Lit on NYC Subways

Frank Kafka

Kafka on the Train

Passengers on the New York City subway may be startled to behold, at 9 A.M., the following announcement:

AS GREGOR SAMSA AWOKE ONE MORNING FROM UNEASY DREAMS HE FOUND HIMSELF TRANSFORMED IN HIS BED INTO A GIANT INSECT.

This message, part of the M.T.A.’s Train of Thought series, cannot be faulted for conventionality—not in a city concerned about train-jumpers and anguished over bedbugs. Stark and chilling, it abstains from the strategies that traditionally anchor the didactic poster. Is it possible that the subway wizards are getting too clever, that in their self-described efforts to “enlighten millions of New York commuters” they are ditching “inspirational” and reaching for “inspired”?

According to Alicia Martinez, the M.T.A.’s marketing director, the process for selecting quotes for Train of Thought is “elaborate.” Until recently, the M.T.A. outsourced its quote search to a committee of Columbia professors led by Henry Pinkham, the dean of the graduate school. Pinkham says that his committee split with the M.T.A. earlier this year, though, in part because the professors pushed for material the M.T.A. deemed too sensitive. He specifically remembers a famous line from Shakespeare being shot down because it contained the word “flood,” which sets off alarm bells in the subway world. (Martinez denies worrying about “flood,” suggesting that a word like “fire” would be far more likely to raise hackles.) Although the Kafka quote was selected after Columbia’s schism with the M.T.A., Pinkham said his committee “would have been happy to recommend it.”

Now the M.T.A. relies on quote-sleuths drawn from the staff of the New York Public Library and the faculty of N.Y.U. Jane Tylus, a professor of Italian who coördinates N.Y.U.’s quote-gathering, says she was instructed to find quotes that are “compelling” and “usable,” a mandate that has, on occasion, kept her up till 2 A.M. thumbing through old copies of Herodotus and Thucydides. She says she has received some “wacky stuff” from colleagues, including one professor who submitted his twelve-year-old daughter’s thoughts on the meaning of life. But Tylus says the Kafka selection came in before N.Y.U. got involved. Still, she approves of it, saying when she first saw it she had “a wonderful moment” of being “transported back to junior year in high school.”

So who is the progenitor of our gloom? The Book Bench has discovered that the Kafka quote slipped in during the brief interregnum between Columbia and N.Y.U. Which is to say, it’s an M.T.A. original. “I’ll have to take responsibility for that one,” Martinez admitted. Her rationale: “If there ever was a line in the history of literature that would make people want to read on, this is it.”