Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and . . . marriage is not among them.
—FRANZ KAFKA, LETTER TO THE FATHER
Kafka wrote this letter near the end of his young life, after he’d written his major works, so he perhaps saw it as a last act of, what—remorse, resolution, revenge? Stating his case as man and son, he was reestablishing his boundaries and rights of selfhood the way a lawyer, which he was, might, so his father would know how he perceived their relationship, and how he had been affected by it. Certainly, whatever reasons he owned for writing it, its inevitability as a statement of cause and effect reveals a logic or argument he may not have himself fully understood, an argument, say, as compulsive as it is hypnotic. I don’t believe it’s too much to claim that all or much of his work comes out of the disorder and turbulence (not to mention guilt, shame, and genius) that produced this argument, which then evolved into an obsession with collecting evidence of injustice and transgression that inspired one of the most influential visions in literary history.
I’ve used this quote from his letter many times in classes, often to illustrate how a metaphor or image can state what might otherwise feel or actually be inexpressible, and each time I used it I’d consider teaching the book in our craft class and then quickly would find a reason not to, without bothering, or wanting, to understand why. Whatever fascinated me in these few words obviously also terrified me, something larger, more prescient and disturbing than I cared to realize.
A year ago, after reading the new translation of Letter to the Father by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, I decided to teach the book, not because the differences from other translations were in any way dramatic, but because I could now see, with the perspective of time, that Kafka’s goal wasn’t simply to repair or perhaps rectify what he perceived as being unjust and inequitable in his relationship with his father, it was something much more ardent and perhaps overpowering: an attempt to examine the very nature of his own being as he saw it reflected in the man who played the role of his father. I say “played the role” because this letter was clearly designed as a book, a work of imagination, not unlike his novels and stories in which all the characters have designated roles. It was more personal and historical than his other books, a “letter” addressed to only one person, which makes it all the more universal and intimate for its portrayal of family dystopia and cruelty, because his persona was clearly aware that with each accusation, he was presenting his case to an audience larger than one man. The fact that he gave the finished letter to his mother to give to his father (which she never did, not even after Kafka died, wanting to protect both parties, and which he may have anticipated) and understood that his friend, future biographer, and literary executor, Max Brod, would see and no doubt eventually publish it, meant that on some level he wanted it to be known. And I’m not using the word “case” lightly, because it seems clear that this rather dramatic reinvention of tribal conflict was being cast as a trial in which his father was the defendant, his persona the prosecuting attorney, and, most important, he himself, the child and man, the plaintiff.
Yes, the author of one of the most original works of the twentieth century, The Trial, was now staging another trial, this time casting his persona as a prosecutor instead of a defendant or victim. If his use of a map as a symbol of suppression and victimhood was impressive, the new metaphor he was now using was even more original, and disturbing; in recasting the central turmoil of his childhood and wretched adolescence as a trial, he was in effect placing his father on the witness stand, without the will or recourse to speak and defend himself. His father’s silence is by itself a verdict of guilt that Kafka must’ve found profoundly gratifying. The personage who dominates the very map of the world is slyly rendered mute and, in a sense, defenseless. Who among us would not enjoy, if we had the imagination and resolve, the satisfaction of placing our most pronounced antagonist on trial, without the luxury or freedom to speak in his or her defense?
Indeed, what a wonderful exercise this would make for my students, who would all own an argument against someone they would benefit from identifying. Kafka’s father, or the argument he turned him into, was most certainly his black bird, an internal barometer of self-worth, perhaps the very fascination that drew me to this metaphor—didn’t we all live in one kind of argument or another, endlessly seeking to appease or avenge whatever injustice we couldn’t bring ourselves to forgive? Didn’t we all desire retribution, some kind of public shaming, and then suffer the resulting guilt and shame? Isn’t this why I so feared teaching Kafka’s book, and turning it into an exercise?
Even if my students failed to identify or articulate their arguments, the very idea of such a confrontation might inspire in them greater courage and forbearance, which, given the shitbird’s love of disguises and invisibility, was half the battle. And if a student could go no further than imagining his or her antagonist, the recipient of their letter, they would encounter, in a more prescribed and explicit way, as Kafka himself did, their most ascendant personas.
My students immediately took to the exercise in a way I hadn’t imagined. One wrote to an alcoholic father, another to an abusive husband, and another to a mother who disapproved of everything she desired and dreamed of pursuing. The letterform-imposed structure and compression, and the idea of using Kafka’s prosecutorial persona, spared them some real portion of shame; it provided a powerful mask to hide behind and many seemed to delight in their newfound prosecutorial powers, demonstrating little mercy on their defendants. One student in particular confronted a father whose drunken rages so intimidated her as a child she could never before even realize how much she desired to express the dormant anger that suppressed her every creative impulse. And, ironically, the required legal nomenclature and diction came naturally to her, coming as she did from a family of lawyers. Her plaintiff was her innocence and individuality, and each of us in class, stupefied by her strength and courage, became not only a member of a carefully selected jury but a witness to a performance so persuasive no one, not one of us, could say anything after she stopped reading. It was an exercise in selfhood unlike any other any of us had heard, one perfectly suited to both Kafka’s and her own candor.
AND THEN I OF COURSE tried to imagine writing one myself. But I’d written about my father many times before in poems and stories, and I wasn’t sure what would be gained in my prosecuting him once again. Kafka and many of these students were addressing people still very much alive, with whom there still existed an active relationship and the hope of at least a limited reconciliation, while my father had been dead for well over fifty years. As Kafka tells his father: “You can only treat a child the way you yourself are constituted, with vigor, noise, and hot temper . . . because you wanted to bring me up to be a strong brave boy.” A letter of such perspicacity and judgment would require great strength of vision and willfulness, but he most certainly hadn’t become the strong brave boy his father desired in any conventional sense. He goes on to say: “I was a timid child . . . obstinate. . . . Mother spoilt me too, but I cannot believe that a kindly word . . . friendly look, could not have got me to do anything that was wanted of me.” Yes, but what did he imagine was wanted of him, what degree of meekness and compliance—the kind that would turn him into a Joseph K, a prey who could be arrested without reason, the kind of mole-like being and insect he wrote about in “The Burrow” and “The Metamorphosis,” creatures so undesirable they must live in isolation, away from all human contact? If this is what he imagines his father wanted him to be, then a letter like this is all the more crucial and piquant, all the more existential.
In revealing his defendant’s character to the jury, and to us, his future readers, Kafka isn’t merely pleading with his father to see and love him for who he is and was, any more than a prosecutor would plead with a defendant for understanding; the charge he is making is that of willful abuse and neglect, of disdain and indifference, and in the very act of prosecution he is liberating his adolescent self from having to see himself through his father’s eyes.
I now see that I was doing a similar thing in this poem from my book Failure:
THE ONE TRUTH
After dreaming of radiant thrones
for sixty years, praying to a god
he never loved for strength, for mercy,
after cocking his thumbs
in the pockets of his immigrant schemes,
while he parked cars during the day
and drove a taxi all night,
after one baby was born dead,
and he carved the living one’s name
in windshield snow in the blizzard of 1945,
after scrubbing piss, blood
and vomit off factory floors
from midnight to dawn,
then filling trays with peanuts,
candy and cigarettes
in his vending machines all day,
his breath a wheezing suck
and bellowing gasp
in the fist of his chest,
after washing his face, armpits
and balls in cold back rooms,
hurrying between his hunger
for glory and his fear
of leaving nothing but debt,
after having a stroke and
his son screaming at him
to stop working and rest,
after being knocked down
by a blow he expected all his life,
his son begging forgiveness,
his wife crying his name,
after looking up at them
straight from hell, his soul
withering in his arms—
is this what failure is,
to end where he began,
no one but a deaf dumb God
to welcome him back,
his fists pounding at the gate—
is this the one truth,
to lie in a black pit
at the bottom of himself,
without enough breath
to say goodbye
or ask for forgiveness?
My father died bankrupt and defeated, a fate he appeared to call upon himself. If Kafka’s father’s shadow covered the world, my father’s shadow created a legacy of failure, anger, and shame. This third-person persona allowed me to address the nature of my grief and to indict my father on charges of vainglory and willful blindness, while distributing blame between him and myself in equal measure, with some suggestion of sympathy and regret, if not forgiveness. My defendant was also the plaintiff, the eighteen-year-old boy who witnessed the heartbreak of his father’s self-destruction. If I were to write such a letter, I wouldn’t ask my younger self to understand or forgive his father, who viewed him as an unsolicited responsibility and annoyance, but to understand and forgive himself, to see himself in the nature of a test, as a person of imagination and goodwill, deserving of the respect and affection his father was incapable of providing. I would plead with him to put into perspective his father’s inadequacies as an immigrant who came to this country as a boy of six speaking not a word of English and who, without the benefit of education or guidance, would have to make his way while helping four younger brothers and two sisters; that he see himself as the only child of a great appetite for acknowledgment and restitution.
I would ask him to imagine himself as the man, poet, husband, and father he would become, to view himself through the prism of this more gracious and generous regard.
I would speak to him not as an ungrateful reprobate unworthy of his father’s strength of will, but as an innocent unfairly burdened with a legacy he would be made to tolerate and sustain for the rest of his life.
I would ask him what I ask of myself and of my students: to delight in qualities he alone possesses, to take pleasure in his own strengths, in the forlorn, frightened, doubting responsibility of his gladness; to define himself only by those qualities of temperament and sensitivity he himself made.
I would ask him to address his own magnitude, which his father could not.