METAPHORS

Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, turns into a giant insect. The event is never explained, but underneath the absurd premises and unaffected narration lies an emotional weight that pushes the story beyond pure fantasy. An intrusion of logic would only sour the taste and lead to mental bloating. Likewise, our attempts to interpret such narratives as extensive metaphors for something clear and concrete are just as lazy as taking them at face value. These stories aren’t simple puzzles hiding a neat solution. They are intricate constructions, unfolding in a new design for each and every reader, as the world unfolds differently to every observer.

On the subject of metaphors, Kafka had this to say: “Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing. Writing’s lack of independence of the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled by their own laws; only writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and a despair.”

Roberto Bolaño concludes his lecture “Literature + Illness = Illness” thus: “[..] Kafka understood that travel, sex and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be—a book, an expression, a misplaced object—in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck the new, which has been there all along.”

To write original fiction is to study everything that has been written before us, and to repeat us in a way that hasn't been done before. Needless to say, it's an impossible task, but one that must be attempted anyway, for all that is contained within the inevitable failure.

ASSIGNMENT 8: SHORT STORY

Write and illustrate a short story in any style or fashion, as long as it fits into a single page.

It may be one elaborate illustration with a caption, a page of comics, or something else involving pictures and words.

Format: 8,5x11” vertical