The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Franz Kafka · Die Verwandlung · a novella in three parts · written 1912, published 1915 · scored on Kafka’s German, read from knowledge, with Stanley Corngold’s translation (1972) and Willa and Edwin Muir’s beside it for sense; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, and no translation quoted
Mode
Domestic realism with one impossible premise; fable without a moral, comedy and tragedy in one plain report
Mythos
The tale of metamorphosis inverted: no god, no cause, no return; the scapegoat, the unclean thing whose expulsion lets the household live
Phase
Some months, from the morning of the transformation to Gregor’s death at dawn and the family’s afternoon in the country
Presentation
Fiction; three numbered parts of roughly comparable length, each ending with Gregor driven back into his room or dead in it; third person held to Gregor until his death, then passing to the family
Register
The syntax of a report for the impossible, a salesman’s worries for a transformed body, a parody of commercial reproach, and pathos, dread and an idyll kept in the same flat style
Scale
One family of four, a servant girl and then a charwoman, three lodgers, and one flat
Governing Proposition
A commercial traveller wakes one morning changed into vermin, and his family, who have lived on his wages, hide him in his room, feed him, come to resent him and at last decide that he must go; he dies in the night, thinking of them with tenderness, and they take the day off and ride into the country. The wager of the novella is that one impossible fact, given in the first sentence and never questioned, can be worked out in the plain detail of rent, debt and furniture until it tells the truth about an ordinary household: that a person’s worth there is his use.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” Gregor Samsa, waking one morning from troubled dreams, found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. The impossible is delivered in the syntax of a report, and the report never once doubts it. It is a rainy working morning in a plain bedroom. He takes in the body, the brown belly and the many thin legs, and then he thinks about his train. He has missed it. His parents owe his employer a debt, and he is the one who pays it.
The first part is the effort to get out of bed, and it is timed to the clock on the chest. The comedy and the horror are the same sequence: each minute lost is a minute late for work, and each attempt to rise is an animal’s. Before any doctor comes to the door, the firm does: the chief clerk arrives at the flat to ask after the traveller who is not on his train, and makes a speech through the bedroom door, a parody of commercial reproach. The first part ends as each part will, with Gregor driven back into his room, here by his father with a walking stick and a newspaper.
Kafka wrote the story in November and December 1912, in the weeks after “Das Urteil”. It was published in October 1915 in René Schickele’s monthly Die weißen Blätter, and as a book the same year by Kurt Wolff in Leipzig, in the series Der jüngste Tag. Kafka saw it into print in his lifetime: it is finished, revised and his. It runs to three numbered parts of roughly comparable length, about seventy pages in common editions. The narration is in the third person and stays with Gregor from the first sentence to his death.
Movement II
The household is four: Gregor, his father, his mother and his sister Grete, who is seventeen, with a servant girl. They have lived on Gregor’s wages. The second part is how they live with what he has become. Grete feeds him and tends his room, and Gregor, behind the door, goes on thinking of what the family needs. He had meant to send her to the conservatory to study the violin. That plan, like the job and the debt, belonged to the son who earned.
He learns things through the door. His father, it turns out, had money put aside all along, from the business that failed, while Gregor worked to pay its debt. The family begins to go out to work, father, mother and sister each at a new job, and grows stronger as Gregor weakens. Nothing in this is cruel. Each step is reasonable, and the book reports each one in the same even voice in which it reported the transformation, so that the household’s recovery and the son’s decline are one movement seen from two sides.
The furniture is carried out of his room. Gregor sees the room being emptied of his human life and clings to the one thing he can keep, the picture of a lady in furs, in the fretwork frame he made for it himself. The mother sees him on the wall and faints. It is here that the sister decides what he is. Then the father bombards his son with apples from the sideboard, and one of them lodges in Gregor’s back and stays there, and rots. He is driven back into his room a second time.
Movement III
The apple stays in his back through the third part, and with the wound comes a slow starvation. The servant girl is gone, and a charwoman comes in her place. The family takes three lodgers, and the flat is run on a new economy in which Gregor has no part except as a cost. The household is reorganising itself around his absence while he is still in it, and it does so by small steps, each of which could be defended.
No one in the book is surprised for long, Gregor included. That is the method of the whole. The transformation is never explained, never dreamed away, never turned into allegory by the narrator; it is a fact the household must manage, like a debt or an illness, and the management is told in the plain detail of rent, jobs, meals, furniture and lodgers. Gogol’s nose was told as a civil inconvenience. Here the inconvenience is a son, and the book follows it through to its end.
The creature itself is never fixed. The word Kafka chose, Ungeziefer, names the unclean animal rather than any species: vermin, the thing that has no place in a clean house. That is the place the household gives Gregor, step by step, and the reader watches it happen from inside his worried, dutiful mind, which still keeps a salesman’s hours and still puts the family’s needs before its own.
Movement IV
One evening Grete plays the violin for the lodgers. They have lost interest. Gregor, wounded and starving, is drawn out of his room by the music, toward her, into the room where they sit. The narration asks the question for him: “War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff?” Was he an animal, that music moved him so? It is the one moment he reaches for something beyond food and work, and he reaches for it in front of three strangers who have stopped listening.
It is the sister, who fed him and tended his room, who says that he must go, and in saying it she changes the pronoun by which she calls him. The love that was owed to the son has become, by small and reasonable steps, the wish that he were gone. The book does not condemn her. It has shown how she came to it, and it lets the sentence stand, as it let the first sentence stand, without comment.
Gregor consents. He dies in his room, at dawn, the light beginning outside the window, thinking of his family with tenderness. The charwoman sweeps the body out. The third part ends as the first two did, with Gregor in his room, and this time he does not come out of it. He has agreed to his own expulsion, and the book records the agreement as it has recorded everything else, plainly.
Movement V
The family takes the day off. The narration, which has never left Gregor, leaves him now and goes with them: out of the flat, onto a tram, into the sunlit country. They plan a smaller flat. The form performs the expulsion the story has described: the reader, too, is let out of the room, and feels the relief the family feels, and is implicated in it. The book that held the reader inside a son’s mind for three parts gives him, in its last pages, the family’s afternoon.
The last image is the daughter, ready for marriage: at the end of the ride she stretches her young body in the sun. The household that lived on the son is renewed by his death, and the book ends on the body of the daughter. The sacrifice is complete. The tale of metamorphosis has been told backward: no god acted, no cause was given, no moral was drawn, and no one changed back.
Every term of the old fable is inverted, and what is left is a family. One impossible fact and the plain economy of a household are enough to show what the household was before the fact and what it was willing to become. The close says in the family’s thoughts what the form had already shown, and it is the only place where the book explains itself. The image of a man waking as vermin in his own bed has passed into common reference and needs no source named.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive and finds almost nothing to take. The first sentence gives the transformation and the rest follows from it by necessity: the first part asks whether the household can admit what has happened, the second how it will live with it, the third how it will be rid of it. Each part needs its expulsion, and each expulsion is worse. The chief clerk’s visit is required, since it shows that Gregor’s first fear is for his job and that the firm comes to the door before the doctor; the furniture scene is required, since it is where the sister decides what he is; the lodgers and the violin bring the family’s new economy and Gregor’s last hunger into one room. The close is required too: without the family’s renewal the expulsion is not completed, and the story would end on pathos rather than disclosure. What holds the axis is the manner of the close, the tram ride into the country, which turns from Gregor to the family in a register more explicit than the rest.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: within a family that lives on a son’s labour, his worth is his use; when he can no longer work, the love that was owed him turns, by small and reasonable steps, into the wish that he were gone, and he consents to it. The action carries it without comment. Gregor’s first thoughts on waking as vermin are of the train he has missed and the debt his parents owe his employer. The father, it turns out, had money put aside all along. The family goes out to work and grows stronger as Gregor weakens; the sister who fed him is the one who says that he must go, and changes the pronoun she calls him by. He dies thinking of them with tenderness, and they take the day off. The book discloses as fully the estrangement of a person from his own body, and the exhaustion of those who care for the helpless. Held below the top because the chief disclosure lies near the surface, where The Trial’s keeps opening.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The heights are frequent for so short a work, and most are dreadful. The first paragraph, an impossible body inspected in a plain bedroom on a rainy working morning, is the cold comic sublime the century learned from. The father bombarding his son with apples from the sideboard, one lodging in his back and rotting there, is the dreadful height. The sister’s violin in the third part is the strangest: Gregor drawn out of his room toward the music, the one moment he reaches for something beyond food and work, in front of lodgers who have lost interest. His death at dawn, the light beginning outside the window, is quiet and high. The last image, the family in a sunlit tram and the daughter stretching her young body, is an uncanny height of its own. Held at this figure because the scale of a novella limits how long any height can be sustained: the heights are many for seventy pages, and none is carried across a large structure.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The inheritance is the tale of metamorphosis, Ovid’s, Apuleius’s, the fairy tale’s, and Kafka inverts every term of it: no god acts, no cause is given, no moral is drawn, and there is no return; the beast is not kissed back into a man by the sister who tends him. The structure underneath is load-bearing in every part: the scapegoat, the unclean thing whose expulsion lets the community live. When Gregor dies the family is renewed at once, and the book ends on the daughter’s body ready for marriage, a sacrifice completed. The word Kafka chose, Ungeziefer, names the unclean animal rather than a species, and the creature is never fixed. And the particular stays particular throughout, as the axis asks: the fretwork frame Gregor made for the picture, his plan to send his sister to the conservatory, his worry about the train. The image has itself become a myth of the century. Held below the top because the myth governs one household, not the larger field of judgment a novel could build.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is the realist family story, the fable of transformation and, nearest, Gogol’s “The Nose”, where an impossibility is also told as a civil inconvenience. The turn is in what the impossible is made to do. The fantastic premise is given in the first sentence as fact and never again questioned; it is neither dream nor allegory nor joke, and everything after it is domestic realism worked out with a clerk’s exactness: rent, debts, jobs, furniture, meals, lodgers. The supernatural is made ordinary and the ordinary monstrous, and no one in the book, Gregor included, is surprised for long. The stake was public: Kafka, almost unknown, published a story about a man turned to vermin, without a frame to excuse it. Held below the top because the transformation tale and Gogol’s precedent were in hand, and the turn had been made two months earlier, in “Das Urteil”.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The narration stays with Gregor while he lives, close enough that the reader shares his worries about the train before sharing his horror, and that order is the disclosure: a mind so formed by work that it meets its own transformation as a scheduling problem. When he dies the narration leaves him and goes with the family, out of the flat and into the sun, so that the form performs the expulsion the story describes; the reader is made to feel the relief the family feels, and to be implicated in it. The three parts, each ending with Gregor driven back or dead, give the story the shape of a sentence carried out in three stages. The flat style that reports the impossible without wonder is the third instrument, and the three work as one: vantage, division and style each carry the same knowledge. Held off the top because the closing pages state in the family’s thoughts what the form had already shown.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence, and more than a century of it. The story has been read as autobiography, beside Kafka’s Letter to His Father; as alienated labour; as illness, disability and care; as religious allegory; as psychoanalysis; and, by Nabokov in his lectures, as the precise fate of a beetle. The readings multiplied past agreement long ago, and the questions stay open: what Gregor is; whether the transformation is punishment, escape or the truth of his life made visible; whether the family is cruel or only exhausted; whether the bright last page is release or indictment. Each reading argues from the same few particulars, the train, the father’s money, the apple, the violin, the pronoun, and none has closed them. Held below The Trial because a short text in one household plants fewer questions, and part of the commentary returns to the single image rather than finding new ground.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is prose fiction of the 1910s, the decade of Death in Venice, Swann’s Way, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: prose fiction was shown able to take one impossible fact as given and work out its consequences in realist detail, without explanation, so that the fantastic became a means of telling the truth about ordinary life rather than an escape from it; of that method this book is the type. The discount is twofold: the reach was delayed, coming after Kafka’s death and after the war, and part of what the word Kafkaesque names rests on the novels. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most read and most taught works of fiction of its century; García Márquez spoke of it as the book that showed him what fiction could be allowed to do, and the line of the fantastic told plainly runs through his work and beyond; Philip Roth’s The Breast (1972) answers it by name; and Nabokov taught it as a masterpiece.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is a hundred and eleven years. The form survives whole and as Kafka authorised it, published in his lifetime and revised by him, with nothing lost and no editorial question about its shape. The presence is as wide as a century allows: in print continuously, translated into most written languages and many times into English, taught in schools and universities across the world, adapted for stage, film and opera, and so present in common reference that waking as an insect needs no source named. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the commercial traveller and the lodgers are period setting, but the book does not depend on them. It stands at the widest a century can show and no higher, since a century does not outscore millennia.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on the work as the German sentences known with certainty and the translations of Corngold and the Muirs carry it; the sound of Kafka’s German beyond those sentences is not scored for or against. The first sentence, “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”, is the work’s whole method: the impossible delivered in the syntax of a report. The command shows in the long sequence of Gregor trying to get out of bed, where comedy and horror are timed to the clock on the chest; in the chief clerk’s speech through the door, a parody of commercial reproach; in the precision of bodily detail, the many thin legs, the brown belly, the apple rotting in the back; and in the pacing of the three parts. Charged: the close, where the tram ride into the country tells more than the rest.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the first morning, a comic and horrible struggle with a body in a dark bedroom, and the last afternoon, the family in a sunlit tram planning a smaller flat. They obey one law: the household lives by labour and use, and what cannot work is first hidden, then resented, then removed, and the household is better for it. The same law governs the chief clerk at the door, the father’s secret savings, the lodgers’ contempt and the charwoman who sweeps the body out. The impossible event submits to it entirely and is never allowed a law of its own, so that the widest strain the book could suffer, between a fantastic premise and a domestic world, never breaks it. The tonal range is wider than the setting: farce, pathos, dread and an idyll. Held below the higher figures because the field the law must govern is narrow, one flat and one family over some months, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as a novella. Consciousness, in Gregor’s mind, estranged from its body and still keeping a salesman’s hours. The body, in the transformation, the wound and the slow starvation. The family, fully, as an economy of debt, care and resentment. Labour, in Gregor’s job and its debt, and in the father’s, mother’s and sister’s new work. Money and class, in the father’s failed business, the secret savings, the servants and the lodgers. Art, in the violin and the picture of the lady in furs. The animal, in what Gregor becomes. They are integrated, not listed: the family economy joins them all, and each order is one more account the household keeps. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count: the state, history, the city and the sacred are absent, and every order is seen in one flat. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, then The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.2. A tale of metamorphosis inverted in every term over a scapegoat structure that bears the whole, with a hero who stays particular to his last thought; a disclosure, carried by the order of events and never stated, that in a household that lives on a son’s labour his worth is his use; a form whose vantage leaves the son at his death and goes with the family into the sun, performing the expulsion it tells; and a text whole as its author authorised it, read and taught across the world for a century.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by the count of what a novella in one flat can hold: consciousness, the body, the family, labour, money and class, art and the animal are joined by the family economy, but the state, history, the city and the sacred are absent. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.5: heights many for seventy pages, from the first paragraph to the death at dawn, and none sustained across a large structure.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1 and The Swerve at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by five tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, scored as the novella as Kafka published it, in three numbered parts. He wrote it in November and December 1912; it appeared in October 1915 in René Schickele’s monthly Die weißen Blätter, and as a book the same year from Kurt Wolff, Leipzig, in the series Der jüngste Tag. It is finished, revised and authorised: Kafka saw it into print in his lifetime, and there is no editorial question about its shape. Every axis is judged on the novella in Kafka’s German. No text, German or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence, the question at the violin and the word Ungeziefer; each is followed by its sense in plain words, unquoted, and events are paraphrased. Translation · Stanley Corngold’s (1972), read beside for sense, chosen because it is the closer version; and Willa and Edwin Muir’s, through which the story entered English, read beside it. No translation is quoted, and neither is charged to the novella. The sound of Kafka’s German beyond the sentences known with certainty is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them Kafka’s wishes for the cover of the first edition, his own later judgment of the ending and the circumstances in which it was written, the title and date of the best-known survey of the story’s criticism, and any count of words, are not given. Citations are by part.