Love + Hate: Stories and Essays

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 subject 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 …’

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.