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Carolyn Barry. My colleagues. Um. Uh, two of the Oxford, uh, team involved in the HRC, uh, project.

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Uh cafcass. Transformative communities as well. Um, and so I'm really pleased to have you here.

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Um, the Oxford read Kafka. Uh, podcasts are going to cover all kinds of aspects of Kafka,

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but I thought this would be a really good way to actually focus on different long metamorphosis,

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the texts that all the students are going to be receiving.

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Um, um, perhaps we could start by talking about the title, um, metamorphosis.

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Um, uh, and uh, people tend always to focus on the metamorphosis because I go,

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who wakes up obviously famously at the start of the text, but, um, it's an important text.

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It's it's an important title in other ways as well, isn't it?

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It is. And of course, in the German it's a singular, the metamorphosis.

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But really what I always tell my students is it's about the transformation of a whole family and how this initial,

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rather spectacular event of gradual waking up as a giant beech or insect triggers this sort of series of changes.

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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.

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And of course, you know, these transformations, some go better than others, but, um, they're all connected to each other.

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So that's definitely an important point. Um, Caroline mentioned the family, but, um, I was just very interested to, to see, um,

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this idea of the great amorphous, um, um, objective being at the centre of the, of the changes.

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And that also came up a bit when we were.

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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.

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Yeah. Of course. I mean, um, he talks about Gretta as being the kind of the elephant in the room.

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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.

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And in a sense, it is an incredibly important form of transformation.

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Um, from the start of the text, she takes on a form of responsibility.

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There's also a sexual, um, transformation, which is happening, a coming of age story which is being told, which is absolutely important.

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And there's also a change in her relationship with Gregor, with the family.

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A lot seems to revolve around the transformation that's happening with her.

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A very, very interesting story. And then just to the point in time, you think she might be in some form liberated.

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At the end of the story, there's a small coda where the family again tried to turn her into some form of property.

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It's time to marry her off. And this development, this sexual development, kind of comes back a little bit.

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It's a very, very interesting story to try and get a handle on.

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And, and also maybe even to think about writing the story from her perspective would be quite interesting.

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I know there are writers starting to do this right now. Um, very, very interesting story, I suppose.

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And but I guess coming back to the question about the title as well,

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it's the idea of metamorphosis in English also doesn't quite capture what's there in the English, in the German, does it?

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Because it could just be change. It could just be some form of transformation.

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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.

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In a sense. Kafka is kind of in the German. It isn't isn't that obvious.

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And it's quite interesting that it opens up this possibility or these possibilities for all these different readings that Carolyn is talking about.

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Because of course, the verb to transform features in the very first sentence.

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So he takes it in quite a literal sense rather than carrying all this historical weight, as you say.

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I mean, I think if anything, a better reference point is fairy tales.

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But of course it's as often has been said, it's an anti fairy tale.

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It's the sort of story which has no obvious cause.

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We never find out what caused him to turn into a beetle.

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And of course, there's no redemption. There's no good fairy who comes to wave her wand.

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Which is why Gretta is so interesting, because she sort of occupies that place of the the fairy godmother.

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But then she doesn't. If anything, she probably brings about his downfall and death at the end.

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So Nabokov called Gretta the villain of the piece. Um, so it could be a bad, bad fairy, if you like.

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I mean, gee, but that opens up all kind of questions, which you just hinted at of why he changes.

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And there are lots of different thoughts about that. So is it something that comes from outside?

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Is it something that comes from within? Is it sudden? Is it a process?

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What do you think or where you do stand on those things?

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I mean, it's a huge question, maybe to start us off.

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Of course, we find out a bit about his previous life in little flashbacks in his mind.

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So he was a travelling salesman. It was a very stressful, pressurised job.

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He had to get up very early, catch the train. There were sales targets.

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He was in competition with other people. He had to stay over in hotels.

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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.

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And the result of the transformation is, of course, that all of that stops.

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And one of the really funny things about the first bit is how he actually initially

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thinks [INAUDIBLE] still try to catch his train and just carry on with his life.

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That's, of course, why it's so hilariously funny how he kind of tries to rationalise this,

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but the real change happens once he settles into his new state,

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and there is a moment in the middle of the story where he really begins to enjoy the freedom that he gains from this.

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And so one way of reading it is as a story of release from, from the sort of rat race of modern life.

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But of course, that's not the only dimension.

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And that's not, of course, how it ends. It doesn't end happily.

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Yeah. And there are these traditional readings of it from a from a kind of a Marxist,

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socialist perspective, which, which makes sense in terms of what Carolin has been talking about.

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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.

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Absolutely, you know, excellent as a worker. But he's taking time out of this.

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And that transformation seems to, you know, seems to offer these different opportunities for different potentials.

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And in a sense, it's kind of the fact that it's happened already and it's radically happened already,

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starts to shift the focus onto the possibilities of the text.

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The thing is not just thinking through in terms of, oh, something's gone wrong, but actually thinking, well.

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Gregor asks at one point, you know, it's easy and animals that he feels this way when he listens to music.

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Well, was he an animal beforehand? Was was that human?

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If that's human, what does that mean to be human? And it is a text that asks these questions.

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And if you just focus on the why, he becomes an insect that actually weirdly stops you asking the types of questions.

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I think that the text that the text asks and the possibilities are definitely there.

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Different ways to experience the world. Not all positive, but certainly with positive things, different ways of experience in the world,

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different ways of sensing the world, different approaches to aesthetic products, projects as well, and products as well.

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Do we understand music differently? Do we understand art differently?

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And it's not until the end, I think, of the texts where and this comes back to greater as well words.

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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.

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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.

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It's at that point in time, and the rest of the text is about in a negative way, matters.

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Prior to that, there are possibilities and potentials that are really interesting to think about,

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and it's actually more interesting to think that the text doesn't suggest in a simple way.

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This is why he becomes an insect. It just rolls with it and asks questions and doesn't give simple answers.

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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.

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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.

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I don't think that's the main question. The text makes us think about why it's just what happens next.

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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,

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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

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see him sort of free to ponder about relationships and emotions and the meaning of life.

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But as that happens, we also, of course, see the humans in his family show their inhuman side.

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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.

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And so it's this sort of incredibly ambivalent perspective on identity whereby no one is on one side or the other.

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It's it's all sort of like a very murky, multi shaded picture, really.

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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,

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one of his very, very early works, um, Wedding Preparations in the country where he uses this motif beforehand.

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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,

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it doesn't just imagine it anymore, and it opens up different possibilities to not think about.

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Why is the human imagining this is what he's doing all of a sudden?

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This is an absolute radical.

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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.

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I think it's also absolutely funny.

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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.

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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.

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There's something about, like kind of watching a baby try out,

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try out new moves and things that it's just absolutely hilarious to, to look at in certain places.

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Obviously dark, but also moments of humour in there that are, that are, you know, really catchy.

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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?

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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.

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Um, and in the wonderful presentation last night that came out in the,

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in the thinking about the ballet as well, that this is something potentially in all of us.

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Um, so does, I guess what does that what does that do for for reading the text?

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Um, it is it precarity that we all need to wonder?

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Does it mean that we can all be, you know, less than human, more than human?

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Uh. Tricky question.

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I'm always a bit wary of like neat little takeaways from Kafka, but I think certainly there are none.

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Um, but I'm. My job is to put you on the spot. I mean, of course,

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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,

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and that makes it incredibly relatable.

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But then, of course, as the story unfolds, I think there are moments when he becomes very strange to us as well.

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So it's also about this.

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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,

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in his case, a transformation that doesn't just happen at the beginning, but it continues happening over the course of the text.

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So we see him, for instance, change his taste in food so he no longer likes what he used to.

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Like. We see him his his sense of vision gradually deteriorates.

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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,

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while, as Barry said, acquiring a certain sort of like way of relating to music.

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So I think one of the strengths of the text is just how, in an incredibly subtle, sort of embodied way,

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we get taken on this journey where I think we stay with him pretty much till the end.

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But there are clearly moments where he becomes very alien to us as well.

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I think the embodied way kind of gets to the point of of the quote, you know, it's not a simple take away,

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but that focus on the embodied relationship to the environment is is interesting here.

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Um, because that then starts to encourage us to think about how our own relationship with the environment,

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with the world around us is equally embodied,

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that we're not just the spirits or the ghosts in the machine that's there driving everything else on that.

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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.

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The text encourages not necessarily to figure out what's happening, but to think about what's happening in this relationship.

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But this is this particular story is quite interesting in terms of kind of Kafka's other animal stories,

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because it does show him move on to ask these questions in a pretty radical way.

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And these questions about the, the, the shifty borders, I suppose, between the human and the non-human,

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um, begin to be to be opened up and to be asked in much more detail and from this text onwards.

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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,

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being a human being is incapable of talking about the conditions of life,

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or is unwilling to talk about the conditions of life as an ape before he started aping human beings.

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But but the kind of behaviour of being a human being that we see there isn't positive.

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And later stories are even more radical.

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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,

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experiences the world without actually getting hung up on this question of, um, of human, uh, sensory, uh, kind of relationship to the environment.

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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.

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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,

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I think I think it's a question that a question that's being asked is where the human

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gets off putting himself at a higher position in the hierarchy over the animal.

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It's it's asking those types of questions.

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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.

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Why do humans think it's okay to treat dogs that way?

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Yeah, it's there are questions like that that are being asked but not being answered

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because he is clearly not willing to do away with the dignity of the human,

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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.

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And that becomes much, much stronger as as the work goes on from this text onwards, I think.

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I mean, the other interesting point is that, of course, Kafka writes about animals in so many different ways.

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So he has narrators who are animals into whose mindset we enter, as you say.

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And of course, Gregor is the sort of hybrid human mind in an animal's body.

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But as you say later, we get animal minds, animals speaking their minds, and us sort of seeing the world through animal eyes.

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But we also get animals that confront human narrators, and that's, um, very kind of interesting in their sort of otherness.

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So there's one of my favourite stories is this little story called crossbreed anecdotes,

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um, which, which describes this impossible animal, a crossbreed between a lamb and a cat.

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And the narrator is clearly very unsettled by this creature.

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Not that it does anything strange, but it's just the animal is completely other.

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And how do we relate? Late to animals. The animal is on the one hand, it's an heirloom passed on by the father.

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The narrator says that it's part of the family. And yet there's also an impulse to kill it at the end.

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There's also a relationship with children, which I think is fascinating.

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So I think Kafka's stories, especially The Metamorphosis and the other animal stories, are so universal that even children can approach them.

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And I think that is maybe not completely unique,

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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.

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You really don't need to know anything to be able to read The Metamorphosis and get something out of it.

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And I think the interesting thing around, around this topic is also seems to be how, you know,

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if you're thinking in terms of kind of the human and non-human,

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the various different perspectives that are given around that, around the animal figures.

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These are some of the texts that creative artists are coming back to most at the minute.

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They're the ones that seem to be kind of spurred. They seem to speak to to something at the minute.

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They speak to a kind of the post-human. Then they end this sort of condition that we're all in.

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I mean, it made me think, um, because particularly students are very worried about, you know, is it a psychoanalytic interpretation?

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Is it about religion? Is it about, uh, Marxist interpretation of work?

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And and now is it all about embodiment? But, I mean, I think you're suggesting that, of course it's all or none.

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Um, yeah. And just coming back to Barry's comment earlier about the wedding preparations

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in the country where he imagines becoming a beetle or sending his clothes,

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body, and he remains in bed as a Beatle. That's a metaphor.

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Yeah, the metamorphosis is literal. Takes that literally.

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And that, I think, releases us from the pressure of having to interpret it as a metaphor.

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We need to read this story. We don't need to attach a label to it.

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And it's very clearly set up in this way.

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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.

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I mean, we talked about Greta. The father changes and transforms, broadly speaking,

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from a pathetic old man into this towering giant who, of course, eventually causes his son's death.

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And yet the father doesn't just make this simple transformation.

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He remains pathetic. At the same time, he still sits slumped in his armchair with his uniform getting more and more stained.

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So it's this sort of it's not either or.

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It's not. You go from being weak to being strong.

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It's it's these things and Kafka's ability to hold them in this sort of balance and suspension.

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And that's why I think we don't need these frameworks.

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We can use them, but none of them will unlock the text.

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I ask about. Um, the point you made earlier about Kafka kind of can be universally read.

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And I'm wondering, is it that about Kafka that allows that, or is it the literalness?

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Is it the is it the fact that that it goes beyond interpretation in a sense,

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and we can just directly read in sentence everything, um, I mean, even like to stick on this,

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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,

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the very fact that it's absolutely literal. He is an insect, but we don't know what insect he is that does it.

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There's an emptiness at the centre of the text that allows people to project things onto the text in different ways,

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and different frameworks also to anchor them in particular things.

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You know, it's kind of there's certain different readings, but there's almost, you know,

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there's a motor in the middle of that text that enables people to generate meanings out of it.

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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.

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And I think that that,

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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,

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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,

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but is an author of world literature in a way that many others aren't, even if they're right around the world.

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Because you can adapt this text in different, in different ways.

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You can adapt the text to different contexts, and you can project different things into it,

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some of which which are makes sense, some of which don't make sense.

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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.

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It's still somebody working with the text actualising it, transforming it, making it relevant to context now.

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And to me, that's one of the reasons why Kafka is such an important writer.

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You can talk about the mechanisms by which that work, but it's the fact that it works,

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I think is what's so exciting to be dealing with him as a writer.

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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.

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It's very straightforward premise. You don't need a sort of big kind of, you know, diagram of characters and relationships.

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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.

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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.

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And this was what became so apparent in our conversation with the creative artists,

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the choreographer, the dancer, and so on, how they drew on that richness.

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It's not just that they thought, okay, Kafka man turns into bug.

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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.

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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.

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These are all details Kafka provides us with, and we found the same talking about a Hunger Artist yesterday or the last few days,

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that the premise is crystal clear, but once you look more closely, it's so much more complex and ambivalent than you initially imagine.