Witness: this is Vladimir Nabokov editing the first page of his teaching copy of Franz Kafka's
The Metamorphosis. The sketches are him trying to work out exactly what Gregor, transformed, looked like. For all the revisions, Nabokov was quite fascinated by Kafka's work, as Open Culture
points out: his
lecture on the novella is famous enough for it to be adapted for television in 1989, starring Christopher Plummer as the Russian master. (
The Metamorphosis – A Study: Nabokov on Kafka). bout this opening passage to the story, Nabokov makes other annotations. He writes, referring to the end of the first paragraph: “A regular beetle has no eyelids and cannot close its eyes—a beetle with human eyes.” And, about the passage generally:
In the original German there is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences. He his(sic) half-awake -- he realizes his plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human memories, human experience. The metamorphosis is not quite complete as yet.
One of Nabokov's "treasured" insights on the text: Gregor, as an insect, never uses his wings.
We shall therefore assume that Gregor has six legs, that he is an insect.
Next question: what insect? Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense. A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)
Quite so. It is a point that seems to pick up nicely from my previous
post.
Nabokov's Kafka lecture, incidentally, is included in his
Lectures on Literature, which he
discussed with an interviewer from The Paris Review before the collection was published. Note that he provides the novella with an English translation of the title that is not the one commonly used, even though he calls it by "The Metamorphosis" in the text of the lecture.
What I intend to do is publish a number of twenty-page essays on several works—Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Kafka's Transformation, Don Quixote, and others—all based on my Cornell and Harvard lectures. I remember with delight tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.
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