Legs and Shells: Vladimir Nabokov’s Reading of The Metamorphosis

SUZUKI Akira

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature (edited by Fredson Bowers, 1980) selectively contains his lectures at Cornell University which dealt with masterpieces of European literature.  Among them Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1912, 1915) is included as the only work which is originally written in German. The purpose of this paper is to locate the problems central to Kafka’s novella with a view to clarifying Nabokov’s unique interpretation. In the course of argument we also try to take Gilles Deuleze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) into consideration. The key question raised by Kafka’s text, “War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff?” (“Was he an animal, that music had such an effect on him?”), could be expressed differently: when one is moved by music (or experiences any of the various sensory events), how could we define that mental state, would it be called animallike or humanlike? It is a conundrum which gets nowhere, to which we could find no solution, and from which we could never escape. Such a predicament is represented by the nightmarsish narrative about Gregor’s failure to deterritorialise a man’s life and acquire some Umwelt fit for living things other than humans, notwithstanding his becoming a living thing other than a man.