ALTHOUGH KAFKA DISTRUSTS his own gift for metaphor, he resorts to metaphorical language both in his fiction and in his autobiographical writings. Metaphors occur to him in what W. B. Yeats called the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” and his fiction often germinates from intensely personal images. We can watch him experimenting in his diaries with a tangle of often tormented images, which he, metaphorically of course, likens to the Gordian knot.

In Kafka studies, where there has been much discussion about metaphor, the pendulum can swing too far, obliterating the partial validity of previous perspectives. Thanks to Stanley Corngold, few of us are now likely to accept without qualification Günther Anders’s once widely accepted notion that Kafka’s narratives are literalized metaphors. Yet if we carry this rejection of the role of figurative language to extremes, we risk losing sight of Kafka’s gift for metaphor. This debate in Kafka studies parallels the lively discussions about metaphor in recent decades, not only in literary studies but also in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. Heeding the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s insistence on the need to recognize “the place and role of feeling in the metaphorical process,” I shall focus here on the manner in which Kafka brings self-conscious craft to bear on intimate obsessions, thereby transforming private images into enduring metaphors.

Kafka’s explicit comments about metaphor might admittedly seem to undermine the case for the centrality of metaphor in his creative process. His criticism of images can be trenchant, as in the often-quoted diary entry of 6 December 1922, prompted by a metaphor in a letter in which he had likened writing to a fire that gives off warmth: