You Need Only to Change Your Direction: New Works on Kafka

The gains of Geddes's approach become especially clear in her captivating chapter on The Metamorphosis: she posits that Gregor Samsa is not only a human-animal hybrid, he is the consummate ambiguous text.3 The family's Oedipal struggle is also an interpretive battle. Since "Gregor appears to be a bad reader of events" (80), he relegates the task of interpreting his condition to the family and the office manager, who initially only interpret his lateness. [...]the father's high level of symbolic capital—that is, his high stature and authority, his ability to claim his interpretations as the legitimate ones—proves stronger" (68). Karl Rossman's famous self-identification as "Negro" in the Nature Theater of Oklahoma—probably Kafka's best-known usage of the word—becomes a primal scene in Kafka's Blues, as the author argues that Karl's final gesture of naming (following multiple adaptations) echoes his initial identification with the German stoker, the Heizer, who dwells slavelike in the bowels of the ship, and whose skin is blackened by soot (as in the verse "Neger Neger Schornsteinfeger"). While Kafka acquired Yiddish by way of "collectively used forms … substrate traces of Western Yiddish in German spoken by Bohemian (and Moravian) Jews" (91), he learned Hebrew actively, over many years, and could communicate in the language, though Nekula believes he remained ignorant of the classical Jewish sources, the Bible and prayer book, in the original Hebrew.