Hanif Kureishi - Love + Hate - Stories and Essays

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.