The Borders of Things

Franz Kafka, With a Trailer for Some Concluding Methodolgical Remarks on D&G

Kafka's "Metamorphosis," everyone knows, opens with Gregor Samsa's realization that he has become a "gigantic insect." We are tempted to allegorize here, and often feel forced to interpret, since "bug" cannot really mean "bug"--perhaps Gregor merely feels like a bug (i.e., the story takes as objectively real his subjective interior state) because of his family, his job, his impoverished social situation. We begin thinking that perhaps Gregor-as-bug represents capitalism, bureaucracy, the Oedipal conflict, the condition of the artist, disease, all other forms of alienation and social, personal, and familial division. We feel this need to come up with alternatives for "bug" for the simple reason that people do not wake up and find themselves insects. This is not real.
Kafka, indeed, feeds that temptation through his excruciating concern for the minute detail of actions. Most of the "Metamorphosis" is devoted to specific operations and actions, and their difficulties as a gigantic insect: getting out of bed, opening doors, feeding your giant insect brother, making sure he has room to move around (Grette Samsa), leaning over a table sewing lingerie for bourgeois women in order to make ends meet (Mrs. Samsa), falling asleep at the dinner table (Mr. Samsa). The actions occupy Kafka far more than their meanings: it is almost as if motivations are simply excuses for the actions, and their narration, to occur. Consequently, for someone utilizing so self-consciously the techniques of narrative realism (albeit of a certain kind), we are compelled to focus in on the obvious impossible giant insect, piling all of our hermeneutic weight upon him as the sign we must interpret.
But I think this is a mistake. "Metamorphosis" is exactly what it is: a story in which a man literally and totally turns into an insect. Which doesn't make this metamorphosis insignificant. Instead, it forces us to pay close attention to what Kafka is really interested: the absolute surreality of realism, the ruptures and gaps in the everyday world that are themselves as bizzarre, and indeed terrifying, as a giant insect. This interest in the conceptual gaps, the space between what we think we know and what actually occurs in the world, or, more accurately, our actions and the theoretical justification for those actions, leads Kafka into even more profound philosophical and aesthetic territory: what I would call pure form. Kafka's thematic choices (insects, punishments without crimes, artists whose activity is entirely invisible, unnamed creatures burrowing beneath the soil) make it possible for his stories to become form without content--we are reading a story which tells us nothing, a narrative for its own sake, an empty, and yet completely enveloping, fictional structure. Empty and yet enveloping. . .I like that. Kafka contains nothing and yet covers all. And for this he is simultaneously the most resistant of artists to interpret (How can you interpret pure form?) and the artist everyone wants to interpret (this must mean something). At most, then, we might be able to say Kafka is an artist of our desire to interpret. He provokes us into an action, only to show that this action cannot be accomplished, which forces us to consider why we undertook it in the first place.

But these observations are too abstract. Look at the beginning of "Metamorphosis." After Gregor's self-discovery, the very next sentence describes his body, "his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments," but slips in, almost unnoticed, the cares of the everyday: "on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely." Kafka's virtuosity in this story is really the narrative voice, a hidden third person narration, largely focalized on Gregor, and yet shifting, through a free and direct style, around the thoughts of other characters as well. Yet there is no easy explanation for this description of the quilt. If we read it as the "narrative persona," it makes little sense. When someone is narrating the fact that another person has turned into a bug, who cares about quilts? They can't keep a cold-blooded insect warm anyway. One could argue that it's a useful detail for understanding how Gregor looks, an effect of his new body, and thus a realist technique to allow greater visualization. But it ISN'T a useful detail: the quilt clause really tells us nothing about Gregor's appearance, nor exactly why the quilt is slipping off. We can read it as a reflection of Gregor's consciousness--after all, we often find ourselves fixating on strange details when in crisis situations. But, in the first paragraph, we have few formal markers to warrant attributing this to Gregor, as we do in the following ("What has happened to me? he thought."). It's true that later in the text, the line between Gregor's thoughts and the narrator's thoughts is not always clearly distinguished, but, again, I would argue that claiming this is Gregor's observation is a stretch. So, then, why is this bit on the quilt there?
What I am calling the strange incommensurability of this quilt description with the narrative event fits with the descriptions of Gregor's room in the next paragraph. The cumulative effect is a realism which is decidedly surreal:

Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out--Samsa was a commercial traveler--hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!
Gregor's eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky--one could hear rain drops beating on the window gutter--made him quite melancholy.

Describing the room, setting the scene: common realist technique. But the exclamation mark at the end of the first paragraph makes all the difference. Whether coming from Gregor or the narrator, the introduction of surprise, wonder, even a certain degree of mass-culture spectacularity, into a magazine picture, is absolutely and totally bizarre, considering the circumstances. Gregor has turned into an insect, and the first exclamation point is granted to an extra-large fur coat. What is going on here? Even Gregor's emotional state is strangely disconnected from his situation, or at least connected in a way we wouldn't expect. The overcast sky makes him sad? He has 6 legs! HE IS AN INSECT!
While it may sound as if I am calling attention to minor details (and, indeed, I am not trying to offer a real "reading" of Kafka here), I think that is exactly the genius of the story, and one we often miss. There is simply no interpretive explanation for these emotions, descriptions, thoughts, just as there is no apparent explanation for the strange and bizarre reactions that come from being sentient beings. The relation between consciousness and the material world is as inexplicable an irruption as the conversion of a door to door salesman into an insect. You might say that Kafka's attention to the incommensurate is an observation of formal emptiness which creates the very thing it is observing: by creating stories that resist interpretation, Kafka is inserting, if you will, aesthetic black matter into the universe. The effect is compelling: we read Kafka's strange tales, and, suddenly, the real world looks even stranger than it did before.
I've only pointed out a few of the sentence-level operations early in the "Metamorphosis," but such subtle, almost unnoticeable insertions, occur throughout the entire story. It is the cumulative effect of these tactics that makes the work a masterpiece, and not, I would argue, the overall thematics that many readers try to emphasize. There are two in particular worth mentioning (I'll skip what might be the most common, "Gregor as artist figure," as this seems to me the least viable reading of the story, the product of far to overzealous allegorization). Both are present in this sentence from Walter Benjamin: "There is much to indicate that the world of the officials and the world of the fathers are the same to Kafka" (Illuminations 113). Benjamin here brings together Kafka as narrator of Oedipus and Kafka as narrator of the bureaucratic, the institutional. Benjamin is right to bring them together, as the structural similarities are compelling. The Law, Benjamin says, whether of the Father or of the State, is written "but in a secret place" (115); its out there, making you guilty, but you never get the chance to read it. Milan Kundera, who knows the world of bureaucracy perfected, echoes Benjamin, calling attention to the "boundless labyrinth" of power in Kafkan texts (The Art of the Novel 101): once you are embedded within the bureaucratic/familial world, you simply cannot get out, nor, and perhaps this is more terrifying, can you understand why you are being punished. Gregor's metamorphosis is inexplicable--he is guilty, but for an offense he could not willfully commit, as was Oedipus. The "officials," in Benjamin's term, are needed to endlessly defer the arrival of the truth, as well as reinforce along every step of the way the power of the paternal.
The two themes are, to be sure, rife throughout the "Metamorphosis." Gregor's immediate concern is with his despotic job situation, a black comic precursor to The Office in its layers of middle-management watching employees, keeping them on track. This job situation, we are told, is a direct result of Gregor's father's failures in business: in other words, the father's rule over Gregor's life conspires with bureaucracy to keep him in check. [Although, and here is where facile analogies become dangerous: to say that the Father and the Office are self-reinforcing power structures doesn't account for the fact that it is Mr. Samsa's failure which dominates Gregor's life. My knowledge of psychoanalysis is inadequate to take up this problem, but too many critics are quick to say "Oedipal drama" where Kafka has created something much more interesting]. More overt Oedipal elements are present. At the end of the story's second section, Gregor's father attacks him with apples (one of which, famously, lodges in the soft flesh of Gregor's back in a nausea-inducing passage). As Gregor passes out from the pain, with

his last conscious look he saw the door of his room being torn open and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her underbodice, for her daughter had loosened her clothing to let her breathe more freely and recover from her swoon, he saw his mother rushing towards his father, leaving one after another behind her on the floor her loosened petticoats, stumbling over her petticoats straight to his father and embracing him, in complete union with him--but here Gregor's sight began to fail--with her hands clasped round his father's neck as she begged for her son's life. (69)

I don't think it is pushing this too hard to say it is some recreation of an Oedipal economy. Gregor's mother drops her undergarments as she rushes to her husband, "in complete union with him," an erotic description if there ever was one (albeit Kafkaesque erotics), within which she "begs" for her son. This isn't interpreting symbols, nor is it free association. Psychoanalysis is all over this.
BUT, and here is where I differ from these critical approaches, is not to say that Kafka isn't interested in Father/Officialdom, etc., but that the narrative insertion of that formal gap, that difference which has no explanation, disrupts these larger hermeneutic modes. That is, Kafka's tales cannot be explained simply by Oedipus or by bourgeois capital: instead, they blow these structures apart, so subtly and precisely, that we are left grasping for the specters of interpretive schema that simply cannot exist as such. Which is to say, Kafka, in his generation of these impossible aesthetic forms, actually gives us a way to think Oedipus and capitalism.
[More examples of this tearing apart through emptying. "In the Penal Colony": discipline in its purest form; the prisoner is convicted of insubordination, which is an assault on Law as such, an undermining of Law's fundamental structure (the ruler and the ruled) thru emptying it of any content. "The Hunger Artist": art made invisible (how does one see one fast? What is one looking at?). Perhaps, strangest of all, "The Burrow": the network without content; the object of desire which one wants to be near but does not want to actually occupy.]
Back to Kafka's disruption, which brings me, at long last, to Deleuze and Guattari's study of Kafka. Their book could easily be a chapter in 1000 Plateaus, thus the theoretical interests (Anti-oedipus, productive desire, intensities over emotions, assemblages over structures). D&G are spot on to call attention to Kafka's explosion of these hermeneutic schema, as I would do the same. Moreover, their book is an important analysis of (and challenge to) what would call itself formal analysis. D&G are far closer to formalism than they think, but they are adamantly anti formalist in other ways. But, for the sake of time and whatnot, I think I'll have to take this up in a separate post.

Posted by pjaussen at March 3, 2007 04:09 PM | TrackBack