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  • Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung:Transformation, Metaphor, and the Perils of Assimilation
  • Simon Ryan

Kafka's Die Verwandlung is the story of a son whose transformation into a repulsive, inhuman, and steadily weakening body marks his banishment from society and from the family he loves. In the course of the narrative Gregor Samsa follows an increasingly inevitable path towards extinction, a death that this unlucky son himself eventually agrees has become necessary. Further, it is the story of a son whose language has become incomprehensible. As this article will argue, Gregor's voice, now an unintelligible squeak, is like Kafka's Jewish voice, both heard and overheard in critical readings and finally ignored because the new code in which it is embedded ultimately falls on deaf ears. Since 1912 Kafka's story has wandered a long way from its original home in a Czech-Jewish minority culture. It appeared at a time when the younger generation, many of whose parents had migrated to the city from the country, was widely subordinated to their parents' desire to assimilate into a new cultural environment. The long and tortuous history of the critical reception of Die Verwandlung demonstrates over and over again the highly elusive nature of the cultural and aesthetic encoding of the key signifier, the vile body around which the constellation of this family drama endlessly gyrates.

A reexamination of Die Verwandlung in relation to issues of ethnicity and gender in the context of recent Kafka scholarship opens a number of interpretative possibilities, including the tantalizing prospect that it may now be possible to uncover with a greater measure of certainty than before the social, linguistic, and ethnopsychological origins of the grotesquely alienated body of the insect man, Gregor Samsa. New evidence supports the hypothesis that the metaphoric body in the text simultaneously expresses and conceals deep-seated anxieties about the writer's ethnic identity during a period of intense cultural transformation. From this perspective, Kafka's narrative may have much to tell us about the fictional representation of a severely alienated body – the writer's body that Deleuze conceptualizes as "an extension of the imagined body of the father." The narrative is also about the destructive power of abusive metaphors and their relationship to cultural and ethnic identity at risk. Although much scholarly enterprise in the past six decades has been devoted to the interpretation of Die [End Page 1] Verwandlung, it is still unclear what we might learn from this example of "minor literature" about why invoking terms of racial abuse and engendering suspicion of minority groups are not only the linguistic symptoms of a deep social ill, but also to be viewed as modes of behaviour that produce, out of the lives of humiliated fathers and mothers, sons and daughters whose culturally transmitted negative self-perception, in turn, leads to acts of violence and self-destruction.

As prototypical Deleuzean "experimental machines" Kafka's narratives seem to have become the perfect postmodern playthings. Amidst an array of poststructuralist, post-Freudian, and feminist readings, the abject body at the centre of Die Verwandlung, Kafka's "ungeheueres Ungeziefer" – or "monstrous vermin" – and the no longer fully human voice that emanates from it threatened to remain abstractions, culturally and temporarily disembodied signifiers, divorced, as they are in the original narrative, from their cultural and historical roots. The widespread critical reluctance to engage with issues pertaining to differences of race and gender in relation to the progression of the narrative's central metaphor is puzzling given that Réda Bensmaïa for one considers that as far back as 1975 Deleuze and Guattari revealed Kafka to be a "writer who for the first time throws open the question of 'literature' to the forces and the differences (of class, race, language, or gender) that run through it" (214). Later, in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari laid the theoretical groundwork for a future reading of the text's commercial-traveller insect body as the enunciation of a machinic and collective assemblage. This concept enables an enquiry into the way the fictional transformation of the body in Die Verwandlung refracts both the social transmission of order-words (mots d'ordre) pertaining to the male...

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