The Sons (2 page)

“The Judgment” provides a dramatic example of this dilemma. Georg Bendemann has been a model son, caring for his aging father and running the family business. His impending marriage will complete the generational shift from father to son, allowing him to continue the family name by starting a family of his own. But instead of letting his son replace him, Herr Bendemann rebels, reclaims his paternal authority, and reproaches his son for his “devilish” intentions. The almost-adult Georg is driven back into the submissiveness of childhood, finally flinging himself from the bridge into death “like the accomplished gymnast he had been in his youth, to his parents’ pride.”

“The Metamorphosis” and “The Stoker” also depict the impossibility of becoming an adult. As a grown-up traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa is still the perfect son, living at home, paying off the family’s debts, sacrificing himself in unacknowledged devotion to his dependent parents and sister. Whether self-willed or not, his metamorphosis turns the tables, reversing the parasitic relationship in his favor and forcing his family to find work and support his leisure. Like the early grotesque drawings of Alfred Kubin, a Prague contemporary and acquaintance whose work meant much to Kafka, Gregor’s monstrous form is meant to scandalize and disempower the conformist, petty bourgeois world around him, represented not only by the Samsas and the chief clerk, but especially by the three uncannily indentical boarders. In the quiet second movement of the story, Gregor’s attempt at self-liberation and self-definition acquires some reality: the memory of his prior human enslavement recedes into the distance, his body grows lighter and freer, he hangs from the ceiling in “blissful absorption” while a gentle, musical vibration—the harmony of existence before the Fall—rocks him back and forth. But of course the metamorphosis also increases his childlike dependence and vulnerability: the
model son transformed into a happy bug simply becomes the outcast son, is bombarded with apples by the father, and in the end is literally thrown out of the house by the cleaning woman.

In “The Stoker” Karl Rossmann has also been banished from the family, but fails to take any positive steps toward adulthood. The ship’s stoker, a childlike, inarticulate but physically massive figure whose relation to Karl is animated by a strong homoerotic undercurrent, seems to represent a kind of anti-father, at once victim and protector. But Karl’s family returns in the guise of his Uncle Jacob, a wealthy and powerful senator who puts a quick end to the relationship with the stoker. The uncle promises protection, but (as we know from subsequent chapters in the novel) Karl will be repeatedly cast out of any secure, stable environment where he might settle, establish roots, and raise a family. In Kafka’s vision, in fact, America becomes a largely uninterrupted landscape of homeless and dispossessed persons, ersatz families forming and dissolving in an endless and futile process.

And yet, and yet—Kafka’s account of the sons’ destruction within the modern family sounds an unmistakable note of triumph. However terrible the content of these stories, their form remains sublimely self-assured, even jubilant. This discrepancy arises from Kafka’s own ambiguous relation—both indentification and repudiation—to the protagonists of his fictions. Like Georg Bendemann, Gregor Samsa, and Karl Rossmann (whose names are all coded versions of his own), Kafka is still a son living at home, exposed to the whim and caprice of his family. Yet in writing down their stories of suicide, grotesque metamorphosis, and banishment to America, Kafka rises above their fate, can control it with the sovereign hand of the author, can dispose of their lives like an almighty father.

As author, Kafka is the father of his literary protagonists. Thus the moment in which he writes the final sentence of
“The Judgment” in his diary—the sentence narrating Georg’s death—signals his own birth as a writer. Kafka told his friend Max Brod that the story’s final image of “traffic” (
Verkehr
, a word with sexual connotations) streaming across the bridge had reminded him of a “giant orgasm.” Similarly, in his diary entry for February 11, 1913, he notes that the story came out of him “like a real birth, covered with filth and slime.” In this sense
The Sons
are Kafka’s literary offspring, his children, as he frequently points out to Felice. “Today I am sending you ‘The Stoker,’ ” he writes in June 1913 when the story was first published. “Receive the little lad kindly, sit him down beside you and praise him, as he longs for you to do.”

Kafka clearly understood these stories as part of his own effort to liberate himself from his parents’ grip. Marriage to Felice was part of his plan, but more important, indeed vital to the possibility of marriage, was his own literary paternity. Every finished story (every fictional death) marked his growing independence and literary adulthood, and brought him closer to his future fiancée. Without
The Sons
, he once confided to Felice, he would never have dared to approach her with the idea of marriage. This explains his unusual insistence to Kurt Wolff on having the stories published as quickly and as often as possible: he needed the social legitimation that only a published work would confer, in his parents’ and Felice’s eyes. Stories thus had to be written, given his name, printed, and sent out into the world as his children, his “sons.”

Eventually, however, literary paternity posed an obstacle to an actual marriage and real children. The dilemma is already evident in the long, tormented marriage proposal Kafka wrote in June 1913, a few days after the publication of “The Judgment” and “The Stoker.” A model of ambiguity and counterstatement, the proposal relates directly to the conflict between literary and biological paternity:

During the five years of their correspondence, ostensibly to frighten Felice away from him, Kafka paints a grim portrait of the monastic solitude his writing requires, an everlasting “night” during which Felice would bring him his meals in a dark, subterranean writing chamber. In August 1917, four years after his first proposal, Kafka coughed blood; his tuberculosis was diagnosed the following month, the engagement with Felice broken off definitively in December for reasons of “health.” In fact, Kafka saw his illness as merely the physical symptom of a wound that had been opened the night he wrote his first son story, “The Judgment,” and entered into direct conflict with his father.

Increasingly, writing became a means of doing battle with his father, and patriarchal authority in general. It is in this period that Kafka considered collaborating on an anti-patriarchal journal with Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud who, in a
cause célèbre
of the Expressionist movement, had been arrested, at the request of his father, and interned in a psychiatric clinic. In 1917, Kafka published a collection of somber, violent stories called
A Country Doctor
, which he dedicated to Hermann Kafka in a combative spirit. Here again, literary paternity is opposed to biological procreation. One of the
stories is entitled “Eleven Sons”; when asked about the significance of this title, Kafka replied that the sons were “simply eleven stories” he was working on at the time. In another story, “A Dream,” he relates a vision of his own literary immortality: as Joseph K. sinks into an open grave, his name in gold letters writes itself across the tombstone with mighty flourishes.

The meaning of such literary gestures, no matter how aggressive, was no doubt lost on Hermann Kafka who, when presented with a copy of the book dedicated to him, instructed his son to “put it on my bedside table,” where it remained, unread. Two years later, in November 1919, still smarting from his father’s refusal to let him marry Julie Wohryzek, the daughter of a synagogue custodian, on the grounds that it would have “dishonored” the family name, Kafka sat down to write a one-hundred-page “lawyer’s letter” indicting his father for the tangle of aborted literary projects and frustrated marriage attempts that had left him, at the age of thirty-six, still a son. In many ways the “Letter to His Father” formulates explicitly the same critique of the bourgeois family that Kafka had put into literary terms seven years earlier in
The Sons
. The very first pages of the letter begin to play with titles, dialogue, and images from the earlier stories. Kafka speaks of his father’s “judgment” of him and compares their fight to that of bedbugs, which not only bite but suck their enemy’s blood. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the letter details the contradictory education he received as a child and that also thwarts his literary progeny:

What takes place at the dinner table is repeated in Hermann Kafka’s numerous stories of his difficult childhood with which he would reproach his children for their comfortable, middle-class existence. Under other conditions, Kafka writes, such stories might have been educational, might have encouraged him to endure similar torments and become like his father. “But that wasn’t what you wanted at all,” he maintains; such efforts to “distinguish oneself in the world” were labeled ingratitude, disobedience, treachery, and madness. “And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to [imitate you] by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity.” This contradictory pedagogy finally culminates in the impossibility of establishing an independent domestic life, a state Kafka longingly describes as an unattainable Eden. “Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come,” Kafka writes in the “Letter to His Father,” “is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing.” Yet Hermann Kafka’s nature blocked him from this realm:

Reading the “Letter to His Father” together with
The Sons
, one understands that the early stories are also a form of personal correspondence. For a writer who once declared that he was “made of literature,” the distinction between fiction and autobiography must have seemed irrelevant. Thus Kafka often used his novels and stories to negotiate problems in his personal life. To Felice he once declared that his novel
The Man Who Disappeared
would give her “a clearer idea of the good in me than the mere hints in the longest letters of the longest lifetime.” Later in their correspondence, when the relationship had reached an impasse, he asked Felice if her father was familiar with “The Judgment.” “If not, please give it to him to read,” he requested. And in the “Letter to His Father” he also admits the inherently epistolary origin of his literary texts: “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you.…”

It is no coincidence that
The Sons
abound in letters and scenes of letter-writing. Letters mark turning points in the stories, written means of mediating effectively in human relations. After Gregor Samsa’s death, the family sits down to write letters of resignation to their employers—a new life is beginning. In “The Stoker” Karl’s true identity is suddenly established by his Uncle Jacob with a letter written by the family servant. But the best example is “The Judgment,” whose sudden composition seems to have been triggered by Kafka’s first letter to Felice Bauer. The story begins with Georg playing dreamily with a letter he has just finished to a friend in Russia, takes a decisive turn when Herr Bendemann announces that
he too
has been corresponding with the friend, and concludes with what is in essence Georg’s suicide letter: “Dear Parents, I have always loved you.”

This is not the place to enter into the intricate and persistent relations between Kafka’s writing and his per
sonal biography. It is enough to note that the “secret connection” between the literary portrayal of sons also links the stories to Kafka’s own poignant letter to his father. Taking Kafka’s lead, we might consider
The Sons
as extended, indeed infinite letters, more revealing in their own indirect, literary way than “the longest letters of the longest lifetime.” By the same token, his extended letter to Hermann Kafka (which he showed to his mother but never sent to his father) can be read on a par with the other literary works. It tells the most moving “son story” of all, the story of a writer whose very literary identity and vision depended on his condition as a son.