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– KENNETH GROSS – these messages for the child (he whose own letters to his family and lovers could be so relentlessly unconsoling, anxious, accusatory, and self-wounding, also wildly funny)? I try to imagine Kafka at his writing table, a year from his death, working to frame a true voice for the doll, to honour the child’s need and innocence, shaping a story that would answer her mourning and also her appetite for truth. He might have reflected on the bafflement, the sense of isolation, that he himself could feel in the face of ordinary objects as well as persons. He might have thought of the actual lost doll lying beneath a hedge, exposed to the weather, wearing away with its glass eyes open, or seized on by a dog, or by another child. The letters would have been kind. They could not have helped being strange. These letters would offer a curious pendant to Kafka’s ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. The story describes a creature-object named Odradek, not quite a doll, rather a thing framed of wooden sticks, a spool, broken bits of thread, able to stand and speak, yet lacking a face or hands. This miniature object looks like something improvised, or like a remnant of some larger construction, and yet, the narrator insists, it is obviously whole, with no part of it unfinished. Kafka makes us feel vividly its crude and careful making, its fitted oddness, even as he keeps it hard to visualize. Odradek is elusive, an artifact and yet alive, if also purposeless, and indifferent to human interest. Questioned by the narrator, it speaks like a child, giving short answers – x
page 13
– Introduction – ‘“Well, what’s your name?” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you live?” “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs.’ Its laughter is inhuman, ‘like the rustling of fallen leaves’, a sound ‘that has no lungs behind it’. The sorrows of the narrator – a parent, a householder – come partly from the fact that this dolllike thing cannot be lost, that its travels remain within the space of his house. Odradek writes no letters. Often as it seems to disappear, it keeps on turning up again, not to be laid hold of, rolling up and down the stairs of his house – and will keep doing so, ‘before the feet of my children, and my children’s children’. ‘He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.’ Odradek might be an image of our memories, our disowned thoughts and histories; or of a child escaping human care, yet challenging it; or simply an evocation of the unknown spaces, noises, dust, lost objects, and small animals that fill any house, marking the fragility and strange power of these things. Odradek becomes one of a population of other such domestic visitants in Kafka’s stories, his lamb-kitten and donkey-greyhound, the shy beast that haunts the synagogue, or the anxious animal who narrates ‘The Burrow’. Many of the essays in this collection evoke the mysterious roots of the child’s relation to its toys, the nature of the impulse to play, what it means for the child to enter into always changing relation to such objects (things xi

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– KENNETH GROSS –

these messages for the child (he whose own letters to his family and lovers could be so relentlessly unconsoling, anxious, accusatory, and self-wounding, also wildly funny)? I try to imagine Kafka at his writing table, a year from his death, working to frame a true voice for the doll, to honour the child’s need and innocence, shaping a story that would answer her mourning and also her appetite for truth. He might have reflected on the bafflement, the sense of isolation, that he himself could feel in the face of ordinary objects as well as persons. He might have thought of the actual lost doll lying beneath a hedge, exposed to the weather, wearing away with its glass eyes open, or seized on by a dog, or by another child. The letters would have been kind. They could not have helped being strange.

These letters would offer a curious pendant to Kafka’s ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. The story describes a creature-object named Odradek, not quite a doll, rather a thing framed of wooden sticks, a spool, broken bits of thread, able to stand and speak, yet lacking a face or hands. This miniature object looks like something improvised, or like a remnant of some larger construction, and yet, the narrator insists, it is obviously whole, with no part of it unfinished. Kafka makes us feel vividly its crude and careful making, its fitted oddness, even as he keeps it hard to visualize. Odradek is elusive, an artifact and yet alive, if also purposeless, and indifferent to human interest. Questioned by the narrator, it speaks like a child, giving short answers –

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