The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Other Works by Franz Kafka

The Trial

The Castle

Amerika

The Metamorphosis

And Other Stories

Franz Kafka

A New Translation by

Donna Freed

Introduction

DESCRIBING A PHOTOGRAPH OF Kafka, Thomas Mann, one of his foremost advocates, remarked that his eyes were dreamy but also penetrating. This is not a surprising observation, considering Kafka's deep interest in his own dreams. Mann's description suggests a kind of sleeping-waking state where the dream not only still controls its special reality but strongly influences that other reality to which it must inevitably yield. It was Max Brod, Kafka's close friend and best-known biographer, who once commented that the only thing that seemed to matter to Kafka was his dreams—a fact that becomes patently evident to anyone who takes the time to skim through his diaries. Those addicted to dreams, like many of the characters that people Kafka's works—like Kafka himself by his own admission—are often unfit for life. He succeeded, managing well as a writer who mined his dreams to enrich the "other" or real world, and yet failed on a personal level in that public reality.

Throughout most of his literary career, Kafka remained a writer of dream-narratives. Dreams, he felt, contained the fundamental truth about the self: They were the essential instrument in the composition of many of his stories. But, though they are dream-influenced, his writings are far from mere phantasmagoric entertainments. They persuade the reader to question—long after a story has been read—his or her own existence in the light of the uncanny experiences the story presents. The reader can often, and with surprising ease, hear and see himself in Kafka's tales. One of Kafka's incomparable gifts is his ability to couple his own objectivity as a writer with a deep and sympathetic awareness of the besieged character's mentality. This riveting technique allows the reader of these dream-narratives, while vicariously sharing the character's sense of alienation or humiliation, to maintain a sharp and critical awareness of the oppressive realities that rule the waking state—those icons of the establishment such as bosses, senators, military officers, and tyrannical fathers.

At one point in his career, Kafka allegedly said: "…to hell with psychology." ("Never again psychology!" is the 93rd aphorism in his
Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way,
meaning that if one is patient enough, the world will reveal itself as it really is without probing or analysis, because it is the world's nature to do so.) Yet it can't be denied that we sense something unmistakably Freudian in the father-son elements contained in many of his stories. In his handling of these conflicts, however, as in "The Judgment" (which he wrote on the eve of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, also known in Hebrew as
Yo ha-Din,
the Day of Judgment), Kafka does not round off these elements in a Freudian sense; instead, he has them backfire. The oppressor-father, deposed temporarily, regains his position, often to the humiliation and outright defeat of the son as would-be usurper. This seemingly senile misfit of a father recoils when his son suggests an alteration to the old man's lifestyle, then regains his "rightful" position by precipitating his son's suicide. In "The Metamorphosis," the patriarchal Samsa family resumes its "normal" functioning soon after Gregor's pitiable death. It is as if Oedipal guilt is too weighty a responsibility for Kafka, the dream-writer, to willfully assume, even in the guise of his characters. So-called familial normalcy is also put on trial as Kafka exposes the exploitative nature of the patriarchal version of this system: With Gregor no longer in the picture, Herr Samsa turns to his budding daughter as a source of the family's future comfort.

To take this a step further, Kafka's stories often wind up condoning what they set out to defy. It is this respect and acceptance of madness-as-norm by his doomed characters that make his stories so seductive and unforgettable. "Contradiction is life, no matter what is hoped," his stories seem to declare. Working to much the same effect is the norm-as-madness reversal that Kafka employs with such remarkable success in "In the Penal Colony." Here, the fanatic, hard-line officer, rather than yield to the new, more lenient order that is fast becoming the law, prefers to confound that order by sacrificing himself to an intricate execution machine employed by the old regime—the former norm. Guided by some impulse to self-destruct, the officer, as if in thrall, carries out this act of his own volition and by his own hand. Although astounded by the officer's complete madness, the traveler-narrator, who must witness this gruesome death, holds an honest respect for him…for the suicide's belief in the logic of his foolish act.

Kafka
is
his stories—not in the sense that they are intentionally autobiographical but that they are spun from those thoughts and dreams that result from a horror of life as it is played out in even as safe-seeming a locale as home. His stories are an arsenal in which a pomegranate may in fact be a hand grenade. Home held a real horror for Kafka, the kind of horror that children may experience, or at least imagine, even when being lovingly tucked into bed. Part of Kafka's genius is his keen ability to present the horrific elements of his stories from a point of view that could very well be that of a defenseless child. To wake up in a cozy bed and find oneself a vermin has the same impact and shock value as, say, Pinocchio's discovery that he has sprouted an ass's ears and tail. As Theodor Adorno once claimed, Kafka's imagination was like that of the smallest schoolchild in the class. Who could make more skillful use of such an imagination than someone as profound in his intellectual and artistic maturity as Kafka proved to be?

His penetrating manner and technique in presenting existential terror with subtly tempered comic overtones, and the rush of images that his words evoke as he unfolds a gripping story, make Kafka's works a natural for the comics. Stories such as "The Metamorphosis" develop inside carefully delineated framing constructs: rooms, windows, and doorways are essential to the telling of these stories. These series of configurations—rectangular or squarelike confines—heighten the action and drama of some of the stories, much as they do in comic book frame sequences. It is useful to point out that certain aspects of comic book art, which give a visual reading to Kafka's works, increase the reader's awareness of the richness of their overall value as stories—not only in terms of shock and immediacy but in terms of the truths they expose. Forceful graphic interpretations of Kafka's stories have the potential to vastly improve the stories' accessibility, widening their appeal far beyond the kind of audience that the author had in mind.

Robert Crumb and Peter Kuper are world-class graphic artists who have notably taken on the difficult task of "picturing" Kafka's world—and they have succeeded admirably. What is often referred to as Kafka's father-son cycle—"The Metamorphosis," "The Judgment," and "The Stoker"—gains an astonishing and renewed vitality in black-and-white comic book form. Far from being shortcuts to Kafka, these comic book renditions, by dint of their necessary succinctness, serve to whet one's intellectual curiosity in a way that encourages and invites reading or rereading the printed English versions. Instead of lessening or cheapening the author's intent and his reputation, they give them a heightened radiance. Kafka's own pen sketches—with their lyrical, rubberlike figures that seem to bounce along the margins of his notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts—demonstrate that he was quite gifted in expressing himself in this way. Far from mere doodlings, these drawings have a definite, finished air about them, demonstrating that their execution, swift though it may have been, was the result of considerable preparation of thought and purposeful intention. Some were undoubtedly "guides"—visual links to the verbal—that helped him to develop his stories.

Intensifying many of the surprising images that lie in store for the reader of Kafka's works is his singular use of language. Written in German, which allows for rambling nonstop sentences that are capable of possessing an entire page, Kafka's stories often pack an unexpected punch just before the period—that punch being the finalizing verb that gives the breathless intricate sentence a fixed meaning and focus. The reader discovers what Gregor Samsa has become, thanks to the past participle that precedes the period,
verwandelt
(transformed). Such vertiginous constructions are not, of course, duplicable in English. So it is up to the translator, in an English version that still fully respects the original text, to provide the reader with that element of surprise, so cunningly positioned in the original. Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. A case in point is the German noun
Verkehr
employed in the final sentence of "The Judgment," a story that Kafka dedicated to his then fiancée, Felice Bauer.
Verkehr
means "traffic" as well as "intercourse." In the story, Georg Bendemann, terminating his engagement and his life, drops from the bridge to which he had been clinging; at that same moment, a stream of traffic races across that bridge. What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of
Verkehr
is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation." In English translation, of course, what can
Verkehr
be but "traffic"?

Born in Prague in 1883, Kafka was fluent in Czech but chose to write in German, the more serviceable language for reaching a wider audience at the turn of the century. Actually, he wrote in
Prager Deutsch
(Prague German), the dialect spoken by the German-Jewish and -Christian minorities in the Bohemian capital. It was plain in comparison to High German, with its rather flamboyant colloquialisms. Users of this dialect, however, preferred to regard it as pure. Some writers of this school, if it can be called such, sought to make up for the poverty of Prague German by dressing it up with various artistic embellishments. Kafka, on the other hand, went in the other direction and strove for an almost ultra-economic simplicity. Prague German, he felt, was more "truthful" than High German: Using it skillfully, he was able to make it work for him in a way that was purely his own, and from it he devised an excellent instrument for tearing away facade, whether it be that of seemingly harmonious relationships or the bustling efficiency of a bureaucratic nightmare.

Successfully using this German dialect afforded its speakers and writers some resilience against the Czech society of Prague at that time, which was hostile to its German exile community. (Kafka was, culturally, an exile.) The Prague German dialect gave them comfort and a confidence in their own culture—one that reflected their own values, history, and aspirations. The status of Prague's German-speaking exiles, whether their condition was self-imposed or not, was marginal at best, a not uncommon case with exiles almost anywhere in the world. In Kafka's case, however, his marginality was compounded by the fact that he was Jewish and therefore, a member of a minority within a minority that was as anti-Semitic as the host culture. He owed his triumph over troubling circumstances to the written word. Kafka's ability to overcome adversity at least in the practice of his art indicates how the hardships that an artist in exile often undergoes can sometimes contribute to achieving the goal for which he strives. It doesn't really matter whether the artist incorporates these obstacles, wittingly or not, into the work; it's enough that these circumstances exist and have had to be dealt with on some level. Kafka's success brings to mind that of other exiles, such as Theodor Adorno, V. S. Naipaul, and C. L. R. James…even Ovid, for that matter. One wonders what their output might have been had they not had to forge lives in areas of the globe where they were considered "other."