Hanif Kureishi - Love + Hate - Stories and Essays

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.