It is hard to find someone who has never heard of The Metamorphosis at some point. Although it is not a mandatory reading in Spanish educational centers, it is common for this short novel by Franz Kafka to be taught in classrooms, so the story of its protagonist, Gregor Samsa, the man who wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect, is at least popular. It has been so since it was published in 1915 under the German title Die Verwandlung or, in other words, The Transformation , a more precise title for this story, translated in Spain ten years later.
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Since it was published, this work has only puzzled its readers. As early as April 1917, a certain Siegfried Wolff wrote Kafka a letter confessing that it had made him “unhappy”: “I bought your Verwandlung and gave it to my cousin, but she is unable to explain the story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who also has no explanation. Her mother gave the book to my other cousin, who also finds no explanation. Now they have written to me: they expect me to explain the work because I am the one with a doctorate in the family. However, I don’t know where to start.”
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In his essay The Truth About Gregor Samsa (Akal), which will hit bookstores on September 21, professor and historian Fernando Bermejo-Rubio analyzes why, so many decades later, the meaning of this canonical text has not yet been unraveled and proposes a hypothesis never before articulated, which clarifies the entire story: Samsa did not turn into an insect.
“Criticism has consolidated an interpretation of the work that has permeated the collective imagination”
“Criticism has consolidated a certain interpretation of the work, materialized in an insect, that has permeated the collective imagination, becoming part of the heritage of modern culture to such an extent that it is hardly possible not to read it from that angle of understanding,” says the expert, who has been pondering the matter for over 30 years. “I started reading The Transformation with two friends and, like many others, I was left perplexed. It intrigued me so much that I decided to read everything written about it in the main European languages. I soon realized that most critics, starting with Harold Bloom or Vladimir Nabokov, who accept what could be called the ‘entomological dogma,’ were unable to elucidate the text.”
What then led him to consider a perspective different from that assumed by all of them? Bermejo-Rubio points to the existence of a series of textual data that do not fit well with the hypothesis of a metamorphosis of the protagonist. “There are indications that both the mind and the body of Gregor Samsa are at all times those of a human being. The protagonist smiles and cries; sighs, pants, clears his throat, and coughs; his body is flesh and blood; he has a neck and nostrils; he is capable of very varied movements with his head; he can stand up; and, as if that were not enough, he speaks, to such an extent that others manage to understand him. If Kafka’s intention had been to shock the reader with the sudden metamorphosis of a man into a monstrous insect, why would he have done it so clumsily and contradictorily, describing him with so many characteristically human traits?”
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“If Kafka’s intention had been to shock with a metamorphosis, why do it so clumsily?”
These observations are just the beginning of an investigation that rethinks the meaning of the work from the start. Hence the first chapter is dedicated to the narrator: “Since the work is told in the third person, criticism usually considers the narrator omniscient and objective and that his information can be accepted without reservations, but in reality what he says reflects a limited perspective, which corresponds to that of Gregor Samsa. However, a metamorphosis cannot be taken as proven just because the story begins by saying that the protagonist is transformed. It is legitimate to ask whether that experience actually belongs to Gregor’s consciousness and not to an objective description of the facts.”
The elucidation made by the author involves discovering that the microcosm inhabited by Gregor Samsa “is actually a victimizing circle,” that is, the protagonist is the victim of his family and the company where he works, for whom he is only a productive being; his situation worsens the day he falls ill. This is the context in which his morning experience takes place, in which he perceives himself as a “bug,” that is, as an insignificant and despicable being.
As if the reasons were not enough to reread the work with different eyes, Bermejo-Rubio recalls another clue: the fact that Kafka emphatically wrote in 1915 to the Kurt Wolff publishing house to state that his protagonist could not be drawn as proposed by the illustrator Ottomar Starke: “Not that, please, not that! He cannot even be shown from afar. I would be very grateful if you would process and support my request.”
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