Briefly

"As Nabokov himself once established with entomological diagrams, Kafka had no clear picture of what his insect looked like. On the other hand, he probably had a clear picture of the framed magazine picture on Gregor’s wall (‘a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer’) and the ‘cool, leather sofa’ and the cigarettes and the textile samples. No matter how you showed the insect, it would be a lie. But physical things, the mass-produced brothers and sisters, have a certain truth. Like Orthodox icons, they are ‘images not made by hands’: symbols that are also somehow identical to the things they represent...."

From Elif Batuman's Diary, in the LRB, available here.