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, to be able to abandon his father (and the closed family circle) and freely set out on his own path in the world. No wonder, then, that Kafka’s reluctance to assume the Name-of-the-Father is the very indication of his failure to break away from his father: what the letter to Kafka’s father bears witness to is a subject who was doomed to remain forever in the paternal shadow, caught up with him in a libidinal deadlock. Far from enabling him to elude his father’s grasp, Kafka’s refusal to accept the father’s name is the surest sign of this imprisonment.
Not in any sense a passive victim of his father’s terror, Kafka was directing the game (recall from the long debate between the man from the countryside and the Priest, which follows the parable about the Door of the Law in Kafka’s The Trial, the Priest’s claim that the man from the countryside was in the superior position and that the guardian of the door was really subordinated to him). The proof? If there ever was a screen memory, it is the accident from when he was two months old that Kafka claims as the only thing from his childhood of which he has a “direct memory” (and appeals to his father that he should also remember it). It was (re)constructed afterwards, probably from what the parents told Franz about it—but covering what, we may ask? Like the primal scene of the Wolfman, it is a retroactive fantasy:
There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You may remember it, too. One night I kept on whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche [the Czech word for the long balcony in the inner courtyard of old houses in Prague], and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. I am not going to say that this was wrong—perhaps there was really no other way of getting peace and quiet that night—but I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and then the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.
The gurgling signifying chain of the child intended to provoke the father is like the obscene soft sounds on the phone line from the Castle, or the US marines’ marching chants . . . There is thus a hidden link between the “subversive” pre-symbolic babble of the child and the inaccessible Power that terrorizes the Kafkean hero, between superego and id.
The true underlying reproach to the father is not his power and arrogant display of authority, but, on the contrary, his impotence, his lack of symbolic authority. Are the father’s terrifying outbursts of rage (Wuten) not so many signs of his basic impotence, signals that his cold and efficient authority has failed? The father himself accounted for his “imperious temperament” as “due to [his] nervous heart condition”—not exactly a sign of power, but, as is clear to Kafka himself, a method of cheap manipulation worthy of a weakling: “the nervous heart condition is a means by which you exert your domination more strongly, since the thought of it necessarily chokes off the least opposition from others.” Here is another of the father’s ritualistic displays of power: “It was also terrible when you ran around the table, shouting, grabbing at one, obviously not really trying to grab, yet pretending to . . .”—a ridiculous, self-undermining, display of power. Furthermore, what kind of a father feels so threatened by his two-month-old son that he has to undertake the absurdly excessive measure of taking him out of the apartment? A truly authoritative figure would deal with the problem with a cold stare . . . (And, incidentally, in the standard patriarchal family which the Kafka family certainly was, is the first sign of the lack of authority not already the fact that it was the father, not the mother, who came to respond to the child?) It is no less clear that the description of the father’s “intellectual domination” is sustained by a barely concealed fear that this obvious fraud, this semblance of authority, will burst like a balloon, laying bare father’s stupidity . . .
From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. It did sometimes happen that you had no opinions whatsoever about a matter and as a result every conceivable opinion with respect to the matter was necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason.
No wonder Kafka’s “exclusive sense of guilt” has been replaced by “insight into our helplessness, yours and mine.”
We have thus to be very precise when we are dealing with the topic of paternal authority: authority is not to be confused with an overbearing, violently intrusive presence. That is to say, one way to read Kafka’s bewilderment with regard to his father is to decipher it as the experience of the gap, the contrast, between the ridiculous, pretentious, and impotent figure that is the reality of his father and the immense power he nonetheless exerts: “How can such a pathetic figure nonetheless exert such power?” The answer would then be the socio-symbolic network that invests an empirical person with power, and the gap would be that of symbolic castration. From the traditional rituals of investiture, we know the objects which not only “symbolize” power, but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effectively exercising power—if a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown, his words will be taken as the words of a king. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them in order to exert power. As such, they “castrate” me: they introduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (that is, I am never fully at the level of my function). This, however, is not the way Kafka experiences his father; the problem for Kafka is rather that his father’s bodily presence disturbs the efficacy of the paternal symbolic function. In other words, his father’s excessive, almost spectral, towering presence whose impact exceeds the immediate reality of his person is not the excess of the symbolic authority over immediate reality; it is the excess of the fantasmatic obscenity of the Real. In Freudian terms, the problem with Kafka’s father is that, in Franz’s eyes, he has “regressed” from the agency of symbolic Law to the “primordial father [Ur-Vater].”
There are two modes of the Master, the public symbolic Master and the secret Evil Magician who effectively pulls the strings and does his work during the night. When the