The Metamorphosis

Let’s say you see a water bug. You grab a piece of toilet paper and prepare to crush it. Sensing the cloud over its existence, the water bug scampers away. You give chase and the water bug becomes fairly elusive like a fleet-footed boxer whose able to duck and slip a powerful opponent’s punches. Water bugs aren’t supposed to think and yet they’re plainly capable of sensing the danger to their existence. Science Times recently ran a piece on quotidian sadism ( "'Everyday Sadists' Among Us” NYT, 9/16/13). The subject of bugs even comes up in one of the experiments the article refers to which tested sadism in run of the mill individuals who aren’t proto Hannibal Lecter’s. It’s like the notion that there is a little bit of larceny in everyone.  Of course Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment which tested obedience to authority by use of shock was also a measure of sadism. Some people turned the shock up even though the actors seemed to be writhing in pain and some couldn’t even though they were told not to pay attention to what they were seeing. But back to that water bug. The fact that the animal gives you a run for the money is a clue to the fact that it experiences something akin to emotion—at least the emotion of fear. However, paradoxically it’s just the presence of this human trait that whets one’s appetite. After being tormented by a little fly, you feel no moral compunctions about using a swatter on it. It’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis in reverse. The fly or water bug has become human.

Letter From Croatia V: Ston Walled

Photograph of Ston Wall by Hallie Cohen

Modern man’s full of inner defenses. The world of Franz Kafka is one in which inner states of mind take the form of impenetrable fortresses like The Castle. But these are merely projections. Ston a city whose name mirrors its function is an example of how man fortified himself in medieval times. It’s the Great Wall of Croatia—and the longest fortified wall in Europe. Of course during the cold war there were the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. However, these mechanisms of crowd control involved electronic surveillance and primarily barbed wire and electricity. Ston, which dates back to 1333 protected the nearby Ragusian salt works which themselves emanate from Roman times. During that period of history Dubrovnik, itself famous for its massive battlements, was a City State (visitors to Dubrovnik today walk its 2 km wall). And Ston was acquired since it was deemed to be so essential for the survival of the local economy. Today tourists ascend the old Ston wall and from sea level they look a little like Gregor Samsa, the man turned into an insect in Kafka’s famed Metamorphosis. The walls of Ston are still providing protection in the form of perspective, chastening against the delusion that man is the master of his own fate.

Is Kafka Overrated?

Joseph Epstein, a usually pithy and insightful critic and pundit, has concluded that Kafka’s reputation is undeserved and hinges totally on Freud. “The spread of Freudianism and the rise of Kafka’s reputation ran, not without good reason, in parallel. Kafka reads like Freud fictionalized.” He concludes his essay “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?” in The Atlantic Monthly (June, 2013) by saying, “Great writers are impressed by the mystery of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them.” Besides the somewhat erroneous assertion that Freud’s reputation "is in radical decline"—Freud was to human nature like Marx  to economics—while both proposed impractical programs, their analyses respectively of man and society are still hugely influential—Epstein is confusing the man and his work. Proust wrote a famous essay entitled Contre Saint-Beuve in which he inveighed against autobiographical interpretation. Just because Kafka suffered from a  horrible relationship with his father, two failed relationships and the TB which ended his life at 40, doesn’t mean that the jigsaw universe his characters occupy is lacking artistic purpose. If we make the argument that conundrums and riddles don’t comprise the makings of great art, then we’d have to eliminate Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex with its sphinx. Epstein makes the point  that none of the prominent Kafka scholars whose work he cites in his piece (amongst them Erich Heller and Saul Friedlander) explain why Kafka’s work is great. But Epstein neither defines what makes a work of literature great nor explains how how masterpieces like The Metamorphosis or The Trial fail to qualify?