Metamorphosis 1

BOOK 1

one

the metamorphosis a spatial investigation of Franz Kafka’s acclaimed novel

The Glasgow School of Art | MDes Interior Design 2013-14 | Andriana Themeli

BOOK 1 introduction 5

theatre as narrative device 9

exhibition. the new theatre 11

the project 13

the author 19

the novel 23

analysis 25

11 aspects of metamorphosis 30

‘A great writer turns his/her reader into an architect who keeps erecting rooms, buildings and entire cities in his imagination as the story progresses.’ - Juhani Pallasmaa -

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introduction

‘...space is only perceived when a subject describes it.’

- Steven Holl

Narrative has always been a fundamental aspect of spatial design. From the paleolithic cave paintings in the cages of Lascaux to the postmodern iconism, architecture has been a tool for telling stories, communicating messages and encoding –or even decoding- cultural values and trends.

It is not that architecture has the need to play such a role. It is the inevitable human habit though, to create links and associations in almost every part of the built environment. Not only these associations create a common ground for societies to communicate but also reflect and embody the hopes and fears of each era.

The most fascinating aspect though about this fundamental role of spatial design is the questions of perception that are raised due to the subjectivity of the observer. The “parallax view”, thus the perception of an object –or event- in dependence of our position towards it, constitutes architectural narrative rather diverse and multifaceted.

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FROM IMAGE TO SPACE In his book “Manhattan Transcripts”, Bernard Tschumi defines the event as the substance of architectural space, in contrast with the prevailing –at that time- notion that form and function “lead” the design. His drawings, between reality and fantasy, aim at transcribing things that are not typically included in architectural representations. That is the space between objects and events. In Tschumi’s work, cinematic vocabulary finds its ideal representation in the architectural context. The designer, through the orchestration of elements, movements, views, becomes a kind of director. Cinematic techniques (framing, zooming, focusing, superimposing etc.) now become architectural gestures.

In fact, the location of the pieces of the program is architecture. In other words, this was not unlike writing a script for a film: one could have a murder at the beginning and a murder at the end, or two murders in the middle.

- Bernard Tschumi

FROM TEXT TO SPACE Literature has always been a source of inspiration for architects. It is the transition from the immaterial to material that triggers the mind and excites the imagination of the designer.

Steven Holl through his long investigation on the phenomenologal space, tries to link narrative and architecture in many of his projects. In “Martha’s Vineyard” house, for instance, the concept of the design evolves from a passage of Herman Miller’s “Moby Dick”. The architect, envisaged the description of the author about an Indian tribe and proposed a particular type of dwelling that formed the basis of his proposal.

In a similar way, Ricardo Bofill referenced Franz Kafka’s book “The Castle” in one of his housing projects, trying to capture the atmosphere of the author’s obsessions and thoughts.

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Kafka Castle, 1968 Ricardo Bofill

above: Steven Holl, House at Martha’s Vineyard below: Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts

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THEATRE AS NARRATIVE DEVICE

Theatre, as a form of art, has been created on the basis of narrating stories to an audience. Performance, speech and movement, are the main channels to communicate ideas and sentiments.

The architectural typology of theatre space is established on the relation between audience and stage. This relation, in recent years, has been doubted numerous times in order to investigate different, more challenging interractions between spectator and spectacle. Many decades ago, Antonin Artaud, a well-known playwriter and theatre director, stating that theatre should represent reality, he demanded that a separation between audience and performer should be lifted and different aspects of the space of action to be integrated.

Numerous experimentations have been made throughout recent years in expanding the audience’s role in theatrical plays. The London-based team Punchdrunk in its last project The Drowned Man: A Hollywood fable directed the spectators as well as the spectacle. The play was performed in loop among a 4-strorey industrial building and the visitors were invited to wander around the sets, explore different spaces, attend the plot from

The Drowned Man: A Hollywood fable

2013, Punchdrunk

different aspects in a fragmented but definitely enriched experience. The spectator strolls from one space to the other, follows the actors he chooses to and even intervenes in the action. In this innovative approach, the audience abandons the theatre seats and gets radically involved in the storytelling. It is here that the idea of the “parallax view� finds its best representation in theatre.

The ever-changing position of the viewer reveals new, unknown aspects of the action taking place on stage. In his effort to describe this phenomenon, Antonin Artaud compares the audience with snakes, ready to vibrate in the music played by the director-snakecharmer.

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“Novecento” (1997) by Maurizio Cattelan

exhibition. the new theatre

What is exhibition design? Exhibition design is a field of practice that embodies what Richard Buchanan has described as the 4 orders of design: objects, symbols, interactions and environments *(2001, 2005)*. The main goal is to shape the experience, to utilise space, movement, and memory, to facilitate multilayered communication.

If the dawn of the idea of exhibition goes back to the 17th century and the habit of people to expose objects that were considered expotic and rare, nowadays, exhibition has entered almost any aspect of cultural life while has been used excessively for the strategic needs of the globalized market.

An exhibition opens a collective memory and it activates the individual imagination.From the visitors point of view, exhibitions offer a multitude of positions with a multitude of perspectives.

What is more, mnemonic processes are of a highly discontinuous nature and follow the path of associations, led by external stimuli and suggestions. Which is exactly what an exhibition is: an orchestrated path of associations through a landscape of things and thoughts. The visitor walks along this path and perceives it through a kaleidoscope of ever-changing perspectives during a random interval.

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Exhibition, after all, is complementary of theatre. As Frank den Oudsten claims "the theatre and the exhibition both construct an island of the extraordinary, a situation where physical presence is essential.

For that reason, both require moving to a place that has been charged with meaning for a specific occasion". One can notice that exhibition and theatre come even closer in the case of "postdramatic" experience. In other words, and as firstly coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, postdramatic is the type of theatre that uses a multitude of languages and signs to adress an open field of associations and interpretations. So, what about "predramatic" exhibition?

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the project

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‘I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them like an organ.’

- Alfred Hitchcock -

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In order to investigate all the aforementioned and place my research in a context, a temporary, "movable" installation, a "post-dramatic theatrical exhibition" for Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is proposed.

A series of chambers offer to the visitor a spatial experience based on the acclaimed novel. Here, the lines of the book are transformed into space, sound, material, movement.

The choice of “Metamorphosis” is made after taking into account a series of considerations. The relatively short length of the novel, the first-person narrative as well as the popularity and awareness of the story by a wide audience, constitute this book an appropriate choice. Moreover, Franz Kafka’s fame and his unique position in international literature make this project being not only a research targeted on a book but a wider problematic about one author’s universe.

Nowhere, 2011,

D. Papaioannou Dimitris Papaioannou, one of the most acclaimed greek choreographers, in his work Nowhere, commented on the role of the audience by setting the stage as the main entrance to the theatre. Thus, the spectators entering the theatre for the latter show (9p.m.) became part of the act for the audience who had just attended the former (7p.m.).

This research project raises questions about the relationship between literature and architecture, between narrative and space. The objective of the project is to identify the importance of storytelling in the context of interior design and at the same time, investigate the relationship between spectator and spectacle, in order to challenge the traditional ways of perceiving an event and propose a new way of experiencing the happening.

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PROGRAMME & STRUCTURE The rooms are placed in a linear array, so that they create a lengthy, rectangular installation space that can be hosted in urban squares, arenas, spacy venues or parks. Each chapter of the installation consists a separate and autonomous structure, as each chapter of the book is explicitly defined, consisting of almost 33 pages. The transitions from one chapter to the other is made through a zone of exterior space that segments but also organizes the narrative into 3 parts.

In terms of structure, the design of each space follows a grid of 1.50X7 m. so that all the rooms are “inscribed� and supported by an external scaffolding system, totally assemblable and transferable. Almost all the architectural spaces are built with the use of plasterboard or similar panelled low-cost materials.

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chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

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WORKS 1912 Metamorphosis 1913 Meditation (short stories) 1916 The Judgement 1925 The Trial 1926 The Castle 1927 Amerika

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the author

“many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self”

Born on July 1883, in Prague, Kafka grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. After studying law at the University of Prague, he worked in insurance and wrote in the evenings. He had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major effect on his writing. In 1923, he moved to Berlin to focus on writing, but died of tuberculosis shortly after.

“all language is but a poor translation”

Only a few of Kafka’s works were published during his lifetime. Most of his works were published posthumously, mostly by his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka’s wish to have the manuscripts destroyed. His books are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent–child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy, and mystical transformations.

- franz kafka

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Walter Benjamin, in his Illuminations, refers the two ways for one to miss the point of Kafka’s works. “One is to interpret them naturally, the other is the supernatural interpretation. Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points.”

If a book were like an acorn, it would mean that each book would have to become an oak tree and only an oak tree. That book would have only one option—to grow up or down—and so it would be limited; it wouldn't be as great a book as it could be, because there would only be one meaning and one interpretation.

The reading that Benjamin proposes for Kafka’s work is clear from the outset and is charactrized -no less than that of Deleuze and Guattari- by never trying to find archetypes that claim to have “qualified” Kafka’s “imaginary” or to interpret his work by moving from the unknown back to the known: the Castle is God, the world of the father, power that cannot be grasped; the cockroach is anxiety, castration, the dreamworld and its multiple metamorphoses, and so forth.

But was is still more striking, neither does Benjamin try -he doesn’t consider it useful or necessary- to relate Kafka’s work to a structure with performedformal oppositions and a signifier of the kind in which “after all is said and done, x refers to y!” Not at all. The reading of Kafka both in Benjamin and in Deleuze and Guattari is determined by the prominence they give to a politics of kafka; but, as Deleuze and Guattari go to articulate, this politics is “neither imaginary nor symbolic.”

Deleuze & Guattari

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kafkesque

The Encarta encyclopedia defines “Kafkaesque” as “grotesque, anxiety-producing social conditions or their treatment in literature”. Overly complex in seemingly pointless, impersonal and often disturbing, the term has been established in the vocabulary of art criticism.

“What’s Kafkaesque,” he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.

“You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.”

Frederick R. Karl

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“when gregor samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.�

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the novel

TYPE · Short story/novella GENRE · Absurdism LANGUAGE · German TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN · Prague, 1912 DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION · 1915 PUBLISHER · Kurt Wolff Verlag NARRATOR · anonymous POINT OF VIEW third person, focusing primarily on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of Gregor Samsa.

TONE flat and unchanging, neutral SETTING (TIME) Unspecified, possibly late-nineteenth or early twentieth century SETTING (PLACE) The Samsa family’s apartment

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summary The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a large, monstrous insect-like creature.

The rest of Kafka’s novel deals with Gregor’s attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repulsed by the horrible, verminous creature Gregor has become.

structure The book consists of 3 chapters. The story is told through the thoughts of Gregor Samsa, the main character. Each of the chapters describes a fight between himself and his family.

characters Gregor Samsa Grete Samsa (sister) Mr. Samsa (father) Mrs. Samsa (mother)

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ANALYSIS Despite the fact that the original, german title of the book is closer to be translated as “transformation”, the chosen english title probably links Kafka’s work with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a series of stories describing mythical characters who are punished for sexual misbehaviour by being turned into plants and animals.

above: Apollo and Daphne ( c.1680–85) , Bernini

Zoomorphism describes the attribution of animal characteristics to humans or humanlike beings. Its tradition dates back beyond historical memory, as even the earliest religions and cultures tell stories of gods transforming into animals, or appearing in animal form. As an extension to this, every language has a lot of common animal associations. A sly person is a fox, a hard worker is a horse, a dishonest person is a snake, a coward is a chicken.

The same happens with the protagonist, Gregor Samsa.

Gregor transforms into an insect because that is how he behaves in his real life.

His anxiety about not being noticed, his daily routine and the repetitive and vain nature of his profession suggest that Gregor Samsa is a kind of bug. At the same time, Kafka is using zoomorphism in order to make an overt statement on the nature of middle-class life. Not to forget that he wrote the novel in a time where the modern way of living was raising questions about issues of alienation, anxiety and identity.

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The dispassionate tone (neutrality) of the narrator intensifies these feelings.

Kafka is using the concept of metamorphosis for three main reasons: 1) in order to set obstacles to the reading, 2) in order to seek the effect of strangeness and 3) for looking for his own space in reality.

Metamorphosis is used in an unexpected way in the novel. While from the very first lines of the book, we encounter the Metamorphosis of the protagonist into a bug, Kafka seems to have a rather different point of view. His irony lies in the fact that he choses to leave aside Gregor’s obvious change and focus on the metamorphosis of his family. Shaken by the horryfying happening, the parents as well as the hero’s sister reveal their true self. What happens next, is that Gregor, although transformed into a lowest creature, he still remains with the kindest of human feelings and thoughts. He is so innoncent he does not even manage to discover his insect wings...

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above: “Mental Wealth� commercial for Sony PlayStation,(1999) Chris Cunningham

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Besides the theme of metamorphosis, the novel deals with two more typical kafkesque topics, bureocracy and the father figure.

The bureaucratic triangle forms itself progressively. First, the director who comes to to menace and to demand; then the father who has resumed his work at the bank and who sleeps in his uniform, demonstrating the external power that he is still in submission to as if even at home he was “only at the beck and call of his superior” and finally, in a single moment, the intrusion of the three bureaucrat lodgers who penetrate the family itself, taking up his roles, sitting “where formerly Gregor and his father and mother had taken their meals.” And as a correlate of all of this, the whole becoming-animal of Gregor, his becoming beetle, junebug,dungbeetle, cockroach, which traces an intense line of flight in relation to the familial triangle but especially in relation to the bureaucratic and commercial triangle.

Insofar as the father figure is concerned, father is the one who punishes; guilt attracts him as it does the court officials. As Walter Benjamin explains in his book Illuminations: “There is much to indicate that the worls of the officials and the world of the fathers are the same to Kafka. In the same way the fathers in Kafka’s strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites.”

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One can say that the main concepts explored in the novel are: - the difficulties of living in a modern society - the struggle for acceptance when in need - the fragility of justice and mercy - the absurdity of life and the disconnect between mind and body

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11 aspects of metamorphosis

bureocracy identity repulsion chase hiding/crawling/peeping clearance throwing apples feeling neglected the violin betrayal death

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