Alienated Man and Cockroach, the Same: An Essay on Marxist Interpretations of Kafka, Surrealism, and Social Ontology
I.
In his efforts to explain the source or influence of the writer’s creative process, Sigmund Freud, through the Uncanny, the Pleasure Principle, and the Interpretation of Dreams, connected the creative’s dreams, early life experiences, and repressed pleasures, as the force of artistic creation. While arguing for repression of the subconscious and primal desires, Freud allows for the contrary: support for the benefits of delving into the subconscious, resisting repression of pleasure, and the rejection of ideologically crafted social ontology for the interest of pure autonomic creative self expression. In recognition of these socially crafted barriers, as well as the inherent role of language in the repetition of ideology, Franz Kafka sought to dispel language to write from a purely autonomous state without outside influence or interference. Kafka’s personal qualms regarding writing, creativity, and the restrictions of which due to social ontology, coincide with Andre Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism, which served as philosophical text to argue for pure psychic automatism as a direct revolt against current ideological structures in favor for Marxist conceptions of ideal workings of society. Social alienation, in a Marxist sense, results from the proletariat’s participation in the capitalist system for means of survival as one who sells labor, who does identify with his or her self with their vocation, and because of this, in a broad sense, is disconnected from the goods they create, disconnected from their self, and thus, disconnected from others, or socially alienated. Social alienation in relation to social ontology results not only from capitalism’s disastrous effects, but also from a disconnection from one’s sense of self as a result of ideology’s significant imprint on the formation of one’s identity – the most notable and everyday ideological imprint being that of the repetition of language. Kafka was quite aware of the politics of language and its role in furthering the power and influence of social structures, and interfered with his writing process. Kafka realized that there was no escaping language, and in a Derridean sense, Kafka aimed to use the structure of language to de-construct language. Specifically, through the themes of alienation, imagery of the effects of a repressed autonomous individual, rejections of language, and an embrace of the subconscious are present in the Metamorphosis.
II.
Completely isolated from the people around him, Gregor Samsa’s feeling of estrangement preceded his transformation into vermin in Franz Kafka’s the Metamorphosis. In the novella, Gregor reflects on his life as a traveling salesman, noting how superficial and transitory his relationships are due to traveling. Samsa’s alienation as vermin was merely an extension of the alienation he felt as a person, due to the effects of capitalism. When Samsa is transformed, his physical form is altered, although the nature of his mental state remains unchanged. From this, we find a disconnection between Samsa’s mind and body. The transformation completely alters his body, although his mind remains the same, there is a disharmony between the mind and the body. The significance of this is represented with Kafka’s concern with what he wishes to express from the realm of his dreams, subconscious, and unadulterated self, and with what he chooses to say when it is filtered through the languages and the politics that underwrite it. As Gregor becomes accustomed to his new body, his mind changes in accordance to his physical desires, allowing his subconscious to surface, allowing him to express himself with language - although, never completely due to the politics and ideological forces that has long underwritten the formation of language. The Metamorphosis suggests that our physical lives direct our mental narration, and that outside forces direct our identity and personal motives. In consideration of this, we find that one is either capable of being physically and socially comfortable or emotionally and subconsciously comfortable, but never both, in a complete sense. The alienation of Gregor Samsa in his human form creates a psychological distance between Gregor and others, and the change from his metamorphosis makes him socially separated from his family, further entrenching the alienation he experienced as a human. This alienation is his imprisonment; he is unable to speak due to his inhuman form. The fact that Samsa was unable to speak during his alienation as vermin is significant to Kafka’s belief that language was ridden with ideology, and served to perpetuate bourgeois elitism through repetition, that the “bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society,” (Marx, 10).
In Franz Kafka: an Anthology of Marxist Criticism, Eegeniya Knipovich finds that in connection with life’s absurdity that Kafka’s characters find themselves with, one hears more frequently about alienation, about Kafka’s figurative embodiment in his work of that phenomenon whose essence was defined by Karl Marx (Knipovich, 195). For Knipovich, ideological and state apparatuses create boundaries that citizens must adhere themselves to, which threaten their own survival if he or she does not, and simultaneously, prevents pure psychic automatism. She writes that participating as proletariats – or selling one’s labor – in a capitalist structure results in social alienation. In Franz Kafka’s the Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, the protagonist, is a traveling salesman who works for an agency that his parents owe large sums of debt to. He is not making an autonomous decision to work for the agency, it is not where his passion lies, yet a great deal of his life is devoted to this work. Here, we can derive the essence of Marx that Knipovich points to. Samsa exhibits a passion for woodworking, prefers to create his own goods, but is forced – by the debt of his parents – to sell items that he is disconnected from, or items that he has not created, thus, in Marxist terms, he is alienated from his work, and inevitably, his self.
This alienation is what Alexe J. Kusek says in On the Marxist Interpretation of Franz Kafka to be “the violence of capitalism, which consists in its turning authentic life into an alienated existence in the shadows, and it cannot be easily revealed, because if it could, then the fight against capitalism today would only be a chapter in the textbook of history,” (Kusek, 99). Kafka’s goal was not to provide a resolution for capitalism’s violence, but was to unveil its presence – to make those oppressed by capitalist forces aware. Kusak elaborates, “the everyday world that we know is not the known and recognized word; so that it can be presented in reality, it must be stripped of its intimately fetishized familiarity and revealed in its alienated brutality,” (Kusek, 100). A distance must be acquired from the everyday world, and man must divest it of its quality of the seeming known, and according to Kusak, “one of the major principles of modern film, art, literature, and theater is the “violence” done to the everyday, the destruction of the pseudo-concrete,” (Kusek, 100). The distance that Kusak writes of here connects to Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the contemporariness. Here, Kusak points to modern artists as contemporaries in Agamben’s sense of the word, and writes that these modern artists create in order to dispel the façade of ideological structures to reveal the violence imputed everyday to the victims of the class struggle. This is what Kusak believes to be Kafka’s creative procedure in his writings, and additionally, Kusak writes that Bertolt Brecht justifies the artistic alienation as an aggressive answer to social alienation. Given the prominence of artistic alienation in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, we can say that his work or creative procedure was a response to social alienation, a concept more thoroughly articulated by Marxism.
III.
In the German Ideology and the Communist Manifestoes, Karl Marx analyzed the economic doctrines of how social organizations are structured and linked, and from which, created an architectural model: the economic base. The economic base, to Marx, determines the superstructure that constitutes the political legal system. Ideology is where the superstructure and the base exist; ideology represents the production of ideas and conceptions, as well as consciousness within the individual. The economic base is founded on the ideals of the bourgeois, the “class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor,” (Marx, 7). Everything that the civilian perceives constitutes ideology, ideology shapes existence, the assumptions, and frameworks from which individuals understand their culture, life, and its meaning to be. Marx observes that the Bourgeois possess the power to exploit their own ideas due to their ultimate economic control of societal institutions, and that “each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class,” (Marx, 9). Marx writes that the class with the means of material production also has the means of mental production, that the “executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” (Marx, 9), and through this, the ruling class dominates all economic and non-economic institutions. The dominant ideas imbedded in the prevailing ideology of the ruling class occur through a mode of persuasion and cohesion, of repetition, and language – Kafka was most concerned with language in this regard. Marx articulates that one must remove this veil of the dominant ideas and point to how the world truly works – that “society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat,” (Marx, 8).
The intents of Marx are to discover the modes of which the mask of oppression is removed, to remove false consciousness with finding the truth of the economic reality and exploitation, the “exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions that has substituted naked, shameless, direct, and brutal exploitation,” (Marx, 10). In order to expose the truth, Marx examines commodity fetishism as the cell of the capitalist society, the building unit. According to Marxist philosophy, capitalists own the value that the commodities add. Marx notes that “cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance and for the propagation of his race,” (Marx, 14). The laborers are paid for the labor they provide, but only just enough for food, shelter, and clothing – in order to produce more labor. Thus, the laborer produces more value than he or she is paid, and it is this very labor that creates the commodity. Marx observes that a commodity must be useful, and must be of value to be exchanged in a market, predicated on the idea of the social division of labor, and that the moment an object is produced for the sake of exchange, it becomes a commodity, Marx writes that today, every object is produced for the sake of exchange. However, if every commodity can technically be exchanged for another commodity, how do you determine that one commodity is not equal to the other? For Marx, the answer is labor. The exchange value of a commodity is predicated on the amount of labor necessary to produce the commodity. Marx finds that what matters are not who produced what for whom, but how much labor was required to produce the commodity. Further, Marx insists that labor is congealed in the commodity, that labor becomes the amount of labor required by the average amount of labor required in any moment – both skilled and unskilled. When commodities are defined by this, there is a movement away from the human to labor, and when commodities are exchanged, this labor becomes increasingly hidden – there is a gradual forgetting of the labor that produced the commodity and now, according to Marx, the relationship is primarily with commodities, and not with the people who produced them. Through this, Marx has brought forth the catastrophic effects of the treatment of humans as inanimate objects for examination, and has highlighted the process of which the alienation of the proletariat occurs within the capitalist structure.
IV.
Judith Butler, while explaining the frames that inhibit the social body in her book, Frames of War, touches on the idea that embracing one’s unadulterated identity, pursuing one’s true passions, and ultimately, exercising pure psychic automatism, has proven to be an anomaly among people in today’s society. In Frames of War, Butler writes that the body is something that, by definition, yields to social crafting and force, and that the body is vulnerable or malleable (Butler, 33). Butler observes that the body’s very persistence depends upon social conditions and institutions, which means that in order to be – in the sense of persisting – the body must rely on what is outside itself (Butler, 33). In consideration of the lack of identity in regard to the body as a result of this socialization, it seems that always looking outside of one’s self in order to persist can yield tragic effects, as illustrated through Gregor Samsa’s determining force of his mental state in the Metamorphosis being that of his physical form or body. Butler’s notion elaborates upon the idea that in order to survive in the capitalist structure, in a Marxist sense, one must sacrifice his or her identity to sell their labor, and inevitably be alienated. Furthermore, not having a personal automatism can restrict the person to the confines of the social structure, and prevent the person from achieving contemporariness, in the sense provided by Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy outline in What is an Apparatus.
Contemporaries, according to Giorgio Agamben’s book, What is an Apparatus?, are those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of their century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity, (Agamben, 41). Agamben writes that those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with time nor adjust to its demands. Socially alienated as both human and vermin, Gregor Samsa exhibits a disconnection and out-of-jointness in respect to the present. Although, as seen through his cooperation as a proletariat in his human form, as well as his sacrifice of his own passions in order to please his parents and the authoritative figures at the agency, Samsa certainly adjusts to the demands of the societal structure. This, in Agamben’s terms, does not allow the human Samsa to perceive life as a contemporary would because it is precisely through this disconnection that contemporaries are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. Agamben insists that the contemporary sees outside of societal and social confines, and maintains a certain psychic automatism. Agamben elaborates, “those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it,” (Agamben, 41). Those who have not unveiled the structure for what it is have not revealed the violence enacted upon the proletariats everyday by the class struggle inherent in the capitalist system, and thus, have not discovered the need for contemporariness. However, the importance of possessing a sense of contemporariness is what we are most concerned with here, because we find with Agamben that with the contemporary’s critical view, norms that inhibit the social body can be transformed, much like Samsa’s transformation from human being into vermin.
V.
We find insight in the significance of the method of Kafka’s production of the Metamorphosis and its themes, as well as their importance in Kafka’s wish to unveil subconscious autonomous thought for means of creative expression in the Uncanny. Sigmund Freud’s the Uncanny theorizes that the meaning of our dreams remain obscure because at night, we are visited by desires that we are ashamed of and must conceal from ourselves, desires that have for this reason been repressed and pushed into the unconscious, and that such repressed desires and their derivatives can be allowed to express themselves only in a grossly distorted form (Freud, 30). For Freud, once scientific research had succeeded in clarifying the phenomenon of dream distortion, there was no longer any difficulty in recognizing that night-dreams were wish-fulfillments, just like our daydreams, (Freud, 30). Freud writes, “on the whole the psychological novel no doubt owes its special character chiefly to the tendency of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into partial egos and consequently to personify the conflicting currents in his mental life in several heroes,” (Freud, 31). This idea is crucial to understanding the influence of Kafka’s dreams in his writing process, which we will discuss later. For Freud, dreams are wish-fulfillments, veiled in a sense by being expressed in uncanny, unsettling, bizarre means to spare the dreamer from feeling ashamed, and the writer exposes these desires through the actions and descriptions of characters in novels. To Freud, a potent present experience often awakens in the writer the memory of an earlier experience – typically from childhood – from where proceeds the desire that finds its fulfillment in literary work (Freud, 32). Essentially, the work itself exhibits elements of both the recent occasion and the old memory, and the literary work, like the daydream, is a continuation of, as well as a substitution for, the earlier play of childhood (Freud, 32). Freud writes that the daydreamer carefully conceals his fantasies from others because he feels he has reason to be ashamed of them. For our purposes, we will consider this closely with social ontology. If we were to disclose the content of our daydreams, Freud asserts that we would not be given any pleasure through such. Is it the obscure nature of dreams that brings us great displeasure at their disclosure, or is it that the inner workings of our subconscious do not coincide with the ideological social regime? We find that a rejection of sorts to the ideological social regime most often results in intrapersonal humiliation, an alienation from the rest, a casting off, so to speak, by the society through embarrassment, and we see this illustrated quite well when Samsa is vermin – his family rejects him in the vermin form, they are repulsed by his metaphorical lack of concurrence with what is most often perceived as a product coinciding with ideological confines. However, with Freud, we find that when the creative writer plays his games for us or tells us what we are inclined to explain as his personal daydreams, we feel a great deal of pleasure, deriving no doubt from many confluent sources, (Freud 33). The writer, to Freud, overcomes our repulsion by toning down the character of the egotistic daydream by modifying and disguising it, and bribes us with the purely formal – that is aesthetic – bonus of pleasure that he offers us in the way he presents his fantasies, (Freud 33). Through this, the literary work dispels our repulsion by relaxing the tensions in our minds, and Freud observes the workings of society, how one protects their self from embarrassment with the method of repression. Kafka seeks to rid of the source that enacts the method of repression for the purpose of freedom of life and expression. The writer enables us to enjoy our fantasies without shame or self-reproach. Samsa, as vermin, rids of this entirely, and lives shamelessly in his primitive form, that is metaphorically described as being vermin to explain the repulsion that products of ideology feel toward this.
In the Pleasure Principle, Freud finds that we believe that any given process originates in an unpleasant state of tension and thereupon determines for itself such a path that its ultimate tissue coincides with a relaxation of this tension, i.e. with avoidance of ‘pain’ or with production of pleasure, (Freud, 1). The tension Freud refers to here is the wish-fulfillment of desires, and the restriction of doing so by outside factors, such as social restrictions. Freud points out that one can only say that a strong tendency towards the pleasure-principle exists in the psyche, to which, however, certain other forces or conditions are opposed, so that the ultimate issue cannot always be in accordance with the pleasure-tendency, (Freud, 4). Not all instincts are allowed to develop at the same stage of the psyche, and some instincts prove irreconcilable in their aims and can be welded into the comprehensive unity of the ego. By the process of repression, Freud writes, the instincts are retained on lower stages of psychic development, and for the time being, are cut off from all possibility of gratification. When repressed desires do succeed in fighting their way through, instead of being brought with pleasure, they are brought with pain. To Freud, most of the ‘pain’ we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful or may arouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus, and is recognized by it as ‘danger’, (Freud, 7). In regard to the pleasure principle, the danger that rouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus are most often made the objects of memory and psychic pre-occupation. Freud’s aim was to “compel the patient to confirm the reconstruction [of repressed desires] through his own memory,” (Freud, 17). The chief emphasis of this endeavor, to Freud, was on the resistances of the patient; the art now lay in unveiling the resistances as soon as possible, in calling the patient’s attention to them, and by human influence, teaching him to abandon resistances (Freud, 17). Here, Freud wishes to urge the patient to bring in the consciousness of the unconscious. According to Freud, “the unconscious, i.e. the ‘repressed’ material, offers no resistance whatever to the curative efforts; indeed it has no other aim than to force its way through the pressure weighing on it, either to consciousness or to discharge by means of real action,” (Freud, 19). Additionally, Freud writes that consciousness cannot be the most general characteristic of psychic processes, but merely a special function of them. What we draw from this is that the conscious and subconscious assume a presence in two different realms of the mind, and that consciousness is most often the dominant realm, repressing the unconscious. Freud has observed the process of repression – the practitioner constantly enacted to protect the individual from embarrassment due to outside social influence. When Samsa transforms, the agent of repression disappears with his human form, he is socially disconnected as vermin, repulsive to the repressed due to the bizarre nature of unadulterated thought.
VI.
In the Metamorphosis, once Gregor Samsa becomes vermin, he becomes disinterested in being understood and through this, he becomes self-aware and finds his true self. In the first part of the Metamorphosis, after the head clerk questions Samsa through the locked door of his room where Samsa has hidden his metamorphosed self, Samsa attempts to respond. The result is a high-pitched, insect-like voice from Samsa, which is responded by the head clerk with, “did you just hear Gregor speak? That was the voice of an animal,” (Kafka, 15). The high-pitched, insect-like voice that Samsa uses is symbolic of his changed state, how through his stepping back from his time, through his reaching of contemporariness, in Agamben’s sense of the word, the societal structure is revealed to him, and he no longer wishes to participate in it. No longer cooperating in the social structure results in a metaphorical inhuman quality in Samsa, a transformation into vermin, because without social norms inhibiting the body, the body in the social sense is bizarre, out of the ordinary, and not concurrent with societal traditions. Samsa’s social carelessness coincides with Andre Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism. By definition, surrealism is psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought, dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern, (Breton, 26). Philosophically, surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life, (Breton, 26). Surrealism seeks to manifest the importance of dreams and the unconscious because these states are psychic automatism in its purest form. In these states, the imagination that one locks up as a result of the confines of societal structures is released. Breton states that the imagination is perhaps on the point of re-asserting itself, of reclaiming its rights, and that if the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them – first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason, (Breton, 33).
Andre Breton’s opening passage in the Political Position of Today’s Art in Manifestoes of Surrealism insists that in the last battle against capitalism, there is a concern to imbue one more and more deeply with the idea that we live in an era in which man belongs to himself less than ever, in which he is held responsible for the totality of his acts, no longer before a single conscience, his own, but before the collective conscience of all those who want to have no more to do with a monstrous system of slavery and hunger, (Breton, 212). Explained throughout the manifestoes, Breton’s, as well as the surrealist’s goal was to destruct social barriers, and to create an all-encompassing hatred for servitude, the profit of workers and the assiduous attention to grasping the whole process of dissatisfaction, (Breton, 213). An essence of Marx is significant in Breton’s writings for surrealism. An emphasis on the notion that an era of which we live is a time in which “man belongs to himself less than ever […] no longer before a single conscience of his own, but before the collective conscience of all those who want to have no more to do with a monstrous system of slavery and hunger” examines the idea that the proletariat in the capitalist structure is permanently imprinted with the ideology that has long restricted, policed and guided their identity, and thus, cannot achieve Agamben’s idea of contemporariness in order to take a step back and critically reflect on one’s position in one’s time. This ideology has further entrenched the forces of capitalism that has created the alienation within the proletariat.
We find that instead of enabling the capitalist structure to permeate through repetition and re-invention, one must dispel the identity shaped by ideology and embrace one’s true identity, the subconscious. Breton writes, “it is because man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all the plaything of his memory, and in its normal state memory takes pleasure in weakly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream, in stripping it of any real importance, and in dismissing the only determinant from the point where he thinks he has left it a few hours before: this firm hope, this concern,” (Breton, 11). At the very least, Breton is asserting that when man ceases to sleep, his memory repeats and re-enacts the guidelines of ideology, and in doing this, dispels its subconscious automatism – his true identity – of any real importance. Breton insists that “man and man alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable in a state of anarchy,” (Breton, 18). Breton observes that the waking state scarcely dares to express itself and if it does, it confines itself to verifying that such and such an idea had made an impression on it. Although, ultimately, to allow the imagination to re-assert itself and to reclaim its rights, a sense of contemporariness in Agamben’s terms will overcome the body. In this state, the person will exceed the social confines of one’s time, while realizing one’s identity through one’s control of reason. Breton’s writing is most concerned with the assertion that man alone can determine whether he is completely a master of himself – which poetry teaches him to do. This emphasis on poetry is important when examining Franz Kafka’s writing because Kafka’s use of language was torn – he never quite felt like he could express himself truly.
VII.
In writing Content Analysis of Kafka’s Dreams, Hall and Lind find that Kafka was pre-occupied with the body in his dreams, as well as the disfigurement of the body. A theme found prevalent in the Metamorphosis. Hall and Lind write that in this post-Freudian era, it is usually conceded that the creative writer is distinguished from the bulk of mankind by being in closer touch with his unconscious, (Hall & Lind, 55). To Hall and Lind, instead of repressing his feelings and ideas, Kafka accepts them and expresses them through the medium of literature, and what this means is that the writer has succeeded in bringing into the preconscious where it is available much of what remains irretrievably unconscious for most people, (Hall & Lind, 56). In this sense, and with Freud’s Uncanny and the Pleasure Principle in mind, Kafka’s literary work dispels the barrier that prevents the pleasure of unveiling what would be unconscious, unattained desires. Hall and Lind write that Kafka took great pains to express the paradoxes and complexities of the human existence, which he found in himself. Kafka’s pre-occupation with the body present in his dreams is not repressed and is expressed in his literary works. In Content Analysis of Kafka’s Dreams, we find that Kafka uses the characteristics of animals to represent aspects of the human condition, for example, alienation and isolation, and that Kafka uses the animal sphere to illustrate the human sphere, (Hall & Lind, 18). However, the Metamorphosis is dissimilar to most animal stories in the sense that “Gregor is a human in the form of an animal and not an animal who has been humanized,” (Hall & Lind, 18). Kafka’s concern of revealing the human condition to his readers is represented through his own pre-occupation with the human body. The human body, according to Butler, is a site of imprinted societal norms, and if one chooses to dispel of those norms, they are essentially transformed into a primitive, autonomous being, and in Kafka’s world, a human in the form of an animal in the eyes of the repressed.
Not only was Kafka’s literary works strongly influenced by his dreams, but his writing process was not consciously controlled, Beug writes in the Cunning of a Writer, “the transformation of feelings into fixed words, sentences and paragraphs on paper cannot be sufficiently controlled,” (Beug, 123). Beug writes that the compulsive self observation must appear all incompatible with the first pre-requisite of a writer, which, according to Kafka, is self-forgetfulness, not alertness but self-forgetfulness, (Beug, 124). For Kafka, according to Beug, writing is a reflection of the inner-most self, a self that isn’t socially or institutionally refined, the unconscious. Beug elaborates, “the price to pay for this life as a writer is rigid, uncompromising aloneness, a radical isolation from the outside world, from other people,” (Beug, 125). For Kafka to truly write, to release the repressed unconscious, he had to reject societal refinements, which ultimately led to his alienation. Beug notes that what Kafka himself says about the themes, the subject matter of his writing, is, ‘the immense world that I have in my head, but how to free myself and free it without being torn apart,’ (Beug, 128). The immense world that Kafka has in his head, or to Beug, the representation of his dreamlike inner world needs to be freed, and is how Kafka describes his task of writing, (Beug 128). The importance of freeing the repressed unconscious mind to Kafka is quite apparent in the analysis of what he said drove him to write. Kafka said that he could only achieve happiness if he could lift the world into the pure, true and immutable. From this, we understand that Kafka wished to lift the world, reality out of fabricated confines of ideology into the purest, truest realm, into the immutable, unchanging truth, out of the provisional, prevailing societal norms and structures. This decent into the unconscious was self-exploratory for Kafka, a hope to be lead to a clearer self-knowledge, with ultimate aims to raise the world into the pure, true and immutable. Kafka’s investigation of the restrictions of society also led to his analysis of the politics of language. Kafka writes, “When I say something it loses its importance immediately and forever; when I write it down that always happens, but sometimes it takes on a new one,” (Beug 129). For Kafka, the unconscious cannot simply be expressed, the implications of the ideological structure run too deep, going so far as to scar the inner-most core of language. The quest for the pure, the true, and the immutable, therefore is much more difficult than merely expressing one’s self in words. According to Beug, “the reasons for this rejection of speech – external interference that leads to falsification and invalidation of the original idea – imply that Kafka must at all costs keep his writing free of such disturbances; and this, to be sure, means more than a quiet room to work in, important as that may be,” (Beug, 129). For Kafka, language itself, the limitations of words, all too often prove to be the form of external interference that he could neither escape nor overcome, (Beug, 129). Beug points out that Kafka realized that the imprints of ideology were imbedded far too deep into language, and that to express himself without external interference was ultimately impossible. For Kafka, Beug writes that the stream of Kafka’s inner vision is for the most part submerged, its waters more often than not are murky; and what can be seized and held through efforts at conscious and considered writing is as nothing compared to the inner plenitude, (Beug, 130). Kafka’s difficulty with breaking through the barriers holding back his unconscious may have never been quite resolved.
Through Kafka and Language, Anthony Thorlby finds that Kafka gazed into the dream-like recesses of his mind, where it passes over into bodily sensation, and glimpsed that barely accessible place where thoughts, words, and images arise from physical impressions, from fantasies, and from various degrees of consciousness and well-being, (Thorlby, 134). Thorlby explains that when Kafka chooses to remain in the realm of the metaphor, rather than of remarks and mere talk, which he tends to regard as a lesser use of words, he affirms his grasp of the weapons of language, a grasp he demonstrates though does not explain – he answers weapon with weapon, metaphor with metaphor; he turns language against itself, (Thorlby, 136). Instead of allowing language defeat his aim to unlock his unconscious from the confines of language and ideology, Kafka cunningly strategizes turn language against itself, or in a Derridean sense, de-constructs the structure using the very structure that created it. Kafka, to Thorlby, transformed his inner need and outer situation entirely into the language of metaphor, into a self-contained metaphorical world, (Thorlby, 137). Like Nietzsche, Kafka knew that mythical assumptions about the world are built into the structure of language, so that we mythologize merely by using it, even though we may not realize this (Thorlby, 140). Thorlby explains that “Kafka embarks upon stories that are pure myth, full of creatures and situations and sequences of events that we recognize as belonging to the myth-making level of our minds, the level of dreams, reverie, or childhood memory, which Freud also acknowledged as the home of myth,” (Thorlby, 140). Through this, Kafka constructs and de-constructs stories at the same time, using the myths that work as the core of language to mystify his own stories, working against the ideological forces, forces imbedded in the signs and structures of language. The structures that words make in the solid ground of physical existence are signs that do not carry within themselves the substance of the things they say. Thorlby elaborates, “they signify their absence, the replacement of the mysterious wholeness of the world, of which the bustling life above ground and the deadly, but no less necessary, inescapable presences and processes below the surface are but two aspects – the replacement of all that by an insubstantial nothing, a noise that in the end can only announce our doom, a labyrinthine void, something exactly ‘like’ a burrow,” (143). Kafka was most concerned with this problem of language in regard to his writing, and wrote that his sentences served as elucidations in the following way, “anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb beyond them, and he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it,” (Thorlby, 144).
VIII.
For Kafka, literary creation was the technique of overcoming alienation, and writing the opposite of alienation. Through his creative procedure, Kafka condemns illusions, de-mystifies the status quo and awakens in everyone a longing for the true law and the true life. According to Roger Garaudy’s essay, Kafka and Modern Art, the major themes of Kafka’s work are “the animal theme as the theme of awakening: man is a being that despairs of his own life, the search theme: the search for a new and true life, and the theme of the incomplete,” (Garaudy, 110). As seen with these themes, the everlasting regret of an imposed autonomy is inherent throughout the Metamorphosis. Like the surrealists, Kafka sought to write from a source of unadulterated presence of inner truth, and to complete his work in a single sitting, unconsciously, without any deliberation. Additionally, according to Walter H. Sokel in Kafka’s Poetics of the Inner self, for a complete inundation of the world by the inner self, an absolute withdrawal was required, an inhuman solitude. Sokel adds, “one of Kafka’s earliest diary entries states that loneliness is best for him, it metamorphoses him – Gregor Samsa’s fate is here seen as a most positive occurrence – and has a power over him which never fails,” (Sokel, 165). Kafka’s withdrawal from the world opens up his inner self, and allows its deeper layers to come forth in order to write without effort. Further evidence of Kafka’s writing processes coinciding with the philosophical ideals of surrealism is in Kafka’s first novel, Wedding Preparations in the Country. Sokel explains that the protagonist, Raban, faced with disagreeable social obligations, imagines that he would separate his real self from his body. The former would stay in bed, in the shape of a great beetle, while his body would be sent to carry out Raban’s tasks in the world outside. Meanwhile, Raban’s true self, reclining in inhuman solitary serenity, would be the absolute master, not only of his human façade, but also of the entire world, (Sokel, 166). “By withdrawing from humanity and totally identifying with his true desire, by becoming his truth, Raban is able to dominate the world from which he is withdrawn,” (Sokel, 166). As we can see, Kafka’s first attempt at a novel closely resembles the Metamorphosis, in the sense that in order for the character to truly embrace a mental automatism, the character had to assume an inhuman transformation, because through this transformation, the character would no longer be a person and thus, no longer be required to adhere to social norms and societal guidelines.
With all of this in mind, Kafka’s the Metamorphosis contains within it an essence of Marxism and an illustration of the disastrous effects of alienation on the proletariat within Marx’s notion of the class struggle. Agamben’s idea of the contemporary allows those concerned with the violent oppression of the proletariat to realize that in order for everyday man to see the truth of the capitalist society that Marx greatly wishes to unveil, one must possess a sense of connected-disconnectedness to one’s time, a stepping back from, to allow for critical perception. As seen through Judith Butler’s explanation of the social ontology of the body, as well as the deep imprint of ideology on identities, Agamben’s notion that contemporariness demands that one neither perfectly coincide with time nor adjust to its demands proves the importance of dispelling the prevailing ideological beliefs and restrictions from one’s mind in order to pursue a true psychological autonomy. A further examination into Kafka’s writing process, as well as into the Metamorphosis shows us that Kafka sought to represent through his stories that for the proletariat to escape oppression, one must withdraw from humanity, identify with his true desire, and become his truth. In a Derridean sense, once the ideologically conformed steps back from society, and identifies his true desire, one can use the language that was so imbedded with prevailing ideological ideals that served to deeply imprint him to deconstruct this very ideology. Andre Breton writes in Manifestoes of Surrealism, “language has been given to man so that he may make surrealist use of it,” (Breton, 32). Kafka, in revealing the horrors of the alienation of man through the essence of Marx, deconstructs the structure, and ultimately, with his writing process in mind, makes surrealist use of language while encouraging ordinary man to do the same as well.
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