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Stanley Corngold Kafka & sex On one occasion Kafka composed a strangest inspirations, and they disappear story with a sexual intensity that per- in this ½re and rise up again . It is only in haps no other writer has ever experi- this context that writing can be done, only enced. The story is “The Judgment,” with this kind of coherence, with such a which Kafka wrote in one go on the eve complete unfolding of the body and the of Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, soul. 1912. He described the event in his diary The story ends with the hero’s leap, the next morning: with gymnastic nimbleness, from a I wrote this story “The Judgment” in a bridge resembling the Charles Bridge single push during the night of the 22nd- into a river resembling the Moldau, obe- 23rd, from ten o’clock until six o’clock in dient to his father’s judgment, which the morning. My legs had grown so stiff sentenced him to death by drowning. from sitting that I could just barely pull The following day, Kafka read the story them out from under the desk. The terri- aloud to a company of friends and rela- ble strain and joy as the story developed in tives and felt the passion again: “Toward front of me, as if I were advancing through the end my hand was moving uncontrol- a body of water. Several times during this lably about and actually before my face. night I carried my own weight on my There were tears in my eyes. The indu- back. How everything can be risked, how bitableness of the story was con½rmed.” a great ½re is ready for everything, for the How might this sort of “indubitable- ness” be illustrated? Kafka’s friend and Stanley Corngold is professor of German and editor, Max Brod, remembered that comparative literature at Princeton University “Franz himself provided three commen- and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Uni- taries to this story, the ½rst in conversa- versity Law School. His numerous publications tion with me. He once said to me, as I include “The Fate of the Self: German Writers recall, quite without provocation, ‘Do and French Theory” (1986), “Borrowed Lives” you know what the concluding sentence (1991), and “Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka” means?’” (It reads, “At this moment the (2004). He is currently at work on a volume en- traf½c going over the bridge was nothing titled “Kafka Before the Law.” short of in½nite.”) “Kafka said, ‘I was thinking here of a strong ejaculation.’” © 2007 by the American Academy of Arts For Kafka, writing, when it went well, & Sciences was fucking, but his remark to Brod ac- Dædalus Spring 2007 79 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.79 by guest on 29 September 2021 Stanley tually channels more than one sexual But Kafka, like a jealous mother, wants Corngold current. In one sense, the process of the pregnancy beyond term. This too, on sex writing the story is the naked metaphor too solid story must not be born, must of fucking: according to his remark, the not break out through the skin of the pa- process ends in an ejaculation. But in a per. It would be stillborn; it must lodge diary entry written early the next year where it has been conceived. –the third commentary to which Brod “The Judgment,” then, represents refers–Kafka raised the stakes of the a leap upward in sexual maturation. metaphor exponentially: “Many emotions carried along in the writing,” the entry of February 11, 1913, February 11, 1913. After correcting proofs continues, “for example, the joy that I of “The Judgment,” I shall write up all shall have something beautiful for Max’s the connections that have dawned on me, Arkadia.” He presents his friend with the as best as I still remember them. This is beautiful baby to which he’s given birth. necessary, because the story came out of Still, the poem as baby is a disturbing me like a regular birth, covered with ½lth metaphor. We have Mallarmé’s account and mucus, and only I have the hand that of an icy, tortured, perfumed night issu- can penetrate to the body of it and the de- ing into the “Don du poème.” There is sire to. Yeats, also stricken, writing in the vein The imagery of penetration persists, but of aut libri aut liberi (“either books or the ejaculation has proved instantly fer- freeborn sons”): tile. In the course of a single night, Kaf- Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake, ka has fertilized the nucleus of a story Although I have come close on forty-nine, and made his words coalesce, grow, and I have no child, I have nothing but a book, force themselves out of him in a violent Nothing but that to prove your blood and thrust. It is a feat even greater than what mine. he had hoped for a year before: Kafka was twenty-nine in 1912. While in If I were ever able to write something large the following twelve years, until his ear- and whole, well shaped from beginning to ly death, he would produce a few small end, then in the end the story would nev- books, he had no children and wrote of- er be able to detach itself from me, and it ten of the anguish of a death without would be possible for me calmly and with true progeny. open eyes, as a blood relation of a healthy story, to hear it read . Ejaculation and birth are the chief At this point, we see him resisting the metaphors of Kafka’s early writing. more frequently heard desire to let the But another motive of great interest story be born. “Go,” wrote Ezra Pound, very likely connects the work of Yom of his “songs,” in “Ité,” in 1913: Kippur eve with a strong ejaculation. In a diary entry in late 1911, the day . seek your praise from the young and after Yom Kippur of the year before he from the intolerant, wrote “The Judgment,” Kafka carica- Move among the lovers of perfection tured the Kol Nidre evening service that alone. ushers in the ceremony. “The Altneu Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean Synagogue yesterday. Kol Nidre. Sup- light pressed murmur of the stock market. And take your wounds from it gladly. In the entry, boxes with the inscription: 80 Dædalus Spring 2007 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.79 by guest on 29 September 2021 ‘Merciful gifts secretly left assuage the somersaults. From that company I prom- Kafka & sex wrath of the bereft.’” And then he men- ise myself everything that I lack, the or- tions recognizing among the members ganization of my powers, above all, for of the congregation “the family of a which the sort of intensi½cation that is brothel owner.” The brothel is the well- the only possibility for this bachelor on known Salon Suha, the house probably the street is insuf½cient. in question when he wrote the year be- Not all of Kafka’s sexuality was subli- fore, “I passed by the brothel as though mated in literature, but a great deal was past the house of a beloved.” It was in- –and the sublimation was an intense af- dubitably the house he more than passed fair. As a young writer Kafka took Flau- by the very night before Kol Nidre 1912; bert for his master in matters of style; his diary says that he spent his evening afterward, he followed stylistic paths of there. his own, like the animal fable and the So, here, if it were necessary, is further ½vefold allegory, which led him past his proof that with Kafka nothing sexual is master and to greater effect. But Kafka simple (in the sense of being unentan- also took Flaubert as a model of one gled with its opposite). There are no true who ‘became’ literature. Kafka’s Ger- opposites in this domain, certainly not man nonce word for this state of being sex with women and sex with literature. is Schriftstellersein: the condition of be- “My antipathy to antitheses is certain,” ing [nothing but] a writer. Kafka noted in his journal that same In the end, he again went past his year; and as if he were besotted with this master in the inventiveness and extrem- very antithesis of sex with women and ity of his claims to be nothing but litera- sex with literature, he wrote of antithe- ture. Evoking the intensity with which ses in an eye-catching way: he cared for writing, he wrote to his ½- Admittedly, [antitheses] generate thor- ancée Felice Bauer, “Not a bent for writ- oughness, fullness, completeness, but only ing, my dearest Felice, not a bent, but like a ½gure on the “wheel of life” [a toy my entire self. A bent can be uprooted with a revolving wheel]; we have chased and crushed. But this is what I am.” In our little idea around the circle. As differ- acquainting her father with his qualities ent as they can be, they also lack nuance; as a future son-in-law, he wrote, “My they grow under one’s hand as if bloated whole being is directed towards litera- by water, beginning with a prospect onto ture; I have followed this direction un- boundlessness and always ending up the swervingly until my thirtieth year, and same medium size. They curl up, cannot the moment I abandon it I cease to live.

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