Post Cards Monthly posts on Art Fiction Writing: Kafka’s Metamorphosis: How Art can be as Captivating as Dream

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: How Art can be as Captivating as Dream

For centuries, artists have used dreams as a resource.

“Truth lies not in one dream

But in many dreams”
A Thousand and One Nights

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature"

The Id and the Ego at loggerheads

The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samson, waking to find himself transformed (metamorphosed) into a large, monstrous insect-like creature.

This story was written in 1915, just a few years before the birth of Surrealism, where metaphysical art portrayed unnatural images, illogical perspectives, and played with dreamlike inconsistencies much like the literature did during this time. In The Nostalgia of the Infinite by Giorgio de Chirico, he explored how everyday objects or places can be transformed to arise a mystery.

The rest of Kafka's novella deals with Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repelled by the horrible, cockroach-like creature Gregor has become.

Gregor is the main character of the story. He works as a traveling salesman in order to provide money for his sister and parents. He wakes up one morning finding himself transformed into an insect. After the metamorphosis, Gregor becomes unable to work and is confined to his room for the remainder of the story. This prompts his family to begin working once again.

This story was written in the wake of Surrealism. The French poet, André Breton, is known as the “Pope of Surrealism.” Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto to describe how he wanted to combine the conscious and subconscious into a new “absolute reality”

Breton first used the word surrealism to describe work found to be a “fusion of elements of fantasy with elements of the modern world to form a kind of superior reality.” He also described it as “spontaneous writing” that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind."

Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy, which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality."

Literature, art, and music expanded and transformed through the twentieth century, heavily influenced by Freud because they all explored the inner depths of the unconscious mind. Freud impacted all forms of art with his new psychology, one of the most important being literature. He influenced many writers in his time, but the three most greatly affected by him were Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce.

Freud was also writing about the unconscious mind. He believed dreams to be an expression of a repressed wish that we would rather not admit to. As such, a dream being an unfulfilled wish is indicative of conflict within the psyche. In deciphering dreams, Freud believed this conflict within the mind could be resolved via the use of a technique called free association.

Freud interpreted dreams to be hidden emotions and desires. These emotions and desires inside the minds of artists during the twentieth century produced often nightmarish and grotesque novels that dealt with bizarre and illogical situations.

Surreal stories deal with different parts of the unconscious. There is he Id, which, according to Freud, “'knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality... [It is] the great reservoir of libido”.

The Ego, however, seeks to please the instinctive drive of the Id but only in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term. The Ego, says Freud, “attempts to mediate between id and reality”. I would say that Gregor, in Kafka's metamorphosis, is desperately trying to please society by going to work, and yet his ID really doesn't want to go. The Ego comprises organized structure of one’s personality. In other words, the great majority of the Ego’s operative duties are at a conscious level (e.g. defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions). Its role is to sift through what is real and what isn’t via organization of our thoughts to make sense of them and how they relate to the world we live in.

The Super-Ego is the Ego’s constant watchdog and if/when it (the Ego) steps out of line, the Super-Ego punishes it with feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inferiority. The Super-ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes misbehavior with feelings of guilt. For example: having extra-marital affairs” Freud explained.

Stories which were able to explore dream-like dilemmas, so often represented in dreamlike stories such as The Thousand and One Nights, were of much interest to Surrealists. Surrealism is a good term to apply to Kafka’s work, because etymologically it means “above realism.” In the early 1920’s artists and writers experimented with alternates to realism, the prevailing mode.

Kafka, his writing life was a projection of his dream-like inner life, erasing the boundary between the fantastic states and the empirical world of pragmatic reason and social reality. The unpredictable and miraculous juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events rules supreme in Kafka’s universe. People’s fates were suddenly changed by sudden, unpredictable encounters or arbitrary decisions. His stories are captivating, in the same way that dreams can captivate the sleeper, as it battles with inner issues and drives.