“The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.” So wrote Franz Kafka to his publisher in 1915, objecting to a proposed illustration to The Metamorphosis. The transformation of Kafka’s anti-hero Gregor Samsa into a monstrous bug may be among the most memorable images of modern literature, but the author took pains to ensure that its edges would remain blurred. Vladimir Nabokov was having none of it: in his teaching copy of the novella, he drew a sketch of a common beetle.
Kafka’s fugitive entomology is the most famous example of his writing’s visual evasiveness. To read his fiction is to feel one’s way through a world set to low resolution, in which the promise of sharper definition always hovers at a remove. What, if anything, do his characters look like? Or the castle that Josef K cannot reach? When it came to appearances, Kafka wrote with a calculated imprecision that evokes, even recapitulates for the reader, the perplexities that his protagonists face. “The objects and faces in [the Kafka world] may be vague,” WH Auden wrote, “but the reader feels himself hemmed in by their suffocating presence: in no other imaginary world, I think, is everything so heavy.”