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International Forum of Psychoanalysis

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On Franz Kafka's Letter to my father

Jos Durval Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Version of record first published: 22 Aug 2011.

To cite this article: Jos Durval Cavalcanti de Albuquerque (2011): On Franz Kafka's Letter to my father, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 20:4, 229-232 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2011.595427

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International Forum of Psychoanalysis. 2011; 20: 229 232

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

On Franz Kafkas Letter to my father1

DURVAL CAVALCANTI DE ALBUQUERQUE JOSE

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Abstract Based on the Freudian point of view as regards the psychic sources of the writers material, the author examines Kafkas Letter to my father as an example of a text that did not aspire to literary pretensions when it was written. Such a text, in spite of its heavy content, which expresses suffering, frustration, rage, and humiliation, still produces pleasure in its reading. The ideas of Derrida, Bakhtin, and Barthes are used as approaches to the structure of a text in order to understand the reasons for which it can be considered artistic and, despite its heavy content, still evokes the pleasure of the reading.

Key words: Kafka, pleasure in reading, structure of the text

Creative writers themselves like to lessen the distance between their kind and the common run of humanity; they so often assure us that every man is a poet at heart and that the last poet will not perish till the last man does. (Freud, 19087/1908, p. 143)

Already at the beginning of our psychic life, we learn that the severity of reality forces us to fight for a more pleasant situation. The Freudian view maintains that childrens play, an expression of the first signs of imaginative activity, craves pleasure, but maturation brings a gradual decrease of this activity. For the child, play and reality are different, but a link is maintained between them. With the cessation of childrens play, these games are lost, together with this way of achieving satisfaction. The missing pleasure will somehow be rediscovered in adult fantasy, the nursery of so-called daydreams. However, differently from childrens play, which is explicit, the fantasy that arises later tends to be hidden. Fantasizing is an attempt to correct some kind of dissatisfaction, or even the realization of an unspoken wish. Playing also aims at satisfaction, but it is clear and exposed. It is probably for this reason that Freud claims we have easier

This essay was presented at the II Congresso Internacional de Psicopatologia Fundamental (2nd Fundamental Psychopathology International Congress), Bele m do Para , Brazil, September 2006.

access to the motivations of childrens play than to those of adult fantasy. The passing from fantasy to daydreaming implies a psychic work originating in a present motivation, determining a strong present wish. This refers back to a past memory, to a moment in which this vow was made. A space is then created for the future in which the wish will be fulfilled (Freud, 1907/1908). From the creator of psychoanalysis, we know that the material used by the writer is the same as that which composes our fantasies, dreams, and daydreams: it is that which is in the gear of the wish demanding realization. As the dream is, according to Freud, a wish fulfillment, so it is the same for a work of art. The seriousness of a childs game will include the sense of creativity in the same way that the applied writers fantastic world is pregnant with emotion. The naming of sensitive objects in literary forms, such as the theatrical play, the actor, etc., points to the preservation, determined by language, between childrens play and poetic creation. In this light, we can examine the similarities between a piece of writing and a daydream. Most certainly, a good novel, drama, tragedy, or any other literary construction genre is far from being a naive daydream, but in the daydream we find the same quest for satisfaction that is present in the literary work. That is, it originates from the same source from which the writers fantasies have sprung.

Correspondence: Dr. Jose Durval Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, Psicanalista da Sociedade de Psicana lise Iracy Doyle, Rua Nascimento Silva 470, CEP 22421020, Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro RJ, Brazil. E-mail: jdurval@unisys.com.br

(Received 23 May 2011; accepted 5 June 2011)

ISSN 0803-706X print/ISSN 1651-2324 online # 2011 The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2011.595427

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J. D. Cavalcanti de Albuquerque father of the primal horde. Kafka speaks vehemently of a desperate quest for a path that provides him with the necessary conditions, which he needs as a minimum, to be qualified to live without his father. He describes intense feelings of fragility, inferiority, incestuous fantasies, parricidal hostility, guilt, and the presence of a constant terror. In his epistolary journey, in the moment in which he writes, the author considers himself a weakly, timid, hesitant, restless person, who hopes to achieve, through this letter, something . . . which so closely approximates the truth that it might reassure us both a little and make our living and our dying easier (p. 4). We may consider that Kafka was not driven by literary intentions in his Letter. He wanted to be heard by his father. He hands the letter to his mother, who returns it with kind words (p. 4). He then keeps the letter, and in the manuscript comments says that it is a lawyers letter, as if he were defending himself in a courtroom, presenting a voluminous list of errors made by his father in his education (Kafka, 2004), yet it is known that this manuscript achieved a high aesthetic value as a literary document (Bakes, 2004). However, this value is not apparent on a superficial reading. As an example, let us evoke Derrida, who, in the opening of his book Platos Pharmacy (1997, p. 17), observes that a text can only be accepted as such if it hides at first sight the law of its composition and the rule of its game. That is, both this law and this rule are not rigorously perceptible from a simple presentation. In order to understand a text, it is necessary to go beyond its surface. The reader must put his hands on it without retreating from the possibility, sometimes inevitable, of adding a thread to its texture. Adding here means nothing but what is ordinarily called reading, the contribution of the reader. It is the attempt to see where the pleasure of reading is produced that motivates this essay. Our premise is that the authors words weave a cloth with autobiographic threads. An autobiography can be a collection of information about oneself of a practical or historic-scientific nature. We could agree with Bakhtin (2003) and say that we cannot find any artistic-biographic purpose in the text. Although the Letter has a definite audience and an explicit goal, it is without a shadow of doubt a literary work. In the letter, from his memories of the past, Kafka at numerous times deals with an other whose idealized nuances remind him of himself. As he narrates his life through telling how the others appear to him, he produces an intertwinement with the formal structure of what he narrates. He puts himself in the role played by an actor and, even though he is not the hero of his

Kafkas Letter to my father (Kafka, 2004) was chosen because it refers to a text that originally did not have literary aspirations. Instead, it was written with the intention of clarifying some issues between him and his father. Those who have commented on this piece of writing have observed that the careful and large handwriting in which it is written, and the few corrections in it, point to an actual intention of sending it to his father. It is a manuscript dated 1919, of around 100 pages, from a time when the literary career of the author, who had never had any great success, had come to a halt. Impressively, his most renowned works, which became very famous after his death The Metamorphosis and The Trial had already been published. One of the major themes in Kafkas work, the authority of the father, is addressed by him in this document, which he wrote at 36 years of age. According to Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti (Bakes, 2004), specialists in Kafkas work, it is undoubtedly an autobiographical text. The Czech writer begins the Letter with an impressive statement of how much he is possessed by a fear of his father, to the extent of having a referential awe that goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning (p. 3). His declared motivation for writing such letter is an attempt to get closer to this fearful and amazing creature. Kafkas arguments come from a place beyond his memory or comprehension capacity. It is where he thinks and is not.2 The thread of desire sews the text, which glides in front of the readers eyes, into a patchwork made up of past, present, and future. Kafkas words move on the paper, giving color to a mixture of frustration and nostalgia. His words are an allusion to a feeling of inferiority and to an impacting barrier imposed by his father, which, according to this manuscript, almost aborts the movement of the main character toward what he would become. In the letter, Kafka appears sometimes as a passive sufferer and at other times as a spectator, or even betrays the fact of living in a torturing amalgam with his father. What comes to our attention is how prescient Kafkas observations on psychoanalytic discourse are when he refers to the authority of father figure. This was still at a time when psychoanalysis was dawning. His narrative presupposes the existence of a symbolic Father, who sustains the replacement of the thing for the word, and at the same time the presence of a real father, who refuses to leave the role of Father-God, an omnipotent father, similar to the

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An expression of Lacan to refer to the unconscious: where I think I do not exist, which lies in clear contrast to the Cartesian cogito I think, therefore I am.

On Franz Kafkas Letter to my father life, he takes part in it (Bakhtin, 2003). When the narrator takes on the ways of perceiving the values of others, he ends up putting on the mask of the character. In these biographic writings, the narrator begins to understand the history of his life through the emotive tone that colors the words of his loved ones, as they reveal his origin, his childhood, his family, and his social life. What gives the narrative artistic value is the triumph of the word as it transforms itself to express the world and the way the author relates to this world. Still using Bakhtins words, we allow ourselves to say that the artistic style does not work with words, but with elements in the world, with world and life values (Bakhtin, 2003, p. 180). About this, Benjamin says that all Kafkas books are narratives pregnant of a moral to which they never give birth (Kafka, 2004, p. 11). The act of reading As we go on to the reading of the text, we ask ourselves why the grievous complaint and the painful feelings of a profound intimacy do not cause repugnance, indifference, or an unbearable uneasiness in the reader. We add these probable obstacles to a reading, those of the narrator, who is intimidated or embarrassed by such exposure of his intimacy. We do not feel repelled, because, as Freud (1907/1908) states, what can cause repulsion is the barrier between the writers and the readers selves. The inventor of psychoanalysis points out that the joy in the act of reading can eliminate tension. Such tensions are caused by anxiety that is connected to the readers fantasies which are similar to the writers ones. Thus, the meeting between the narrator and the reader becomes more possible as the distance between them decreases. This movement is caused by the creative action of the writer influencing the poetic intimacy of the reader. With this drawing closer, a space is created between both, leading to a cohabitation of languages and thus establishing the conditions for experiencing the text. And how does this separation between writer and reader decrease, allowing the excellence of a text to be put to the test? Maybe through the pleasure created by a peculiar sense of humor, such as that of Kafka, who writes for his father and wishes to be read by him. It is interesting to remember here that, for the writer, this father is nothing but a direction of his associations guiding the pen that glides upon the paper (Dumayet, 2002; Jamek, 2002). The decrease in separation can also occur by giving the fabric of the text a soft texture that can mitigate

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the selfish nature of the writers daydreams in the eye of the reader. Thus, the former in a certain way seduces the latter in the presentation of his fantasies, rewarding him with an esthetic (or formal) pleasure. Therefore, we find a sense of humor and seduction among the maneuvers or artifices of the word used to narrow the gap between writer and reader. Barthes (1999) claims that, when it comes to the pleasure of the text, no thesis is possible, only an inspection that, just like the pleasure, ends quickly. He also states that the pleasure of the text is irreducible to its grammatical functioning, as the pleasure of the body is irreducible to its physiological necessity (1999, p. 25). The author also argues that literature tries to achieve the unachievable reality, making it seem that it is accomplished in a sensible manner (Barthes, 2004). Still according to Barthes, we can state that pleasure takes the place of a loss, expressed in the vertigo that takes over the subject at the heart of fruition. It is in the enunciation, not in the sequence of words enunciated, that the lack of jouissance of possession emerges. The pleasure of the text is in the fugacity of this moment pregnant with good judgment, of a wish of the impossible, an obstinacy of the text that takes over the narrator reader pairing (Barthes, 2004). The prize of fore-pleasure, as Freud (1907/ 1908) called it, is obtained by the artistic and esthetic value with which the author bribes us, but the major enjoyment comes from a liberation of tension and an implicit permission to enjoy our daydreams without guilt and shame. That is what leads us to turn the page in order to find again the satisfaction that is vanishing. The reader is seduced by Kafkas humor through anxiety. As the reader identifies with Kafkas struggles, there is an increase in tension but the tension decreases in the act of reading. We must add here that this effect would not be obtained from reading an ordinary letter, constituted by a list of complaints and demands, but only from a literary work, in which the satisfaction is the very effect of poetic art in action. References
Bakes, M. (2004). Prefa cio [Preface]. In Kafka, F. (Ed.), Carta ao Pai. Porto Alegre: L&PM. Bakhtin, M. (2003). Este tica da criac a o verbal [The esthetics of verbal creation]. Sa o Paulo: Martins Fontes. Barthes, R. (1999). O prazer do texto [The pleasure of text]. Sa o Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva. Barthes, R. (2004). Aula [Lecture]. Sa o Paulo: Ed. Cultrix. Dermayet, P. (2002). Porquoi il faut lire Kafka [Why one should read Kafka]. Magazinne litte raire, 409 416.

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J. D. Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Author Durval Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, MD, is a Jose psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is a full member of the Sociedade de Psicana lise Iracy (Iracy Doyle Society of Psychoanalysis), which is a Member Society of the IFPS.

Derrida, Jacques: A farma cia de Plata o o [Platos pharmacy]. Sa Paulo, Ed. Iluminuras, 1997. Freud, S. (1907/1909). Creative writers and day-dreaming. SE 141 154. Jamek, V. (2002). Les paradoxes de lhumour [The paradoxes of humur]. Magazinne litte raire, 415. Kafka, F. (2004). Carta ao Pai [Letter to his father]. Porto Alegre, L&PM.

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