against him, introduces a new affective and symbolic layer. Blue like the night, like depth. It could be like a thought not yet verbalized. The dog is not in front, not a guide; it is carried by the left arm, on the side of the heart. The man speaks to it. This suggests that speech here is not addressed to the social world, but to a faithful presence, intermediary between instinct and language. The dog becomes a figure of accompanied thought, of speech seeking itself by speaking to what listens without judging. The blue intensifies this idea: it is not a naturalistic animal, but a mental one, almost dreamlike.
To the right of the boat, placid and stable, stands the donkey, and with it flows an entire symbolic constellation. The donkey is traditionally associated with obstinacy, slowness, humility, sometimes with supposed stupidity, but also with discreet wisdom, patience, endurance without emphasis. Where the dog is held, the donkey is free. Where the dog receives speech, the donkey observes. Its position on the right, for the reader, is not incidental: it becomes a figure of counterpoint, almost a silent mirror. It does not judge; it does not intervene. It is simply there, stable on the boat or at its edge, as if it already knew what the man is in the process of discovering.
“Depending on how one looks at things, each way may have its merits…”—this thought acts as a hermeneutic key. The image now explicitly accepts the plurality of readings. The man who uncovers himself, the dog to whom one speaks, the donkey who watches, the wave that carries: none of these elements imposes a hierarchy. They are modes of relation to the world that coexist. Speaking, holding, watching, enduring, advancing without advancing—none is disqualified.
What becomes striking, then, is that the boat does not merely unite figures, but modes of existence. The social and thinking man, the affective and faithful dog, the humble and persevering donkey, the impersonal and cyclical wave. The boat is too narrow to choose. It forces together what elsewhere would be separated. Balance does not arise from the domination of a single viewpoint, but from their tense cohabitation.
Thus, the first reading spoke of a suspended fall. The second introduces a suspended navigation. In both cases, nothing is resolved. But what changes is the tone: one passes from a scene of loss to a scene of crossing. Not a heroic crossing, but a modest and fragile one, where uncovering oneself is perhaps nothing other than accepting to travel without armor, surrounded by animals who, each in their own way, already know something about the world the human is still learning how to see.
