The centenary of Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece.

Milton Ribeiro, from Sul 21

In 2012, Kafka's classic novella, The Metamorphosis, will be celebrating its 100th anniversary. The mark it has left on Western culture is as profound as that left by George Orwell's 1984 and very few other books of the last few centuries. Indeed, those who have read the short work of just over 30 words will hardly forget it, and among those passionate about literature or fantasy, it is not uncommon to find someone who can recite the beginning of the novella by heart, certainly one of the best and most intriguing openings in literature of all time:

One morning, upon awakening from troubled dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect. He lay on his back, which was as hard as armor, and when he raised his head slightly, he saw his bulging, brown belly, divided into arched segments, over which the blanket, about to slip off completely, barely clung. His many legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the bulk of the rest of his body, vibrated helplessly before his eyes.

Although published in 1915, The Metamorphosis was written in November 1912. The nearly century-old novella was completed in just 20 days on December 7, 1912, when Kafka wrote to his eternal and repeated fiancée Felice Bauer: “My little story is finished.” There is another very significant note written by Kafka. Two months earlier, upon finishing The Judgment, another short novella, Kafka recorded in his diary that he had discovered “how everything could be said.” The Metamorphosis was the first attempt after that note.

Everything is very enigmatic when dealing with someone as shy and with so few friends as Kafka, but certainly the written phrase has the meaning of an illumination, and everything the writer created from then on—a remarkable series of novels and novellas that include The Stoker, Before the Law, The Penal Colony, The Trial, Letter to His Father, A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist, The Castle, and The Burrow, among others—are either first-rate works or works of considerable and unforgettable content. The critic Otto Maria Carpeaux, who emigrated to Brazil with the rise of Nazism, recalls:

– I was introduced to Kafka in Prague. We were at a dinner party. They told me he was a genius. He was very thin; we know now that he was 1,82 meters tall and weighed around 65 kilos. He was in a corner, alone. I went over to him to include him in the general conversation. When I introduced myself, I understood his name to be Kauka, because he spoke very softly. Now, if it was Kauka, it wasn't the author from whom I had received two books that I hadn't yet read. I tried to start a conversation, but he didn't continue, only answering the bare minimum. I felt I was bothering him and I moved away.

Carpeaux—a great literary critic, author of a lengthy eight-volume History of Western Literature—regretted for the rest of his life having given up so quickly on a writer he went on to praise a few years later. He had misheard; it wasn't Kauka, it was actually the Kafka of the little books he received. It's understandable that Carpeaux lamented the lost opportunity, but it's not logical to torture himself—after all, it was 1921, and although the so-called "enlightenment" occurred in 1912 and the writer lived until 1924, Kafka never became very well-known during his lifetime. He was an obscure writer who published some things and shelved others. When he died, he asked a good friend to destroy his unpublished writings. Luckily for us, Max Brod was an even better friend and betrayed him, saving novels like The Trial and The Castle for the world.

Today, critical volumes of Kafka's work fill bookshelves, but enigmas remain, even regarding *The Metamorphosis*. It is known that Kafka read excerpts of the work to Max Brod and a few other close friends. Biographers say that the group laughed at the grotesqueness of the scenes. Kafka did too. It is possible to read Kafka in a comic register, undoubtedly, but it is indisputable that the most magnificent reading is the one that places man in despair in the face of existence. There is an almost imperceptible layer of humor and another of irony, this one slightly thicker, permeating his texts, but the overall effect can never be described as cheerful or motivating. In fact, it is an imperturbable narrator telling a suffocating story, without resorting to formulas of suspense or terror. Gunther Andres, on page 19 of *Kafka: Pro and Contra (the records of the trial)*, brilliantly summarizes: "The astonishing thing about Kafka is that the astonishing doesn't astonish anyone."

The title *The Metamorphosis* likely refers not only to the physical transformation of Gregor Samsa – whose name is structurally quite similar to Kafka's, isn't it? – who becomes an insect "one morning," but also to all the other changes that follow in the family. Before the metamorphosis, the whole family depended on his work as a traveling salesman, supporting and loving him. However, with his transformation into an insect and subsequent confinement to his room, his father is forced to return to work, as is his naive and pure 17-year-old sister, his mother starts sewing, and the house becomes an inn where Gregor is more than dispensable; he is unwanted. Samsa's physical transformation generates another metamorphosis, and one could say that he goes from being parasitized to being the parasite, from being a pillar of support to being dead weight and an object of repulsion.

It's strange that Gregor wakes up that morning without trying to analyze what might have happened, how, and why. The question "What happened to me?" is isolated. Later, we learn of his anxieties about his previous life and get the impression that his current one doesn't matter much. At some points in the narrative, he seems to be taking revenge, at others, lustful. Ostracism within the family, work pressure, the need to obey, the profound dissatisfaction of being enslaved—everything the novel suggests resonates in the author's life. The story of the man turned beetle is entirely realistic. The family problem receives an important observation from the translator Marcelo Backes: “Kafka invokes his father, mother, and sister almost without using possessive pronouns. It is something very insistent. It is rare for the narrator to speak of HIS sister, HIS father, HIS mother. They are, most of the time, just father, mother, and sister, without the affection of the possessive pronoun and living only in their generic condition of father, mother, and sister.”

In the classic Conversations with Kafka (1920-1923), Gustav Janouch quotes Kafka as saying that "The Metamorphosis is not a confession, although – in a certain sense – it is an indiscretion." A lesser indiscretion than the famous Letter to His Father, but let's not digress.

The way Kafka quickly constructs the conflicts in the book is also surprising. The first is in the famous first paragraph, followed by two other serious conflicts, built in the same direct and succinct language, with almost notarial precision: the moment when Gregor is first seen by his family—a scene of remarkable artistic achievement by Kafka—and the moment when Gregor's sister, Grete Samsa, advises her parents to get rid of the enormous insect, as they had already tried everything to live with it. There is also the much-interpreted aggression with the apple, but perhaps what disturbs the reader most is what underlies it from the first to the last word: the fact that another extraordinary event simply does not occur. There is no moment of explanation for what happened or of a return to normalcy. In fact, there are no explanations; everything is left open to interpretation. There is an Aristotelian and disturbing absence of the classic scheme of exposition, conflict, climax, and conclusion.

Kafka asked his editor to avoid drawing Gregor's figure, even from a distance, but today we have versions of Gregor Samsa in comic books and films. For some, it's a cockroach, although the signs clearly indicate a type of beetle. We again invoke the translator Marcelo Backes: "Kafka refers to it only as a 'dung beetle'. But what is objective can be even more diffuse, since Mistkäfer (dung beetle) can also refer to a dirty and careless person, or it can be any scarab beetle, since it is a common designation for coleopteran, coprophagous and scarab beetle insects, which generally live on the excrement of herbivorous mammals."

Kafka always said: “Everything that is not literature bores me, and I even hate conversations about literature.” Which would certainly include this article. In other words, it is much more worthwhile to read the short and revolutionary novella.