A symbol of the
hopeless response to the despair facing modern man, this iconic image, with its distorted,
cadaverous figure issuing a silent scream to a barren landscape, is an apt symbol of the
alienation facing modern man. Franz Kafka
German
Published 1915 (written in 1912)
Introduction
Did you ever groan at the thought of getting out of bed and going to
work? Have you ever felt belittled by your boss and misunderstood by your co-workers? Have
you ever felt your family didn't appreciate the hours you put in at work or the money you
brought in? I know, I know, who hasn't. But take heart – at least you haven't changed
into "monstrous vermin" (3).
Unlike Gregor, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis, you probably will never undergo a literal transformation into vermin. But perhaps, on a particularly bad day when your alarm doesn't go off, your car won't start, and your boss is waiting for you by the time-clock as you punch in one hour and twenty eight minutes late, you may figuratively feel like, well, vermin. This figurative sense is what Kafka would like the reader to glean from the story. We aren't supposed to read this as a realistic story like The Awakening, instead, as in Candide, the actions in this story often suggest broader meanings. More like a parable than a work of realism, Kafka is interesting in suggesting, not telling. He presents the readers not with a single message, but with a variety of them, and through a variety of means. As readers we have to interpret the exaggerations of the story not as an attempt at fantasy, but as an attempt to render the unconscious into the physical: a depiction of the fears, anxiety, and desires of an oppressed and alienated individual. In an odd way, the distorted view of "reality" in The Metamorphosis renders the "real" world in a heightened, more accessible form. This figurative sense lends it a timelessness, transforming a story concerning the plight of an early 20th century German textile salesman into the plight of any worker caught in the daily grind of capitalism.
This is essentially a Marxist reading of the story, and since I've brought up Marxism, it would be a good idea for me to define it. Marxism is an economic theory of culture – and thus a social view of literature – based mainly on Karl Marx's view of the antagonistic relationship between the proletariat and the capitalist. In this view, the capitalist exploits workers by literally profiting from their labor. A parasitic view of capital, this theory looks askance at business practices which pay a worker, say $8.00 an hour, while the capitalist is making, say $16.00 an hour, on the worker’s labor. That difference is called profit motive by capitalists – and exploitation by Marxists. In literature, Marxist criticism is often employed to explain the dynamic in class differences, the tensions between worker and employer, and the debilitating effects of poverty or wage-slavery.
Since reading the story solely with this in mind seems about as much fun as plowing through the collected works of Chairman Mao, I'm not going to make the mistake of Stanley Corngold in his introduction and focus on only one theme (in his case, the autobiographical); a work this rich should not be limited to only one interpretation. As one critic observes, Kafka's special talent "was for finding concrete metaphors and symbolic situations which are so replete with potential meaning that they can be construed in a great variety of ways" (Goodden 4). Accordingly, we’ll try and extract as many "potential meaning[s]" from the story as we can. I’ll concentrate on its examination of authority and power, its depiction of the alienation of modern man, and its vivid dramatization of Freudian views of familial relationships – you can concentrate on whatever seems to emerge from your own readings. As Kafka once said, "one reads in order to ask questions" (qtd. in Manguel 89).
Still, at a time when corporate mergers are hailed while the layoffs they cause are ignored or accepted as the cost of the "Global Economy;" a time that has seen steadily increasing corporate profits and stagnant or decreasing real wages; and a time when political offices are more like seats on the stock exchange than forums for public improvement, a story like The Metamorphosis acts as an corrective, a warning of the end results of such practices. Unfortunately, it is doubtful if Alan Greenspan, Rupert Murdoch or other titans of capital would respond sympathetically to Gregor's plight. Safe within their plush cocoons insulated with treasury bonds and account books from offshore tax shelters and Swiss bank account certificates, they would not offer an IMF bailout to help out the Samsa's, but would first sternly warn Gregor to "get over it." Shifting to a more reverent tone, they would piously state that in the new economy reversals of fortunes are to be expected, embraced, and worshipped. Us working stiffs can only hope that Greenspan et al., will wake up one morning, after a night of "unsettling dreams" and find themselves changed in their beds into . . . .
The Times
Political
First, a quick note on Germany’s influence on Kafka. While technically a
Czechoslovakian living for most of his life in the capital city of Prague, Kafka was
raised in a German-speaking household and went to German schools. Part of what was then
called the Austro-Hungarian empire, Czechoslovakia had a large population of transplanted
Germans who, while they assimilated to some degree into Czech society, maintained their
ties to the fatherland through language and culture. Ernst Pawel, one of the best
biographers of Kafka, points out that there was a "wholehearted, not to say blind,
commitment to German culture on the part of Prauge’s German – and especially
German-Jewish – minority" (214). This commitment manifested itself in
Kafka’s abiding love for German literature, and his abiding interest in German
culture.
The story was written in 1912, on the cusp of the first war to end all wars, World War I, and premonitions of the impending conflict are found in the theme of authority in the story. The genesis of the war, in part, is based on German aspirations for power. At the turn of the century, the clear world power was Great Britain: it was said that "the sun never set on the British Empire" because of its colonial outposts flung all around the world. However, as the 20th century dawned, Germany was becoming more prosperous and wanted to become a bigger player on the world stage. Unfortunately, nations typically assert their dominance through war. What’s interesting in the story is not any hidden references to the coming war; instead the belligerence of war makes its appearance in a cultural fashion. The strictures of war mean that control over the individual is more pronounced and even welcomed by the people. Any dissent is quickly, often violently, crushed.
Social/Cultural
The cultural ethos of Germany, with its tendency to fall under the sway of a strong
leader or authority figure, fed into the government’s desire for war. Adolf Eichmann,
henchman for Hitler, wrote the following comments for his autobiography: "Obeying an
order was the most important thing to me. . . .It could be that is in the nature of the
German." "Now that I look back . . . I realize that a life predicated on being
obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces
to a minimum one’s own need to think" (qtd. in "Eichmann" 2). While in
part a self-serving excuse for his role in the Holocaust, this also points to a the desire
in the German culture to abide by the rules, and to look to and obey authority figures. In
The Metamorphosis this love of authority is exhibited both by the images of
dominance and control associated with Gregor’s job, and the relationship between him
and his father.
The Arts
From an aesthetic point of view, the story fits in with two movements, one
specific and one more general, that were changing the way serious artists articulated
their ideas. German Expressionism, a movement which flowered from the turn of the century
until the end of WWI, saw painters and sculptors using distortion or heavily stylized
techniques to express their own personal visions of reality. For some, it was an attempt
to limn the unconscious and depict the raw, unfiltered perceptions that lay there. A
conscious break from the more representational art of the previous century, these artists
delighted in exaggeration or, more bluntly outrageousness, because only then, or so they
believed, could they penetrate the deep layer of apathy, ennui, or more simply
complacency, that deadened the public's sensibilities. Edvard Munch's "The
Scream" is the most obvious example of this.
A symbol of the
hopeless response to the despair facing modern man, this iconic image, with its distorted,
cadaverous figure issuing a silent scream to a barren landscape, is an apt symbol of the
alienation facing modern man.
In a similar
fashion, Egon Schiele's garishly colored and distorted "Self Portrait" reflects
the sense of self-loathing that permeates Gregor’s thoughts in "The
Metamorphosis." Read with these art movements in mind, the distortion and
exaggerations in the story are meant, like the paintings of the German Expressionists, to
depict Kafka's view of reality and to jolt the reader out of complacency and into a direct
connection with art.
More broadly, German Expressionism fit into the Modernist movement, which rebelled against the prevailing bourgeois ethos. Kafka and other modernists revolted against the middle-class notions of propriety and sense of moral superiority by refusing to conform to their expectations. In an 1904 letter to Oskar Pollak, Kafka sets out his aesthetic of literature, an aesthetic which mirrors the modernist intention to shock the audience:
I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. (qtd. in Manguel 93)
Thus, in The Metamorphosis, his experiments with point of view, plot and characterizations, as well as his conception of reality, which apparently included rather startling transformations (and the odd, unsettlingly casual manner with which they are accepted) amount to a thumb in the eye of convention. This story is not Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Science/Philosophy
As many critics have noted, the novel is also colored by the views of
the prevailing psychological theorist of the time, Sigmund Freud. His Interpretation
of Dreams had been published just twelve years before the story was written, and in
Europe, his ideas and views on life, particularly family dynamics, were widely
disseminated. While it’s often difficult to discern the degree to which any outside
influences affected a particular writer, Kafka left a paper trail making clear his
connection to the psychologist and thinker. Writing about "The Judgement" (a
story about a surreal and antagonistic conflict between a father and son) two months
before he composed Metamorphosis, he noted in his diary "Thoughts about
Freud of course." Freud is perhaps best known for his theory of the Oedipal Conflict,
which suggests that the tensions between a father and son are based on unconscious and
unresolved incestuous desires. Another Freudian idea displayed in the story is the
struggle between the id (the instinctive, irrational unconscious mind), the ego (the
rationalized, conscious mind), and the superego (the mind's use of extrinsic cultural and
social forces that suppress the id and foster altruistic actions). On these and other
levels, the story can be read almost as a casebook on Freudian tendencies. While it is
possible to read too much Freud into this, or any work, the predominance of Freudian views
make it a fruitful area of study.
Moving from science to ethics, the philosophy of existentialism, was prominent among European writers and thinkers from the early 1900s to the second World War. In The Metamorphosis, it plays an important role in the alienation of the Gregor. In short, existentialism is the belief that man is alone and free in an indifferent and often cruel world. While this view can be exhilarating – you are responsible for your own existence and can shape it as you may – for many writers, it signifies the absurdity of any attempt at action: in the long run, all is futile. This leads to a sense of alienation because it makes each person, to borrow the time-worn phrase, an island, a world apart and separate from others. Obviously, such a belief can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation, which, in turn, can lead to alienation. It is this more pessimistic view that is on display in The Metamorphosis. Or is it? You folks can decide if Gregor's actions are ultimately pessimistic or fulfilling.
The Life
See the introduction by Stanley Corngold for biographical information --
though do so only after you read the novel. While I disagree with Corngold's view of
the novel as autobiographical (though it has, of course, connections with Kafka's life),
the information should help round out your understanding of the work.
Two notes on German:
The German title, "Die Verwandlung," also denotes a scene change in a theatre.
The German word for debt, "schuld," also mean guilt and self-hatred – which makes it easy to understand why Germany has one of the lowest rates of credit default in the western world.
Questions to Mull Over As You Read
Works Cited
"Eichmann, in Memoirs, Tries to Explain His Psyche." New York Times 15 August 1999, sec. 4: 2.
Goodden, Christian. "Points of Departure." The Kafka Debate. Ed. Angel Flores. New York: Gordian
Press, 1977. 2-9.
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996
Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1984.
© 2001David Bordelon