Mourning Kafka

All of us would like to forget without going through the wound again. . . . We would like to forget everything without shedding a tear, without sweating, without vomiting; it’s impossible.

—Hélène Cixous, Déluge¹

[It] must be said of his work: everything in it is an obstacle, but everything in it can also become a step. Few texts are more somber, yet even those whose outcome is without hope remain ready to be reversed to express an ultimate possibility, an unknown triumph.

—Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka”²

Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment,” 1912) seems to leave the reader with a suicide. Infatuated with corpses, we have eyes only for this death. We put on a grave face and fail to notice how the text light-footedly escapes our judgments. We miss our chance to glimpse—“passing before us like a dream”—the slightly green Georg, “almost transparent in his delicacy.”³ Perhaps we refuse to move with the text toward this happy ending because the realization that there is no corpse would require shedding tears over the loss of the well-known nightmarish Kafka, sweating through an impossible leap that departs from familiar logic, and vomiting doubled-up over a dirty toilet bowl.⁴

The very beginning of the text sets things up for change: “Georg Bendemann . . . had just finished a letter to an old friend of his, . . . closed the envelope in a slow dreamy fashion, and with his elbows propped on the writing table was gazing out of the window at the river, the bridge, and the elevations on the farther bank with their slight green” (“die Anhöhen am anderen Ufer mit ihrem schwachen Grün” [43]).⁵ There is the goal: the slight green. The change that has already begun will have been one of becoming slightly green. The dreamy focus on the slightly green hills carries Georg out of this world, leaving only his shell on this side to perform empty gestures like the “absent smile” with which “he had barely acknowledged . . . a greeting waved to him from the street by a passing acquaintance” (49). How long, how many hours, days, or years does the residual husk of Georg sit there holding the letter?

Right from the start, we encounter a problem that will accompany us throughout the story: Georg’s split personality. Here, in the first few pages, a split is introduced between Georg’s persona or shell (the body that sits at the writing table and maintains the etiquette) and Georg’s rather undefined, slightly green life (projected on the other bank of the river). This poses a problem for the reader because, especially as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify which of these two Georgs we are dealing with, whose perspective we occupy when we see the world through Georg’s eyes, where this world is located (on which side of the river, as it were), and whether it is becoming greener or losing the intensity of its color (acquiring the quality of slightness). Similarly, the reader faces increasing difficulty in properly differentiating between the characters of the story: we become less and less certain whether the friend in Saint Petersburg, the mother, the fiancée Frieda Brandenfeld, the clients, and even Georg and the father are indeed different characters or rather doubles of one another and thus perhaps parts of one evanescent character (the slightly greening Georg).⁶

Georg dreams of the slight green on the other side of the river. But why does he think that writing (letters to his friend in Saint Petersburg) will get him there?⁷ And why can’t he resist the—even for his correspondence with the friend, completely unnecessary—detour to the deep end of the apartment where the father sits in waiting? Why does he have to make things so difficult for himself? Why not simply put his worldly remains in a car and drive to the other bank like everyone else does in the “unending stream of traffic . . . going over the bridge” (61)?

Georg is not the kind of guy who takes a cab...