Free Finding a Form by William H. Gass

butterfly at the end. Let the Realist worry about bedbugs and their bite; the Idealist will study Jewish family relations, and he will see that the name “Samsa” contains “sam,” that is, seed, or the cock’s roach.
    Meanwhile, the Romantic will have understood the sentence to be really about the author’s own condition, for isn’t he the put-upon person who has to work like a menial when his spirit would be free? Kafka writes about Kafka principally, and only secondarily about Gregor Samsa and his plight; or, if you insist on some theoretical intent, also about the anxieties inherent in the human condition. But of course I have gone too far.
The Metamorphosis
does not reveal Kafka; rather, it delivers to us the consciousness presupposed by its creation. This consciousness is a construction, it must be admitted, and its distance from its swearing, sweating, farting namesake is substantial. This distance—this difference—is also the reason why we often admire an author whom, as a citizen or a biographical subject, we can scarcely endure; or, to point to the problem from its opposite end, why we occasionally wish some dear sweet friend were a better writer, even at the expense of their sweetness, and even if the friendship were to bend.
    A fully felt fictional world must be at least three-dimensional, and bounded by the Real, the Ideal, and the Romantic. But there is, as we know, a fourth dimension, and I tend to emphasize it, not only because of its neglect, but also because it is the country to which I have fled, and that safe haven is the medium itself. There, if we are a Methodologist (my term for my type), we shall have found the other dimensions in miniature already, since the word rests nowhere but on the pedestal of its referent (Gregor Samsa, the bedded bug person); there it measures its mass by the numberand nature of its range of meanings (all the definitions of “metamorphosis,” for instance: the scientific, the poetic, the philosophical, the religious); nor is any word spoken without a speaker, or written without a writer (at least it has a human source); consequently every utterance has a cause and, one presumes, a reason as well, so if we are content to explain the nature of any particular part of a text by appealing to the rest, we nevertheless have to turn to the author for the answer: why did you write
The Metamorphosis
when you could have been engaged in something harmless like a game of golf?
    A Methodologist (for whom the medium is the muse) will reformulate traditional esthetic problems in terms of language. Crudely put: in this milieu point of view has to do with the deployment of pronouns, character with the establishment of linguistic centers to which and from which meanings flow; themes are built with universals, and their enrichment depends upon the significance of a text beyond its surface sense; perceptions will appear to be fresh and precise if denotation is managed well; energy is expressed by verbal beat, through sentence length and Anglo-Saxon or Latin vocabulary choice; feeling arises particularly from such things as rhythm and alliteration, although every element of language plays a role; thought is constructed out of concepts and their interconnections; imagination involves the management of metaphor at every level; narrative reliability rises or falls with the influence of modal operators; form can be found in the logic of the language—its grammar, scansion, symmetries, rhetorical schema, and methods of variation; and each of the qualities I have just listed, along with many others, can be used to give to a text its desirable complement of four dimensions.
    So even if you hope to find some lasting security inside language, and believe that your powers are at their peak there, if nowhere else, despair and disappointment will dog you still; for neither you nor your weaknesses, nor the world and its villains, will have been banished just because, now, it is in syllables and