style="font-size:15px;"> An army, which liberticide and preyMakes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,
Religion Christless, Godless—a book seal’d,
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
A conservative would reply, of course, that this phantom which may burst from a grave “to illumine our tempestuous day”, may turn out not to be so glorious at all, but rather a phantom of murderous revenge like Frankenstein’s monster. This brings us to Mary Shelley’s contradiction: the contradiction between “oppression and anarchy”, between the stifling and oppressive home and the murderous consequences of our attempts to break out of it. Unable to resolve this contradiction, and not willing to confront it directly, she could only tell it as a family myth.
The lesson of all these impasses is not that one should bypass the family myth and turn directly to social reality; what one should do is something much more difficult: to undermine the family myth from within. The key testimony of a struggle to achieve this goal is Kafka’s letter to his father.
A letter which did arrive at its destination
The 2001 Darwin Award for the most stupid act was posthumously conferred on an unfortunate woman from rural Romania who woke up during her funeral procession. Crawling out of her coffin and realizing what was going on, she ran away in blind terror, only to be hit by a truck on a busy road and instantly killed. So she was put back into the coffin and the funeral procession carried on . . . Is this not the ultimate example of what we call fate—of a letter arriving at its destination?
A letter can also reach its destination precisely insofar as its addressee refuses to receive it—as is the case towards the end of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s aforementioned neglected masterpiece, when the deceived lover Troilus rips up and throws away the letter from his Cressida in which she tries to explain her flirtation with Diomedes. We never learn what was in the letter, although the scene cannot but arouse our melodramatic expectations: will Cressida redeem herself, “explain it all”? The force of this expectation accounts for the fact that, throughout the eighteenth century, the version of the play usually performed was Dryden’s revision from 1679, in which Cressida is fully redeemed: we learn that she has plotted with her father an escape back to Troy and to Troilus, and that her seeming surrender to Diomedes was merely a ploy to enable that. So, what if Shakespeare wanted to make a point—and not just keep our curiosity in suspension—when he refuses to divulge its content? What if the letter was meant to be rejected? The scene to which this letter refers occurred earlier, when, after Cressida and Troilus spend their first (and only) night together, she was delivered by her own father to the Greeks, as part of a cold bargain, in exchange for a Trojan warrior captured by the Greeks. In the Greek camp, she was given as a booty to Diomedes; in his tent, she flirts with him, shamelessly offering herself under the gaze of Troilus, who has been brought to the tent by Ulysses. After Diomedes leaves the tent, she reflects aloud:
Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see. Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find: The error of our eye directs our mind. What error leads must err. O then conclude: Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude.
(V, 2)
The key question to be raised here is: what if Cressida had been all the time aware of being observed by Troilus, and just pretended to be thinking aloud alone? What if the entire seduction scene, her shameless attempt to arouse Diomedes’ desire, was staged for Troilus’s gaze? Let us not forget that Cressida announces her split nature already at the lovers’ first anxious meeting, when she ominously warns Troilus of how
I have a kind of self [that] resides with you—
But an unkind self, that itself will leave
To be another’s fool.
(III, 2)
thereby foreshadowing his bitter statement, after witnessing her flirting with Diomedes, that, in her, there is no “rule in unity itself.” This strange internal dislocation of hers is more complex than it may appear: part of her loves him, but this part is “unkind,” and, with the same necessity that it linked her to Troilus, will soon push her towards another man. The general lesson of this is that, in order to interpret a scene or an utterance, sometimes, the key thing to do is to locate its true addressee. In one of the best Perry Mason novels, the lawyer witnesses a police interrogation of a couple in the course of which the husband tells the policeman in unexpectedly great detail what happened, what he saw, and what he thinks happened—why this excess of information? The solution: this couple committed the murder, and since the husband knew that he and his wife would soon be arrested on suspicion of the murder and kept separated, he used this opportunity to tell his wife the (false) story they should both cling to—the true addressee of his endless talk was thus not the policeman, but his wife.16
And thus we come to Franz Kafka’s letter to his father, in which he articulated the crisis of paternal authority in all its ambiguity—no wonder that the first impression one gets in reading Kafka’s letter is that there is something missing in it, the final twist along the lines of the parable on the Door of the Law (“This door was here only for you . . .”): the father’s display of terror and rage is here only for you, you have invested in it, you are sustaining it . . . One can well imagine the real Hermann Kafka as a benevolent and nice gentleman, genuinely surprised at the role he played in his son’s imagination.17
To put it in Californian style, Kafka had a serious attitude problem with regard to his father. When Kafka identified himself as “Lowy,” assuming his mother’s name, he located himself in a series which comprises Adorno (who also shifted from father’s name, Wiesengrund, to his mother’s family name), not to mention Hitler (from Schickelgruber)—all uneasy with assuming the role of the bearer of the paternal name. This is why one of the points in the letter to his father is Kafka’s claim that it would have been possible for him to accept (the person of) his father, to establish a non-traumatic relationship with him, if he were his friend, brother, boss, even father-in-law, just not his father . . .
What bothers Kafka is the excessive presence of his father: he is too much alive, too obscenely intrusive. However, this father’s excessive presence is not a direct fact: it appears as such only against the background of the suspension of the father’s symbolic function. This father’s “too-muchness” (as Eric Santner would call it) is ultimately the too-muchness of life itself, the humiliating quality of the father’s excess of vitality which undermines his authority—let us note how Kafka’s notices his father’s
taste for indecent expressions, which you would produce in the loudest possible voice, laughing about them as though you had said something particularly good, while in point of fact it was only a banal little obscenity (at the same time this again was for me a humiliating manifestation of your vitality).
Again, one should bear in mind the proper order of causality: it is not that his father’s excessive vitality undermines his symbolic authority; it is, rather, the other way round, namely, the very fact that Kafka is bothered by his father’s excessive vitality already presupposes the failure of symbolic authority.
What is the true function of the Name-of-the-Father? It is, precisely, to allow the subject to “symbolically kill” the father,
