‘The Metamorphosis’: The Insect in the Room
A review of ‘The Metamorphosis’, by Franz Kafka; Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1915.
The German word Ungeziefer means, roughly, ‘vermin’ or ‘unclean creature’. So when we read that Gregor Samsa awakes one morning from ‘uneasy dreams’ to find ‘himself transformed in his bed into an ungeheueren Ungeziefer’, we do not know what, exactly, he has become. In the Muir translation he is a ‘gigantic insect’; Stanley Corngold renders it as ‘monstrous vermin’. Many assume, owing to the description of numerous legs and hard shell, that Gregor is now a cockroach, or a beetle. But the ambiguity is important — so important, in fact, that Kafka wrote to his publisher that ‘the insect is not to be drawn’. It is an instrument of meaning, a meaning that we ourselves discover in the reading of the story.
There is no explanation for how or why Gregor has become whatever it is he has become. There is no moment of terror at the sheer body-horror of becoming—as I see it—an insect. Gregor’s fear springs instead from the sudden recognition that his job, family and routine cannot continue. His horror, then, is that he has ceased to be useful. And so, it is suggested, he has ceased to be human.
He is a traveling salesman, a dutiful son who supports his parents and sister. His life is dull, but orderly. His father is helpless in old age, his mother frail, his sister young. He works because he has to, just as an insect does. Not that his conscientiousness does him much good once he transforms. His family’s high regard for him crumbles. They are repulsed by his shape but—more still—they are appalled by his uselessness. They make feeble attempts to care for him; it is the least they can do: his sister brings food, his mother hopes he will recover. But the weeks pass, and their concern sours into bitterness. He is not a brother or son any longer. He is a burden.
His life is dull, but orderly. His father is helpless in old age, his mother frail, his sister young.
Most of this takes place in just one room. Gregor is trapped, unseen, reduced to listening through the walls. His father, once weak, suddenly finds the strength to drive his son back into his room by throwing apples. His sister, once an ally who depended on him, calls him ‘it’. And the family, unburdened of Gregor, begins to thrive. It turns out Gregor’s absence improves their lot. They get jobs. They move on. And in the end, the room is vacant, and Gregor is long forgotten. Life resumes its natural shape.
The story is absurd, of course, yet it pursues a grim logic. The insect is a metaphor, but it is also real. Gregor’s transformation from man to ‘vermin’ reflects the perceived truth that the worth of a man is measured by his use. He is treated with kindness only for so long as he can earn his keep. And so, when he can no longer do that, his family shun him and scorn him, for he no brings nothing, so to speak, to the table. He has no point. The ambiguity of what he has turned into reflects his inability to crystallise an identity that is independent of what he does. He is his duties, nothing more.
So this is a tale about work, about duty, about the quiet violence of neglect. Gregor, in his human form, had already been living like an insect: working without joy, sleeping in odd places, existing only for the benefit of others. The transformation simply makes this explicit. If a man lives for work alone, what is left of him when he cannot work? One thinks of the arguments advanced in my country when the Covid virus escaped its market or lab, and swept across the world: the old cannot work, ergo they should be left to die. The young are productive: they should not be locked up for the sake of their unproductive elders.
Gregor, in his human form, had already been living like an insect: working without joy, sleeping in odd places, existing only for the benefit of others.
Much of the humour of The Metamorphosis springs chiefly from this, what Kafka perceives as the absurdity of getting one’s priorities the wrong way round. Gregor frets more over being late to the office than having been turned into a giant insect. His family are just as ridiculous: their petty concerns overshadow the fact that Gregor is now what Gregor is, with the all the enormity of any man, let alone a loved one, being transformed overnight into anything, being mixed up with that. Indeed it has the ring of farce; and yet the gruesomeness of Gregor at times precludes us from finding it funny. So too does the manner of his suffering, which is slow, quiet, almost dignified. He fades from life without protest, without bitterness, because he understands where those around him are coming from.
Kafka shows; he doesn’t tell. He has taken on board the great advice attributed to Chekhov: ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.’ He writes in a plain, restrained, measured style, and provides no explanations. The transformation is presented as fact, with other facts following; and in this way the story unfolds: with a ruthless precision. There is no melodrama, no appeal to sentiment. We watch Gregor’s slide into nothingness with a sense of inevitability. He is like a man sinking into quicksand: things can only progress in one way.
This is Kafka, so we can hardly hope to be comforted in such a story. And it is a brutal story if we consider, briefly, its implications. If we are just our labour, our ‘productive capacity’, then what does that say about those who have been laid off, those who are too disabled to work, those who are old? What grounds can a non-religious culture give for saying that every human person has intrinsic worth and dignity? Kafka seems to say that a culture that bows to productivity, economic growth and the accumulation of personal wealth is not cruel to those who are deemed unproductive. It simply does not consider them people. It just forgets them; and they slide, slowly but surely, into nothingness.
