As the story begins he has, for a change, slept overnight in the flat. Gregor, then, is the man of the house: his wages keep the family. His sister Grete was too young to work, his mother too poorly with asthma, his father rather a broken man. Why does Gregor work so hard? Five years ago his father lost a lot of money and Gregor took a job with one of the creditors.
Let’s look again, then, at the setup of Metamorphosis: Gregor Samsa is a travelling salesman in cloth, who works to support his family – mother, father, younger sister – and lives with them in a flat in an apartment house, though frequent business trips mean he is rarely there.Ģ5. Kafka did, however, stipulate that a few works were to be spared: “ The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor, and the short story “A Hunger Artist” … since they do exist, I do not wish to hinder anyone who may want to, from keeping them.” Certainly these are stories one would call keepers.Ģ4. In other words, we may infer that Kafka was playing hard to get.Ģ3. Brod disobeyed Kafka, claiming that his friend had intimated his wish some years earlier, whereupon Brod had made it clear he would do no such thing. Kafka’s famous literary death wish, delivered to Brod, was: “Dearest Max, my final request: Everything I leave behind in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters, from others and my own, sketches, and so forth, to be burned completely and unread … ”Ģ2. Even as he inspected the proofs he was unpersuaded. Given how well the story has aged, it is telling that Kafka at first didn’t wholly delight in his handiwork. If you grant the preceding, then Metamorphosis is perhaps the quintessential Kafka story.ġ5. To dig a little deeper, the term evokes an individual’s sense of finding himself victimised by large impersonal forces, feeling after a while that he can’t but take it personally – and feeling haunted, too, by the sense that maybe, after all, he deserves it.ġ4. I’ll venture we mean “Kafkaesque” to denote a sense of suddenly inhabiting a world in which one’s customary habits of thought and behaviour are confounded and made hopeless.ġ3. We call this world “Kafkaesque”, of course, while keeping mindful of Italo Calvino’s lament that one hears that term “every quarter of an hour, applied indiscriminately”.ġ2. Wu Hsing-kuo in Contemporary Legend theatre’s production of Metamorphosis at the 2013 Edinburgh international festival. Metamorphosis exemplifies the world Kafka invented on paper – recognisable but not quite real, precisely detailed and yet dreamlike. As Vladimir Nabokov commented: “This grim speed in checking a remiss employee has all the qualities of a bad dream.” But it is also farce: a personal embarrassment raised to a debacle by multiple easily shocked persons arriving on the scene to witness it.ġ0. As Gregor struggles to crawl off his bed, a clerk from his company calls at the Samsa apartment.
Gregor Samsa wakes to discover he has six legs and a shell, yet for some pages he thinks that what ails him might just be the kind of throat complaint that is “the occupational malady of travellers”. Another is that it is, amid its pathos, awfully funny. Its premise – a man awakens in the body of an insect – exerts a ghastly fascination beyond anything in even the consummate short works of Chekhov or Joyce or Alice Munro.Ĩ. A century on, why does Metamorphosis still attract readers? One reason is that it’s a horror story of sorts. Finally Metamorphosis was set before readers in October 1915, in the avant-garde monthly Die Weissen Blätter, then put between covers that December.ħ. But negotiations with publishers were complicated, and circumstances – the first world war, among other things – intervened.Ħ. Kafka worked on Metamorphosis through the autumn of 1912 and completed a version on 7 December that year. At least, 1915 is when the story was published, which is to say “finished” and Kafka, famously, didn’t finish very much.ĥ. Here, though, is a little novelty: in 2015, Metamorphosis is 100 years old. Kafka’s place in the literary pantheon has been assured for some time, most pleasingly expressed by George Steiner’s suggestion that he is the only author of whom it may be said that he made his own a letter of the alphabet – K.Ĥ.
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