DEAREST FATHER
On one level, Kafka has written the letter every parent fears. He recalls every unfairness, every heedless action; he broods on them, cherishes them, and finally builds them into a sort of horrific theology of the second fall of man. You were loud, he tells the old man. You were sarcastic. When we went swimming, you were broad and tall, and I “a little skeleton, unsteady, barefoot on the boards, frightened of the water, incapable of copying your swimming strokes.” You made rules about table manners and then broke them yourself. You made me fail.
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And the humor flattens the emotional range of the piece. Kafka’s terror about his father may have been an exaggeration, a metaphor, or even a hallucination, but it wasn’t a shtick. Novikoff’s reading occasionally lets us forget that. Near the end, for instance, after Kafka’s heartrending discussion of his inability to marry, there’s a moment when Kafka imagines his father answering the letter with an astonishing, excoriating attack: “I admit that we fight with each other, but there are two kinds of combat. The chivalrous combat, in which independent opponents pit their strength against each other, each on his own, each losing on his own, each winning on his own. And there is the combat of vermin, which not only sting but, on top of it, suck your blood in order to sustain their own life. . . .That’s what you are. You are unfit for life.” A moment later, Kafka is taking it all back, reminding his father, and the unacknowledged audience he seems certainly to have had in mind, that it was he, Franz, who made the attack. But unless we can hear the imagined violence of the father’s attack, and the son’s terror, we cannot experience the point.
