Roberto Calasso - K.

The father is a toothless giant. As soon as he begins to speak with his son, the intensity rises. The tone becomes allusive, laden with pathos. We hear him speak of “certain unpleasant things that have happened since the death of our dear mother.” And then suddenly a question that is also a provocation: “Do you really have this friend in St. Petersburg?” One of the two is crazy, the reader immediately thinks. Either the son, who concocts with all manner of trickery a letter to a nonexistent person. Or the father, who is convinced that his son is talking to him about a nonexistent friend. By this point, the narrative ground has already begun to give way beneath the reader’s feet. But not beneath the narrator’s, who continues on, unflappable.

The son now declares that he’s worried about his father’s health. Perhaps he thinks his father is crazy, but he limits himself to suggesting a few changes in his father’s “way of life.” And in the meantime he should get more light (as if the father usually remained in the dark). Open a window. Maybe change rooms. But the son’s attentions go further: he wants to put the giant to bed, to help him undress. One suspects that each of them considers the other crazy. The torturous dialogue resumes: “You don’t have any friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a prankster and you’ve never spared even me,” the father says. Now the son looks more like a mocking deceiver than a madman. Meanwhile he is undressing the father. He lifts him from his chair, as he might a child or an invalid. And he patiently explains that the father himself met the friend three years earlier. He reminds the father that on that occasion the friend had told “amazing stories about the Russian revolution” (of 1905). The undressing continues: now the son removes the father’s long, woolen underwear and his socks. He observes moreover that the undergarments are not “particularly clean” and wonders whether he shouldn’t take it upon himself to change them. This question leads to another, much more important one: where will the father live when the son marries? The son planned to have him “remain in the old apartment alone.” But now, suddenly, as he’s undressing him, the son decides to bring his father with him to his new home. At this point he takes his father in his arms and lays him down on the bed. In the space of a few lines the giant shrinks. He’s helpless and light, and yet his son feels a “frightening sensation” as he approaches the bed with his father in his arms. The father is playing raptly with his son’s watch chain. He’s tenacious, doesn’t want to let go. Perhaps that implies something terrible already. Then the father stretches out and covers himself up to his shoulders. This scene of filial attention seems about to end — and we still don’t know whether it’s the father or the son who’s delirious, or the pair of them.

And here, abruptly, we enter the story’s third phase: pure violence. The father throws off the cover. He rises up on the bed, placing “one hand lightly on the ceiling.” (Has he turned back into a giant? Or is the room unusually small?) His words reveal a new scenario. The St. Petersburg friend exists, of course he does, indeed the father says he would have been “my kind of son.” And the father adds: “That’s why you’ve deceived him all these years.” The son is once again accused of being a deceiver: not of the father now but of the friend. But the father, “fortunately,” can see through the son, who can’t escape his gaze. Now the father appears to the son as a “bogeyman.” And even the image of his friend in Russia has changed utterly and stands out now against a murky, churning backdrop. The friend appears “lost in the vastness of Russia”; he stands in the doorway of a plundered shop, “among the wreckage of shelving and ruined wares.” The father isn’t finished yet with his cruel rant — now he comes to sex. Surely the fiancée was chosen merely “because she lifted her skirts,” the father says, imitating “that disgusting goose” by raising his nightshirt high enough that the “war scar” on his thigh could be seen.

The disproportion has been exacerbated. The son looks on from a corner, trying to control himself. But he lets a word escape: “Comedian!” The father rails on. He accuses the son of having supplanted him, of “going through life triumphantly closing deals” that his own hard work made possible.

The calm, lazy Sunday morning in a bourgeois interior has become the stage for a ferocious duel. The son can feel this wish taking shape: “If only he’d fall over and shatter!” But the father doesn’t fall. He says: “I’m still much stronger than you.” Now his words bend toward their final arc. He says he’s been expecting this scene with the letter for years. It’s as if everything that happened between father and son were distilled in that letter. The St. Petersburg friend knew everything too. The son has one last thrust: “So you’ve been lying in wait for me!” But nothing can slow the father as he approaches the moment of sentencing: “And so know this: I sentence you now to death by drowning!” Standing on his bed in his nightshirt, with his stringy white hair and his toothless mouth, the father has passed judgment. The son feels driven from the room. He is concerned now only with letting as little time as possible pass between the sentence and its execution, and so he flings himself into the river with the agility of the “excellent gymnast he had been as a boy, much to his parents’ pride.” Never had a death seemed so irrational in the telling, nor so well prepared for, proved like a theorem. Disproportion is a compass opened so far that it flattens on the page. That’s the page on which, in a progressive palimpsest, all of Kafka’s work would be written.

The nineteenth-century novel had brought about a gradual exposure of domestic and marital horrors, culminating in the white heat of Strindberg (“the enormous Strindberg,” whom Kafka read “not to read him but rather to lie upon his breast”). The scenes become ever more embarrassing and ever more comical. But a father who, standing in his bed in his nightshirt, pronounces a death sentence on his son (specifying: “by drowning”); and a son who rushes nimbly off to carry out the sentence, proclaiming, just before disappearing into the river, his love for his parents, like a subversive proclaiming his faith in the revolution to the firing squad that’s about to shoot him, except that here the revolution is the firing squad — psychology, however poisoned, had never been pushed this far. And having reached this point, the story might be expected to sail on, into a realm where the relationship between images and actual events is seriously destabilized and will never go back to being what it was before.

The morning after he wrote “The Judgment,” Kafka went “trembling” into his sisters’ room and read them the story. One of his sisters said: “The apartment (in the story) is a lot like ours. I said: What do you mean? Then dad would have to be living in the bathroom.” That same day, reflecting on the night of “The Judgment,” Kafka thought among other things “naturally of Freud.”

In the critical edition of the Diaries , we find a series of fragments from 1910 that were largely eliminated from previous German editions. Why? Surely because of their embarrassing repetitiveness, like a broken record. Yet it is precisely this repetitiveness that is their most important trait. There are six of these fragments, ranging in length from fourteen lines to four pages, written in succession. Let’s look at the opening of each:

If I think about it, I must say my upbringing in certain respects has done me great harm.

If I think about it, I must say my upbringing in certain respects has done me great harm.