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.”
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.