The inclusion of the word has two effects. One, by qualifying the sentence, it makes it tentative, ambiguous, arbitrary. Two, by making the sentence call attention to its own temporality, it gives it a much stronger force, it makes the judgement irrevocable. It certainly gives it a peculiar power over Georg.

Individual details like this in Kafka's writing force us to look again at what he has written. According to Camus, his art consists in getting the reader to reread. And thus in reading Kafka, everything becomes uncertain and indefinite. It is from this point of view, the uncertainty, that I propose to look at Kafka's writing and his life. The fact of uncertainty makes well nigh impossible any attempt to put forward a definite interpretation. Nevertheless this is exactly what most critics have tried to do. If we try to give the work a definite meaning, we often find that the story appears to have changed when we come back to it. Quite often critics, in their enthusiasm to apply a single interpretation to a particular work, miss individual details which not only undermine their own readings (that is why they miss them) but also offer us new insight into the work. Close and unbiased reading of the text therefore repays.

Kafka's The Judgement divides into four major sections. In the opening, Georg Bendemann gazes out the window and ruminates on the letter he has just written to his friend in Russia. In the letter, he has finally revealed to this friend that he is about to get married. It is on account of his fiancée that he has finally done this. In the second section, about a third of the way through, he goes through into his father's room, for the first time in several months. He tells his father about the letter, but the father does not seem to believe that Georg has a friend in St Petersburg. Georg puts him to bed. The father asks if he is well covered up. In the third section the father leaps up on the bed and begins denouncing Georg, accusing him of many acts of disrespect. He undermines everything that Georg believes to be true about his life, and Georg cannot respond effectively. Finally, the father sentences his son to death by drowning. In the last part of the story, Georg, feeling himself driven from the room, heads off towards the bridge and leaps into the river.

In the story as a whole we move from an opening in which Georg is detached, reflective, intellectualising, to one in which he is fully engaged (in the other sense of the word) and no longer thinking, merged with the "human harmony". A similar (complete) movement can be found in Oedipus Rex, three-quarters of which consists in an unmoving detached intellectual search, switching to a heavily emotional lament, as Oedipus forgoes all he had and sets off into exile. Indeed, in a similar way Georg moves from seeking control over everything to - at the very last - letting himself drop. The Judgement is like a Greek tragedy.

The first sentence sets the tone: "It was a Sunday morning..." To begin with, all is static. Georg does not do anything: in fact we have five pages of what he has just done, reminiscence only. He then proceeds into his father's room, where little by little the action speeds up until at the moment when he has let go of the bridge we are aware of nothing but the constant stream of people just going over it. In other words we have progressed from a lack of movement to nothing but.

The way Georg changes: he considers every possibility, for example, what he should write to his friend. But during his father's outburst this is no longer the case, he seems unable to think.

Georg breaks his routine when he goes to see his father actually in his room. Breaking one's routine always occurs at significant moments in Kafka. In Metamorphosis it figures on two occasions: once in Gregor's original transformation and once when the door of his room is left open one day, as a result of which he hears Grete playing the violin and is entranced.

The decisive event on which the story hangs has, as in Metamorphosis, already happened when the story starts. The routine has already been broken. The subject of the story is really how Georg changes in the aftermath of his decision.

Set up 07 March 1999

Last updated 07 March 1999

© R. Millar 1999