*
Now and again, to nicely devalue me, as if I’ve got the wrong idea about who I am, my youngest son will suddenly start to abuse me wildly in the foulest language, saying the hardest things he can think of. Then he looks at me nervously and asks, ‘Are you still alive?’ But today he is in a mild mood, and merely says, ‘Come on, old fellow, don’t give up, you can do it – maybe …’
He will run with fitter people, I tell him. But he doesn’t like to compete with his friends, for fear of losing and being humiliated. I can only say that if you don’t compete, you have already lost, that your conflicts make you, and that, if you can, you must welcome them. Yet he will have a lifetime of competition ahead of him: for friends, lovers, sex, jobs. Substituting the lost paradise of a secure childhood for the intenser vagaries of sex and love, he will win and lose. He will be envied, hated even; he will enjoy the pleasures of brutality, and will suffer from sexual jealousy; there’s no cure for that, or for any of it.
*
At the end of the street I can see all he has been holding back. He turns it on, rushing along the pavement to the gate, ‘destroying me’, as he puts it, and laughing when I finally turn up.
At last we are home; he takes off the weights, and we both lie on our backs on the floor. We are together, and we are happy together for a while.
His Father’s Excrement: Franz Kafka and the Power of the Insect
In the famous, reproachful ‘Letter to His Father’, which Franz Kafka wrote in 1919 but, characteristically, never delivered, the writer recalls an early memory in which the old man left the whimpering young boy on the balcony at night, ‘outside the shut door’, just because he wanted a drink of water.
‘I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm … Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.’
Far from being an absent, unimpressive father, Hermann Kafka was an overwhelming man: too noisy, too vital, too big, too present for his son, so much so that Franz was unable ever to abandon or break with him. Although Franz wrote in his diary, ‘A man without a woman is no person,’ and came close to marrying Felice Bauer and, later, Julie Wohryzek, he could not become a husband or father himself. Franz Kafka was otherwise engaged: he and his father were locked in an eternal arm-wrestle.
Kafka takes the ‘absolutely nothing’ of his ‘Letter’ very seriously. In the two stories discussed here, ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘A Hunger Artist’, written seven years apart, this ‘nothing’ becomes literalised. Out of fury and frustration, Kafka’s characters use their worthless bodies – these so-called ‘nothings’ – as a weapon, even as a suicide bomb, to destroy others and, in the end, themselves.
In ‘The Metamorphosis’, generally considered to be one of the greatest novellas ever written, and a foundation stone of early modernism, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he has become transformed from a human being – a hard-working travelling salesman, a son and a brother – into an insect, a bug, or a large dung beetle, depending on the translation. And in ‘A Hunger Artist’ the protagonist, a determined self-famisher, exhibits himself publicly in a cage, where, eventually, he starves himself to death as a form of public entertainment. Like Gregor Samsa in ‘The Metamorphosis’, at the conclusion of the story he is swept away, having also become ‘nothing’, a pile of rubbish or human excrement that everyone has become tired of. The hunger artist is replaced in his cage by a panther with ‘a noble body’, a fine animal the public flock to see.
As a young man, Franz Kafka, notoriously fastidious when it came to noise and food, became a follower of a Victorian eccentric called Horace Fletcher. (Henry James was also a ‘fanatical’ follower of Fletcher.) Known as ‘The Great Masticator’, Fletcher advocated ‘Fletcherising’, which involved the chewing of each portion of food at least a hundred times per minute, as an aid to digestion. (A shallot, apparently, took seven hundred chews.) Fletcher’s disciple Franz Kafka was, on top of this, a vegetarian, in Prague, of all places. Hermann Kafka, on the other hand, was a man of appetite, who seems, from the outside, to have been hard-working, devoted to his family, loved by his wife, to whom he remained faithful, and a Czech-speaking Jew in a tough, anti-Semitic city. Certainly, Hermann had a more difficult childhood than his son, working from a young age, leaving home at fourteen, joining the army at nineteen, and eventually moving to Prague to open a fancy-goods shop. His two youngest sons died in childhood and his daughters would die in the concentration camps.
Hermann’s surviving, sickly, scribbling, neurotic first son, Franz, something of an eternal teenager, appears to be what might now be called an anorexic. Despite the fact his mother blithely considered him healthy, and refused to fall for the ‘performance’ of his numerous illnesses, there wasn’t much he could digest; it was always all too much. The boy was certainly strong in his own way; he was pig-headed and stubborn, a refusal artist of some sort, and he was not unusual in that. There are many kinds of starvation, deprivation and protest, and some of them had already become a form of circus.
A generation before, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the sprawling Salpêtrière hospital in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement, the psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot was overseeing another form of exhibitionism of the ill. It was mainly hysterical women he exhibited in his semi-circular amphitheatre on Tuesday afternoons, where ‘all of Paris’ – writers like Léon Daudet and Guy de Maupassant, along with interested doctors like Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud and George Gilles de la Tourette, as well as socialites, journalists and the merely curious – came to stare at these strippers of the psyche. Some of the women were hypnotised by Charcot’s interns; Charcot also publicly diagnosed patients he’d never met before. And while hysteria was mostly a disorder diagnosed by men and associated with women, there were a few male patients: one had been a wild man in a carnival; another worked in an iron cage at a fair, eating raw meat.
What sort of show was this, and what kind of staged illnesses did they suffer from, these weird somnambulists and contortionists, with their tics, paralysis, animalism and inexplicable outbreaks of shaking and crying? Were their conditions organic, or was it true that illness was merely misdirected sexuality? Were they ill at all, and, if so, which words best described them? And doesn’t the physician, before he can heal, first have to wound?
After one of these crowd-pleasing occasions, and while researching ‘Le Horla’, his story of possession, Guy de Maupassant wrote in a newspaper article, ‘We are all hysterics; we have been ever since Dr Charcot, that high priest of hysteria, that breeder of hysterics, began to maintain in his model establishment in the Salpêtrière a horde of nervous women whom he inoculates with madness and shortly turns into demoniacs.’
Sigmund Freud, studying in Paris for a few months, visited Charcot’s home three times, where he was given cocaine to ‘loosen his tongue’, and was so impressed by him that he translated some of his works, and named one of his sons after him. But Freud was to take an important step on from Charcot. Rather than looking at women, he began to listen to them. From being avant-garde, living works of art, they became human beings with histories, traumas and desires. Rather than action, it was language, with its jokes, inflections, omissions, hesitations and silence which was the telling thing here. The mad are people who don’t understand the rules, or play by the wrong rules, internal rather than official ones; they are heeding the wrong voices and following the wrong leaders. Yet the mad, of course, cannot do absolutely anything. Madness, like everything else, has to be learned, and, as with haircuts, when it comes to folly, there are different styles in fashion at the time. If madness, and questions about sanity and the nature of humanity, are the subj
ect of twentieth-century literature – what is a person; what is health; what is rationality, normalcy, happiness? – there is also a link to theatre, and to exhibitionism. As a form of self-expression, it might be important to be mad, but it might also be significant that others witness this form of isolating distress, for it to exist in the common world, for it to be a show, moving and affecting others. More questions then begin to unravel. Who is sick in this particular collaboration, the watcher or the watched, the doctor or the patient? And what exactly is sick about any of them? Isn’t the exclusive idealisation of normality and reason itself a form of madness? And if these exhibitionists wish to be seen, understood or recognised, what is it about themselves they want to be noticed?
Jean-Martin Charcot’s ‘living sculptures’, as one might characterise them, these divas on the verge of madness – those who can only speak symptom-language – are not unlike Strindberg’s female characters: fluid, disturbing, undecipherable, indefinable, oversexualised. (Kafka loved Strindberg, and writes in his diary, ‘I don’t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast. He sustains me.’) Yet in their exhibitionism – the only communication they were encouraged in – these hysterics resemble the self-starver in ‘A Hunger Artist’.
Most great writing is strange, extreme and uncanny, as bold, disturbing and other-worldly as nightmares: think of One Thousand and One Nights, Hamlet, ‘The Nose’, The Brothers Karamazov, Oedipus, Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein or The Picture of Dorian Gray. If someone had never met any humans, but only read their novels, they’d get an odd idea of how things go here on earth: a series of overlapping madnesses, perhaps. Kafka is no exception when it comes to comic exaggeration, using the unlikely and bizarrely untrue to capture a truth about ordinary life.
However, in most magical tales of imaginative transformation, the subject of the story becomes bigger or greater than he is already, a superhero of some sort, with extra powers: a boy wishing to be a big man. One of the puzzles, ironies and originalities of ‘The Metamorphosis’ is that the alteration is a diminishment. Kafka is canny enough to take his metaphors literally, to crash together the ordinary and the unreal, the demotic and the fantastical. He doesn’t, after all, tell us that Gregor feels like a dung beetle in his father’s house, but rather that one morning Gregor wakes up to find he has actually become a dung beetle. As with Charcot’s hysterics, Gregor had become alien to his family and the world, and the story tells us that almost any one of us could wake up in the morning and find ourselves to be foreign, not least to ourselves, and that our bodies are somewhere beyond us, as strange as our minds, and, like them, also barely within our agency.
‘What shall I become through my animal?’ Kafka asks in 1917, in The Blue Octavo Notebooks. He no longer wants to be either an adult or a man. And we might ask of the hunger artist, whose body is also destroyed, what sort of diminished thing does he want to be? Is he a starving saint, idiot, or sacrificial victim? Self-harm is the safest form of violence; you are, at least, no danger to anyone else. No one will seek revenge. To starve oneself, or to become a bug, is to evacuate one’s character, to annihilate one’s history and render oneself a void. But what are these transformations in aid of? Is this living sculpture showing us that we ask for too much, or showing us how little we need? What sort of demonstration is this spiritual anorexic engaged in?
The hunger artist’s ‘bodywork’ resembles some of the ‘performance’ art of the twentieth century, which existed outside the conventional museum, and was probably most influential in the 1970s. Human bodies had been torn apart in the wars, revolutions, medical experiments, pogroms and holocausts of the twentieth century. Subsequently, artists who had formerly disappeared behind their ideas would become overt autobiographers, literally using their bodies as their canvas or material, mutilating, cutting, photographing or otherwise displaying themselves before an audience, a ‘theatre of torture’, if you like, showing us the ways in which our bodies are a record of our experience, as well as what we like to do to one another.
Kafka, who loved theatre and cabaret, and hated his own ‘puny’ body, particularly in comparison to his father’s hardy, ‘huge’ physique, was more interested in the tortured male frame than the female form. Not that Kafka wasn’t interested in women, and not that he didn’t torture them. This was a pleasure even he could not deny himself. As is clear from his many letters, he practised and developed this fine art for a long time, until he became very good at maddening, provoking and denying women. He also went to enormous trouble to ensure that none of the women engaged with him was ever happy or satisfied. In case she got the wrong idea, or, worse, the right one – that he was a panther masquerading as a bug – Kafka pre-emptively describes himself, to his translator and friend Milena Jesenská in 1919, as an ‘unclean pest’.
Kafka met Felice Bauer at Max Brod’s in 1912. She must have panicked him, since soon afterwards he wrote ‘The Metamorphosis’ in three weeks, quickly making it clear that he would rather be a bug or a skeleton than an object of female desire. He made sure, too, never to write a great woman character. Kafka could not portray the eroticised, sexually awakened subject; the body was always impossible and a horror, and he worked hard all his life to remain a grotesque infirm child. Too much love and sexual excitement on both sides would have been exposed, and Kafka, the paradigmatic writer of the twentieth century, is, above all, a writer of resentment, if not hatred. In his world view – and all artists have a basic implicit fantasy which marks the limits and possibilities of what they might do – there are only bullies and victims; nothing more. The women had to learn, repeatedly, what it was like to be refused. No woman was going to get a drink of water from Franz Kafka.
Yet Kafka constantly solicited information from his women, making them ‘captive by writing’, as he put it in a letter to Brod. He insisted they follow his instructions; he always wanted to know ‘everything’, as he puts it, about a woman. There is, of course, nothing in this kind of ceaseless ‘knowing’. There is no actual knowledge in such a heap of facts, and certainly no pleasure, exchange, laughter or unpredictability. Kafka preferred to eroticise indecision and circling; he came to love ‘a long uncertain waiting’, and he never possessed the women he loved. He wanted to be their tyrant, not their equal. After all, he knew tyrants: he had lived with them. And he, the kindest of men, tyrannised mainly himself until everything became impossible. He would chew and chew until his food was fit only for a baby, but he would rarely swallow. Likewise, the women would ride on Zeno’s arrow forever, never arriving, never getting anywhere at all, always on the way – to nowhere.
Kafka’s writing, his diaries, letters, notebooks, stories and novels, as well as his personal life, have become one work or dream. They were his self-analysis and his social and sexual intercourse. He made everyone up out of words: Felice, Milena, Gregor, Joseph K, and himself. The child even created his own parents. Kafka’s father, the supposed super-tyrant, who told his son he would ‘tear him apart like a fish’, was one of Franz Kafka’s liveliest lies, probably one of his best literary creations or fictions. Kafka might have turned himself into a bug, but he transformed his father into a text. Throughout literature, the two of them would be an immortal double-act, always co-dependents, like Lucky and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, unable to live with or without one another, dancing together forever. So, when Hermann deprived his son of a drink, when Hermann became the master who could make the slave die, food and nourishment became the son’s enemy, and deprivation and failure his subject. Kafka has more in common with Beckett than he does with Joyce or Proust when it comes to a world view. He and Beckett are both philosophers of the abject, of humiliation, degradation and death-in-life, just right for the twentieth century, a time of authoritarian fathers and totalitarian fascists, the weak and the strong, generating one another.
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 …’
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