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Stanley Corngold's Essay on "The Judgment."

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Stanley Corngold's Essay on Warning Concerning Copyright Restrictions The Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code} governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted materials. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If electronic transmission of reserve material is used for purposes in excess of what constitutes "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. .. TIIE PROBLEM OF THE JUDGMENT Eleven Approaches to Kafka's Story EDITED BY ANGEL FLORES with a new translation of "The Judgment" by Malcolm Pasley • GORDIAN PRESS NEW YORK 1977 \0J\cknowledgments u: :,foreword .?rranslator's Note on the ' /The Judgment . Translated by Malcol \ '.The Background ,r . Harmut Binder The Hermeneutic of "Thi Stanley Comgold 1Through Dream to Self-A Ronald Gray ·11'he Bizarre Texture of "1 John M. Ellis Georg Bendemann's Frie11 ~ Symbolic Correspondetl Copyright© 1976 by ANGEL FLORES John J. White ALL RIGHTS RESERVED fGuilt and the Feeling of ( . J.P. Stern ·.~ and Language: :: Georg Bendemann's Th Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data ·. · . James Rolleston ···~ to an Absent Frie11 Main entry under title: . , Charles Bernheimer •~ Pathos of Fatherh()()( ( Kate Flores The problem of the judgment. ·~tives and Truth in ·· · Walter H. Sokel Includes bibliographical references. Jtadgment" in die c 1. Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924. Das Urteil. I. Flores, Angel, 1900- Piin ·u. Beicken II. Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924. Das Urteil. English. 1976. PT262l.A26U737 833'.9'12 76-48958 ISBN 0-87752-210-3 Stanley Corngold The Hermeneutic of "The Judgment" For he and his property are not one, but two, and whoeundestroys tfi,,cunm'<liu11 destroys him at the same time. 1 "The Judgment" is the only prose work of tel\ pages in world literature which does not belong to a sacred or classical canon and which in the West alone has inspired some 100 visible commentaries. The scandalous character of "The Judgment'' invites reflection on its distinctive power to compel interpretation. This power unfolds as a paradoxical indiffer­ ence and generosity. As the story draws readings to itself, it makes room in every instance for one more reading: its precincts are crowded, but no interpreter must ever turn away for lack of the gate which has been kept open uniquely for him. To read "The Judgment" is to experience a force like that (for Adorno) of an onrushing locomotive. "Each sentence of Kafka's says 'interpret me ... '"; and this is nowhere so much the case as in the story whose title "Das Urteil" means (in philosophical language) "The Sentence". "Through the power with which Kafka commands mterpretation," Adorno writes, "he collapses aesthetic distance. He demands a , desperate effort of the allegedly 'disinterested' observer of an earlier time, overwhelms him, suggesting that far more than 40 ST AN LEY CORN GOLD THE HER, his intellectual equilibrium depends on whether he truly perspective is that of understands; life and death are at stake. "2 expressiveness of his mea1 These stakes are precisely thematized in "The Judgment". falsity ... while writing" The force with which the story exacts interpretation is the force months before compos with which a sentence strikes Georg Bendemann. Powerless to prompts him to long, w1 interpret his sentence-to swerve-he accedes, and is "driven" entirely out of me, write i out of his father's room, into the street, and to his death by comes out of the depths oJ drowning. This cautionary fable identifies the force it produces of "communication". Hi as the force which here destroys the overwhelmed subject. It could say but the shrewd warns, as it were, against a like accession: the assaulted reader him the impossibility c must turn and judge what in himself is the willing accessory to function of social tact. l the sentence. The reader who seizes his freedom to interpret course of writing down executes the naive reader in himself and approximates the meaning, unwittingly te narrator of "The Judgment", who survives the execution he ~'there was indeed no-;; has arranged-survives specifically as the name of the joy and urning home and rer sheer force of the "Verkehr", the erotic upsurge and infinite org has registered his traffic of the concluding sentence. ger understood the w, The other side of this abundant power compelling so noted the possibiii!,y_ interpretation is the curious meagerness that cries out for this me~cause ofihefact supplement. Here the work displays its restless, unsettled longer find himself in character, its anxiety, as it takes its path through ..the "abyss" rg'iies once again wl between its literal and signifying moments (Adorno). Its uire in Georg's fiance« anxiety will not permit it-as Morike wrote of a work of art-to conviction that "ma shine and seem ecstatic in itself.3 A work that invites so much visiting the couple e interpretation can have inspired the production of meaning r when he says that only as a function of its refusal of meaning. ing his friend of hi If the story symbolizes the force with which it exacts tly to the impqrtuni1 interpretation, it cannot, however, directly thematize its refusal e father, meanwhile of meaning. It does approach an indication of this kind-as we ted in the convulsec shall see-through its allegory of character. There is a kind of is inscrutable. refusal of meaning in the stubborn silence and withdrawal of work is thus oblige the Russian friend. This refusal is implied clearly, though \ knowledge that it is privatively, in Georg's bad faith and in the lies he unwittingly · inexplicit, mai1 writes to his friend. The refusal of meaning in the strong sense nee of truth and f is conceivable only as the intention of a literary text or as the act nd hence no Ion~ of a consciousness wholly transparent to itself, which knows lding of meaningJJ that as a consciousness it cannot express itself. There can be no ~ however, is centr. such consciousness dramatized in this work, since the leading full sense, as the THE HERMENEUTIC OF "THE JUDGMENT" 41 perspective is that of Georg, who simply assumes the expressiveness of his meaning. He does not know the "feelingof falsity ... while writing" which Kafka painfully registers some months before composing "The Judgment" and which prompts him to long, without hope, "to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me ... ''.4 Instead Georg speaks glibly of "communication". His concern is not the truth of what one could say but the shrewdness of what "one ought to say". For him the impossibility of "authentic communication" is a function of social tact. Yet it is precisely Georg who, in the course of writing down his meaning and then stating his. meaning, unwittingly tells lies. He lies when he thinks that "there was indeed no obstacle" in the way of his friend's returning home and renewing all his old friendships. For Georg has registered his friend's own statement that "he no longer understood the way things were at home", and he has also noted the possibility that his friend woufdoe oppressed at· home ''because of the facts" -the fact especially that he would no longer find himself in rapport with his old acquaintances. Georg lies once again when he writes his friend tltat he will acquire in Georg's fiancee a "sincere friend" and when he adds with conviction that "many things" would prevent his friend from visiting the couple even briefly. Indeed he even lies to his father when he says that he has "thought differently" about informing his friend of his engagement; in fact he has reacted directly to the importunities of his fiancee. The father, meanwhile, is no more lucid than the son. He is presented in the convulsed perspective of Georg; his conscious­ ness is inscrutable. The work is thus obliged to withhold any direct presentation of the knowledge that it is "repudiating expression" (Adorno). It keeps inexplicit, maintains as the inexplicit, the non­ j coincidence of truth and fiction-the fact that trutli.µttered is fiction and hence no longer truth. The story allegorizes its own /i···w· ithh.olding of me~ningJnai.Q_~y in the opaque figure of the lie. lil(T_he he, however, 1s centraL , In its full sense, as the solicitation of falsity, it is another 42 STANLEY CORNGOLD THE HERM name for the "peculiar relation of correspondence" between, story assumes a distance tc Georg and his Russian friend. Theirs is a writing that neveri desires, the craving for int arrives at telling the truth; the point is dramatically illustrated\ fusal of individuation, a in the father's image of the friend crumpling Georg's letters 1 f{ere again the story is e unopened. But their failure is otherwise apparent. For whether from taking direct access I or not the friend reads these letters, he could not understand a · tensible self-evidence in writing that does not make sense, since Georg's text, a literature displace that reading a of self-justification, aims to conceal and suppress sense. terested object (though Georg's meaning remains rigorously hidden from him. But if ping belongs to the p] there is to be such a thing as a coherent interpretation of the tuiing, not negligibly, tl story, one must assert that it is this meaning which is repeated ·ng the sixty-year hi in the scene that issues from its suppression, even if only gment" thus implicit privatively once more, as that sense which it is death to hide.
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