This article was downloaded by: [McMaster University]

On: 22 December 2014, At: 11:30

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Symposium: A Quarterly
Journal in Modern Literatures
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsym20

What The Metamorphosis

Means
a
Rudolph Binion
a
Columbia University
Published online: 06 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Rudolph Binion (1961) What The Metamorphosis Means,
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 15:3, 214-220, DOI:
10.1080/00397709.1961.10732692

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1961.10732692

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,
or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views
expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the
Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with
primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the
Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,
 sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014
 RUDOLPH BINION

WHAT THE METAMORPHOSIS MEANS

Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014

THE FIRST generation of Franz Kafka's crincs has construed The

Metamorphosis, like his other enigmatical tales, diversely as a fusion
of naturalism and supernaturalism, or of~m and surrealism.i. or
as an allegory, or as a mere psychotic projection. Gregor Samsa's
metamorphosis into a bug serves,' if supernatural, to magnify his
natural an~uish or despai!..j,'l-if surrealistic, to illumine the categories
Of the self, of the absurd, or of\nonentity; if allegorical, to figure the
reincarnation of Christ, the isolation of the artist, neurotic illness, or
alienation at large.V,If, finally, it expresses literally Kafka's own view
of the world, then its significance is autobiographical rather than
artistic.
Only one Kafka critic, to my knowledge, has proposed a fifth line
of interpretation-Friedrich Beissner, who in a lecture delivered in
19P (Der Erzlihier Franz Kafka, Stuttgart, 19~Z, pp. 36-37) remarked:
"It would have been quite impossible for the author even to hint that
this metamorphosis is merely a fantasy of the sick hero's: in so doing
he would have destroyed the specific gravity of his tale. But ought
we to be so sure how matters stand?" To bear out his doubt Beissner
pointed to the drawing on the jacket of the first (1916) edition of
the story, which depicted-"presumably not without the author's
consent"-a tormented-looking but unmetamorphosed young man
who "can only be Gregor Samsa himself ... Gregor Samsa, who in
the very first sentence of the tale turns into a horrible insect." When
the· artist (Ottomar Starke) objected that, working without instruc-
tions, he had depicted the mood ("dread! despair!") but not the
matter of the tale, Beissner retorted (Kafka der Dichter, Stuttgart, I 9 ~ 8,
pp. 39-4z) that for Kafka and his devoted publisher, Kurt Wolff, to
have approved the sketch, they must have found it appropriate to both.
Even so the evidence would be equivocal at best: Gregor reminisces
much, and the scene may be one prior to his illness. Furthermore,
some of its details do not fit the tale however construed. On the other
ZI4
 RUDOLPH BINION ZI5

hand, the tale does afford full internal evidence that Kafka meant
Gregor's illness as mental and not physical.
For The Metamorphosis is simply a conventional account of a natural
occurrence. It is the story of a man who thinks he has become a bug,
told as if the content of his delusion were physical reality. The narrator's
perspective is equivalent to that of the hero himself, who, like a typical
victim of hallucinosis, sees the world accurately in all of its particulars
save one. Thus what crawls out of Gregor Samsa's bedroom one
morning, naked and drooling, to astound his parents and the chief
clerk is not a man-sized bug but Gregor physically intact. Indeed, what
other explanation is there for their instantly recognizing him ?-or for
the charwoman's mere playfulness with him later, or the lodgers'
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014

mere amusement?
The best way to grasp what Kafka has done is to imagine him
having first invented his hero, then decided to tell his hero's story
in accordance with his hero's own outlook. To devise a narrative
idiom in accordance with the hero's perspective on reality is common
literary practice in our century: Thomas Mann's narrators are as
reflective as his heroes, Hemingway's as primitivistic, Camus' as
absurd. And neurotic heroes too are common in our time. What is
singular about The Metamorphosis is only Kafka's use of this narrative
technique in the case of a hallucinated hero-though here of course
the oddity of the effect far exceeds the-singularity of the means
employed.
Gregor's is plainly a neurotic case history. He himself, even while
regarding his metamorphosis as an extrinsic accident, sees its origin
in the events of the preceding five years. He was a carefree youth.
fresh out of the army when, five years earlier, his father's business
failed. Thereupon his

only concern had been to do what he could as fast as possible to

make the family forget the business disaster that had brought them
all to the point of utter despair. And so he had started work with
real eagerness, rising almost overnight from petty clerk to traveling
salesman, which of course meant a big difference in earning power
as well as the immediate conversion of what he earned by way of
commissions into ready cash, which could be laid out on the table
at home before the surprised and delighted family. But even this
they had grown used to, the family as well as Gregor; they took
the money gratefully, he gave it willingly, but all special warmth
of feeling was now lacking. Only the sister had remained close to
Gregor, and as she, unlike him, loved music and played the violin
movingly, he was secretly planning to send her to the conservatory
in a year regardless of the high costs involved, which would
 2.16 Fa" r96r SYMPOSIUM

somehow be met. The conservatory came up often in his con-

versations with his sister during his brief stays at home, but only
as a beautiful dream with no chance of coming true-and even
these innocent allusions were not much to the parents' liking. But
Gregor's mind was quite made up, as he meant to declare solemnly
on Christmas Eve.

The father meanwhile has grown fat and the mother sickly, while the
sister, as Gregor saw her, "was still a child for all her seventeen years."
They have all been using him-even the sister, coquettishly-without
admitting it to themselves. Gregor also, out of respect for his parents
and love for his sister, has made a point of not noticing. His incentive
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014

fails him, however, leaving his work unendurable:

If I weren't holding back on my parents' account I'd long since

have given notice, I'd have gone right up to the boss and told
him off from the bottom of my heart.

His output drops. On the road he goes to bed homesick and rises
with imaginary ailments. Finally, after a week at home before his
pre-Christmas sales trip, he oversleeps his alarm, and outside his
locked door his mother tells the clerk from his firm:

He's not well, Sir, believe me. Why else would Gregor miss a train?
The boy has nothing on his mind except his job. It almost makes
me angry the way ~e never goes out evenings-he's been a whole
week in town now and every evening at home. There he sits with
us at dinner, quietly reading his paper or studying timetables. It's
even a distraction for him to do some fretwork. Why, he cut a
little frame in the course of two, three days

to enclose a picture of a woman in furs, clipped from a magazine,

pathetic in its restrained eroticism.
Gregor's illness serves the purpose of enabling him to miss his train
without any call for self-reproach. Presumably the illness declares itself
in the course of his "troubled dreams" after the alarm goes off. It
justifies his sleeping late by his having been in the throes of becoming
a bug; better, it renders self-excuse superfluous. On awakening he
reflects, explicatively: if he reported sick, the boss would call him a
shirker-"and indeed, would [the boss] be so very wrong ?"-whereas
if he has really become a bug, he will have "no further responsibility"
and may "rest easy." By getting himself recognized as sick he releases
himself with a clear conscience from the obligation to provide for the
family, and so he takes his revenge on them even while claiming their
 RUDOLPH BINION 217

sympathy and tender care. Likewise, moved by secret shame, he evades

the discussion of his sister's future. His symptoms, including his
aphasia, answer to all these requirements of his illness; like all neurotic
symptoms, furthermore, they are overdetermined psychosexually as
well. They enable him. to discharge his narcissism-the ferment of his
malady-in the form of abuse of his body and of pity for his self.
They represent to his unconscious mind a physical regression to
infancy, as if to reinforce the emotional one. In neurosis "vile little
animal" means "infant," and Gregor impersonates ~ no less than
a bug. He is speechless and helpless; he crawls, feeds on pap, and
knows no disgust; he resumes his infantile gazing, and he gradually
loses his sense of time and his concern for the outside world. He even
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014

no longer shuns incest: his last vital initiative is an attempt to seduce

his sister.
The family treat him not as transmogrified but as disgustingly sick, I
which he is. At first they expect him to recover. As instead he grows
worse, his sister urges his removal, presumably to the madhouse.
In so doing she does call him an animal-but angrily, and amidst other
falsifications: " ... that animal pursues us, drives the lodgers away,
obviously wants to take over the whole flat and make us sleep in the
street." The charwoman often teases him "in terms she evidently took
to be friendly, such as 'Come on over here, old dung-beetlel' or 'Look
at the old dung-beetlel' " Otherwise the members of the household
call him "Untier," which is delightfully ambiguous (monster/non-
animal). Such ambiguity occurs throughout: for example, Gregor
"found himself" transformed into a bug. It seems designed to tip the
reader off; in fact it falls within the narrative convention, corresponding
as it does to the hero's ironic attitude toward his own symptoms.
Once the narrator even asks, "Was he an animal if music moved
him so?"
For the narrative respects the manner as well as the content of
Gregor's delusion. Following his peculiarly psychotic pattern of
awareness it tends to fix unnaturally on single elements of a whole
physical complex, ones having special meaning for Gregor, which then
become self-sustaining and quasi-absolute: the father's uniform of
office, which dominates the father and through him the whole house-
hold, or the sound of the lodgers' teeth, which drowns out the other
sounds of their eating "as if thereby to apprise Gregor that one needs
teeth in order to eat." Also like Gregor's own mind the narrative notes
sights and sounds by preference, it notes them in simple perceptive
sequence, and it notes them indifferently as it were, in their bare
externality, such that when quoted in bits and snatches it even appears
naturalistic-especially the dialogue, which it records as if in steno-
graphic transcript. Again like Gregor's own consciousness it prohibits
 ZI8 Fall zltz SYMPOSIUM

direct evidence against his delusion, such as his being called a lunatic,
and registers no contradiction when he sees only kindness in his
mother's and sister's removing his furniture, or "foresight and thrift"
in his father's having kept a nest egg on the sly.
His ~elIPQ!h is once extended, to include the lodging of an apple
in his bac -the hallucinatory conversion into a ~matic trauma of
a psychic one: his shock at his father's bombarding him'With apples.'
The presentation of the scene according to Gregor's mode of percep-
tion brings out the affective basis for his shock. The rhythmic pursuit
of Gregor by the father, agitated and erect in his uniform, followed
by Gregor's slow passage through a double door back into his dark
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014

chamber, the father loading his pockets with apples and then dis-
charging them while the mother, giddy, disrobed, "embracing him,
in complete union with him-but here Gregor's vision was already
failing-her hands behind the father's head, pleaded for Gregor's
life"-the scene requires only an instant's elaboration by Gregor to
become a fantasy of his own procreation, hostile and violent. Pre-
sumably it revives in him a like pseudomemory at the root of his
illness. Schizophrenics have fantasies of the sort often enough without
the benefit of provocation, so strong in them is the l.!!'ge to und..Q..tlLeir
,birth and cO~S-Qtion. Obedient to this urge Gregor reverts to primary
narcissism, SImulates embryonic life in the sickroom, and finally curls
up and dies.
The extension of his delusion is given in the line "But then one that
came flying at him immediatelY afterward.penetrated right" (right is jiirmJich:
another pun) "into Cregor'. back," which to be recast in the perspective
of sanity requires only a tacit "as he thought" after the word
"penetrated." With this addition the apples, like everything else in the
scene, remain real; only the penetration becomes imaginary, and the
malignant apple joins the others in rolling about the floor. Where,
as here, the narrator indicates no witnesses' reactions to a putative
happening, such a reconstruction of the physical reality behind
Gregor's imaginings lacks dramatic urgency. Alone in his room he
crawls crisscross over walls and ceiling, dangles in "almost blissful
distraction," and "to his own surprise" falls without injury; so says
the narrative, that is, and the question of what he is then doing phy.rica/!J
is as easily disposed of as it is unessential to the plot. When, on the
other hand, the text has it that as he was covering a picture on the
wall with his belly his mother "caught sight of the gigantic brown
spot on the florid wall-paper, cried out in a loud hoarse voice 'Oh
God, oh Godl' before fully realizing that what she saw was Gregor,
and fell back over the.sofa with outstretched arms," this reaction, even
on the part of a hysterical mother catching sight of her son suddenly
for the first time since his confinement, calls for a reconstruction of
 RUDOLPH BINION 219
[ust what she does see-Gregor on tiptoe or perhaps kneeling on a
table, flat against the wall, naked, filthy, emaciated, glaring defiantly,
This, though, is as much r~constru~n as ever the narrative requires,
and so for me to de-hallucinate any more of it would be pointless:
whoever has once grasped the logic of its composition can do so for
himself. Nothing in it needs explaining away: on the contrary. Kafka
may well have been a prepsychotic who elaborated his fantasies into
w~tks of art as a defense against converting them into symptoms; but
elaborate them he did, and into works of art as dose to reality as any
literary convention will permit.
Gregor's predicament is, like neurosis, common in our time. It
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014

deserves to be shocking; Gregor himself makes it so through his

choice of illness, and the narrative follows suit. By dint of entering
into his symptomatic perspective the narrative renders his choice of
illness plausible at least, if not appealing. Then, by showing how
weirdly well the family's treatment of hiny-not an unconventional
treatment at the tiffie-accords with such a perspective, it is able to
make certain facts abotrt families evident. This is doubly ironical:
because the perspective is a false one, and because Gregor, whose
perspective it is, does not himself see the evidence. The narrative
technique is ironical also in a philosophical sense. In the end Gregor
is, existentially, nothing if not a bug, since others deny him his old
identity-"Indeed, how can it be Gregor?" asks the sister-and refuse
to accept him under any other.
In sum, Kafka exposes an everyday social and domestic situation"
as psychologically destructive. Gregor's protest against his job is'
profoundly human:

Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting profession I've picked

outl Day in, day out, on the go. It gets you much more worked
up than a business of your own at home would, and then you've
got the plague of constant traveling to put up with, the worry over
train connections, the irregular bad eating, and making new
acquaintances all the time none of them ever intimate or lasting.
The devil take it alll

So too is his revolt against not being loved save as son-provider-"the'

disgusting circumstances reigning in this house and family," as the
chief lodger puts it-profoundly human. He is, however, no extra-
ordinary young man. He lacks the intellectual and moral resources
for his revolt to be anything but neurotic. As such it is as fatal to
his personality as resignation would have been. It is, however,
beneficent to his family-his decline revitalizes them-and so by way
of his morbid choice, a free and deliberate one in the end, he acquires
 zzo Fa" rj6r SYMPOSIUM

tragic dignity. His dilemma from start to finish is a specifically modern

one, arising as it does out of conditions of financial insecurity 3.!id
dehumanized social labor. Through it Kafka points to a vast historical
problem, that of mankind's having generated social and domestic
inst;tntiQRS Qestructive of its own humanity.
Kafka's other enigmatical works do not fit the same formula as
The Metamorphosis; each of them does, though, relate to reality accord-
ing to some simple formula of its own. The Castle presents an itinerant
paranoiac's view of the world by having some local authorities confirm
his pretended identity and then actualizing each of his subsequent
fantasies in turn. These fantasies lead two ways at once: upwards,
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:30 22 December 2014

toward an administration resembling a profane Providence, and

downwards, into pervasive latent homosexuality. Their elaboration is
virtually interminable, and because of its form the hero appears as
sane in an insane world. The point of this narrative scheme is to
satirize implicitly such human attitudes and institutions as fit into it
with the least distortion and likewise to ironize implicitly about the
human lot as some of its problematical aspects, such as our inability
t.Q..~scape using others for our own ends, emerge ·with unique clarity.
Of course not all of Kafka's stories are adventures in madness: Josephin.e
the Singer is a study of ghetto life in which the distinctive moral
qualities of the Jews, and again of their spiritual leaders, are presented
as special biological faculties. Nor did Kafka always use enigmatical
conventions in his writings. Those he did use have, moreover, proved
more puzzling than in all likelihood he meant them to, for he was
enigmatical only to good purpose. One might tell a story of mistaken
identity or of racial discrimination without letting on that it is one.
The procedure would be mystifying in the first case, illuminating in
the second. Kafka is always illuminating.
Columbia Univer siry