“The Thinker,” illustration by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis April 27, 2017

Lecture Outline

1.  Franz Kafka 2.  The Metamorphosis: Form, Style, & Translation 3.  Psychology of Space 4.  A Marxist Reading

Franz Kafka •  Born in 1883

•  From a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague

•  Complicated relationship with father

–  Father was overbearing, authoritarian, and temperamental

–  Profound impact on Kafka’s works

•  Studied law at the University of Prague then worked for various insurance companies for most of his life

•  Suffered from depression, anxiety, and insomnia for much of his adult life, occasionally suicidal

•  Wrote The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) in 1912 but didn’t publish it until 1915 due to outbreak of World War I

•  Died in 1924 of tuberculosis

•  Asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he had written

•  Impact of his works

–  Only known to small group of readers during lifetime

–  The Metamorphosis banned in Nazi Germany and Soviet Union

The Metamorphosis: Form and Style •  Short story •  First published in Die wiessen Blätter, a German expressionist monthly

magazine –  Modernist movement that sought to express emotional experience

over physical reality, opposed to rationalistic views of world •  Three parts •  Kafka’s style

–  Mixes realism with the fantastic –  Reflection of modern condition:

•  Alienation and anxiety •  Absurdity: conflict between our desire for meaning and the

world’s indifference to that desire and refusal to provide meaning

–  Known for precision and terseness –  “Kafkaesque”

Kafka’s biographer Frederick Karl to The New York Times in 1991…

“What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.”

Translation •  First sentence: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams

he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect” (67).

•  What exactly does Gregor transform into?

–  “Gigantic insect”—Ungeheueres ungeziefer

•  “monstrous” or “huge”

•  From Middle High German ungezibere, a negation (“un”) of Old High German zebar, meaning “sacrificial animal”

–  Unclean animal unfit for sacrifice

–  In German, suggests six-legged insects

–  Related to English word “vermin” (rodents)

–  In correspondence with publisher, Kafka refers to Gregor as an insekt, but insisted that the insect never be drawn on the book’s cover

–  With his friends, casually referred to Gregor as wanze, or bug

!  Nabokov on “insect” o  Lepidopterist, entomologist, and literary critic o  A “big beetle”

•  Convex body divided into segments •  Hard, rounded back—wing cases?

!  When Grete can’t find Gregor, she asks, “he couldn’t have flown away, could he” (90)?

Reproduction of Nabokov’s annotated copy of The Metamorphosis

•  How strange is this metamorphosis?

–  Is Gregor literally a bug?

•  The story suggests so…

–  Life as a commercial traveler is disorienting

–  “Gregor is a human being in an insect’s disguise; his family are insects disguised as people.”–Nabokov

–  David Cronenberg on Gregor’s transformation: “I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man. Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis? [. . .] We have both awakened to a forced awareness of what we really are, and that awareness is profound and irreversible; in each case, the delusion soon proves to be a new, mandatory reality, and life does not continue as it did.”

Psychology of Space

•  Reading The Metamorphosis

–  Very easy to get caught up in plot and character development

–  Pay attention to the way Kafka uses and moves things in space (rooms, doors, furniture, appliances, etc.)

•  Family drama expressed through Kafka’s control of space

•  Gregor and the picture frame (76)

–  Is this Kafka?

Gregor’s mother to the chief clerk:

“The boy thinks about nothing but his work. It makes me almost cross the way he never goes out in the evenings; he’s been here the last eight days and has stayed at home every single evening. He just sits there quietly at the table reading a newspaper or looking through railway timetables. The only amusement he gets is doing fretwork. For instance, he spent two or three evenings cutting out a little picture frame.” (75-6)

Doors •  Interpretive key to understanding family drama

–  Gregor hopes the clerk and his parents won’t “open the door” (74) so he doesn’t have to go to work

–  “Open the door” becomes a command (75)

–  When they hear Gregor’s inhuman voice, they tear “open the front door [. . .] and [leave] it open, as one does in houses where some great misfortune has happened” (79)

–  Gregor painfully struggles to open the door (80-81)

–  Finally opens the door…and “he was still invisible when it was really wide open” (81)

–  Family members “open a little and quickly shut” the doors to his room, as if they want to come in but can’t (89)

–  “When the doors were locked, they had all wanted to come in, now that he had opened one door and the other had apparently been opened during the day, no one came in” (89).

–  Presses his body against the door to eavesdrop on his family (93)

•  “clinging upright to the door” (95)

•  “out of sheer weariness he had to [. . .] let his head fall negligently against the door” (95)

–  As his condition worsens, the doors are “always thrown open, so that lying in the darkness of his room, invisible to the family, he could see them all at the lamp-lit table and listen to their talk, by general consent as it were” (111)

–  When the lodgers come, the doors are shut again (118)

The Couch and the Sheet •  Gregor’s “apprehension” and “shame” (90)

–  He “scuttled under the sofa, where he felt comfortable at once, although his back was a little cramped and he could not lift his head up, and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get the whole of it under the sofa” (90)

–  To “help the family bear the inconvenience he caused them” (90)

•  His kindness

–  Realizes that he is “repulsive” (99) to Grete and his mother

–  To spare Grete, “he carried a sheet on his back to the sofa—it cost him four hours’ labor—and arranged it there in such a way as to hide him completely” (99)

–  Repeats this on p. 101

Grete’s evolution

•  From kindness to repulsion…

–  Puts the armchair near the window for Gregor (98)

–  Takes Gregor’s food away “not with her bare hands, true, but with a cloth” (91)

–  Shovels leftovers, “even the things he had not touched,” into a bucket, “which she covered with a wooden lid and carried away” (92)

–  Later, she stops bringing food that he likes, pushes “into his room with her foot any food that was available,” and cleans it up “with one sweep of the broom” (114)

Gregor’s Room

•  Grete and her mother debate whether it’s best to leave the room as is or to make room for Gregor to crawl about (100-3)

–  Mother’s view: easier to forget what happened when Gregor changes back if we leave the furniture as is, he’s used to the furniture

–  Grete’s view: he never uses the furniture and needs more space to crawl about in

–  Both think themselves “experts” (103), Gregor has no choice

–  Gregor initially agrees with Grete, then his mother

•  Room becomes storage (117) for “things there was no room for elsewhere”

The Metamorphosis: A Marxist Reading

•  The plight of the proletariat under capitalism

•  The Samsas: a proletarian family

•  Chief clerk: member of the bourgeoisie

•  Marx

–  On wage labor

•  “The labourer [. . .] is allowed to live only in so far as the ruling class requires it” (Marx, Pt. 2)

–  On human relationships, especially the family

•  “The bourgeoisie [. . .] has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (Marx, Pt. 1)

The Opening

•  Gregor’s profession: commercial traveler, cloth salesman

–  Already wearied and alienated before the metamorphosis (68-70)

–  Only works to help out family

•  Fathers’ debts due to “the collapse of his business five years earlier” (94)

•  Portrait of woman in fur: a bourgeois dream? (67, 105)

Chief Clerk

•  Arrives (74)

•  First day Gregor has ever missed, and clerk personally comes to his house to check on him

•  Gregor’s “incredible” neglect of work (77)

•  Gregor fears what would happen if he missed one day of work

–  Wage laborer kept in “bare existence” (Marx, Pt. 2)

The Proletarian Family

•  Family relation reduced to “mere money relation” (Marx, Pt. 1)

–  Family deteriorates under miserable conditions of proletariat

–  They’ve saved up money! (94, 96)

–  But Gregor lives to provide for his family

•  Gains sense of pride from it

•  Wants to send his sister to study at the Conservatorium because she loves music (95)

“He had been of the opinion that nothing at all was left over from his father’s business, at least his father had never said anything to the contrary, and of course he had not asked him directly. At that time Gregor’s sole desire was to do his utmost to help the family to forget as soon as possible the catastrophe which had overwhelmed the business and thrown them all into a state of complete despair. And so he had set to work with unusual ardor and almost overnight had become a commercial traveler instead of a little clerk, with of course much greater chances of earning money, and his success was immediately translated into good round coin which he could lay on the table for his amazed and happy family. [. . .] Gregor had earned so much money that he was able to meet the expenses of the whole household and did so. They had simply got used to it, both the family and Gregor; the money was gratefully accepted and gladly given, but there was no special uprush of warm feeling.” (95)

•  Gregor “kept only a few dollars for himself” (96)

•  He could have “paid off some more of his father’s debts to the chief with this extra money” (96)

•  Gregor rationalizes his family’s despicable behavior…

–  “doubtless it was better the way his father had arranged it” (96)

–  Gregor feels “shame” and “grief” for being unable to help his family in his current state (97)

–  His father is too old “to be expected to do much” (97)

–  His mother suffers from asthma

–  His sister is “still a child of seventeen and whose life hitherto had been so pleasant” (97)

Condition of the Wage Laborer •  Trying to escape his father, Gregor “simply [goes] forward [. . .]

having almost forgotten that the walls were free to him” (109)

•  With Gregor unable to work, his family is forced to work (111)

–  Father keeps “his uniform on even in the house”

–  Mother sews for an underwear firm

–  Grete become a salesgirl

–  Family of wage laborers

•  “overworked and tired-out” (112-13)

•  Bring in lodgers to help pay rent

•  Have kept servants, but now plan to let them go

•  “They fulfilled to the uttermost all that the world demands of poor people” (113)

Ending •  Gregor’s death

–  Before his death he’s already a commodity, regarded by his family in terms of money he brings in

–  Grete deems Gregor an “it” (124)

•  A commodity that has lost its value to the family and must be dispensed with

•  Thinks of his family with “tenderness and love” (127)

•  False happy ending

–  Family calls in sick to work and leaves the apartment

–  “prospects for the future” (132)

–  “the jobs they had got [. . .] were all three admirable and likely to lead to better things later on” (132)

•  Grete commodified (132)

“It struck both Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, almost at the same moment, as they became aware of their daughter’s increasing vivacity, that in spite of all the sorrow of recent times, which had made her cheeks pale, she had bloomed into a pretty girl with a good figure. They grew quieter and half unconsciously exchanged glances of complete agreement, having come to the conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.” (132)

•  He sacrifices himself, but for what?

–  To no longer be an “inconvenience” (90)

–  He dies, and his sister takes his place as the new object to be exploited

•  Exploitation of wage laborer: “naked, shameless, direct, brutal” (Marx, Pt. 1)

–  Unlike Christ, Gregor is not a “redeemer”

•  Gregor died for nothing, world indifferent to his death (the absurd)

–  World has no place for his “tenderness and love” (127)

•  Gregor’s “personal worth” was his “exchange value” (Marx, Pt. 1)

–  Once that value was lost, Gregor became dispensable

–  These are the burdens of capitalism, of the modern condition!

•  Exploitation, alienation, brokenness, indifference