No Kafka Without Freud
Kafka wrote his early story The Judgment on the eve of Yom Kippur in one night. The story appears fully formed in his diary, a near perfect first draft that would receive little editing before being published some few months later. The next morning, high on his sleepless trajectory, Kafka knew that he had accomplished something. He would write in his diary: “The terrible strain and joy, how the story unfolded itself before me how I moved forward in an expanse of water. Several times last night I bore my weight on my back. How everything can be risked, how for all, for the strangest ideas a great fire is prepared in which they die away and rise again.”
What are these strange ideas and what this fire?
The reader (me) can sense the destiny in this moment too: the preceding two years of entries in the diary, while ebullient, filled with brilliant images and fragments, contain more than a few aborted stories: the reader may be relieved to find that despite the otherworldly power of his later fiction, and all of his burning ambition, Kafka was still perfectly capable of bad writing: the dairy includes many clumsy fiction experiments, lifeless failures devoid of the menace, the urgency, and the dreamy force that animates The Judgment.
Its story is simple, retaining elements of a marriage plot that we might recognize in Tolstoy, only to veer into the phantasmagoria of inky dream and nightmare. A young man named George has written a letter to his estranged best-friend, informing him of his recent happy engagement to a girl of a well-to-do family. Letter in hand, he goes to speak with his old father in the next room—who is a giant dressed in dirty underwear. The old man becomes enraged, and leaping above the bed (like Baron Harkonnen leaping from his throne) explains that George has been a fool, for he has been writing to George’s best friend this whole time and that he knows everything while George has submitted himself to a woman who has “raised her skirts for him,” an insult and an affront to George’s dead mother. The old man condemns George to “death by drowning.” George, “as if driven,” leaves the apartment, crosses the street to walk up the bridge over the river and, clinging to the railing, he says, “Mother and father I have always loved you.” He falls into the river as “a positively endless stream of traffic was going over the bridge” The end.
In the following day’s entry in the diary, Kafka attempts to gather the sources that lead to this story, with one of particular interest to us: “and thoughts of Freud naturally.” Biography notes that Kafka had attended a symposium on psychoanalysis that year, and likewise that he had read The Interpretation of Dreams “with considerable care,” and had lifted two images of Freud’s scenes with his own father from his dream book and fitted them into The Judgment (Marson, Leopold, 1964).
It seems obvious (to this reader anyhow) that what allowed Kafka to become Kafka, what catalyzed this phase shift, in which—as Reiner Stach says—“suddenly… the Kafka cosmos was at hand”—is none other than Freud and his theory of dreams.
