Mark Christian Thompson, a professor of English at Johns Hopkins, is a scholar to reckon with: he is the author of Kafka’s Blues, a work on Kafka and racial blackness, or as the book’s subtitle puts it, “Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic.”[i] You might not think this field of inquiry the most urgent domain for reflection right now, but Thompson’s scholarly energy and originality are exemplary. In the interest of good ecology, I’ll reproduce his (and his publisher’s) account of his book:
Kafka’s Blues proves the startling thesis that many of Kafka’s major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the “Negro” (a term he used in English). Indeed, this book demonstrates that cultural assimilation and bodily transformation in Kafka’s work are impossible without passage through a state of being “Negro.” Kafka represents this passage in various ways—from reflections on New World slavery and black music to evolutionary theory, biblical allusion, and aesthetic primitivism—each grounded in a concept of writing that is linked to the perceived congenital musicality of the “Negro,” and which is bound to his wider conception of aesthetic production.[ii]
Kafka combines, thus Thompson, “two theories of human evolution, scientific and spiritual, in order to create an aesthetic of degeneration and redemption, or redemption through degeneration and atavism. He does this as a way of imagining not a pure work of art but a pure artist capable of generating works of art in no way beholden to human judgment” (Kindle 286-294/4018).
There is little doubt of Kafka’s keen racial awareness. He will have read or heard of a notorious review of Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (The Old New Land, 1902) by Achad Haam, the Odessa scholar and pioneer of cultural Zionism. Haam criticizes, as a betrayal of Jewish tradition and identity, Herzl’s sympathy for the parallel between Jewish and “Negro” strivings for a homeland, the latter, a so-called “Negro Movement.”[iii] It is otherwise for Kafka, according to the scholar and activist lawyer Jack Greenberg, who writes, along with Thompson, “It is likely that Kafka, personally affected by anti-Semitism and deeply interested in Zionism, readily equated the two groups.”[iv] In 1913 Kafka attended the 11th international Zionist Congress, and heard debated the leading question of whether the new state should be a religious entity or a secular, a lay entity: should only orthodox Jews or others be allowed to make landing in Zion? To the laicitists, the religionists were quick to respond, irritated, “Yes, and while you’re at it, maybe Negroes should be coming in as well!”[v] Kafka read and heard all this, no doubt sorely bemused. (At present, Ethiopian Jews who have immigrated from the Beta Israel communities in Africa constitute 1.7 percent of the Israeli population or approximately 170,000 people of color.)
I’m eager, however, to get to another chapter in Thompson which, although not prominently race-related, lays out the discovery that first led me to his work–one he made by dint of exceptional existential perseverance. In an interview, Thompson remarks that he could not write truthfully about Kafka until he had absorbed Kafka’s place–his city, Prague—his main languages, German and Czech–and remnants of his time. He moved to Prague and immersed himself in the stations of Kafka’s cross, with telling results. His discovery, which is, for me, of the greatest interest, ought to be of at least considerable interest for anyone seriously interested in Kafka—a cohort that today numbers in the millions.
Thompson’s discovery concerns Kafka’s breakthrough story “The Judgment,” which I’ll summarize, with apologies to erudite readers who already know the story by heart. “The Judgment,” which Kafka so loved, dramatizes a struggle between a father, a certain Herr Bendemann, and his son Georg. The old man appears frail, indeed senile—whereupon Georg puts his father to bed and proceeds to cover him up. His father, however, refuses to allow himself to be covered up—in every sense of the word–and rises up from the bed, a seeming giant. In his nightgown–performing a sort of wild Bacchic dance, the father attacks his son. As they seem to share the running of a business, his father declares that he, and not Georg, has all of Georg’s clientele “in his pocket.” Georg replies, staring humorously at his father’s nightshirt, “He’s got pockets even in his nightshirt.” This remark could seem feebly playful enough, but not when one considers—as do Kafka, his German readers, Georg, and his father—the proverbial citation of “the last shirt [which] has no pockets”—namely, the shroud. On Georg’s lips, his father’s nightshirt has become a shroud: he wishes to see his father dead! The awareness of this infamy rises in a crescendo: it is now Georg’s father’s turn to traffic in death and condemns his “devilish” son to death by drowning. Now the obedient son, Georg embraces the verdict, accepting a dire punishment for his parricidal fantasy and even appearing to be grateful for it. Racing to the river that flows through Prague—the Vltava, the Moldau—he lets himself drop into the water, which reads like a Dionysian fusion with an elemental world.[vi]
All good. The son commits a kind of exalted suicide, since he is not forcibly compelled to die. “To die”? There is no mention of death at the end but only something Dionysian and wonderful. Accompanying his drop is the famous sentence that concludes the story: “At that moment, the traffic going over the bridge was nothing short of infinite.”[vii] (The word here translated as “traffic”–Verkehr—also means sexual intercourse.) There has always been this aura of a survival attending Georg’s fall. Thompson contributes to this matter with breathtaking trenchancy, an observation ripe with implications for our understanding of all of Kafka. It is one of the readings, as Thompson remarks, “that I’m most proud of in this book [although, again] it isn’t necessarily purely race-related.” Thompson shows
that the bridge [that the main character Georg Bendemann jumps off] is not Charles Bridge but the Czech bridge (Svatopluk Čech Bridge)—which is meaningful for almost any reading of that story, because it means that [Bendemann’s action] might not be a suicide, and it links up to Kafka’s own life.
This bridge was very close to a swim school that Kafka went to with his family quite often. Knowing that he was dying, Kafka, in his last letter to his parents, referenced that swim school and the good times they had had there. What I don’t include in the book, because it just didn’t fit, is that at that very swim school, which in the story is right next to where the so-called suicide takes place [in “The Judgment”], on the day Kafka was born, a 3-year-old child drowned. In that whole [fictional] scene, you connect the beginning of his life and the end of his life through some kind of deep emotional connection to this swim school and that bridge.
Indeed, the swimming school mattered to Kafka. It was not only cited in the last letter to his parents but in his very last scribbled notes passed to his doctor and his lover as he lay dying. The imagery of swimming swims through his work. There is no doubt of an identification of this Georg figure with Kafka himself, since he describes the writing of “The Judgment” as if “advancing in a body of water” (Gewässer)—the text is more fluent in the German.
Here are corollaries to the above:
Kafka: “I can swim as well as the others, only I have a better memory than they do, so I have been unable to forget my formerly not being able to swim. Since I have been unable to forget it, being able to swim doesn’t help me, and I can’t swim after all.” The Moldau encourages Kafka to convert imaginatively statistics of suicides into imagery, such as, “The man in ecstasy and the man drowning–both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.”
Readers eager to learn even more about the decisive role that swimming plays in Kafka’s imagination are invited to read Aaron Schuster’s philosophically ambitious essay, “Kafka Swims.”[viii]
But it’s urgent to return to Thompson and “the newer bridge that represented Czech nationalism in the early 20th century. It was not deep enough to drown from. You can jump in and survive (emphasis added, SC).”[ix] In the story, Georg Bendemann, on grounds of filial impiety, is sentenced to death by drowning. But now, if as seems likely, Kafka is envisioning the Czech Bridge as the scene of reparation, he does not drown at all. Did Kafka have this only farcical end in mind? In “The Judgment,” it is Georg who accuses—and then bitterly regrets accusing—his father of being a “Komödiant” (hypocrite, play-actor). Before long, the charge rebounds to Georg, who absorbs the insult, then merely foils his demented father (and with him, every reader before Thompson) by dropping—indeed, with the nimbleness of “the excellent gymnast he had been in his youth”—into a sort of swimming pool. Does this barely open secret forecast everything that Kafka writes—mischievous “play,” as in Goethe’s famous phrase about his poems, “serious jests”? What powerful implications for the reading of all of Kafka’s works and his aesthetic practice is implied here? Kafka wrote of his intention, too deep for mastery, to “raise the work into the pure the true, the immutability.” And this bit of trickery? The jury—generations of Kafka-readers—is out, well-occupied.
In another piece, I will discuss in detail Thompson’s subtle, trenchant reading of a Black Kafka. But I am eager now to enlarge this topic by citing, as does Thompson, the volume Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (2008), edited by Benno Wagner, Jack Greenberg, and me in 2009. This work had the benefit of the serene wisdom of Greenberg, cited above, who, together with Thurgood Marshall, argued successfully before the Supreme Court the landmark case of Black versus the Board of Education. Greenberg was the first scholar to link Kafka—or what he called “the Kafkaesque”—with Black civil rights, via the 1955-judgment by the Court granting Blacks entry into hitherto “white” schools and universities “with all deliberate speed”—an oxymoron inviting painful delay. One commentator, Allan Jalon, noted “The absurdity of a progress that is no progress in The Trial and other writings framed Greenberg’s anger at how the court ‘wrapped all the standards (for enacting the decision) within the oxymoron, “all deliberate speed.”’ ‘“Deliberate,” Greenberg writes, ‘can mean slow. “Speed” connotes fast. A Kafka aficionado would find the impenetrable contradiction delicious.’”[x] The decree was not effectively implemented throughout the South until years after its passage. In 1964, according to Congressional Quarterly Almanac, only 2.14% of Black students attended integrated schools across the eleven former Confederate states.[xi] Perhaps with such concerns we are now returned, once again, to a domain inviting the most urgent reflection.
NOTES
[i] Mark Christian Thompson, Kafka’s Blues (Evansville, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016).
[ii] https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810132856/kafkas-blues/
[iii] Benno Wagner, “Ein Platz zum Landen. Kafkas Semiotik der Diaspora,” in: Zeitschrift für Semiotik, vol. 41, no. 2-3 (2019): 89.
[iv] Jack Greenberg, “From Kafka to Kafkaesque,” Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 368. Cited in Thompson (Kindle 2726/4010).
[v] In conversation with Benno Wagner, May 18, 2024.
[vi] This description of Kafka’s story is taken from a piece I published in First of the Month titled “Kafka’s Literary Unconscious,” March 1, 2024.
[vii] “In diesem Augenblick ging über die Brücke ein geradezu unendlicher Verkehr.”
[viii] https://www.academia.edu/43305851/Kafka_Swims
[ix] https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2017/summer/mark-christian-thompson-new-reading-of-kafka/
[x] The commentor is Allan Jalon, in his piece for the newspaper Forward titled “How Franz Kafka can help us understand the history of segregation in America. In Kafka’s work, scholars have found a connection to the Black experience in the 20th century.” https://forward.com/culture/616549/how-franz-kafka-can-help-us-understand-the-history-of-segregation-in-america/. Jalon is citing Jack Greenberg’s essay “From Kafka to Kafkaesque,” 370.
[xi] Ibid.