Kafka's Selected Stories

"Why read these two stories above all others? It is rather that they ought to be read along with all of Kafka’s stories, but they must not be missed. They are great stories individually. The first—‘The Judgment ’(1912)—tells of a sudden reversal in the power relations between father and son. The son, confident of his future, which includes the prosperous management of the family business and his imminent marriage to the daughter of a well-to-do- family, reports the news to his enfeebled father that he has informed his friend in St. Petersburg of his engagement. In the course of their conversation, his father rises up from his bed, suddenly a giant, and condemns his son to death by drowning, a judgment that the son cannot resist and executes, crying out, “Dear parents, I always really loved you”. Kafka composed the story in a fit of literary ecstasy in a single breath one night till dawn and constitutes, by common consent, his breakthrough as a writer, his conviction of being destined henceforth to live as the ‘being of the writer’ ( Schriftstellersein , in his word). Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The second, ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914-19), written to dispel a writer’s block while Kafka was working on The Trial , describes another atrocious punishment. The torturer in a penal colony chooses, in despair at failing to obtain a confirmation of his ‘machinery’ from a visiting explorer, to have himself tortured to death in the hope of realizing, through a fatal inscription on his own body, the nature of a crime of which he considers himself guilty. The ‘machinery’ breaks down. In one intriguing way, the second story literally alludes to the first—the victim, it is said “does not know his own judgment”; the allusion proceeds via an uncanny process of communication over which, according to Kafka, thirsty ghosts preside. The first was decisively important for him, as we have noted; it constituted his literary ‘breakthrough’. He loved reading it aloud to his family and friends. The reading, he said, confirmed for him the rightness of the story. The second is a puzzle, since, as with The Metamorphosis, he was once again acutely dissatisfied with the ending. In this instance, he wrote various drafts of the ending: they are altogether mad. Here is one. We are hearing about the explorer, who has been sent for by the island commandant: “He jumped up as if refreshed, when they spoke to him. With his hand on his heart, he said: ‘I would be a cur [ Hundsfott ] if I let that happen.’ But then he took it literally and began to walk on all fours.” Kafka read the story in Munich. We all ‘know’ that owing to its terribiltà, a woman in the audience fainted and had to be carried out. But that’s, begging your pardon, “fake news,” concocted by a rogue reporter writing on the event for a local newspaper. One speculative argument (of many) for his wanting to publish ‘In the Penal Colony’ by reading it aloud—a rare enough event—is the way it reproduces at its core the structure and conclusion of ‘The Judgment’, which he so valued. The two works belong together as works of punishment: Kafka always contemplated publishing several stories together under this rubric— Strafen. Both stories are built on a logomachy of sorts between two persons. At the outset, in ‘The Judgment’, the son assumes authority—but Georg will be crushed and condemned to death by his father, at first the weaker. In ‘In the Penal Colony’, traveler and officer debate; the officer attempts to assert his authority as executioner but his doubts are reinforced by the resistance of the traveler. The officer condemns himself to death. Both victims accede to their sentence. It would be hard not to, knowing what we do of the parlous relation between Kafka and his father, who at one moment, when Franz was quite young, seemed to cover the map of the world. The boy’s sense of his father was that of a giant—the giant into which Mr. Bendemann, in ‘The Judgment’, is metamorphosed. What is indisputable is that Franz would have greatly appreciated his father’s blessing of him as a writer. I do think that this wish-drama is played out in the latter half of ‘The Judgment’. In a sense, the story is all about writing and reading what writers write in their letters. The ‘devilish’ son Georg is at work writing yet another letter to his ‘friend’ in St. Petersburg. But his friend, if we are to believe Mr. Bendemann, pays no heed to them; he , Georg’s father, has been writing letters to this friend. It is this impoverished bachelor who enjoys unimpeded, transparent communication with Georg’s father—might this not constitute a blessing? But who, then, is this St. Petersburg bachelor? “Kafka understood PTSD better than most bureaucrats” It is not a far interpretive cry to see that Kafka has split himself into two filial figures: the prosperous businessman Georg, who is about to embark on an advantageous marriage (how Hermann Kafka in life would have blessed this figure!); and an ailing, solitary outcast, “yellow enough to be thrown away”. But these are hardly words that one applies to people but rather to paper. This bachelor is at least for one moment entirely paper; recall that at other moments Kafka described his own being as entirely ‘ Literatur ’— as “ Schriftstellersein ,” the being of the writer. Kafka finished writing ‘The Judgment’ in an ecstatic trance. What he had accomplished was to destroy the bourgeois modality of the self whose conatus would have earned his father’s blessing—but not his —and envisioned, in a wish-dream, a flow of paternal love to himself as an ascetic and writer."