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
