That he has disappeared as a human brother and should now disappear as a beetle deals Gregor the last blow. Painfully, because he is so weak and maimed, he crawls back to his own room. At the doorway he turns and his last glance falls on his mother, who was, in fact, almost asleep. "Hardly was he well inside his room when the door was hastily pushed shut, bolted and locked. The sudden noise in his rear startled him so much that his little legs gave beneath him. It was his sister who had shown such haste. She had been standing ready waiting and had made a light spring forward. Gregor had not even heard her coming, and she cried 'At last!' to her parents as she turned the key in the lock." In his darkened room Gregor discovers that he cannot move and though he is in pain it seems to be passing away. "The rotting apple in his back and the inflamed area around it, all covered with soft dust, already hardly troubled him. He thought of his family with tenderness and love. The decision that he must disappear was one that he held to even more strongly than his sister, if that were possible. In this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning. The first broadening of light in the world outside the window entered his consciousness once more. Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath."
Scene VIII: Gregor's dead, dry body is discovered the next morning by the charwoman and a great warm sense of relief permeates the insect world of his despicable family. Here is a point to be observed with care are! love. Gregor is a human being in an insect's disguise; his family are insects disguised as people. With Gregor's death their insect souls are suddenly aware that they are free to enjoy themselves. " 'Come in beside us, Grete, for a little while,' said Mrs. Samsa[*] with a tremulous smile, and Grete, not without looking back at the corpse, followed her parents into their bedroom." The charwoman opens the window wide and the air has a certain warmth: it is the end of March when insects come out of hibernation.
Scene IX: We get a wonderful glimpse of the lodgers as they sullenly ask for their breakfast but instead are shown Gregor's corpse. "So they entered and stood around it, with their hands in the pockets of their shabby coats, in the middle of the room already bright with sunlight." What is the key word here? Shabby in the sun. As in a fairy tale, in the happy end of a fairy tale, the evil charm is dissipated with the magician's death. The lodgers are seen to be seedy, they are no longer dangerous, whereas on the other hand the Samsa family ascends again, gains in power and lush vitality. The scene ends with a repetition of the staircase theme, just as the chief clerk had retreated in slow motion, clasping the banisters. At the orders of Mr. Samsa that they must leave the lodgers are quelled. "In the hall they all three took their hats from the rack, their sticks from the umbrella stand, bowed in silence and quitted the apartment." Down they go now, three bearded borders, automatons, clockwork puppets, while the Samsa family leans over the banisters to watch them descend. The staircase as it winds down through the apartment house imitates, as it were, an insect's jointed legs; and the lodgers now disappear, now come to view again, as they descend lower and lower, from landing to landing, from articulation to articulation. At one point they are met by an ascending butcher boy with his basket who is first seen rising towards them, then above them, in proud deportment with his basket full of red steaks and luscious innards—red raw meat, the breeding place of fat shiny flies.
Scene X: The last scene is superb in its ironic simplicity. The spring sunshine is with the Samsa. family as they write their three letters—articulation, jointed legs, happy legs, three insects writing three letters—of excuse to their employers. "They decided to spend this day in resting and going for a stroll; they had not only deserved such a respite from work, but absolutely needed it." As the charwoman leaves after her morning's work, she giggles amiably as she informs the family: " 'you don't need to bother about how to get rid of the thing next door. It's been seen to already.' Mrs. Samsa and Grete bent over their letters again, as if preoccupied; Mr. Samsa, who perceived that she was eager to begin describing it all in detail, stopped her with a decisive hand....
" 'She'll be given notice tonight,' said Mr. Samsa, but neither from his wife nor his daughter did he get any answer, for the charwoman seemed to have shattered again the composure they had barely achieved. They rose, went to the window and stayed there, clasping each other tight. Mr. Samsa turned in his chair to look at them and quietly observed them for a little. Then he called out: 'Come along, now, do. Let bygones be bygones. And you might have some consideration for me.' The two of them complied at once, hastened to him, caressed him and quickly finished their letters.
"Then they all three left the apartment together, which was more than they had done for months, and went by trolley into the open country outside the town. The trolley, in which they were the only passengers, was filled with warm sunshine. Leaning comfortably back in their seats they canvassed their prospects for the future, and it appeared on closer inspection that these were not at all bad, for the jobs they had got, which so far they had never really discussed with each other, were all three admirable and likely to lead to better things later on. The greatest immediate improvement in their condition would of course arise from moving to another house; they wanted to take a smaller and cheaper but also better situated and more easily run apartment than the one they had, which Gregor had selected. While they were thus conversing, it struck both Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, almost at the same moment, as they became aware of their daughter's increasing vivacity, that in spite of all the sorrow of recent times, which had made her cheeks pale, she had bloomed into a buxom girl. They grew quieter and half unconsciously exchanged glances of complete agreement, having come to the conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body."[*]
Nabokov's notes on the triad theme in "The Metamorphosis"
Let me sum up various of the main themes of the story.
1. The number three plays a considerable role in the story. The story is divided into three parts. There are three doors to Gregor's room. His family consists of three people. Three servants appear in the course of the story. Three lodgers have three beards. Three Samsas write three letters. I am very careful not to overwork the significance of symbols, for once you detach a symbol from the artistic core of the book, you lose all sense of enjoyment. The reason is that there are artistic symbols and there are trite, artificial, or even imbecile symbols. You will find a number of such inept symbols in the psychoanalytic and mythological approach to Kafka's work, in the fashionable mixture of sex and myth that is so appealing to mediocre minds. In other words, symbols may be original, and symbols may be stupid and trite. And the abstract symbolic value of an artistic achievement should never prevail over its beautiful burning life.
So, the only emblematic or heraldic rather than symbolic meaning is the stress which is laid upon three in "The Metamorphosis." It has really a technical meaning. The trinity, the triplet, the triad, the triptych are obvious art forms such as, say, three pictures of youth, ripe years, and old age, or any other threefold triplex subject. Triptych means a picture or carving in three compartments side by side, and this is exactly the effect that Kafka achieves, for instance, with his three rooms in the beginning of the story—living room, Gregor's bedroom, and sister's room, with Gregor in the central one. Moreover, a threefold pattern suggests the three acts of a play. And finally it must be observed that Kafka's fantasy is emphatically logical; what can be more characteristic of logic than the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. We shall, thus, limit the Kafka symbol of three to its aesthetic and logical significance and completely disregard whatever myths the sexual mythologists read into it under the direction of the Viennese witch doctor.
2. Another thematic line is the theme of the doors, of the opening and closing of doors that runs through the w
hole story.
3. A third thematic line concerns the ups and downs in the well-being of the Samsa family, the subtle state of balance between their flourishing condition and Gregor's desperate and pathetic condition.
There are a few other subthemes but the above are the only ones essential for an understanding of the story.
You will mark Kafka's style. Its clarity, its precise and formal intonation in such striking contrast to the nightmare matter of his tale. No poetical metaphors ornament his stark black-and-white story. The limpidity of his style stresses the dark richness of his fantasy. Contrast and unity, style and matter, manner and plot are most perfectly integrated.
JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)
Ulysses
(1922)
Opening page from Nabokov's lecture notes on Ulysses
James Joyce was born in 1882 in Ireland, left Ireland in the first decade of the twentieth century, lived most of his life as an expatriate in continental Europe, and died in 1941 in Switzerland. Ulysses was composed between 1914 and 1921 in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. In 1918 parts began to appear in the so-called Little Review. Ulysses is a fat book of more than two hundred sixty thousand words; it is a rich book with a vocabulary of about thirty thousand words. The Dublin setting is built partly on data supplied by an exile's memory, but mainly on data from Thom's Dublin Directory, whither professors of literature, before discussing Ulysses, secretly wing their way in order to astound their students with the knowledge Joyce himself stored up with the aid of that very directory. He also used, throughout the book, a copy of the Dublin newspaper the Evening Telegraph of Thursday, 16 June 1904, price one halfpenny, which among other things featured that day the Ascot Gold Cup race (with Throwaway, an outsider, winning), an appalling American disaster (the excursion steamer General Slocum on fire), and a motorcar race for the Gordon Bennett Cup in Homburg, Germany,
Ulysses is the description of a single day, the sixteenth of June 1904, a Thursday, a day in the mingled and separate lives of a number of characters walking, riding, sitting, talking, dreaming, drinking, and going through a number of minor and major physiological and philosophical actions during this one day in Dublin and the early morning hours of the next day. Why did Joyce choose that particular day, 16 June 1904? In an otherwise rather poor though well-meaning work, Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce's Ulysses (1947), Mr. Richard Kain informs me that this was the day on which Joyce met his future wife Nora Barnacle. So much for human interest.
Ulysses consists of a number of scenes built around three major characters; of these major characters the dominant one is Leopold Bloom, a small businessman in the advertisement business, an advertisement canvasser to be exact. At one time he was with the firm of Wisdom Hely, stationer, in the capacity of a traveler for blotting paper, but now he is on his own, soliciting ads and not doing too well. For reasons that I shall mention presently Joyce endowed him with a Hungarian-Jewish origin. The two other major characters are Stephen Dedalus, whom Joyce had already depicted in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Marion Bloom, Molly Bloom, Bloom's wife. If Bloom is the central figure, Stephen and Marion are the lateral ones in this triptych: the book begins with Stephen and ends with Marion. Stephen Dedalus, whose surname is that of the mythical maker of the labyrinth at Knossos, the royal city of ancient Crete; other fabulous gadgets; wings for himself and Icarus, his son—Stephen Dedalus, aged twenty-two, is a young Dublin schoolteacher, scholar, and poet, who in his days of schooling had been subjected to the discipline of a Jesuit education and now violently reacts against it but remains of an essentially metaphysical nature. He is a rather abstract young man, a dogmatist even when drunk, a freethinker imprisoned in his own self, a brilliant pronouncer of abrupt aphoristic sayings, physically fragile, and as unwashed as a saint (his last bath took place in October, and this is June), a bitter and brittle young fellow—never quite clearly visualized by the reader, a projection of the author's mind rather than a warm new being created by an artist's imagination. Critics tend to identify Stephen with young Joyce himself, but that is neither here nor there. As Harry Levin has put it, "Joyce lost his religion, but kept his categories," which is also true of Stephen.
Marion (Molly) Bloom, Bloom's wife, is Irish on her father's side and Spanish-Jewish on her mother's side. She is a concert singer. If Stephen is a highbrow and Bloom a middlebrow, Molly Bloom is definitely a lowbrow and a very vulgar one at that. But all three characters have their artistic sides. In Stephen's case the artistic is almost too good to be true—one never meets anybody in "real life" who has anything approaching such a perfect artistic control over his casual everyday speech as Stephen is supposed to -have. Bloom the middlebrow is less of an artist than Stephen but is much more of an artist than critics have discerned: in fact, his mental stream flows now and then very close to Stephen's mental stream, as I will explain later. Finally, Molly Bloom, despite her triteness, despite the conventional quality of her ideas, despite her vulgarity, is capable of rich emotional response to the superficially lovely things of life, as we shall see in the last part of her extraordinary soliloquy on which the book ends.
Before discussing the matter and manner of the book, I have still a few words to say about the main character Leopold Bloom. When Proust portrayed Swann, he made Swann an individual, with individual, unique characteristics Swann is neither a literary type nor a racial type, though he happens to be the son of a Jewish stockbroker. In composing the figure of Bloom, Joyce's intention was to place among endemic Irishmen in his native Dublin someone who was as Irish as he, Joyce, was, but who also was an exile, a black sheep in the fold, as he, Joyce, was. Joyce evolved the rational plan, therefore, of selecting for the type of an outsider, the type of the Wandering Jew, the type of the exile. However, I shall explain later that Joyce is sometimes crude in the way he accumulates and stresses so-called racial traits. Another consideration in relation, to Bloom: those so many who have written so much about Ulysses are either very pure men or very depraved men. They are inclined to regard Bloom as a very ordinary nature, and apparently Joyce himself intended to portray an ordinary person. It is obvious, however, that in the sexual department Bloom is, if not on the verge of insanity, at least a good clinical example of extreme sexual preoccupation and perversity with all kinds of curious complications. His case is strictly heterosexual, of course—not homosexual as most of the ladies and gentlemen are in Proust (homo is Greek for same, not Latin for man as some students think)—but within the wide limits of Bloom's love for the opposite sex he indulges in acts and dreams that are definitely subnormal in the zoological, evolutional sense. I shall not bore you with a list of his curious desires, but this I will say: in Bloom's mind and in Joyce's book the theme of sex is continually mixed and intertwined with the theme of the latrine. God knows I have no objection whatsoever to so-called frankness in novels. On the contrary, we have too little of it, and what there is has become in its turn conventional and trite, as used by so-called tough writers, the darlings of the bookclubs, the pets of clubwomen. But I do object to the following: Bloom is supposed to be a rather ordinary citizen. Now it is not true that the mind of an ordinary citizen continuously dwells on physiological things. I object to the continuously, not to the disgusting. All this very special pathological stuff seems artificial and unnecessary in this particular context. I suggest that the squeamish among you regard the special preoccupation of Joyce with perfect detachment.
Ulysses is a splendid and permanent structure, but it has been slightly overrated by the kind of critic who is more interested in ideas and generalities and human aspects than in the work of art itself. I must especially warn against seeing in Leopold Bloom's humdrum wanderings and minor adventures on a summer day in Dublin a close parody of the Odyssey, with the adman Bloom acting the part of Odysseus, otherwise Ulysses, man of many devices, and Bloom's adulterous wife representing chaste Penelope while Stephen Dedalus is given the part of Telemachus. That there is a very vague and very general Homeric echo of
the theme of wanderings in Bloom's case is obvious, as the title of the novel suggests, and there are a number of classical allusions among the many other allusions in the course of the book; but it would be a complete waste of time to look for close parallels in every character and every scene of the book. There is nothing more tedious than a protracted and sustained allegory based on a well-worn myth; and after the work had appeared in parts, Joyce promptly deleted the pseudo-Homeric titles of his chapters when he saw what scholarly and pseudoscholarly bores were up to. Another thing. One bore, a man called Stuart Gilbert, misled by a tongue-in-cheek list compiled by Joyce himself, found in every chapter the domination of one particular organ—the ear, the eye, the stomach, etc.—but we shall ignore that dull nonsense too. All art is in a sense symbolic; but we say "stop, thief" to the critic who deliberately transforms an artist's subtle symbol into a pedant's stale allegory—a thousand and one nights into a convention of Shriners.
What then is the main theme of the book? It is very simple.
1. The hopeless past. Bloom's infant son has died long ago, but the vision remains in his blood and brain.
2. The ridiculous and tragic present. Bloom still loves his wife Molly, but he lets Fate have its way. He knows that in the afternoon at 4:30 of this mid-June day Boylan, her dashing impresario, concert agent, will visit Molly—and Bloom does nothing to prevent it. He tries fastidiously to keep out of Fate's way, but actually throughout the day is continuously on the point of running into Boylan.
3. The pathetic future. Bloom also keeps running into another young man—Stephen Dedalus. Bloom gradually realizes that this may be another little attention on the part of Fate. If his wife must have lovers then sensitive, artistic Stephen would be a better one than vulgar Boylan. In fact, Stephen could give Molly lessons, could help her with her Italian pronunciations in her profession as a singer, could be in short a refining influence, as Bloom pathetically thinks.
Lectures on Literature Page 36