Double Medicine: The Text that was Never a Story: A Reading of Kafka's "Ein Landarzt"

Abstract

Although organized, perhaps, by an intense oedipal pain, Kafka's Ein Landarzt never becomes what might be properly called a story. The results are too inconclusive, the characters too blurred to permit any pretense to narrative cohesion on the part of this brief work. Twice the peasants who receive the doctor's judgments break out into incantations, which, like the music throughout Kafka's writing, exemplified by Josephine's piping, are refrains of fugitive and unfilfilled desire. The doctor may indeed be stripped and placed beside the ailing young patient as the chants exhort, but 'Sist nur ein Arzt, 'sist nur ein Arzt: the peasant song, lending the text the air of an anthropological encounter, declares the limit of its own expectations, as well as those of the patient. But for all its declared and dramatized inconclusiveness, the tale is a suggestive allegory of how texts configure themselves. There is no lack of structure here. The text begins and ends in the forbidding winter landscape to which an aging doctor no less harsh and forlorn has been summoned by his vastly inferior clients. The scenic and thematic symmetry of the two scenes comprising the narrative framework is duplicated within the dramatic core. The text dramatizes not one diagnostic scene, but two. Only after an initially unsympathetic examination of the sick boy, on the basis of which the doctor concludes Junge ist gesund, ein wenig schlecht durchblutet, von der sorgenden Mutter mit Kaffee durch-