MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE, VOL. 44, NO. 3–4. © 2011 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE ASSOCIATION Kafka’s Verwandlung, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus , and the Limits of Metaphorical Language 1 Rebecca Schuman The Ohio State University The goal of interpreting Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung is often to add another to what Mark Anderson has aptly termed the “negative ininity” of the text’s metaphorical “meanings” (155). But the development of Gregor Samsa’s corporeal and familial (and social, economic, ethnic, or religious) transformation is, in addition to this metaphorical richness, also an exceptional demonstration of how Kafka conceives metaphor itself. In this article, I would like to offer a novel re-examination of Kafka’s metaphor, novel because it is aided by a source readers may at irst assume has little to offer it: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus. 2 Though the Tractatus’s most dramatic moment is itself expressed in metaphor—Wittgenstein implores us to “throw away the ladder” of philosophical language after we have climbed it (6.54)—Wittgenstein’s text does not concern itself in the least with the workings of literary language. 3 Instead, it details a radical skepticism bent on deposing philosophical language, concluding that all propositions (Sätze) outside the scientiic realm are nonsensical (“unsinnig”) (Tractatus 6.54). But it turns out that Wittgenstein’s attack on philosophical sense actually has a great deal to offer those who seek to interpret Kafka, for it is through the study of Wittgenstein’s attempts to transform our comfortable preconceptions about what makes literal sense that we can then see how Die Verwandlung also transforms our equally comfortable preconceptions about what is at stake in Kafka’s literary language, namely, metaphorical sense. This discovery in turn provides a fascinating entry point for Wittgenstein and the analytic tradition into areas of literary study from which such philosophy is usually excluded. Die Verwandlung and Metaphorical Sense The concept of metaphorical sense may at irst seem like a misnomer. Whereas literal sense is itself far from indelible (as several hundred years of the philo- sophy of language will attest), there is at least a casual, common idea of what it might be. 4 However, despite sounding counterintuitive, the sensicality of meta- phorical language is actually a common, vital, and cohesive idea, one upon which most works of literature depend. 5 Kafka’s work in particular thrives precisely on creating narrative elements that cannot make literal sense in a realistically narrated universe, but must make some other kind of sense so as to be recognized as prose narration rather than outright gibberish. These elements include not only