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.
Often I ponder it and then every time I must say my upbringing, in certain ways, has done me great harm.
Often I ponder it, letting my thoughts follow their own course without interfering, and every time, however I view it, I come to the conclusion that my upbringing, in certain ways, has done me terrible harm.
Often I ponder it, letting my thoughts follow their own course without interfering, but every time I come to the conclusion that my upbringing has damaged me more than I can understand.
I often ponder it, letting my thoughts follow their own course without interfering, but every time I come to the same conclusion, that I have been more damaged by my upbringing than anyone I know and more than I am able to comprehend.
Kafka must have been quite convinced of that incipit to have varied it six times. But who is the “I” who speaks here? One thinks at once of Kafka himself, since this notebook is full of references to particular episodes of his life. Were that the case, these incipits would almost merit consideration as the inaugural text of that literature of psychological recrimination that would later spread through the century. The troops of all those who were to declare themselves damaged — by mom or dad, by their family, by school, by their environment, by society — could have paraded behind the heraldic insignia of that text. A vast company, mostly tedious and querulous. But even if the expression of the psychology, as it often is in Kafka, is here oddly clear and incisive, indeed almost brutal, the psychology itself is certainly not the point of the narrative. Indeed, the psychology here will be pushed to an extreme, but as if to ridicule it.
How can that be shown? Simply by looking at the variations in the roster of guilty parties as it appears from one version to the next. In order:
This reproach is aimed at a multitude of people, namely my parents, several relatives, certain house guests, various writers, a certain particular cook who accompanied me to school for a year, a heap of teachers (whom I must bundle together in my memory, otherwise I’ll lose one here and there, but having bundled them together so tightly, the whole mass begins, in certain spots, to crumble away), a school inspector, slow-walking pedestrians, in brief this reproach twists like a dagger through society.
This reproach is directed against a multitude of people, all of whom however are gathered here and as in old group photographs they don’t know what to do with each other, it doesn’t even occur to them to lower their eyes and they don’t dare smile, because they’re waiting. My parents are there, several relatives, several teachers, a certain particular cook, several girls from the dance lessons, several guests at our previous house, several writers, a swimming instructor, a ticket seller, a school inspector, then some people I met only once on the street and others I can’t remember at the moment and those I’ll never again remember and finally those whose instruction I, being somehow distracted, failed to pay attention to at the time; in brief, they are so numerous that one must be careful not to name any of them twice.