More than Metaphor
Dreams as Metaphor:
Understanding dreaming as a giant metaphor-machine alienates the dreamer from his dreams and, according to Kafka, his inner self. Critical theorist, Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari address the inclination to explain abstractions through metaphor, and its limitations. “‘Metaphors are on of the things that make me despair of literature.’[Kafka] Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less that all designation. Metamorphosis is contrary to metaphor” (Deleuze 22). He does this by eliminating the need for a tenor and vehicle to carry meaning- he simply offers text which can be taken as is and affect the reader.
Deleuze and Guattari marked Kafka scholarship by acclaiming the positive and even joyous elements his work. Their undertaking of Kafka involved an immersion in his world, not a fight to relate it to ours, and without the fundamental bias that his is exclusive of ours. “We believe in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests and experience.” (Deleuze 7) “Experience” and “tests” are interactive; they are dependant on the fact that the things being tested exist in the same world as the tester or observer.
In his introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams Robertson hints at this point in the context of dreaming:
At least some dreams, however, have not only a function but also a meaning which may be apparent in the manifest content. There need be no universal key, no system of symbols to explain this meaning; a dream has been successfully interpreted when its meaning suddenly clicks for the dreamer (Robertson xxxii)
He makes room for such a reading of Freud, that there can be meaning without interpretation, as long as the dreamer (or reader in our case) finds a means to relate to the material. But Freud, in describing the unique quality of “dream-thought” as completely and singularity distinct from waking-thought, claims that “it is qualitatively something completely different from it, and so at first not comparable to it.” And that dream-thought “confines itself to reshaping” (329). Freud never found a way to relate without imposing a standard interpretation. Kafka’s texts have been the butt of hundreds of Freudian-guided interpretations, all of which in essence deny the “manifest content” of his stories.
Dreams are not objectified in Kafka’s work, they are not used. His relationship with dreaming is not rooted in some sympathy for the dream, nor is it the result of reckless anthropomorphization of the phenomenon. Kafka understands that the part of the self that is exhibited in the dream is indispensable and indiscernible from the whole of the person. He does not resort to allegory, even when a man wakes up one morning as a giant vermin, “Kafka’s animals… correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions” (Deleuze 13).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The original image for the cartoon can be found at http://lrrc3.sas.upenn.edu/popcult/metaphor/BACKSTAB.JPG
Read more:
Kafka Meets Freud... and Whatever that Means: Introducing the link between them
Just what makes Kafka so Kafkaesque?
One popular (and quite possibly missguided) way of reading Kafka’s Dreams:
More than Metaphor
A Country Doctor: How Many Lit Critics does it take screw in some meaning?
Kafka on Trial: THE TRIAL and its Potentiality
Concluding (Somewhat) Inconclusively
Further Reading
About Me