Kafka & sex

On one occasion Kafka composed a story with a sexual intensity that perhaps no other writer has ever experienced. The story is “The Judgment,” which Kafka wrote in one go on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, 1912. He described the event in his diary the next morning:

I wrote this story “The Judgment” in a single push during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock until six o’clock in the morning. My legs had grown so stiff from sitting that I could just barely pull them out from under the desk. The terrible strain and joy as the story developed in front of me, as if I were advancing through a body of water. Several times during this night I carried my own weight on my back. How everything can be risked, how a great fire is ready for everything, for the strangest inspirations, and they disappear in this fire and rise up again . . . . It is only in this context that writing can be done, only with this kind of coherence, with such a complete unfolding of the body and the soul.

The story ends with the hero’s leap, with gymnastic nimbleness, from a bridge resembling the Charles Bridge into a river resembling the Moldau, obedient to his father’s judgment, which sentenced him to death by drowning. The following day, Kafka read the story aloud to a company of friends and relatives and felt the passion again: “Toward the end my hand was moving uncontrollably about and actually before my face. There were tears in my eyes. The indubitableness of the story was confirmed.”

How might this sort of “indubitableness” be illustrated? Kafka’s friend and editor, Max Brod, remembered that “Franz himself provided three commentaries to this story, the first in conversation with me. He once said to me, as I recall, quite without provocation, ‘Do you know what the concluding sentence means?’” (It reads, “At this moment the traffic going over the bridge was nothing short of infinite.”) “Kafka said, ‘I was thinking here of a strong ejaculation.’”

For Kafka, writing, when it went well, was fucking, but his remark to Brod actually channels more than one sexual current. In one sense, the process of writing the story is the naked metaphor of fucking: according to his remark, the process ends in an ejaculation. But in a diary entry written early the next year –the third commentary to which Brod refers–Kafka raised the stakes of the metaphor exponentially:

February 11, 1913. After correcting proofs of “The Judgment,” I shall write up all the connections that have dawned on me, as best as I still remember them. This is necessary, because the story came out of me like a regular birth, covered with filth and mucus, and only I have the hand that can penetrate to the body of it and the desire to.

.  .  .