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In his Letter to My Father (1954) Franz Kafka draws his readers into a haunting inner landscape in which he exposes his tortured relationship with his father. Father is ever present. Kafka cannot study, marry, build a career, or claim his place within his family without suffering father's implacable presence. Only in the relative sanctuary of writing does Kafka occasionally find respite from feelings of impotence and states of self-negation. But even in his writing he suffers the self-contempt that is the legacy of his father's relentless and uncanny refusal to recognize his son.
Kafka wrote unceasingly, but his fevered outpourings remained, for the most part, unpublished during his lifetime. He characterized his work as the impotent spasms of a decapitated worm (1954). His letter, never sent and unread by his father, embodies that tone and atmosphere we term “Kafkaesque.” To read it is to feel fated, inexorably caught, emptied of will and agency, and irredeemably shamed. The reader, in identification with Kafka, longs for a liberation he knows will never come. What glimmers of determination and protest that survive this psychic evisceration are enacted as refusals, and unacknowledged vengeful projects. But when Kafka knowingly seeks to turn the tables on his father, he resorts to masochistic forms of assertion. How can he counter, let alone best, a presence that is ubiquitous, preternaturally assured, and morally superior? Along with Kafka, the reader succumbs to the crushing weight of futility. This experiential and literary world-the disembodied worm's head, the subhuman self of Gregor Samsa, the self-erasure of The Hunger Artist, the obscurely formulated punishment that one awaits throughout The Tial-constitutes Kafka's Letter to My Father.
Readers of Dan Shaw's masterful Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation may consider the tragic, heroic Kafka as the prototype for Shaw's study. The Kaf