characters belong to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around
them, but the central one tries to get out of that world, to cast off the mask, to transcend
the cloak or the carapace. But in Stevenson’s story there is none of that unity and none of
that contrast. The Uttersons, and Pooles, and Enfields are meant to be commonplace,
everyday characters; actually they are characters derived from Dickens, and thus they
constitute phantasms that do not quite belong to Stevenson’s own artistic reality, just as
Stevenson’s fog comes from a Dickensian studio to envelop a conventional London. I
suggest, in fact, that Jekyll’s magic drug is more real than Utterson’s life. The fantastic
Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, on the other hand, is supposed to be in contrast to this
conventional London, but it is really the difference between a Gothic medieval theme and
a Dickensian one. It is not the same kind of difference as that between an absurd world
and pathetically absurd Bashmachkin, or between an absurd world and tragically absurd
Gregor.
The Jekyll-and-Hyde theme does not quite form a unity with its setting because its
fantasy is of a different type from the fantasy of the setting. There is really nothing
especially pathetic or tragic about Jekyll. We enjoy every detail of the marvelous
juggling, of the beautiful trick, but there is no artistic emotional throb involved, and
whether it is Jekyll or Hyde who gets the upper hand remains of supreme indifference to
the good reader. I am speaking of rather nice distinctions, and it is difficult to put them in
simple form. When a certain clear-thinking but somewhat superficial French philosopher
asked the profound but obscure German philosopher Hegel to state his views in a concise
form, Hegel answered him harshly, “These things can be discussed neither concisely nor
in French.” We shall ignore the question whether Hegel was right or not, and still try to
put into a nutshell the difference between the Gogol-Kafka kind of story and Stevenson’s
kind.
In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him
but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans—
and dies in despair. In Stevenson the unreal central character belongs to a brand of
unreality different from that of the world around him. He is a Gothic character in a
Dickensian setting, and when he struggles and then dies, his fate possesses only
conventional pathos. I do not at all mean that Stevenson’s story is a failure. No, it is a
minor masterpiece in its own conventiona l terms, but it has only two dimensions,
whereas the Gogol-Kafka stories have five or six.
Born in 1883, Franz Kafka came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague,
Czechoslovakia. He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or
such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him. He
read for law at the German university in Prague and from 1908 on he worked as a petty
clerk, a small employee, in a very Gogolian office for an insurance company. Hardly any
of his now famous works, such as his novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926)
were published in his lifetime. His greatest short story “The Metamorphosis,” in German
“Die Verwandlung,” was written in the fall of 1912 and published in Leipzig in October
1915. In 1917 he coughed blood, and the rest of his life, a period of seven years, was
punctuated by sojourns in Central European sanatoriums. In those last years of his short
life (he died at the age of forty), he had a happy love affair and lived with his mistress in
Berlin, in 1923, not far from me. In the spring of 1924 he went to a sanatorium near
Vienna where he died on 3 June, of tuberculosis of the larynx. He was buried in the
Jewish cemetery in Prague. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he had
written, even published material. Fortunately Brod did not comply with his friend’s wish.
Before starting to talk of “The Metamorphosis,” I want to dismiss two points of view. I