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Franz Kafka (1883-1924) A Brief Biography and Introduction to his Novella, The Metamorphosis (w. 1912; p. 1915). NOVELLA.
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Franz Kafka (1883-1924) A Brief Biography and Introduction to his Novella, The Metamorphosis (w. 1912; p. 1915)
NOVELLA A novellais, as its name suggests, a short novel or a very long story. “a work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel .”
Franz Kafka • Franz Kafka was born in Prague (Bohemia) in 1883. At the time Prague was the second major capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most of the working class people in Prague spoke Czech; the upper class spoke German. The origins of Kafka’s alienation are rooted in the social and cultural conflicts in which Prague was steeped: Czechs vs. Germans; Jews vs. nonJews.
Another (implicit) conflict existed in the union of his parents, since his father was middle class, while his mother came from an upper-class, German-speaking family.
German-speaking family. • Hermann Kafka (father) worked initially as a traveling salesman; he then became a wealthy retailer of men’s and women’s clothing and accessories. • Julie Lowy (mother) was the daughter of an affluent brewer.
Kafka was the first born son. He had two younger brothers who died in infancy. Of Kafka’s three younger sisters, he favored the youngest, Ottla.
Kafka’s father was reputed to be an over- bearing, materialistic, tyrannical man who valued making money above all else. He was critical of Franz’s literary efforts and viewed his son as lacking substance and ambition. Because Mrs. Kafka helped her husband run his lucrative business, the Kafka children were left in the care of a series of governesses and servants.
According to Dr. Grzegorz Gazda, a Kafka scholar from the University Of Lodz, Poland, the Kafka children did have one long-term positive surrogate parent—a Czech-speaking governess--Marie Wernerova, who remained in the Kafka household until her death in 1918. It was Wernerova’s presence that gave the children’s everyday lives more of a “family atmosphere.”
For most of his adult life, Franz Kafka was employed at the “Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. The job involved investigating personal injury to industrial workers, such as lost fingers or limbs, and assessing compensation. Industrial accidents of this kind were commonplace at this time.”
Kafka’s Romances: Engaged to Felice Bauer in 1914 but called off a few weeks later. Engaged again in July 1917 but due to Kafka’s failing health, the second engagement was broken in Dec. 1917.
In 1918, while convalescing in a Schelensen boarding house for tuberculosis patients, Kafka met a shy dressmaker from Prague, Julie Wohryzek. By the summer of 1919, Kafka proposed to Julie, much to his father’s objections, who suggested that his son would do better to visit a brothel than to marry a woman from such a low social standing. Kafka and Wohryzek amicably agreed to call off the engagement and remained friends.
1920, Kafka had a serious relationship with the married Czech journalist and writer Milena Jesenská. However, their relationship did not last. His final relationship was with 25-year-old Dora Diamant, a kindergarten teacher who volunteered at one of the last sanatoriums Kafka visited.
The Theme of Transformation or Metamorphosis Kafka borrows from a rich literary tradition of “transformation” or metamorphosis stories.
“Wedding Preparations in the Country” Among Kafka’s unfinished manuscripts (Max Brod was Kafka’s literary executor) was a long story called “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” a fragmented work about Eduard Raban, a man who is reluctantly traveling to the country to prepare for his own wedding to his fiance, Betty. Composed around 1907-08, but never published during Kafka’s lifetime, it contains common themes in Kafka’s work… “nonarrival” and “stasis.”
“WPITC” reads like an exercise in stasis: Eduard’s watch stops, he is preoccupied with the ineffectual forward movement of the horses’ “thin forelegs,” and notes the “light short steps of the people coming toward him.” The “carriage wheels squeaked with the brakes on,” and “the wind was blowing straight against him.” Eduard Raban so dreads the wedding plans that he imagines sending a BODY DOUBLE:
“I don’t even need to go to the country myself…I’ll send my clothed body…For I myself am meanwhile lying in my bed, smoothly covered over with the yellow brown blanket, exposed to the breeze that is wafted through the seldom-aired room….As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think….The form of a large beetle, yes. Then I would pretend it was a matter of hibernating…and I would press my little legs to my bulging belly…”
I will stay in bed and pretend I am a stag beetle, hibernating. I will be your body-double and attend the wedding.
Roman poet Ovid 43 B.C.-A. D. 17 Franz Kafka: 1883-1924 Ovid wrote Metamorphoses in epic poetry form. It tells of several mortals or nymphs who were transformed into animal or plant (or other) form by the gods, usually as a punishment for a wrongdoing. Some mortals asked to be transformed to avoid a certain fate. Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” tells of Gregor Samsa’s transformation and how his altered state impacts the rest of his family.
Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales • Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their famous collection of fairy tales in 1814. One of the Grimm brothers’ purposes in gathering and publishing these folk tales was to help Germans regain a sense of national pride. The tales are designed to represent a patriarchal hierarchy and traditional family and gender roles.
Transformation (which means “change”) in these fairy tales is often the result of an evil being’s curse or is a “wish gone awry.” Frequently in the Grimm Brothers’ tales, a transformation occurs, and through the good deeds of the character or through the intervention of a loyal and kind-hearted person, the spell is broken and the transformed person is turned back into his or her original human form.
Transformation/Intervention/Reversal of Transformation • In “The Seven Ravens,” for example, a father, upset that his seven sons are not prompt in delivering spring water for the baptism of their new baby sister, wishes that they all get turned into ravens. The father’s wish comes true, and the brothers all fly off to live in the woods together. Later, the sister wants to know about her brothers, and when she learns what has happened to them, she sets out to find them. When the sister does find the seven ravens, due to her goodness, they are transformed back into their human form and reunited with the family.
Note the use of the KEY in both TSR and in TM. The sister in both stories eventually is the key or controls the key to the brothers’ (or brother’s) release from the transformation.
“He must go…That’s the only solution. You must try to get rid of the idea that this is Gregor.”
Although a psycho-biographical reading of Kafka’s work can be reductive, there are several parallels between Kafka’s life and the tone and themes in The Metamorphosis:
The strained and distant father/son relationship. • “His father knotted his fist with a fierce expression on his face as if he meant to knock Gregor back into the room” (35). • “[The father] seized in his right hand the walking stick which the chief clerk had left behind…in his left hand a large newspaper…and [he] began stamping his feet…to drive Gregor back into his room” (35). • The father “hisses” at Gregor and pushes him so hard that Gregor is injured (41).
On page 64 the father throws apples at Gregor. Gregor is never given any indications that his parents or sister appreciate his sacrifices. Once after Gregor arrived home from a long business trip, his father “could not really rise to his feet but only lifted his arms in greeting” (62).
#2: Gregor’s feelings of guilt and obligation to earn more money correspond with Franz Kafka’s awareness that his father was disappointed in his career choice and earning potential. Kafka, like Gregor, had difficulty establishing his own independence.
#3 (Military image) Gregor had been a lieutenant in the military, as indicated by the picture described on p. 35. Although the parents are portrayed as near- invalids at the novella’s beginning, once Gregor is incapacitated by his metamorphosis, his father gradually becomes more robust. The father’s blue uniform with its shiny golden buttons seems to give him an air of authority and power. Ironically, no one in the family ever mentions that Gregor had served in the military.
Despite Kafka’s desire to join the military, his employer arranged to have his service deferred on the grounds that the country needed him to continue in his position at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Later, his health issues disqualified him from serving in the military.
The father makes no effort to comfort his son after his transformation. While Gregor was a conscientious care-taker of his family, when the roles are reversed, his parents and (even eventually, his sister) view Gregor as an embarrassing inconvenience. Mr. Samsa’s lack of involvement in Gregor’s care parallels Kafka’s lifelong feelings of inadequacy and assumptions that he had disappointed his own father.
Although we as readers never learn how or why Gregor Samsa transformed into a large insect, we can surmise from the family dynamics that Gregor is alienated, tired of working to pay off his parents’ debts, and he unconsciously desires to be fired from his job.
Obsessed with his obligation to support his family and apparently guilt-ridden over his desire to abandon such duties, he has, symbolically, been transformed into something repulsive. Instead of simply telling his family that he is going to quit his job, and move away to establish his own life, it is easier for Gregor to accept his metamorphosis into something he has apparently always suspected: that he is worthless and despicable.
Furthermore, to add to his self-punishment, the loneliness Gregor has felt as a traveling salesman is heightened when he is confined to his own room and eventually stripped of everything that allows him “a recollection of his human background.”
#4: Both Gregor Samsa and Franz Kafka are critical of bureaucratic hierarchies and hypocrisy. Early in the novella, Gregor fears that though he has not been absent from work one day during his five years of employment, he will be severely punished for his absence. When the chief clerk arrives, he reprimands Gregor, telling him that his job performance has not been satisfactory lately, and the firm suspects he may have taken money!
Neither the chief clerk nor anyone else can understand a word Gregor utters, but Gregor defends himself, saying “All that you’re reproaching me with now has no foundation; no one has ever said a word to me about it” (31). Before the chief clerk arrives, Gregor thinks, “What a fate, to be condemned to work for a firm where the smallest omission at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion!” (27).
5th psychobiographical similarity: Gregor is closest to his sister Grete, and Kafka favored and was cared for by his youngest sister Ottla. 6thpsychobiographical similarity: As Gregor’s eyesight and hearing fail, he also notices when his father is again chasing him from the living room," he was already beginning to feel breathless, just as in his former life his lungs had not been very dependable” (emphasis added 62). Kafka had tuberculosis.
