To judge from its critical reception, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) is the most haunting and universal of all his stories; and yet Kafka never claimed for it any particular distinction. His comments on the story in his letters and diaries are almost entirely negative. "A pity," he wrote to Felice Bauer on December 6, 1912, "that in many passages in the story my states of exhaustion and other interruptions and worries about other things are clearly inscribed. It could certainly have been more cleanly done; you see that from the sweet pages." His disappointment with the ending was especially great. "My little story is finished, but today's conclusion doesn't make me happy at all; it should have been better, no doubt about it." This charge recurs in the diary entry for January 19, 1914: "Great antipathy to 'Metamorphosis.' Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow. It would have turned out much better if I had not been interrupted at the time by the business trip."

Kafka's own sense of The Metamorphosis tends, I think, to shift the weight of its significance towards its beginning. This result is confirmed by other evidence establishing what might be termed the general and fundamental priority of the beginning in Kafka's works. One thinks of the innumerable openings to stories which are scattered throughout the diaries and notebooks, which are suddenly born and as swiftly vanish, leaving undeveloped the endless dialectical structures they contain. Kafka explicitly expressed, on October 16, 1921, "The misery of a perpetual beginning, the lack of the illusion that anything is more than a beginning or even as much as a beginning." For

Dieter Hasselblatt "[Kafka's prose] is a fugitive from the beginning, it does not strive towards the end: initiofugal, not final. And since it takes the impulse of its progression from what is set forth or what is lying there at the outset, it cannot be completed. The end, the conclusion, is unimportant next to the opening situation."

One is directed, it would seem, by these empirical and theoretical considerations, to formulate the overwhelming question of The Metamorphosis as the question of the meaning of its beginning. What fundamental intention inspires the opening sentence of The Metamorphosis: "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin (ungeheures Ungeziefer)". (All translations of The Metamorphosis are from The Metamorphosis, newly translated and edited by Stanley Corngold.) In answering this question we shall do well to keep in mind, in the words of a recent critic, "the identity [of the beginning] as radical starting point: the intransitive and conceptual aspect, that which has no object but its own constant clarification" (Edward Said, "Beginnings," Salmagundi [Fall 1968]). Much of the action of The Metamorphosis consists of Kafka's attempt to come to terms with its beginning.

The opening of The Metamorphosis recounts the metamorphosis of a man into a monstrous, verminous bug, but in doing this it appears to accomplish still another metamorphosis: it metamorphoses a common figure of speech. This second metamorphosis emerges in the light of the hypothesis proposed, in 1947, by Gunther Anders: "Kafka's sole point of departure is . . . ordinary language.... More precisely: he draws from the resources on hand, the figurative character (Bildcharakter), of language. He takes metaphors at their word (beim Wort). For example: Because Gregor Samsa wants to live as an artist (i.e., as a 'Luftmensch' -- one who lives on air, lofty and flee-floating), in the eyes of the highly respectable, hard-working world he is a 'nasty bug' ('dreckiger Käfer'): and so in The Metamorphosis he wakes up as a beetle whose idea of happiness is to be sticking to the ceiling" (Kafka-Pro and Contra). For Günther Anders The Metamorphosis originates in the transformation of a familiar metaphor into a fictional being literally existing as this metaphor. The story develops, as aspects of the metaphor are enacted in minute detail.

Anders's evidence for this view is furnished partly by his entire comprehension of Kafka: "What Kafka describes are ... existing things, the world, as it appears to the stranger (namely strange)." Anders adduces, moreover, examples of everyday figures of speech which, taken literally, inspire stories and scenes in Kafka. "Language says 'To feel it with your own body' ('Am eignen Leibe etwas erfahren') when it wants to express the reality of experience. This is the basis of Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony,' in which the criminal's punishment is not communicated to him by word of mouth, but is instead scratched into his body with a needle."

Anders's hypothesis has been taken up in Walter Sokel's writings on The Metamorphosis. The notion of the "extended metaphor," which Sokel considers in an early essay to be "significant" and "interesting" though "insufficient as a total explanation of Metamorphosis," reemerges in The Writer in Extremis as a crucial determinant of Expressionism: "The character Gregor Samsa has been transformed into a metaphor that states his essential self, and this metaphor in turn is treated like an actual fact. Samsa does not call himself a cockroach; instead he wakes up to find himself one." Expressionist prose, for Sokel, is to be defined precisely by such "extended metaphors, metaphoric visualizations of emotional situations, uprooted from any explanatory context." In Franz Kafka -- Tragik and Ironie, the factual character of the Kafkan metaphor is reasserted: "In Kafka's work, as in the dream, symbol is fact.... A world of pure significance, of naked expression, is represented deceptively as a sequence of empirical facts." But in Franz Kafka, Sokel first states the "pure significance" of Kafka's literalization of the metaphor:

German usage applies the term Ungeziefer (vermin) to persons considered low and contemptible, even as our usage of "cockroach" describes a person deemed a spineless and miserable character. The traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, is "like a cockroach" because of his spineless and abject behavior and parasitic wishes. However, Kafka drops the word "like" and has the metaphor become reality when Gregor Samsa wakes up finding himself turned into a giant vermin. With this metamorphosis, Kafka reverses the original act of metamorphosis carried out by thought when it forms metaphor; for metaphor is always "metamorphosis." Kafka transforms metaphor back into his fictional reality, and this counter-metamorphosis becomes the starting point of his tale.

The sequence of Sokel's reflections on Anders's hypothesis contains an important shift of emphasis. Initially the force of The Metamorphosis is felt to lie in the choice and "extension" (dramatization) of the powerful metaphor. To confirm his view, Sokel cites Johannes Urzidil's recollection of a conversation with Kafka: "Once Kafka said to me: 'To be a poet means to be strong in metaphors. The greatest poets were always the most metaphorical ones. They were those who recognized the deep mutual concern, yes, even the identity of things between which nobody noticed the slightest connection before. It is the range and the scope of the metaphor which makes one a poet'" (John (sic) Urzidil, "Recollections," The Kafka Problem, ed. Angel Flores). But in his later work, Sokel locates the origin of Kafka's "poetry," not in the metamorphosis of reality accomplished by the metaphor, but in the "counter-metamorphosis" accomplished by the transformation of the metaphor. Kafka's "taking over" images from ordinary speech enacts a second metaphorization (metaphero = carry over) -- one that concludes in the literalization and hence the metamorphosis of the metaphor. This point once made, the genuine importance of Kafka's remarks to Urzidil can be revealed through their irony. In describing the poet as one "strong in metaphors," Kafka is describing writers other than himself; for he is the writer, par excellence, who came to detect in metaphorical language a crucial obstacle to his own enterprise.

Kafka's critique of the metaphor begins early, in the phantasmagoric story "Description of a Struggle" (1904-1905). The first-person narrator addresses with exaggerated severity another persona of the author:

"Now I realize, by God, that I guessed from the very beginning the state you are in. Isn't it something like a fever, a seasickness on land, a kind of leprosy? Don't you feel it's this very feverishness which is preventing you from being properly satisfied with the genuine (wahrhaftigen) names of things, and that now, in your frantic haste, you're just pelting them with any old (zufällige) names? You can't do it fast enough. But hardly have you run away from them when you've forgotten the names you gave them. The poplar in the fields, which you've called the 'Tower of Babel' because you didn't want to know it was a poplar, sways again without a name, so you have to call it 'Noah in his cups.'"

In the sense that "language is fundamentally metaphoric," in the sense that naming links the significations within words (Sprachinhalte) to the "significations to which words accrue," [as Derrida, Weisgerber, and Heidegger argue] this critique of naming amounts to a critique of the metaphor. But what is remarkable about this passage is its dissatisfaction with both ordinary names and figurative names. With the irony of exaggerated emphasis, it calls the conventional link of name and thing "genuine" and the act of renaming things, an act which generates metaphors, arbitrary. The new metaphor leaves no permanent trace; it is the contingent product of a fever, or worse: it arises from deliberate bad faith, the refusal to accept the conventional bond of word and thing. The exact status of ordinary names remains unclear; but what is important is that Kafka sees no advance in replacing them with the figures of poetic language.

In a diary entry for December 27, 1911, Kafka states his despair of a particular attempt at metaphor: "An incoherent assumption is thrust like a board between the actual feeling and the metaphor of the description." Kafka has begun this diary entry confidently, claiming to have found an image analogous to a moral sentiment: "This feeling of falsity that I have while writing might be represented in the following image." The image Kafka constructs is of a man in front of two holes in the ground, one to the right and one to the left; he is waiting for something that can rise up only out of the hole to the right. Instead of this, appearances rise up, one after the other, from the left; they try to attract his attention and succeed finally in covering up even the hole on his right. At this stage of the construction, the image predominates in its materiality. As the image is developed, however, the role of the spectator is developed, who expels these appearances upwards and in all directions in the hope "that after the false appearances have been exhausted, the true will finally appear." But precisely at the point of conjuring up "truthful apparitions," the metaphorist feels most critically the inadequacy of this figurative language: "How weak this image is." And he concludes with the complaint that between his sentiment and figurative language there is no true coherence (though he cannot, ironically, say this without having recourse to a figure of speech). Now what is crucial here is that an image which is mainly material has failed to represent the sentiment of writing; and though it has been replaced by one which introduces the consciousness of an observer, between the moral sentiment of writing and an act of perception there is no true connection either. If the writer finds it difficult to construct metaphors for "a feeling of falsity," how much graver must be his difficulty in constructing figures for genuine feelings, figures for gratifying the desire "to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely"?

Kafka's awareness of the limitations of figurative language continues to grow more radical. The desire to represent a state-of-mind immediately in language, in a form consubstantial with that consciousness, and hence to create symbols, cannot be gratified through figurative language. "For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used in the manner of an allusion (andeutungsweise), but never even approximately in the manner of a simile (vergleichsweise), since corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations" (Dearest Father, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins). But try as language will to reduce itself to its allusive function, it continues to find itself dependent on the metaphor, on accomplishing states-of-mind by means of material analogues.

Kafka writes on December 6, 1921: "Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing. Writing's lack of independence of the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled by their own laws; only writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and a despair." Indeed, the question arises, what truth could even a language determinedly nonfigurative -- in Kafka's word, "allusive" -- possess? The parable employs language allusively, but in the powerful fable, "On Parables," Kafka writes: "All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already." At this point, it is clear, the literary enterprise is seen in its radical problematicalness. The growing desperation of Kafka's critique of metaphorical language leads to the result (in the words of Maurice Blanchot) that, at the end of Kafka's life, ."the exigency of the truth of this other world [of sheer inwardness desiring salvation] henceforth surpasses in his eyes the exigency of the work of art" ("The Diaries: The Exigency of the Work of Art," translated by Lyall H. Powers, Franz Kafka Today, edited by Angel Flores and Homer Swander). This situation does not suggest the renunciation of writing, but only the clearest possible perception of its limitations, a perception which emerges through Kafka's perplexity before, and despair of escaping, the metaphor in the work of art.

Kafka's "counter-metamorphosis" of the metaphor in The Metamorphosis is inspired by his fundamental objection to the metaphor. This is accomplished -- so Anders and Sokel propose -- through the literalization of the metaphor. But is this true? What does it mean, exactly, to literalize a metaphor?

The metaphor designates something (A) as something (B), something in the quality of something not itself. To say that someone is a verminous bug is to designate a moral sensibility as something unlike itself, as a material sensation complicated, of course, by the atmosphere of horror which this sensation evokes. We shall call, with I. A. Richards, the tenor of the metaphor, (A), the thing designated, occulted, replaced, but otherwise established by the context of the figure; and the vehicle, the metaphor proper, (B), that thing as which the tenor is designated (The Philosophy of Rhetoric). If the metaphor is taken out of its context, however, if it is taken literally, it no longer functions as a vehicle but as a name, directing us to (B) as an abstraction or an object in the world. Moreover, it directs us to (B) in the totality of its qualities, and not, as the vehicle, to only those qualities of (B) which can be assigned to (A).

This analysis will suggest, I think, the paradoxical consequence of "taking the metaphor literally," supposing now that such a thing is possible. Reading the figure literally, we go to (B), an object in the world in its totality, yet, reading it metaphorically, we go to (B) only in its quality as a predicate of (A). The object (B) is quite plainly unstable and, hence, so is (A); as literalization proceeds, as we attempt to experience in (B) more and more qualities that can be accommodated by (A), we metamorphose (A); but we must stop before the metamorphosis is complete, if the metaphor is to be preserved and (A) is to remain unlike (B). If, now, the tenor, as in The Metamorphosis, is a human consciousness, the increasing literalization of the vehicle transforms the tenor into a monster.

This genesis of monsters occurs independently of the nature of the vehicle. The intent towards literalization of a metaphor linking a human consciousness and a material sensation produces a monster in every instance, no matter whether the vehicle is odious or not, no matter whether we begin with the metaphor of a "louse" or of the man who is a rock or sterling. But it now appears that Anders is not correct to suggest that in The Metamorphosis literalization of the metaphor is actually accomplished; for then we should have not an indefinite monster but simply a bug. Indeed the progressive deterioration of Gregor's body suggests ongoing metamorphosis, the process of literalization and not its end-state. And Sokel's earlier formulation would not appear to be tenable: the metaphor is not treated "like an actual fact." Only the alien cleaning woman gives Gregor Samsa the factual, the entomological identity of the "dung beetle"; but precisely "to forms of address like these Gregor would not respond." The cleaning woman does not know that a metamorphosis has occurred, that in this insect shape there is a human consciousness, one superior at times to the ordinary consciousness of Gregor Samsa. Our analysis shows that the metamorphosis in the Samsa household of a man into a vermin is unsettling not only because a vermin is unsettling, and not only because the vivid representation of a "human louse" is unsettling, but because the indeterminate, fluid crossing of a human tenor and a material vehicle is in itself unsettling. Gregor is at one moment pure rapture, at another, very nearly pure dung beetle, at times grossly human, at times airily buglike. In shifting incessantly the relation of Gregor's mind and body, Kafka shatters the suppositious unity of ideal tenor and bodily vehicle within the metaphor. This destruction must distress common sense, which defines itself by such "genuine" relations, such natural assertions of analogues between consciousness and matter, and this way masks the knowledge of its own strangeness. The ontological legitimation for asserting analogues is missing in Kafka, who maintains the most ruthless division between the fire of the spirit and the principle of the world: "What we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world" (Dearest Father).

The distortion of the metaphor in The Metamorphosis is inspired by a radical aesthetic intention, which proceeds by destruction and results in creation -- of a monster, virtually nameless, existing as an opaque sign. "The name alone, revealed through a natural death, not the living soul, vouches for that in man which is immortal" (Adorno). But what is remarkable in The Metamorphosis is that "the immortal part" of the writer accomplishes itself odiously, in the quality of an indeterminacy sheerly negative. The exact sense of his intention is captured in the "Ungeziefer," a word which cannot be expressed by the English words "bug" or "vermin." "Ungeziefer" derives (as Kafka probably knew) from the late Middle High German word originally meaning "the unclean animal not suited for sacrifice." If for Kafka "writing is a form of prayer" (Dearest Father), this act of writing reflects its own hopelessness. As a distortion of the "genuine" names of things, without significance as a metaphor or as literal fact, the monster of The Metamorphosis is, like writing itself, a "fever" and a "despair."

The metamorphosis of a vermin-metaphor cannot be understood as a real vermin, as that biting and blood-sucking creature to which, for example, Kafka has his father compare him in his Letter to His Father. But it may be illuminated by the link which Kafka established earlier between the bug and the activity of writing itself. In the story "Wedding Preparations in the Country" (1907), of which only a fragment survives, Kafka conjures a hero, Eduard Raban, reluctant to take action in the world (he is supposed to go to the country to arrange his wedding); Raban dreams instead of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and omnipotence. Kafka finds for this transparent reflection of his early literary consciousness the emblem of a beetle, about which there hovers an odd indeterminacy:

"And besides, can't I do it the way I always used to as a child in matters that were dangerous? I don't even need to go to the country myself, it isn't necessary. I'll send my clothed body. If it staggers out of the door of my room, the staggering will indicate not fear but its nothingness. Nor is it a sign of excitement if it stumbles on the stairs, if it travels into the country, sobbing as it goes, and there eats its supper in tears. For I myself am meanwhile lying in my bed, smoothly covered over with the yellow-brown blanket, exposed to the breeze that is wafted through that seldom aired room. The carriages and people in the street move and walk hesitantly on shining ground, for I am still dreaming. Coachmen and pedestrians are shy, and every step they want to advance they ask as a favor from me, by looking at me. I encourage them and they encounter no obstacle.

"As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think....

"The form of a large beetle, yes. Then I would pretend it was a matter of hibernating, and I would press my little legs to my bulging belly. And I would whisper a few words, instructions to my sad body, which stands close beside me, bent. Soon I shall have done -- it bows, it goes swiftly, and it will manage everything efficiently while I rest."

The figure of the omnipotent bug is positive throughout this passage and suggests the inwardness of the act of writing rendered in its power and freedom, in its mystic exaltation, evidence of which abounds in Kafka's earliest diaries:

The special nature of my inspiration . . . is such that I can do everything, and not only what is directed to a definite piece of work. When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, "He looked out of the window," it already has perfection.

My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states . . . in which I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea, and in which I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.

How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again.

But this is only one side of Kafka's poetic consciousness. The other is expressed through the narrator's hesitation in defining his trance by means of an objective correlative ("a stag beetle ..., I think"), which suggests, beyond his particular distress, the general impossibility of the metaphor's naming immediately with a material image the being of an inward state, and hence a doubt that will go to the root of writing itself. After 1912 there will be few such positive emblems for the inwardness and solitude of the act of writing; this "beautiful" bug (Sokel, Franz Kafka--Tragik und Ironie) is projected in ignorance; the truer emblem of the alien poetic consciousness, which "has no basis, no stability" (Briefe 1902-1924), which must suffer "the eternal torments of dying," becomes the vermin Gregor. The movement from the beautiful bug Raban to the monstrous bug Gregor marks an accession of self-knowledge -- an increasing awareness of the poverty and shortcomings of writing.

The direction of Kafka's reflection on literature is fundamentally defined, however, by "The Judgment," the story written immediately before The Metamorphosis. "The Judgment" struck Kafka as a breakthrough into his own style; after the night he spent composing it, Kafka wrote in his diary, with a fine elation, "Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul." But in his later interpretation of the story, Kafka described it in a somewhat more sinister tonality, as having "come out of me like a regular birth, covered with filth and mucus." The image has the violence and inevitability of a natural process, but its filth and mucus cannot fail to remind the reader of the strange birth which is the subject of Kafka's next story -- the incubus trailing filth and mucus through the household of its family.

Mainly two aspects of "The Judgment," I think, inspire in Kafka a sense of its authenticity important enough to be commemorated in the figure of the vermin. First, the figure of the friend in Russia represents with the greatest clarity to date the negativity of this "business" of writing (the friend is said by the father to be "yellow enough to be thrown away"; secondly, "The Judgment," like The Metamorphosis, develops, as the implications of a distorted metaphor are enacted: "The Judgment" metamorphoses the father's "judgment" or "estimate" into a fatal "verdict," a death-"sentence."

Kafka's awareness that "The Judgment" originates from the distortion of the metaphor dictates the conclusion of his "interpretation." The highly formal tonality of this structural analysis surprises the reader, following as it does on the organic simile of the sudden birth: "The friend is the link between father and son, he is their strongest common bond. Sitting alone at his window, Georg rummages voluptuously in this consciousness of what they have in common, believes he has his father within him, and would be at peace with everything if it were not for a fleeting, sad thoughtfulness. In the course of the story the father ... uses the common bond of the friend to set himself up as Georg's antagonist." This analysis employs the structural model of the metamorphosed metaphor. At first Georg considers the father as the friend; his friend, as the metaphor of the father. But Georg's doom is to take the metaphor literally, to suppose that by himself sharing the quality of the friend, he possesses the father in fact. Now in a violent counter-movement the father distorts the initial metaphor, drawing the friend's existence into himself; and Georg, who now feels "what they have in common ... only as something foreign, something that has become independent, that he has never given enough protection," accepts his sentence.

It is this new art, generated from the distortion of relations modelled on the metaphor, which came to Kafka as an elation, a gross new birth, and a sentence; the aesthetic intention comes to light negatively when it must express itself through so tormented and elliptical a strategem as the metamorphosis of the metaphor. The restrictedness and misery of this art is the explicit subject of The Metamorphosis; the invention which henceforth shapes Kafka's existence as a writer is original, arbitrary and fundamentally strange. In a later autobiographical note he writes: "Everything he does seems to him extraordinarily new, it is true, but also, consistent with this incredible abundance of new things, extraordinarily amateurish, indeed scarcely tolerable, incapable of becoming history, breaking the chain of the generations, cutting off for the first time at its most profound source the music of the world, which before him could at least be divined. Sometimes in his arrogance he is more afraid for the world than for himself" (The Great Wall of China). Kafka's pride in his separateness is just equal to his nostalgia for "the music of the world." We shall think of the violently distorted metaphor which yields this figure, of Gregor Samsa, who in responding to his sister's violin playing, causes this music to be broken off. That being who lives as a distortion of nature; who, without a history and without a future, still maintains a certain sovereignty; conjures through the extremity of his separation the clearest possible idea of the music he cannot possess.

In his letter of July 5, 1922, to Max Brod, Kafka envisions the writer as inhabiting a place outside the house of life--as a dead man, as one among the "departed," of the Reflections, who long to be flooded back to us. It cannot be otherwise; the writer has no genuine existence ("[ist] etwas nicht Bestehendes"); what he produces is devilish, "the reward for devil's duty -- this descent to the dark forces, this unbinding of spirits by nature bound, dubious embraces and whatever else may go on below, of which one no longer knows anything above ground when in the sunlight one writes stories. Perhaps there is also another kind of writing. I only know this kind." "Yet," as Erich Heller remarks, "it remains dubious who this 'one' is who 'writes stories in the sunlight.' Kafka himself? 'The Judgment' -- and sunlight? 'The Metamorphosis' . . . and sunlight . . . ? How must it have been 'below ground' if 'above ground' blossoms like these were put forth?" (Briefe an Felice, edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born).

Kafka's art, which Kafka elsewhere calls a conjuration of spirits, brings into the light of language the experience of descent and doubt. And even this experience has to be repeated perpetually: "Thus I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but then fall back in a moment.... [It] is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying." There is no true duration in this desperate flight; conjuring his own death, Kafka writes: "The writer in me of course will die at once, for such a figure has no basis, has no substance, isn't even of dust; is only a construction of the craving for enjoyment. This is the writer." The self-indulgence which defines the writer is that of the being who perpetually reflects on himself and others. The word "figure," in the passage above, can be taken a la lettre: the writer is defined by his verbal figures, conceived at a distance from life, inspired by a devilish aesthetic detachment craving to indulge itself; but he suffers, too, the meaninglessness of the figure uprooted from the language of life-the dead figure. Kafka's spirit then does spend itself "zur Illuminierung meines Leichnams," in lighting up -- but also in furnishing figural decorations for -- his corpse.

It is this dwelling outside the house of life, "Schriftstellersein," the negative condition of writing as such, which is named in The Metamorphosis; but it cannot name itself directly, in a language that designates things that are, or in the figures that suggest the relations between things constituting the common imagination of life. Instead Kafka utters in The Metamorphosis a word for a being unacceptable to man (ungeheuer) and unacceptable to God (Ungeziefer), a word unsuited either to intimate speech or to prayer. This word evokes a distortion without visual identity or self-awareness -- engenders, for a hero, a pure sign. The creature of The Metamorphosis is not a self speaking or being silent but language itself (parole) -- a word broken loose from the context of language (language), fallen into a void the meaning of which it cannot signify, near others who cannot understand it.

As the story of a metamorphosed metaphor, The Metamorphosis is not just one among Kafka's stories but an exemplarily Kafkan story; the title reflects the generative principle of Kafka's fiction--a metamorphosis of the function of language. In organizing itself around a distortion of ordinary language, The Metamorphosis projects into its center a sign which absorbs its own significance (as Gregor's opaque body occludes his awareness of self), and thus aims in an opposite direction from the art of the symbol; for there, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, the sign is "devoured" by its signification (Phénoménologie de la perception). The outcome of this tendency of The Metamorphosis is its ugliness. Symbolic art, modelled on the metaphor which occults the signifier to the level of signification, strikes us as beautiful: our notion of the beautiful harmony of sign and significance is one dominated by the human signification, by the form of the person which in Schiller's classical conception of art "extirpates the material reference." These expectations are disappointed by the opaque and impoverished sign in Kafka. His art devours the human meaning of itself, and indeed must soon raise the question of a suitable nourishment. It is thus strictly internally coherent that the vermin -- the word without significance -- should divine flesh nourishment and affinity in music, the language of signs without significance.

But the song which Gregor hears does not transform his suffering; the music breaks off; the monster finds nourishment in a cruder fantasy of anger and possession. This scene communicates the total discrepancy between the vermin's body and the cravings appropriate to it, and the other sort of nourishment for which he yearns; the moment produces, not symbolic harmony, but the intolerable tension of irreconcilables. In Kafka's unfathomable sentence: "Was he an animal, that music could move him so?", paradox echoes jarringly without end.

At the close of The Metamorphosis Gregor is issued a death-sentence by his family which he promptly takes over as his own; he then passes into a vacant trance.

He had pains, of course, in his whole body, but it seemed to him as if they were gradually getting weaker and weaker and would finally go away entirely. The rotten apple in his back and the inflamed area around it, which were completely covered with fluffy dust, already hardly bothered him. He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even stronger than his sister's. In this state of empty and peaceful reflection, he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning.

He is empty of all practical concerns; his body has dwindled to a mere dry husk, substantial enough to have become sonorous, too substantial not to have been betrayed by the promise of harmony in music. He suggests Christ, the Christ of John (19:30) but not of Matthew (27:50) or Mark (15:37), for Gregor's last moment is silent and painless. "He still sensed that outside the window everything was beginning to grow bright. Then, against his will, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils came his last weak stream of breath." For a moment the dim desert of Gregor's world grows luminous; his opaque body, progressively impoverished, achieves a faint translucency. Through the destruction of the specious harmony of the metaphor and the aesthetic claims of the symbol, Kafka engenders another sort of beauty and, with this, closes a circle of reflection on his own work. For, in 1910, just before his mature art originates as the distortion of the metaphor, Kafka wrote in the story fragment, "'You,' I said ...": "Already what protected me seemed to dissolve here in the city. I was beautiful in the early days, for this dissolution takes place as an apotheosis, in which everything that holds us to life flies away, but even in flying away illumines us for the last time with its human light" (Diaries).

At the close of The Metamorphosis the ongoing metamorphosis of the metaphor accomplishes itself through a consciousness empty of all practical attention and a body that preserves its opacity, but in so dwindled a form that it achieves the condition of a painless translucency, a kind of beauty. In creating in the vermin a figure for the distortion of the metaphor, the generative principle of his art, Kafka underscores the negativity of writing, but at the same time enters the music of the historical world at a crucial juncture; his art reveals at its root a powerful romantic aesthetic tradition associated with the names of Rousseau, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Schlegel, Solger, which criticizes symbolic form and metaphorical diction in the name of a kind of allegorical language. The figures of this secular allegory do not refer doctrinally to Scripture but to the source of the decision to constitute them. They replace the dogmatic unity of sign and significance with the temporal relation of the sign to its luminous source. This relation comes to light through the temporal difference between the allegorical sign and the sign prefiguring it; the exact meaning of the signs is less important than the temporal character of their relation. The vermin that alludes to verminfigures in Kafka's early work, whose death amid increasing luminousness alludes casually to Christ's, is just such a figure. But to stress now the temporal character of the metamorphosed metaphor of The Metamorphosis is to distinguish it fundamentally from the "extended metaphor" of Sokel's discussion; for in this organistic conception of the figure, sign and significance coincide as forms of extension. And if expressionism is to be defined by its further extension of metaphor, then The Metamorphosis cannot be accommodated in an expressionist tradition.

But though The Metamorphosis joins an allegorical tradition within romanticism, it does so only for a moment before departing radically from it. The light in which Gregor dies is said explicitly to emanate from outside the window and not from a source within the subject. The creature turned away from life, facing death, and as such a pure sign of the poetic consciousness, keeps for Kafka its opaque and tellurian character. It is as a distorted body that Gregor is struck by the light; and it is in this light principally unlike the source of poetic creation that the work of art just comes to recognize its own truth. For, wrote Kafka, "our art is a way of being dazzled by truth; the light on the flinching, grimacing face (zurückweichenden Fratzengesicht) is true, and nothing else" (Dearest Father). Because the language of Kafka's fiction originates so knowingly from a reflection on ordinary speech, it cannot show the truth except as a solid body reflecting the light, a blank fragment of "what we call the world of the senses, [which] is the Evil in the spiritual world (Dearest Father).

And so the figure of the nameless vermin remains principally opaque. More fundamental than the moment of translucency; reflecting itself not so much in the dawn as in the fact that this moment is obtained only at death and without a witness; is the horror that writing could never amount to anything more than the twisted grimace on which glances a light not its own. Here the essentially linguistic imagination of Kafka joins him to a disruptive modern tradition, described in these words of Michel Foucault:

The literature of our time is fascinated by the being of language.... As such, it brings sharply to light in their empirical vividness the fundamental forms of finitude. From inside language experienced and traversed as a language, in the play of its possibilities taken to their limit, what comes to light is that man is "finite"; and that arriving at the summit of all possible utterance, it is not to the heart of himself he comes, but to the edge of that which limits him: that region where death prowls, where thought fades out, where the promise of the origin retreats indefinitely.... And as if this probing of the forms of finitude in language could not be borne . . . it has manifested itself inside madness -- the figure of finitude thus appearing in language as that which discloses itself in it but also before it, on its near side, as this shapeless, mute, meaningless region in which language can liberate itself. And it is truly in this space thus laid open that literature ... more and more purely with Kafka, with Bataille, with Blanchot has appeared . . . as the experience of finitude.

From Mosaic 3, no. 4 (1970). © 1970 by the University of Manitoba Press.

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By Stanley Corngold

Edited by Harold Bloom

STANLEY CORNGOLD is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. A leading Kafka scholar, he is the author of The Commentators' Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka's Metamorphosis and the editor of an annotated critical edition of The Metamorphosis.

HAROLD BLOOM, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of The Anxiety of Influence, Poetry and Repression, and many other volumes of literary criticism. His forthcoming study, Freud: Transference " and Authority, attempts a full-scale reading of all of Freud's major writings. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he is general editor of five series of literary criticism published by Chelsea House. During 1987-88, he served as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.