Georg Bendemann, the
protagonist of Kafka’s “The Judgement”, thinks he’s a grown up. He runs the
family firm, he is engaged to a woman with both looks and money, he has a place
in his community. Georg has all the apparel of maturity, quite unlike his
‘overgrown schoolboy’ of a friend, who moved to Russia to start a business, who
aimed high and crashed low. Georg, however, is not mature. Kafka smears his
protagonist’s face in this fact. Georg is still under the thumb of his aging
father: Georg is still a child.
If you’ve heard of,
but have not read, “The Judgement”, then you likely only know about the climax,
where Georg’s father ‘sentences’ Georg to death by drowning, a sentence Georg obeys.
Taking this climax out of context makes Georg seem like a daddy’s boy. He is a
daddy’s boy, but this is a twist, not the set up. The set up of the story is
Georg implicitly comparing himself to his friend in Russia (never named). This
friend is ‘the manager of his own business in Petersburg, which had begun very
promisingly, but for a long time now had been in the doldrums’. This business
is ‘frankly unimpressive compared to the scale of Georg’s business’. This
friend has no companions in Russia, and will likely suffer ‘life as a
bachelor’, while Georg is engaged to ‘Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a young lady
from a well-off family’. Georg has his life on track, while his friend has
derailed. Or so Georg thinks. He thinks this because he puts too much weight on
qualities which are accidental to maturity. But of course, you could have no
money, you could have no friends, you could have no spouse, and yet you would
still be more mature than a child, regardless of how many decades that child
has lived.
What is more childish
than being dependent on a parent? Georg might protest that he is not dependent
on his father; his father is dependent on him. Georg lives under his father’s
roof because his father’s mental and physical frailty have put him under
Georg’s care. Being a caretaker is a position of power, even though the power
expresses itself through service: being a caretaker implies your charge needs
help. Consider how the parent serves the infant’s needs, feeding it, clothing
it, washing it. The infant is served, but the infant does not rule. The parents
have total power over the infant’s wellbeing. Now that his father seems to have
entered his second childishness, Georg takes, or thinks he takes, control of
his father’s wellbeing, even down to supervising ‘the changing of his father’s
underwear’.
‘Do you really have this friend in
Petersburg?’ Georg’s father asks. It seems an absurd question, springing from a
slackening brain. But Georg’s father is not so ignorant. He has been in secret
correspondence with Georg’s friend. Georg must sense something untoward in the
absurd question, something which suggests his father is not as frail-minded as
he thought, something which suggests Georg himself is ignorant of something. ‘Don’t
let’s talk about my friends,’ Georg says:
‘I think you don’t
look after yourself properly. Old age demands to be treated with consideration
… You peck at your breakfast, instead of taking proper nourishment. You sit
here with the window closed, when fresh air would do you the world of good. No,
Father! I’m going to send for the doctor, and we will follow his instructions.
We will change rooms – you can move into the front room, and I’ll move in here
… for now you should just lie down in your bed a little, you need rest. Come
on, I’ll help you get undressed, you’ll see, I can manage that’
Georg pivots the
conversation to all the ways he can help his father, that is, all the ways in
which his father is too weak to help himself. But his father is not weak,
neither physically nor mentally. Kafka executes this twist when the father,
just after being tucked in by Georg, leaps to his feet, looming so large he
‘supported himself lightly on the ceiling’ and proceeding to harangue his son,
revealing that Georg barely runs the family business, that Georg’s friend
doesn’t even read his letters, that Georg has ‘dilly-dallied before reaching
maturity’. Georg’s father, returned to the role of parent, talks down to Georg,
returned to the role of child. Georg’s power was an illusion, his independence
was an illusion, his maturity was an illusion. Now disillusioned, he submits
entirely to his father’s authority, even unto becoming his own executioner.
“The Judgement” is the
story of a man who realises he has wandered into all the signs of maturity.
Maturity, which is made of independence of mind if not body, Georg has walked
past. Georg is a full-grown child, who cannot grow up, even when his life
depends on it.
Quotes taken from Michael Hofmann's translation in Metamorphosis and Other Stories: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
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