Carolyn Barry. My colleagues. Um. Uh, two of the Oxford, uh, team involved in the HRC, uh, project.
Uh cafcass. Transformative communities as well. Um, and so I'm really pleased to have you here.
Um, the Oxford read Kafka. Uh, podcasts are going to cover all kinds of aspects of Kafka,
but I thought this would be a really good way to actually focus on different long metamorphosis,
the texts that all the students are going to be receiving.
Um, um, perhaps we could start by talking about the title, um, metamorphosis.
Um, uh, and uh, people tend always to focus on the metamorphosis because I go,
who wakes up obviously famously at the start of the text, but, um, it's an important text.
It's it's an important title in other ways as well, isn't it?
It is. And of course, in the German it's a singular, the metamorphosis.
But really what I always tell my students is it's about the transformation of a whole family and how this initial,
rather spectacular event of gradual waking up as a giant beech or insect triggers this sort of series of changes.
And it's almost like Kafka set up a little narrative experiment where he kind of, you know, lights the fuse, and then we just watch what happens.
And of course, you know, these transformations, some go better than others, but, um, they're all connected to each other.
So that's definitely an important point. Um, Caroline mentioned the family, but, um, I was just very interested to, to see, um,
this idea of the great amorphous, um, um, objective being at the centre of the, of the changes.
And that also came up a bit when we were.
And I was at your wonderful event yesterday talking about the, uh, version done by Arthur Arthur Pitre and Ed Watson, um, as a ballet.
Yeah. Of course. I mean, um, he talks about Gretta as being the kind of the elephant in the room.
He's always looking for something like an elephant in a room with a textbook. He talks about it being the elephant in the room.
And in a sense, it is an incredibly important form of transformation.
Um, from the start of the text, she takes on a form of responsibility.
There's also a sexual, um, transformation, which is happening, a coming of age story which is being told, which is absolutely important.
And there's also a change in her relationship with Gregor, with the family.
A lot seems to revolve around the transformation that's happening with her.
A very, very interesting story. And then just to the point in time, you think she might be in some form liberated.
At the end of the story, there's a small coda where the family again tried to turn her into some form of property.
It's time to marry her off. And this development, this sexual development, kind of comes back a little bit.
It's a very, very interesting story to try and get a handle on.
And, and also maybe even to think about writing the story from her perspective would be quite interesting.
I know there are writers starting to do this right now. Um, very, very interesting story, I suppose.
And but I guess coming back to the question about the title as well,
it's the idea of metamorphosis in English also doesn't quite capture what's there in the English, in the German, does it?
Because it could just be change. It could just be some form of transformation.
Metamorphosis. We get this kind of weight of something which is like literary history as well, going back to always going back to kind of Greek myths.
In a sense. Kafka is kind of in the German. It isn't isn't that obvious.
And it's quite interesting that it opens up this possibility or these possibilities for all these different readings that Carolyn is talking about.
Because of course, the verb to transform features in the very first sentence.
So he takes it in quite a literal sense rather than carrying all this historical weight, as you say.
I mean, I think if anything, a better reference point is fairy tales.
But of course it's as often has been said, it's an anti fairy tale.
It's the sort of story which has no obvious cause.
We never find out what caused him to turn into a beetle.
And of course, there's no redemption. There's no good fairy who comes to wave her wand.
Which is why Gretta is so interesting, because she sort of occupies that place of the the fairy godmother.
But then she doesn't. If anything, she probably brings about his downfall and death at the end.
So Nabokov called Gretta the villain of the piece. Um, so it could be a bad, bad fairy, if you like.
I mean, gee, but that opens up all kind of questions, which you just hinted at of why he changes.
And there are lots of different thoughts about that. So is it something that comes from outside?
Is it something that comes from within? Is it sudden? Is it a process?
What do you think or where you do stand on those things?
I mean, it's a huge question, maybe to start us off.
Of course, we find out a bit about his previous life in little flashbacks in his mind.
So he was a travelling salesman. It was a very stressful, pressurised job.
He had to get up very early, catch the train. There were sales targets.
He was in competition with other people. He had to stay over in hotels.
So it's very sort of Kafka captures in a really economic way that sort of experience of modern life that I think we can still very much relate to.
And the result of the transformation is, of course, that all of that stops.
And one of the really funny things about the first bit is how he actually initially
thinks [INAUDIBLE] still try to catch his train and just carry on with his life.
That's, of course, why it's so hilariously funny how he kind of tries to rationalise this,
but the real change happens once he settles into his new state,
and there is a moment in the middle of the story where he really begins to enjoy the freedom that he gains from this.
And so one way of reading it is as a story of release from, from the sort of rat race of modern life.
But of course, that's not the only dimension.
And that's not, of course, how it ends. It doesn't end happily.
Yeah. And there are these traditional readings of it from a from a kind of a Marxist,
socialist perspective, which, which makes sense in terms of what Carolin has been talking about.
But if it's if it's the conditions of modern life that turn them into this, then being in this condition would surely make them.
Absolutely, you know, excellent as a worker. But he's taking time out of this.
And that transformation seems to, you know, seems to offer these different opportunities for different potentials.
And in a sense, it's kind of the fact that it's happened already and it's radically happened already,
starts to shift the focus onto the possibilities of the text.
The thing is not just thinking through in terms of, oh, something's gone wrong, but actually thinking, well.
Gregor asks at one point, you know, it's easy and animals that he feels this way when he listens to music.
Well, was he an animal beforehand? Was was that human?
If that's human, what does that mean to be human? And it is a text that asks these questions.
And if you just focus on the why, he becomes an insect that actually weirdly stops you asking the types of questions.
I think that the text that the text asks and the possibilities are definitely there.
Different ways to experience the world. Not all positive, but certainly with positive things, different ways of experience in the world,
different ways of sensing the world, different approaches to aesthetic products, projects as well, and products as well.
Do we understand music differently? Do we understand art differently?
And it's not until the end, I think, of the texts where and this comes back to greater as well words.
It's critique. He calls it in the German at the end of the text, the as it turns from the era the he to to it because she calls it this way.
And that's a kind of a point in time at which it actually becomes it matters that he's an insect, as it were.
It's at that point in time, and the rest of the text is about in a negative way, matters.
Prior to that, there are possibilities and potentials that are really interesting to think about,
and it's actually more interesting to think that the text doesn't suggest in a simple way.
This is why he becomes an insect. It just rolls with it and asks questions and doesn't give simple answers.
And I think that's why we keep on coming back to it so much, is because it doesn't answer the questions that it asks.
It just throws them out there and lets us think about them. Yeah, and I think we almost stop wondering about that after a while.
I don't think that's the main question. The text makes us think about why it's just what happens next.
I mean, the other thing that's so fascinating is this sort of crossover between the human and the animal and the way Kafka thinks about this,
which is that, of course, it's in a sense, by becoming an animal that Gregor reclaims his humanity because we are with him and we
see him sort of free to ponder about relationships and emotions and the meaning of life.
But as that happens, we also, of course, see the humans in his family show their inhuman side.
So one of the first things the father does, um, is this when Craig or first emerges from the room, which is a very insect like sound.
And so it's this sort of incredibly ambivalent perspective on identity whereby no one is on one side or the other.
It's it's all sort of like a very murky, multi shaded picture, really.
And to follow up on that, I think it's also it's quite interesting if you compare it to one of the stories that Kafka had written previously,
one of his very, very early works, um, Wedding Preparations in the country where he uses this motif beforehand.
But it's a, it's a, it's a human figure imagining he's a beetle, where this text is so much more radical,
it doesn't just imagine it anymore, and it opens up different possibilities to not think about.
Why is the human imagining this is what he's doing all of a sudden?
This is an absolute radical.
Literal reality to this, that open up all of these questions that are, in a sense far more interesting to to ask and to discover.
I think it's also absolutely funny.
I mean, it's important not to forget how funny it is to see the idea of somebody lying there on its back with, like, little legs.
Yeah, it's kind of. And a new way of sensing the world brings new, new, new humorous ways of sensing the world with it.
There's something about, like kind of watching a baby try out,
try out new moves and things that it's just absolutely hilarious to, to look at in certain places.
Obviously dark, but also moments of humour in there that are, that are, you know, really catchy.
There are so many things to pick up on in that. Can I, can I go back to this idea of the animal and the human inner soul?
Um, because that suggests that can I go is just one of all of us, and that we all have the potential, um, to change in this way.
Um, and in the wonderful presentation last night that came out in the,
in the thinking about the ballet as well, that this is something potentially in all of us.
Um, so does, I guess what does that what does that do for for reading the text?
Um, it is it precarity that we all need to wonder?
Does it mean that we can all be, you know, less than human, more than human?
Uh. Tricky question.
I'm always a bit wary of like neat little takeaways from Kafka, but I think certainly there are none.
Um, but I'm. My job is to put you on the spot. I mean, of course,
I think what the text does is just it takes us on a journey into the mind of someone who is thrown into an absolutely new experience,
and that makes it incredibly relatable.
But then, of course, as the story unfolds, I think there are moments when he becomes very strange to us as well.
So it's also about this.
So that maybe the other point, coming back to your initial question about the title is it's about the transformation of a family, but it's also,
in his case, a transformation that doesn't just happen at the beginning, but it continues happening over the course of the text.
So we see him, for instance, change his taste in food so he no longer likes what he used to.
Like. We see him his his sense of vision gradually deteriorates.
He loses a sense of time. He seems to be able to speak to some extent at the beginning and then loses his human voice,
while, as Barry said, acquiring a certain sort of like way of relating to music.
So I think one of the strengths of the text is just how, in an incredibly subtle, sort of embodied way,
we get taken on this journey where I think we stay with him pretty much till the end.
But there are clearly moments where he becomes very alien to us as well.
I think the embodied way kind of gets to the point of of the quote, you know, it's not a simple take away,
but that focus on the embodied relationship to the environment is is interesting here.
Um, because that then starts to encourage us to think about how our own relationship with the environment,
with the world around us is equally embodied,
that we're not just the spirits or the ghosts in the machine that's there driving everything else on that.
We need to think of, of our beings in, in a much more holistic sense of the mind and body together and figure out what's going.
The text encourages not necessarily to figure out what's happening, but to think about what's happening in this relationship.
But this is this particular story is quite interesting in terms of kind of Kafka's other animal stories,
because it does show him move on to ask these questions in a pretty radical way.
And these questions about the, the, the shifty borders, I suppose, between the human and the non-human,
um, begin to be to be opened up and to be asked in much more detail and from this text onwards.
So if you think about a report for an academy, um, where we've got a monkey, an ape who's transformed or is aping,
being a human being is incapable of talking about the conditions of life,
or is unwilling to talk about the conditions of life as an ape before he started aping human beings.
But but the kind of behaviour of being a human being that we see there isn't positive.
And later stories are even more radical.
So we get we get stories like, like the Bo, um, where we see the burrow winning in English, where we see an animal as an animal,
experiences the world without actually getting hung up on this question of, um, of human, uh, sensory, uh, kind of relationship to the environment.
There's an entirely different form of living there. And you can see this radicalism kind of growing across the across the body of text that he writes.
And rather than saying it's kind of encouraging to see the animal within all of us or the human in all of the animals,
I think I think it's a question that a question that's being asked is where the human
gets off putting himself at a higher position in the hierarchy over the animal.
It's it's asking those types of questions.
So if you also have Carr in the trial, for example, kind of constantly compares himself when he's being treated badly to being a dog.
Why do humans think it's okay to treat dogs that way?
Yeah, it's there are questions like that that are being asked but not being answered
because he is clearly not willing to do away with the dignity of the human,
but he is interested in introducing a question of whether animals should have a similar dignity and whether we should afford them a similar dignity.
And that becomes much, much stronger as as the work goes on from this text onwards, I think.
I mean, the other interesting point is that, of course, Kafka writes about animals in so many different ways.
So he has narrators who are animals into whose mindset we enter, as you say.
And of course, Gregor is the sort of hybrid human mind in an animal's body.
But as you say later, we get animal minds, animals speaking their minds, and us sort of seeing the world through animal eyes.
But we also get animals that confront human narrators, and that's, um, very kind of interesting in their sort of otherness.
So there's one of my favourite stories is this little story called crossbreed anecdotes,
um, which, which describes this impossible animal, a crossbreed between a lamb and a cat.
And the narrator is clearly very unsettled by this creature.
Not that it does anything strange, but it's just the animal is completely other.
And how do we relate? Late to animals. The animal is on the one hand, it's an heirloom passed on by the father.
The narrator says that it's part of the family. And yet there's also an impulse to kill it at the end.
There's also a relationship with children, which I think is fascinating.
So I think Kafka's stories, especially The Metamorphosis and the other animal stories, are so universal that even children can approach them.
And I think that is maybe not completely unique,
but I think it's a very special quality to be able to write in a way which is relatable for readers of all ages, readers from around the world.
You really don't need to know anything to be able to read The Metamorphosis and get something out of it.
And I think the interesting thing around, around this topic is also seems to be how, you know,
if you're thinking in terms of kind of the human and non-human,
the various different perspectives that are given around that, around the animal figures.
These are some of the texts that creative artists are coming back to most at the minute.
They're the ones that seem to be kind of spurred. They seem to speak to to something at the minute.
They speak to a kind of the post-human. Then they end this sort of condition that we're all in.
I mean, it made me think, um, because particularly students are very worried about, you know, is it a psychoanalytic interpretation?
Is it about religion? Is it about, uh, Marxist interpretation of work?
And and now is it all about embodiment? But, I mean, I think you're suggesting that, of course it's all or none.
Um, yeah. And just coming back to Barry's comment earlier about the wedding preparations
in the country where he imagines becoming a beetle or sending his clothes,
body, and he remains in bed as a Beatle. That's a metaphor.
Yeah, the metamorphosis is literal. Takes that literally.
And that, I think, releases us from the pressure of having to interpret it as a metaphor.
We need to read this story. We don't need to attach a label to it.
And it's very clearly set up in this way.
It's this sort of unfolding thing which resists a clear interpretation, just as none of the characters can be pinned down or put into boxes.
I mean, we talked about Greta. The father changes and transforms, broadly speaking,
from a pathetic old man into this towering giant who, of course, eventually causes his son's death.
And yet the father doesn't just make this simple transformation.
He remains pathetic. At the same time, he still sits slumped in his armchair with his uniform getting more and more stained.
So it's this sort of it's not either or.
It's not. You go from being weak to being strong.
It's it's these things and Kafka's ability to hold them in this sort of balance and suspension.
And that's why I think we don't need these frameworks.
We can use them, but none of them will unlock the text.
I ask about. Um, the point you made earlier about Kafka kind of can be universally read.
And I'm wondering, is it that about Kafka that allows that, or is it the literalness?
Is it the is it the fact that that it goes beyond interpretation in a sense,
and we can just directly read in sentence everything, um, I mean, even like to stick on this,
on this text in particular, that the fact that we never actually know for sure and Kafka doesn't want us to see what the insect is,
the very fact that it's absolutely literal. He is an insect, but we don't know what insect he is that does it.
There's an emptiness at the centre of the text that allows people to project things onto the text in different ways,
and different frameworks also to anchor them in particular things.
You know, it's kind of there's certain different readings, but there's almost, you know,
there's a motor in the middle of that text that enables people to generate meanings out of it.
And I think this generating beat, which which will never capture the text, they will never capture the text, might capture an aspect of the text.
And I think that that,
that that motor of meaning that's at the centre of that ability to kind of transform the text itself in different contexts at different times,
read the text in different contexts, in different times. That's one of the reasons why Kafka is, is is still popular now, not just popular,
but is an author of world literature in a way that many others aren't, even if they're right around the world.
Because you can adapt this text in different, in different ways.
You can adapt the text to different contexts, and you can project different things into it,
some of which which are makes sense, some of which don't make sense.
But even if they don't make sense to us as literary scholars, they're still important because there's still a creative dimension to the reading there.
It's still somebody working with the text actualising it, transforming it, making it relevant to context now.
And to me, that's one of the reasons why Kafka is such an important writer.
You can talk about the mechanisms by which that work, but it's the fact that it works,
I think is what's so exciting to be dealing with him as a writer.
And maybe the other thing that has just been so incredibly resonant is, on the one hand, you've got a story you can sum up in one sentence.
It's very straightforward premise. You don't need a sort of big kind of, you know, diagram of characters and relationships.
It's. A completely simple premise, but then it's got so much detail attached to it that you discover as you go through the text.
And so it's that sort of link between that, the simplicity and yet the richness of it that I think writers and artists can then discover.
And this was what became so apparent in our conversation with the creative artists,
the choreographer, the dancer, and so on, how they drew on that richness.
It's not just that they thought, okay, Kafka man turns into bug.
Let's discard the text they drew on the details of the text, the theme of food, the theme of eating, the theme of trains.
I mean, they bring the sort of train journey into the ballet, but because it's already there, they don't have to make that up.
These are all details Kafka provides us with, and we found the same talking about a Hunger Artist yesterday or the last few days,
that the premise is crystal clear, but once you look more closely, it's so much more complex and ambivalent than you initially imagine.