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PARTISAN REVIEW
Freudian biographers, like Neider in
The Frozen Sea
(1948), contend,
for example, that "The Metamorphosis" has a basis in Kafka's com–
plex relationship with his father and his lifelong sense of guilt; they
contend further that in mythical symbolism children are represented by
vermin-which 1 doubt-and then go on to say that Kafka uses the
symbol of the bug to represent the son according to these Freudian
postulates. The bug, they say, aptly characterizes his sense of worthless–
ness before his father. 1 am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs,
and 1 reject this nonsense. Kafka himself was extremely critical of
Freudian ideas. He considered psychoanalysis (I quote) "a helpless
error," and he regarded Freud's theories as very approximate, very
rough pictures, which did not do justice to details or, what is more, to
the essence of the matter. This is another reason why 1 should like to
dismiss the Freudian approach and concentrate, instead, upon the
artistic moment.
The greatest literary influence upon Kafka was Flaubert's. Flau–
bert who loathed pretty-pretty prose would have applauded Kafka's
attitude towards his tool. Kafka liked to draw his terms from the
language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision,
with no intrusion of the author's private sentiments; this was exactly
Flaubert's method through which he achieved a singular poetic effect.
The hero of "The Metamorphosis" is Gregor Samsa (pronounced
Zamza),
who is the son of middle-class parents in Prague, Flaubertian
philistines, people in teres ted only in the material side of life and
vulgarians in their tastes. Some five years before, old Samsa lost most of
his money, whereupon his son Gregor took a job with one of his
father's creditors and became a traveling salesman in cloth. His father
then stopped working altogether, his sister Grete was too young to
work, his mother was ill with asthma; thus young Gregor not only
supported the whole family but also found for them the apartment they
are now living in. This apartment, a flat in an apartment house, in
Charlotte Street to be exact, is divided into segments as he will
be
divided himself. We are in Prague, central Europe, in the year 1912;
servants are cheap so that the Samsas can afford a servant maid, Anna,
aged sixteen (one year younger than Grete), and a cook. Gregor is
mostly away traveling, but when the story starts he is spending a night
at home between two business trips, and it is then that the dreadful
thing happened. "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a
troubled dream he found himself transformed in his bed into a
monstrous insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated,
back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like
brown belly divided into corrugated segments on top of which the bed
