Thank God For Family Therapists.

There’s an expected set of feelings every son should hold to his father, should they be affection, love, gratitude for the upbringing, you name it, there are just some things that are supposed to exist in every father and son relationship or so it’s been said. There’s a common thought that being the father the one who, quite literally, gives life to his son, it should only be natural for the son to “pay” for such a gift by showing the mentioned feelings and this in fact happens to some extent. When comparing Paul Auster’s “The Invention of Solitude” and Franz Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” we notice that the things on which they match are the ones coming from said expected relationship, and so, it would be redundant and almost boring to talk about such similitude which would also surface if we compared any father-son relationship. What primarily defines the way the texts talk about parenthood and what it means both to the author and the readers comes from the difference they hold between each other. With this in mind, the coming text shall focus on the differences rather than on the similarities between the works.Now, as we go through the novel and the letter, we come to a very peculiar, yet clear idea. When we read one against the other, we see that even though both are in fact talking about the same topic: fatherhood, through Auster’s “Invention Of Solitude” and through Kafka’s “Letter to his father”, it’s clear how each one writes about his father in a very different way. Auster writes to maintain his father alive, through the use of memory, while Kafka writes to finally relief himself from his memories concerning his father, and thus be able to bridge the growing gap between them. This is the main difference between the texts; a difference deriving from intentionality.We can see this difference more clearly if we take some exceprts from the texts themselves. Auster clearly states the intention of his work. “When I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever” (Auster, 69) which literally means “I write to keep him alive”, I shall not keep silent, I cannot stop writing. Only when he’s ready to let him go he’ll be able to finish his writing. On the other hand, we have Kafka which in the first part of his letter mentions: “If I could get you to acknowledge this (None of them being guilty of their present state), then what would be possible is, (...) a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches”. Again, a clear statement of his intention. Both of the texts have a clear purpose, nevertheless, let’s go deeper.
The first part of each text defines how the author reacts toward his father, be it dead or alive. When it comes to Auster, the text starts with the death of his father, going further into how such a man came to be who he was and how he was involved in Auster’s life, he talks about his ancestors, about his father’s early life and finally his experience with him as a child. On the other hand, Kafka’s text starts with a series of apologies, for lack of a better term, in which he talks to his father and tells him how it wasn’t his fault (Making explicit reference to the way he grew up) and how the letter is only meant to mitigate the terrible inner quarrels Kafka had had with him. Kafka’s intentions to show his father what he thinks, yet trying to maintain the text at a respectful, even careful tone can be seen when he states “I too believe that you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless”. In a nutshell, while Auster’s text tries to bring back to life the memories which try to reanimate the way in which his father appeared in his life, Kafka’s text remembers different passages which serve to show his father how is it that he appeared in his life and which shall let him, on the long run, take out some of the pain from said memories.Deriving also from the previous argument, there’s a clear differentiation of the text’s intention shown just by the mere fact of looking at the addressee of the texts. Auster writes for his own sake, for himself. He writes in order to understand how his life changes with the death of his father; he writes to dig on his own mind for the most important facts about fatherhood, both his and his father’s. There’s a very nice example in Auster’s text which shows how the different aspects of parenthood collide. “Yesterday one of the neighbour children came here to play with Daniel. A girl of about three and a half who has recently learned that big people were once children, too, and that even her own mother and father have parents. At one point she picked up the telephone and launched into a pretend conversation, then turned to me and said ‘Paul, it’s you father. He wants to talk to you.’ It was gruesome” (Auster, 13).
The fact that Auster’s own parenthood, he taking care of his own child, collides with his memories of his father is the turning point in which we understand Auster simultaneously as a father and a son. If we look on the other hand, at the addressee of Kafka’s text, it’s easily shown that it is his father; after all, it is a letter. The fact that Kafka’s text is a letter to his father, shows how he’s not digging in his mind specifically for himself, but rather for his father. We must note that in the process of digging for his father he ends up digging for himself, even if the main objective is to talk or convey a message to his father through the letter. The search for memories takes a turn as the recipient of such memories is not Kafka himself, but rather his father, who’s got a different view on life, as we can infer by the way the letter is written, and by the countless description that we can read throughout the letter. Now that we’ve talked about the texts themselves and how each topic is shown through them, we can go ahead and turn to the authors. The impact of the text on each of the authors is vital in understanding how they differ. Kafka’s letter goes as far as to give evidence to his father of how he feels and of how he felt during his upbringing, but Auster’s text has a broader impact, as the fact that he’s talking about his father not only gives him ground to talk about him but also to talk about fatherhood as a whole, including his own, the way he found it in other personages, and the way he expected it to be from his father (Although the latter one can be seen by glimpses in Kafka’s letter).Auster’s text is much more complex in this sense and therefore we can see the different lenses through which he looks at the topic of fathers. First, about his fatherhood being the son, and how his father was so estrange that he later developed fatherly feelings towards other persons. “Many years later, at a time of great personal distress, he realized that what drew him continually to these meetings with S. was that they allowed him to experience for the first time, what it felt like to have a father.” S’s his friend in Paris, who he identifies as a fatherly figure. Mallarme’s son is another figure used to show parenthood regarding him as a father, how he sees his son, and further more, there are certain episodes in “The Book of Memory”, which clearly show him as a father. “Merely to have contemplated the possibility of the boy’s death, to have had the though of death thrown in his own face at the doctors office, was enough for him to treat the boy’s recovery as a sort of resurrection”. This quote shows Auster as a father, and as a caring one. On the whole, Auster’s and Kafka’s text have different scopes of fatherhood; Auster talks about it as a whole, starting from his father’s and growing into his, but Kafka stays in his father’s fatherhood, not going further than that.After the previous development, the most rational and simple conclusion would be to restate the fact that they are different and briefly summarize the aspects in which they differ. This is, after all, a comparative essay. However, it is not what I should do, as it’s more than clear than these texts are different and that the intentionality in these texts is what sets them apart, how each of the arguments exposed show the way in which each of the authors wanted to approach the element of fatherhood in their lives and there should be more to this than a simple restatement. So in the end, intentionality gives the texts their characteristic tone and themes, however, it’s mediocre to stay in such a shallow position having so much depth to explore.The first thing the previous conclusion sends us to is how the way in which the texts differ show us an example of the way in which one can cope with a problem through memory, being this extremely common. And why through memory? Because it is the main tool the authors use to talk about their fathers. Neither of the authors talk from the present about their fathers, and when they do (Auster primarily), it’s a brief showing of the way they’ve come to relate to them because of past events but not giving a real insight of it (Auster does talk about the events after his father’s death, yet he never talks how this influences his conception of fatherhood. He only shows how it was the trigger for his experiment). Authors mostly talk from their remembrances, from their memories. Auster having the intention of reviving his father, or rather keeping alive what’s left of him, and Kafka trying to show his father how he wronged him (Even if he’s too afraid, still, to say his father did wrong him in a proper way) show us the way in which memory can be used for different purposes, as it is a vault of innumerable scenes which gives us a way to analyse our relationship to someone or something, and how this relationship might have had an influence on us or on our then to-be future.Now, with this we can see how memory lets us give a wider scope to the problem we have if we take into account past experiences, so to say “We learn from our mistakes”, mistakes being engraved on our memory, memory letting us see a problem from different perspective than just the “now and here”. As Auster eloquently puts it: “Memory: The space in which a thing happens for the second time” (Auster, 87)Finally, we can see yet another nice piece of advice coming from the texts: Especially in the cases of Auster and Kafka, in which their parents were so distant and so hard to reach, writing can be especially useful as it’s a way in which they can state their position and “talk” to them or “reach” them, at least in a metaphorical sense. They can get to them and tell them what they want to, even if it is only within their own memory, even if one of the fathers was dead or the other never actually got to read the letter, it was a successful mission for the authors, they both succeeded at coming to terms with their fathers, at least in their minds. Memory by itself is not only what the texts use as a tool, but the fact that they are texts, that they are written word has a value all on its own. Written word lets someone organize thoughts and by reading them it’s even easier to understand them. Coping with a problem is shown to be much easier when one writes about it, hence the fact that both Kafka’s and Auster’s texts derive from problems: a death and a life-long familiar quarrel. Furthermore, not only the texts sprout from problems, but they seek a solution for them. We can even go ahead and say that even if we’ve previously shown that the texts are different regarding the intentionality, that the intentions are different, the intentions by themselves can be categorized in a same group: solutions. If there’s one similarity worth mentioning between the texts is that both of them seek solution to a problem, whichever this might be. The texts greet us with writing as a tool, enhanced by memory, to cope and try to resolve a problem; sliding through the comparison, and going into the real deal in the texts, what they imprint in the readers, this is one of the most important parts of the texts, the catharsis both Authors undergo within them.

Auster, P. (2010). The Invention Of Solitude. Faber and Faber, London. [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com