Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Trayler

Introduction

Rather like ‘Orwellian’, the term ‘Kafkaesque’ has come to be used, often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka, to describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night (or, in the case of Josef K. in The Trial, just before breakfast). Kafka appears to have articulated, even to have prefigured, many of the horrors and terrors of twentieth-century existence, the Angst of a post-Nietzschean world in which God is dead, in which there is therefore no ultimate authority, no final arbiter of truth, justice, or morality. Ironically, for all his own debilitating diffidence and his reported instructions to have all his unpublished works destroyed after his death, Kafka has become established as a towering, ‘iconic’ figure of twentieth-century literature.

There have, of course, been dissenting voices. For much Marxist orthodoxy, Kafka was a negative exemplar of self-absorbed bourgeois defeatism, burdening posterity with his own neuroses, unproductive and enfeebling. His works were banned in Nazi Germany (he was both Jewish and a ‘degenerate’ mod-ernist), and met with official disapproval in post-war Eastern bloc countries, including his native Czechoslovakia. Only occasionally were there defiant attempts to revive official interest, notably in the Prague Spring of 1968; but it was not until after 1989 that his works were freely available in most of Eastern Europe. From a quite different direction, the American critic Edmund Wilson characterised Kafka memorably and provocatively as a ‘Brocken Spectre’. This is a phenomenon occasionally glimpsed by mountaineers when a low sun throws a climber’s shadow across cloud or mist in a valley or corrie below; the shadow appears impressively huge, with an iridescent halo around its head. The point of Wilson’s analogy is that the size of the shadow is an illusion; in physical reality it is far smaller than it appears – as is the shadow cast by Kafka over modern literary consciousness.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the son of Hermann Kafka, an itinerant Jewish trader from provincial Bohemia who established a successful haberdashery business in the capital shortly before Franz’s birth, and of Julie Löwy, who came from a prosperous family of more orthodox, but culturally and professionally assimilated German-Jewish origins. Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German was the official language of the future Czechoslovakia; the language of the Kafka household was German, and Franz was given a German education. For all his strange uniqueness, he belongs firmly and consciously within a German literary and cultural tradition – though he was also familiar with foreign writers such as Kierkegaard, Strindberg, Dostoyevsky, and Dickens; he also learned to write in Czech, knew Yiddish and taught himself some Hebrew. A lonely childhood, a delicate constitution and progressive ill-health (which Kafka attributed to, or at least regarded as a manifestation of, a psychic or spiritual sickness), the consciousness of belonging to a minority (or of being a hybrid; see the story of that name) in at least two senses – a Jew in Austro-Hungary, a German writer in Czech Bohemia; and above all a fraught and problematic relationship with his overbearing, philistine and opinionated father – all these factors must have conspired to mark Kafka as a writer who articulated the vision of a fragile, insecure and vertiginous existence.

For all the nightmarish insecurities of his imaginative work and his own inner life, Kafka’s professional career was, by contrast, remarkably ordered (though increasingly disrupted by sickness). In 1903 he took a law degree at the German University of Prague, and after a brief spell with the Assicurazioni Generali, in 1908 he joined the clerical staff of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, working diligently and conscientiously until 2.00 p.m., when he would devote himself to writing, frequently into the night. He occupied a responsible post before taking retirement on grounds of ill-health in 1922. A series of fraught and ill-fated sexual relationships with women – he broke off two engagements, to Felice Bauer and Julie Wohryzek; the former haunts the pages of much of his writing in various guises – ended with a brief affair with Dora Dymant, with whom he moved to Berlin in 1923. He was admitted to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died of laryngeal tuberculosis in 1924. Before his death, Kafka instructed his literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work – including his major novels The Trial and The Castle. Brod ignored his instructions, and edited and collated the surviving manuscripts himself – which has led to some uncertainty about the authentic versions; many of Kafka’s major works are incomplete, much re-editing has been done, and even today new manuscripts appear from time to time. Three of the stories in this collection (Metamorphosis, The Judgement and In the Penal Colony) were published during Kafka’s lifetime.

The interface of biography and imaginative fiction in Kafka’s writing is complex and elusive, but the many parallels are striking and tantalising. He seems to invite a degree of ident-ification in many details of his work, naming the principal figures of his major novels Josef K. in The Trial, and in The Castle simply K. He remarked, perhaps whimsically, to Felice Bauer (to whom The Judgement is dedicated) that the name Georg Bende[mann] had faint traces of ‘Franz Kafka’; [Gregor] Samsa has a similar vowel/consonant pattern to ‘Kafka’; and it is scarcely coincidental that Fräulein Bürstner in The Trial or Frieda Brandenfeld in The Judgement recall the initials of Felice Bauer. In the Penal Colony, however, is a striking exception to this parallelism; it appears to be derived from Kafka’s reading of accounts of typical (French or German) colonial settlements in Africa or the Caribbean – perhaps even specifically from accounts of the notorious French colony of Devil’s Island. It examines in a disturbingly graphic way issues of guilt, justice, punishment and atonement, and suggests a historical watershed between a shockingly arbitrary and barbarous penal system and the more liberal, enlightened ethos of the visiting traveller from Europe. It is not, however, unequivocally clear that the progressive justice represented by the new governor (and endorsed by the traveller) will prevail; instead, the story suggests uneasily that the sinister forces of the old régime are not dead, but – only temporarily, perhaps – in abeyance. As so often with Kafka, the issue is poised on a disturbingly ambiguous knife-edge.

More evidently parallel to Kafka’s personal experience, however obliquely and grotesquely, is his best-known piece of short fiction, Metamorphosis [to which I have given the alternative, but unauthorised, subtitle The Transformation of Gregor Samsa. Metamorphosis is a term freighted with biological, even entomo-logical associations; and while this might seem particularly appropriate for the transformation of a human being into an insect, Kafka chooses the word Verwandlung rather than the usual German term for the biological process, Metamorphose.]

Both Metamorphosis and The Judgement (which might equally well, or even better, be titled The Sentence) are bizarre and nightmarish accounts, seen through the distorting mirror of Kafka’s imagination, of his relationship with his family, and quite particularly with his father: a severely conflicting and harrowing mix of fear and love, filial guilt and pietas, responsibility and resentment, comfort and anguish, devotion and rebellion, insecurity and self-loathing. They are of course fictional accounts; but the Letter to my Father, a central text to the understanding of both Kafka’s personality and much of his fiction, shows just how close both stories are to his own psychology and his perception of his relationship with his family.

To be sure, this letter, written when Kafka was thirty-six (this is no adolescent outburst, but a savage and considered analysis of many years of frustration – which he did not, in the end, actually show to his father), is scarcely straight autobiography; just as Metamorphosis and The Judgement are autobiographical fiction, the letter might be described as fictional autobiography. It presents not only Kafka’s perception of his father, but also Kafka’s imagined account of the father’s perception of his son – indeed, in the interjection towards the end of the letter, ‘Franz’ allows his father a (brief) right of reply, as it were; but this section is itself written entirely from the son’s perspective. It is true that ‘Franz’ appears at times to be almost as critical of himself as he is of his father, and is (over-)eager to explain on several occasions that he does not blame his father for the way this overbearing and overpoweringly self-confident parent has undermined the son’s sense of adequacy and security; but these convoluted assurances often appear at best disingenuous. In particular, the ‘Franz’ of the letter manages to turn even the father’s occasions of kindness and benevolence into material for his own resentment – because these occasions only increased the son’s sense of guilt ‘and made the world yet more incomprehensible for me’. This outrageous checkmating of any remotely favourable understanding of the father’s behaviour calls to mind the Jewish story illustrating the gift of chutzpah: a young boy murders his parents, and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he is an orphan.

The father is relentlessly held responsible for ‘Franz’s’ anxieties, obsessions, insecurities, his guilt feelings, his unfitness for marriage or a career, his dislocated relationship to society and religion, his inadequate sense of Jewishness, his sexual ignorance, even his physical weakness – in short, for his unfitness for life (as a colleague of mine is given to saying, at least half-seriously: ‘It’s his Dad I feel sorry for’). The letter to his father also throws a direct light on the related stories in a striking way: at one point ‘Franz’ describes how even his mother’s love and protectiveness would prevent his ‘escape’ and drive him back into his father’s ‘sphere of control’, where he became once again a ‘creature that shunned the light’ – an unmistakable echo of Gregor Samsa’s insect instincts to scuttle away from the light or from the eyes of his family. And in the father’s interjection towards the end of the letter, ‘Franz’ puts into his father’s mouth a comparison of his son to a ‘verminous insect’ – the very word, Ungeziefer, with which the account of Gregor Samsa’s transformation opens.

The first four prose works in this selection – the three fictional stories and the confessional, at times self-exculpatory, at times self-lacerating letter – appear to present an unrelieved picture of bleak hopelessness, guilt, self-loathing and self-pity, shame and arbitrary punishment, for all that there are occasional flashes of bizarre or grotesque humour: the clumsy efforts of Gregor Samsa to control his insect body and come to terms with his new existence, the headlong flight of the chief clerk, the routing of the three comical lodgers. Indeed, we are told, hard as it may be to credit, that when Kafka read from the manuscript of Metamorphosis to his friends, he would frequently burst into fits of laughter. But it is in some of the small parables and fables Kafka wrote that his gift for black humour can be detected; opaque and even despairing they may be, but there is some dark comedy of the absurd in the parable on metaphors, in the policeman’s advice to ‘give it up’, and in the cat’s laconic advice to the mouse before it eats it.

John R. Williams

St Andrews 2011

Suggestions for Further Reading

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Albert Camus, The Outsider

Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

Nadine Gordimer, Letter from his Father

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Franz Kafka, The Castle

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Metamorphosis

and other stories

Metamorphosis

The Transformation of Gregor Samsa

1

One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a huge verminous insect. He lay on his hard shell-like back, and when he raised his head slightly he saw his rounded brown underbelly, divided into a series of curved ridges, on which the bedding could scarcely stay in place and was about to slip off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin relative to the rest of his body, wriggled helplessly in front of his eyes.

‘What has happened to me?’ he thought. It was not a dream. His room, quite adequate for one person though rather too small, was there as usual with its familiar four walls. Spread out on the table was a collection of samples of material he had unpacked – Samsa was a travelling salesman – and above it hung the picture he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and set in a handsome gilt frame. It showed a lady with a fur hat and wrap sitting upright and holding out towards the viewer a heavy fur muff which covered the whole of her forearm.

Then Gregor turned his eyes towards the window, and the dreary weather – he could hear the rain dripping onto the metal window-ledge – made him feel quite depressed. ‘Why don’t I just sleep on a little longer and forget all this nonsense,’ he thought, but that was quite impossible; he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present situation he could not get into that position. However hard he tried to throw himself to the right, he always rolled onto his back again. He must have tried a hundred times; he closed his eyes so he did not have to see his wriggling legs, and only gave up when he began to feel a slight dull ache in his side that he had never felt before.

‘Oh God,’ he thought, ‘what a strenuous job I’ve chosen! On the move day in, day out. The stresses of this work are much greater than in the office at home, and on top of that I’m plagued with all this travelling, have to worry about catching trains, put up with irregular bad meals and constantly meeting different people for a short time without ever getting to know them more closely. To hell with it!’ He felt a slight itch on his belly and squirmed slowly on his back towards the bedpost so that he could raise his head more easily. He found the place that was itching; it was covered with small white spots that he could not account for. He tried to feel the place with one of his legs, but withdrew it immediately because he felt a cold shiver whenever he touched it.

He slid back to his previous position. ‘All this getting up early,’ he thought, ‘numbs the mind. One has to have one’s sleep. Other travellers live like women in a harem. For instance, if I go back to my lodgings during the morning to dispatch the orders I’ve taken, these gentlemen are just having their breakfast. I should try that with my boss – he’d sack me on the spot. Still, who knows, that might suit me very well. If it weren’t for the sake of my parents I’d have given notice long ago, I would have gone up to the boss and told him what I thought from the bottom of my heart. He would have fallen off his desk! It’s a strange way he has, too, of sitting up there on his desk and talking down to his employees, and what’s more, you have to go right up to him because he’s hard of hearing. Well, I haven’t given up all hope yet; once I’ve saved enough money to pay off what my parents owe him – it can’t be more than another five or six years – I’ll do it for sure. Then that will be the end of it. Still, for the moment I must get up; my train goes at five.’

He looked at the alarm clock that was ticking on the chest of drawers. ‘Dear God in heaven!’ he thought. It was half past six, and the hands were moving steadily on, it was even gone half past, getting on for quarter to. Had the alarm not gone off? He could see from his bed that it had been set correctly for four o’clock; it must have rung. Yes – but was it possible to sleep peacefully through that din that shook the furniture? Well, he had not slept peacefully, though probably all the more deeply. But what was he to do now? The next train went at seven; to catch it he would have to make a mad dash, the samples hadn’t been packed yet, and he didn’t feel particularly fresh and lively himself either. And even if he did catch the train he wouldn’t avoid a thunderous rebuke from his boss, because the message boy from the firm would have been waiting for the five o’clock train and would have reported his absence long since; he was the boss’s creature, spineless and stupid. What if he were to call in sick? But that would be extremely embarrassing and suspicious, for Gregor had never once been sick in five years’ service. His boss would surely come along with the doctor from the insurance company, he would complain to his parents about their lazy son and dismiss any excuses by referring to the doctor, who regarded everyone as perfectly healthy but sometimes workshy. Besides, would he be so very wrong in this case? Gregor did in fact feel quite well, apart from feeling drowsy, which was really quite unwarranted after such a long sleep; indeed, he even felt extremely