Roberto Calasso - K.

“The Judgment” is a spare story. If the plot is reduced to its threads, its strangeness becomes even more arresting. Nothing in the course of the telling gets explained, but one feels the pressure of enormous forces. Is this psychology? Or an astral storm? If it is psychology, how can its elements be named, isolated? This once, Kafka himself shows how it’s done, like an obstetrician: only he has “the hand that can reach the body itself and the will to do so.” Thus he explains that the name Georg Bendemann is a transformation of Franz Kafka, obtained through a few easy operations on the letters, of the kind many writers practice almost automatically, without needing to resort, as some have zealously supposed, to the Kabbalah. Similarly, the name of Georg’s fiancée, Frieda Brandenfeld, corresponds to that of Kafka’s future fiancée, Felice Bauer, to whom the story is dedicated. It would be difficult to demonstrate more plainly the relationship between the short story and certain facts of the author’s life. And not only of his past and present but of his future. Just as the story elsewhere exposes Georg’s friend, in 1912, to “Russian revolutions” that didn’t reach their climax until 1917, one passage anticipates a scene that will take place in Kafka’s life seven years later. In the story, as the father is raging against Georg, the fiancée suddenly becomes his target: “Because she lifted her skirts,” the father began to whisper in a flutelike voice, “because she lifted her skirts like this, that disgusting goose,” and to demonstrate, he lifted his nightshirt up high enough that the scar on his thigh from the war was visible, “because she lifted her skirts like this, and like this and this, you thrust yourself forward and, in order to have your way with her in peace, you disgraced our mother’s memory, betrayed your friend, and chased your father into bed so that he can’t get out.” Ferocious, grotesque words. At this point the story, which had begun as the chronicle of an ordinary daily event in a bourgeois interior, worthy of being told only for a certain play of nuance, bursts open onto a horrible intimacy, so excessive that it seems to distance itself from any possible autobiographical pretext. Wrong impression.

One day in 1919 Kafka revealed to his father his intention to marry Julie Wohryzek, and he received in reply the following words, which can now be read between quotation marks in his Letter to His Father: “She probably put on a fancy blouse, something these Prague Jewesses know how to do, and so you, of course, immediately decided to marry her. And what’s more, as soon as possible, in a week, tomorrow, today. I don’t understand you, you’re a grown-up, you live in a city, but you can’t find any solution other than marrying the first girl who comes along.” The lifted skirts of the short story have become the “fancy blouse” of the dramatic dialogue between father and son. The story, however, lacks the dialogue’s conclusion: “Aren’t there other options? If they scare you, I’ll come with you myself.” In order to divert his thirty-six-year-old son from his intention to get married, Hermann Kafka offered to accompany him to a brothel, if he was scared of going alone. As his father spoke, his mother entered and left the room, removing objects from the table with an expression that indicated tacit accord with her husband. It was her silent motions that Kafka focused on. His father, meanwhile, kept on amassing words that were even “more detailed and more direct.”

On a page of his Diaries , written when he was correcting the proofs of “The Judgment,” Kafka decided to describe “all the relationships” that had “become clear to [him] in the story.” The result was something almost unbearably psychological, which doesn’t, however, resemble anything called by that name before or since. Let’s observe. First of all, what or who is the distant friend? “The friend is the link between father and son, he is their greatest commonality.” Sitting at the window, having just finished the letter to the friend, “Georg wallows pleasurably in this commonality, he believes he has his father within him and feels at peace with everything, except for a fleeting sadness in his thoughts.” For a moment the son feels as if he has incorporated his father into himself, thus dominating him. But “the story’s development” will show that this feeling is an illusion: like a demon from a bottle, the father “emerges from their commonality, from the friend,” and pits himself against Georg, taking over, also, the other elements that link them, such as the dead mother and “the clientele, originally won over to the store by the father.” The father, therefore, has everything, “Georg has nothing.” Not even the fiancée remains: “she can’t enter the ring of blood that encircles father and son” and so is “easily driven away by the father.” This, then, is the father-son “relationship”: a “ring of blood” that expels every foreign element, a magic circle that surrounds them. Georg passes from the delirious belief that “he has his father within him” to the certainty that the “ring of blood” excludes his own existence. Indeed his place is occupied by another Georg, the friend, a puppet who was “never sufficiently protected, exposed to Russian revolutions,” and who in any case has now become “foreign, become autonomous.” What is left, then, for Georg? “The gaze toward the father.” That’s how Kafka defines the eye that observes the scene that his hand is writing down in “The Judgment.” And if the story’s ending, with the sentence and the suicide, seems at first monstrously irrational, it now seems the final, consequent, and almost self-evident step in the working out of an equation.

As long as Bendemann remains brooding in his room, the episode appears to promise what might be called psychological chiaroscuro, in the end of little interest. The prose in this section, however, stands out immediately for an incisiveness and clarity that seem almost excessive with respect to the episode’s slightness. Something changes when the young Bendemann moves from his room to his father’s, “where he hadn’t been in months.” And we notice at once, even if we can’t say why, a change in the tone. The room is dark, the father is sitting beside the window. On the table, the remains of a breakfast. Then the father gets up and walks. His heavy dressing gown falls open, and the son thinks: “My father is still a giant.” This sentence introduces us to a new register, which belongs under the heading disproportion . But it’s a disproportion that is never signaled. Everything proceeds as before, as if the father were an actual giant, confined to a little room, while both the reader and the son consider him such only metaphorically.

An imperceptible line of demarcation separates the events in the son’s room — which are dull, calm, and reasonable — from the events in the father’s room — which are obscure, violent, and extreme. The great nineteenth-century writers shared a worshipful — or at least respectful — attitude toward that line. Some placed themselves in the son’s room, others in the father’s room. And occasionally they passed from one to the other. But they always took the necessary precautions — and each time they gave warning that they were passing to the other side . With Kafka there’s no warning. The shift is smooth and nothing foreshadows it. A current takes the narrative, the current Kafka referred to when describing the eight consecutive hours he spent one night writing “The Judgment,” from start to finish: “The frightening strain and the joy, the way the story unfurled before me, while I moved forward inside a wave.” And at the same time he felt overwhelmed by the feeling that “anything could be dared,” because “for all ideas, even the strangest, there awaits a great fire in which they dissolve and are reborn.”