Franz Kafka and Animals

Date: 1981On The Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaAuthor: Peter StineFrom: The Metamorphosis, Bloom's Guides.

We might speculate that Kafka, in turning to his family for subject matter, needed the animal world for fear of violating his own sense of wholesomeness while exploring under the rock of repression. His remarks to Brod make it clear that, for him, to write out of bad or perverted passions ("I have hundreds of wrong feelings—dreadful ones—the right ones won't come—or if they do, only in rages; absolutely weak") was to let them get the upper hand.22 Kafka's celebrated writer's block may have been the exercise of a animal world, with The Metamorphosis in 1912, did his imagination find its sanction. Prior to its composition, Kafka confessed to Felice that "when I didn't write, I was at once flat on the floor, fit for the dustbin,"23 We recognize this as the fate that befalls the hero in this story, which becomes a vehicle for Kafka to review his own failure, "a general load of fear, weakness, and selfcontempt" before his father, now described from the rockbottom reality of a despicable insect, a metamorphosis that both seals the failure and disassociates him personally from any charge of disrespect. Upon completing the story, Kafka is reported to have buoyantly asked of a friend on the streets of Prague, "What do you think of the terrible things that go on in our family?"24

In The Metamorphosis, then, Kafka grieves about living under the invisible constraints of a family, and the enabling condition is Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis into a gigantic insect: "It was no dream."25 Gregor's body is so alien to him that his transformation has no effect upon his mental life, which initially sets in motion droll and terrible ironies. Gregor imagines his family will take his change "calmly, he had no reason to be upset" (p. 98); he need only "put [his] clothes on" and race tardily to the office. Once in control of his legs, he breaks forth into the normal world where his eager enslavement to routine evokes a wonderful "Ugh!" as the chief clerk vanishes down the stairs. It is only when his Father drives this literalization of "troubled dreams" into his room with a newspaper—"Shoo!"—and locks him there as a prisoner, a more forcible and telescoped version of his life as son and servant of officialdom, that Gregor starts to touch reality. Indeed, his metamorphosis is less a tragedy than a naked clarification of all Gregor's relations to the world, a restoration of Truth—in particular, the hidden rage of the Father who has been battering on him like an insect.

And yet Gregor is as far removed from this "dazzling" recognition as the gap between his consciousness and his numerous waving legs. having toiled for years to bail his parents out of debt, he now feels "guilt and shame" (p. 112) that they must work and finds "cheerful" the news that his father has been duplicitous about finances and has been hoarding his son's contributions. There might be hope had Gregor experienced anger, had he in fact been guilty of the venality the chief clerk accused him of earlier, but he has no individual thoughts apart from his filial loyalty. Aware of being increasingly comfortable with his state of insecthood as he crawls the walls, Gregor need only hear his Mother talk wistfully of his old desk to renounce this adjustment. The fear of losing "all recollection of his human background" (p. 116) will culminate in his obedience

to his Father's wish that he die out of simple consideration. Kafka wrote of his father that "perhaps the strangest of all my relationships with him is that I am capable of feeling and suffering to the utmost not with him, but within him"26 For Gregor and for his creator metamorphosis is a kind of secret rescue from the loss of self into others, the attending alienation a form of liberation even if it does no good.

Notes 22. Brod. p. 75 23. I am a Memory Come Alive, p. 55. 24. Quoted by Erich Heller in his Franz Kafka, Modern Masters Series, Viking. p.1. 25. Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken

Paperback, 1971). p.89. All page references in the text refer to this edition. 26. I am a Memory Come Alive. p. 93.

Citation Information

Text Citation: Stine, Peter. "Franz Kafka and Animals." Contemporary Literature 22, no. 1(1981). Quoted as "Franz Kafka and Animals" in Bloom, Harold ed. The Metamorphosis, Bloom's Guides. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=BGTM022&SingleRecord=True (accessed February 25, 2012).

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