Kafka maintained his indifference to formal religion throughout most of his life. Yet, while never depicting the characters in his stories as Jewish, he never tried to obfuscate his Jewish roots. Intellectually, Hasidism held a strong appeal for him, especially because of the value it places in transcendent, mystical experience. During the last ten years of his life Kafka even professed an interest in moving to Palestine. The ethical and procedural dilemmas presented in stories such as “The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “A Country Doctor” all bear distinct traces of Kafka’s interest in rabbinical teachings as they pertain to law and justice.
The humorously meticulous style of the argumentative narrator in “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse People,” on the other hand, shadows the rhetorical conventions of rabbinical discourse. In two important ways, “Josephine the Singer” is the culmination of Kafka’s shorter works: It is the last story he completed, and it represents the purest distillation of his mature style. Ostensibly “Josephine” is about the art of the voice. While writing it, Kafka himself had no voice. He was dying of tuberculosis of the larynx. Unlike his earlier stories, where dark, dreamlike details of plot are commonly found, “Josephine” is a work whose signature syntactic and rhetorical cadences stand virtually alone to support the depiction of a creature whose exact nature is being revealed and made to evaporate simultaneously. This allegorical tale about the evanescence and the necessity of art is, arguably, Kafka at his most masterful. His earlier efforts in the shorter, parable form—”An Old Leaf,” “A Message from the Emperor,” and “Before the Law”—provided him with ample opportunities to explore ways of delimiting the conventions of story narrative. Intellectually provocative though they may be on their own, as examples of the art of prose they can, in addition, be appreciated as tools that helped carve the pathway to “Josephine.”
In addition to their moral and aesthetic dimensions, these captivating tales, taken as a whole, have a strongly sociohistoric aspect. They explore a particular culture at a particular time. Rainer Maria Rilke—another German-speaking, Prague-born writer of Kafka’s generation—referred to Franz Josef’s realm as Kakaland, such was his contempt for the sterile glitter and stultifying hierarchy of the Hapsburg Empire. But Kafka took it all in and transfigured it. This place, defined in this period, would not have become and remained so vivid and memorable in the minds of his readers had it not been for Kafka’s artistry, which rendered it indelible.
—Gerald Williams
1996
| Go to Contents |
The Metamorphosis
I
AS GREGOR SAMSA AWOKE FROM unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard armorlike back and when he raised his head a little he saw his vaulted brown belly divided into sections by stiff arches from whose height the coverlet had already slipped and was about to slide off completely. His many legs, which were pathetically thin compared to the rest of his bulk, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
“What has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, if a little small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the desk, on which a collection of fabric samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put in a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, sitting upright, dressed in a fur hat and fur boa; her entire forearm had vanished into a thick fur muff which she held out to the viewer.
Gregor’s gaze then shifted to the window, and the dreary weather—raindrops could be heard beating against the metal ledge of the window—made him quite melancholy. “What if I went back to sleep for a while and forgot all this foolishness,” he thought. However, this was totally impracticable, as he habitually slept on his right side, a position he could not get into in his present state; no matter how forcefully he heaved himself to the right, he rocked onto his back again. He must have tried it a hundred times, dosing his eyes so as not to see his twitching legs, and stopped only when he felt a faint, dull ache start in his side, a pain which he had never experienced before.