Stigmata: Writing from Persecution in
Hoccleve, Kafka and Porpentine
Jack Caulfield
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 3
Writing from Persecution: Complaint and Refusal 5
Autobiography and the Problem of Reliability 11
Shame and Shaming 13
Hoccleve, Kafka and Porpentine 15
Chapter One: Hoccleve’s ‘Complaint’ 20
Complaint and Shame in the Medieval Context 22
‘In euery mannes mouþe’: Unbearable Visibility 24
‘“Men in her owne cas bene blinde al day”’: The Appeal to Human Fallibility 28
Concluding Remarks 31
Chapter Two: Kafka’s ‘Letter to My Father’ 33
‘Why I claim to be afraid of you’: Emotion and Inhibition 34 ‘Responsible, but blameless’: Innocence and Helplessness 38 ‘The mistrust you have taught me’: Ventriloquising the Father 41
Concluding Remarks 44
Chapter Three: Porpentine’s ‘Hot Allostatic Load’ 46
‘Laundered pain’: Disposability and Persecution 47
‘An effigy burnt in digital’: The Problem of Complaint 51 ‘Build with the body’: Refusing the Persecutors’ Language 53
Concluding Remarks 59
Conclusion 61
INTRODUCTION
Social exclusion and arbitrary persecution are experiences which lend themselves to representation in writing, while at the same time presenting unique challenges for literary depiction. On the one hand, the arbitrary, the sense of the unjust or inexplicable, has been a powerful theme in world literature since the Book of Job. The incomprehensible, that which is in some sense greater than our comprehension, defines the Romantic notion of the
Sublime.1 On the other hand, already implicit in the notion of the Sublime is a sense that what
is frighteningly incomprehensible is, on some cosmic level, justified. There is an equally powerful tendency in literature towards amor fati or justification of one’s place in the world, however much suffering it might entail, and however arbitrary the powers imposing it upon one might appear to be. In Job, after all, we hear the justifications of God himself for Job’s persecution; whether one finds them convincing or not, they receive rhetorical weight from their position at the poem’s climax.2 In an essay with widely applicable concerns, William
Hazlitt neatly summarises the idea: ‘The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’ (345). Writing from a position of stigma and exclusion, then, is a problematic process. For writers in this position, the simplest choice is frequently the construction of a counter-discourse in which condemnation is turned back on their
persecutor(s). This naturally involves a similar appeal to power or moral authority, with the distinction that this power sets itself rhetorically against the dominant power in the life of the persecuted individual. In writing against one abusive power, the writer is often simply
appealing to another.
We can also see this as a problem of solitude. Experiences of persecution are solitary by their very nature, as writing is solitary. Literary writing, discourse directed at an unclear interlocutor (or no interlocutor at all), can be an effective mode of writing from a position of 1 Cf. Burke.
persecution. Yet writing, aporetically, is frequently figured instead as an engagement with tradition, just as much as it is the expression of a single perspective.3 In extreme cases of
absolute alienation with life, this kind of engagement may seem unpalatable, or transform into engagement with deliberately archaic, noncanonical or otherworldly texts and writers. The persecuted writer is necessarily steering a difficult course, not only between different powerful discourses, but between the dichotomy of engagement and non-engagement itself. The paradox of literature and rhetoric’s tendencies to justify power, even when they are ostensibly opposing it, combines with difficult questions about engagement to make this kind of writing a fascinatingly fraught territory.
I begin by dealing with the problematics of writing from persecution because the texts which I intend to consider here—Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Complaint’, Franz Kafka’s ‘Letter to My Father’, and Porpentine’s ‘Hot Allostatic Load’—are all in different ways examples of this category of writing, and I wish to engage with them as such. Hoccleve complains of alienation resulting from the discriminatory treatment to which his peers subject him after an earlier mental breakdown, stating that ‘No wiȝt [person]4 with me list make daliaunce. | The
worlde me made a straunge countinaunce’ (77). In his letter, in painful and self-effacing terms, Kafka attempts to explain to his father ‘why I claim to be afraid of you’ (555); that is, to speak directly to his perceived persecutor. And Porpentine’s article claims early on to be ‘about disposability [...] about being human trash’—in other words, about being made to feel worthless by one’s community.
In order to approach these texts, a significant amount of groundwork is necessary. To begin with, I will outline the questions I wish to answer in the course of my analysis, and make some conjectures about their answers. In the same section I will outline the concepts I 3 Cf. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Rainey pp. 152-156.
4 When quoting the Middle English of Hoccleve’s ‘Complaint’, I provide glosses on some of the more archaic vocabulary in square brackets, for the sake of clarity.
view as most pertinent to these questions and conjectures: the notion of writing from
persecution, and a dichotomy I will propose between complaint and refusal as two
paradigmatic forms which this type of writing can take. Subsequently I will turn to secondary ideas which will support my analysis, these ideas revolving around two key concepts:
autobiography and shame. Finally, I will conclude my introduction by describing the texts in
greater detail and outlining the approach I intend to take to each of them. Writing from Persecution: Complaint and Refusal
Broadly, the questions with which I wish to engage in this essay are related to the discursive position of the persecuted, their experiences of persecution and how these experiences can be said to (mis)shape their (written) expression, especially when this expression concerns itself directly with the people and social forces which could be described as complicit in this persecution. I will refer to the category of writing with which I am dealing as ‘writing from persecution’, and will shortly define it with greater precision. My specific questions, then, are these: how do writers from persecution relate to the language, logic, and other cultural assumptions of their persecutors? Can the experience of persecution be said to impact or determine the modes of expression available to the persecuted? And what claims can be made about the relative rhetorical power and efficacy of rejecting persecution in the persecutor’s own language versus rejecting even the language itself? Preliminarily, I conjecture that a painfully ambivalent relationship will become evident in all three texts between the writers in question and the culture which has persecuted them; that connections can be established between the distressing experience of persecution and the subsequent mode of expression of the one who has suffered it; and that rejecting the language of the persecutor can generally serve as a powerful statement of resistance, but that this rejection can never be absolute. We will see whether these conjectures are borne out by the subsequent analysis.
What do I mean, then, by writing from persecution? Firstly, I should note that the texts I have chosen cannot hope to, and are not intended to, provide anything like a complete perspective on persecution per se. For instance, though I will be drawing to an extent upon postcolonial theory, all three writers I am focused upon are white Europeans or Americans; if I were to claim these three figures as adequate representatives of the whole tradition of writing from persecution, the claim would certainly be easily contestable on grounds of race and nationality, not to mention class. Moreover, many of the persecutions faced by these writers do not fit particularly well with even avowedly intersectional modes of analysis: to the extent that Kafka is persecuted by his father, it is generally for his meekness and due to his father’s general attitude, not explicitly targeting any racial, gendered, or sexual deviance from any norm. And in the case of Porpentine’s article, though queer identity plays a strong role, and appeals to marginalisation are made on this basis, it is generally other queer-identified feminists inflicting persecution on the writer. That is, as Porpentine puts it, the article is about ‘the hyper-marginalized among the marginalized’, and thus even other marginalised figures are figured among the persecutors. My selection of texts with which to represent writing from persecution, therefore, should not be viewed as an attempt at
representing the whole experience of persecution, even in the western world, in any
particularly even manner. Rather, I have chosen these texts as exemplary of certain trends and tropes within writing from persecution which fascinate me, and which I wish to examine in greater depth.
To give a proper definition to the notion of writing from persecution, then, I should clarify that it includes much of the writing I noted above as being excluded from this
particular analysis: postcolonial writing, the writing of persecuted racial minorities, etc. The exclusion of these examples is a reflection of the sheer number of ‘persecutions’ one can be seen as ‘writing from’, and the subsequent impossibility of including all of these in an
analysis of limited length. It is not a judgment of these other topics and texts as less valid or interesting for analysis. To define the notion positively, ‘writing from persecution’, for my purposes, can be said to entail any written expression5 which contains a claim that its narrator
has been, by whatever metric the author chooses, unjustly treated, marginalised, ostracised, or otherwise excluded by society as a whole—or by a figure (or figures) representing some level of authority in the writer’s everyday life. Thus, Kafka’s perceived victimisation by his father qualifies, as does Porpentine’s ostracism within supposedly radical communities; there is no specific metric to which one has to live up, other than feeling oneself to be persecuted—with the caveat that the reader may of course be more or less sympathetic with claims of
persecution depending on the foundation upon which they rest. The notion can be compared with the idea of ‘writing back’ laid out by Bill Ashcroft et al in The Empire Writes Back, but is, as I have discussed, more general by virtue of not being tied to postcolonial contexts.
Implicit in this definition is an assumption that the text is autobiographical in nature, as indeed my chosen objects are. I will delve into the subject of autobiography more deeply in the following section, but for now it is worthwhile to note that texts which are not
explicitly autobiographical, but which draw on the author’s experiences of persecution (or the inherited, ambient experience of a persecuted social group to which they belong), would also qualify for this label.6 The notion of shaming should also be raised here, as it is in cases
where the mode of persecution was largely social and shame-based that the problems I wish to engage with come to the fore. What I mean is that, compared with acts of violence and other more explicit forms of persecution, shame-based persecution can be much more difficult to express. It is easier, and more inflammatory, to accuse someone of physical
5 The notion could also be adapted for other forms of expression, but this is beyond the scope of my analysis here.
6 One might think, for example, of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a novel in which, without its being actually autobiographical, we are easily able to see the ways in which Ellison’s experience as a black man in twentieth-century America informed his writing.
violence against me than to argue that they made me feel less valuable as a person. Shame is also important in that a writer from persecution can potentially turn it on their persecutor(s)— retaliate in kind by ‘shaming the shamer’. In other words, shame is a part of the writer’s arsenal in a way that violence is not. But we will see that this potentiality, too, presents its own problematics.
As I gestured towards in my opening paragraph, a key issue with which writers from persecution have to wrestle is the question of how their writing should relate to the ideas, rhetoric, and images which have structured or otherwise proven complicit in their
persecution. Hazlitt’s pessimistic claim about the bond between even ostensibly liberatory artistic expression and the ‘language of power’ can be taken to summarise the problem faced by persecuted figures who wish to use these modes of expression to their advantage. It seems to me that a dichotomy can be made between two broad responses to this problem, which I will call complaint and refusal. These categories operate on both a formal level and on the level of content.
By complaint, I mean to indicate responses which are in some sense operating in the same discursive world as the phenomena, individuals or systems against which the complaint is directed. Complaint may seek to subvert the arguments and ideas of the dominant power, to twist them to its own ends, or, as I have indicated, set up an alternative power as more
authentically representative of these values—but, in appealing at all to the ideas upon which oppression is founded, it always implies a basic level of faith in them. An example of this might be a letter of formal complaint which, though it raises objections, frames these
objections as betrayals of normative values meant to be shared by complainant and defendant alike. It is, in other words, still very much operating within the discursive world of the letter’s recipient. Its end is a return to the normative principles which ostensibly unite complainant and defendant, and it is written in a form familiar and palatable to the defendant.
In contrast, by refusal I mean to indicate responses which in some sense opt out of the discourses and structuring values of the object against which objections are raised. In this case, the end is not a return to the values which are meant to reconcile persecutor with
persecuted, but a claim that these values do not exist, are irrelevant, or are inherently harmful. Nor is an alternate power held up, as it may be in complaint, as a better example of the values the persecutor is supposed to uphold; if any power is appealed to, it is one which rejects these values unequivocally. In instances of refusal, what is strongly emphasised is not commonality but division. That which divides the writer from that against which they are writing is figured not as a healable wound but as an unbridgeable gap. An example of this mode of resistance could be any form of expression which aims to achieve a form of unpalatability,
incomprehensibility: in music, one might think of punk or hip-hop, politically charged genres which phrased their rebellion in language deliberately divergent from that of the
‘mainstream’. In writing, one can think, to the extent that they are politicised, of avant-garde forms like dadaism. Refusal involves not only expressing sentiments which are beyond the pale for ordinary discourse, but expressing them in a fashion which consciously departs from the formal trappings of that discourse. I do not mean to posit that every example of writing from persecution must be either refusal or complaint, but rather to indicate these as the two poles of a continuum, useful for structuring my analysis of everything that can be found in between.
Though I will generally refer to complaint and refusal as independent concepts, and not rely heavily on supporting criticism in the body of the text, a couple of relevant concepts can be helpfully invoked here to clarify the distinction I am making. Firstly, Lauren Berlant’s writing about ‘cruel optimism’ is useful in discussing this dichotomy. The concept
names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. [...] the subjects [of cruel optimism] might not well endure the loss of their object [...] even
though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form [...] provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living[.] (Berlant 21) In other words, a reliance upon a particular object (a desire, hope, value, person, etc.) is sustained beyond the point where it ceases to be helpful and becomes actually harmful, by the subject’s attachment to its formal qualities. The subject, accustomed to the mode of thinking associated with their object, is unable to think other than in this mode. My notion of
complaint can be seen as strongly related to cruel optimism, since it implies a reliance upon the conventional forms of expression of whom- or whatever persecutes the complainant.
While Berlant also refers to moments of apparent escape from this cruel optimism, she does not seem hopeful about their potential to truly depart from it: ‘It is impossible to say how deep the break is’ (26). To provide theoretical background for the notion of refusal, therefore, I turn to The Empire Writes Back, which I mentioned earlier. Applied outside the postcolonial context, the work has arguably limited value. But what is relevant for my own analysis in the work of Ashcroft et al is its account of the refusal, in much postcolonial writing, of certain elements of the coloniser’s language and culture, and the appropriation of other elements for subversive ends—the construction of ‘englishes’ as opposed to a single English. For Ashcroft et al, ‘[l]anguage becomes the medium through which conceptions of “truth”, “order”, and “reality” become established. Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effective post-colonial voice’ (7). In other words, there is an explicit acknowledgement here that resistance to colonial cultural hegemony requires (at least to some extent) a
modification or rejection of colonialism’s very language. While I have acknowledged that I am not writing about postcolonial objects here, I do believe that this frame can easily be adapted to deal with questions about the discourse and cultural assumptions of any persecuted group or person. We need only replace the centre with the persecutor, the periphery with the
persecuted, and the more or less radically postcolonial with positions along the previously proposed complaint-refusal continuum. Different points on this continuum can therefore be formulated in terms of a rejection or reappropriation of the language of persecution.
In order to write effectively about complaint and refusal, it is necessary to now engage with complementary conceptual frameworks surrounding the notions of
autobiography and shame which I have drawn attention to above. I will deal with these ideas in two sections, the first concerning notions of autobiography.
Autobiography and the Problem of Reliability
An obvious commonality between the texts I wish to examine here is that all three deal directly with events from their authors’ lives: that is, they can be described as
autobiographical. This is an element that must be taken into account in any analysis of these texts. According to Dan Shen and Dejin Xu, in analysing fiction, ‘we are only concerned with how the narrator rearranges the textual story within the boundary of the text, whereas in autobiography our concern is twofold: we also have to consider to what extent the textual story is true to the “real” personal experiences’ (46). Noting the autobiographical character of these texts is important, then, because such texts must be dealt with in a fashion distinct from the approach one might take to a work of fiction. In the case of the specific texts with which I am dealing, problems can present themselves in terms of comparing the textual with the ‘real’. Aside from Kafka, about whose private life a significant amount is known, the authors of the texts under consideration are somewhat marginal figures in terms of academic
consideration and public knowledge of their lives. Because of this, ‘official’ narratives against which to measure their autobiographical claims are somewhat lacking. Even in the case of Kafka, much of what is known about his strained relationship with his father comes from the letter itself. These texts all declare themselves autobiographical, and my instinct,
certainly, is to trust that the events they describe are broadly true to life—yet the dearth of evidence against which to measure them raises questions about how to engage with these texts as autobiography.
While the question of veracity cannot be ignored, then, it is a problematic one. These texts, though ostensibly based on real events, must to some extent stand alone, much like fictional narratives. Literary theorist Roland Barthes’ concept of the ‘death of the author’ is naturally also implicated here.7 To what extent, even when dealing with forms of
autobiography, is a concern with details of the author’s life legitimate? The object of my investigation is certainly not the falsifiability of the information presented in these texts, yet I do not raise these concerns to arbitrarily complicate my analysis. Rather, I believe that questions of veracity are intimately tied up in discourses of writing against power, or ‘from persecution’. In accusing a power greater than oneself of abusive or unjust actions, truth is currency, and claims of falsehood are anathema. Therefore despite the problematic nature of the approach, this essay cannot avoid concerning itself with issues of biography.
This brings me to the question of (un)reliability. In an autobiographical text which raises complaints against a third party or dominant power, any openness to an accusation of unreliability can be regarded as a rhetorical weak point, vulnerable to counter-accusations. Shen and Xu write that ‘fictional unreliability is [...] a matter of the reader’s secret
communication with the (implied) author at the expense of the narrator,’ while in
autobiography, ‘unreliability [is] a matter of the cognizant reader’s judgment at the expense of the [...] narrator-author’ (56-57). In other words, unreliable narration in fictional narratives brings the reader closer (through dramatic irony) to the perspective of the author, while its counterpart in autobiography achieves essentially the opposite: it causes the reader to become suspicious of the author’s discourse. As I have mentioned, in the texts on which I am
focusing, factual unreliability is difficult to determine, because there is little biographical information to use as a yardstick against which to measure the text.
However, Shen and Xu highlight a second level of unreliability, ‘“ideological” unreliability’, wherein ‘the yardstick is not the (implied) author but the ideology of
interpretive communities or individual readers who do or do not endorse the autobiographer’s perspective’ (81). That is, cases in which the interpreter cannot point to any specific
inconsistency, but objects to the claims made on the basis of their own beliefs or
assumptions. In the context of autobiography, this is generally regarded as occurring only on an extratextual level, against the author’s wishes, since the author is assumed to be seeking, in this genre, the reader’s trust and belief above all. We will see how far this turns out to be an accurate characterisation of the motivations of my chosen authors. Regardless, it is this concept of specifically ideological unreliability which I view as useful for the following analysis, since it is one which foregrounds the element of power relations in judgments of truth.
Shame and Shaming
Another overriding concern in these texts is the notion of shame. It appears both as a phenomenon experienced internally by their narrators, and as a social process (shaming or stigmatisation) which does harm to these narrators’ wellbeing and exerts control over their lives. Since the texts, as I will subsequently discuss, are embedded in such wildly different social-historical contexts, I will to some extent be drawing upon sources sociologically appropriate for each text’s historical period. For example, in discussing Hoccleve, J.A. Burrow’s essay on medieval depictions of shame will become relevant. However, for a more generally applicable account of shame, I will turn to Martha Nussbaum’s insightful book,
they are valid criterion for the shaping of public policy. While the object of my analysis is obviously not public policy, I draw on Nussbaum because her account of shame begins from psychoanalytical accounts of how it develops during childhood, before moving towards an analysis of how it functions in adult life, especially in the context of deliberate public
shaming.8 I consider her analysis very useful, then, in that it combines an account of shame as
it is personally experienced, with a broader account of how it is produced, deliberately or inadvertently, in liberal and communitarian societies alike.
One strength of Nussbaum’s book is her focus on shaming as a social phenomenon which, while frequently linked with moral criteria, also functions on a more basic level as a self-sustaining activity undertaken by the community. For Nussbaum, ‘the stigmatizing behavior in which all societies engage is typically an aggressive reaction to infantile narcissism and to the shame born of our own incompleteness’ (219). Moreover, she argues that even in cases of shaming in which what is being shamed is a deviance from moral values one does oneself endorse (e.g. in the case of a person who is shamed for sexist or racist behaviour or attitudes), there is reason to be sceptical of the mechanism of shaming itself, and to distrust its claim to be motivated exclusively by moral considerations. ‘Behind the parade of moralism and high ideals,’ she asserts, ‘there is often likely to be something much more primitive going on to which the precise content of the ideals in question, and their normative value, is basically irrelevant’ (220). Elsewhere she writes that ‘people who inflict shame are very often not expressing virtuous motives or high ideals, but rather a shrinking from their own human weakness’ (232).
To relate this rather politically motivated argument to my own literary approach, I wish to draw out a couple of claims from the above citations, with which I intend to structure 8 I will generally prefer the term ‘shaming’ to ostracism, due to its link with the word ‘shame’, and thus tendency to emphasise the links between the emotion or affect in question and the social processes that (attempt to) produce it.
my treatment of shame and shaming in my objects. The first such claim is that any instances of shaming encountered in my chosen texts should be analysed not (or at least not only) in terms of the values they are ostensibly intended to enforce, but primarily in terms of the mechanism of shaming itself. The question must not be, ‘is this instance of shaming
legitimate or merely abusive?’ but rather, ‘how can we relate such instances of shaming to the social-political context of the texts under consideration; what is the function and
methodology of shaming in each case?’ The second claim which I wish to elaborate from Nussbaum’s argument is essentially correlated with the first: that, just as shaming can be more productively analysed on a formal than a content-level, the experience of shame will be seen, in these texts, to relate more to what Nussbaum argues are ‘primitive’ concerns than the alleged moral content of the shame. That is, even in instances such as Hoccleve’s, where the persecuted figure to some extent concedes the validity of his persecutors’ claims, it is nevertheless valid to examine the form as much of the content of the shame to which he is exposed. Both of these claims can be related to my earlier distinction between complaint and refusal, by recourse to the question, ‘to what extent are shame and shaming fully rejected (refusal), and to what extent are they merely questioned in terms of content, and thus deflected (complaint)?’ In this way I intend to incorporate the consideration of shame, a strong theme of all three texts, into my broader concerns about the discursive position of the persecuted.
Hoccleve, Kafka and Porpentine
I will now properly introduce the objects of my analysis, first explicating broadly the rationale behind this particular combination of texts and concepts, then describing in more detail the content of the texts in turn, and briefly outlining the approach I will take to each.
The texts I have chosen—a Middle English poem, a letter (never sent, certainly never intended for publication), and a recent online article—are on the surface various enough to present problems for a comparative analysis of the three. This is why I chose firstly to outline the concepts of which I will make use in addressing these objects. In my view, the concepts outlined above are applicable to every text and facilitate valuable connections between them. Firstly and most importantly, I will frame my analysis of my objects through the ideas of complaint and refusal which I have highlighted as my key concern, arguing that the three texts occupy surprisingly and interestingly various points on the complaint-refusal continuum sketched above, and drawing more general conclusions about this continuum from my specific analysis.
To turn to auxiliary concepts, autobiography is relevant for the obvious reason that all three texts are autobiographical in some form: Hoccleve writes from his own perspective about a breakdown and its aftermath which, apparently, he really suffered; Kafka’s letter is a personal correspondence detailing elements of his own life and his relationship with his father; Porpentine’s article is, among other things, a personal account of her time living in an abusive community. Notions of ostracism are central to all three texts, albeit in quite various ways: Kafka’s experience of shame seems intensely attached to the father-son relationship he outlines, while Porpentine and Hoccleve both experience stigmatisation as a more broadly social process. The conflation of traumatic emotional experiences with bodily harm and physical violence is also detectable throughout all three texts—admittedly having a much greater prominence in Porpentine’s article, yet facilitating useful points of comparison between all three texts.
‘The Complaint of Hoccleve’, written early in the fifteenth century by a fairly minor poet, Thomas Hoccleve (primarily known to literary criticism as an unremarkable successor to Chaucer), holds a great interest for me as one of the earliest examples in English of an
autobiographical account of mental breakdown. What is striking about the poem is its choice of focus. The traumatic experience of breakdown itself is given surprisingly little space in the poem, being covered in the early stanzas and subsequently referred to in rather vague terms which seem to avoid deep engagement with the experience of breakdown itself. The poem’s primary focus, however, is fascinating in itself; Hoccleve, repeatedly assuring the reader that he has recovered—that ‘[d]ebaat is nowe noon bitwixe me and my wit’ (82)—moves on to a long and painful consideration of the permanent stigma which public knowledge of his breakdown has attached to him. He writes that his peers ‘hadden [...] disdein’ (77) at the prospect of dealing with him, and paints a vivid picture of social ostracism. In an interesting rhetorical turn towards the poem’s conclusion, Hoccleve seems to take refuge in a remarkably non-judgmental image of God, to whom he appeals for the moral strength which will allow him to endure his experience of persecution. In my analysis of the ‘Complaint’, then, I will trace the rhetorical development of the poem, from an autobiographical account of mental illness in a historical context in which such accounts were not so much taboo as simply unheard of, to an account (and implicit critique) of the ostracism which followed this experience, to a religious text appealing to God as not a judge, but an escape from judgment —an image of God which must have seemed peculiar in its medieval context. Throughout, I will be asking how these surprising shifts of focus relate to the complaint-refusal continuum, and what conclusions can be drawn from Hoccleve’s unique blend of rhetorics.
Franz Kafka’s ‘Letter to My Father’ is concerned with persecution on a more intimate scale; for Kafka, it is not his peers at work by whom he feels himself victimised, but his own father. This marks a shift for the experience of persecution from the public sphere of work and social life to the private sphere of the patriarchal family unit—and Kafka’s father is depicted in a very direct sense as a patriarchal figure. Yet Kafka’s account is not merely a list of accusations of petty misconduct in the home, but a reflection upon his whole development,
and how he sees his adult personality to have been deformed, and his emotional growth stunted, by his interactions with his father since a young age. It is notable that the letter was written late in Kafka’s life; it is no rebellious adolescent outburst, however much it can at times resemble one. Also notable is the letter’s generally cringing, self-effacing tone—Kafka insists repeatedly that his father is ‘responsible, but blameless’ (556) for the problems
between them—and Kafka’s tendency to second-guess his father’s responses and answer them in advance, in a way that recalls Bakhtin’s account of the discourse in Dostoevsky’s novels. An important passage late in the letter begins: ‘If you consider my explanation [...] you might answer as follows’ (599), and goes on to imagine at considerable length what his father’s response might be. In approaching this text, then, I will deal firstly with the all-encompassing effect that Kafka believes his father’s shaming and persecution to have had on his development, and secondly with the formal position which the letter itself occupies in terms of complaint and refusal. Is Kafka able to achieve any redress of grievances with his letter, or is it simply a continuation of his inability to escape his father’s shadow?
Porpentine’s ‘Hot Allostatic Load’ is, again, a significantly different text from the others. Firstly, it is the most modern of the three, and brings the consideration of persecution into a very different context. The article covers issues within contemporary queer and feminist circles, deals with how shaming and exile can manifest in social media spaces, and cites postmodern theorists like Deleuze. Secondly, its subject matter complicates questions of complaint and refusal, since Porpentine’s persecutors are themselves members of ostensibly radical, liberatory political spaces, and yet are here the figures whose abuses must be
responded to. Porpentine highlights the ways in which progressive language is used to justify abuses, saying of victims of abuse that ‘[e]veryone agrees they must have been [...]
problematic’. This raises the complicated issue of how to resist a persecution the perpetration of which is justified in precisely the language of progressivism and resistance. Finally,
Porpentine’s article can be said to range much more widely than the other texts, being a hybrid of autobiographical trauma writing and theoretical engagement with modes of persecution, and incorporating within the body of the text materials as various as dream journal entries, pieces of visual art, videos, and quotations from critical theory. ‘Hot
Allostatic Load’ is for the above reasons probably the most difficult text to approach, since its fragmentary nature raises so many questions. In treating it as the final object of my analysis, I will attempt to draw together the ideas that I have developed in reading Hoccleve and Kafka, and reach some conclusions about the function of shaming in social life, the question of reliability in relation to testimonial authenticity, and most vitally, the role of complaint and refusal in writing from persecution.
Now that I have laid out my questions, conjectures, concepts, and texts, it is time to move on to the first object of analysis, ‘The Complaint of Hoccleve’.
HOCCLEVE’S ‘COMPLAINT’
Thomas Hoccleve, despite occasional revivals of critical attention, is generally viewed as a minor figure in English literature. Even M.C. Seymour’s introduction to a volume dedicated entirely to Hoccleve’s poetry calls him
a minor poet whose closeness to Chaucer vividly illuminates the narrowness of his achievement [...] he offers no sudden revelations to aesthetic taste. [...] His poetry reveals a sober, good-natured view of things, a love of order and justice, an underlying sense of piety, and a gentle and inoffensive sense of humour.
(Seymour, in Hoccleve xxxiii) Hoccleve’s writing appears to represent a small curiosity for specialists in late medieval literature, and to be conventional and ‘inoffensive’ in every way. Seymour’s edition is admittedly dated, and interpretations of the role of mental illness in Hoccleve’s poem—some of which I will engage with here—have certainly surfaced more recently. Meanwhile Jennifer E. Bryan refers to Hoccleve as ‘a complainer in the best modern sense of the word. [...] few medieval complaints have struck readers as quite so egregiously, woefully self-absorbed’ (1172). Though this impression of Hoccleve differs substantially from Seymour’s, what they share is a sense that Hoccleve’s concerns are trivial or irrelevant—in a word, minor. Despite its claim to novelty as the first autobiographical treatment of mental illness in English, the ‘Complaint’ remains a minor work by a minor poet. What does it offer for the purposes of this analysis?
The text’s prologue does little to dispel these impressions: Hoccleve’s opening stanza begins ‘Aftir þat heruest [autumn] inned had hise sheues, | And that the broun sesoun of Mihelmesse [Michaelmas] | Was come, and gan the trees robbe of her leues’ (Hoccleve 75), consciously mimicking (if in seasonally inverted form) the famous prologue to the
Canterbury Tales.9 Indeed, Hoccleve adopts, here as elsewhere, Chaucer’s own rime royal
form. He writes, undoubtedly, in Chaucer’s shadow. Thematically, too, Hoccleve initially does little to distinguish himself from his forebears. He turns quickly to the common
medieval theme of the changeability of fortune, writing that ‘Ther is no þing but chaunge and variaunce’ (75). The poem’s opening amounts to a strong appeal to literary and philosophical tradition, rather than any attempt at originality of thought or style. Yet what Hoccleve is attempting—an account of his own mental illness—is, as I have indicated, novel, and we might expect that upon arriving at the breakdown, the poem would become more boldly unconventional, in line with its subject matter.
This is not really the case: the language of these stanzas is almost humorously clichéd. Hoccleve refers to sleepless nights (‘sleep cam noon in myn ye’ (75)), to melancholia (‘the þouȝtful maladie’ (75)), and, again, to the wheel of fortune (‘cloudy hath bene þe fauour | That shoon on me ful briȝt in times past’ (75)). He refers conventionally to his illness as a period of ‘wilde infirmite’ and to his recovery as a result of God making his ‘memorie [...] retourne into the place | Whens it cam’ (76). The account is as brief as it is trite; by the end of the eighth stanza (out of around sixty total), we have read as much as we ever will about the breakdown itself. Hoccleve’s account of his own illness is absolutely subservient to
traditional discourses about madness, to the extent that it contains almost no real sense of his personal experience. His writing is meek where one might have expected it to be bold; what I wish to investigate are the consequences of this characteristic meekness for the remainder of the text.
Indeed, the interest which the ‘Complaint’ holds for me is closely linked with Hoccleve’s perceived mildness. As a clerk working for the Privy Seal, he was embedded, if not particularly influential, in the business of courtly politics, and remained so for most of his 9 ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote | The droghte of March hath perced to the roote’ (Chaucer 23).
life. He was a figure, then, who aside from his generally mild character, also could not afford to do anything outrageous, to be too outspoken, because of his position. Yet the text I am here analysing is explicitly a complaint directed primarily against his peers. How does Hoccleve square his apparent conformity with his need to air grievances? This brings me to another issue that will have to be addressed: namely, Hoccleve’s positioning himself within the medieval corpus of ‘complaint literature’, and how far this terminology can be said to correspond with my own use of the term ‘complaint’. Themes of shame are naturally also foregrounded, and it will be worthwhile to embed these ideas, too, in their late-medieval context, so as not to make the mistake of confusing medieval conceptions of these issues with modern ones.10
Because of this, I will begin my analysis with a section tracing some key medieval ideas about shame and complaint respectively, before moving on to direct engagement with the text. This direct engagement will follow the broad outline I gave in my introduction. Having dealt already with Hoccleve’s brief account of his own breakdown, I will move on to consider his much more substantial account of subsequent persecution by his peers, the ways in which his various invocations of God function rhetorically within the ‘Complaint’, and finally what conclusions can be drawn from all of the above for writing from persecution more generally.
Complaint and Shame in the Medieval Context
In approaching the medieval genre of complaint literature, it is important to firstly consider its close relationship with autobiography. Yet this relationship is a fraught one. J.A. Burrow’s essay ‘The Poet as Petitioner’ highlights that, though medieval poets do often include details of their own lives in their writing, the concept of autobiography can sometimes obscure the 10 As Mieke Bal writes, concepts like these are valuable ‘[n]ot because they mean the same thing for everyone, but because they don’t’ (11). Yet she highlights that we dilute this value if we do not properly acknowledge these variations in usage in different contexts.
poet’s reasons for including such details. Burrow argues that ‘[i]t is not autobiography when I give my name and address to a policeman. [...] in many medieval texts the reasons which lead an author to speak of himself are, precisely, practical’ (162). I am slightly sceptical of a simplistic division between autobiographical inclusions that are practically motivated and those that are not (since I am working with a fairly broad definition of autobiography that can include, for instance, Kafka’s personal correspondence with his father). Nevertheless,
Burrow’s claim that the medieval poet is frequently ‘doing some practical thing such as claiming credit for his book, greeting his friends, complaining about his lot, [...] making a public confession [...] [or presenting] a petition’ (162) highlights the important fact that a medieval poem need not be seen as a solitary artistic object, but as a participant in the social sphere alongside (and sometimes incorporating) such acts as greeting, complaining,
petitioning, and so on.
Naturally, complaint is the concept which is most important to a consideration of Hoccleve. M.C. Seymour draws attention to the salient medieval conception of complaint or
planctus, ‘a formal, rhetorical expression of grief where the rhetoric is employed to assuage
as well as to define’ (Seymour, in Hoccleve 133). This idea of complaint differs somewhat from my own; the planctus is more generally directed against the ills that have befallen the writer, rather than a specific antagonist, and reflects the medieval conception of misfortune as resulting from the whims of God or fortune, rather than from the concrete actions of
mankind. It will be important to consider whether working within this tradition disarms Hoccleve’s complaints against his peers.
Notions of shame in the medieval period are equally interesting for this analysis. Elsewhere Burrow, writing about the chivalric romance Gawain and the Green Knight, highlights several medieval ideas about shame that will prove important: firstly, he writes that, in the medieval conception, ‘a thing is only shameful if it is judged as such by those with
the power to do so. [...] anyone who insists on seeing shame where competent judges have declared that there is none merely brings shame upon his own head’ (128). The same claim is made for honour: one must be honourable oneself in order to bestow honour upon another. This is important because it highlights the socially determined nature of shame and honour. A plausible way of resisting shame and dishonour in the rigidly hierarchical society of medieval England was to question the legitimacy of the person(s) attempting to shame one, and as we will see, this is a tactic of which Hoccleve attempts, to some extent, to avail himself.
Secondly, Burrow argues that personal honour, and conversely, personal shame, are in the medieval context inextricable from the honour and shame of groups to which one belongs —in Gawain, ‘the whole collective “renown of the Round Table” rests, while the adventure lasts, upon [Gawain’s] shoulders’ (124). This is something towards which I have already gestured above, when speaking of Hoccleve’s social position and career. It will be important to remember that, far from insulating him against shame, Hoccleve’s position rather presents the worrying possibility that he might, in bringing dishonour upon himself, also bring it upon his whole social circle. This could additionally go some way to explaining the enduring hostility of his colleagues—as, at least in part, a defense mechanism.
‘In euery mannes mouþe’: Unbearable Visibility
The bulk of Hoccleve’s ‘Complaint’ gives an account of the persecution he suffers from his peers after considering himself to have recovered from his breakdown. Indeed, he speaks highly of the attitudes of his peers during the episode itself: ‘Howe it wiþ me stood was in euery mannes mouþe […] They for myn helþe pilgrimages hiȝt [promised pilgrimages]’ (Hoccleve 76). That his friends attempted to help him during his time of need seems laudable, but these lines also contain the first suggestion of Hoccleve’s experience of public scrutiny; that his condition was ‘in euery mannes mouþe’ is worrisome even if, for the time being, the
general attitude is sympathetic. This visibility comes to be a problem not during his illness but after its apparent conclusion; Hoccleve writes that ‘þouȝ that my wit were hoom come aȝein, | Men wolde it not so vndirstonde or take’ (77). In other words, the problem’s origin lies in a contradiction between Hoccleve’s own perspective on his mental health, and that of his peers. He believes himself to be recovered, while they are suspicious of this hypothesis. Hoccleve’s reliability is called into question by his peers.
To an extent, their suspicions seem to be based on their own ideas about the recurrence of madness: “trustiþ this,”’ his peers argue, ‘“Assaile him wole aȝein that maladie”’ (77). They claim to know, from common wisdom, that Hoccleve cannot be
permanently recovered; Shen and Xu might call this mistrust ideological. On the other hand, Hoccleve’s breakdown does raise twin suspicions: that he is exaggerating the extent of his ostracism, or that his peers are correct to believe he is not yet fully recovered. Critics such as Stephen Harper have commented on Hoccleve’s ‘morbid self-consciousness [...] Thomas is aware, that is, of being a spectacle’ (Harper 390). A key moment in the poem highlights the difficulty of the question: ‘Men seiden I loked as a wilde steer, | And so my looke aboute I gan [began] to throwe’ (Hoccleve 78). Like much of the text, these lines are unclear about the truth-value of the accusations; does Hoccleve begin to throw his ‘looke aboute’ in paranoia having heard these rumours, or is this mannerism what inspires the initial comparison to ‘a wilde steer’? The inclarity attests to the difficulty of Hoccleve’s position; his paranoia and anxiety may be justified, but at the same time they inevitably supply his peers with rhetorical ammunition against him. Here, Burrow’s claim that the medieval poem is as much a part of social life as it is an artistic object disadvantages Hoccleve. For from this perspective the ‘Complaint’ has two goals: the expression of genuine emotion and private experience and
equally the rhetorical force necessary to convince Hoccleve’s peers of their wrongness. As
scrutiny for eyes more powerful than his own’ (1173). To a great extent, he is at the mercy of his audience.
Hoccleve writes candidly of his own self-conscious attempts to, as it were, look sane. He goes ‘vnto my mirror and my glas, | To loke howe þat me of my chere þouȝt [To judge my bearing]’; He writes of occasions on which he has ‘[c]ause had of anger and inpacience’ but ‘not answerid aȝen [retaliated]’ (Hoccleve 80) for fear that his legitimate grievance would be taken as symptoms of instability. Hoccleve is apparently forced, in every aspect of his life, to think carefully about his self-presentation, for fear that any lapse could deepen the general suspicion directed towards him. When these attempts fail, we receive vivid accounts of the shame he experiences. Upon overhearing a conversation about himself, for example, Hoccleve reports that ‘my visage | Bigan to glowe for the woo and fere’ (77).
A key stanza, which it is worthwhile to read closely, relates both Hoccleve’s changed mannerisms and his peers’ discourse about such changes:
Chaunged had I my pas [pace], somme seiden eke, For here and there forþe stirte I as a roo [deer], Noon abood noon areest, but al brainseke. Another spake of me and seide also, My feet weren ay wauynge to and fro,
Whanne þat I stonde shulde and wiþ men talke,
And þat myn yen souȝten euery halke. (Hoccleve 79)
The stanza lists a set of symptoms that make Hoccleve seem alarmingly unstable; he moves like a deer, cannot control his feet, distractedly watches the corners of the room rather than looking at the person to whom he is speaking, and is ‘brain-sick’. Yet it is easy to miss, due to Hoccleve’s use of reported rather than direct speech, that these are not self-reported symptoms but the observations of his peers. In the seven-line stanza, only the first (‘somme seiden eke’) and the fourth (‘Another spake…’) lines actually highlight this, which in
combination with the lack of speech-marks has the effect of allowing the reader to forget the nature of the speech in question and take it for Hoccleve’s. This occurs especially when, as in the fifth line, the word ‘þat’, which would have highlighted this as reported speech, is
omitted. ‘My feet weren ay wauynge to and fro’, in isolation, can be taken simply as Hoccleve’s own account of his behaviour.
We might take these lines as examples of Bakhtinian dialogism—‘the speech of another [...] introduced into the author’s discourse’ (198). Bakhtin acknowledges that speech which is ‘openly introduced as indirect discourse’ may nevertheless be ‘surrounded by the hidden, diffused speech of another’ (199), and this seems a reasonable description of what Hoccleve does here. Though these symptoms are reported through the words of his gossiping peers, Hoccleve in the surrounding stanzas neither denies nor confirms their veracity. The true nature of Hoccleve’s mannerisms during this period is held deliberately in ambiguity; we learn only of his peers’ reported perceptions. There is a dialogic attempt to blur the lines between Hoccleve’s self-examination and the observations of his peers. The ambiguity is productive. Nussbaum’s account of the irrationality of shaming is useful here; if we
acknowledge ‘there is [...] likely to be something much more primitive going on’ (220) here than the shaming’s stated justification suggests, it suddenly makes sense that Hoccleve does not more carefully distinguish between his self-description and the assertions of his peers. The insupportable scrutiny under which Hoccleve is placed matters more than the actual aspects of his personality and behaviour under consideration. Hoccleve cannot bear the shame of being slandered in this way, whether or not he believes the slander to be true. Again, the dispute is ideological rather than based in fact. The unique disadvantage of Hoccleve’s former madness is that it places him in a situation in which he cannot help but legitimise the claims of his persecutors. From this weak position, how does he construct an
effective rebuttal? The essence of the rebuttal, it transpires, resides in Hoccleve’s peculiar invocation of God, not as moral arbiter, but precisely as escape from judgment.
‘“Men in her owne cas bene blinde al day”’: The Appeal to Human Fallibility The stanza which provides the seed of this invocation is also worth quoting in full:
And therwithal I þouȝte þus anoon [presently]: ‘Men in her owne cas bene blinde al day [always], As I haue herde seie manie a day agoon,
And in þat same plite I stonde may. Howe shal I do? Wiche is the beste way My troublid spirit for to bringe in rest?
If I wiste [knew] howe, fain wolde I do the best.’ (Hoccleve 80)
The claim which I believe provides a rationale for Hoccleve’s subsequent argument is that in the second line, that ‘“Men in her owne cas bene blinde al day”’. Considering it in context is worthwhile because it highlights the fact that the idea initially serves as a piece of
commonplace wisdom (‘As I haue herde seie...’) used for self-rebuke. After attempting to restore an appearance of sanity by arranging his face before the mirror, Hoccleve reminds himself with this phrase that he is ‘blinde’ to the marks of madness which others may detect in him, and that this is therefore a futile exercise. This seems to inspire a sense of despair and helplessness, in which Hoccleve asks rhetorical questions about his own plight, and claims that he would be at peace, if he only ‘wiste howe’. The line, in other words, encapsulates a clear defeat for Hoccleve, a realisation that attempts at self-fashioning are futile when he cannot trust his own perception.
Yet the same phrase with which Hoccleve rebukes himself contains the blueprint for his subsequent rebuke of his peers. The phrasing, including the general terms ‘men’ and ‘her’ (their) renders the sense ambiguous. Is Hoccleve unable to detect his own shortcomings, or is mankind more generally unfitted to judge themselves and, crucially, one another in these
terms? It is by generalising the sense of this expression, as we will now see, that Hoccleve achieves a limited rhetorical victory over his persecutors. What began as a hopeless
resignation to the failure of his attempts at self-fashioning now transforms into the claim that if he cannot judge of his own sanity, nor can any man. He argues that ‘It is a lewidnesse | Men wiser hem pretende þan thei be’ and that ‘God, whanne him liste, may, wole and can | Helthe withdrawe’ (78). People who attempt to judge him, Hoccleve claims, are committing a ‘lewidnesse’ (an act of ignorance) and should bear in mind that the unpredictable power of God could easily treat them as it has treated him. As Harper argues, the poem ‘attests to an awareness of a gap or mismatch between outer, physical appearances and inner, mental or spiritual realities’ (388-389). Hoccleve argues that mortal man cannot see beneath the surface of his peers, or judge such deep questions as sanity from superficial visible symptoms—that only God can judge such matters.
Recalling Burrow’s remarks upon the hierarchically determined nature of shame, it could be said that Hoccleve’s persecutors have brought shame upon themselves, by
projecting shame upon him where there was none. This is what the poem seems to imply. We might call this, so far, complaint (in my sense of the word). In resisting persecution, Hoccleve appeals to an alternate power, God. Moreover, in the strongly religious context of the writing, God may be seen as representative of a set of normative values to which everyone would be expected to adhere. Indeed, Hoccleve seems to take a sort of rhetorical shelter under God; ‘“What nedith it,”’ he asks, ‘“my feble wit appeire | Sith God hath made myn helþe home repeire? | Blessid be he…”’ Shortly after this he asserts that this refuge in God gives him the strength to ‘suffre’ anything (83). And while there is no explicit appeal to God in the speech of Hoccleve’s persecutors, the association common in the period between mental instability and impiety is certainly evoked, as for example in the phrase, ‘“Se howe this man is fallen in aȝein”’ (80), referring to the possibility of a recurrence in Hoccleve’s illness. To be mentally
unsound is, implicitly, to be ‘fallen’ in the spiritual sense. Therefore we might also say that Hoccleve appeals to a belief system—Christianity—already complicit in his persecution. Yet while all of the above is true, it is too simplistic. As I have indicated, a work may contain elements of both complaint and refusal, and Hoccleve’s poem also contains strong examples of the latter. To detect these, it is necessary to examine how exactly Hoccleve invokes the divine—in short, what does Hoccleve’s God look like?
Firstly, He appears to have no particular love for Hoccleve himself. Hoccleve makes no claim to special dispensation from God, indeed attributing his illness just as much as his recovery to divine influence. Secondly, Hoccleve’s God has equally little special malice for his persecutors. At no point does Hoccleve threaten his peers with any kind of divine
retribution or disapproval should they continue to ostracise him. The ‘lewidnesse’ mentioned above is Hoccleve’s own judgment upon them, and not explicitly attributed to God. In other words, God, usually figured as the supreme judge, is here supremely non-judgmental. This image of God is more easily identified with the medieval conception of changeable Fortune than with a judgmental God who rewards good and punishes evil. A God who, ‘whanne him liste, may, wole and can’ visit illness or health upon his creations, appears to be acting more upon whim than upon careful discrimination. Hoccleve’s generic assertion in the prologue that ‘Ther is no þing but chaunge and variaunce’ (75) is transformed from defeatist cliché to powerful rhetorical tool. Hoccleve claims God as his shield from judgment, not insofar as He is on his side, but rather insofar as He is on nobody’s side.
This connects the text strongly with refusal; again, Hoccleve questions his
persecutors’ right to shame him, on the above grounds drawn out of Burrow’s remarks, but now it is evident that rather than simply dismantling the rhetorical status of his persecutors, he is attacking the very foundation upon which shaming is built: mortal man’s right to judge his peers. In essence, Hoccleve achieves a fairly radical levelling of the playing field.
Moreover, this levelling involves a reworking of the image of God to which he appeals— essentially a refusal, not of God, but of the particular perception of God upon which
persecution relies. We move rhetorically from the judgmental God of Hoccleve’s peers, Who bestows good and ill on his creations according to their virtue, to the unknowable God of Hoccleve, the basis of Whose judgments, if it exists at all, is so beyond human understanding as to appear arbitrary.
Concluding Remarks
It is worth noting that these strong elements of refusal do not render Hoccleve’s rhetoric any more forceful or self-assured than the meekness to which we are accustomed. In fact, a hypothetical alternate ‘Complaint’ in which Hoccleve called down the judgment of God upon his peers—a rhetorical move I would associate with complaint rather than refusal—would certainly be a great deal more strikingly aggressive than this. I stress this because the instinctive response is to assume that refusal, as a more radical break with tradition, will necessarily be more aggressive, self-assured and condemnatory of norms than its presumably meeker cousin, complaint. This is inaccurate. Hoccleve’s refusal of the norm of judgment leads him not to fiery condemnation of the folly of his peers, but to a rather stoic or solipsistic position, from which he considers his peers’ opinions to no longer be relevant. This erases none of his meekness or subservience to God. Indeed, in the poem’s reflective final stanza, Hoccleve thanks God for ‘my welthe and myn aduersitee’ (87). Hoccleve’s refusal is ultimately contradicted; by the poem’s conclusion he is once again referring to ‘Goddis iust doom and his iugement’ (87)—a vengeful, judgmental God quite unlike the one to Whom he previously appealed. This is difficult to reconcile with what comes before; these are, after all, precisely the kind of amor fati statements which I implicitly linked with the notion of
complaint in my introduction. It is important to acknowledge, then, that Hoccleve’s refusal is powerful in the context in which it occurs, but ultimately limited in breadth. Hoccleve does
not follow his rejection of the knowability of divine judgment to its natural conclusion, and ultimately resumes a stance which tries guiltily to account for his misfortunes precisely as divine punishment.
Yet Hoccleve’s limited refusal is important, insofar as it shows the possibilities this mode of writing from persecution presents even to one so characteristically meek, and how it can be productive not of an exhausting rebellious energy, but of a quiet, unassailable refusal of judgment. In the following chapter we will see whether Kafka’s letter, the tone of which is if anything even more cringing and uncertain, avails itself of the same rhetorical tools.
KAFKA’S ‘LETTERTO MY FATHER’
Kafka’s long, painful letter to his father never reached its intended recipient. His mother, who was to pass it on, never did so. Instead the letter, along with Kafka’s other writings,
ultimately attained a wide readership which would doubtless have mortified its author. The frankness with which the letter lays out the seemingly irreconcilable differences between its author and addressee makes it, I think, a very suitable text for this analysis. This is, of the three texts which I have taken as my objects, the one most clearly addressed to the author’s perceived persecutor. Whereas Hoccleve complains in a poem to no-one in particular, and Porpentine deals with her experiences in a magazine article, Kafka attempts to write directly to the person against whom his complaints are directed. Yet the letter’s tone is not so
unabashedly accusatory as we might expect. Kafka’s writing here, while honest about the emotions he feels and the origins which he ascribes to them, nevertheless makes at least an attempt to treat his father’s actions as non-malicious, and consequently to treat himself as partially responsible for what has come between them. Furthermore, Kafka is honest about the inhibitions and fears his father inspires in him even in writing, and the letter’s self-effacing style can be seen as one obvious product of these feelings. Finally, Kafka makes sustained, even bizarre, attempts to imagine how his father might rebut his arguments, which attest both to Kafka’s own crippling self-doubt and to his desire to give his father, as it were, a fair hearing.
These elements are all productive sites of analysis for a consideration of writing from persecution in the letter, and are all key considerations in relation to claims that could be made about its status as complaint or refusal. I will firstly approach the question of Kafka’s emotions towards his father—his paralysing fear of, and conversely almost worshipful respect for him—and the extent to which these strong feelings can be said to limit what it is
possibility of an equal exchange between both parties, while that of refusal suggests that this is sometimes unmanageable or undesirable. Secondly, I will deal with two of the letter’s most frequently reiterated claims—that neither Kafka or his father can be said to be ‘to blame for’ the problems between them, and that these problems, being the result of irreconcilable differences between their respective natures, are basically insoluble. I will observe how these claims structure the text, how they function rhetorically within its argument, and what such claims of simultaneous blamelessness and irreconcilability suggest about the possibility of dialogue between the two parties. Finally, I will conclude with what is for me the letter’s strangest and most uncomfortable element: Kafka’s repeated anticipations of his father’s responses to the arguments being presented, and especially his attempt at the end of the letter to explicitly imitate the voice of his father for a lengthy rebuttal to the arguments presented up to that point. I will consider how this ventriloquism relates to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic writing, and also how such a bizarre rhetorical choice fits in with the notions of complaint and refusal which are my key concern.
‘Why I claim to be afraid of you’: Emotion and Inhibition
In the letter’s opening lines, Kafka reminds his father of his recent request for an explanation of ‘why I claim to be afraid of you’; he claims that he ‘could not give you an answer, partly because of my fear of you’ (Kafka 555). Here we first encounter the notion that Kafka’s fear of his father can directly inhibit his verbal expression. This fear is the primary symptom of Kafka’s father’s perceived persecution of him, and it is significant to see such a symptom directly linked to an apparent inability to express the reality of that persecution. After recognising the limitations of speech for an extended explanation of his fear, Kafka asserts that ‘if I now attempt to give you a written answer, it will still only be a very incomplete one, because even as I write my fear, and the consequences of this fear, inhibit me’ (555). Within the letter’s first paragraph Kafka describes both his chosen topic—his fear of his father—and
the ‘consequences’ this fear might have upon even his own expression of it. Kafka’s fear, then, is paradoxical: it is evident from the letter’s length and rigour that he feels a very strong need to express it in some way, yet the nature of the fear is such that it cannot fail to limit what it is possible for him to express. The consequence for the letter is that persecution is expressed more often as symptom rather than as discourse.
Kafka seems to wrestle with this problem throughout the letter; that which is most inexpressible, or painful to express, is precisely that which he intends the letter to get across. His expression is very directly limited by his emotions. Later in the letter we see a clear example of this: ‘So far in this letter there is relatively little I have deliberately left unsaid; but now and later I shall have to hold back some things that are still too difficult for me to admit—to you or to myself’ (580). Obviously there is no way of knowing what exactly Kafka is holding back here, or why he feels the need to make this disclaimer at this particular point around halfway through the letter; he only writes that he is holding back ‘evidence’ which, if presented, ‘would make the picture unbearably bleak’ (580). We do not learn who precisely it is that would be unable to bear this hypothetical picture, but the gesture towards mutuality in the phrase ‘to you or to myself’ suggests that Kafka fears the full picture would be too much for both him and his father. Kafka’s fear, then, is not only of his father’s retribution, but is also fear of the consequences for both of them of Kafka’s saying too much.
So far, I have dealt only with Kafka’s direct announcements of how the letter itself was shaped by his emotions; yet elsewhere he describes in a more general sense how his feelings have inhibited his expression in his everyday life. We cannot doubt that his fears and anxieties have a strong impact upon his experience of life and health; a striking passage late in the letter describes his hypochondria, and concludes that ‘the superhuman stress of wanting to get married [...] brought on bleeding in the lungs’ (587).11 This seems an absurd statement,
11 Another passage expands upon this anxiety in similarly bodily terms: ‘from the moment I decide to marry, I am unable to sleep, my head feels feverish day and night, I stumble about in desperation’ (595). Kafka’s
but attests to the extent to which Kafka believes his physical wellbeing to have been impacted by his emotional state. Elsewhere we see the impact this has upon his powers of expression. ‘The impossibility of any calm exchanges between us’, he writes, ‘had a further effect, and a perfectly natural one: I was unable to talk’ (564). An inability to express the specifics of his fears in the letter broadens here to a general and permanent inability to speak. Going into more specifics, Kafka writes that ‘I adopted a hesitant, stuttering way of speaking, and even that was too much for you; in the end I fell silent, at first perhaps out of defiance, then because I could not think or speak in front of you’ (565). This is significant in terms of the question of refusal; silence in the face of demands for engagement is, of course, a form of refusal. Yet what apparently begins as a refusal to engage with his father’s arguments ‘out of defiance’ apparently ends in an actual inability ‘to speak or think’ in his presence. This highlights the extent to which the hallmarks of complaint and refusal are not necessarily conscious stylistic choices for authors working with them, but rather modes of expression whose use is necessitated by circumstances. Kafka is silent firstly out of defiance, but subsequently out of inability to speak.
Conversely, it is clear that the letter can in other ways be described as complaint—its direct address to the perceived persecutor, its stated ambition to ‘establish a kind of truce’ (556) between its author and recipient—and it is important to question the extent to which these gestures of engagement, too, are necessitated by Kafka’s position. Aside from his fear, the other strong feeling Kafka experiences towards his father appears to be an
almost-reverential respect. This is most clearly expressed in the passages dealing with the father’s opinions; Kafka recognises these opinions (on people, organisations, politics, etc.) as contradictory, related more to his father’s contrarian and domineering nature than any identifiable logic. Yet he is unable to reject them; he writes that his father has ‘acquired the
