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.
VII. A Photograph
I came into this world with a fine wound; I wasn’t provided with anything else.
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.”
“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.”