Kafka's refusal (or inability) to provide his readers with a clear message about his work or his attitudes toward women is not only characteristic but also useful and prophetic. "The Metamorphosis - Introduction" Short Story Criticism Gregor notices that there's some new help in the apartment. Max Broad, trans. 16. The state in which we find ourselves is sinful, quite independent of guilt.". If the theater stages humans in action, Gogol's and Kafka's narrative dramas reveal conflicts through enactments of metaphors. The Metamorphosis Flashcards | Quizlet Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mousehole. It does not know. (3.28). Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Lionel Trilling, in his essay "The Fate of Pleasure: Wordsworth to Dostoevsky," points to the "more life" that Dostoevsky's anti-hero claims for his impotent hole-in-the-wall existence ("So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you") and criticizes the spirituality of modern literature, including Kafka's conception of spiritual life, for being anti-human. The reader gains understanding in the act of partaking in the referential process. . How does Gregor's father react to his appearance in Gregor Significantly, one of the first things he sees when he leaves his room is a photograph of himself dressed "as a lieutenant, hand on sword, a carefree smile on his face, inviting one to respect his uniform and military bearing" (101). How these lodgers are stuffing themselves, and here am I dying of starvation!". I. Ed. (ROS, p. 287). 12 See Christian Metz, "Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism," Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (1982). The attribution of responsibility is the vermin's sting, and the love is the bloodsucking of the parasitethe love which makes your whole emotional life dependent on him, and which in turn allows you to hold him responsible in the first place. Never once questioning his family's desire to keep him hidden from the world's eyes, Gregor must repress his deep-rooted need to display himself if he is to avoid bringing public shame and humiliation upon both himself and his family. As Grete sweeps his room and feeds him, the only one who has not forgotten him, he realizes that he has relinquished his male status to her. My thanks go to Prof. Wolfgang Iser and Prof. Walter H. Sokel who offered invaluable suggestions regarding an earlier draft of the text. It is as unthinkable for Gregor to feign illness as it is for his parents to imagine that he would not and should not keep his job. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, trans. Does it reflect, as some critics argue, his moral or spiritual defects? Meanwhile, Gregors concerned mother asks her daughter, Grete, to call for a doctor and a locksmith. only a series of disconnected sentences having no relation whatever to the general situation." "], Critical discussions of Kafka's The Metamorphosis have long been based on the questionable assumption that the Samsa family's judgment of Gregor, the son, is accurate. His initial inability to control the chaotic movements of his insect legs and his later submissive turning movements before his father make manifest his inner feelings of helplessness and powerlessness; his "senseless crawling around and around" his room (117) and his increasingly disorganized appearance, his feelings of psychic disorganization; his self-mothering gestureshe rocks back and forth and tries to replicate the protective feeling of the mother's embrace by hiding under the sofa, a "half-unconscious action"19 (106-7)his attempts to soothe himself; his dissolving sense of clock time, his loss of an awareness of himself, to use a Kohutian description, as a cohesive "continuum" in time;20 his lethargy and depression, his inner feelings of deadness, depletion. 316-317. by Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), p. 303. Sharply contrasted with Gregor's "stiff," "dome-like," and impenetrable form, with its small openings that make it difficult for him to speak, the lady in furs has a large opening; she is vaginal and furry: "The picture . Finally I kept still, perhaps from stubborness, at first; then because, facing you, I could neither think nor speak any more. The new metaphor leaves no permanent trace; it is the contingent product of a fever, or worse: it arises from deliberate bad faith, the refusal to accept the conventional bond of word and thing. In other words, she wants to isolate and control him. In other words the self is extended in order to include a 'not-self,' and identity is undermined by a (non-identical) double. . The vividness of his experience coupled with the doubt about its veracity suggests Franz Brentano's theory about the relation of mind to the world. At this point, his job becomes a meaningless, treadmill kind of existence. 377-81. For when the insect-Gregor makes his first appearance, his father knots his fist as if to strike, then falters and begins to weep; his mother collapses; the loathed chief clerk first backs away "as if driven by some invisible steady pressure" ( 100) and then, his right arm outstretched, approaches the staircase "as if some supernatural power were waiting there to deliver him" (102) and finally flees. to foster women's intellectual growth," does not seem prompted, at least for Gregor, by what Pawel calls an "unconscious need to desexualize them. 5 Selma Fraiberg, "Kafka and the Dream," in Partisan Review(Winter 1956). Kafka himself acted as a critic of sorts when he sent a warning to the publisher not to have an illustration depicting the protagonist of The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, on the cover. A. "44 In a conversation with Gustav Janouch, he described the story as an "indiscretion. Grete, with whose dressing Gregor has been so much concerned, now emerges fully dressed from the door of the living room, where she has been sleeping since the advent of the priapic or phallic gentlemen. Although Grete tries "to make as light as possible" whatever is "disagreeable in her task" and Gregor wants to thank her for her "ministrations," "time" also brings "enlightenment" to him for when she enters his room, she rushes to the window, tears it open, and gasps for air (113). . . In a feeble act of self-defense, Gregor runs toward her once, only to retreat when she raises a chair as if to attack him. Grete, Gregor's sister, is a more complex character; indeed, her metamorphosis during the time of the story's action is as complete as Gregor's, though it takes a form which looks more positive. But visual terms serve better than auditory ones. The only way he was able to rescue himself from his unbelief was by finding the reality of values established in a Nature embraced by and embracing the poet's creative imagination. Instead, Corngold proposes "validity" of interpretation as, measured by a scrutiny of the work, which unfolds as the adventurous combat of principles authorizing interpretations. Having understood the method and some of the values created in this field of meaning, one can go on to understand the non-realistic element that creates the field. This concept of symbolic reading presupposes the work of art as the ontological place that stores meaning in a coherent system of signifiers, the references of which point to phenomena on the outside. Metamorphosis Part 2 Study Guide Questions.pdf - Course Hero To act in the world requires life-confidence based on knowledge; but the Underground Man's "overacute consciousness" exposes doubts which undermine his confidenceself-knowledge turns him into a "mouse" who is incapable of avenging an affront, a nasty "babbler" who can only sit with folded hands. The insect crosses over to a point where there is no crossing back, moving far from known human forms and falling outside the conceptual structures which make recognition possible. He notices that it's getting light outside. If, as I think, the anti-hero has a starting point in Hamlet, and that is after all a noble ancestry, what is one to say about him today, in his contemporary manifestations, when he is a best-seller, a box-office attraction, a crowd-pleaser? Just as Metamorphosis is written in the kind of language that reflects upon what it is reflecting (or in deconstructionist terms, folds back upon itself), so the story of Gregor is a parabolic reflection of Kafka's own self-exposure and self-entombment. Although he wanted desperately to free himself from his dependency on his father, he could not surrender the comfort of his love for his father, a love which enslaved him because it enabled him, in a twisted and neurotic way, to avoid self-reproach for his inadequacies, inadequacies of which he was somewhat too exquisitely aware and on whose bitter fruit he had to feed in order to live at all. 51Dearest Father, sixty-third aphorism, p. 41. Angus, Douglas. "35 When they began what turned out to be a prolonged correspondence, he insisted that she share with him every detail of her life: he wanted totally to possess her in fantasy and in writing but not in the flesh. He leaves his room later because he wants to listen to Grete play the violin, and she is performing for the boarders. Kafka, that is their thesis, oedipalizes the world of his protagonists. Trans. Metamorphosis Quiz The problem of distinguishing between method and meaning in Kafka is a critical one, all the more so since Kafka's method of distortion essentially generates the meaning which critics have found incomprehensible, obscure, absurd, nonexistent. The Metamorphosis is one of the most frequently analyzed works in literature. For, wrote Kafka, "our art is a way of being dazzled by truth; the light on the flinching, grimacing face (zurckweichenden Fratzengesicht) is true, and nothing else" (H46).51 Because the language of Kafka's fiction originates so knowingly from a reflection on ordinary speech, it cannot show the truth except as a solid body reflecting the light, a blank fragment of "what we call the world of the senses, [which] is the Evil in the spiritual world . In its central preoccupation with a change of identity and the ensuing problematization of the boundaries of the real, Kafka's text necessarily moves towards an interrogation of our notions of representation per se. It is almost as if Gregor, in seeing that they had become his helpless parasites, decided unconsciously to exchange places with them in order to free them, for they could not find it in themselves to break away from their dependency on him any more than Kafka could find it in himself to break away from his dependency on his father. . As in the ancient mysteries and some forms of Christianity, without the shedding of blood there is no redemption. Tolstoy's condemnation of the living, with their vulgar bursting vitality and impatience to get on with their business of living forever, in Kafka's hands becomes life's impatient condemnation of the dead that is the novella's last word. This causes Gregor great physical pain and the wound eventually becomes infected. Lectures on Literature. "The early death of Kafka's brothers and his mother's reaction to their lossprobably warding off emotion on the surface but deeply depressed beneath," she writes, "must have had a profound effect on Kafka. Steer and A. K. Thorlby (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), p. 37. In order to make room for the boarders, the family starts storing random stuff in Gregor's room, including the trash cans and useless furniture they're unwilling to sell. Word Count: 7250. As she withdraws her service from him, her female voice begins to rise independently in the text, alongside the conflated voice of narrator and male character. It goes without saying that Kafka's most explicit and emphatic statement of his indebtedness to another writer is, at the same time, a rigorous and shrewd defense of his very own method of writing. That his desire to sleep a little longer is an implicit threat to the rest of his family is made abundantly clear by his parents, his sister, and even the chief clerk, each of whom pleads with him not to forsake his duty. But tragically, when Grete becomes his sole caretaker and thus the center of Gregor's and her parents' attention, she begins to make narcissistic use of him as she asserts her own grandiose needs. His father goes to work for a bank: he now wears the special clothes and acquires Gregor's pride in supporting the family. Delineated by neglect, his body finally acquires substance and form: "he . WebGrete insists that Gregor has to go. nicely dressed, getting plenty of sleep, helping in the house, taking part in a few harmless little entertainments, and playing her violin." [In the following essay, Beicken surveys contemporary criticism of The Metamorphosis.]. 14 Martin Walser, Beschreibung einer Form (Mnchen: Hanser, 1961). . Gregor's consciousness, however, is clearly related to his human past. But precisely at the point of conjuring up "truthful apparitions," the metaphorist feels most critically the inadequacy of this figurative language: "How weak this image is." Totally isolated from the others, Gregor becomes sensitive to eye glances, this hypercathexis of the visual mode, as Kohut would describe it, a signal of Gregor's unmet primitive need to be mirrored, to be the "gleam in the mother's eye. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Part 1, Division 1: Questions and Answers, Part 1, Division 2: Questions and Answers, Part 2, Division 1: Questions and Answers, Part 2, Division 2: Questions and Answers, Part 3, Division 1: Questions and Answers, Part 3, Division 2: Questions and Answers, https://www.owleyes.org/text/metamorphosis/read/chapter-i. When Gregor gets to the door, he allows himself a glance back at his family. Spatial access and medical attention are seen as reaffirming what has come into question: Gregor's status as a person. What causes Gregor to leave his room? The active became a passive, whether man wanted it or not. The Metamorphosis Chapter 3: Summary and Analysis - IvyPanda At this point in his life the distance separating Wordsworth from Dostoevsky (and Kafka) was not so very great. Visual and verbal discord accompany Gregor's appearances throughout, and yet his disunity emerges from a kind of unity as his isolation is born from symbiosis. But it now appears that Anders is not correct to suggest that in The Metamorphosis literalization of the metaphor is actually accomplished; for then we should have not an indefinite monster but simply a bug. "45 Verbalizing in his art his preverbal fears, needs, and fantasies, Kafka confronted and gave artistic expression to the twilight world of "Tragic Man.". "I am capable of enjoying human relationships," as he once described it, "but not experiencing them. New York: Schocken, 1949. . A sign of this change occurs in the first section when Gregor enters the living room and involuntarily starts snapping his jaws at some coffee spilling from an overturned pot (18). The cleaning woman's outburst seems to have ruined the general feeling of relief. Pointing out precursors of Kafka, Walzel refrained from reducing the story to a scheme of narrative conventions. When Mrs. Samsa and Grete clear Gregor's room of all its paraphernalia, the insect defendsuncharacteristicallyhis writingdesk and framed picture of a woman in fur. One of the apples sinks into Gregor's back, causing him such pain that he can't move. Ed. Mr. Samsa comes out in his bank messenger's uniform, with Mrs. Samsa and Grete on each arm. "Harassed by self-reproach and worry" when Grete cuts him off from his mother and herself and thus excludes and rejects him, Gregor acts out his feelings of disintegration anxiety as he senselessly crawls "to and fro, over everything" until, becoming enfeebled, he collapses (119). As he wakes up this morning in this strange condition, his first anxiety is about his job. 25 I employ this term in conscious allusion to the notion of the dialogical developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. But the human self whose claims he always postponed and continues to postpone, is past being put off, having declared itself negatively by changing him from a human being into an insect. See answer Advertisement Advertisement fg4qyvhh7a fg4qyvhh7a Ludufhjtuudhjo Shwjwkwowowlwl Advertisement Advertisement New questions in English. . Believe usit makes the rest of the story even more depressing. 89-139. The poetic of the Kafka story, based on the dream, requires the literal assertion of metaphor; Gregor must literally be vermin. "He still sensed that outside the window everything was beginning to grow bright. His public display rebuffed, Gregor, from the refuge/prison of his room, attempts to defend his vulnerable self and become the center of his family's attention. Metamorphosis provides, as Kohut himself observed, an "artistic anticipation" of the "leading psychological problem" of our time: the self-disorder.4 In the character of Gregor Samsa, Kafka depicts Kohut's "Tragic Man,"5 the narcissistically defective individual suffering from a fragmenting, enfeebled sense of self. It has been understood by Hellmuth Kaiser, for example, as the merciless attack of the elder Samsa upon his insect son, through three chapters which climax consecutively in Gregor's maiming, starvation, and death. He alternates between hopethat the next morning he'll wake up as his normal, human self, go back to work, and support his familyand anger at his family for caring so little about what he needs, particularly when it comes to eating. His wound "seemed to have reminded even his father that Gregor was a member of the family, in spite of his present pathetic and repulsive shape . The boarder sitting in the middle, who seems to be the lead guy, invites Grete to come into the living room and play. The three boarders often take their meals in the living room where the family used to eat, so the door to Gregor's room remains closed. The anal libido even reverts upon his own metamorphosed body as it trails with filth along the floor. At the very outset of his ordeal, Gregor, while disavowing his need for attentionhe claims he wants to be left "in peace" (96)listens to the discussion about him between the chief clerk and his parents, intent on not missing "one word of the conversation" (96) and later, when they stop talking, he imagines that "perhaps" they are "all leaning against" his door and listening to the noises he makes (99). Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, 1948), p. 62. "Language says 'To feel it with your own body' ('Am eignen Leibe etwas erfahren') when it wants to express the reality of experience. . His taste in food changes. ." This principle seems obvious enough, but it has been easy for both psychoanalysts and literary critics to ignore. London: Methuen, 1984. It is his freedom as a valuing being he is anxious to defend, not his freedom from human conditions. Mr. Samsa tries to explain Gregor to the boarders, and somehow gets them back into their own room. 14, No. The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923, p. 188f. . 11-12. Sometimes in his arrogance he is more afraid for the world than for himself (B279).43 Kafka's pride in his separateness is just equal to his nostalgia for "the music of the world." . It is precisely this question which was raised by Walter H. Sokel in his investigation of The Metamorphosis. Yet his relationship to the others seems reversed when he is transformed from a supportive to a disruptive figure. Character Roles (Protagonist, Antagonist). Of course it is no dreamto the dreamer. Firstly Lukacs himself explicitly criticizes the ways in which Kafka's texts conflict with his conception. Soon I shall have doneit bows, it goes swiftly, and it will manage everything efficiently while I rest." Struck by the idea that the illustrator Ottomar Starke "might want to draw the insect itself," Kafka exclaimed categorically: "Not that, please not that! In The Metamorphosisby Franz Kafka, why did Gregor's dad throw apples to Gregor and what is the symbolic meaning? Locks also symbolize Gregor's imprisonment in the body of an insect. The American Imago 35, No. . What Pawel, Kafka's biographer, calls Kafka's "crab-like approach to women" and "often most comically earnest eagerness . John Winkelman, in Angel Flores ed., The Kafka Debate (New York: Gordian Press, 1977), pp. "The Metamorphosis" Flashcards | Quizlet As history leaves, confusion settles in. The worm has indeed turned, or rather the strong one has made himself weak in order to make the weak ones strong. The fact that he is not himself sanctions an otherwise unacceptable change in his relationship with his family. If there is a difference between the two in this regard, it lies in the constant disruption in Kafka's texts of the realistic trajectory by alternative modes such as the fantastic. . Since Kafka does not privilege any one theoretical perspective, the reader is encouraged to undertake what Giles Deleuze and Flix Guattari have called an "experimentation" (48-50), a process which involves a recognition of the inadequacy of the respective opposed theories and an acknowledgment of the unresolved nature of the debate. He turned his head towards the door of the living room so as to observe the women when they came back.50. A vast multinational search for five people who had descended to view the wreckage of the sunken R.M.S. The most powerful of these is displaced onto his sister Grete, who, in her relatively carefree existence is a figure representing the possibility for 'Entgrenzung,' in her role as a delimited and fictional projection of Gregor's subjectivity, a supplementary self: Es war sein geheimer Plan, sie, die zum Unterschied von Gregor Musik sehr liebte und rhrend Violine zu spielen verstand, nchstes Jahr . 9 Ernst Bloch "Diskussionen ber Expressionismus," Hans-Jrgen Schmitt (ed. Lyall H. Powers, Franz Kafka Today, ed. His final repulse follows, with his sister demanding that "he must go. "If they were shocked," the narrator comments, "then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. . See also Corngold, The Commentators' Despair, (pp. Could the essence of the pathology of modern man's self be stated more impressively?" . 343-68. The kitchen to the rear is the ordinary dream representation of the sources of the libido, where often enough women are preparing food for the renewal of the distressed ego, which is now under the flood or invasion of the basic fantasy introjects of the primary imagos, including the castrating father. . That is the horror of lifethe terror of art. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states . In other words, in the case of Die Verwandlung although the factual statement of Gregor's transformation in the first lines of the text serves to set the event within the realm of the fantastic-marvelous, this literary convention is broken almost immediately and soon abandoned completely as the text moves into a realist vein. He has already had a hint or two that the meaning of his metamorphosis contains some sort of positive possibility. Gregor's anomalous form is inhabited by the same human consciousness that had earlier inhabited a man's body. Unable to understand why he continues to remain locked in his room, the manager calls to him through the door, "I thought I knew you to be a quiet, reasonable person, and now you suddenly seem to want to start strutting about, flaunting strange whims" (11). The power of The Metamorphosis's introductory image, Gregor Samsa "transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" (67), overwhelms the remainder of the story. (P. 576). A similar hierarchical structure of interpretive modes was established by Horst Steinmetz in 1977 when he made his plea for a "suspended interpretation" (Suspensive Interpretation)5 If the allegorical is superior to the symbolical in Corngold's estimate, so Steinmetz subordinates reception and elevates interpretation to a higher level. In a later autobiographical note he writes: "Everything he does seems to him extraordinarily new, it is true, but also, consistent with this incredible abundance of new things, extraordinarily amateurish, indeed scarcely tolerable, incapable of becoming history, breaking the chain of the generations, cutting off for the first time at its most profound source the music of the world, which before him could at least be divined. The light in which Gregor dies is said explicitly to emanate from outside the window and not from a source within the subject. It admits only those who keep up appearances; the most powerful emotion for them is not love or loyalty, but shame. and trans. Corngold's sense of allegory takes the Schriftstellersein and its enactment in the process of writing as the essential correlative of what is allegorized in the text, suspending the traditional sense of allegory as representation of a metaphysical nonpresence. In The Metamorphosis, what happens to Gregor when he ": "Already what protected me seemed to dissolve here in the city. Ronald Gray (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 51. Gregor finds the cleaning woman incredibly irritating. The metaphysical abyss it discloses to the reader becomes on the stage that gap between the actors' efforts and our idea of the play which makes any production of Hamlet a disappointment. He hardly wondered at the fact that he had recently had so little consideration for the others; earlier, he had been quite proud of this solicitude. Gregor hardly sleeps or eats anymore. 30 June 2023
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