Free Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi Page A

private language. Kafka told us often that he could not speak, for fear, presumably, that something might happen. Speaking and acting were the father’s realm, and he left them to the old man. There were only certain circumstances in which Kafka could produce words, and writing was something his father did not do. So writing was the single creativity and freedom Kafka allowed himself, though he was careful to ensure this creativity did not seep into his life or relationships. The question here has to be: what does writing do for the writer? What place does it have in his or her life?
    Despite the purported therapeutic benefits of some forms of writing, Kafka’s writing was not an attemptedcure. None of his characters can change or be redeemed; they’re tragic – their instincts will drive them inevitably to the zero point of death. Fate is a father, and he is inescapable. For Kafka, art became an important ‘instead of’, a substitute for speech and action. Transporting his inner world outside the magic circle of the family – and onto the page – writing both saved his life, and stopped him living. ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘A Hunger Artist’ show what you might become if you can’t be an artist. These are, if you like, alternative lives. Not that Kafka merely hid out scribbling in his burrow of words. While writing, he wasn’t afraid: at his desk he had few scruples about what he said, and his position was extreme and destructive. Kafka’s characters are not timorous, weak or indecisive. They are powerful beings, and the alterations they choose have a dramatic effect. Kafka’s work was a violent fantasised attack on himself and on the other, via his own body. He aestheticised his suffering, though even that wasn’t satisfying enough. In the end, he had to attack the body of his own writing, apparently asking Brod to burn his unpublished work.
    Writing could never be curative for Kafka; he was always as ill as he needed to be. Instead, writing was a fantasy of mastery, a kind of balancing act, keeping everything the same until he faded and died. Otherwise, life beyond Kafka’s desk would always and only ever remain an altruistic masochism. Sometimes such narrowingsare necessary. Kafka believed that it was in his words that he was at his best; writing was what he lived to do; he was ‘made of literature’ and he was omnipotent there, exerting control within the illusion of literature.
    Kafka wrote in his diary in 1921: ‘It’s astounding how I have systematically destroyed myself …’ Yet he and his readers were always aware of this Christ-like facade. His self-portrait as an insect, and the perverse insistence on innocence, ensured that his destructiveness was never a secret. Kafka repeatedly insisted on this self-cancelling and the shame it caused him. But he is never entirely convincing. He misled himself, as people do, for good reasons. There was more to his pose than he could know or own up to. He was always ‘devilish’, as he put it in the diary, ‘in his innocence’. Don’t the bug and the starving hunger artist attract much amazement and confused attention before they begin to bore their spectators? Don’t they at least have an audience? And, look here, the characters seem to be saying, look at what you made me do to myself!
    Not that the bug or the starving artist are all that Kafka is. While Kafka reminds us of important things – of the abuse of authority and the impossible stupidity of bureaucracy and of justice, of the ever-suffering body and the proximity of death, of how vile other people can seem – writers are bigger, more intelligent and almost always more creative than their characters. They have to be: the writer is the whole book and all the protagonists,not just a part of it. From his or her place at the centre of the scene, the writer sees behind the story, and ahead of it. In