An essay in last month’s Town Topics, a Princeton gazette, begins on target: “This is an anniversary year for Franz Kafka, who died on June 3, 1924—a doubly noteworthy centenary, given the immensity of the author’s posthumous presence, which suggests that if ever a writer was born on the day he died, it was Kafka.”[i] Given that “immensity of presence,” one would be hard put to define concisely its core significance. But I will attempt to get to that core by example—the core being the difficult beauty of Kafka’s writing, a beauty that is full of thought, and which has inspired, as is well known, a great variety of attempts to understand it. For Theodor Adorno, in a celebrated essay, satisfying the need to understand Kafka is a matter of life and death!
The approach I want to adopt, well suited to matters of life, death, and interpretation, might be called psychoanalytic, but I have no school in mind. I aim to explore a piece of Kafka’s literary unconscious, for it is a truth universally acknowledged that many of Kafka’s vital and repeated word-images arrive on the page as if unconsciously expelled, in line with his diary comment that reads: In the solitude of writing, “My inner self is loosening […] and is ready to let deeper things emerge.”[ii] I want, now, to explore the meanings of several of Kafka’s privileged” metaphors—they are: “die Narbe” (the scar), “die Tasche” (the pocket), “der Verkehr” (traffic, and also sexual intercourse), and “der Schuss” (the shot, and also the gunshot wound)–as they are linked throughout three stories: “The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “A Report to an Academy.” Their coherence over time is owed, I maintain, to their enchainment in his unconscious. Kafka’s devil lies in its details.
I will summarize these stories, with apologies to erudite readers who are already quite familiar with them. “The Judgment,” a story composed on the night of September 23, 1912, is commonly regarded as Kafka’s breakthrough to his proper writing destiny. The story 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, which exposes the scar (Narbe) of the wound on his thigh—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” (hier, in der Tasche). Georg replies, staring humorously at his father’s nightshirt, “He’s got pockets (Taschen) 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 to 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. Accompanying his fall is the famous sentence that concludes the story: “At that moment, the traffic going over the bridge was nothing short of infinite.”[iii]
I’ll begin with the one traveling metaphor—the pocket (Tasche), which leads from “The Judgment” to its sequel, “The Metamorphosis.” “The Metamorphosis” enriches the meaning of this pocket-metaphor. You know the plot: On a rainy day, a certain Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself in his bed metamorphosed into a giant verminous beetle. After the initial shock, he struggles to regain his equilibrium. The family, failing to call for either a locksmith or a doctor, opens their door to the office manager, who is very angry with an employee whom he suspects of malingering. Gregor’s sister Grete assumes the care of her unfortunate brother, but then, growing bratty, becomes impatient and bored. Gregor’s father—Herr Samsa—who, like Georg’s father in “The Judgment”—abhors his son, takes his revenge, bombarding him with small, hard apples. Wounded, Gregor crawls back into his room and meekly, tenderly, dies, whereupon the family celebrates its liberation by going on a picnic.
We want to take special note of the small hard apples fired by Herr Samsa into the back of Gregor, his emasculated son. A great deal of libidinous hay has been made of this scene, in which one of the apples that “literally forced its way into Gregor’s back” suggests, for some, a homosexual wish-dream for intimacy with the father. But here I want to concentrate on one detail, regularly overlooked: these apples are small: they need to be small enough to fit into the pockets (die Taschen) of Herr Samsa (of “The Metamorphosis”)—or should we also say, of Herr Bendemann of “The Judgment.”
Recall, once more, Georg’s cruel rejoinder to his father in “The Judgment”— “Even in his nightshirt he has pockets.” The implication is the son’s view of this nightshirt as a shroud—it is parricidal, horrible, and so goes a long way toward explaining the father’s verdict. Pockets (Taschen) then become a sort of mnemonic in Kafka’s unconscious supermemory for violence aimed by the son at the father. Wouldn’t the day of reckoning, when Gregor Samsa awoke one morning—his hideous, verminous shape a reproach to his family—wouldn’t that aggression call for punishment along the trace line of “the pocket (Tasche)?”[iv] Wouldn’t it be exactly right for the father to turn the pocket to his advantage, the pocket that in “The Judgment” marked the peak moment of filial aggression, by packing it with “small hard apples”—a rhetorical ballistic reservoir? The text reads: “For the father was determined to bombard him. He had filled his pockets from the fruit bowl on the buffet and was now pitching one apple after another ….” Why, otherwise, “fill his pockets?” And so “the last shirt” is, contrary to all childish expectations, not the shroud but the father’s newly acquired bank uniform. And what has Daddy got in his smart blue uniform”? Pockets … full of an odd clientele, murderous family metaphors.
Some readers have preferred to think of this patriarchal bombardment as an Old Testament stoning[v] or as the original Apfelwurf (“apple toss”)—the epistemic disaster following Eve’s temptation by the serpent and hence—quote—“an ironic allusion to the expulsion from Paradise.”[vi] But that is vague stuff and not the crux. The key word, once more, is Herr Samsa’s “pockets”; we need to perform a Copernican turn and consider that the fruit is what it is—small apples, crab apples—in order to fit comfortably into the latter’s pockets. The latter, as we know, is a Kafkan meme for intergenerational violence, stressing Georg Bendemann’s vicious comment to his father. And now, in “The Metamorphosis,” one story removed, we have the father’s revenge. There is more: we have heard about the apple that literally forced its way into Gregor’ s back: “Gregor tried to drag himself away, as if the startling unbelievable pain might disappear with a change of place, but he felt nailed to the spot and stretched out his body in a complete confusion of all his senses.”[vii] I’d like us to reflect on this startling, unbelievable pain suffered from a paternal shot, which results in—quote—“Gregor’s serious wound.”
We encountered a wound in “The Judgment.” Georg’s father’s quasi-Bacchic dance in his nightgown exposed the scar (Narbe) of a war wound in his thigh. His wound is an invitation to us to intensify the Dionysian flavor of this story. We have had Georg’s plunge under a sexually-charged bridge into the Moldau river; and we’ll now add to the story what is called “the birth mystery of Thebes”—namely, “the rescue of Dionysus from the womb of Semelê, who was fatally struck by lightning”—her death provoked by Zeus’s jealous wife Hera, at domestic war with her husband … whereupon Zeus, the father—for whom we will now insert Georg’s father—“turns himself into a surrogate mother by sewing the saved fetus into his thigh and carrying it to term.”[viii]
Now, in at least one place in Kafka’s manuscript of “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka writes “Gregor” as “Georg,” unconsciously linking the destinies of the two victims.[ix] And so, I want to think, with Kafka, of the “serious wound” in Gregor’s back as retaliation for the wound in Father Bendemann’s thigh, which we have linked, in the mythic register, to the birth pangs he suffered in delivering his son, Dionysus. This son, however, is no Dionysus—Georg is an anxious seeker of the Dionysian, perhaps—but in his current guise is merely a treacherous, ungrateful, devilish sprig. Kafka remarked to his lover Milena—quote—“It was then, during one long night”—in ‘The Judgment’—that the wound—’the angst’—broke open for the first time … .”[x] Wound … and womb.
Can we strengthen this Dionysian element even further and gain some additional interpretive momentum? We can, if we will consider the conclusion of “The Judgment” one last time: “At the moment [of Georg’s death], the traffic going over the bridge was nothing short of infinite.” The word “Verkehr” means “traffic,” yes—but it also means the circulation of commodities, people coming together, and above all, sexual intercourse. Kafka’s best friend and booster, Max Brod, reports that Kafka once asked him, without being prompted, “Do you know what this last sentence means?” And Kafka then answered his own question: “When I wrote it, I had in mind a violent ejaculation.”
Thinking of this seemingly triumphant “ejaculation” (this shot)—together with the wound in Father Bendemann’s thigh (a war wound, presumably a gunshot)—we cannot but be drawn, finally, to a story written some five years later, “A Report to an Academy.” The narrator, a certain Red Peter, is an acculturated ape—precariously at home in the human world—but he is also the victim and martyr of two bullets. (These wounds will lead to his capture and send him onto a path into human society, in which, we learn, he will achieve the cultural level of an average European). But the correct way of naming the second of these shots is veiled in mystery. In referring to the source of the scar (Narbe) that the shot has left “below the hip,” Red Peter declares, with eye-catching emphasis: “Let us choose here a specific word for a specific purpose, a word, however, that should not be misunderstood”—and he states his choice: it is “the scar left by ‘einem frevelhaften Schuß,’ a profligate shot.” Here are some other English words for “frevelhaft”: —“outrageous,” “sacrilegious,” “wicked,” “sinful,” “malicious,” “blasphemous,” “criminal,” “wanton.” With this shot, I suggest, Kafka is alluding to that fateful ejaculation concluding “The Judgment” that announced his breakthrough to his life as a writer—the opening into a writing destiny that would forever cut him off (as he would brood) from all good and natural things—from “sex, eating, drinking, [and also] philosophical reflection on music. … I starved,” he wrote, “in all these directions.”
I think we have here the answer to the riddle explicitly posed in “A Report to an Academy” of the peculiarly sacrilegious character of this shot, this jouissance. Had Kafka after all forgotten what he said of his writing in the earliest days, “God does not want me to write—but I—I must!”? And so, in this perspective, the famously sexed, ecstatic, nocturnal composition of “The Judgment” appears as an improper, sinful, profligate bliss and the writing destiny it announces as only the path, like Red Peter’s, to a mediocre artistic competence.
And so, to recapitulate: Kafka meant to take “The Judgment” into the heights of literature, but the wound in the thigh of Herr Bendemann that figures as the effect of another sort of shot (Schuss), hence—a sort of ejaculatio praecox in foreshadowing the Dionysian conclusion of the story, the ecstatic ejaculation of the final “Verkehr,” Georg’s plunge below a nearly infinite flow of sexual life—I say: this wound in the thigh of Herr Bendemann implicates a different, a sadder literary future for its author. In “A Report to an Academy,” Bendemann’s wound resurfaces as the Schuss, also into the thigh, of the ape Rotpeter, which inaugurates his destiny—Rotpeter being, as we will have it (in Samuel Beckett’s phrase) the “vice-exister” for his author, Franz Kafka—the destiny of an only mediocre European artiste. The moment conforms with Kafka’s intermittent but savage doubts about his Schriftstellersein—his being as a writer.
In many readings in and around Kafka’s work, one hears of the impossibility of happiness, the impossibility of a unified personality, and the impossibility of a progressive synthesis of mental contents. On the other hand, in the conclusion of an older but excellent paper—K. M. Gunvaldsen’s “Franz Kafka and Psychoanalysis”—such pessimism is finely adjusted. After the sad conclusion to “A Report to an Academy,” Kafka will write on, for many years more. And so, concludes Gunvaldsen: “Kafka ultimately brought back from the unknown an assurance of guidance: he harmonized the disparate elements of his being and created for himself the spiritual conditions in which his mundane aspirations might have prospered—and belatedly did prosper in a modest degree.”[xi] Among his “mundane aspirations” is Kafka’s well-attested desire to write stories deserving of publication. Such a prosperity, however modest its stature, was owed, at least in part, to Kafka’s rich, pulsating unconscious.
A Supplement
As for Herr Samsa’s uniform full of pockets, we might jump one story further, into The Trial. Here, we have the traveling outfit, replete with pockets, of the warder who, in the opening scene, comes to arrest Joseph K. in his nightgown. This time, this dangerous henchman of the court is called “Franz”! If my logic of the explosive pocket (die Tasche), or what in German is called this “Taschenspielerei” (this conjuring trick), is any good, then it makes perfect sense that this novel—The Trial—should stage the arresting figure as Franz … as Kafka himself, who, as we believe, intended this novel as a piece of self-punishment. I am alluding to the debacle with his fiancée Felice in a Berlin hotel on the afternoon of July 12, 1914, which resulted in the breaking off of their engagement). But this is a topic for another First of the Month!
Notes
[i] Stuart Mitchner, “Adventures in Kafka Country: From Prague to Fargo,” Town Topics, January 24, 2024.
https://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2024/01/24/adventures-in-kafka-country-from-prague-to-fargo/
[ii] The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, tr. Joseph Kersh (New York: Schocken, 1948), 39. “Mein Inneres löst sich […] und ist bereit Tieferes hervorzulassen.” Franz Kafka, Tagebücher (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990), 139.
[iii] “In diesem Augenblick ging über die Brücke ein geradezu unendlicher Verkehr.” “Das Urteil,” Drucke zu Lebzeiten (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996), 61.
[iv] “Die Verwandlung,” Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 115.
[v] David Gallagher, Metamorphosis: Transformations of the Body and the Influence of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” in Germanic Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft) (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2009), 155.
[vi] Manfred Engel, “Aus Kindlers Literatur Lexikon: Franz Kafka, ‘Die Verwandlung,’” in: “Franz Kafka, ‘Die Verwandlung’ (‘The Metamorphosis,’ first published in 1915),”
[vii] Gallagher, 171-2.
[viii] I was made aware of this mythic association in reading a bold, original paper titled “Kafkas Urteil: Eine dionysische Heimkehr im Muttergewand eines grotesken Satyrtanzes,” submitted anonymously for publication to the journal Seminar. For this citation, the author notes Euripides, Bacche: The Bacche of Euripides translated into English rhyming verse with explanatory notes by Gilbert Murray, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen, 1906), 19-21. The submitted essay has not appeared in print.
[ix] Kafka, The Metamorphosis, A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 1996), 50.
[x] Briefe an Milena, 235. “Every sentence, every word, every—if I may say so—music in that story is connected with the ‘fear.’ It was then, during one long night, that the wound broke open for the first time […]. Letters to Milena, tr. Philp Boehm (New York: Schocken, 1990), 179.
[xi] K. M. Gunvaldsen, “Franz Kafka and Psychoanalysis,” University of Toronto Quarterly 12, no. 3 (April 1962): 281.