LEONARD KRIEGEL
581
name of diagnosis, the mind has been burdened with the task of saving us
from illness. "Canst thou administer to a mind diseased?" cries MacBeth. In
our time, he would subscribe to ajournal of holistic medicine. Think healthy
and you are healthy. The intensity of our interest in quackery staggers the
rational mind. We peddle cures for virtually every condition known to man–
cancer, acne, heart attack, impotence, stroke, hair loss, pneumonia, bad
breath. We are deluged by books urging us to eat our way to health, to will
our way to health, to exercise our way to health, to fuck our way to health.
Physicians vie with one another for the chance to treat the soul rather than
the body - or, better yet, to treat the body through treating the soul.
And we veteran denizens of Kafka's House, even we are absorbed
not by the pathology of disease but by the psychology of those who
"allowed" disease to enter their lives. How curious that it is Michael, not his
wife, whose motives I probe. The bearer of the virus is of little interest; the
victim commands our attention. In Kafka's House, one learns how to view
terror rather than the terrorized with compassion. Just as in certain writings
about the Holocaust the implicit question addressed to the Jews is "How
could
you
let this happen?" so Michael discovers that he has been condemned
to answer his wife-jailer and guard-sons as they cry out, "How could
you
al–
low us to do this?"
Ours is a century that views weakness as sin. Even those whose lives
are intertwined with the lives of the weak become victims of their victimiza–
tion. "Why me?" compels "Why them?" The victims of the victim become the
significant bearers of his pain. His scars - the useless legs, the weak arms,
the bent shoulders - are their burden. The mind of the jailer haunts the pris–
oner. Michael's true shame is for what he has done to those who once loved
him.
It
has been almost three years since Michael last spoke to his sons.
Curiously, I can understand that. They lack the intensity of his obsession.
And they lack his belief, his sense of having been selected to suffer for the
rest of humanity. They
are
the rest of humanity. Kafka's father is the father
they desire, created as need dictates. To ask them to love their father is to
ask them to deny themselves. His ravaged body will forever rebuke their
need for strength.
What makes their resentment understandable is that they feel trapped.
Disease truly is a sharing. Only its burdens and rewards are unequal. Think
ofMichael's two sons, men themselves now, aware from the time they were
toddlers that they were physically more powerful than the man they called
"father." A father who is God's solitary beggar rebukes the very power
they seek. What they desire is a father against whom revolt might be con–
ventional, a father who seems powerful and overwhelming, a father like
Kafka's father. What they have gotten is a father who inspires in them rage
intense enough to create its own metaphysics of injustice.
