It is one of the clichés of our time that we all have our stories to tell. But Kafka tells us here that such stories are always self-serving, created by us to protect ourselves from reality and out of the desire to “shine” […] In “The Judgment” he tells a story about the nature of stories and dramatizes a ritual of exorcism. […] By so doing he saves both himself and storytelling. Instead of seeing the excessive gestures of his youth as ridiculous and shameful, he builds a drama out of excessive gestures: “For everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again.” (Recall the fire he felt he had to find within himself because it would never be provided by the world, not even by his family.) He has discovered that while words are far more recalcitrant than drawing, it is only in the art of words that narrative can be produced and can then turn against itself and uncover its corrupt origins and motivations. By so doing it reveals its beneficent and healing power: the power to speak the truth about our desires and the world of others. By writing stories that dramatize writing and the fantasies of the imagination and then dramatizing their destruction, he escapes the realm of fantasy, of solipsism, and finds at last that “description in which every word would be linked to my life, which I would draw to my heart and which would transport me out of myself” for which the early diaries show him so feverishly searching. Of course the healing lasts only as long as the moment of writing, and so has to be fought for and found afresh every day. But that is the path that has opened itself up to him.
— Josipovici (via here)
Notes from a Room 