Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka.pdf - tywls12ela

34 u WALTER H. SOKEL
And even if the cause of quarantining might not be physical, could it not
be some mental or moral lapse, or any stroke of outrageous fortune, that
might make me exactly like Gregor? Horrifying uniqueness was not
limited to individuals. The horror of it was its being potentially a universal
condition without, however, losing, for those unfortunate enough to
fall its victims, the sting of absolute aloneness. And was it not the fate of
each one of us eventually to find herself or himself cut off forever from
all fellowship in the transition from life to death? Tolstoy’s The Death of
Ivan Ilyich seemed to me to be the only other narrative that came near
to producing something comparable to Kafka’s metamorphosis effect.
Like The Death of Ivan Ilyich, “Die Verwandlung” also achieved,
through the reader’s identification with a single victim, an enormous
enlargement of the scope of empathetic sensitivity toward all human
beings. Going beyond Ivan Ilyich, however, Kafka’s text had the effect
upon me of extending sympathy and solidarity in suffering to life beyond
the human species. A human being had been changed into a specimen
of vermin. Might not the huge cockroach I chanced upon in an upper
Manhattan bathroom be a creature with some feeling, some sensibility,
might it not by some inexplicable fluke be sheltering another traveling
salesman or former clerk, another Gregor Samsa? Or at least a being not
totally unlike myself? Kafka’s fiction gave such horrendously persuasive
testimony to these possibilities that it took quite a while after the reading
of his story for me to gather enough insensitivity to get rid of cockroaches
again.
For Northrop Frye, as I was to learn not too long thereafter, identification
with a fictional character was the distinguishing sign of the effect
of mimesis in literature. For Aristotle mimesis was the essence of art.
Teaching Aristotle’s Poetics several years after my first soul-shaking encounter
with Kafka’s story made me better understand that experience
and allowed me to place it in a cultural context. Kafka’s tale seemed to
me a prime example of mimetic art, and it produced the effect of tragedy.
For more than any other, it was the text that had made me identify with
the abysmal suffering depicted in it, engendering in me the emotions
ascribed by Aristotle to tragedy — fear and pity, pity of poor lonely
Gregor and fear for myself if somehow his fate should also become mine.
Despite the grotesque singularity of this fate, there radiated a deeply
disquieting universality from the life Kafka portrayed. What went on in
his work concerned me with terrifying urgency, and I felt that it would
equally concern anyone else who allowed himself to be opened and
drawn by its magnetic power.