Admitting Ignorance.

Another literary milestone was reached this week when I finished Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which I started in the summer but laid aside because I wasn’t in the mood.

So now I want to know what it’s all about. I could, of course, read the Introduction which will probably explain it to me in great detail. The problem is that the Introduction is written by the same academic who translated it, and not only do I have reservations about the quality of the translation which doesn’t flow well, I also have reservations about the role of the academic. With all due and genuine respect to certain persons I hold in high esteem and who I know to be academically inclined, I still can’t avoid the suspicion that much academic criticism and analysis is disingenuously constructed to bolster their egos and their job prospects. I might well be wrong. Feel free to excuse my ignorance on the grounds that I’m largely devoid of formal education. You might well be right.

You see, I’d love to think that The Metamorphosis is simply a random outpouring of Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination. I don’t really want to be told that it’s an allegory for the emergence of the beef burger as a staple of the western diet, or that Gregor Samsa is Jesus in disguise. Some stories need to make a point, obviously. Others can just be stories which touch a nerve in the human condition, surely. The one observation I should like to make about this one is this:

Kafka’s pronouncement of Gregor’s death is beautifully understated and all the more poignant for so being. In fact, I think The Metamorphosis is possibly the saddest story I’ve ever read.

Off to wash the dishes now, and then hopefully meet Lolita.

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Somebody I met in the Shire yesterday told me I don’t look well. ‘That is, not as well as the last time I saw you,’ she continued with undertones of both urgency and apology. That made me feel a lot better.