There are stories that begin with unforgettable phrases, which everyone knows even without having read the book, like this one: “When Gregorio Samsa woke up one morning after a restless dream, he found himself in his bed transformed into a monstrous insect.”
The manuscript of The metamorphosis where Franz Kafka wrote those disturbing images are on display until April in the Morgan Library and Museum from New York, along with dozens of the artist’s objects: postcards in Kafka’s handwriting, first editions, letters to his lovers and numerous other documents.
The metamorphosis
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The idea of that horrible cockroach that was impersonating the body of a salesman was so clear in Kafka’s head that you can see how he wrote the first two sentences straight, without amendments, and continued writing the entire first page with hardly any erasures.
“I was not dreaming,” the text continues after describing in detail the “painfully thin legs that waved without concert” while Gregorio Samsa tried to understand what had happened to him.
Kafka was only 29 years old when he wrote ‘The Metamorphosis’, stealing time from his anodyne tasks as an insurance broker, and although his vocation was literature, he never enjoyed recognition or fame in his short life (he died at the age of 40 from tuberculosis). .
However, the influence of that work has been immense: in 1946, another great writer, Vladimir Nabokovan expert on butterflies, entertained himself by drawing the insect that Kafka had become according to the details described in the novel, to arrive at something similar to a cockroach, and his drawing served to illustrate subsequent editions.
The exhibition, with material provided by the Boldeian Library of the University of Oxford, includes numerous correspondence with his favorite sister, Otta – later murdered in the Nazi ovens – as well as a description of her serious health problems and her approach to a world Jewish in adulthood, when his family had never been observant.
But his interest in Judaism did not help him clarify his tortured world. And so, he wrote to his great friend and literary executor upon his death: “What do I have in common with the Jews? “I have little in common with myself and I should stay very still in a corner, happy to be able to breathe,” he told him.
The allusion to breathing was not accidental: tuberculosis had seriously weakened him, and his respiratory system was so damaged that he could barely swallow solid food. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why he became a vegetarian, since he confessed to Otta in another postcard that “as you well know, I can’t even chew meat…”.
But contrary to the widespread idea that he was a sickly being, the exhibition describes a Kafka who fought his tuberculosis with large doses of exercise, and was very fond of swimming and hiking in the forests of his native Bohemia.
Kafka, who grew up in the shadow of a domineering father, never even became independent, and continued to live in the apartment he shared with his parents and three sisters. The family bustle had disturbed him, and his tormented soul described his own room as “the headquarters of noise.”
For this reason, he took advantage of his business trips as an insurance broker to, in the tranquility of the hotels, write literature, as well as postcards to his lovers and his friend Brod, who was the one who saved all his work for posterity.
Kafka traveled widely through what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy, but he never left Europe. That didn’t stop him from writing. Americana novel he left unfinished about a young man’s trip to the United States, a country he describes as ultramodern, defined by the fever of modern gadgets and workers’ struggles.
The exhibition has a section on his novel the castle, with numerous posthumous editions as new manuscripts were discovered. It is curious how the novel begins in the first person (‘ich’, I in German) and then turns to a third person called K.
The castle of the novel, an ominous place where individual K shrinks to nothing, strangely had a translation in real life with the colony designed by the Spaniard. Ricardo Bofill in Sant Pere de Ribes, a set of cubes superimposed in an almost delirious pile-up.
A “Kafkaesque” pileup, we could say. There are few writers in the world who have created a world so personal that it gave rise to an adjective.
Source: EFE
