In 1919, Franz Kafka took a two week sojourn from the insurance company where he worked to pen a letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in an attempt to address their taut relationship. He began his protests fully aware of the heavy undertaking of detailing the abuses of his domestic tyrant.
Dearest Father,
You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.
Over the next hundred pages, through glaring anecdotes and incisive psychological insight, Kafka unburdens himself of the injustices suffered at the hands of his father, whom the notion of paternal love, that which Kafka most longed for, had almost entirely escaped. Although the use of broad generalizations in personifying his father and for his black and white thinking, Kafka’s scholars take this giant of a letter to be a study of the author himself than a portrait of its subject, and believe the purpose of the letter to be self-therapy over rekindling the familiar bond, I, however, stand beside Kafka in support of his approach. During court proceedings, the defendant charged with a crime would not expect to hear a complete and unabridged sketch of his personality in favor of an account of the facts directly relevant to the crime of which he is accused and its effects on the injured parties. In his delicate and emotionally laden tone, Kafka is able to do justice to the frustration and resentment he has borne for so long, without undermining the love towards his father that he makes little effort to conceal. Moreover, he remains supremely deferential throughout the letter, making space for his own errors, and even somewhat loosely using this court analogy himself:
You are, admittedly, a chief subject of our conversations1, as of our thoughts ever since we can remember, but truly, not in order to plot against you do we sit together, but in order to discuss—with all our might and main, jokingly and seriously, in affection, defiance, anger, revulsion, submission, consciousness of guilt, with all the resources of our heads and hearts—this terrible trial that is pending between us and you, to examine it in all its details, from “all sides, on all occasions, from far and near—a trial in which you keep on claiming to be the judge, whereas, at least in the main (here I leave a margin for all the mistakes I may naturally make) you are a party too, just as weak and deluded as we are.
In faulting Kafka for his (justified) emotional charges, his scholars are guilty of doing him the same injustice as his father did unto him: expecting him to bear the brunt of their relationship on the simple grounds of being the subject of a toiling guardian.
It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy.
After a childhood spent in his father’s shadow, Kafka wrote the letter to his father when he was at a considerable distance from him — as an adult, in a world apart from his family. Now, having defended Kafka’s position and with intimate knowledge of familial relationships that can elicit a letter of this magnitude, I now turn to an account of my own.
I have been away from home for only a few years, but I daresay I had lived with the rift in my household dynamic for far longer. There is this really popular scene from Ladybird that goes viral every other week on social media, featuring Ladybird and her mother, and this much is probably enough for everyone to recognise the scene. “Of course, I love you,” her mother sighs. Ladybird pierces through the platitude, asking, “but do you even like me?” This piqued my interest, because Ladybird and every red-haired teenage girl sympathizer placed “liking” to be an act of higher merit and valor than “loving”. In the same breath, and I am certain Ladybird would’ve done the same had she been real, these people champion Bell Hooks for her aphorisms on love and the act of loving. I gave up reading the book, All About Love, about 100 pages in, because of Hooks’s insufferable patronizing and ridiculously conservative opinions, but I can say this much that what the Ladybird fanbase got wrong and Bell Hooks probably got right is that loving is an active and constant enterprise. I already knew this in middle school, when I wrote in an essay in English class, “my parents like me.” My teacher said this was wrong, and you can’t say that your parents like you because they actually love you. But I had made the conscious decision in choosing against the stronger verb, because I wasn’t sure if it could rise to the occasion. My parents like me enough to house and feed me, to let me take the English class in school. But did they love me, say, in the way that Bell Hooks says we should love one another, with agency and commitment? “Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love.” Had my father been acting out love, when he cursed me out in profanities so ugly that I shut my ears when my friends in middle school learned to use the same ones, or when he traded his anger for my humiliation in public, or when he whipped me with prickly twigs on a random evening in the name of inspiring religious faith? I could’ve stopped reading Bell Hooks at page 1 and I would still say no.
I know I have grown up a little because the world around me looks familiar. I can recognise the name of an obscure village in France because I’ve been there. I can read the line “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and know it to be the opening of a Tolstoy novel. I know not to guilt people for not knowing what they want because nobody really knows what they want. All this is to say that I feel that I have gathered a few experiences here and there, enough to make me confident enough to seek out more, but too few to make me feel small against the uncompromising pool of experiences yet to be experienced. I feel that I am still too young to reread books, despite how much I might like one, because there are just too many I haven’t even started. Sometimes, when I’m watching a movie by myself, I’ll skip ahead a few times to get to the end quicker, so I advance the time when I can watch the next one. It’s a strange tug of war, where I am constantly introduced to new things which open up even broader planes that I haven’t known before. This notion is perhaps altogether unknown to my father, because it seems he is already accustomed with everything, or at least he already knows everything he needs to know to confer judgements on everything. Some new discovery is not a discovery to him at all, but rather a mere confirmation. When we were kids, my father used to tell us this story of how as an adolescent he used to dream of working in the Gulf. For context, two days before the 1971 war ended, the Pakistani military had the brilliant idea of gathering hundreds of doctors, lawyers, engineers — almost everyone capable of critical thoughts — in a field and shooting them to death. So, when my father was born around that time, the war torn and now intellectually bankrupt country’s only resource was its masses of people. Those people flocked to the wealthier Gulf nations to work as migrant workers, while a few others here got awfully rich taking care of the logistics of all that. My father dreamt of the former. Lucky for him, he was able to get a master’s degree before he had the chance to actualize his adolescent aspirations. He is now probably the most well traveled person I know, and so it is not unreasonable of me to expect his worldview to have expanded proportionately. However, that has not been the case, and he remains as frugal in ideas as ever before. This argument could have just as well gone the other way, that he is from a different time, and I have been having communal experiences much more expansive and liberal than him, while he has been at the same place since at least when I was born. But the way I see it, even this point works against him, because while I have been making transitory acquaintances here and there, he has had the chance to see far and wide with the added benefit of being grounded by a home and family, which should’ve given him plenty of space to experiment and be more comfortable with the nature of human relationships. Instead, of the compassion and respect, appreciation of the immaterial, and emotional intelligence in those around me that I love, I find little resemblance in my father. Sometimes, when I hear the unfounded conceit in his voice, I wonder if his goal had at all shifted from that all those many years ago.
Kafka never posted the letter. He showed it to his lover, Milena, and his best friend and confidante, Max Brod, and it was published nearly 30 years after Kafka’s passing. The letter probably did more for Kafka’s later readers that it would’ve done for its addressee. While thinking of writing this post, I came across this filter online that shows you as an older person. I saw lighter hair, skin nowhere near as tight, and the wrinkles carved on my forehead as if in stone. If I say I saw my father, that would be too poetic even for me and thus annoying. I am not Ocean Vuong. Instead, I caught a glimpse of what I might look like in 40 or 50 years, which made me realize I should wear sunscreen more often.
1 Here, Kafka refers to his sister, Ottla, who was often the victim of their father’s abuses, due to her irreverent choices of suitor and profession.
Also isn't it weird that I recognize Kendall from succession, even though its a picture of the back of his head.
I really enjoyed reading this post! It has a a stream-of-consciousness style that conveys honesty and vulnerability. Interestingly, your writing also creates a mirror between yourself and Kafka, which adds a beautiful touch to the overall piece. Maybe I should start reading books again…