The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
I‘ve read Kafka’s Metamorphosis story many years ago. I don’t recall the impression it made on me back then. I don’t think I understood it. Though it may not have occurred to me at the time (when we were teenagers and thought we knew everything ever) some books are better left to read or re-read when we are more mature.
A few days ago, I came across this lovely looking edition of The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by the prolific, multilingual translator–but also critic and poet - Joachim Neugroschel. I thought it was time to climb again inside the mind of Franz Kafka.
"One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin."
Gregor is a hard-working young man whose family (father, mother and sister) depends on him for their happiness and well-being. But when they realised that Gregor’s change to an inset is permanent and therefore he was no longer of any use to them, he becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. Despite his metamorphosis, Gregor is not actually unhappy. He actually likes the quietness of his room, and all the talk of him in the next room makes him think that he is better off as a bug. The idea that as a man “he would take the family’s affairs in hand again just as he used to do” makes him sick. He is so tired of everyone depending on him.
Gregor’s death is a relief for the family. “With the new jobs they had found, Gregor’s death was likely to lead to better things later on.” In a way, his death re-establishes the natural order of domestic things. The parents now see that the daughter who has to get a job to support the family as Gregor once did, has grown up and they think it is time for her to find a husband. It will help them maintain their comfortable life. What they fail to realise is that the total interest towards themselves made them unable to see how cruelly they had treated their son.
“In Kafka the protagonist often has to pay a terrible price when willingly or not, he goes against ‘nature’”, says Joachim Neugroschel in his introduction, not only by turning into a bug as in The Metamorphosis, but also by betraying his father, as Georg Bendemann in The Judgement, who by carrying out his own death sentence, put his father back in power. Kafka exposes the nuclear family and its destructive patriarchal basis, yet he longs to restore it, to give the punitive father his “natural” place.
In the Penal Colony, is a story of deep religious symbolism. The torturing justice system of this peculiar place it contains elements that can be found in Christian religion. In the end this cruel system collapses upon itself because its ethics and justness were never questioned. In his introduction, Joachim Neugroschel says that this horrifying account of someone undergoing torture in a way which predicts what was to happen in the concentration camps (of both Russia and Germany) only a few years later.
The world of Kafka is allegorical; his writing style grotesque and alienated. Humour and anguish appear to be in an ingenious and uncomfortable balance. There is a sense of detachment and passivity, guilt and absurdity. Each story is a challenge for the reader. Even after re-reading them, I was left with the impression that I barely scratched the surface of Kafka’s world.