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Swift and Kafka
Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2004 by Meyers, Jeffrey
When Gulliver, "a Lump of Deformity... smitten with Pride" (242), finally returns to his family in England, he longs for the Houyhnhnm smell of horses, stables, and manure. He says the sight of his wife and children "filled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt" (239). Kafka takes up the theme of domestic revulsion at the end of "The Metamorphosis" when, despite Gregor's "present unfortunate and repulsive shape . . . family duty required the suppression of disgust" (65). Kafka's well spoken ape, reporting to the Academy, is torn like Gulliver between human and animal existence, and feels similarly conflicted at the end of the story: "When I come home late at night. . . there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take [sexual] comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her" (180).
In a letter to his younger sister ElIi Hermann about the destructive connection of parents and children, Kafka naively equated Swift's views with Gulliver's and quoted a long passage from chapter 6 of Gulliver's Travels. Ostensibly advising her about how to bring up her ten-year-old son, he actually analyzed the troubled relations with his own father-whose first name was also Hermann. Invoking Swift as his "great witness" and mistakenly claiming that the celibate Dean was "the father of a family," Kafka agreed with the Lilliputians, who " 'will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him or to his mother for bringing him into the world, which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself or intended so by his parents' " (293). Swift obviously means, Kafka explained, "that if a child is to become a person, he must be removed as soon as possible from the brutishness, for so he expresses it, the mere animal conjunction from which he has his being" (293).
Kafka's obsessive theme-in "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," and Letter to His Father-is that parents do terrible damage to their children and create in them a lifelong enmity. Still using Swift as a stick to beat his father, Kafka-in a Rousseauistic vein-argued for the child's right to escape from his powerful parents and develop in his own individual way: "Swift's main point is ... 'Parents are the last of all others to be entrusted with the education of their children.'" Swift thinks that "education within the family is a kind of intellectual incest. . . . Real education is the quiet, unselfish, loving development of potentialities of a growing human being or merely the calm toleration of a child's independent development" (294). Kafka attacks "the monstrous superiority in power of the parents vis-avis the children for so many years, [which] deprives the children ... clutched in the tight embrace of the parents ... of their right to personality. . . . The selfishness of parents-the authentic parental emotion-knows no bounds" (295). As Kafka writes in "Josephine the Singer," "children should be granted a special freedom, a special protection, their right to be a little carefree, to have a little senseless giddiness" (316).
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