Swift and Kafka

Meyers, Jeffrey

Kafka recognized many of his own perverse ideas in Gulliver's Travels, which he first read in 1921 (three years before his death), before writing his late animal tales. 1 He identified with Gulliver and found in Swift not an influence but a literary soul mate who seemed to see the world as he did. In Swift's Gulliver's Travels man discovers his animal nature; in Kafka's stories the animals-gigantic beetle in "The Metamorphosis," ape in "A Report to an Academy," dog in "Investigations of a Dog," mole in "The Burrow," and mouse in "Josephine the Singer"-think, speak, and act like men, and provide a satiric commentary on human society. Metamorphosis is a dominant theme in Gulliver's Travels as in Kafka's most famous story. Though Gulliver stays the same size, he's incongruous and disproportionate-too gigantic or too minuscule-in relation to the people he visits on his weird voyages. He's a Brobdingnagian in Lilliput and a Lilliputian in Brobdingnag. Kafka's Gregor Samsa, though small for a human being, is big for a bug. In their grotesquely surrealistic Yahoos and beetles, Swift and Kafka reveal their pathological obsessions. Swift's Gulliver and Kafka's anti-heroes are perpetually despised and frequently humiliated outsiders, constantly terrified and profoundly alienated. Frequently enclosed in small cages, they find ingenious ways to escape. Gulliver-like Kafka's hunger artist, ape, and mouse-singer-is forced into degrading public performances. Though Swift is tougher and angrier, Kafka more self-pitying, both convey their tragic sense of life in a chaste prose style, leavened with ironic wit and black humor.

Both Swift and Kafka were disgusted by the human body. The giants in Brobdingnag, their physical defects magnified, force Gulliver to recognize the horrific aspect of human skin. Close up, the women are monstrous: the color of the nurse's nipple and breast "was so varified with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous" (66). When the maids of honor lay him in their bosoms, he "was much disgusted; because to say the Truth, a very offensive Smell came from their Skins" (88). The Yahoo prostitutes-hairy, disgusting and abominable-are infected with syphilis. They have "acquired a certain Malady, which bred Rottenness in the Bones of those, who fall into their Embraces" (206). Writing to his friend Max Brod in 1922 in a rather contorted memento mon passage, Kafka cited Swift's emphasis on the horrors of human flesh to stress the brevity of human existence: "How short human life must be if flesh one hardly dares to touch because of its perishability, because its shapely con tours last only a moment (which contours, as Gulliver discovered-but most of the time I cannot believe it-are disfigured by sweat, fat, pores, and hairs)-how short human life must be, if such flesh will last out a good portion of that life" (351). While witnessing a dispute at a country inn between his sister Ottla and an imperious landlady, Kafka again invoked Swift, reduced himself to Lilliputian insignificance and told Brod, "I stood there like Gulliver listening to the giant women conversing" (358).

When the shipwrecked Gulliver awakes in Lilliput, he finds himself helplessly tied down and shot with a shower of arrows thatleave him "groaningwith Grief and Pain" (6). Gregor Samsa, also attempting to regain his mobility and freedom, "had only the numerous little legs which he never stopped waving in all directions and which he could not control in the least" (24). He also feels a stinging pain in the lower part of his body. In Brobdingnag, the tiny Gulliver is in constant danger of physical injury and fears, for example, that a huge reaper "would dash me against the Ground as we usually do any little hateful Animal which we have a Mind to destroy" (63). When Gregor's father lifts his foot uncommonly high, Gregor, staring up from the ground, is frightened and "dumbfounded at the enormous size of his shoe soles" (63).

Swift constantly degrades his hero to the level of a "diminutive, contemptible, and helpless Animal" (105). When Gulliver describes the European engines of war, the King of Brobdingnag "was amazed how so impotent and groveling an Insect as I ... could entertain such inhuman Ideas" (103). After his laudatory and self-satisfied account of the English, the king crushingly condemns them as "the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth" (101). In Brobdingnag a monkey mistakes Gulliver "for a young one of his own Species" (92). Worse befalls him in the country of the Houyhnhnms, the rational horses, where he's distressed to see in the repulsive, ape-like Yahoos "a perfect human Figure" (186). Since the Yahoos are sexually attracted to Gulliver arid embrace him in the most humiliating manner, he is forced to admit "that I was a real Yahoo, in every Limb and Feature, since the Females had a natural Propensity to me as one of their own Species" (218).

Like Kafka's ape-actor, mouse-singer, and hunger artist (starving himself to death before an indifferent public), Gulliver is sometimes confined in a small cage and forced to perform in public. In Lilliput "the Box was close on every Side, with a little Door for me to go in and out, and a few Gimlet holes to let in Air" (71). Like the courtiers who must attempt a tightrope dance and suffer serious falls in order to gain high office, Gulliver also shows off in public and makes a fool of himself. In Brobdingnag "there was a Cow-dung in the Path, and I must needs try my Activity by attempting a leap over it. I took a Run, but unfortunatelyjumped short, and found my self just in the Middle up to my Knees" (93). Kafka, who felt perpetually humiliated by every aspect of ordinary life, once questioned his oppressive father about sex and was advised to go to a prostitute. In his Letter to His Father he bitterly complained: "There was hardly any smudge of earthly filth on you at all. And it was you who pushed me down into this filth" (105). A robust comic episode in Swift was for Kafka a perfect analogue for the more sordid aspects of life. Everything seemed to push him into unclean humiliation.

Gulliver's greatest performances take place in Lilliput when he reveals his outsized sexual organ. He first astonishes the natives when obliged to expose himself in order to make water. When the tiny soldiers march under his legs and look up through his torn breeches, they are "afforded some Opportunities for Laughter and Admiration" (23). Kafka, a Lilliputian in relation to his Brobdingnagian father, recalls being intimidated by his father's large member: "I was, after all, weighed down by your mere physical presence. I remember, for instance, how we often undressed in the same bathing hut. There was I, skinny, weakly, slight; you strong, tall, broad" (19).

In Lilliput, Gulliver's fear-irrational, all-pervasive, and menacing-is psychologically oppressive. He's unjustly accused by jealous ministers of high treason and threatened with an array of horrible punishments: being burnt alive, shot with poisoned arrows, subject to the utmost torture, having his eyes put out and flesh torn from his bones (as in Kafka's Penal Colony). Kafka's characters are constantly terrified-though even paranoids have real enemies. The mouse-narrator of the story says that Josephine's "thin piping voice amidst grave decisions is almost like our people's precarious existence amidst the tumult of a hostile world" (315). The mole in "The Burrow," despite all his escape routes, confesses that "I can scarcely pass an hour in complete tranquillity; at that one point in the dark moss I am vulnerable, and in my dreams I often see a greedy muzzle sniffing round it persistently . . . [and fear I'll] suddenly feel the teeth of the pursuer in my flank while I am desperately burrowing away" (357). Like Gulliver, Joseph K. in the The Trialis accused of crimes he did not commit (but still feels guilty about these unnamed offenses).

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).

Kafka's accusatory yet ironically deferential Letter to His Father considers a Swiftian theme: the "monstrous superiority" of brutish Brobdingnagian parents whose gross sexual coupling produces powerless Lilliputian children. (Kafka found the very idea of his parents' sexuality so revolting that he felt like vomiting when the maid turned down his parents' bedcovers.) Kafka begins by frankly telling his father, "I am afraid of you" (7), and then explaining what produced this fear. Hermann, unfortunately, is the exact opposite of little Franz, who seems to shrink as his father expands: "as a father you have been too strong for me" (11). He is "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind" (13). Oppressed by the force of his father's personality, Franz feels "you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me" (13).

The key episode in Kafka's childhood, narrated in Letter to His Father, occurred when he was quite small. When he persisted in whimpering for water at night, his father got angry, carried him outside, and left him alone on the balcony. Franz's "performance" led, once again, to "imprisonment." In Kafka's view, his father had ignored his cry for attention and love and reduced him to bug-like insignificance: "Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come for almost no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that meant I was a mere nothing for him" (17). Kafka never dared to send this cathartic Letter. He died before his father, and the Letter was, not published until long after his father's death.

Kafka's fictional relations with his father moved from estrangement to annihilation. The startling first sentence of "The Metamorphosis" contains the dramatic climax of the story: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" (19). His nightmare signals his revolting transformation, the passive voice ("found himself) suggests his helpless victimization and the usually secure bed becomes (as in the Penal Colony) the site of his torments. When his father first sees Gregor as a beetle, he "knotted his fist with a fierce expression on his face as if he meant to knock Gregor back into the room [he later does precisely this], then looked uncertainly round the living room, covered his eyes with his hands and wept till his great chest heaved" (35).

At the end of the story, his father bombards him with apples-which "nail him to the spot," cause a suppurating wound, and lead directly to his death-while his mother vainly begs for her son's life. In life, Kafka described the voracious Hermann eating "everything fast, hot, and in big mouthfuls" (27), while he himself-sickly and puny, tubercular and almost anorexicslowly wasted away. In "The Metamorphosis," the lodgers stuff themselves with food while Gregor literally dies of starvation. After his death-when he's finally called "he" instead of "it"-the charwoman remarks, "Just see how thin he was. It's such a long time since he's eaten anything. The food came out again [as vomit] just as it went in" (84). Unable to fulfill his father's expectations, Kafka felt permanent guilt. He would have agreed with Sartre, who wrote, "Parents lodge like a knife in the skulls of their children, whose thoughts they cut in two" (viii).

Swift's excremental vision (to use Norman O. Brown's phrase) of man as Yahoo matched Kafka's sickening self-loathing. Cutting across two centuries, two languages, and two cultures, Kafka found in Swift (a posthumous child who never knew his father) the quintessential characteristics we now recognize as Kafkaesque. Swift's Gulliver traveled the world to find his agonizing experiences; Kafka's heroes turned inward, tormented by their fathers and themselves.

1 In "Franz Kafka andjonathan Swift: A Symbiosis" (DalhousieReview45 [1965]: 60-65), Peter Neumeyer discussed Kafka's references to Swift in his Letters, but did not relate them to Kafka's stories or Letter to His Father. In "A Splacknuck and a Dung-Beetle: Realism and Probability in Swift and Kafka" (College English 31 [1969] : 376-391), Elizabeth MacAndrew described the vise of realistic techniques in Gulliver's Travels and "The Metamorphosis," but did not quote Kafka on Swift or refer to Neumeyer's article.

WORKS CITED

Kafka, Franz. Letter to His Father. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. 1919; New York: Schocken, 1966.

____. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. 1958; New York: Schocken, 1977.

____. Selected Short Stones. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Intro. by Philip Rahv. New York: Modern Library, 1952.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Simone de Beauvoir. Trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee. 1983; New York: Scribner's, 1992.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Ed. with an intro. by Ricardo Quintana. New York: Modem Library, 1958.

JEFFREY MEYERS, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently published biographies of Orwell and Maugham. He has just completed Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassait, and is now writing a life of Modigliani.

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