Love + Hate (6 page)

If you want to control others, either you can use strength or you can try weakness. Both methods have
their drawbacks and particular blisses. Kafka's father took one position, and the son the other. It was a perfect division of labour, a torture machine which always worked. Franz rebelled against Hermann, complaining about him ceaselessly, as he appeared to rebel against families and marriage. But he only complained because he never found a father, family or marriage that he liked – just as the hunger artist claimed he never found any food which appealed to him. Otherwise, he claims, he would have eaten.

So Kafka grumbled, protested and rebelled, but he never revolted. He never overthrew the system or sought to do away with it, to escape the impasse and start afresh in another place with another family, making new mistakes. Perhaps none of us can forsake our love of the stand-off. Kafka refers to his father as ‘the measure of all things for me' but also calls him weak, ‘with a nervous heart condition', which, presumably, was why Franz wrote rather than spoke to him. Franz sensed his father's vulnerability; a sick father is doubly dangerous for an ambitious son. In order to hate him, Franz needed to keep him alive, and he needed to ensure his father would always have the advantage over him. The father had to remain powerful. Unlike Franz, Hermann was loved steadfastly by a loyal woman for his entire adult life. The son was sure to die first.

These stories by Kafka are important, and so resonant
and unimpeachable when it comes to their place in world literature, because they expose a familiar self-destructiveness involved in trying to please or punish the other. As with any ascetic, or the figures Freud in his essay on Dostoevsky calls ‘criminal', Kafka and his characters, these victims of themselves, came in time to learn to love but also to utilise the punishment they required. This hysterical martyrdom became an area of minimal enjoyment and freedom, where they and other marginalised subjects – women, Jews, writers – could dose themselves with the cool love of pain whenever they wished. They could, too, torture the other while remaining innocent, forever a victim. Kafka liked to remain a slave, while attempting indirectly, through writing, to control the master. Not long after reading Dostoevsky's
Notes from Underground
in 1887, Nietzsche writes of this sort of malevolent, resenting figure in
On the Genealogy of Morals
: ‘Intoxicated by his own malice … his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors. Everything covert entices him as his world … Man suffers from himself, and is like an animal in a cage …'

The abject believe that their suffering is sacred and a virtue, that their sacrifice will save the other, and, ultimately, themselves. In ‘The Metamorphosis' Gregor Samsa turns himself into an insect in order to ensure his family survives. Remember, there's nothing absurd about Kafka's characters. While they are, of course, obtaining
huge satisfaction from being ill, and while their lascivious work of agony might seem futile, they are – at least in fantasy – busy saving lives, and at some personal cost. However, Gregor's father, understandably fed up with him, pelts him with apples, indicating perhaps that the boy could do, at least, with acquiring some balls. Eventually the son's corpse is swept out by the maid.

It was commonly believed that the world was dangerous, but that inside the desexualised family, where the kind, authoritative parents held everything together, all was safe. This was the bourgeois ideal of family happiness, a myth Freud helped destroy with his own story of love, desire and hate, the Oedipus Complex. Kafka illustrated Freud's tale in ‘The Metamorphosis', the tale of what a youngster might have to do to survive within the complicated passion of a family, and what he might have to do to help ensure the others' survival. You can forget the police or racists: the people most dangerous to you are those you love, and who love you. Love can be worse than hate, a tender tyranny, when it comes to forms of control and sadism. After all, Kafka never says his father doesn't love him.

Towards the end of his life, while thinking about education, Kafka cited the myth of Kronos, who devoured his own children after they were born to prevent them overthrowing him, after he had previously cut off the genitals of his own father. Is education about flourishing,
or is it about constraint, punishment and policing? What does the parent want the child to be?

However, ‘The Metamorphosis' is not merely a tale of how mad, envious, indifferent or just ordinary parents can limit a child's imagination and sense of possibility. Kafka's texts, unlike his relationships, are endlessly fertile and open. No artist knows quite what they're saying: the world blows through them, and, if they're lucky, they might catch a scrap of it, which they will shape and remake, but without entirely grasping the entire truth of the thing. Saying and meaning are never the same. Hence, ‘The Metamorphosis' can be read differently, the other way round entirely.

It is in this reversal that we see ‘The Metamorphosis' as a terrible amusement, a black comedy, illustrating how one sick member of a family, seemingly the weakest one, can control, manipulate or mesmerise the rest, and there isn't much the others can do about it without appearing cruel or becoming consumed by guilt. As with the maestro Charcot's surreal displays at the Salpêtrière – a ‘production line of madness' – ‘The Metamorphosis' is also about the fascinating power of the ill and the spell they can cast. The story concerns the creativity of illness and the mutability of the self, and what a powerful tool sickness is, one which is rarely used just by the merely incapacitated. Nietzsche calls man ‘the sick' animal, and for him the sick, particularly the ‘purposefully'
or unconsciously sick, are a hazard, absolutely lethal in their sadistic power. After all, in time the West would become pathologised in its emotional tenor, and almost everyone at one point or another would claim to be a victim of their history, a subject of trauma, and helpless in the grasp of the past. There would be a veritable proliferation or plague of diagnoses from numerous ‘experts' – counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists – many directed at children. Illness, equated with innocence, would be everywhere, until the world resembled a hospital.

At the conclusion of ‘The Metamorphosis', when Gregor is dead and his corpse swept away by a servant, the family seem liberated and revived. They leave the apartment at last, and indeed the town. Kafka, not normally associated with happy, healthy endings, writes ecstatically, ‘The tram, in which they were the only passengers, was filled with warm sunshine. Leaning comfortably back in their seats they canvassed their prospects for the future, and it appeared on closer inspection that these were not at all bad.'

In Kafka's 1914 story ‘In the Penal Colony', a condemned prisoner's body is literally written on with a poisoned dagger-like pen, over twelve hours, until he dies, thus bringing together in one tale Kafka's favourite themes. As we know, outside of writing, Kafka's preferred site of activity was the body, about which he obsessed. But if Kafka preferred somatic solutions to
political ones, we must not forget that something else was going on – something important. It was the beetle, the sick son himself, who was both recording this and inventing the story as a consolidated picture of what went on. Who, after all, could tell this family's story? Who had the right? And from which point of view? No one authorises a writer to be a writer. Certificates of excellence cannot be handed out here. He or she has to be their own authority and guarantor. With Kafka, the ‘weakest' member of the family kept the ledger, and his imposed vision prevailed. He had the talent to demand complicity from the reader.

And there, in his writing, Kafka hid himself, while displaying himself for literary eternity. He spoke from where he hid. No one was going to get much love or even a glass of water, but they might get an amusing if not grim story, at least the ones which survived the destruction he appears to have half-heartedly requested. And Kafka kept on writing, until the end. This persistence showed the necessity of writing, and that some stories could seem like a cockroach in the room, reminding us of that which we prefer not to consider part of us. The intrinsic anarchy of real writing could become an attack, too, on total systems of thought, like Marxism or Nazism, or religion: always outside, the hysterics, masochists, bugs and self-starvers, despite their wish to be nothing, just would not fit into any comfortable place,
always making people work to think about what they might signify.

It is a contemporary nostrum that writing might organise and advance people's ideas, making for some clarity. Writing can function as a kind of therapy by exposing the unconscious. Write as it comes and you might get a glimpse of how you feel and who you really are. Writing, too, might also be some sort of appeal to the other, a letter pretending to be a novel. It might represent the hope of change, of engagement, of a future. If we are made of words, we can be undone by them; but we can also undo them.

‘I am incapable of speaking,' Kafka announced in his diary and, of course, the insect in ‘The Metamorphosis' is incomprehensible to his family, communicating only in a private language. Kafka told us often that he could not speak, for fear, presumably, that something might happen. Speaking and acting were the father's realm, and he left them to the old man. There were only certain circumstances in which Kafka could produce words, and writing was something his father did not do. So writing was the single creativity and freedom Kafka allowed himself, though he was careful to ensure this creativity did not seep into his life or relationships. The question here has to be: what does writing do for the writer? What place does it have in his or her life?

Despite the purported therapeutic benefits of some forms of writing, Kafka's writing was not an attempted
cure. None of his characters can change or be redeemed; they're tragic – their instincts will drive them inevitably to the zero point of death. Fate is a father, and he is inescapable. For Kafka, art became an important ‘instead of', a substitute for speech and action. Transporting his inner world outside the magic circle of the family – and onto the page – writing both saved his life, and stopped him living. ‘The Metamorphosis' and ‘A Hunger Artist' show what you might become if you can't be an artist. These are, if you like, alternative lives. Not that Kafka merely hid out scribbling in his burrow of words. While writing, he wasn't afraid: at his desk he had few scruples about what he said, and his position was extreme and destructive. Kafka's characters are not timorous, weak or indecisive. They are powerful beings, and the alterations they choose have a dramatic effect. Kafka's work was a violent fantasised attack on himself and on the other, via his own body. He aestheticised his suffering, though even that wasn't satisfying enough. In the end, he had to attack the body of his own writing, apparently asking Brod to burn his unpublished work.

Writing could never be curative for Kafka; he was always as ill as he needed to be. Instead, writing was a fantasy of mastery, a kind of balancing act, keeping everything the same until he faded and died. Otherwise, life beyond Kafka's desk would always and only ever remain an altruistic masochism. Sometimes such narrowings
are necessary. Kafka believed that it was in his words that he was at his best; writing was what he lived to do; he was ‘made of literature' and he was omnipotent there, exerting control within the illusion of literature.

Kafka wrote in his diary in 1921: ‘It's astounding how I have systematically destroyed myself …' Yet he and his readers were always aware of this Christ-like facade. His self-portrait as an insect, and the perverse insistence on innocence, ensured that his destructiveness was never a secret. Kafka repeatedly insisted on this self-cancelling and the shame it caused him. But he is never entirely convincing. He misled himself, as people do, for good reasons. There was more to his pose than he could know or own up to. He was always ‘devilish', as he put it in the diary, ‘in his innocence'. Don't the bug and the starving hunger artist attract much amazement and confused attention before they begin to bore their spectators? Don't they at least have an audience? And, look here, the characters seem to be saying, look at what you made me do to myself!

Not that the bug or the starving artist are all that Kafka is. While Kafka reminds us of important things – of the abuse of authority and the impossible stupidity of bureaucracy and of justice, of the ever-suffering body and the proximity of death, of how vile other people can seem – writers are bigger, more intelligent and almost always more creative than their characters. They have to be: the writer is the whole book and all the protagonists,
not just a part of it. From his or her place at the centre of the scene, the writer sees behind the story, and ahead of it. In writing, the horror happens to one's characters, rather than to oneself. The writer cannot be the victim of this particular story, the story he is telling, because although a book might be a collection of possible fates, these are not the fates he will encounter. That is not the door he must go through.

Kafka wrote to Brod not long before he died, ‘What I have play-acted is really going to happen.' His symptoms had finally become his life. Yet, despite his desperate protestations of hopelessness, his willed passivity and his penchant for victimisation, Kafka remained an omnipotent progenitor. The world is made of words, and he was the father of his texts, becoming his father's father, the one with the power, telling the story as he saw it and inviting the reader to take his side. A shaper and authority when it came to his fictional reality, he constructed, structured and organised an effective world, running every part of it. As with the ringmaster and showman Charcot's Tuesday performances, the entire scene was of the writer's making, and, like Charcot, he expected the audience's complicity, and for his interpretation to confirm his view of the world. Kafka was the master we still read: he was the weakest and the strongest, and, through his words, kept all of them – his family and his characters – alive forever.