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I will be back with new essays on books on Wednesday, when I get home from my travels. I am also going to be reading in Delhi (on July 10) and Kolkata (July 17) next month.
Hence there were for me three worlds, one where I lived, a slave under laws that had been invented solely for me and, moreover, with which I could never fully comply (I did not know why), then another world, infinitely distant from mine, in which you dwelt, busy with ruling, issuing orders and being angry when they were not obeyed, and finally, a third realm where everybody else lived happily, free from orders and obligation. I was forever in disgrace, either I obeyed your orders, which was a disgrace for they applied, after all, only to me; or I was defiant, that was also a disgrace, for how dare I presume to defy you, or my reason for failing to obey was that I lacked, for example, your strength, your appetite, your aptitude, although you expected it of me as a matter of course; that was, in fact, the greatest disgrace of all.“I was no real match for you, you soon disposed of me; all that then remained was escape, bitterness, grief, inner struggle,” writes Kafka. The general tone of Dearest Father is one of a helpless flailing in the face of a remote and unshakable power that recalls the exact existential condition of the protagonists of Kafka’s novels, such as Josef K. in The Castle. Indeed, at one point Kafka confesses: “My writing was about you, all I did there was to lament what I could not lament on your shoulder.” But if we are left convinced about the atrocities half-consciously perpetrated by Hermann, we see no less clearly the extreme fragility and anxiety of Franz, a condition that turns all the colours of the world into grey. The letter becomes all the more tragic and moving for the few moments of happiness that it records:
Fortunately there were some exceptions to this, mostly when you suffered in silence, and your love and goodness joined forces to succeed in moving me, in spite of all the obstacles. This was admittedly rare, but it was wonderful. For instance whenever I saw you exhausted and nodding off in the shop on hot summer afternoons, elbows on the desk, or on Sundays when you came running to us breathless in the fresh summery weather; or once when Mother was seriously ill and I witnessed you shaking with tears, steadying yourself by the bookcase; or the last time I was ill and you came silently to me in Ottla's room, standing in the doorway and merely peering round to see me in bed, acknowledging me with a single considerate gesture of your hand. At times like this I lay back and cried with happiness, and I am crying again now as I write these lines.In closing, Kafka suggests to his father that although the problems between them are too many and too basic to be eradicated, his attempt to make a record of their relationship for their mutual perusal “might comfort us both a little and make it easier for us to live and to die.” So we naturally want to know how the letter was received by Hermann. But the most striking fact about the letter was that it was never sent. Perhaps the same fear and guilt exhibited by Kafka in the letter prevented him from delivering it to his father. He left the typewritten letter behind in a bundle of manuscripts at the time of his death, asking his friend Max Brod to burn them all. So it is the reader today who has become the letter’s real recipient, and it is upto us to imagine a rapprochement, and a new understanding between father and son that might have been but never was.