There are many ways of interpreting "The Transformation" by Franz Kafka, and in my opinion, too many critics have given only symbolic readings of the story, which limit its impact and complexities. The events of the story can be seen as an analogue for what happens to a person emotionally who has become severely ill. It would be fair to say that the state in which Gregor Samsa finds himself is terminal, as much as he might wish it to go away--it will only get worse. When someone becomes seriously ill, his relationship to the world changes utterly. That is the dreaded transformation. After a stroke, for example, a person speaks gibberish or nonsense, all the while believing he is talking correctly and intelligibly; one becomes completely dependent on others. Gregor must be taken care of by his family who resent his presence in the household almost immediately after the onset of the transformation, for in his pathetic state he has become a large burden. Besides the fact he can no longer bring home the bacon, Gregor smells bad and looks disgusting.
What I find interesting is that this story makes me question how we are regarded by others and, as a consequence, regard ourselves. Gregor is resisting the fact that he has turned into a bug by thinking it is only temporary. In a way, this parallels the reader resisting the story in its literal form. The reader tries to rationalize it, avoiding an emotional response to the initial event disclosed in the first sentence. In rereading the story, I allowed myself to be affected by this horrible possibility: one has lost all manual dexterity but, more importantly, all one's capacity to communicate. Instead of trying to rationalize this event by interpreting it in symbolic terms, one should imagine what it would feel like to be turned into a bug physically while retaining the consciousness one had previously as a person, when one had name, personality, job, family to support, remaining in one's former room. One can still think, feel, remember, worry, but is unable to negotiate the world physically--does not have the use of one's hands, is for all practical purposes immobile, like a quadriplegic. Gregor's body does not respond to his will. His body is alive and moving but completely out of his control.
Let's go to the text. Gregor's first predicament is getting out of bed. Against all odds, he succeeds. More to the point, he has woken up from a bad dream, which I interpret to be his former life. His prior situation was as the main working part in his family, the provider of income. He was the only source of income except for what remained from the father's failed business. Gregor finds himself changed, "in his bed into a monstrous insect." One could interpret the first sentence of the story as Gregor waking up from his former life as one who was trapped in a situation he had never questioned, a life full of pressure and stress. Gregor was always responding to other people's needs and demands. His job and family responsibilities have made him into a person driven by worries and anxieties, whose life is not his own. Read as an analogue for what happens inside to someone who has become incapacitated by illness, the story gives us a person who, when he was well, could carry his burden and perhaps even take some pride in shouldering so many responsibilities, even though his is a life poisoned by anxiety. Incapacitated, only the anxieties remain, intensified because he can do nothing to deal with the demands that have always been expected of him. In the fourth paragraph of the story, he recalls his hollow life as a traveling salesman: "the anxiety about train connections." (P. 77) The explicit key word is anxiety. At the end of the fifth paragraph, he recalls the loan, which is coming due in five to six years. For the moment he is kidding himself that it will be easy to pay off. Then the first sentence of the sixth paragraph, he looks at the alarm clock and is jolted by the anxiety (of the everyday) that he has missed his train for work.
The jobholder lives by the clock. One is terrorized by time in Gregor Samsa's world. The work ethic and its pressures are crushing. Self-interest is put aside in favor of the demands of the job, the institution, and society at large. The jobholder is other directed (see David Reisman). Anxieties about being late for work, meeting deadlines, having one's work found inadequate by one's superior, are not only totally draining but finally destroy one's sense of autonomy. One either becomes a company man or loses out in the struggle for promotion, and is seen by one's co-workers as a has-been. Such a person might be seen as a "mere tool of the chief, spineless and stupid." (P. 78)
"The Transformation" depicts more powerfully than any fiction I have read--including CRIME AND PUNISHMENT--a consciousness tortured by anxiety. Immediately in paragraph one we are given the fact of a being who is paralyzed--the key word is "divided," is besieged by worries that the coverlet is about to drop to the floor--the thing that covers the awful fact of his condition, and finally we get the second key word, "helpless." We have been dealing with the text on an emotional level, which includes worries and painful memories, and to this extent is synonymous with the psychological dimension.
II.
The narrative technique used in "The Transformation" is a form of indirect discourse in conjunction with the narrative past tense which creates the illusion of events taking place in the present. Single quotation marks surround Gregor's thoughts. Another way of indicating this kind of interior monologue in the third person is: he thought that his life was a mess; or: he thought to himself: he should get going as soon as possible. Also, these thoughts or this talking to himself could be represented without the he thought that...by putting the said thoughts in italics. Falkner does this. In the German original, double quotes are used around Gregor's thoughts. His thoughts are generally given surrounded by quotes, followed by "he thought." It is not dissimilar to the way dialogue is indicated followed by "he said" or "she said." Kafka's technique is less subtle than that of Henry James, Flaubert, James Joyce and other masters of point of view writing. Nonetheless it is clear and serves his purposes.
The grammar of these narrative signals is further understood if one thinks about the kind of verb being employed, the reflexive verb: he thought to himself (said to himself) that such and such...In a sense the subject of this story is reflexivity or self-consciousness. It is about a character who is incapable of action, like a quadriplegic, or someone in the last stages of a terminal illness, whose only activity is thinking about himself and remembering his former life. How is self-consciousness depicted? As a negative, self-canceling process.
III.
I wish to venture another interpretation, which complements what I have written above: it concerns waking up to how one has always been regarded by others. One has lived a life protected from the knowledge that other people saw one as despicable, as loathsome, as vermin, as no better than a dog. Gregor's parents and sister are still protected from that knowledge. Gregor now feels about himself that he is as bad, as disgusting as others have always felt. By others, I mean, the gentiles. In the middle of page eighty-eight: "Travelers aren't popular, I know." For the word traveler, read Jew. The wandering Jew was a colloquialism. Two lines down, the word "prejudice" comes into the text explicitly. "People think they make pots of money and lead a life of luxury." This was one of the many ways in which Jews were stereotyped at the time the story was written. Earlier in the story, on page eighty-four, when the chief clerk was talking directly to Gregor about reasons for why he was in the state he was in at present, and also about suspicions that his productivity is inadequate, and further implications that he has been stealing from the firm, the chief mocks him, saying "on parading these peculiar whims." This refers to Gregor's present state of being locked in his room, his absence from work, and causing worry to his parents. One line further: "...a possible explanation for absence--it concerned the authority to collect payments..." So Gregor is suspected of stealing money, being a thief, and therefore by implication, a Jew.
If Kafka intended this meaning--we should always remain skeptical of any interpretation of a literal text--, it is a more covert meaning than the analogue I drew attention to earlier, namely, with illness, which is referred to explicitly in the text many times, for example, when the mother says "perhaps he's seriously...You must get a doctor this minute. Gregor is ill." (p. 85) Ironically, his superior from the office takes this as a fabrication, his mother's attempt to make excuses for her son's deviant behavior. The reading of this story as someone realizing that they are a Jew, how much they are despised by the dominant population by their dominant society is based on the fact that there is no doubt that Kafka is capable of creating this kind of covert code, for he did so in the story "Investigations of a Dog." The word dog was a common metaphor for the Jew during Kafka's lifetime. It is possible that bug is being employed in the same way. The idea that he is preoccupied with invisible forces could refer simply to the anti-Semitism in his society, views he has internalized, producing self-hatred. Copy Right 2011 by Nicholas Van Vactor, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No comments:
Post a Comment