depths.’
‘The Stoker’ is also a story about a young man going to America. But this time Kafka does not wait for someone to wrench the page from him and look at it. He has grown in confidence to such an extent that he actually reads it out loud to the sternest judge of all, his father. And though he notes that his father listened ‘with the most extreme reluctance’, he himself is not in the least put out by this. As he reads he sees clearly that there are ‘many shallow passages’ in the story, but that these are ‘followed by unfathomable depths’.
What has happened to alter things in this way?
To put it simply, what has happened is the experience of the night of 22–23 September 1912. Under the date 23 September he transcribes the whole of a long short story and then comments:
This story, ‘The Judgment’, I wrote at one sitting during the night of 22–23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during this night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge … The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only
in this way
can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.
All his life Kafka was to look back to this night as the fulfilment of his dream of writing. Never again was he to feel such total satisfaction: at last he was doing what he had long obscurely felt he had been put on earth to do.
‘The Judgment’ opens with Georg Bendemann sitting at an open window from which, as from Kafka’s window, a bridge can be seen, daydreaming and writing a letter to a friend in far-off Russia. ‘Absent-minded Window-gazing’ had stopped there. Kafka had perhaps sensed that the scene was a kind of metaphor not just for modern life but also for the work of the writer, dreaming at his desk. Now, by bringing writing andwindow-gazing into the same orbit he discovers the way to move forward. Just as Kafka’s story of the two brothers had been dismissed in a single sentence under the judgment of his uncle, so now both letter and daydreams are banished by Georg’s father. The aged, enfeebled man suddenly rears up in bed where Georg had solicitously – as he no doubt put it to himself – tried to cover him up, and issues a judgment on the writer and dreamer: ‘An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being! – And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning.’
The terrible sentence is a strange kind of release for both Georg and the narrative: ‘Georg felt himself urged from the room, the crash with which his father fell on the bed behind him was still in his ears as he fled … Out of the front door he rushed, across the roadway, driven towards the water.’ The force which drives him on makes all hesitation, all dreaming on his part, a thing of the past. He swings himself over the side of the bridge, ‘like the distinguished gymnast he had once been in his youth, to his parents’ pride’, and then lets himself drop. ‘At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge.’
The indifferent landscape of the fragment about the rape has turned into an image of the world going on its way as Georg’s individual life of desire, frustration and compromise comes to an end. In the earlier fragment the narrator had been guilty but seemed unwilling to recognize his guilt; here he is guilty