Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 41-42, 2004
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Copyright © by the International Comparative Literature Association. All rights reserved. Copyright © par l'Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée. Tous droits réservés. Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 59-85
Stanley Corngold Princeton University
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Vermin: Metaphor and chiasm in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Metaphern sind diese flachen Steine, die man aufs offene Meer Schleudert vom Ufer aus. Die trippelnd die Wasser-flächeberühren, Drei, vier, fünf, sechs Mal im Glücksfall, bevor siebleischwer Den Spiegel durchbrechen als Lot. Metaphors are these flat stones, which you fling from the shore onto the open sea. Which trippingly skim the surface three, four, five, six times with a stroke of luck until, heavy as lead, they crash through the surface like plummets. Durs Grünbein[1]
Once you’ve been bitten by the bug, it is impossible to stop thinking about The Metamorphosis. old saying I have been looking at the poor, vile Denkbild at the center of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis for thirteen years now; and the conclusion to which I have reluctantly come is that I must disappoint the expectations aroused by the notion that we have to do here with a metaphor come alive. That is because Gregor Samsa has been metamorphosed into a vermin, and hence it is only in an inexact sense that he is a metaphor alive, dead, or undead. For the concept of a vermin is not of a natural thing, it has no predictable visual identity, it is not literally a thing: “vermin” is a shifting social construction. Beetles in turn-of-the-century Prague, mountain lions in the contemporary Western United States, Jews in the Third Reich – all have had the distinction of being defined as vermin: they are judged to be non-beings, outside the pale of the law, as good as dead. Something of the uncanny, mysterious, unfortunate identity of this “ungeheures Ungeziefer” (monstrous vermin) is conveyed by its etymological background: being “ungeheuer,” it is a creature unsuited to a household (ungeheures = the Latin infamiliaris); being an “Ungeziefer,” it is a creature unacceptable as a sacrifice (Middle High German: ungezibere).[2] [end page 59]
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Metaphor, on the other hand, would appear to require a more nearly definite entity for its vehicle, so that by means of this entity, which has recognizable characteristics, something else – often something higher, something that cannot be directly pictured – can be grasped by “carrying over” to it some properties of this more definite entity;[3] this way the more elusive, the higher entity can be perceptually spelled out and, indeed, made to appear in boldface. This is not the effect, however, of the properties supplied by a vermin, which cannot literally illuminate Gregor Samsa, the human son, except as the obscure object of others’ revulsion. If Gregor Samsa is to be grasped as a rhetorical figure, as a trope come alive, he is then more nearly a metalepsis, a metaphor at second remove, though even that is not quite right. That is, to see him as a metalepsis come alive, we must see him as a metonymy of a metaphor. In Map of Misreading, Harold Bloom supplies a definition of metalepsis: “In a metalepsis,” he writes, “a word is substituted metonymically for a word in a previous trope, so that a metalepsis can be called, maddeningly but accurately, a metonymy of a metonymy.”[4] This is useful, but it is too stringent: it would also be correct to say that in metalepsis, one rhetorical figure (metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche) substitutes for another, and in so doing may then be held to illuminate, at long last, an otherwise elusive being. Why is it useful here to speak of metalepsis? That is because we have in the figure, of which Gregor Samsa is the embodiment, a more than two-part metaphorical structure: we have a shifting, unsettled constellation of features whose complexity can be suggested by at least triplicating the ostensibly two-part system of the metaphor.[5] The three parts are now: (1) Gregor Samsa, the human self; (2) the vermin into which – we read – he has been transformed; and (3) the insect (“a mélange of bug and beetle and – possibly – cockroach,” as the Kafka scholar Hartmut Binder memorably puts it).[6] Since bug, beetle, and cockroach – all of them insects – are sometimes held to be part of the class of creatures called vermin, we can now say that this insect (body) represents by metonymy the vermin into which Gregor has been transformed; Gregor is a certain sort of extension of an insect, an insect equipped with loathsome, uncanny features, an insect designating by metonymy the vermin that Gregor has become. This picture may represent an advance on Gregor as a metaphor come alive, but you will see that it really does not do away with the uncertainty at its center: and this is once again the fact that Gregor has been metamorphosed into a vermin, which, as the vehicle of a metaphor, remains shadowy and indistinct. Allow me, finally, to get out of my system several other more general arguments against the view that we have in Gregor a metaphor come alive. [end page 61] In fact, I am rather inclined to see The Metamorphosis as a text that resists metaphor, first, in the plain sense that, to adapt a phrase of Proust’s a propos of Flaubert, you will look in vain in Kafka’s fictional oeuvre for a single beautiful metaphor.[7] There are next to no metaphors of whatever sort in The Metamorphosis that cry out to be acknowledged: where there are opportunities for Kafka to contrive metaphors, he appears not to have taken them. Consider such a moment (it occurs at the close of Section II): Nur mit dem letzten Blick sah er noch, wie die Tür seines Zimmers aufgerissen wurde, und vor der schreienden Schwester die Mutter hervoreilte, im Hemd, denn die Schwester hatte sie entkleidet, um ihr in der Ohnmacht Atemfreiheit zu verschaffen, wie dann die Mutter auf den Vater zulief und ihr auf dem Weg die aufgebundenen Röcke einer nach dem anderen zu Boden glitten, und wie sie stolpernd über die Röcke auf den Vater eindrang und ihn umarmend, in gänzlicher Vereinigung mit ihm – nun versagte aber Gregors Sehkraft schon – die Hände an des Vaters Hinterkopf um Schonung von Gregors Leben bat.[8] With his last glance he saw the door of his room burst open as his mother rushed out ahead of his screaming sister, in her chemise, for his sister had partly undressed her while she was unconscious in order to let her breathe more fully; saw his mother run up to his father and on the way her unfastened petticoats slide to the floor one by one; and saw as, stumbling over the skirts, she forced herself onto his father, and embracing him, in complete union with him – but now Gregor’s sight went dim – her hands clasping his father’s neck, begged for Gregor’s life.[9] Adorno’s comment here is shrewd: he insists on taking this scene literally as a moment of nonpsychological, psychoanalytical verism.[10] It does not present the metaphor of a psychoanalytical truth (“the Oedipus”): it is that truth itself. Similar examples offer themselves: Gregor’s father raises up his
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chair as if to crush this would-be rival of his bond with his wife, Gregor’s mother. This is not a metaphor for that other aggressive part of the Oedipus: it is the Oedipus itself. Gregor does not merely crave union with the woman in furs, the fetish he has cut out of a glossy magazine and hung up in a pretty picture frame: he presses his hot belly against it.[11] In other scenes, other objects – the writing desk, the apples flung into Gregor’s back – invite the classification “symbol,” not metaphor: the writing desk is only by a stretch a metaphor for the human, as the being who writes stories (it is too particular a case, requiring mediation by [end page 62] Kafka’s own preoccupations);[12] and the Biblical apple is too blatantly culturally-enshrined, too much a monumental icon of sense, to do much work as a metaphor of – What? – the sin that flows from father to son, since both figure in the ordeal of procreation; or are the little apples obnoxious metaphors for the father’s testicles, which shockingly find their way into the son’s “back”? Perhaps we can take up this point further on another occasion. Finally, in the matter of listing difficulties in the way of conceiving The Metamorphosis as a metaphorically-enriched text, one could note how Kafka’s work, as a whole, resists the Expressionist program, which, according to the poet Carl Einstein, used “metaphor and fictions, the technique of aesthetic metamorphosis, [to] allow individuals to escape [their] social determinations” (emphasis added).[13] Correspondingly, we have Kafka writing in his diary, “An incoherent assumption is thrust like a board between the actual feeling and the metaphor of the description.”[14] One of Kafka’s best aphorisms reads, “For everything outside the phenomenal world language can only be used allusively [in the manner of an allusion (andeutungsweise)], but never even approximately by way of comparison [in the manner of the simile (vergleichsweise)], since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations” (GW 6:237-8).[15] On December 6, 1921, Kafka wrote in his diary: “Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing...”[16] One should contrast the sense of aesthetic metamorphosis of which Carl Einstein speaks with the rigorously non-aesthetic metamorphosis depicted by Kafka in his “bug story.” By now I will have said enough in the way of producing obstacles to my topic. I have mentioned both internal difficulties (the non-conspicuous character of the figure of the “vermin”) and external difficulties (the way the rhetoric of the piece as a whole appears resistant to metaphor).[17] Let us see, however, if we still cannot address my posited topic on heuristic grounds. I believe that this track is profitable to follow, for to the extent that Gregor can be read as a metaphor come alive (something that depends, again, on our willingness to ascribe stable, conceptualizable, visual identity to his metamorphosis), then the way that Gregor reads himself yields a ton of information about the way metaphor works. So, we will figure the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa as a bringing to life of metaphor and, above all, as a depiction of the process of reading metaphor. Gregor can be seen as one engaged throughout in a reading of the metaphor he has become. His entire survival depends on the outcome of this reading: he must interpret to his advantage the properties he has acquired in the course of his unsettling dreams. [end page 63] Let us pursue this point. We have in this story a man who has become a metaphor of himself. We see him feeling out the properties of his new identity, his new mode of being. He is the meaning of this change; his (new) body is its most visible sign. He is feeling out the metaphor of himself; he is discovering what pertains to him. In short, Gregor is performing, with the most radical stakes involved, the act that every reader of metaphor performs: he is regulating, correcting, assimilating salient properties of some entity (not himself) to himself, as himself. What the reader of metaphor performs, with respect to Achilles, who is a lion, Gregor is performing most dangerously: his life is at stake, because he must learn to act in conformity with a metaphor that leaves him no slack, no free play. He and the metaphor, the reader and the sign, are a perfect fit, they are one organism, one task, in the spirit of Kafka’s aperçu, “You are the task. No pupil far and wide.”[18] If we are to continue talking about metaphor, we shall need a few analytical definitions, so I shall introduce terms familiar from I.A. Richards: under “metaphor,” Richards understands a relation of two entities having names, as, for example, this very Achilles and the lion, and he refers to them, in light of their individual functions, as (a) the tenor – the final meaning, here the human being; and (b) the vehicle,
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that image as which the tenor, the human being, is depicted.[19] In our case we have, corresponding to Achilles, Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman; and corresponding to the lion, the verminous insect. That is modern literature for you. To see the mechanism of the metaphor at its clearest, consider the allegedly unproblematic metaphor that represents Achilles as a lion. The vehicle is “lion”; the tenor, “Achilles.” Is the vehicle the entire lion? Not for long. We are leaving out: the wet, black nose, the dusky tail, the mangy mane. Is the tenor all of Achilles? Not for long. We are leaving out Achilles’s Greek nose, vestigial coccyx, and horsehair helmet. Here we have begun to perceive the cardinal feature of metaphor: only so much of the vehicle is supplied to the tenor that generates uptake – intelligibility, sense, fittingness; and what does not is suppressed and becomes the unused context of the metaphor; we may refer to this as the metaphorical unconscious. And what is it that crucially guides the suppression of irrelevant features? Why, context, of course: but that is only to invoke a joker, a card able to assume any function, any value in the deck. What determines anything? Context. So what is crucial is to specify that aspect of the context that does the most work; and that aspect is the tenor itself. Conditions of verisimilitude in respect of the tenor determine just what [end page 65] features may be drawn from the vehicle and supplied to the tenor. It is clear that we are dealing now not with a uniflow, a single direction in the exchange of characteristics, but with a to-and-fro, a flow that, in principle, forever reverses itself. Metaphor works only as it achieves an equilibrium of a selective reciprocal supplying of features. Achilles is a lion only to the extent that the lion is (congruent with) Achilles. “A,” the vehicle (lion), supplies properties of itself to “B,” the tenor (Achilles), all the time that “B,” the tenor Achilles, imposes constraints on those properties that can be supplied to it by “A” the vehicle (lion), whence “A,” the vehicle (lion), is forced to assume (humanized) properties of itself all the time that it is returning (only semi-lionizing) properties to “B,” the tenor (Achilles), and so on. This is the sort of movement that Freud has in mind in his Dream-Book under the head of “Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit,” a concern for intelligibility, as it were. Now, does this mechanism – this reciprocal constraining of properties that flow to and fro vehicle and tenor – come into play only because the vehicle is so little specified in advance? What if we were to remove from the vehicle in advance all the extraneous properties – the mangy mane, the furry tailtip, the stinking teeth, and the birds that perch like metonymies on the lion’s back, searching for little vermin? That would appear to relieve the tenor entirely of the burden of supplying constraints in the form of its own characteristics to the beastly vehicle. Or? Take, then, to stay among the lions, Richard Lion-Heart, Richard I, the English king who went on the Crusades: Lion-Heart is the vehicle – or metaphor proper; the tenor is the man Richard, “celebrated for his military prowess.” Does the fact that the metaphor specifies itself as lion heart remove the necessity that there be a to-and-fro exchange of properties from vehicle to tenor and also from tenor back to vehicle? Not at all. Note that once again not all the properties of a lion’s heart can be appropriately applied to King Richard I – the very thick muscular wall, the network of veins and arteries, the altogether foreign DNA. What properties shall flow to Richard is a matter of constraints that exclude such properties as I have named as not applicable. The metaphor does not settle into a meaning until the interpreter has experienced a subjective limit to the to-and-fro of properties between tenor and vehicle.[20] This theory is of the “interactive” type associated with such thinkers of metaphor as Max Black and Gerard Genette and may be thought of as an improvement over the substitutive theory of Quintilian. I, however, have termed it “chiastic,” again with a heuristic value for The Metamorphosis. So we had better take a moment to say what “chiastic” means. I shall illustrate the point with a plain chiastic figure from Kafka’s posthumously published work. The aperçu runs: [end page 66] Auf Balzacs Spazierstockgriff:Ich breche alle Hindernisse. Auf meinem: Mich brechen alle Hindernisse. Gemeinsam ist das “alle.” On the handle of Balzac’s walking-stick: I break all obstacles. On mine: All obstacles break me. The common factor is “all.”[21] I omit from this analysis the usurpatory, probably wry genius of the proposition: “The common factor is ‘all’.”
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At the outset we have the terms: “A” = “I” (the subject); “B” = “all obstacles.” The relation between them flows from A to B; A breaks B. Now, here is the chiastic reversal: “All obstacles break me.” The action flows from the former object (B) back to the subject (A). I break all obstacles | obstacles (all) break I/me The general formula runs: In performing or grasping a chiasm, we reverse the sequence of a set of two or more terms, and in so doing, we reverse the direction of the action that originally determined their relation. This is the logic of the interactive mechanism in metaphor: the sequence A (vehicle)→B (tenor) promptly reverses itself, whence B (tenor) becomes the agent, the first term in the sequence, addressing constraining considerations (properties) to A (the vehicle). This means, importantly, that in The Metamorphosis, in the living metaphor Gregor, the human soul, B (the tenor), also supplies intentions and directions to A, the insect-body. This soul is itself at every moment the outcome of an exchange of properties flowing between the one pole marked human and the other marked insectlike monstrosity. In constructing Gregor Samsa as a metaphor into which fictitious life has been breathed – a metaphor in which his bug-nature is the vehicle and his soul the tenor – we posit the logic of the exchange between these poles as chiastic.[22] To the extent that Gregor lives as a metaphor, he lives chiastically – and not only in the sense that, in interpreting himself, he necessarily reads chiastically, but in visibly being a repulsive metaphor for his family, he necessarily loses, chiastically, the relation of authority he once held vis-à-vis his family. He is read by them – but essentially in all one way: he is taken literally as the monster he appears to be. The plot, which is one of reversal of the power lines, may be thought of as a dramatization of the chiastic possibilities of reversal indwelling metaphor, possibilities that may be taken forever, or, here, seemingly foreclosed. (I have decided that in principle, in their free state, they are not foreclosed). [end page 67] It may be useful to review these latter points in slow motion. First, Gregor’s “self-interpretation” is very much bound up with his intrinsic metaleptic/metaphoric nature. Yet why have we recently been saying that Gregor is the living representation of a metaphor – of the salesman as a verminous insect – and not that he is identical with this creature, that he is himself the insect? This would after all be one way to read the opening sentence, which states that “er [fand] sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt (he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin)” (GW 1:93; M 3). We deny his bug’s identity because of the questioning movement of his mind; Gregor immediately inquires how he is to come to terms with his new body. And the movement of this process of inquiry, the language in which he thinks, cannot readily be ascribed to a bedbug. Kafka knows this: he cannot assign Gregor a bug’s body and also a bug’s consciousness, both to the same extent in a single continuum of being, and inspire credulity. No one could know how to make – or what to make of – the mind of a heteroptera. Gregor is reasonably lucid throughout; the consciousness he exhibits – and its feeling tonality (mostly sweetness and light) – is not presented, I think, as an attribute of bugs; Gregor cannot be at once a bug and the rational citizen he often is. The crux is that the uses of his being are his to discover; and one is inclined, following Heidegger, to associate the reflection on the kind of being one has with the distinctively human: Dasein (the human existent), writes Heidegger, is “das Seiende, dem es in seinem Sein um dieses selbst geht....”[23] The being of the human existent is that of the entity for which its mode of being is an issue. The transfer of properties from the bug-beetle-cockroach-louse to the human is much constrained by the given of Gregor’s humanity. The metaphor “this man is a louse” in ordinary use would bring about the transfer of properties from the louse to the interior of the man: he would be saturated by “lousy” properties. He would, for example, have no more conscience than a louse, no more loyalty than a louse. Here, however, we have a very special imposition of properties onto the body only (and onto that periphery of consciousness powerfully determined by the body as such). This is the difference between this one sort of metamorphosis and metaphorization. Kafka makes no attempt to represent in Gregor a “lousy” mode of reasoning, a “lousy” sort of feeling life, a “lousy” sort of attitude. (This makes the “literalization” aberrant). He takes pains to show that this is not the case, representing Gregor as a kind man, a “Christian” man, capable of joy in the most difficult of straits – and often altogether lovable when his inner life is revealed; and when he turns nasty, it is because he has been provoked.
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He is provoked by his family; and here a crucial point emerges: the reciprocal, chiastic movement of constraining properties does not flow [end page 69] evenly for this – or any – interpreter; the pace and thrust of his reading of his metaphor will vary. This flow of properties is accelerated by a commotion of external constraints. Let us dwell for a moment on his vulnerability to external constraints. Consider: What are the decisive features of Gregor’s metamorphosis? First, he has acquired an insectlike body of some unclassifiable sort; as this vile body, his metamorphosis is, crucially, visible to the others – his family, chiefly. At first his body is shown as something visible to himself; thereafter, he does not much note it except as an object of possible revulsion that he needs to hide from the others. A good deal of the story is concerned with Gregor’s efforts to conceal his body under a large cloth. In hermeneutic terms, this means: he wishes to avoid the others’ interpretation of the sort of metaphor he has become, because this reading is invariably hostile to the tenor of his soul. As a thing visible to the others, his body is a cause of shame; in Gregor’s initial scrutiny of its possibilities, there was less shame than curiosity. Thereafter, it is the others’ view of it that matters. Gregor’s downfall is to exhibit his body brazenly during his march into the living room; drawn by his sister’s violin playing, he has exhibited it to the astonished boarders. This produces a situation dangerous to those other interpreters, his only occasionally sympathetic family. The outcome of his metamorphosis is to have been transformed into a being whose character is essentially determined for him by the reaction of others. As a result, Gregor’s attitude must be chiefly pragmatic: he must be a practical bug. Just as his interest in his body at the outset is concerned mainly with making it function, thereafter he is concerned with making it function as a family member, so as not to be destroyed. Consistent with this picture is the fact that Gregor is endowed with an understanding of others’ words but cannot speak, and so he can (barely) be understood. The fact that he can understand human speech but cannot himself speak could seem an aberrant feature, but it is crucial. In this way he is limited in his ability to change the impression that other share of him; and that impression is made chiefly by his repulsive body. He is read strongly by his family. A thesis, quite crucial, I believe, to an understanding of this story as a model of metaphorical exchange is embedded here: the outcome of these scenes of conflict is an accelerated exchange between properties of tenor and vehicle, which issues into aggressive violence outward (he is, in his view of things, being misinterpreted); and on two of the three occasions, they finish in pictures of aggressive sexual desire. The accelerated exchange leads to an excitement of aggressive and sexual instincts. In this story, I conclude, we deal more with an instinctualization of metaphor than with a metaphorization of [end page 70] instinctual being. This takes us into a Lacanian field, in which the symptom, it is said, is structured like a metaphor. In our case, the analogy is transparent: like the symptom, Kafka’s metaphor is impacted with repressed libidinal and aggressive energies. The link between drive and compulsion also put forward by Adorno in his essay on Kafka is confirmed: the energy that powers the compulsion to interpret the metaphor is instinctual. That energy gets caught up in the repetitive activity of self-interpretation; that same energy – sexual and aggressive – is then triggered by the intrusions of family members, who become its target. Here are some of the scenes in which this acceleration occurs. The great pages at the end of the second section enact the operations of the chiasm, as properties of the human flow back into Gregor, dislodging the buglike. Deciding that the absence of human intercourse during the past two months has addled his wits, Gregor rejects the buglike impulse to move about unimpeded in an empty room. Nichts sollte entfernt werden; alles mußte bleiben; die guten Einwirkungen der Möbel auf seinen Zustand konnte er nicht entbehren; und wenn die Möbel ihn hinderten, das sinnlose Herumkriechen zu betreiben, so war es kein Schaden, sondern ein großer Vorteil. Nothing should be removed; everything had to stay; he could not do without the beneficial influence of the furniture on his state of mind; and if the furniture prevented him from carrying on this senseless crawling around, then that was no loss but rather a great advantage. (GW1: 129; M 25) There’s a bit of Kafka’s taste for semi-private games on display in the remark that follows: “Nun, den Kasten konnte Gregor im Notfall noch entbehren, aber schon der Schreibtisch mußte bleiben (Well in a
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pinch Gregor could do without the chest, but the desk had to stay)” (GW1: 130; M25). For one moment, the creature, as a sort of hybrid or outlaw, correlates with the sort of hybrid or outlaw that Kafka, the writer, for one moment is; Samsa becomes an alias of Kafka, a notion that according to Gustav Janouch, however, will subsequently inspire Kafka’s resistance. You recall their conversation: “The hero of the story is called Samsa,” I [Janouch] said. “It sounds like a cryptogram for Kafka. Five letters in each word. The S in the word Samsa has the same position as the K in the word Kafka. The A....” [end page 71] Kafka interrupted me. “It is not a cryptogram. Samsa is not merely Kafka, and nothing else. The Metamorphosis is not a confession, although it is – in a certain sense – an indiscretion.” “I know nothing about that.” “Is it perhaps delicate and discreet to talk about the bedbugs [Wanzen] in one’s own family?”[24] “Samsa is not merely Kafka...” (emphasis added). If this odd remark is true, Kafka appears to be pointing to the greater generality, the greater significance of the creature Samsa vis-à-vis his own empirical identity. For the bug, as he will add, in another conversation with Janouch, is a marker of the times: such metamorphoses are “in the times…. Animals are closer to us than human beings” (M 75). This remark calls for a good deal of reflection, which is also troublesome to undertake, however, because here we do not have Kafka’s remarks but only Janouch’s transcriptions of possibly apocryphal remarks. Furthermore, this way lies symbolic madness, as, say, most recently, in the reading of the literary historian Kurt Flasch, who writes: The greatest misfortune, this [First World] war, was not brought about through the actions of the greatest majority. Kafka told the story of this event in 1915 as the metamorphosis of the free subject into an insect. This transformation of modern individuals into the cogs of a war machine – one impossible to conceptualize and in the end not even purposeful – is something deserving theoretical reflection.[25] Or not. We would do better to observe the detail. As the episode in The Metamorphosis proceeds, we note a resurgence of buglike properties, producing an indistinguishable mix of properties associable with a human soul under duress and at the same time with the automatisms of an animal – or, as we’re reminded here – buglike body: Trotzdem sich Gregor immer wieder sagte, daß ja nichts Außergewöhnliches geschehe, sondern nur ein paar Möbel umgestellt würden, wirkte doch, wie er sich bald eingestehen mußte, dieses Hin- und Hergehen der Frauen, ihre kleinen Zurufe, das Kratzen der Möbel auf dem Boden, wie ein großer, von allen Seiten genährter Trubel auf ihn, und er mußte sich, so fest er Kopf und Beine an sich zog und den Leib bis an den Boden drückte, unweigerlich sagen, daß er das Ganze nicht lange aushalten wurde. [end page 73] Although Gregor told himself over and over again that nothing special was happening, only a few pieces of furniture were being moved, he soon had to admit that this coming and going of the women, their little calls to each other, the scarping of the furniture along the floor had the effect on him of a great turmoil swelling on all sides, and as much as he tucked in his head and his legs and shrank until his belly touched the floor, he was forced to admit that he would not be able to stand it much longer. (GW 1:130, M 25-26) The buglike body comes to the fore (it surfaces into that signature Kafkan perspectival consciousness that fluctuates from a point close to Gregor’s eye to a point above his eye – not obviously remote, yet still preserving a sense of congruity) – the buglike body comes to the fore when Gregor is being assaulted by his family! This excites his libidinal and aggressive impulses: da sah er an der im übrigen schon leeren Wand auffallend das Bild der in lauter Pelzwerk gekleideten Dame hängen, kroch eilends hinauf und preßte sich an das Glas, das ihn festhielt und seinem heißen Bauch wohltat. Dieses Bild wenigstens, das Gregor jetzt ganz verdeckte, würde nun gewiß niemand wegnehmen.... Die Absicht Gretes war für Gregor klar, sie wollte die
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Mutter in Sicherheit bringen und dann ihn von der Wand hinunterjagen. Nun, sie konnte es ja immerhin versuchen! Er saß auf seinem Bild und gab es nicht her. Lieber würde er Grete ins Gesicht springen. then he saw hanging conspicuously on the wall, which was otherwise bare already, the picture of the lady all dressed in furs, hurriedly crawled up on it and pressed himself against the glass, which gave a good surface to stick to and soothed his hot belly. At least no one would take away this picture while Gregor completely covered it up.... Grete’s intent was clear to Gregor, she wanted to bring his mother into safety and then chase him down from the wall. Well, just let her try! He squatted on is picture and would not give it up. He would rather fly in Grete’s face. (GW 1:132; M26) In the verb “verdecken,” you hear the verb “decken,” for beastly copulation.[26] Thereafter, Gregor is threatened by his sister – who, with “erhobener Faust (raised fist)” has now assumed the aggressive posture of the father; the room begins to whirl, a foretaste of the “vollständige Verwirrung (complete confusion)” he will experience upon the uncanny entry into the rear of his body of the little apples pelted by his father. One may ask: Why does Gregor [end page 74] read with bliss this act of humiliation, bestialization?[27] The answer would appear to take us back either to the order of what I have called “symbolic madness” – in this case to the empirical Kafka’s libidinal organization – or, in another direction, to the non-symbolic literalization of Freudian pieces. But we have already been there. There is an extraordinary detail of this mad exchange of properties that should not go unnoticed. Consistent with the chiastic theory of metaphor, it is not only – or even finally – buglike properties that invade Gregor. Aggressive and sexual energies are not exclusively the properties of bugs; indeed, they are not entirely unknown to humans, especially when they’re being at once harried and enticed. And note further, here, the clearly human property, a physically human property, upsetting the dyad that would have Gregor’s metamorphosis (into a metaphor of sorts) be entirely a matter of his new body. Under assault by his father, we hear: Allerdings mußte sich Gregor sagen, daß er sogar dieses Laufen nicht lange aushalten würde; denn während der Vater einen Schritt machte, mußte er eine Unzahl von Bewegungen ausführen. Atemnot begann sich schon bemerkbar zu machen, wie er ja auch in seiner früheren Zeit keine ganz vertrauenswürdige Lunge besessen hatte. Of course Gregor had to admit that he would not be able to keep up even this running for long, for whenever his father took one step, Gregor had to execute countless movements. He was already beginning to feel winded, just as in the old days he had not had very reliable lungs. (GW1: 135; M28) The link between the present and past, the time of metamorphosis and the time of sanity, floats between two senses of the “wie (just as)” which can denote mere analogy but, in this context: identity – meaning: it is now just the way it was. His insect body has taken over features of his former body. There are evidently no dyads in Kafka’s universe: when we examine under pressure either of these terms: body and soul, holding to the view that they can be distinguished as the pair: beast and man, we discover that they cannot: each has always intruded in the other, neither is pure. Unsettled dyads: the father is a figure of might in chiastic reversal to Gregor – but his uniform soon acquires “Flecken (stains),” which undistinguishes him from Gregor, the creature who is covered with marks and gashes and leaves a trail of stains everywhere. The chiasm of power in the family persists in moving. [end page 75] At the close of the Second Section, the whirling chiasm of Gregor’s interpretation of his metaphor is accompanied by a sort of body dancing, set to movements in different tempi: first, fast and lurching, then slow, as he is driven into buglikeness under the pressure of his father’s fury. The physical pressure put on him during his encounters with the others always sets him moving; when he is surprised by the appearance of the cleaning woman, he begins “hin und her[zu]laufen (to race back and forth)” (GW 1:142; M 33). To be seen by others is to be distressed and active. In one instance he sees himself in his mind’s eye as the thoughts he has of others, and in words that feel analogous to the descriptors of his own metaphorical condition: “sie alle erschienen untermischt mit Fremden oder schon Vergessenen (they all appeared intermingled with strangers or people he had already forgotten)” (GW 1: 139-140; M 32). These
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are the descriptors of flux, of thought that cannot fix its object, thought that cannot identify itself with its object – descriptors of the metaphorical state. It is interesting that the first occasion of a sublimation – Gregor is shown having an appetite for something unknown – occurs with the appearance of the boarders, more precisely, in competition with the boarders. “Wie sich diese Zimmerherren nähren, und ich komme um (Look how these roomers are gorging themselves, and I’m dying!)” (GW 1: 145; M 34). They are extra-familial presences, provoking a powerful potentiation of the tenor. Such moments are crucial to Gregor’s story in showing the operations of social constraints on Gregor’s reading of his own metaphor. This play (with bestialization) is starkly influenced – set in motion and accelerated – by the domestic impingements of the Samsa family, a scene of intermittently staged crises. And following the assumption that The Metamorphosis is a handbook analysis of the reading of metaphor, of the functioning of metaphors, we are alerted to the pressure on any reading of metaphor of intricate social, historical, intertextual constraints. The reading of metaphors is enfin a heteronomous act. I cannot sufficiently stress that for Kafka, then, the chief constraint on this metaphorical relation is interpersonal (homo homini verminum); he imagines interpretation as occurring in an interpersonal field; and crucially, the outcome of any interpretation, the point at which interpretation comes to a stop, is determined by chance, which he elaborates as fatigue: a fatigue invariably produced by the intrusions of the other person, the outer limit of which is the threat of punishment and death. See “The Judgment,” see The Trial. [end page 77]
Towards a Conclusion One of the profits of this demonstration might be that we can now obtain a firmer hold on the contested term of “literalization.” “Literalization” must be taken as a process only, as a movement toward an end-state that can never be fully realized. “Literalization” is a Kantian idea, denoting a virtual totality, the moment at which every assignable property of the metaphor, the vehicle, is transferred to, imposed on, the tenor; when there is nothing left to select (as appropriate), nothing left to exclude as inappropriate, because everything that pertains to the vehicle now pertains to the tenor. But the idea of literalization should not be discarded as having only an ideal, abstract sense because literalization is always a live factor in the functioning of metaphor (as long as it is understood as necessarily incomplete). The idea of literalization forces us to look directly and unabashedly at the metaphor (the vehicle) however gross or unendurable; although here, in the case of The Metamorphosis, we deal with another twist: Gregor is literally a vermin (Ungeziefer), yet vermin is impossible to define, being a “historical” concept, viz. Nietzsche: “All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.”[28] In the end no particular metaphor can be defined! Now, you will encounter resistance to this idea. In an essay entitled “The Metamorphosis: The Long Journey into Print,” Hartmut Binder, the most capacious of Kafka scholars, is very concerned to extract the vermin from the etymological freeplay of a destructive field of deconstructive analysis and assign it a manageable entomological identity and concludes: Seen biologically, therefore, the insect represented by Kafka is a mélange of bug and beetle and – possibly – cockroach. It was designed to lend reality to his narrative intentions, even if a creature constructed like it cannot be found in the empirical world. At the same time, such a being is every bit as imaginable as any fabulous beast, especially as his physical build does not [wrong! SC] display any self-contradictory characteristics. Hence, it can certainly be drawn and be shown from a distance. It is not easy to see why Kafka rejected a graphic description of this sort of hybrid-insect while considering a verbal description possible (emphasis added). (M 189) As futile as this reads as literary analysis, it is instructive: Binder wants to focus on the specific literal detail of the metaphor. He is afraid it will lose its specificity in a vague sense of association or fusion between the two poles of the metaphor. [end page 78] But here, again and again, we come up against the dilemma of the creature whose metaphor is “vermin”:
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“vermin” is not itself one thing; vermin is an entirely hybrid, non-self-identical, historically transient, socially constructed entity about which there exists no certain information. There is no science of the vermin, unless it be political science. We would marvel to think of a bug as kind and solicitous, but we can attribute such consciousness to a human being monstrously termed vermin by his persecutors. Still, it is unlikely that Gregor has become a kind-hearted social outcast only by virtue of his transformation into a vermin. Outcome: it is extraordinarily difficult to conceive of this metamorphosis as the transformation of man into a metaphor, because we deal here not with metaphorization but, precisely, with metamorphosis of the metaphor, the whole point of which is to insert entities into another order of law, in which their stability is patently a contrivance, an affair of artistic or readerly intention. This entails one or two quite final conclusions. The first, inauspicious, is that The Metamorphosis, in the last resort, has nothing to tell us about metaphor; the second, that it has everything to tell us about metaphor, and it is the gist of its tale that metaphor is an enigma, to be grasped, if at all, only by approximations. For metaphor rests, impermissibly, on the alleged self-stable character of the metaphorical vehicle (let alone the human tenor: the soul) and on the exclusion from our conceptual vocabulary of “the self-mutating entity.” But the latter is a necessary inclusion, because we deal, here, with the verbal (rhetorical) and literary (stylistic) representation of the only putatively self-stable entity; in short, we deal only with the fiction of things. I do not see, then, that a metaphorology of literature contributes a whit to reliable cognition unless it be that cognition is only, finally, a form of literary experience, in which case it contributes everything of importance.
Receipt 1. In reading The Metamorphosis we must perform the (impossible?) act of staring literally into the eye of the metaphor – the vermin – who appears at the outset to be an unknown species of bug – beetle, cockroach, louse; we have a range of target-images in our scope: not finite but not infinite either. 2. It is important to stress that we are dealing here with an “insectlike monstrosity,” for Gregor has been changed not into an “insect” but into a vermin, an “Ungeziefer”; and a vermin is indeed the creature formed by [end page 79] unusual flows, a partly animal, biological entity and a partly socially constructed, cultural entity, deeply, cruelly endowed with the attitudes that people project onto it; hence its unfamiliarity, its uncanniness; hence the incitement to destroy it on sight. A vermin is an aberrant metaphor come alive. 3. Our difficulty in reading the opening pages stems from the plain fact that the vehicle of this “metaphor” is itself unsteady. The concrete vehicle (something buglike) offers itself to interpretation, but its contours shift. This is also the predicament of Joseph K. and K. in the great novels. They are attempting to understand their situation; they need to define themselves as an interpreted product of their situation, of the data given them. But the data won’t hold still. 4. If we attempt to read the “Ungeziefer” as a metaphor, we are following in Gregor’s footsteps, as it were. He might find safety in deciding the sort of thing he now is (he isn’t what he used to be; his being has been “carried over” into a new body – and, perhaps, he can hardly know this – he has a new sort of consciousness); but until he knows what he is, he is vermin – the pure physical/rhetorical correlative of angst! 5. For the longest time Gregor’s nature is neither verminous nor buglike: it is buglike only if bugs can be assumed to be sweet and considerate, but there is nothing inwardly abhorrent about him that merits his exclusion from human society. 6. Gregor does not become ever more the verminous beast as the story unfolds: these transformations in the direction of a verminous consciousness are intermittent. They occur during family crises. But during a family crisis anyone could reason like a beast. 7. If “it” is a metaphor, it never comes to rest: the two or three crises are marked by a perturbation in the contest of vehicle (bug body, with traces of Gregor’s old body) and tenor (the man whose psyche is only occasionally invaded by buglike properties).
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8. What we have, then, is a highly unstable exchange of features, so unexpected that we might speak of a “destruction” of the metaphor – meaning: a foregrounding, an analysis, and a shattering of its mechanisms. And so, more decisively, the entire story organizes itself around a figure whose entire sense is to demystify and truly to deconstruct metaphor. It does so by tampering with its normal operations; it introduces into it a restlessness which it at once x-rays and stops from functioning normally. 9. A story presumably featuring man through the metaphor of vermin becomes a story featuring the literary figure of metaphor as vermin. 10. This is how metaphor – the trope – at last becomes interesting for the larger narrative: not only in the obvious sense that the chiastic movement indwelling metaphor is dramatized as the father’s recovery of [end page 80] top position at home. It is, rather, that this movement is exhausting; Gregor dies of the effort to understand his situation as a metaphor. 11. He dies of exhaustion. He is exhausted by his task of self-reading; or does he just die [...] of death, because he has suddenly stopped eating? But is it his despair of the metaphor, of the entangling parasitism of metaphorical relationship, that prompts him to starve? Kafka wrote: “Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing. Writing’s lack of independence of the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled by their own laws; only writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and a despair.”[29]
Notes [1]. Durs Grünbein, “Erklärte Nacht.” Erklärte Nacht. Gedichte. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002: 145. [2]. “While he may be a monstrous human being, he is certainly the shadow of an outlandish pair of words, chiefly marked by their negative un-, un- sound and therefore having only etymological significance (they have no other clear-cut significance) as a creature unsuited to a household (infamiliaris) and unacceptable as a sacrifice (MHG. ungezivere).” Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka. The necessity of form. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988: 173. [3]. From the Greek metapherein, “to transfer.” [4]. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975: 102. [5]. Indeed, this does leave out – impermissibly – a decisive third term, the copula “is.” For it can be argued, and has been argued by Lewis Cook, that the truly problematical term of interest in the metaphor is the “is.” The human is grasped as the human, the vermin (somehow) as the vermin; and what needs to be differently grasped is the way that “is” functions. It does not import an identity of vehicle and tenor; it functions only metaphorically; hence, “is” is not “is.” See the contribution to “A Discussion of Derrida and Deconstruction” by
[email protected], October 8, 1997, nosferatu.cas.usf. edu/journal/logs/log9710.html. [6]. Hartmut Binder, “The Metamorphosis: The long journey into print.” The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold. New York: Norton, 1996: 189. [end page 81] [7]. “Some of the wisest comments on his style and its working are those by Marcel Proust. Proust wrote to defend Flaubert against hostile criticism in 1919. He said that he himself believed that ‘la métaphore seule peut donner une sorte d’éternité au style, et il n’y a peut-être pas dans tout Flaubert une seule belle métaphore’.” A.S. Byatt, “Scenes from a Provincial Life: Part Two.” Manchester Guardian, 27 July (2002): http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,763026,00.html. Byatt is citing Marcel Proust, “A propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert.” Nouvelle revue française, January (1920). [8]. Gesammelte Werke in Zwölf Bänden, nach der Kritischen Ausgabe. Ed. Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt
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a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1992: 1.136. References to this text of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) will henceforth be indicated in the body of this essay by (GW: page number). [9]. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis. Norton Critical edition. Ed. and trans. Stanley Corngold. New York: Norton, 1996: 29. References to this translation of The Metamorphosis will henceforth be indicated in the body of this essay by (M: page number). [10]. Theodor Adorno, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1955: 311. [11]. The presence of these solid fragments of Freudian lore, however, should not suggest a commitment on Kafka’s part to the Freudian belief-system anno 1912. Professor Henry Staten has alerted me to this point, warning off any reader’s “buying into Oedipus so lightly as the sense of the familial scene here. It seems to me that Oedipus is as oddly askew here as everything else – yes but no.” Henry Staten, personal correspon-dence, 22 July 2004. Cf. note 26. [12]. Resolving this issue raises a general problem: how to draw the line between (1) identifying a metaphor and (2) reading word-images metaphorically. Here, for example, we could supply Gregor’s writing desk with a metaphorical intent: it is a metaphor (if we add on to it the ubiquitous writing chair) of a posture – the writing posture – the special relation of uprightness and supplication (writing involves bending at the waist) that distinctively marks the human. As the stiff-backed vermin he has become, Gregor will not write again. What we run into here is an application of Wittgenstein’s aperçu to the effect that no verbal rule can be grounds for judging the conformity or nonconformity of some event to it, since the event can always be described as conforming or then again not conforming to it. In this case: the writing desk is materially resistant to its appropriation in a metaphorical field in which attributes flow from it as vehicle to the human attitude – or condition – [end page 82] as tenor. The identification of this or that word-image as metaphor is a judgment call; so if you make certain discriminations, they will flow from the context of your suppositions as a reader of Kafka, from the history of your judgments as a reader pure and simple. [13]. Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen. Ed. Sybille Penkert (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1973: 132. [14]. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1913. Ed. Max Brod. Trans. Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken, 1948: 201. [15]. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works. Ed. and trans. Malcolm Pasley. London: Penguin, 1973: 88. [16]. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923. Ed. Max Brod. Trans. Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1948: 200-1. [17]. The latter point is in line with what I have discussed as Kafka’s “aversion to metaphor” in my Franz Kafka. The necessity of form, 47-89, and again in Lambent Traces. Franz Kafka. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004: esp. 24-5. [18]. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China, 82. [19]. The famous 20th Book of The Iliad, in which Achilles goes forward to encounter Aeneas, begins, truth to tell, with a simile of the lion: Opposing him [Aineias] Akhilleus now came up like a fierce lion that a whole countryside is out to kill: he comes heedless at first, but when some yeoman puts a spear into him, he gapes and crouches, foam on his fangs; his mighty heart within him groans as he lashes both flanks with his tail, urging his valor on to fight; he glares and bounds ahead, hoping to make a kill or else himself to perish in the tumult.
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That was the way Akhilleus’ heart and spirit drove him to meet Aineias. But the simile “Akhilleus now came up like a fierce lion that a whole countryside is out to kill” is vastly extended to bring about a wide exchange of properties between Akhilleus and the lion; and at the close, Homer writes, in the words of Robert Fitzgerald, “That was the way that Achilles’ heart and spirit drove him to meet Aineias.” The thrust of Achilles’ [end page 83] heart and spirit is not likened to anything; “this was the way” it thrust. Robert Fitzgerald, The Iliad [ll. 192-202]. New York: Anchor, 1989: 478-9. [20]. Here, admittedly, the process appears to come to a steady state sooner; though this “heart,” read as a metonymy, could also once again invoke the totality of lion. [21]. Dearest Father. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. New York: Schocken, 1954: 250. Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß. Ed. Max Brod. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1953: 281. [22]. Further to the point about chiasm: it will come as no surprise that fictional works produced by writers possessing a high degree of poetic consciousness replay, at the order of narrative (or diegesis), the chiastic logic of the trope. In plain words, stories – The Metamorphosis – that thoughtfully involve metaphor are likely to stage chiastic effects in the world of their fiction – effects which may even be held to be due to the operations of the chiasm in metaphor. The chief chiastic effects – effects of reversal that dominate the plot of The Metamorphosis – are the reversal in the family’s hierarchy of the positions of Gregor and his father, which does not, as it happens, proceed smoothly, all one way; and these effects, of course, are due to the metamorphosis, the conversion of Gregor into a kind of living metaphor. Chiastic is his self-interpretation of the metaphor he has become: chiastic is his relation of authority vis-à-vis that of the family. [23]. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1963: 42. [24]. Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka. Trans. Gorony Rees. New York: New Directions, 1971: 32. [25]. Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung. Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg. Berlin: Alexander Fest, 2000: 384. [26]. Henry Staten probes this image of Gregor’s covering the picture on the wall: “The ‘decken’ move is nice, but why if this is sexually motivated is the narrative so careful to tell us that Gregor protects it by chance, that it just happens to be the first object he sees as he looks around for something to protect?” (Henry Staten, personal correspondence, 22 July 2004). See also note 11. This concern might be fruitfully answered by a newly theorized Freud such as one finds in the writings of Eric Santner. Meditating on the notion of the ‘creaturely’ in man, Santner profiles this dimension as “life that has been perturbed and amplified – driven – by its inscription in the sphere of the political, its subjection to the dynamics and dilemmas of political power and authority. Paradoxically, human life assumes its ‘creaturely’ aspect by way of its entrance into political [end page 84] space.... It is also, as I have indicated by the word ‘driven,’ [a perspective] ultimately shared by Freudian thought, as well. That is to say, in analogy with the natural-historical paradox, what, in Freudian thought, is ostensibly most ‘animallike’ about us – our sexual drives – is what most distinguishes us from other animals. We are, in turn, most caught up in the dilemmas of being human where we seem to be most ‘animal.’ [“W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Exposure,” an unpublished paper delivered at the conference on “Democracy/Totalitarianism: Political theory and popular culture in an age of global insecurity,” UIUC, April 23-25.] As a result, the least that can be said is that Gregor’s sexual drive does not proceed in a direct line but must involve the energies of chance. And it is this aberrant trajectory of his desire that would then make him most “creaturely” and least amenable to an orthodox Freudian account ca. 1912. [27]. A comparable moment, involving a bestial metaphor for an act of dorsal humiliation of the son at the hands of the father, is found in Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme. On the battlefield at Waterloo, Fabrizio is crassly unhorsed by his father’s men – dragged over the tail of the animal and dropped onto the ground – as the horse is given (returned to?) his putative father, General R.... Thereafter Fabrizio is, as it were, castrated: we are told repeatedly of his inability to love a woman. The relation of Stendhal and Kafka can seem remote, but they are in fact mediated by the figure of Nietzsche: Stendhal was important
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for Nietzsche for his vitalist speculation in both cases. Sebald in his Schwindel. Imagination: The Review of
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aesthetics as was Nietzsche for Kafka – great stylists and objects of intense The associability of Stendhal and Kafka has been richly confirmed by W.G. Gefühle (1990). See, too, my “Tropes in Stendhal and Kafka.” Literary the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, 4 (Fall 2002): 275-90.
[28]. On the Genealogy of Morals (II: 23). Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Modern Library, 1968: 516. [29]. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923, 200-1.
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