Kafka's Metamorphosis

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Place of Execution for the Genres of European Culture.

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

We tend to approach our literature with fairly set ideas.  Thus a novel has to have an ending; if it lacks one it is a poor novel. But while it may be a poor novel, it is so only as long as a poor novel is not considered to be of itself poor literature. Not just literary style but also literary form rely crucially on significant departures from what readers have come to expect. To give just one example: you will notice that quotes in a work of literature have more often than not been meaningfully misquoted.

If one looks at the origins of German literature in the seventeenth century one will realize that expressive and creative literature could only develop once the local language societies had developed in the educated reader a sense of the apt and proper in language and in genre. The language societies also fostered translations of the major works of European literature. These contained stories and styles which authors could copy but from which they could just as well depart, along with a fund of notable passages which could be quoted, misquoted or quoted out of context with at least some probability of the reader noticing and reacting. It is with a view to this use and abuse of models that I would like to discuss Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis here.

Due to the vast amount of secondary literature that has been published on Kafka it is not even necessary for us to use our own ingenuity to discover genres Kafka’s story could be likened to. In addition to its novella-like quality The Metamorphosis, we are told by various readers, resembles a fairy-tale, a tragedy, a parable, a myth, a legend, a fable, a cautionary tale, an animal story, an allegory, and a vastly inflated metaphor.

This sounds very confusing. But why would a reader bother to place the story in the pidgeon-hole of its genre in the first place? Why doesn’t she or he just enjoy it for what it is? What difference does it make whether we call the story a novella or fairy-tale or fable? There are several reasons for this panicked resort to genre. In the first place the story is not what one would call enjoyable but extremely worrying and as the whole intensity of that worry is already contained in the shock-line of the first sentence of the story, the timid reader has no time to escape. Moreover, we can’t enjoy the story for what it is simply because we do not know what it is. The story is impossible and yet it moves us as only things that are possible can move us.  As we don’t want to be left at the mercy of this alarming paradox, it is essential that we prove the events to be either real or unreal.

But it is also a fallacy to think that genres are mere moulds in which any substance can be successfully cast. In literature all form is relevant to meaning. It makes a difference whether we describe a phenomenon primarily with nouns, adjectives or verbs for in doing so we place it either with the objects (a stable world), the qualities (a world of dubious reliability), or the movements (a world of change). So the genres too each have intrinsic to them a way of seeing things, a purpose, a philosophy, and a definition of reality that the reader accepts for the moment as his own. Once the reader has caught a piece of writing in the cage of its genre he feels safe and can settle back comfortably, knowing what is expected of him and what he can expect. So what a temptation for the reader of a story that begins with the sentence

            As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found     himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect

to waste no time about putting this monstrous vermin which, who knows, could be of extreme danger to his mental health, in the next best available cage. ‘It’s a fairy-tale’, the reader comforts himself, only to discover almost immediately that this cage has only three walls and the creature is still at large.  For cages are, unfortunately, of use only if they are completely intact. Even a single bar bent or missing can make them useless.

Our apparently fanciful image is of course suggested by the story itself. Whatever genre may mean in other literary contexts, in this story the reader’s search for genre prefigures and amplifies the family’s attitude to the disturbing metamorphosis of one of its members.  When the breadwinner of the family turns into a monstrous insect their immediate reaction is to lock him into his room. Later they discover he may not be as dangerous as he seemed and that, for the sake of humaneness, they cannot ignore him completely. There are moments when they open the door to him, only to lock it again in panic as he becomes the cause of new disturbances. The reader follows train. How many cages the reader tries and with what determination he covers their gaps or inadequacies, often risking his integrity, his dignity or his clear vision, will vary from case to case.

Why is The Metamorphosis not a fairy-tale? It does resemble fairy-tales insofar as it takes the unreal for granted. The motif of humans turning into animals is common in fairy-tales. Some of the characters too fit the traditional pattern. The father as supreme authority, the sister as faithful and compassionate companion,

the potentially helpful mother incapacitated by frailty or death all seem at home in the fairy-tale. Unfortunately these simple and absolute figures soon break down. The authority of the father, far from being that of the wise king or even the wicked wizard, is in actual fact non-existent. He is a dishonest, mediocre, powerless man, a servile man dressed up to look authoritative. The sister’s faithfulness and compassion quickly wears out. And the mother stays alive, eternally useless. Too schematic to be quite like real people, these characters are nevertheless not consistent and ideal enough for fairy-tale characters. The most essential characteristic of the fairy-tale is the redemption of the hero and the happy ending. But in this story the hero suffers a devastatingly depressing destruction; it is his erstwhile friends and eventual destroyers that finally enjoy the prospect of happiness. In other words: there are enough similarities to keep the blessed prospect of the fairy-tale ever before our eyes and enough departures from the genre to rule it out completely as a ‘solution’. We are tricked into placing our hopes on the laws of fairy-tale only to be shown that each one of them is utterly deceptive. Nothing turns out the way we would like it to turn out.

So we resort to the next cage. Perhaps the story is a tragedy. In tragedy an incomprehensible and unexpected turn of fate (does not The Metamorphosis describe just this?) hurls the hero, whom we admire and with whom we sympathize, from a position of power and promise to the depths of utter ruin so that our emotions are caught between fear and compassion.  In the genuine tragedy we are spared despair because we are left with the prospect of new order to come. The Metamorphosis does give us this prospect of the world righting itself again. What it does not give us is the hero ascending to a climax of glory while our admiring respect for him steadily increases, only to fall a prey to some small flaw or weakness in his all too human character. Gregor begins as an insect and ends as an insect. We are never sure whether his metamorphosis is due to some flaw in his character or just a senseless miracle. If we admire him then this admiration has none of the elements of hero-worship. Where the steep curve to glory veering to sudden destruction is replaced by a gradual and uneventful drying up of the main character, the prospect of happier days is not comforting but seems an unseemly and callous disregard for the uncanny confrontation with nothingness we have just experienced. Similarly, a sudden turn of fate has meaning only if we experience it as a turn and for that we would have to empathize with Gregor.  Yet however many pieces of information about this travelling salesman we accumulate, the task of assessing their significance is hopeless, when we are not given the opportunity to form an emotional relationship with him. Again, the cage of tragedy has gaps through which the story escapes us.

Perhaps Kafka is trying to tell us a fable with a moral such as the following: Those who allow themselves to become dependent on others will find that they are harbouring corruption and decay in their apparently idyllic home. Or: if you allow yourself to be swallowed up by the relentless commercial world, you will end as nothing more than a dried up piece of rubbish. But creatures of fable are never former human beings. They are simple human qualities usually exemplified by a stylized animal. Gregor is much too human, much too complex, much too real.

Some East German writers have read the The Metamorphosis as a cautionary tale describing the downfall of bourgeois society. But one can hardly speak of convincing economic or social analysis; and does the ending really indicate a new and better form of society?

What about an animal story? In this genre the pretence is upheld that the animal has a full range of human thoughts and emotions and consequently deserves our sympathy and compassion. It is, however, essential that the animal be a real animal, not a monster. Men turn into outsized animals only in fairy-tales and myths. Even though we do sympathize with this insect as with a human, Kafka is obviously not writing an animal story.

A myth?  Perhaps the story is a fertility myth, the myth of the Egyptian scarab, the myth of death and disintegration that leads to rejuvenation and new life? Gregor’s parents do appear to be rejuvenated as a result of his decline and his sister –insofar as her name, Grete,  resembles Gregor’s name she seems almost a reincarnation of the ‘dying king’ – is shown beautiful in her expectation of marriage and procreation. Even the Orphean motif of music as a regenerating force is found in the story. But the one essential element of myth, that alone can give it plausibility, is lacking. That is the conviction of the cyclic nature of life. Gregor’s work took him senselessly backwards and forwards along the train-tracks; his death has nothing to do with the fertilizing of new and invigorating life forces but is simply a drying up, not earth to earth but garbage to garbage, sealed off in the hygienic bin.

So is the story a legend? Is Gregor a saint, a martyr whose courageously und unselfishly suffered death brings redemption? First ruthlessly exploited by his firm and his family alike, he is then imprisoned, misunderstood, maltreated, humiliated, wounded, neglected, starved and ignominiously disposed of. In spite of all this he never becomes resentful or revengeful; when his sister proclaims that his death is the only thing that can save the family he humbly submits to it and does, it seems, achieve for the family some kind of redemption. As Christ died in the third hour of the afternoon with darkness ensuing, so Gregor dies in the third hour of the morning with dawn approaching. As Christ, the New Adam, took on the aspect of a sinner for the sake of mankind, so Gregor carries in his festering flesh the rotting apple of the Fall. As the martyrs might have been comforted by the music of hymns that aroused in them premonitions of celestial music and sacramental nourishment, so Gregor listens to his sister’s music that promises him the unknown food he had always longed for. – But the story is not a legend either. Martyrs may be slain like sacrificial animals but never under any circumstances are they animals. The whole genre of the legend relies on the contrast between the utter humiliation of the human being, to the point where he is slaughtered like an animal, and the supreme glory of the resurrected martyr, whose bliss is far beyond anything man deserves or could envisage. Gregor is an animal. He is not slaughtered, but left to die. He is certainly not resurrected to a life of bliss. Finally, the one thing essential to the concept of martyr is that the redemption he brings be identical with man’s ultimate redemption through Christ and stand in no direct relationship to his removal from a real life situation. Gregor, however, dies because he is an impediment, a nuisance to his family. By taking all responsibility upon himself he had turned the other members of his family into useless and pretentious parasites.

Crime and punishment resulting from the violation of family laws and policies is the material of the Icelandic saga and determines its structure as a distinctive genre. The harshly exiled member of the family, condemned for some breach of family law, which is based on the dynamics of family life rather than on love or morality as we know it, does appear to bear some resemblance to the Gregor of Kafka’s story. The crude realism of the Saga is traditionally surrendered only at one point, when a violent man turns into a werewolf, an image of complete loss of temper and control that is likely to endanger all law and order. Gregor’s metamorphosis to a beetle is of an almost opposite nature. The Saga rambles on and on from generation to generation, presenting us with ever new variations of typical situations. It proves by recurrence – statistically, so to speak – the necessity of laws and illustrates the dire consequences of breaking them. With its focus on the family unit and its outcast son, who had prematurely and therefore unrightfully assumed the responsibilities of the father, Kafka’s story bears resemblances to the Saga. But the uniqueness of this family’s misfortune, which we feel could not recur in a million years, directly opposes the whole concept of the Saga, as does the unreality of the event. Even Dostojewski’s more sophisticated family sagas (with which Kafka was well acquainted) cannot give the Metamorphosis definition.

A parable? Maybe, but it lacks the simplicity and the definitive solution characteristic of biblical parable. If it is a parable, it is one without obvious application or explanatory interpretation, one that arouses our desire to know the true path to justice and then peremptorily dismisses us.

Allegory? Whatever structures we may impose on the story, the fine psychological shading of the beetle, Gregor, contradicts an allegoric intention on the part of Kafka. All the same, more than one Kafka interpreter has tried his luck with this genre, bending the story to suit his preconceptions.

An inflated metaphor? If this could be conceived as a genre it must rely centrally on a merging of image and reality to produce a constant flow of meaningful ideas. But the central point of Kafka’s story is that ‘reality’ and ‘image’ are successive stages, that they are mutually exclusive real states that cannot and must not be identified with each other.

A novella? In line with this genre we have a real life situation that gives stronger emphasis to event than to character. As in the novella the author economises by resorting to symbols (e.g. the picture of the woman in the boa as alluding to sex, the apple with which the father pelts his son with its biblical overtones, the hospital across the road as a pointer in the direction of sickness) to create an impression of depth in his story. The final episode can be seen in the nature of a novella frame that helps us to gain perspective on turbulent extraordinary events (though it is linked a little too closely to the story to fulfil this function adequately) and the story recounts an extraordinary event, ‘eine sich ereignende unerhörte Begebenheit’. But in essence the novella is a genre intent on making us realize that the near to impossible, the totally unlikely und unforeseeable is actually possible. It tends to insist on giving us plausibly sounding details concerning the time and place of occurrence, as though to offer us, the readers, the chance to check the accuracy of the account given. Where the Romantic novella appears to depart from this pattern and slide into fairy-tale, it is on the whole an artistically clumsy insistence on the reality of the occult and supernatural. Kafka’s story could have been written as a novella to warn us of the dangers of mental illness with its preposterous hallucinations. But it was not. If Gregor was suffering from hallucinations, his view of the family would show obvious distortions; likewise the family could not react as they do. The central and characteristic idea of the novella is missing. Kafka is not trying to nudge us out of our acceptance of a self-satisfied, stable Biedermeier world by showing us that the improbable is by no means to be confused with the impossible. Kafka’s story shocks far more deeply.

What then is Kafka doing? I think that this question need not necessarily be construed as meaning ‘what did he set out to do’ but rather ‘what does he, intentionally or unintentionally succeed in doing?’ In view of the literally thousands of reader reactions to Kafka that are available to us today, we tread on firmer ground here than if we delve into Kafka’s motives. And is there a writer who really knows and understands what he is doing to his readers?

There can be little doubt that a story like The Metamorphosis makes us painfully aware just how much our interpretation of the world relies on the conventions of literary genre. If we can place a story in a known genre it assumes meaning and our minds are at peace.  If this crutch is taken from us we flounder. The Metamorphosis forces us to search for a meaning independent of genre and we are as hopelessly lost as we would be if we tried to think without the aid of language. Of all Kafka’s stories none has the impact of The Metamorphosis, perhaps because none has hit at something so basic to the condition of man and so terrifying.

Is it likely that Kafka knew what he was doing? Memories of his own dreams, shaped partly by the dream structures described by Freud and then amalgamated with realities similar to those of his own daily life, to which the dreams obviously stood in some impenetrably complicated relationship, would have permitted Kafka to perform the apparently simple yet utterly revolutionary act of writing without regard to genre. Whether or not he then consciously allowed his memories of genre to influence the story insofar as they did not impede its natural course, whether he himself used genre in a futile attempt to understand himself as he wrote, must remain a moot point. Ultimately we can be nothing but readers. Returning to my introduction I would suggest that what Kafka does in this story is an extreme manifestation of what all great writers have done throughout the ages, namely broken down the set patterns of meaning that had established themselves with accepted genres by giving voice to experiences so original that they no longer fitted into conventional moulds.

While some writers did this by letting their stories wear conventional genres like a fancy-dress costume, missing no opportunities for drawing attention to outmoded fashions, others developed new genres in keeping with their new visions.  In The Metamorphosis Kafka is a radical of the former group. He doesn’t just ridicule, he destroys, and not one genre at a time but the whole wardrobe containing the dress-ups of European culture.  By doing this he faces his prudish and evasive readers to take their first look at naked reality, the animal in man, to pick up the images of the story. The Metamorphosis proclaims the revolution. Other stories follow it up.  And Kafka’s novels then lead the novel ad absurdum.

While it would be wrong to suggest that The Metamorphosis represents a true new genre, Kafka was certainly even at this early stage well on the way to developing one. The Trial , finished not very much later, could perhaps be considered in this light.

As it is difficult to speak about anything that has no name, I will tentatively call Kafka’s new genre a dysaction. The dysaction treats of disturbed, disrupted, inconsistent, inappropriate action.  Josef K’s actions have no obvious continuity; the chapters of the book seem to be placed in fortuitous order. They are disorientated in time and space, labyrinthine; one is never sure whether what happens is meaningful in itself or just as a gesture or symbol, whether it is hallucinatory or real, whether it is self-willed action or action determined by some force that cannot be controlled or understood. The story has no frame of reference, no underlying ideology, no plot. Though unlike many of Kafka’s works it has an end, it appears to be fragmentary because the end comes abruptly, as an annoyance rather than as a logical conclusion to what went before.

The genre of the dysaction shows that action cannot be abolished because it is the essence of life. The protagonist must do something; even doing nothing is refusing, or neglecting, or omitting to do something. The dysaction also shows that it is impossible for a human being to act without envisaging a meaning for this action. On the other hand it is impossible to prove any human action to be meaningless. The dysaction shows that men have to live in time and space, even though both these categories do not refer to reliably real phenomena.

As every genre should, the dysaction moulds the experience of the reader to suit its own assumptions. As the reader too is a human being he must do things in the process of living and reading is one of them. Kafka provides him with a fair amount of reading. As the reader too finds it impossible to act without envisaging a meaning for such action , Kafka stimulates him to look for meaning and satisfy himself. He forces the reader to accept the fact that anything material must occur in time and space, even if this makes no real sense, and therefore does not give his chapters the looser form of the cycle. Lastly no reader will find it possible to prove the chapters of this tale meaningless. In other words, the form of Kafka’s dysaction , its subject matter and themes, and the reader’s experience all amount to the same thing and reinforce each other. This is characteristic of the true genre.

What Kafka perhaps realized more than any other writer (though Goethe and Schiller were outspoken on this point they also did much to mislead the reader) is that the writer’s gift to the world is not the ideas he propounds but genre: a new, contemporary though by the nature of things also temporary form of solution to the besetting fears and problems of life. Kafka’s strange fusion of negativity and progressiveness finds expression in many of his aphorisms and it is with two of these that we will close this investigation.

Der Unterschied zwischen dem ‘Ja’ und ‘Nein’, das er seinen Zeitgenossen sagt, und jenem, das er eigentlich zu sagen hätte, dürfte dem vom Tod und Leben entsprechen, ist auch nur ebenso ahnungsweise für ihn fassbar.

Die Kraft zum Verneinen, dieser natürlichsten Äußerung des immerfort sich verändernden, erneuernden, absterbenden, auflebenden menschlichen Kämpferorganismus, haben wir immer, den Mut aber nicht, während doch Leben Verneinen ist, also Verneinung Bejahung.

Footnotes:

1. Eberhard Frey Franz Kafkas Erzählstil, Bern, 1970 has made this point very clearly.

2. viz. Benno von Wiese Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka, Bd. 2, Düsseldorf 1962, pp. 319-354.

3. A good summary of works that treat The Metamorphosis as a true or deviating fairy-tale is given by Peter U. Beicken Franz Kafka. Eine kritische Einführung in die Forschung. Frankfurt/Main, 1974, p.263 f. Edwin Honig Dark Conceit. The Making of Allegory. Evanston (Illinois), 1959 is one of the many who see the story as an allegory.  Heinz Politzer consistently speaks of the story as a parable. Beside von Wiese, M. Sonnenfeld “Parallels in ‘Novelle’ and ‘Verwandlung’” In: Symposium 14, 1960, No.3, p.221-225 also sees the story as a novella. Walter H. Sokel uses the term tragedy as relevant to Kafka’s writings. Kurt Weinberg’s monumental book Kafka’s Dichtungen. Die Travestien des Mythos. Bern/München 1963 paves the way for the use of categories such as myth, legend and allegory. Other genres are perhaps more often implied than actually named. Parable and fable aare both terms that Kafka himself applies to certain of his writings, though probably with ironic undertones.

4. Andre Jolles’ controversial book Einfache Formen, Darmstadt 1959, first published in 1930, is probably the earliest to develop a theory of genre suitable as a basis to our approach.

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University