Free Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi

mutability of the self, and what a powerful tool sickness is, one which is rarely used just by the merely incapacitated. Nietzsche calls man ‘the sick’ animal, and for him the sick, particularly the ‘purposefully’or unconsciously sick, are a hazard, absolutely lethal in their sadistic power. After all, in time the West would become pathologised in its emotional tenor, and almost everyone at one point or another would claim to be a victim of their history, a subject of trauma, and helpless in the grasp of the past. There would be a veritable proliferation or plague of diagnoses from numerous ‘experts’ – counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists – many directed at children. Illness, equated with innocence, would be everywhere, until the world resembled a hospital.
    At the conclusion of ‘The Metamorphosis’, when Gregor is dead and his corpse swept away by a servant, the family seem liberated and revived. They leave the apartment at last, and indeed the town. Kafka, not normally associated with happy, healthy endings, writes ecstatically, ‘The tram, in which they were the only passengers, was filled with warm sunshine. Leaning comfortably back in their seats they canvassed their prospects for the future, and it appeared on closer inspection that these were not at all bad.’
    In Kafka’s 1914 story ‘In the Penal Colony’, a condemned prisoner’s body is literally written on with a poisoned dagger-like pen, over twelve hours, until he dies, thus bringing together in one tale Kafka’s favourite themes. As we know, outside of writing, Kafka’s preferred site of activity was the body, about which he obsessed. But if Kafka preferred somatic solutions topolitical ones, we must not forget that something else was going on – something important. It was the beetle, the sick son himself, who was both recording this and inventing the story as a consolidated picture of what went on. Who, after all, could tell this family’s story? Who had the right? And from which point of view? No one authorises a writer to be a writer. Certificates of excellence cannot be handed out here. He or she has to be their own authority and guarantor. With Kafka, the ‘weakest’ member of the family kept the ledger, and his imposed vision prevailed. He had the talent to demand complicity from the reader.
    And there, in his writing, Kafka hid himself, while displaying himself for literary eternity. He spoke from where he hid. No one was going to get much love or even a glass of water, but they might get an amusing if not grim story, at least the ones which survived the destruction he appears to have half-heartedly requested. And Kafka kept on writing, until the end. This persistence showed the necessity of writing, and that some stories could seem like a cockroach in the room, reminding us of that which we prefer not to consider part of us. The intrinsic anarchy of real writing could become an attack, too, on total systems of thought, like Marxism or Nazism, or religion: always outside, the hysterics, masochists, bugs and self-starvers, despite their wish to be nothing, just would not fit into any comfortable place,always making people work to think about what they might signify.
    It is a contemporary nostrum that writing might organise and advance people’s ideas, making for some clarity. Writing can function as a kind of therapy by exposing the unconscious. Write as it comes and you might get a glimpse of how you feel and who you really are. Writing, too, might also be some sort of appeal to the other, a letter pretending to be a novel. It might represent the hope of change, of engagement, of a future. If we are made of words, we can be undone by them; but we can also undo them.
    â€˜I am incapable of speaking,’ Kafka announced in his diary and, of course, the insect in ‘The Metamorphosis’ is incomprehensible to his family, communicating only in a