The Metamorphosis

"The Metamorphosis tells the story of a turn-of-the-century, Central European textile salesman who wakes up one rainy morning to find himself changed, according to a not entirely reliable narrator, into a verminous insect—A HUGE ONE! This short novel, which the Nobel-Prize-winner Elias Canetti called ‘one of the few great, perfect poetic works of the century’ recounts the struggles of Gregor Samsa and his family to come to terms with this monstrous, unheard-of metamorphosis. It remains moot whether we are to regard this event within the story-world as a fact or a delusion inflicted by the family on this hapless son and brother. Though often disliked by Kafka, The Metamorphosis is his best-known and most commented-upon story. I have always loved this perplexing story, ever since my older brother Noel brought it home from Columbia University to augment my high school reading list. And an edited paperback translation of The Metamorphosis , still in print, is the first book I ever published—one which I cannot but like, since it has sold over 2 million copies! The problem of translating the ‘Ungeziefer’ — indeed, the ‘ ungeheures Ungeziefer’, normally, ‘the monstrous vermin’ — into which Gregor Samsa has been changed is that in ordinary English ‘vermin ’is plural. But we do want some form of the word ‘vermin’ — and not ‘insect’ — because their modes of being are radically different. Insects are what they are through biological or, more precisely, entomological determinism. Vermin are what they are through social—that is to say, linguistic and hence etymological determinism. For the Nazis, the Jews are vermin; for sheep ranchers in the American Far West, pumas are vermin; for citizens of Berlin meaning to enjoy peacefully their white beer while wild hogs rampage past their cafe tables, these porkers are vermin. There is a hint. One possible way of understanding Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis is in the social determination of vermin: his metamorphosis is not a real event but a delusion inspired by what one astute scholar—Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, a professor of Gnostic theology at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia — calls ‘the victimary circle’. You are caught, perhaps unawares, by others’ low opinion of you; you agree to find it reasonable and begin to conform to it, which in turn ‘proves’ the charge of the others that you are vermin indeed. This point is supported by a second etymological factor: the German word ‘Ungeziefer’ in Middle High German connotes a being unsuitable as sacrifice, i.e., unacceptable to divinity. Such a being has no place in the cosmos. Moreover, as an ‘ungeheures Ungeziefer’—listen to the negative force of that repeated ‘un’ (and earlier in the sentence we have Gregor’s ‘unruhige Träume’)—he or it is quite literally without a place at the family hearth—a family outcast. The Latin for ‘ungeheuer’ is infamiliaris . When the “gigantic, bony charwoman” at the close of The Metamorphosis calls to Gregor, “Come here, you old dung beetle,” the narrator informs us, quite properly, that “To forms of address like these Gregor would not respond … .” He is not a dung beetle; he is “a monstrous vermin”. The answer is quite simple. From time to time, writing to his fiancée Felice Bauer, he found the story “a little horrible”, indeed, a day later, “exceptionally disgusting”, though, on another occasion, it was not without its “sweet passages”. The crux was the ending, which he claimed to have botched: the sign of it might very well be the “metamorphosis” of the narrative stance. Until the end, everything—the entire diegesis — was registered by a narrator whose perspective is almost entirely congruent with that of Gregor. A problem arises, which Kafka presumably did not solve well; Gregor is dead. The narrator must take leave of him, and now, indeed, ‘father’ and ‘mother’ have become Mr. and Mrs. Samsa! The book ends, “in many passages of the story, … states of exhaustion and other interruptions and extraneous worries are clearly inscribed; it could certainly have been done more cleanly.” Why was Kafka so distracted throughout this writing? The narrative flow was severely disrupted: Kafka had to take a business trip—to Chrastava (Kratzau), a couple of hours to the north—with an unfinished story on his mind and, in its own right, something of a vexatious interruption to his chief predilection, to get on with the writing of Amerika . The entire constellation must have caused him considerable anguish. But Kafka, an athlete of anguish, was not so fazed as to relax his grip on his task as a pursuer of deadbeat factory owners disinclined to pay premiums for the accident insurance of their workmen. In fact, that weekend, he won a substantial payment for his Institute; but that ‘’restitution’ was ‘disproportionate’ to the grief he suffered at having ruined the ending of The Metamorphosis. If transformation of this type is an event in space—from one frame to the next the victim assumes a different shape—consider its analogue: a transformation in—better, of —time. The sense of the time occupied by some event is radically transformed in the next moment. More plainly, the new event occurs abruptly, breaking the ordinary flow. The two might occur together — a different, an overpowering sense of self suddenly arises. If Kafka could liken himself to a creature without footing, he could also suddenly think of himself as a great leader of men—another Alexander the Great . But here is the more common experience: Kafka is overmastered by a sudden fugue of images and ideas, not self-centered: a brainstorm, a fullness—‘the tremendous (ungeheure) world’ in his head — and now, how to express them without shattering? But, foremost, is their different temporal character. They come suddenly, but they also leave suddenly. Kafka is subject to this ceaseless alternation of the temporalities of coming and going. The earliest extant piece of his writing, as I have noted in Lambent Traces , are runes he wrote in 1897, at the age of fourteen, in a poetry album belonging to his friend Hugo Bergmann (whom we will meet): “There is a coming and a going/A parting and often—no meeting again.” The vision of an immense coming into being and of an equally potent vanishing accompanied Kafka throughout his life—a vision of world assertion and world extinction—which he adapts in his aesthetic as a logic of recursiveness, of chiastic return."