Notes on Franz Kafka's "A Country Doctor"

Introduction

This lecture focuses on Franz Kafka's short story, "A Country Doctor," written in 1917.
The story is part of a collection of 14 short texts Kafka wrote during the winter nights of 1916-1917 in Prague.
Kafka's sister, Otla, allowed him to use a small cottage in the Golden Lane, Slater Uclicka, for uninterrupted writing.
The collection is also titled "A Country Doctor," indicating the story's significance.
Most of Kafka's work was published posthumously, as he was a scrupulous editor and asked Max Brod to burn unpublished manuscripts after his death.
Kafka dedicated the collection to his father, suggesting a father-son conflict as a primeval theme in his stories.
Kafka’s father's dismissive reaction to the book deeply offended Kafka.
A country doctor is a second-degree doctor mediating between the patient and their primary physician or a specialist.

Approaching the Text

Approach the text by examining the forces within the story itself.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a widely read and enigmatic author.
His texts invite interpretation, presenting a house without a master where unconscious forces take over.
Keys to understanding Kafka's work include theology, politics, social justice, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
"A Country Doctor" has been viewed both as influenced by and as a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Freud and Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" introduces the theory of the unconscious.
Dreams connect to past events but are represented in disguised forms.
Three main disguises:
- Condensation: A single image bears multiple allusions.
- Displacement: Dream content is moved to a different, often unrelated event.
- Regard to Representation: Abstract dream content is represented through images.
According to Freud, every dream, even a nightmare, fulfills a wish.

Kafka's Suspicion of Psychoanalysis

Kafka read Freud but was suspicious of psychoanalysis' therapeutic value.
Kafka described his first experience coughing blood, noting excitement mixed with fear. He realized he could finally sleep after years of insomnia, provided the bleeding stopped. This event seems related to events in the story being analyzed.
Kafka describes how his maid stated he wouldn't last long after seeing the bloody towel, likening it to a scene in the story, a bloody towel swung by the boy's sister.
In 1921, Kafka wrote to Milena Jesenska, explaining his angst as a form of illness and criticizing psychoanalysis as a helpless error.
Kafka viewed illness as a matter of faith, an attempt to anchor oneself in "maternal soil," suggesting that psychoanalysis cannot heal such deep-seated issues.
Consider moments of emergence or breaking in/out in the text, like passageways or windows.

Analysis of "A Country Doctor"

The story begins with "I was distraught," shifting from a third-person title to a first-person perspective.
The German term for distraught ( $Verlegenheit$ ) implies perplexity, difficulty, embarrassment, or even mendacity.
The death of the horse puts the doctor in this state of $Verlegenheit$ , driven by unconscious forces.
Without a horse, the doctor cannot fulfill his duties as a mediator between life and death.
The story quickly dissolves into surrealism, entering a dreamlike state.
A messenger from the pig stable provides horses but threatens the maid, Rosa, moving the dream toward a nightmare.
The doctor ends up naked in bed with his dying patient, mocked by an unearthly school choir.
Unknown forces are released, blurring the lines between life and death.
The doctor's guilt is unavoidable, even though he followed a false alarm.

Doubling and Juxtapositions

The story is characterized by doublings, siblings, and juxtapositions.
Examples include the dead horse and the dead boy, the doubling of horses, wounds on Rosa and the boy, and double diagnoses.
There are two windows, doors being shut from the inside and opened from the outside, and two rides with no return.
The doctor is bound to the groom (enabler and enemy) and the boy (whose place he takes in bed).
The doctor is pulled between his duty to his patient and his repressed desire for Rosa.
The shady groom may represent the doctor's wish to stay home and sleep with Rosa.
$Pflicht$ , duty, means care and concern. The doctor has a duty to his own house and to his patient.
The boy's words, "Let me die," reflect a wish to die with a mourning family, possibly mirroring the doctor's own wish.

Duty and Shame

The story explores the line between life and death, with duty and shame related to the fear and wish of self-annihilation.
The doctor's duties include arriving on time, making a correct diagnosis, and healing the patient.
The cure eludes the doctor when he ends up in bed with the boy, substituting for him.
Fulfilling his duty is a weak wish dictated by the superego, while the threat to Rosa occurs simultaneously in separate compartments of the mind.
If the story is a dream, the wish is to be a patient or a dying boy, not necessarily the wish to die.
The wish to see himself dying is a common fantasy.
Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Steckel notes that in dreams, death means as much as life, and the lust for life often expresses itself in a death wish:

In dreams, as so frequently in life, murder is only a desire for sex murder … often represents nothing other than a strongly sadistic colored sexual act.

The school choir sings of sacrifice, indicating the doctor is a mere messenger who cannot mediate or bridge anything.

The Logic of Sacrifice

If he doesn't bring a cure, the doctor may be killed.
The antagonistic wish fulfillment turns against the doctor, who is naked next to the boy.
The doctor defends his diagnosis, but both have become dangerously indistinguishable.
The boy appears to have saved himself by dying, while the doctor must escape.
The doctor is stuck in a dilemma, and the horses crawl slowly through the snow.
Another chorus echoes his situation, suggesting the patients should rejoice in having the doctor beside them.
Life and death are related in the bed, reversing the Christian scene of healing.
The doctor is stuck, naked, exposed, and betrayed.
A false ring of the night bell can never be made right.
The failed messenger is born as someone who has lost everything and cannot return.
It's all wrong in a dream, ending in a terrible awakening.

Kafka's Diary Note

Kafka noted in his diary in December 1914 that he would be content on his deathbed if the pain wasn't too great.
He admitted to enjoying the agonizing deaths of his characters, moving the reader while secretly playing a game.
He makes calculated use of the reader's attention, lamenting perfectly and purely.
Maurice Blanchot notes a secret connection between literature and death in this game.
Kafka's contended death is caught in a circular logic: write in order to be able to die, dying in order to be able to write.
This denotes the failure through which avant-garde literature engages in a different relationship to death, work, and history.

Conclusion

The doctor and the boy come to life and die in a strange way, entangled in the same fear of death and enjoyment of watching oneself die.
This horrible enjoyment is bound up in the vision of the doctor lying in bed with his patient.
Kafka's contented death is the satisfaction of making an end to an unhappy life rather than achieving mastery over death.

Essay Prompts

Drawing on condensation, displacement, and regard for representation, show how the story engages with these Freudian concepts.
Explain the meaning and symbolism of the horse or horses in the story, tracing their appearances and connections.
Is the country doctor driven by embarrassment or mendacity, or simply by a sense of duty? Explore shame, guilt, and responsibility.
Why is it so difficult for the doctor to diagnose the patient?
Focus on the rhythm and structure of the text, describing the force that carries the doctor forward. Analyze speed, interruptions, and flow.
If the story is like a dream, and every dream fulfills a wish, what kind of wish is being fulfilled here?