No matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat; another poor fellow is turned into a beetle — so what?
There is no rational answer to so what. We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lecture on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”