7/27/2019 On Kafkas Method

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On Kafkas Method, The Metamorphosis and Mimesis

Posted: June 4, 2011 inLiterary,NotesTags:European literature, Franz Kafka, mimesis, reading

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More notes on reading Kafka

To understand Kafka, it is crucial to understand his compositional method. But attempting to do so

generates more questions than answers. His imagery evokes the Unconscious. Was Kafka practicing a

kind of automatic writing such as was to become popular among the surrealists? If, as it seems so in

most of his texts, he enters a stream of consciousness, where does the drive to structural perfection

come from? How is one to understand the intensely aware, self-reflective, un-dreamlike quality of hisprose? Certainly you can stress Kafkas modernism, his commitment to the potentiality redemptive goals

of an aesthetic language that you find also in contemporaries such as Rilke. But you still confront the

apparent oxymoron of unconscious perfection.

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The work that opened my access to Kafka was The Metamorphosis, which I first read as a college student

in Dumaguete in 2007. As I have learned since then, it is the text by Kafka that has opened his world to

many other readers. Its impact was overwhelming. Its one of those works that struck me, hit me to the

psychic bone, and established my earlier attempts to study literature. Through the study of philosophyexistentialism in particular and of the literature to which he belonged, at least linguistically, I had

always hoped to acquire a key to the enigma of his work.

The enormous effect of The Metamorphosis had on me was first of all based on identification with its

main characters situation. The text literally captivated me, in the sense that it kept me emotionally glued

to the deplorable position of its protagonist. I suffered a nd agonized in Kafkas place. Suppose, I asked

myself, an analogous fate should happen to me? Empirically it was inconceivable, but the pervasive

magic of Kafkas story made it appear by no means certain that something like it could not happen to

myself, or to anyone for that matter. Even if I would not turn literally into some bug, was it not possible,

or probable, that I could get into the same kind of absolute isolation, turn into an object of horrendous

disgust, beneath even the contempt reserved for human beings? Couldnt I be transformed by some

mental, psychological or moral lapse, or any stroke of outrageous fortune, that might make me exactly

like Gregor? Horrifying uniqueness is not limited to individuals. The horror of it is its being potentially a

universal condition without, however, losing, for those unfortunate enough to fall its victims, the sting of

absolute alone-ness. And is it not the fate of each one of us eventually to find himself cut off forever

from all fellowship in the transition from life to death? Fyodor Dostoevskys Notes From Underground

seems to me now to be the only other narrative that comes near to producing something comparable to

Kafkas metamorphosis effect.

Like Notes From Underground, The Metamorphosis also achieves, through the readers identification

with a single victim, an enormous enlargement of the scope of empathetic sensitivity toward all humanbeings. Going beyond the underground man, however, Kafkas text had the effect of extending

sympathy in suffering to life beyond the human species. A human being had been changed reduced

into a specimen of vermin However or whichever way I interpret that, Kafkas story gave such

horrendously persuasive testimony to such a possibility that it took me quite a while after the reading of

his story for me to gather enough insensitivity to interact or deal with or get rid ofspecific persons

in my life.

Identification with a fictional character is a distinguishing sign of the effect of mimesis in literature. For

Aristotle mimesis was the essence of art. Having read Aristotles Poetics a year or two after my first

soul-shaking encounter with Kafkas story made me better understand that experience and allowed me to

place it in an impersonal context. Kafkas tale seemed to me a prime example of mimetic art, and it

produced the effect of tragedy. For more than any other, it was the text that had made me identify with the

abysmal suffering depicted in it, engendering in me the emotions ascribed by Aristotle to tragedy.

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7/27/2019 On Kafkas Method

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Despite the grotesque singularity of Gregor Samsas fate, there seems to radiate a deeply disquieting

universality from the life Kafka portrayed. As I read him, and re-read him, what goes on in his work

concerns me with terrifying urgency, but I also feel that it would equally concern anyone else who

allowed himself to be opened and drawn by its magnetic power.