My father is too powerful for me

One

"You recently asked me why I am afraid of you. As always, I am speechless, both because I am afraid of you and because to articulate this fear would require a detailed count of so many trivialities that I simply could not say them all at once." In November 1919, at the age of 36, Kafka wrote a lengthy letter - "To My Father" - to his father, Hermann Kafka, who was then 67 years old. The letter was more than 100 pages long and dissected in detail the painful and strained relationship between their father and son. He entrusted his mother to deliver the letter to his father, but his mother read the letter and sent it back.

It is probably a good thing for Kafka that Hermann did not read the letter because Hermann could not have accepted this analysis of their father-son relationship by Kafka. Had he read the letter, another confrontation between father and son would have been inevitable. Indeed, Kafka anticipates his father's reaction, and at the end of his letter he writes, in his father's voice, his father's reply after reading the letter: "I admit that we both struggle with each other, but there are two kinds of struggle. One is the knight's struggle, where the two independent sides fight each other, each giving up, losing openly, and winning justly. The other is the fight of the beetle, which not only stings but also sucks blood to sustain life. This is a real professional fighter, and you are such a fighter. You could not live, and to live comfortably and carefree and without having to blame yourself, you decided that I had taken all your ability to live and put it in my pocket."

The conflict between father and son revealed in the letter is sharp and obvious, but as Kafka's close friend Max Brod knew, in real life, they did not get along so well as father and son. For Kafka, however, the very presence of his father was enough to terrify him.

II

At the time of Kafka's birth, Hermann, 31, was just on the upswing of his career. He had successfully expanded the men's clothing supply grocery store he had opened when he married and started a wholesale textile business, and he had the next step in his business plan, too driven to care about anything else. As the first child in his family, Kafka had little opportunity to see his father-child and spent very little time with his mother - who needed to help out in the store with the business. He was raised by a maid, and when he was older, his father hired a governess to pick him up from school and tutor him in his studies.

Objectively speaking, the material conditions of Kafka's childhood were not unlike those of a middle-class Jewish family of the time, but the happiness Kafka derived from his family was minimal. Most of the time, Kafka was in the shadow of his father Hermann's strong personality. "As a father, you were too strong for me."

"I am thin, frail, and narrow-shouldered; you are strong, tall, and broad-shouldered." At home, the father has absolute authority, "You have the right opinion; any other opinion is absurd, bigoted, insane, and abnormal. You are so confident that you don't have to be consistent at all; you always have a point. Sometimes you have no opinion about something, therefore, any opinion I have about it must be wrong. In my eyes, you have the mysterious inexplicability that all tyrants have, and they are right by their presence, not by thinking."

One night, when Kafka was very young, his crying and fussing for a drink of water surprisingly annoyed his father. He was dragged out of his bed and carried to the balcony, where he stood facing the closed door. "The act of asking for a drink of water, though meaningless, seemed to me to be a matter of course, but the result was to be carried out. I was horrified, and by my nature, I could never figure out the connection between the two. For years after that, this imagination tormented me, and I always felt that this giant, my father, the ultimate court, would come along for no reason, pull me out of my bed in the middle of the night and carry me out onto the balcony, and I would be so small in front of him."

It probably never occurred to Hermann how much damage he had done to Kafka by this act. By general standards, Hermann wasn't that bad as a father. He worked hard, provided good material living conditions for his children, and spared no effort in Kafka's upbringing. He provided for Kafka until he graduated with his doctorate, and Kafka, even after working, continued to live with his parents and occasionally needed them financially. Hermann's initial intention in yelling and throwing tantrums at his son was to raise him to be a strong, brave boy, a style of education that existed in most families at the time, and few people realized its irrationality and the harm it could cause to their children.

But Herman overlooked what was special about Kafka. Kafka was so sensitive, so lonely, so obsessed with minutiae, and so careful, that he was always inexplicably afraid when confronted by his father. He said, "I am made of fear. It's probably the best thing in me." Hermann's angry "I'll tear you apart like a fish" was enough to shatter Kafka's entire childhood. "Although I know that this is just talk (I didn't understand this as a child), it almost fits my imagination of your power. In my imagination, that's what you can do." And when Hermann drew his belt to make it look like he was going to hit Kafka, which he didn't, Kafka felt a greater fear than death: "I was like a man about to be hanged. If one were really to be hanged, one would be fine once one died. Whereas a man who had to see with his own eyes all the preparations for being hanged, and did not learn of his rescue until the noose was already hanging around his neck, he might suffer for the rest of his life for it."

III

Kafka's strained relationship with his father is heavily projected in his writing.

Many critics look at Kafka's short masterpiece "The Verdict" as the beginning of his work around the relationship between father and son. The novel's protagonist, Georg Bendemann, intends to write to a friend in Russia to tell him that he is engaged to a wealthy young lady. But when he reports the letter revealing the engagement to his father, it triggers his father's suspicion. His father's anger seems to be sudden, but it has been deliberate for a long time - Georgi's attempt to take over his father's business on his own has been known to him for a long time, as he does not want to live in his father's shadow all the time. "To deal with you, the last bit of my strength will be enough, and more than enough." Suddenly, the frail father stood straight up on the bed and announced, "You were an innocent child, but you are a devil! --so listen, I sentence you to drown right now!" Immediately afterward, Georg "jumped out of the door, crossed the driveway and ran into the river".

Georg gladly accepted his father's sentence and went to die, obviously, the father here no longer refers only to the father by blood, but also includes the patriarchal power, social power hierarchy, and other symbols of secular authority. Georg wants to break free from his father's control and gain independence, which means that he wants to break free from all shackles and gain freedom. From the symbolic point of view, Georg's "running to the river" foreshadows his failure to fight for independence and freedom.

Kafka wanted the publisher to combine "The Stoker", "The Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment" into one book and publish it under the title of "The Sons". He believed that they were "identical in appearance and substance, and that there was an obvious, or more to the point, secret connection between them", and that only the word "sons" could accurately "express this connection". Only the word "sons" can accurately "express this connection". In his view, whether it is Georg the businessman, Karl Rothman the wanderer, or Gregor Samsa the traveling salesman, they are all "sons" by nature of their existence. Their fates were controlled by their fathers, and all efforts to break free would be in vain.

Benjamin says: "To Kafka, the world of the office is the same as the world of the father." In his later novels, such as The Lawsuit, In Exile, and When the Great Wall was Built, the father figure becomes increasingly obscure, but there is always a powerful force that fundamentally shapes the fate of the novel's protagonists, a collection of patriarchal power, bureaucracy, the ruling class, and social conventions. But in the long novel "The Castle," written in 1922, Kafka creates the protagonist K, who has no name of his own, no place to come from or go to, and who has absolute freedom, but this terrifies K: "There is nothing more boring and disappointing than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolable privilege. "

Kafka's pessimism is deep in the marrow of his characters' efforts to break free from the secular authority represented by his father, which is completely denied by the appearance of K. K wants to break free after gaining absolute freedom. Because what K wants to fight for after gaining absolute freedom is precisely the approval of secular authority, which is a deadly circle that never has a way out.

IV

For Kafka, writing was one of the ways to escape from his father. Similarly, marriage was also seen as a way to gain independence from his father.

In "To My Father," he writes: "If I had a family - and having a family seems to me to be the limit of what one can achieve, which is what you have achieved - then I would be your equal, and all the shame and violence, both past and violence, whether past or emerging, becomes history." But then he denies the possibility of independence through marriage. "It's like a fairy tale, but that's the problem. This fairy tale is so beautiful that it's impossible to be so beautiful." He was afraid of becoming a husband, of becoming a father; he was afraid of becoming a second Hermann.

Kafka never married for life, but he was twice engaged and twice unengaged to Phyllis. The short story "The Verdict" is dedicated to "Miss Phyllis B." He once told Phyllis: "My life is made up of attempts to write, which are mostly failed attempts. And when I don't write, I am immediately knocked to the ground like a pile of garbage. ...... Now, the thought of you enriches my life. There is hardly a moment when I am awake that I am not thinking of you, and for many such moments I can do nothing else." Phyllis and Kafka dated for five years, during which time Kafka wrote her more than 500 letters, which reveal no less intense feelings, but every time marriage was mentioned, Kafka began to back off. "I was mentally incapable of getting married. This manifested itself in the fact that from the moment I decided to get married, I could no longer sleep, my head burned day and night, I could no longer live my life, and I wandered around in despair." "Cowardice, lack of self-confidence, they built a cordon between me and marriage."

Milena began dating Kafka when she was 24, and unlike Phyllis, she was well aware of Kafka's yearnings and fears about marriage. Milena, who was also a writer and an excellent translator of Kafka's novels written in German into Czech, understood him, admired him, and loved him, but never wanted to marry him. "Life was completely different for Kafka than it is for other ordinary people. His books are surprising, and he is even more surprising."

The only time in Kafka's life that he actively wanted to get married was after he met Dora. At that time Kafka was 40 and Dora was 19, but their intention to marry was strongly opposed by Dora's father.

However, the absence of a marriage certificate did not cool their relationship, and on September 23, 1923, Kafka went to live with Dora in Berlin. There he had the happiest and most enjoyable time of his life. Brod described it as "an idyll": "I finally saw my friend in good spirits; his health had become worse (Kafka was suffering from lung disease at the time), which was true, but not dangerous at the time. Franz said the demons had finally let him go. 'I slipped away from them. It was great to move to Berlin, and now they're looking for me and they can't find me, at least not yet.' He finally realized his dream of living an independent life and having a home of his own." However, the happiness did not last long, and on March 17, 1924, due to his deteriorating condition, Kafka returned to Prague. three weeks later, Kafka went to the Vienna Forest Sanatorium to convalesce, followed by Dora, who cared for him until his death on June 3, 1924.

The day after Kafka's death, Milena published a short farewell in the Nation: "Dr. Franz Kafka, a German-speaking writer who lived in Prague ...... produced the most meaningful work in modern German-language literature; the kind of harsh truth that, even with the symbolism employed, also look like naturalism. They reflect the mocking, prophetic landscape of the mind of a man condemned to look with dazzling clarity at a world he finds intolerable, and to die."