Roberto Calasso - K.

Was he a pagan, Gracchus? Was he a Christian? We don’t know. He was a hunter. Like a sailor in a tavern, and with the single-mindedness of a loner, Gracchus continues to repeat: “I was a hunter, is that some kind of crime?” He doesn’t know that his existence is like a trapdoor through which one tumbles down the walls of time. And the farther one falls, the clearer it seems that his question has an answer: “Yes, it’s a crime. Indeed, it’s the crime.” If there’s one thing humans have always felt as such, at every latitude, it’s that unprecedented transition, after having been torn to pieces for thousands of years by invincible predators, to becoming predators themselves, by inventing a prosthesis, the arrowhead, to rival the fangs of the great cats. The other animals never forgave humans for this leap. They kept on faithfully being what they had always been. They killed and let themselves be killed according to the ancient rules. Only humans dared expand their repertoire of gestures. Gracchus was the latest witness to that transition, the latest manifestation of the hunter in his pure state. The most modern, even if he is fifteen centuries old. His life — now so remote — appeared to him as the natural order itself: “It was my lot to be a hunter in the Black Forest, where wolves still roamed in those days. I would he in wait, shoot at my mark, hit it, skin it — is that a crime? My labors were blessed. The great hunter of the Black Forest, they called me. Is that a crime?” Yet a nagging doubt persisted, unreasonably. Unless perhaps because, in the long hours he spent lying on his bier, covered by the flowery shawl with the fringe, Gracchus was forced to look at “a small image on the facing wall, clearly a bushman, who is aiming a spear at me and taking cover as best he can behind a magnificently painted shield.” That image, “one of the stupidest” of the many incongruous, haphazard images that one encountered on all kinds of boats, taken from some kind of Magasin pittoresque , annoyed the hunter Gracchus because its absurdity reminded him of something. It reminded him of history, the history that gets lost in the shadows of time, that history in which his own part was negligible at best — and yet still excessive, if one sought to understand it, follow it. Too many things had happened in fifteen hundred years. And now, who knows why, Gracchus has ended up in that port on an Italian lake, and a stranger is asking him, with a grave and inquisitive air, to explain the “connections.” The connections! What did he expect to learn from them? Here Gracchus’s sarcasm, his painful sarcasm, erupts. “The ancient, ancient stories. All the books are full of them,” the hunter replies — and if we listen closely, we’ll notice that he’s about to be overcome by an unusual form of aphasia: the aphasia born of history. “So much time has passed. How can I keep it all in this overstuffed brain,” says Gracchus, as if to himself. For such a man, who lives amid an overpopulation of stories that can no longer be understood, nothing remains but to pour more wine for the ignorant stranger who continues to pester him with questions — he’s company, after all, someone to talk to. Such a companion might be found in any port and is always comforting, because he offers the chance to repeat certain phrases, phrases others before him have heard in countless other ports: “And here I am, dead, dead, dead. And I don’t know why I’m here.” Words to repeat yet one more time before the story breaks off and Gracchus turns his gaze back toward the bushman whose spear is pointing toward him.

Many are the hardships that the hunter Gracchus must endure. Like the legendary mariner, he has a story to tell that no one will hear to its end. Or that no one will be able to grasp. Because Gracchus is made of time. His body has accumulated the impatience of centuries. Gracchus knows what it means to approach, dozens and dozens of times, the celestial waters only to be turned back each time. Not violently, but as if by a trick of the currents. And yet those waters looked so similar. The transition looked easy. And it had been for countless dead. But not for Gracchus. On an immense stairway of waters, his boat sometimes rose, sometimes fell, “sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, always in motion.” But he never succeeded in reaching the liberating, celestial waters.

At the same time, this aberrant, lonely condition, in which Gracchus is completely alive and at the same time “dead, dead, dead,” isn’t even an object of people’s curiosity. “You are not the talk of the town,” his anonymous and cruel interlocutor, who belongs to the land, informs him. For those who live on the land, it isn’t news that Gracchus is wandering all the earthly waters without ever reaching the celestial waters. By now figures such as “the great hunter of the Black Forest” are found only in the occasional children’s book or an ethnographic encyclopedia. When people stop to talk with Gracchus, they may demand that his story’s “connections” be made clear to them, but nothing in their experience bears any relation to that time when wolves still roamed the Black Forest. How, then, to explain, how to tell that story? People think it’s enough to have historiographers who sit “in their studies gaping at the distant past and describing it incessantly.” They describe, sure. But do they know? Have they ever felt that terror, that awe? This is what the hunter Gracchus wonders, as his brain churns with stories that will never find an outlet, a listener who can understand them, just as the boat that carries him will never plow through celestial waters.

During the night of September 22, 1912, Kafka experienced his birth as a writer. It was a delivery: “The Judgment,” he would one day write, “came out” of its author “covered with filth and mucus.” The labor lasted eight hours, from ten in the evening till six in the morning. A new structure, a previously untested chemical compound, was introduced to the world in a perfect, self-contained, compact form. The drastic, ceremonial nature of the event brought the writer’s greatest strengths to bear on that story. Reading “The Judgment,” we see parading past us the traits that will later appear everywhere in Kafka, and first among them an irrepressible tendency to play with disproportion. On one hand, we observe the steady pace of the narration, its calm, considered, diligent tone. And on the other the enormity, even the horror, of what is being narrated.

The plot is an insolent absurdity. One Sunday morning, a young businessman (Georg Bendemann) looks out the window of his house by the river. He has just finished writing a letter to a friend who years before moved to Russia — without achieving notable success there. The young businessman, meanwhile, has seen his business flourish. Now, he feels embarrassed as he writes to his friend, thinking that any reference to his own successes might seem an allusion to the other’s failures. Thus he has always avoided discussing the details of his life. But now there’s a new fact: the young businessman has become engaged. Should he reveal this to his friend? He decides to do so in the letter he writes that Sunday morning.

Later he stops by his father’s room and tells him that he has written to his friend, announcing his engagement. The father, after a brief exchange, asks his son whether the St. Petersburg friend really exists. A little later, he asserts that the St. Petersburg friend doesn’t exist. The son insists that, three years earlier, the father even met the friend. Then he lifts his father in his arms and lays him down in bed. After further remarks, the father stands up in his bed and begins to rage. He says he knows the son’s friend. He asks his son why he has deceived him. Then he starts in on the fiancée and declares that his son chose her “because she lifted her skirts.” Father and son continue to argue. And the father concludes: “I sentence you now to death by drowning!” The son feels “driven from the room” and makes a dash for the bridge. He throws himself nimbly into the river, yelling: “Dear parents, still I’ve always loved you.”