מטמורפוזה קפקאית כפי שהיא משתקפת ביצירותיו של סמיר נקאש
التحوّل الكافكوي كما ينعكس في أعمال سمير نقاش
Geula Elimelekh
Journal of Semitic Studies LVIII/2, Autumn 2013, pp. 323–342 · doi: 10.1093/jss/fgt005
Abstract
Franz Kafka chose the complete metamorphosis of classical reality as the foundation of his world. His stories describe the deterioration and dehumanization of mankind and portray the world as dominated by demonic forces. An examination of the works of Samir Naqqash reveals that dehumanization and metamorphosis are recurring themes in his stories as well. Following in Kafka’s footsteps, he uses imagery that exposes the falsehood and delusion that permeate human existence.
Kafka also exposes the absurd in human existence, both on the national-Jewish level (namely the absurd existence of the modern Jew) and on the universal level (namely the absurdity of human life in general). Comparing his works to those of Naqqash, we find that the latter also focuses on a specific and local reality, namely the reality of Iraqi Jews, but at the same time addresses universal themes that characterize the human condition in the twentieth century. His works deal with the fate of man in a universe without boundaries or providence, and with man’s illusory pursuit of reason and scientific achievement following the collapse of his spiritual and religious world. Kafka and Naqqash describe modern man as bereft of divine providence and abandoned to the helplessness of his human nature.
Mikhail Bakhtin states that ‘metamorphosis serves as the basis for a method of portraying the whole of an individual’s life in its more important moments of crisis: for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was. We are offered various sharply differing images of one and the same individual, images that are united in him as various epochs and stages in the course of his life. There is no evolution in the strict sense of the word; what we get, rather, is crisis and rebirth’.1
1M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin 1981), 115.
Baruch Kurzweil notes that stories like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle are definitive descriptions of man’s devolution into a beast or an inanimate object. It is clearly no coincidence that, in many of Kafka’s works, animals are used as a metaphor of the human condition. Kafka’s world is one that mocks human dignity; man’s dignity is trampled until he sees himself as a mere beast or object.2 Kafka chose to base his world on a complete transformation of everyday reality. In his world, man resides among the ruins, his only certainty being uncertainty. The obsolete and atrophied become the new and contemporary; authority is characterized by violence and depravity, and the divine is alien to the human. These values represent a profound metamorphosis, accompanied by a process of dehu-
manization: everything familiar is transformed beyond recognition, whereas arbitrariness and wantonness are sanctified. Absurdity and metamorphosis are presented as commonplace, thereby negating classical reality which leaves room for certainty. Kafka presents a world in which the absurd and the dehumanizing are the norm.3 Kafka exposes the satanic forces that dominate the world, the regression into a demonic mythology. The victims of metamorphosis share a dubious and pathetic existence, experiencing a demonic reality that is both fantastic and disturbing.
The fundamental assumption in Kafka’s works is that, at some point in man’s past, a more blissful reality existed, which was somehow transformed into the present reality, creating a new existential state.4 This claim is compatible with the position of Wilhelm Emrich, who argues that the animals in Kafka’s works represent ‘the subliminal dreamlike world […] that part of [man] that is pre-human or early human’.5 According to Moked, The Metamorphosis is the first work in which Kafka portrayed a drastic and comprehensive description of such an
2 Baruch Kurzweil, Treatise on the European Novel and Story (Jerusalem 1973)
(Hebrew), 317.
3 Kurzweil, Treatise, 316, 321. Metamorphosis is a central theme in traditional
fairy tales like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘The Frog Prince’. But in these stories, the transformation is temporary, and the character eventually returns to his ‘natural’ human state. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s transformation is permanent, and the only escape from it is death.
4 Gabriel Moked, On The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Tel-Aviv 1984)
(Hebrew), 138–9.
5 Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka: A Critical Study of His Writings, trans. Sheema
Zeben Buehn (New York 1968), 141.
existential transformation, which appears repeatedly in his subsequent works. Outwardly, Kafka’s characters come from different walks of life, but they all grapple with a single problem, symbolized by some form of metamorphosis.
Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an animal occurs in a strange and sudden manner. Unable to recognize himself, he is certain at first that the transformation cannot be real.6 But he soon finds that the transformation is a physical reality that affects every fibre of his being, for he has turned into an insect. The metamorphosis leaves him crippled and places him in absurd situations. His senses are different from a man’s, and his inability to speak renders him incapable of communicating with people around him. Mute, he exemplifies a ‘loss of emotional connectedness with society’, characteristic of many Kafka
characters.7 Gregor is alienated and shunned, for he is strange and monstrous in the eyes of his family and society. He is also alien to himself, since he experiences an internal conflict between the impersonal ‘one’ (the civilized persona he wishes to project to the world) and the ‘self’ — the subliminal, untamed nature that he wished to suppress and which is embodied by the monstrous insect. This alienated self is the reality not only of Gregor in The Metamorphosis and Josef K. in The Trial, but of all human beings.8 Gregor’s absurd existence as an insect comes to an end when his family gets rid of his body, breathing a sigh of relief because the outrage has been removed.
The focus in the work is on the monstrous nature of the metamorphosis, which fills society with dread and with feelings of helplessness.
Society tries — and occasionally manages — to eliminate the victims of metamorphosis who threaten its collective sense of comfort. Gregor is a radical example of society’s desire to eliminate the monster, for his family tries to destroy him by the most violent means.
In The Trial, the metamorphosis takes the form of Josef K.’s struggle with the court authorities, and the new reality that emerges is one of guilt. In Amerika, the transformation is geographical, taking the form of the protagonist’s trip to the New World, and in The Castle, K. struggles to regain his status as a land surveyor.
Describing arguments by Marthe Roberts, Sara Loeb notes that, instead of portraying his characters and their actions through a description of their detailed traits, Kafka uses two methods: he transforms the protagonist into a strange and otherworldly creature,
6 Emrich, Franz Kafka, 136.
7 Moked, On The Metamorphosis, 77–8, 138–43.
8 Emrich, Franz Kafka, 139–40.
thereby creating a grotesque situation that is a mirror of his own mental suffering. In addition, he splits the protagonist into several characters that appear side by side throughout the narrative. This two-pronged process created in the author’s imagination creates a reality reflected in tangible literary images.9 The metamorphosis of Kafka’s characters is paradoxical in that the human becomes bestial or inanimate, yet at the same time the beast or object remain human. Loeb points out that, even when transformed into a dog, an insect or a bridge, Kafka’s narrator does not cease to exist or feel like a person.10 Though Gregor has turned into an insect, he has not become an animal in the full sense of the word, otherwise he would not have retained his human consciousness. His body is transformed, yet his soul continues to suffer, even more acutely than before.
Conversely, in ‘Report to an Academy’, the ape, Red Peter, becomes an honorary member of human society, after he adopts human behaviour in order to avoid being locked up in the zoo. However, his transformation is not complete, for he does not cease to be an ape, though he dresses and talks like a man. Red Peter is a tangible and ironic symbol of the tragic and grotesque state of modern society. His metamorphosis reflects the transformation that has occurred in the status of the academy, and the decline of the civilization that the academy represents.11 In the case of both Gregor and Red Peter, the sense of horror emanates from the existence of a human consciousness within the body of a beast. In other words, the transformation combines a body and soul that are totally alien to one another, creating a being that is doubled, or split. As Sara Loeb points out, based on ideas by Marthe Roberts,12 ‘Kafka’s doubts, the split that occurred in him, and his lack of confidence all blend together in manifold images that he is unable to speak of openly, and therefore reveal in creations that can be interpreted in a variety of ways […] Kafka does not confront the world in order to cleanse it of inaccuracies. He creates a fictional world in order to reflect its complexity and alienation. The animals that exist in this ostensibly real framework actually belong to a world suffused with fear, paradox and contradiction’.13
9 Sara Loeb, Franz Kafka: A Question of Jewish Identity, trans. Sondra Silverston
and Chaya Naor (Lanham 2001), 209.
10 Loeb, Franz Kafka, 212.
11 Moked, On The Metamorphosis, 207.
12 Marthe Robert, Kafka (Paris 1960) 147–8.
13 Loeb, Franz Kafka, 213.
In the story ‘A Crossbreed’, Kafka presents a lonely and strange creature, half cat and half lamb. The narrator points out that ‘perhaps the knife of the butcher would be a release for this creature’, but that, because it is a ‘legacy’ inherited from his father, he cannot put it to death. Roberts ‘perceives this story as the drama of the unstable existence of two worlds, two cultures and two moral codes’.14 The lamb symbolizes the condition of the Jewish people, which exists like a lamb among wolves. But Kafka is also implying that the lamb itself has changed in that it has taken on a predatory aspect, thereby becoming a symbol of absurdity.
The Theme of Metamorphosis
in the Works of Samir (Moshe) Naqqash
Samir (Moshe) Naqqash (1938–2004), who was born in Baghdad and emigrated to Israel in 1951, was the youngest Jewish writer who came to this country after the establishment of the state, and remained an anomaly on the Israeli literary scene. Unlike most of the writers who immigrated to Israel from the Arab world, he did not write in Hebrew but in Arabic. In 1958–62 he visited Turkey, Iran and India, but spent most of his time in Iran, where he mastered the Persian language. In the years 1972–5 he studied Arabic and Persian Literature at the Hebrew University, and in 1978 he received an MA in Arabic Language and Literature for his thesis on ‘Jewish Writers and Poets in Iraq’. His first literary works were published in 1958 in al- MirÒad, the paper of the MAPAM Party in Arabic.15 His oeuvre contains novels, short stories and plays.
In Arabism, Judaism and Zionism: The Struggle for Identity in the Writings of Iraqi Jews, Reuven Snir writes: When the State of Israel was founded Naqqash was filled with national pride, but this feeling was dashed to pieces after he came to Israel, due to the economic and social crisis that beset his family. He declared at every opportunity that Arabic was his first language and that he would continue to write in it, although he did also try to write in Hebrew, without success.
Naqqash’s adherence to the Arabic language is an integral part of his search for his own identity.16
14 Loeb, Franz Kafka, 213.
15 The journal was published variously as a bi-weekly, weekly and daily, and
ceased appearing towards the end of the 1960s.
16 Reuven Snir, Arabness, Jewishness, Zionism (Jerusalem 2008) (Hebrew), 202.
The theme of metamorphosis, namely a shift from one situation to a radically different one, exists in Naqqash’s works as well as Kafka’s. This is evident, for example, in The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried (yawm Ìabilat wa-ajha∂at al-dunya),17 a collection of short stories published in 1980. Three of the stories deal with Iraqi Jews who immigrate to Israel, and juxtapose the old situation — namely the life of the Jews in Iraq before their immigration to Israel — with the new situation that emerges after their immigration.
In the title story, ‘The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried’, as in other works by Naqqash, the transformation involves the complete degeneration of the relationship between the individual and society (so that human relations devolve into bestial ones). Simul-
taneously, there is a degeneration of the relationship between the individual and God, which, in this story, comes to a peak during the Closing (‘Ne‘ila’) Prayer of Yom Kippur.18 Like Kafka, Naqqash uses symbols to reflect the falseness and deceitfulness that permeate human existence. Like the castle in Kafka’s eponymous story, which turns out to be nothing more than a small and wretched village, the synagogue in Naqqash’s story is revealed to be other than it seems: it is not a place of purity and holiness — which becomes even holier on the most holy day of the year — but a place where the gravest offences take place. Not only do the characters fail to transcend themselves during the holy moments of the Closing Prayer, they give in to their basest instincts or discover the most despicable truths. One character, an ageing man named IsÌaq ‘Ida, loses himself in erotic fantasies about the boy praying next to him, while the protagonist, Shaul Hillel, discovers that his wife is being unfaithful to him. The reality described in the story is repulsive, sordid and corrupt. Fleeing from the synagogue, the protagonist is moved to ask: ‘Is the moment of the world’s destruction coming near?’ (p. 44). Though Shaul Hillel attempts to escape, the symbols of corruption prevail, with tragic results.
Another story, ‘In the House of Rags and Miracles’ (Fi manzil al-khiraq wa-l-khawariq), which takes place in the ma‘abbara (transit camp for newly arrived immigrants), describes the metamorphosis
17 Samir Naqqash, The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried (Jerusa-
lem 1980) (Arabic).
18 Lillian Debi-Guri, ‘Samir Naqqash — An Examination of His Narrative
Works’, in Warren Harvey et al. (eds) Zion and Zionism among the Jews of Spain and the Orient (Jerusalem 2002) (Hebrew), 582.
of the Iraqi Jewish community upon its arrival in Israel: its deterioration into inhuman depravity. The story focuses on three characters: two sisters (known only as ‘the younger sister’ and ‘the elder sister’) and Menashe the ragman, who is a demonic and corrupt character. The ‘wretched’ and ‘exhausted’ sisters feed Menashe and care for him: ‘The two poor women are exhausted, yet they stand before him like servants, and how joyous the moment! Menashe is full. Menashe is happy. The world is full. And the faces of the two women shine with the happiness of an entire world’ (p. 61). When Menashe dies, they weep: ‘How he loved to eat! If you only saw him last Friday, how he sat cross legged on that chair! He didn’t feel like getting up’ (p. 62).
The sisters, whose charity extends even to feeding the birds, sym-
bolize the ‘safe fortress’ that was Baghdad — an antithesis to the disappointing reality of 1950s Israel. Their kindness prevents a complete deterioration into inhuman evil. Their home in Israel is described as a place where ‘the hand of legendary love reaches out into unknown distances, trying to pluck blue and red suns […] and sow them in the space of our dark earthly world’ (p. 81). Though the story describes a hellish reality, controlled by demonic forces (children amuse themselves by killing stray cats),19 it ends on an optimistic note, which likewise involves a metamorphosis: the arm of the younger sister becomes like ‘the branch of a tree in early spring, wearing fresh green leaves […] The palm, filled with the gift of their legendary love, becomes like a spring of sweet healing waters, in which a hundred thirsty, trusting beaks are dipped’ (p. 84).
In the story ‘Willow Night’ (Laylat ‘araba), the transformation that follows the immigration to Israel involves the death of the narrator’s father, younger brother and grandmother (pp. 162–3).20 The reality in the story is silent, frozen, barren and devoid of emotion, whereas the world of childhood, which the narrator attempts to recreate, is innocent and whole, ‘a world that has the wings of angels wrapped around it. We filled that world with innocence and joy brimming over’ (p. 163). The narrator yearns for ‘the fragrance of the earth in which God planted the Garden of Eden and later destroyed it because of man’s sins’ (p. 173). The theme of exile — whether it is the exile of the Jew or a universal exile — is prominent in this story and in
19 Debi-Guri, ‘Samir Naqqash’, 586.
20 Natan Ofek points out that metamorphosis is frequently associated with loss:
the consciousness attempts to recapture the lost memories, but does not always succeed. Natan Ofek, Kafka and the Jewish Existence (Jerusalem 2002) (Hebrew), 141.
other works by Naqqash, as it is in works of Kafka.21 The mythical expulsion from Paradise, which violated the harmony between man and the earth, sentences the narrator to exile, and this exile has the metaphysical character of a forced expulsion.22 Kafka too yearned for a lost paradise that could never be recaptured.
The motif of yearning for the past, for childhood, is likewise dominant in Naqqash’s stories. His view of childhood is a tragic one, for he sees it as a period that, once over, is forever lost. The protagonist states, ‘Our childhood is dead and gone’ (p. 162). The loss of childhood is synonymous with the loss of values and the collapse of the old order.
The Metamorphosis also describes the collapse of an earlier reality:
‘What a quiet life our family has been leading’, said Gregor to himself, and as he sat there motionless staring into the darkness he felt great pride in the fact that he had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat. But what if all the quiet, the comfort, the contentment were now to end in horror?23 Before his transformation, Gregor believed that he must sacrifice himself to his job in order to provide his family with a life of comfort.
He created the semblance of an orderly world.24 In ‘Willow Night’, too, there is an old world that is whole and harmonious, like ‘a necklace of orderly pearls’. The gradual disappearance of this world means the disruption of this order and harmony. Yearning to recapture the lost completeness, the narrator compares the worshippers gathering for prayer to beads arranged on a string.
21 Kafka was an exile in an absolute sense — from his homeland, his father’s
house, and even his own body. His essential alienation stemmed from a sense of detachment from himself and from the social circles in which he grew up. Kafka associates the figure of the eternal Jew with a sense of sin and filth. His feelings of guilt are anchored in the rootlessness of the eternal Jew, or the ‘wandering Jew’ (Ofek, Kafka, 146). In one of his letters to Milena Jesenská, he wrote: ‘My body, often quiet for years, would then again be shaken by this longing for some very particular, trivial, disgusting thing, something slightly repulsive, embarrassing, obscene, which I always found even in the best cases — some insignificant odor, a little bit of sulfur, a little bit of hell. This urge had something of the eternal Jew — senselessly being drawn along, senselessly wandering through a senselessly obscene world’. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. P. Boehm (New York 1990), 148.
22 Ofek, Kafka, 144.
23 F. Kafka, Selected Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York
1952), 42–3. Henceforth: Selected Short Stories.
24 Emrich, Franz Kafka, 142.
The expulsion from the old world marks the beginning of a process of physical and mental decay, a deterioration into an abyss of poverty and decadence — for the modern world in which the immigrants find themselves is a materialistic one that negates the world of spirituality (p. 196). Modern man loses his inner essence and becomes an empty shell. Among the many Jews who undergo a drastic transformation upon coming to Israel are the narrator’s friends Admun and Îasqil Ezra. Their spiritual death precedes their physical death.
The narrator says: ‘Admun probably died spiritually, physically and existentially, died due to the kindness of his heart. He probably became a pile of bones, with the earth crouching lovingly over them’ (p. 177). Îasqil too is not the same man the protagonist knew in Iraq: ‘His shrivelled and exhausted body melted away. Even his soul
melted away. Uncle Îasqil Ezra forgot even his own self, lost his soul, became a walking automaton’ (p. 212).
The old world, which collapsed, was orderly and harmonious, or at least appeared to be. It seemed to be a world in which religious, social and cultural values were clear, giving its inhabitants a sense of security and safety from foreign elements that could threaten their protected environment. But was this world truly so harmonious?
It turns out that, for both Kafka and Naqqash, even ‘harmonious’ reality tends to be exposed as a deceptive shell. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s pre-metamorphosis reality is apparently tranquil and secure — yet this reality is torn apart in his dreams, and gives birth to the monster. Gregor understands that, by sacrificing himself to his job in order to provide for his family, he did himself great harm, and that his family did not really require his sacrifice, because his father had money. The family’s apparent happiness was built upon a foundation of dishonesty and secret calculations. Everything rested on possessions and appearances, instead of on the characters’ ‘inner being’. Now that Gregor’s sacrifice has taken the tangible form of a monster, it has to be driven away.25 Naqqash’s story ‘The Death of Santa Claus’ (MaÒra‘ Santa Clawz), which appears in the collection The Mistake (al-Kha†a’),26 removes the mask from the face of the old world. The falsehood is embodied in the character of an unpopular teacher, Grasia Farhud, who dresses up in a Santa Claus costume. The children know that the clothes and the beard are only a mask behind which she is hiding, and the narrator remarks contemptuously that she is far from being a saint. In
25 Emrich, Franz Kafka, 142.
26 Samir Naqqash, The Mistake (Jerusalem 1971) (Arabic), 15–45.
other words, she is the epitome of deception and falsehood, the costume being a cover for her immoral nature (p. 20). Everything in the story takes on a bleak hue of deception: the teacher, Santa, the school management, and ultimately also ‘our world, whose walls are blank and windowless’ (p. 41).
While the teacher tries to hide her corrupt nature under the guise of a saint, the boy Napoléon Kaku is her complete opposite, for his unclean exterior hides a pure soul. Both these characters convey the same message: that corruption and purity are not physical traits but rather spiritual ones, which cannot be discerned by the eye. Napoléon Kaku’s filthy exterior disgusts his classmates, who refuse to go near him or sit next to him. However, eventually they accept him into their circle. His unclean exterior remains, but now it becomes ‘no
more than a garment, covering a clean and noble interior’ (p. 41).
The repugnance aroused by Napoléon Kaku is no different from the horror evoked by Gregor Samsa. The latter’s appearance is likewise misleading, a hideous outer shell that is no more than a costume.
Though Kaku is not transformed into a bug, he too exhibits a repulsive exterior that hides a warm human heart.
A growing awareness of the deceptive nature of things signals the approaching end of childhood, which is likened to an expulsion from Paradise, albeit a necessary one: ‘To know the truth about this world, which God has cursed, is a thousand times better for one than to stay in the Garden of Eden, in a stupor, surrounded by fog in every direction’ (p. 41). There is a keen desire to know the truth, despite the anguish and pain that the discovery brings. The father’s collapse at the end of the story intensifies the crisis of childhood’s end and the process of discovering the truth. The father, whom the children thought omnipotent, undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming weak, helpless and ill. The story ends on a hopeless note: the father dies and the children, now no longer children, face a world very different from the one they knew: ‘Father’s death wiped away all traces of that strange world which held us in its bosom for a while during our childhood. The game of childhood was over, and at this moment a new “game” began — a game that was real and concrete’ (p. 45).
The story ‘The Little Things’ (al-Ashya’ al-∑aghira) likewise contains echoes of The Metamorphosis. Depicting an indigent Jewish porter named Jum‘a, it describes the inequalities in society and the mental world of the oppressed, who are treated like lowly creatures without feelings.27 This story too describes the process of transformation and 27 Snir, Arabness, 215.
dehumanization that recurs in the works of Kafka and Naqqash.
Jum‘a is no different from the beetle that resides in the folds of his clothing, and which he takes out and plays with at idle moments. The beetle crawls and hides in his garments and he does not even feel it (p. 46). His beetle and the sand and refuse that surround him are the elements that make up his world. His wretchedness is accentuated by the arrogance of the passersby, who do not even spare him a glance.
Even his voice repulses them, and if he touches them they brush the ‘contamination’ off their clothes. Jum‘a is undoubtedly aware that society regards him and his family as subhuman, and the beetle reflects his social and psychological state. The beetle’s dark shell, which serves as its home, is analogous to the dark and shabby shack in which he lives.
A character named Yehuda Sha‘ya, who hires Jum‘a to fix the toilet in his home, says of him: ‘He [Jum‘a] continued to cast his net into the murky water, in hopes of catching his life and saving himself from drowning’ (p. 63). What eventually happens in Sha‘ya’s house is a further reflection of Jum‘a’s dehumanized state.
Jum‘a wishes to fix the blockage in the toilet not in order to earn his pay but because he wants to expose ‘the marble, clean as a mirror’, which is covered with human excrement (p. 58). Here again we see the motif of the clean and the pure that is obscured by filth.
The last spark of humanity within Jum‘a is expunged when the sewage floods his face: ‘The last remains of his humanity faded, […] his life drowning in a tank of sewage and dying among the human excrement’ (p. 56).
Jum‘a laughs, but his laughter is not human — it is like ‘the chirping of a cricket in a sewer’ (p. 63). After he is bathed in human excrement, his spirit dies and he becomes a ‘statue’: ‘The statue moved, […] dragging its feet like wind-blown rags’ (p. 65). As in many of Kafka’s tales, the metamorphosis is followed by Jum‘a’s physical death. The final sentence of the story states, with bitter irony, that the beetle continues to crawl among the piles of garbage, free and happy (p. 66).
Naqqash again follows in the footsteps of Kafka when he associates the figure of the eternal Jew with the concepts of sin and filth28 (though it should be stressed that both Kafka and Naqqash address two aspects: the Jewish and the universal). Howard Fast points out that ‘Horror and nausea are the effects Kafka’s tale have on the reader
28 Ofek, Kafka, 146.
[…] In his mind he has performed the equation: man and roach are the same’.29 Another Naqqash character who lives in dehumanizing poverty and filth is Moshe al-Najjag, in the story ‘I, They and Ambivalence’ (’Ana wa-ha’ula’i wa-l-fiÒam), which appears in the eponymous collection.30 While Jum‘a in ‘The Little Things’ is likened to a beetle, Moshe is likened to a turtle, because of his slowness and stupidity: ‘The turtle leans towards the box, trying to open it’ (p. 138). In other passages he is described as ‘a wounded animal dragging itself in search of the door’, and as a ‘hungry dog’ (p. 140). Kafka’s Josef K. also feels and suffers like a dog.
However, Moshe’s bestial character gradually fades when he decides not to immigrate to Israel with the other Jews (p. 179) and becomes
the synagogue caretaker. The transformation in him, the return of his dignity, is evident when he serves the others at the synagogue a few hours before their departure. He has become a man full of confidence, who ‘forbids and commands’, ‘behaves as though the synagogue is his home’, and feels as though the others ‘need his services’ (p. 180). The narrator of the story, a young boy, admires Moshe for being the only one who goes against the flow and chooses not to emigrate, thus avoiding the mental anguish of uprooting himself from his homeland. Moshe decides to stay in Baghdad as the keeper of the Jewish flame, and consequently his soul is at peace.
Moshe’s metamorphosis is a mirror image of the transformation that awaits the emigrants. While he becomes human upon the others’ departure, they lose their humanity the minute they arrive in Israel and are sprayed with DDT: ‘Our human shadows vanished from the very first moment, drowned in pesticide, and now we are beasts’ (p. 184).
One of the characters who suffers this fate is Gurji, the boy’s former Hebrew teacher, who becomes a shadow of his former self: he ages prematurely, becoming an emaciated old man with a deeply lined face. He deteriorates to the point where he becomes homeless and sleeps on the street, and soon dies. The story ends on a morbid note: ‘Everything is ending, […] dying’ (p. 190).
An important story in this collection, in terms of the theme of metamorphosis, is ‘™an†al’, which, like many of Kafka stories, exposes
29 Howard Fast, ‘The Metamorphosis’, in Kenneth Hughes (ed.), Franz Kafka:
An Anthology of Marxist Criticism, trans. Kenneth Hughes (Hanover and London 1981), 13.
30 S. Naqqash, I, They and Ambivalence (Jerusalem 1978) (Arabic).
the demonic forces that are present in the world and in fact control it. ™an†al is the name of a demon. The narrator states that this demon ‘is not a mere legend, but a truth known throughout the city. He is not like the evil, harmful demons in fairy tales; he is a new and interesting being’ (p. 70).
™an†al, the epitome of the demonic, is also a symbol of uncertainty and instability, for he is a shape-shifter who can take on the guise of various animals. Various characters in the story claim to have seen him and are absolutely certain he is real. The boy-narrator wants to see him too. The stories he hears about the demon arouse his interest in legends and myths, and he yearns to see a fantastic and otherworldly creature. However, his yearning soon turns to dread, when his excited imagination turns the illustrated monsters on the covers
of books into real monsters that move about and watch him. The experience terrifies him and he tries to escape and forget it.
In the second part of the story, titled ‘Israel in the Early Fifties’, the narrator describes his life in the transit camp. One day, his uncle, who usually comes home late at night, comes back much earlier.
When the narrator asks him why, he replies ‘™an†al has left Baghdad and come here. He is here, beside us. You only have to cross the bridge on the way to the market’ (p. 82). Surprised at his uncle’s fear, the boy points out that the uncle is ™an†al’s friend, and has often met him and even held his hand. The uncle answers: ‘What are you talking about? Are we in Baghdad? Nobody has any courage left. These things have begun to be scary. We are half dead. If we [start] seeing things like that, it will be the end of us’ (p. 83).
™an†al is a mixture of certainty and uncertainty, despite the apparent absurdity of this contradiction. The demon is at once real and unreal, because he constantly appears and disappears, and changes his shape. In Baghdad, the Jews were able to accept his presence without too much dread, whereas in Israel, having lost their sense of security and confidence, they begin to perceive him as threatening. In other words, the fear of ™an†al represents the fear of losing the mainstays of life: a stable, traditional lifestyle, a regular livelihood, a secure future, etc.
In Baghdad, too, the Jews were perceived as outsiders, not as an integral part of the Iraqi people — but the sense of alienation that envelops them in Israel is much more profound. When a friend tells the narrator that he believes in science, the narrator replies that he believes in ™an†al, because ‘™an†al is truth and he is certainty, and all else is illusion’. The friend objects: ‘But you have never seen [the demon]’, to which the narrator replies, ‘Perhaps I have never seen
him with my eyes, but I have begun to feel him and live him’ (p. 88).
In other words, the narrator has begun to share the existential anxiety, strange fears, everyday pressures and mental anguish that have afflicted some of the older immigrants. Like many Kafka characters, he now inhabits a world where uncertainty is the only certainty.
As the narrator walks into the sea (apparently trying to kill himself) and struggles against the waves, he understands that his struggle is against the entire universe. The sea takes on a human form, its arms ready to enfold him in an embrace of death and its mouth open and ready to devour him. The immensity of the sea accentuates his human frailty and insignificance, as does the immensity of the giant demon ™an†al, who suddenly appears — possibly in order to rescue him — but then disappears. The narrator is likened to ‘a feather that is buf-
feted up and down by the sea until it capitulates’ (p. 90).
™an†al seems to embody all the existential questions that trouble man and dictate his path in life. He represents man’s existential anxiety, the fear of invisible and mysterious natural forces, the sense of doubt and detachment, the fear of the future, the alienation that is experienced by all men and in this story specifically by the Iraqi immigrants. ™an†al mocks the human characters, exposing their insignificance compared to the immense forces of the universe that control their fate and have them at their mercy. These hidden forces break out and overpower man in times of crisis.
We see, then, that the emigration from Baghdad to Israel undermines the Jews’ sense of security. But was the security they felt in Baghdad real and justified? The author’s answer to this question seems to be negative. Their former sense of security and strength was an illusion, and the immigration only exposed a dreadful truth that was already there: man, regardless of his religion, is a weak, anxietyridden creature, whose sense of confidence waxes in times of stability, and wanes in times of change, when a drastic transformation generates pressure and crisis. Routine gives man a sense of power, which vanishes when the routine is disrupted. The dread of ™an†al, the shape-shifter, is the dread of fluidity and uncertainty. Trading one country for another — and let us not forget that wandering is an integral part of the Jewish condition — undermines confidence and intensifies anxiety.
Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an insect likewise involves a disruption of his routine. William Kluback writes: ‘Samsa was eager to escape the illusion which overwhelmed him. The routine of his morning activities ran back and forth in his mind. “Before it strikes a quarter past seven I must be quite out of this bed without fail”. […]
We wonder how long the old will last as the new appears and is the reality. Gregor Samsa now lives those delicate and painful moments when the past fades away and the present emerges’. Gregor Samsa longs to continue his routine. Even after turning into an insect, he continues to be preoccupied with thoughts of his work and worries about being late. As Kluback points out, the metamorphosis he undergoes may symbolize the upheavals that occur in our lives and the fear of these upheavals, the desire to cling to the past.31 In ‘™an†al’, escape from the demon is achieved by sinking into routine and oblivion, into ‘the distractions of life’. The narrator says: ‘Oblivion is the most hideous affliction that torments a man, but, in order to live, we must sometimes deliberately forget and impose this [hideous affliction] upon ourselves’ (p. 76).
Oblivion is intimately associated with loss. It is a tragic sense of absence that is part of the human condition in general and of the Jewish existence in particular. Forgetting means losing one’s connection to the past. Kafka sees it as a shattering of the generation chain, which creates anxiety.32 In ‘“He”: Notes from the year 1920’ Kafka wrote: ‘All that he does seems to him, it is true, extraordinarily new, but also, because of the incredible spate of new things, extraordinarily amateurish, indeed scarcely tolerable, incapable of becoming history, breaking short the chain of the generations, cutting off for the first time at its most profound source the music of the world, which before him could at least be divined’.33 The theme of metamorphosis is also present in the title story of the collection I, They and Ambivalence. In this story the Jews who immigrate to Israel lose their humanity and turn into sheep. Is this a hint at the existential condition of the Jewish people, who live like sheep among wolves, similarly to Kafka’s lamb-cat? The sheep may also represent the changes that the Jewish nation has undergone. In Kafka’s ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’, the elusive, unidentified creature represents a memory of something that has been lost. The animal cannot be identified because oblivion has prevailed, and fewer and fewer people uphold the tradition.34 In ‘I, They and Ambivalence’, ‘Aziza the Mourner (‘Aziza al-‘Addada) accompanies the Jews as they
31 William Kluback, Franz Kafka: Challenges and Confrontations (New York
1993), 91–2.
32 Ofek, Kafka, 123, 141.
33 Franz Kafka, Description of a Struggle and the Great Wall of China (London
1960), 290.
34 Ofek, Kafka, 141.
leave their homeland. Her presence is necessary, because ‘within every soul there is a corpse that is being accompanied [to the grave]’ (p.
187). The stench of death stifles ‘Aziza, and she cries: ‘The beginning is black and the end is black’ (p. 188). The narrator wonders: ‘Is ‘Aziza the Mourner aware of the pearls that are emerging from her mouth? Does this mourner know that she is expressing the wisdom of the ages and that she is uttering the most profound truth ever expressed by a [human] tongue?’ (p. 188).
The Metamorphosis of the Father Figure
For both Naqqash and Kafka, the theme of metamorphosis is
closely associated with the issue of authority. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Judgement both involve a father-son relationship. In both stories, the father initially appears to be a very authoritative figure, whereas the son is weak and browbeaten. But later a reversal occurs: the father is exposed as old and pathetic. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor recalls his father napping uncomfortably in his filthy uniform: ‘His uniform, which was not brand-new to start with, began to look dirty, despite all the loving care of the mother and sister to keep it clean, and Gregor often spent whole evenings gazing at the many greasy spots on the garment, gleaming with gold buttons always in a high state of polish, in which the old man sat sleeping in extreme discomfort and yet quite peacefully’.35 The collapse of the father-figure is also central to Naqqash’s story ‘The Death of Santa Claus’, which discusses the world of childhood from the perspective of an adult. Again, we see that the adult narrator’s world is complicated and tangled, whereas the world of early childhood is blissful.36 The father, at first depicted as a strong and authoritative figure, begins to change as the family’s financial situation deteriorates. He experiences a profound mental crisis that undermines his paternal authority in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, and retreats into himself, neglecting his physical appearance. Within a few years, this process of spiritual and physical decline results in his death (p. 45).
As in The Metamorphosis, the transformation leads to death. The father’s departure, in turn, entails a loss of security and certainty for his family. His death is not quick but slow and painful; the story is
35 Kafka, Selected Short Stories, 66–7.
36 Snir, Arabness, 208.
replete with expressions of dying, perdition, pain, and silence (‘the silence of bewilderment’).
The description of the father reflects his deep depression: ‘In the large room, the father [lay] withdrawn, still in his night clothes, his face covered with short prickly hairs that no knife had touched for several days’ (p. 42). When the children rush in to tell him that Santa Claus has not brought them any gifts, he fails to respond and remains silent. The boy’s cry (‘Speak, father. Why is this happening? Why is this happening?’ — p. 42) expresses his horror at the father’s silence: he expects to find someone to lean on, but instead finds his father bereft of all power and authority. The shelter the boy is seeking is at once near and far: his father is right there beside him, yet he is unable to protect him or help him. The boy is horrified to see his father
weep, and when the father promises that he will do all he can to see Santa punished, the boy does not believe him, for he understands that his father is now no match for Santa Claus. The motif of the father’s death — which is also the loss of God and of faith — is possibly another echo of Kafka in Naqqash’s stories.
Baruch Kurzweil notes that, in Kafka’s works, ‘there is undoubtedly a psychological connection between the perception of the father and the perception of God’. He writes: ‘The way to God is blocked for Kafka, because Jewish tradition has lost its essence (Jewish tradition passes from father to son, hence the importance of the father figure). Thus, he lives in alienation from Judaism, experiencing the doubtful existence of a Jew detached from the roots of his faith’.37 At the moment of the father’s death, the child feels that one part of his life is over (his childhood, which was characterized by happiness, security and a sense of belonging), and a new era is beginning: one of fear, alienation and vulnerability.
Naqqash’s story ‘The Return’ (al-‘Awda), in the collection The Story of Every Time and Place (Îikayat kull zaman wa-makan)38, also presents a father-son conflict. Here, too, the motifs of metamorphosis and dehumanization are present, namely the gradual decline of man into beast. The father is described as a ‘despised old man’ (p. 42), who attempts to impose his will on his son but grows gradually weaker until he becomes nothing more than a ‘filthy cricket’ or a ‘constantly barking dog’ in his son’s eyes (p. 43). The son coldly plans to kill his father, guided by the words of his teacher Kamil, who
37 Kurzweil, Treatise, 331.
38 S. Naqqash, The Story of Every Time and Place (Jerusalem 1978) (Arabic),
38–59.
tells him: ‘We have put an end to the legend and to the false spector of God. When the roots die, the branches crumble of their own accord’ (p. 46). This sentence reflects the analogy between the God figure and the father figure as symbols of authority. The story again ends with a metamorphosis: the son turns into an ape, and, amazingly, he is happy. His happiness derives from his return to his roots: ‘There, in the middle of the pack [of apes], a face with prominent fangs that reminds me of my real father’ (p. 58).
In the story ‘Abousi Lord of the Worlds’ (‘Abbusi Rabb al-‘Alamin), in the collection The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried,39 the protagonist is a Muslim man who, following his father’s death, becomes addicted to drugs and grapples with existential questions.
This is not a mystical story; rather, it portrays the inner world of a
man who, abused by those around him, finds an outlet in fantasy.
His hallucinations become ever more detached from reality, until, in a final act of ecstasy, he leaps from the roof of a building to his death.40 The story involves a two-way metamorphosis: from man to god and then back again. ‘Abbusi yearns to transcend the worldly and attain the divine. He longs to escape the fate of man, who is a creature weak and wretched, a slave to his own instincts and destined to die. He believes he can attain the sublime by killing his reason, and learns his mistake only after he has done so. Then he feels fear and emptiness, but ‘the voice’ — a disembodied presence that accompanies him in his quest for the divine — assures him, telling him that he has not killed his reason but only ‘the worm’. The worm apparently represents the earthly human aspect that ‘Abbusi is attempting to shed. And indeed, after killing it, he is filled with a sense of purity.
He feels that a pure river is flowing through his mind, and that he has become a super-human being, disdainfully aloof from other humans who are wretched and earthly (p. 141).
Eventually, however, ‘Abbusi comes to realize that he must not try to escape or transcend his humanity; rather, he must discard his illusions and accept that man’s true existence is one without freedom, power or glory — for these qualities are God’s alone. Sobering from his delusions of grandeur, he experiences a crisis of faith in his own power. He transforms from a god into a ‘mosquito’. Though these thoughts lead him to the conclusion that death is the only truth, he
39 S. Naqqash, The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried (Jerusalem
1980) (Arabic).
40 Snir, Arabness, 220–1.
does not take the final, almost inevitable, step of concluding that human life has no meaning. At the last moment, he shakes off his dreary thoughts, and at the instant of his leap to his death, he is happy, for he has regained his awareness of his true dimensions (p. 154).
Like other motifs in Naqqash’s works, the motif of authority carries both a universal meaning and a more particular, local one, specific to the Jewish community, and especially to the Jews of Iraq and Israel. The decline of authority — manifest in the loss of religious faith and the collapse of the authoritative father figure — is an issue that concerns the Jew but also modern man in general. As mentioned, the decline of the father is related to the decline of faith in God.
The loss of faith gives rise to existential fears, which man suppressed
and overcame for many generations by means of his faith in a protecting God.
Conclusion
Baruch Kurzweil writes that few works of modern literature provide as profound and shocking an expression of existential anguish as Kafka’s writings do. Kafka exposes the depths of the human psyche and the irrational power of evil.41 He describes the despair and the orphaned state of modern man, which is characterized by a profound transformation and a regression into a demonic mythology. The metamorphosis is a fantastic conception that attempts to unite the past and present and bridge the abyss of oblivion.42 It is this oblivion that brings disaster upon humanity.
Kafka reveals the absurdity of human existence on two levels: the national Jewish level — i.e. the absurdity of the modern Jewish existence that renounces religion — and the universal level — i.e. the absurdity of human existence in general. (The Trial, for example, presents modern man as living a life devoid of meaning, purpose, certainty or protection. Bereft of a family circle, Josef K. yearns for a normal life and for natural and healthy relations with those around him. In The Judgment, the son, the protagonist, is unable to form relationships with others).
One of the most prominent characteristics of Kafka’s works is that everything takes place in a constant tension between reality and
41 Kurzweil, Treatise, 307–8.
42 Ofek, Kafka, 141.
fantasy, between existence and illusion, between the given and the implied. Kafka removes the mask that men don as they attempt to solve the problems of existence.43 The details, as they are described, are not necessarily part of the real world but are rather the reflection of a complex inner world.44 Examining Naqqash’s works alongside Kafka’s, we find that his stories too focus on a specific local reality, but at the same time embrace universal truths that characterize the existence of man in the twentieth century. They describe that fate of man living in an insecure and unprotected world, amid the illusions of his reason and his scientific achievements, after the collapse of his spiritual and religious world.45 Following Kafka, Naqqash presents events and characters which
reflect his perception that reality is two-fold, i.e. consists of an overt level and a covert one. The overt reality may be attractive and pleasing to the eye and to the senses, or it may be the opposite: hideous and repulsive. But this overt level does not necessarily reflect the nature of the covert one. The author presents a gallery of characters from the fringes of society, who are poor, wretched and filthy — beneath their rough exterior they are true and sincere. Conversely, he describes characters who hide their ignoble natures behind a mask of beauty and virtue.
Most of Naqqash’s stories depict the world of Iraqi Jews, and, like Kafka’s works, they present Jewish reality as absurd, grotesque and demonic. However, the specific realities also take on a symbolic-philosophical meaning. Naqqash examines two kinds of relationships: between man and man, and between man and God. The former relationships are generally characterized by aggression, treachery, uncertainty and dehumanization.46 Examining the latter relationship, Naqqash depicts man’s pathetic and failing quest for atonement, purification, and closeness to God’s forgiveness. But the encounter with God only reveals the uncertain, treacherous and ugly face of reality. Having lost God’s protection, man is condemned to his corrupt and helpless humanity.
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43 Kurzweil, Treatise, 307.
44 Loeb, Franz Kafka, 207.
45 Debi-Guri, ‘Samir Naqqash’, 597.
46 Debi-Guri, ‘Samir Naqqash’, 582–3.