Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Joshua writes
, where he writes book reviews, cultural criticism, and general insightful essays.Here, Joshua brings that trademark insight to a story close to my own heart — Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Enjoy!
There has been far from any shortage of writings on Franz Kafka. These range from the more grounded and tactile—although those are too few—to the excessive, convoluted, or bloviating with the latter ranging from Paul Goodman to Judith Butler. It has reached the point where myself even making this comment is cliché as even commenting on the scale of Kafka writings is now common. Here is an excerpt from a quite recent introduction to a Kafka collection by the acclaimed novelist Joshua Cohen:
Kafka's charachters have no choice but to suffer Kafka. We readers, however, have chosen to submit to his machinery of our own free will, and we have done so in every generation since Kafka's own, in the process producing thousands of essays and academic papers, over a hundred biographies, over a dozen films and TV shows, not to mention the Kafka branding industry...
This inflicts upon me some guilt in adding (or an attempt as such) to the expanse.
Amidst the sea of essays written by scholars of lofty positions and some of his fellow great writers such as Mann, Updike, and Nabokov, one of my favourites is from none other than Canada's preeminent filmmaker, David Cronenberg. In his 2014 essay—pertinent as it is solely on the work in question, the Metamorphosis—he writes the following succinct and perspicacious note on the plight of Gregor Samsa:
But the Samsa family is the Samsabeetle's context and his cage, and his subservience to the needs of his family both before and after his transformation extends, ultimately, to his realization that it would be more convenient for them if he just disappeared, it would be an expression of his love for them, in fact, and so he does just that, by quietly dying.
As with much of the Kafka scholarship there is immense focus on all sorts of psychoanalytic gibberish and arcane symbolism but Cronenberg gets to the important crux of the matter quite easily as much of Kafka's work, although profound, is that simple.
Following Gregor's transformation, or Verwandlung, as per the German title, everything goes quickly awry for Gregor. The initial segment—which also offers some of Kafka's beloved witty and dark humour—has Gregor much less concerned about his well-being than being late for work and what effect that may have on his career, and thus, the income of the family, for which he is nearly the sole breadwinner of his household which contains himself, his younger sister, and his parents. His manager from his office comes in to aggressively inquire into Gregor's brief absence, despite Gregor's more than stellar record of work-ethic and punctuality. All simultaneously discover what has happened to Gregor and the manager slinks away as his family are more taken aback in horror than out of concern for what has happened to Gregor.
Gregor's voice has been badly distorted from his state but he's not entirely incapable of communicating. His thoughts are merely not considered to exist, as if they cannot possibly exist, and throughout the story, the family carries on as if Gregor can neither speak nor even hear. Over numerous periods, the family laments their now present financial woes in the face of the fact they're giving that more thought than to the person who, until now, was the source of their financial stability, and that the fact that he cannot attend to such matters is from being in such a dire condition.
At one point his sister, being of well intent—as far as one can tell—instructs the family that the furniture must be removed from Gregor's bedroom so that he can have more room to shuffle about. The mother beseeches that the furniture mustn't be moved, supposedly to accommodate Gregor as it can then be left as it is for “when Gregor returns to us”—as if he will, by divine intervention, abruptly morph back to his previous state—and that so with the room unchanged, that Gregor can pretend nothing has occurred. This notion is to aid the mother's delusional and self-serving state of mind, but Gregor overhears this, and through his submissive and resigned disposition, convinces himself that this is reasonable and partial to his interests, even though Kafka overtly makes this clear to not be the case. Although, the sister's will prevails and even as they begin to move everything out, Gregor is earnestly dismayed at the thought of his pictures and beloved desk being removed—and with everything else gone, he would still have ample space anyway to scurry around. The sister doesn't consider to consult Gregor if there may be any degree of discrimination required as for what should go or stay. Even then, the endeavour ends up being abandoned—and then some—as near the end of the story, Gregor's room becomes a dumping-ground for all manner of items from around the apartment when the family takes in three lodgers for extra income and Gregor's space ends up so cluttered than he can no longer move at all.
Everything worsens as time progresses. The family becomes more and more irritated with their burden. The father becomes violent, and the combination of direct assaults and accidental injuries inflicted on Gregor in moments of distress leaves Gregor with a litany of serious wounds. Still, Gregor expresses his love for his family and his guilt for being such a hindrance. He recalls lovely past moments with his father and longs for his sister—who's derided by the lodgers—to spend more time with him as he would love her company and to hear her violin playing. Gregor ends up dying of starvation—which is eerily prophetic, as that would be Kafka's own fate, being unable to eat from tuberculosis twelve years after finishing the story's draft—and nothing inherent to his condition designated that it was terminal. His fate came from his inability to go on, and he was no longer able to eat from the accrual of his injuries atop his feelings of depression and shame; he died from environmental circumstances following the transformation, not the transformation itself. After Gregor's death is unceremoniously announced by the uncouth charwoman, the family is initially elated but the family's excitement quickly changes over to sadness. Near the end, the family deemed that Gregor was no longer him but “it”. He was a cretin thrust in their midst but now they'd, albeit briefly, considered how they've lost their important family member. Just as quickly, they move on from that grief and partake in a family outing to the country. They speak joyfully of their new found jobs—needed from Gregor's inability to keep working—even though they were purportedly distraught about them while Gregor lived. In closing, the family observes the daughter is now a beautiful woman. As they treated Gregor as a commodity, they see now the daughter as an asset to be married off.
The most key factor in the story is the first sentence. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect, as per the well known Muir translation. I don't say this regarding the sentence's status as one of the literature's most heralded but for what it describes, especially the last two words. I'm not fond of any of the Muir translations; I find they've had the proclivity to sacrifice the essence of Kafka's writing to make it seem akin to more conventional English writing of the time. Oxford German professor Ritchie Robertson has noted Kafka's writing as containing “oddly official, legal language”, or as a Bavarian friend of mine once said to me that reading Kafka is akin to reading an insurance pamphlet. Some other words can be dissected and elaborated upon but I'll confine this to “ungeheueres Ungeziefer” which the Muirs translate as “gigantic insect”. Michael Hofmann translated it as “monstrous cockroach”, being more specific with the noun. In a more recent translation, Susan Bernofsky combines the two with “monstrous insect”. We imagine Gregor as some sort of cockroach or beetle-like being because of the descriptions throughout the story. In her translators note, Bernofsky outlines that “Ungeziefer” is general for being more of a pest, or better yet, vermin—but more frequently of the insect variety. But in English a vermin makes one consider a rodent. Her translation lands more true as she moves away from being too specific with the noun, as with Hofmann, but focuses on being more exact to convey Kafka's meaning with the adjective, unlike the Muirs. From the first sentence Kafka doesn't merely tell us a man has become a big bug as some interpret: making the story more so a hip, surrealist venture. But, Kafka tells us Gregor is now something that is a pest to those in his surroundings.
As per the theme of this publication, how does this seminal work relate to myself? In the aforementioned Cronenberg essay, he contrasts Gregor's transformation with the aged and infirm, and his thoughts on his own aging. This holds as Kafka isn't clear that anything specific may put one in such a position. As for me, I feel, and have much of my life, to be a ungeheueres Ungeziefer.
As for literary works that are important to me, I can consider my attachment to the likes of Orwell or Tolkien from my youth, thus being fairly formative, or works I am drawn to at present for their notable literary value with the likes of Shakespeare, Faulkner, McCarthy, Knausgård, Atwood and many more. But none I feel a more personal attachment to than Kafka and none of his works more so than this short fable. In my poor state, and as my life has gone on, I have found out that the worse one's state of ill-being becomes, and health declines, the more you repel rather than attract more lovingly sympathetic attention in accordance with the degradation of one's state. I can understand The Metamorphosis as I can see a connection with all the details in reality: those who are ostensibly close to you turning on you and making matters worse; the imposed focus toward the hindrance one's own present existence may cause for another—even if such disruptions are relatively trivial; the superficiality of many relations and observing that once true trials and travails are shown, that supposed bonds swiftly shatter; and the sentiment that the most selfless and kind act one in such a position may grant is to simply dissipate from sight and presence in totality.
Within modernism there are some writers who kept one foot in the preceding realism, with such examples as Hamsun, Conrad, and Hemingway. Kafka has appeared on the opposite end, seemingly the most removed from realism, except for perhaps Joyce. In actuality, Kafka brings reality and truth forward—and not simply a subjective perspective—more than all except for a minuscule amount of others. What we so often perceive as our reality—in our social, familial, or political lives—is often not fully true, nor some outright delusion, but is largely a veneer. We are surrounded by so much pretense, proprietary codes masquerading as sincere conduct, and general superficiality. This all isn't exactly not real but isn't truly demonstrative of actual truth, all of which I deem “anti-reality”, as it isn't a wholly separate untruth but acts that do, or may, contort truth. Kafka acts to peel back this veneer. He was able to use his strange little stories which have too often been wrongly deemed as only bizarre, quirky, or absurd and uses them as a lens to show us all the deeper truths that are beneath. In this regard—not to even mention aesthetically—The Metamorphosis is a triumph.
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Oh, this was wonderful. The metamorphosis has a profound impact of me, too, and now I feel I must go back and reread. Thank you so much.
Perceptive reading! I am always haunted by the use of the word “empty” to describe Gregor’s dying thoughts in the translation that I favor. Maybe the greatest tragedy is the anticlimactic death stripped of catharsis & shaped by self-objectification in response to the cruel treatment he has received from his family members—the utilitarian monsters of this subversive fable.