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.
The Wound and the Wand
I have come to adore my pens and can often be found fondling them, particularly my old classic Mont Blanc. But I have fallen for a new black Montegrappa, with its shiny case, heaviness and bendy nib. A favourite occupation of mine is to study the Montegrappa catalogue, turning the glossy pages slowly, convincing myself I need the turquoise one, and cannot survive another minute without the limited edition St Moritz. Not that expensive pens are always better than cheap ones. I use Lamy fountain pens every day, as well as their roller balls, in a variety of colours. Muji is excellent for light gel pens. But sometimes only a soft pencil will do … And still, a lot depends on the kind of paper you use and which nib runs best on what surface …
A writer could come to love the eventful paraphernalia of writing equipment and inks, of which colour where, as guitarists love guitars, photographers their cameras, and fetishists their thing. I like to see the page I’m on decorated. I want my art or craft – writing – to resemble a physical activity like drawing. This is not only passing time until one has to actually commit to the agony of beginning. In terms of sentences and paragraphs, I like the page to be prettily laid out; it is part of the pleasure of what I do, just as I like to look at art while I’m writing, rather than reading other people’s words.
This pleasure, of course, is only a minor hedonism, for how could I forget that I grew up in the 1960s, when pleasure was still hidden, subversive and irreligious, when sucking on a cigarette could seem decadent? Recently, in my spare time, I’ve taken to lying on my sofa thinking of hedonists I admire – or admired. I think, in particular, of a good friend who died recently, a former roadie, private detective and storyteller – a man who could make the world seem worth getting up for – who explained last year to my youngest son and me, as we sat in Rio’s Sugarloaf cafe, that he once fucked six women in a day. How hip it was in the 1960s, and particularly in the seventies, not to take care of yourself or anyone else, stepping as close as you could to peril and death, where things got raw and seemed to matter more than anything else: how important it was to be a threat to oneself, if not to others. The Velvet Underground, with their black polo-necks and near-death look, were an impressive influence. With dyed blond hair, Charlie Hero, in the television version of The Buddha of Suburbia, stalks the school playground with authority because he has the Velvet Underground and Nico album under his arm …
But as for committed hedonism, there’s always the danger of there being too much of it. If, in certain circumstances, drugs can be bad for you, work can be worse. The ever-reliable Nietzsche, when it comes to truth, denotes work ‘the best policeman’ and pits work – mind-numbing labour – against more important matters like ‘brooding, dreaming, worrying, loving, hating’, suggesting that pure labour organises us too easily and excludes too much. We use work as a discipline to kill off our most interesting and passionate impulses.
If the most significant post-war literary text, Waiting for Godot, was about the unbearable heaviness of deferment, about how mad you can go when nothing important is happening, we grew up – in the mode of capitalism then fashionable – in a period of instant gratification. Waiting, and frustration, were no longer allowed. We wanted it all now, and we wanted it at once.
So beware: if there’s only pleasure, it will call up destructiveness and death. Sacrifice is always a temptation. The pleasure-seekers explode, go crazy, or otherwise ruin themselves, as if that were the most perverse privilege of all. The natural end to pleasure would be addiction, a fatal narrowing, where one would find, at last, a boundary or a limit.
The important question has to be: how can we defend ourselves against our own destructiveness, those tantrums of the self-damned? How can we even see that we are being destructive? Where might we find better pictures of good lives?
The making of art represents the crossroads where the good things collide, where duty, magic and creativity fruitfully run into one another. Being an artist is a way of being interested in other people without having to sleep with them. There’s an apt sentence by the British analyst Ella Sharpe: ‘Sublimation is in its very externalisation an acknowledgement of powers within us to both love and hate.’
Not everything can be sublimated; one thing cannot be turned into another indefinitely. Nor can the excluded element be forgotten or renounced; it must find danger and an object or you will fall ill of unfulfilment, becoming unbearable to yourself. The hedonist, joy-rider and addict are safe from this; nothing new will happen since they have cancelled the future. They have ensured that the bad thing has already happened.
Making a swift survey, I see that friends who have endured with most contentment, if not happiness, are the artists or craftsmen, the ones who continue to work however futile it might feel. They go on: the work might be eccentric, far-out or delin
quent, but the artist has to form and control her somersaults of the imagination to make something for others, enduring the frustration of turning day-dreaming into meaning. All work is productive, a greeting, a wave across an abyss, as the audience overhears what the artist is going through.
The artist must live on the edge of failure. There can be no omniscience; any work could be a triumph, disaster or a bit of both. The difficulty here must be proportionate, and the work not impossible. The pen is a more than useful instrument; it is a wand which conjures that which you don’t yet know into being.
The Art of Distraction
The other day it occurred to me that I needed more exercise and should take up skipping. I obtained a smart leather rope with weights in the handles, and, waiting until it was almost dark, went out into the street. Making sure that no one was coming, I started bouncing on the pavement. I must have skipped a bit as a child, I guess, because I could remember how to do it. Being a determined if not bloody-minded fellow, I improved after a few days; I could go on longer. But that was that: I didn’t do more skips; my knees couldn’t take it, and I soon ran out of breath. Nor could I do the leaps, twirls, step-overs and girly hops I’d seen on the internet. I repeated the same little leaden jumps over and over. Soon I had to conclude that I’d reached my level. The only way was down.