K.

VII. A Photograph

During the night of September 22, 1912, Kafka experienced his birth as a writer. It was a delivery: “The Judgment,” he would one day write, “came out” of its author “covered with filth and mucus.” The labor lasted eight hours, from ten in the evening till six in the morning. A new structure, a previously untested chemical compound, was introduced to the world in a perfect, self-contained, compact form. The drastic, ceremonial nature of the event brought the writer’s greatest strengths to bear on that story. Reading “The Judgment,” we see parading past us the traits that will later appear everywhere in Kafka, and first among them an irrepressible tendency to play with disproportion. On one hand, we observe the steady pace of the narration, its calm, considered, diligent tone. And on the other the enormity, even the horror, of what is being narrated.

The plot is an insolent absurdity. One Sunday morning, a young businessman (Georg Bendemann) looks out the window of his house by the river. He has just finished writing a letter to a friend who years before moved to Russia — without achieving notable success there. The young businessman, meanwhile, has seen his business flourish. Now, he feels embarrassed as he writes to his friend, thinking that any reference to his own successes might seem an allusion to the other’s failures. Thus he has always avoided discussing the details of his life. But now there’s a new fact: the young businessman has become engaged. Should he reveal this to his friend? He decides to do so in the letter he writes that Sunday morning.

Later he stops by his father’s room and tells him that he has written to his friend, announcing his engagement. The father, after a brief exchange, asks his son whether the St. Petersburg friend really exists. A little later, he asserts that the St. Petersburg friend doesn’t exist. The son insists that, three years earlier, the father even met the friend. Then he lifts his father in his arms and lays him down in bed. After further remarks, the father stands up in his bed and begins to rage. He says he knows the son’s friend. He asks his son why he has deceived him. Then he starts in on the fiancée and declares that his son chose her “because she lifted her skirts.” Father and son continue to argue. And the father concludes: “I sentence you now to death by drowning!” The son feels “driven from the room” and makes a dash for the bridge. He throws himself nimbly into the river, yelling: “Dear parents, still I’ve always loved you.”

“The Judgment” is a spare story. If the plot is reduced to its threads, its strangeness becomes even more arresting. Nothing in the course of the telling gets explained, but one feels the pressure of enormous forces. Is this psychology? Or an astral storm? If it is psychology, how can its elements be named, isolated? This once, Kafka himself shows how it’s done, like an obstetrician: only he has “the hand that can reach the body itself and the will to do so.” Thus he explains that the name Georg Bendemann is a transformation of Franz Kafka, obtained through a few easy operations on the letters, of the kind many writers practice almost automatically, without needing to resort, as some have zealously supposed, to the Kabbalah. Similarly, the name of Georg’s fiancée, Frieda Brandenfeld, corresponds to that of Kafka’s future fiancée, Felice Bauer, to whom the story is dedicated. It would be difficult to demonstrate more plainly the relationship between the short story and certain facts of the author’s life. And not only of his past and present but of his future. Just as the story elsewhere exposes Georg’s friend, in 1912, to “Russian revolutions” that didn’t reach their climax until 1917, one passage anticipates a scene that will take place in Kafka’s life seven years later. In the story, as the father is raging against Georg, the fiancée suddenly becomes his target: “Because she lifted her skirts,” the father began to whisper in a flutelike voice, “because she lifted her skirts like this, that disgusting goose,” and to demonstrate, he lifted his nightshirt up high enough that the scar on his thigh from the war was visible, “because she lifted her skirts like this, and like this and this, you thrust yourself forward and, in order to have your way with her in peace, you disgraced our mother’s memory, betrayed your friend, and chased your father into bed so that he can’t get out.” Ferocious, grotesque words. At this point the story, which had begun as the chronicle of an ordinary daily event in a bourgeois interior, worthy of being told only for a certain play of nuance, bursts open onto a horrible intimacy, so excessive that it seems to distance itself from any possible autobiographical pretext. Wrong impression.

One day in 1919 Kafka revealed to his father his intention to marry Julie Wohryzek, and he received in reply the following words, which can now be read between quotation marks in his Letter to His Father: “She probably put on a fancy blouse, something these Prague Jewesses know how to do, and so you, of course, immediately decided to marry her. And what’s more, as soon as possible, in a week, tomorrow, today. I don’t understand you, you’re a grown-up, you live in a city, but you can’t find any solution other than marrying the first girl who comes along.” The lifted skirts of the short story have become the “fancy blouse” of the dramatic dialogue between father and son. The story, however, lacks the dialogue’s conclusion: “Aren’t there other options? If they scare you, I’ll come with you myself.” In order to divert his thirty-six-year-old son from his intention to get married, Hermann Kafka offered to accompany him to a brothel, if he was scared of going alone. As his father spoke, his mother entered and left the room, removing objects from the table with an expression that indicated tacit accord with her husband. It was her silent motions that Kafka focused on. His father, meanwhile, kept on amassing words that were even “more detailed and more direct.”

On a page of his Diaries, written when he was correcting the proofs of “The Judgment,” Kafka decided to describe “all the relationships” that had “become clear to [him] in the story.” The result was something almost unbearably psychological, which doesn’t, however, resemble anything called by that name before or since. Let’s observe. First of all, what or who is the distant friend? “The friend is the link between father and son, he is their greatest commonality.” Sitting at the window, having just finished the letter to the friend, “Georg wallows pleasurably in this commonality, he believes he has his father within him and feels at peace with everything, except for a fleeting sadness in his thoughts.” For a moment the son feels as if he has incorporated his father into himself, thus dominating him. But “the story’s development” will show that this feeling is an illusion: like a demon from a bottle, the father “emerges from their commonality, from the friend,” and pits himself against Georg, taking over, also, the other elements that link them, such as the dead mother and “the clientele, originally won over to the store by the father.” The father, therefore, has everything, “Georg has nothing.” Not even the fiancée remains: “she can’t enter the ring of blood that encircles father and son” and so is “easily driven away by the father.” This, then, is the father-son “relationship”: a “ring of blood” that expels every foreign element, a magic circle that surrounds them. Georg passes from the delirious belief that “he has his father within him” to the certainty that the “ring of blood” excludes his own existence. Indeed his place is occupied by another Georg, the friend, a puppet who was “never sufficiently protected, exposed to Russian revolutions,” and who in any case has now become “foreign, become autonomous.” What is left, then, for Georg? “The gaze toward the father.” That’s how Kafka defines the eye that observes the scene that his hand is writing down in “The Judgment.” And if the story’s ending, with the sentence and the suicide, seems at first monstrously irrational, it now seems the final, consequent, and almost self-evident step in the working out of an equation.

As long as Bendemann remains brooding in his room, the episode appears to promise what might be called psychological chiaroscuro, in the end of little interest. The prose in this section, however, stands out immediately for an incisiveness and clarity that seem almost excessive with respect to the episode’s slightness. Something changes when the young Bendemann moves from his room to his father’s, “where he hadn’t been in months.” And we notice at once, even if we can’t say why, a change in the tone. The room is dark, the father is sitting beside the window. On the table, the remains of a breakfast. Then the father gets up and walks. His heavy dressing gown falls open, and the son thinks: “My father is still a giant.” This sentence introduces us to a new register, which belongs under the heading disproportion. But it’s a disproportion that is never signaled. Everything proceeds as before, as if the father were an actual giant, confined to a little room, while both the reader and the son consider him such only metaphorically.

An imperceptible line of demarcation separates the events in the son’s room — which are dull, calm, and reasonable — from the events in the father’s room — which are obscure, violent, and extreme. The great nineteenth-century writers shared a worshipful — or at least respectful — attitude toward that line. Some placed themselves in the son’s room, others in the father’s room. And occasionally they passed from one to the other. But they always took the necessary precautions — and each time they gave warning that they were passing to the other side. With Kafka there’s no warning. The shift is smooth and nothing foreshadows it. A current takes the narrative, the current Kafka referred to when describing the eight consecutive hours he spent one night writing “The Judgment,” from start to finish: “The frightening strain and the joy, the way the story unfurled before me, while I moved forward inside a wave.” And at the same time he felt overwhelmed by the feeling that “anything could be dared,” because “for all ideas, even the strangest, there awaits a great fire in which they dissolve and are reborn.”

The father is a toothless giant. As soon as he begins to speak with his son, the intensity rises. The tone becomes allusive, laden with pathos. We hear him speak of “certain unpleasant things that have happened since the death of our dear mother.” And then suddenly a question that is also a provocation: “Do you really have this friend in St. Petersburg?” One of the two is crazy, the reader immediately thinks. Either the son, who concocts with all manner of trickery a letter to a nonexistent person. Or the father, who is convinced that his son is talking to him about a nonexistent friend. By this point, the narrative ground has already begun to give way beneath the reader’s feet. But not beneath the narrator’s, who continues on, unflappable.

The son now declares that he’s worried about his father’s health. Perhaps he thinks his father is crazy, but he limits himself to suggesting a few changes in his father’s “way of life.” And in the meantime he should get more light (as if the father usually remained in the dark). Open a window. Maybe change rooms. But the son’s attentions go further: he wants to put the giant to bed, to help him undress. One suspects that each of them considers the other crazy. The torturous dialogue resumes: “You don’t have any friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a prankster and you’ve never spared even me,” the father says. Now the son looks more like a mocking deceiver than a madman. Meanwhile he is undressing the father. He lifts him from his chair, as he might a child or an invalid. And he patiently explains that the father himself met the friend three years earlier. He reminds the father that on that occasion the friend had told “amazing stories about the Russian revolution” (of 1905). The undressing continues: now the son removes the father’s long, woolen underwear and his socks. He observes moreover that the undergarments are not “particularly clean” and wonders whether he shouldn’t take it upon himself to change them. This question leads to another, much more important one: where will the father live when the son marries? The son planned to have him “remain in the old apartment alone.” But now, suddenly, as he’s undressing him, the son decides to bring his father with him to his new home. At this point he takes his father in his arms and lays him down on the bed. In the space of a few lines the giant shrinks. He’s helpless and light, and yet his son feels a “frightening sensation” as he approaches the bed with his father in his arms. The father is playing raptly with his son’s watch chain. He’s tenacious, doesn’t want to let go. Perhaps that implies something terrible already. Then the father stretches out and covers himself up to his shoulders. This scene of filial attention seems about to end — and we still don’t know whether it’s the father or the son who’s delirious, or the pair of them.

And here, abruptly, we enter the story’s third phase: pure violence. The father throws off the cover. He rises up on the bed, placing “one hand lightly on the ceiling.” (Has he turned back into a giant? Or is the room unusually small?) His words reveal a new scenario. The St. Petersburg friend exists, of course he does, indeed the father says he would have been “my kind of son.” And the father adds: “That’s why you’ve deceived him all these years.” The son is once again accused of being a deceiver: not of the father now but of the friend. But the father, “fortunately,” can see through the son, who can’t escape his gaze. Now the father appears to the son as a “bogeyman.” And even the image of his friend in Russia has changed utterly and stands out now against a murky, churning backdrop. The friend appears “lost in the vastness of Russia”; he stands in the doorway of a plundered shop, “among the wreckage of shelving and ruined wares.” The father isn’t finished yet with his cruel rant — now he comes to sex. Surely the fiancée was chosen merely “because she lifted her skirts,” the father says, imitating “that disgusting goose” by raising his nightshirt high enough that the “war scar” on his thigh could be seen.

The disproportion has been exacerbated. The son looks on from a corner, trying to control himself. But he lets a word escape: “Comedian!” The father rails on. He accuses the son of having supplanted him, of “going through life triumphantly closing deals” that his own hard work made possible.

The calm, lazy Sunday morning in a bourgeois interior has become the stage for a ferocious duel. The son can feel this wish taking shape: “If only he’d fall over and shatter!” But the father doesn’t fall. He says: “I’m still much stronger than you.” Now his words bend toward their final arc. He says he’s been expecting this scene with the letter for years. It’s as if everything that happened between father and son were distilled in that letter. The St. Petersburg friend knew everything too. The son has one last thrust: “So you’ve been lying in wait for me!” But nothing can slow the father as he approaches the moment of sentencing: “And so know this: I sentence you now to death by drowning!” Standing on his bed in his nightshirt, with his stringy white hair and his toothless mouth, the father has passed judgment. The son feels driven from the room. He is concerned now only with letting as little time as possible pass between the sentence and its execution, and so he flings himself into the river with the agility of the “excellent gymnast he had been as a boy, much to his parents’ pride.” Never had a death seemed so irrational in the telling, nor so well prepared for, proved like a theorem. Disproportion is a compass opened so far that it flattens on the page. That’s the page on which, in a progressive palimpsest, all of Kafka’s work would be written.

The nineteenth-century novel had brought about a gradual exposure of domestic and marital horrors, culminating in the white heat of Strindberg (“the enormous Strindberg,” whom Kafka read “not to read him but rather to lie upon his breast”). The scenes become ever more embarrassing and ever more comical. But a father who, standing in his bed in his nightshirt, pronounces a death sentence on his son (specifying: “by drowning”); and a son who rushes nimbly off to carry out the sentence, proclaiming, just before disappearing into the river, his love for his parents, like a subversive proclaiming his faith in the revolution to the firing squad that’s about to shoot him, except that here the revolution is the firing squad — psychology, however poisoned, had never been pushed this far. And having reached this point, the story might be expected to sail on, into a realm where the relationship between images and actual events is seriously destabilized and will never go back to being what it was before.

The morning after he wrote “The Judgment,” Kafka went “trembling” into his sisters’ room and read them the story. One of his sisters said: “The apartment (in the story) is a lot like ours. I said: What do you mean? Then dad would have to be living in the bathroom.” That same day, reflecting on the night of “The Judgment,” Kafka thought among other things “naturally of Freud.”

In the critical edition of the Diaries, we find a series of fragments from 1910 that were largely eliminated from previous German editions. Why? Surely because of their embarrassing repetitiveness, like a broken record. Yet it is precisely this repetitiveness that is their most important trait. There are six of these fragments, ranging in length from fourteen lines to four pages, written in succession. Let’s look at the opening of each:

If I think about it, I must say my upbringing in certain respects has done me great harm.

If I think about it, I must say my upbringing in certain respects has done me great harm.

Often I ponder it and then every time I must say my upbringing, in certain ways, has done me great harm.

Often I ponder it, letting my thoughts follow their own course without interfering, and every time, however I view it, I come to the conclusion that my upbringing, in certain ways, has done me terrible harm.

Often I ponder it, letting my thoughts follow their own course without interfering, but every time I come to the conclusion that my upbringing has damaged me more than I can understand.

I often ponder it, letting my thoughts follow their own course without interfering, but every time I come to the same conclusion, that I have been more damaged by my upbringing than anyone I know and more than I am able to comprehend.

Kafka must have been quite convinced of that incipit to have varied it six times. But who is the “I” who speaks here? One thinks at once of Kafka himself, since this notebook is full of references to particular episodes of his life. Were that the case, these incipits would almost merit consideration as the inaugural text of that literature of psychological recrimination that would later spread through the century. The troops of all those who were to declare themselves damaged — by mom or dad, by their family, by school, by their environment, by society — could have paraded behind the heraldic insignia of that text. A vast company, mostly tedious and querulous. But even if the expression of the psychology, as it often is in Kafka, is here oddly clear and incisive, indeed almost brutal, the psychology itself is certainly not the point of the narrative. Indeed, the psychology here will be pushed to an extreme, but as if to ridicule it.

How can that be shown? Simply by looking at the variations in the roster of guilty parties as it appears from one version to the next. In order:

This reproach is aimed at a multitude of people, namely my parents, several relatives, certain house guests, various writers, a certain particular cook who accompanied me to school for a year, a heap of teachers (whom I must bundle together in my memory, otherwise I’ll lose one here and there, but having bundled them together so tightly, the whole mass begins, in certain spots, to crumble away), a school inspector, slow-walking pedestrians, in brief this reproach twists like a dagger through society.

This reproach is directed against a multitude of people, all of whom however are gathered here and as in old group photographs they don’t know what to do with each other, it doesn’t even occur to them to lower their eyes and they don’t dare smile, because they’re waiting. My parents are there, several relatives, several teachers, a certain particular cook, several girls from the dance lessons, several guests at our previous house, several writers, a swimming instructor, a ticket seller, a school inspector, then some people I met only once on the street and others I can’t remember at the moment and those I’ll never again remember and finally those whose instruction I, being somehow distracted, failed to pay attention to at the time; in brief, they are so numerous that one must be careful not to name any of them twice.

Implicit in this recognition is a reproach directed against a multitude of people. Among them are my parents, my relatives, a certain particular cook, my teachers, several writers, families friendly with ours, a swimming instructor, the residents of holiday resorts, several ladies in the city park who don’t show certain things, a hairdresser, a beggar woman, a tax man, the family doctor, and many others besides and there would be still more if I wanted and were able to call them all by name, in brief they are so numerous that one must be careful not to name anyone in the bunch twice.

[The reproaches] are directed against a multitude of people, this can be frightening and not only I but anyone else would rather look at the river through the open window. Among them are my parents and relatives, and the fact that they harmed me out of love renders their guilt even greater, because how they could have helped me with their love, then friendly families with a spiteful gaze, who aware of their guilt resist rising up into memory, then the legion of nannies, teachers and writers and among them a certain particular cook, and then, blurring into one another as their punishment, a family doctor, a hairdresser, a tax collector, a beggar woman, a paper seller, a park warden, a swimming instructor and then certain foreign ladies in the city park who don’t show certain things, several residents of holiday resorts, which make a mockery of innocent nature, and many others; there would be still more if I wanted and were able to call them all by name; in brief, they are so numerous that one must be careful not to name any of them twice.

These wild, exhilarating gallops revolve around Kafka’s favorite theme: guilt. They are attempts by the writer to list all those who have, to whatever degree, harmed him. Just as Josef K., shortly before being sentenced to death, will envision a crowd of his accusers as a solid, unanimous chorus, so the young Kafka looks around and sees all those who are guilty in relation to him — guilty to the point of becoming his executioners. Certain presences are essential: his parents and relatives. But just as essential is “a certain particular cook” who had accompanied Kafka to school for a year. We finally meet her again in a letter to Milena from June 21, 1920: “Our cook, small dry and thin with a pointy nose and hollow cheeks, yellowish, but firm, energetic and superior, took me to school each morning.” These words suffice to admit us to the secret memory rooms of an individual named Franz Kafka. But, even as the dim psychologist is congratulating himself for uncovering the true material concealed behind every piece of literature, Kafka the writer snatches it away and renders it meaningless. For his lucidity goes much further. Among the guilty, father and mother certainly come first. But the others step forward in an inexorable procession. We meet not only the yellowish cook, but also some people who made the mistake, on a certain day, of walking slowly, some girls from the dance school, a hairdresser, a beggar, a paper seller. And in the end they will all be arranged together, as for a group photo. They’re a little embarrassed, since many don’t know one another, have never even seen one another before. But all are united by guilt. Even, lost and forgotten in that crowd, his parents.

In his mad rush, Kafka sets no limits; we even find, among the procession of the guilty, some people he met once on the street and others he is unable to remember. Guilt, then, extends not only to everything that has been perceived, even if only faintly and only once, but also to everything that happened, unnoticed, around us. At this point, every psychology collapses from within, opening a breach that leads toward literature. First of all Kafka’s.

Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening, Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. But that doesn’t mean he went elsewhere. “I stayed to watch, apart, a complete outsider.” One day he paused to reflect: “What does that refusal, repeated so often since childhood, mean?” The invitation to play a game represents a call to take part in the community. And the game per se, Kafka observed, “would not even have been all that boring.” And yet his reply was invariably negative. From such mulishness Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him. There is something slightly comic, at first, in seeing which grave consequences can be deduced from a little domestic scene. But Kafka, imperturbable, goes one step further. On an evening soon after the day he recorded these observations, he decided to take part in the game, in a manner of speaking, by “keeping score for mom.” In doing so, he realized that his new situation corresponded mockingly to his typical rapport with the outside world: participating “didn’t give rise to greater closeness, and whatever hint of it there might have been was drowned in weariness, boredom, and sadness over the lost time. And it would have always been that way. Only in the rarest of cases have I forsaken this borderland between solitude and community, indeed it’s there that I have settled, even more than in solitude itself. How lovely and lively by comparison was Crusoe’s island.” Here Kafka has situated himself, defining himself almost as a geometric locus, in relation to communal life.

It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse as an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or clumsy ways of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.” This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless misunderstandings, with whatever woman. And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.

“Metaphors are one of the many things that make me despair of writing,” noted Kafka in December 1921, commenting on the last sentence of one of his letters to Klopstock, which says only: “I warm myself by it this sad winter.” A high-power lens comes upon an apparently innocuous sentence, recognizes in it the upsurge of metaphor, and despairs. Why? Kafka, a dogged naturalist of the metaphor, succeeded in bringing nearly everything, and most of all writing, back to that mysterious moment when the image breaks free from the letter — the very moment when what used to be considered real becomes precarious. But not in order to affirm the sovereignty of writing, which is already in itself a metaphor. Indeed, what gets revealed instead is its insuperable dependence on something else. Kafka continued: “Writing’s lack of autonomy, its dependence on the maid who lights the stove, on the cat warming itself there, even on the poor old man who warms himself. Those are all autonomous activities ruled by their own laws, writing alone is helpless, doesn’t dwell in itself, is diversion and despair.” Let’s isolate a few words: only writing “doesn’t dwell in itself”—writing, then, is first among all strangers. To recount the adventures of this stranger is therefore to give an account of writing itself, “diversion and despair.”

The outsider, the stranger, the foreigner — he wasn’t merely the constant protagonist of Kafka’s writing. He must have also been a secret companion, who appeared and reappeared, who accompanied him without being asked to. A few days after commenting on the last sentence of his letter to Klopstock, Kafka wrote: “I woke with a start from a deep sleep. In the middle of the candle-lit room, a stranger was sitting at a tiny table. He was sitting in shadow, broad and heavy, his unbuttoned winter jacket making him seem even broader.”

Foreignness is the background noise in Kafka. Everything presupposes it, everything leads to it. Kafka knew that feeling in its various aspects: from its most obvious, and even banal, psychological manifestations (the sense of being excluded by a group, by a certain type of people, by a community) to its extreme metaphysical figurations (the Gnostic as Stranger in the world and to the world). At the origin of such feelings lay Kafka’s hyper-acute sense of the singularity — even the untranslatability — of his own psychic experience. He didn’t take pleasure in this singularity but rather fought it, going so far as to seek out the humiliation of sojourns in naturist colonies such as Jungborn or Hellerau, where the prime attraction was offered by the illusion of blending in with a group. (He soon realized that he stuck out even more among nudists, even if only as “the man in the bathing suit.”)

All of Kafka’s work is an exercise (in the way that Chopin’s Études are exercises) on the many keys of foreignness. Karl Rossmann is the foreigner in the most radical and literal sense: the adolescent expelled from his country and thrown onto a new continent. K. is the foreigner in the traditional sense: the stranger who comes from the city to a closed and inhospitable town in the country. Josef K., as an ignorant outsider, is foreign with respect to the great organization that’s sucking him in. The hunter Gracchus is foreign with respect to all the world, traveling without reprieve in the middle zone between the earth and the realm of the dead. The traveler in “In the Penal Colony” is the foreigner who visits exotic lands and records their strange customs. Gregor Samsa is the most irredeemable of foreigners, since he has, in his own room, become the unrecognizable itself: not simply foreign but biologically extraneous. At the same time, Gregor Samsa finds himself in the most common of situations. It would be easy to recognize him in certain descriptions that Kafka left of his family life. But no story discourages commentary as much as “The Metamorphosis,” perhaps because of the extreme “indubitability of the story,” a feeling Kafka felt for the first time when writing “The Judgment.”

Before analyzing the text he had given his students at Cornell, Nabokov felt compelled to say a few simple and definitive words: “Beauty plus pity — that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers.”

Up until Franz’s death, Hermann Kafka — as far as we can tell from the surviving photographs — didn’t resemble his son. At sixty-two years of age, thus already twenty years older than Kafka would ever get, his father appears to be a hulking, strong-willed man, with short, grizzled hair and thick features. It’s easy to imagine him behind a counter, but no longer that of his father’s butcher shop in Wossek. He had his own wholesale fancy-goods store that now occupied the right corner of Palais Kinsky. Between his legs Hermann Kafka is holding his grandson Felix, whose birth he announced — Kafka wrote — by marching around the house in his nightshirt “as if the baby hadn’t merely been born, but had also already led an honorable life and had his funeral celebrated.”

Now let’s shift our gaze to a photo of Hermann Kafka in 1930, six years after the death of his son and one before his own death. He’s standing next to his wife, who in her long, dark overcoat seems to have grown into the ground. Hermann is thin, the neck of his shirt is too big, his overcoat is open and hangs from him, with a certain elegance, as if on a hanger. The face is that of Franz Kafka, had he grown old. Everything’s the same: the hairline, the protruding ears, the slight tilt of the head, the triangular facial structure, the quiet desolation of the gaze. Only the gaze doesn’t seem to correspond absolutely to his son’s. But it presupposes it.