One day, inexplicably, Gregor Samsa, the protagonist in Kafka’s 1915 novella, wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug. Common depictions have him as a cockroach. No matter the case, the metamorphosis is shocking yet quite telling. Samsa is, after all, a salesman who works a dead-end job to provide for his family. In many ways, his lot is one we can all relate to. Days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months, and all the sudden you are a year older, still plugging away at the same job. Kafka, I am sure, is not suggesting we all adopt the rambling life, flitting from job to job and even relationship to relationship; however, he is certainly offering commentary on a society that looks more like a capital-building machine with men and women as cogs and nothing more: a soulless existence, inconsequential as an insect. Nobody ever wants this condition, yet so many happen to inhabit it. And why? Like Gregor Samsa, we do it for money and take what solace there is from our hopes and dreams. It cannot always be this way, we say to ourselves. Yet another year goes by...and another...and another.
Gregor’s fate, in light of this condition, is telling. Increasingly unable to see him as a person, his family turns on him by removing the furniture from his bedroom – an act that shows their denial of his humanity – and refusing to give him food and water. Gregor eventually dies of neglect and starvation, and his family sets their sights on the future: one where Gregor’s sister will find a suitable husband and presumably enter the grind herself. It is a ruthless punctuation to a jarring story. In the end, Darwin has his say. Survival of the fittest. Gregor Samsa was dehumanized by his living conditions and was summarily rejected by other human beings who happened to be members of his family.
On one hand, this could be a critique of capitalism. Gregor’s surprising transformation into a bug mirrors the transformation many have from an aspirant with hopes and dreams into a mere money-maker, living paycheck to paycheck and wondering what it – life – is really all about. On the other hand, however, Kafka may be challenging his readers to take a deeper plunge. The Modernist movement had found its stride by 1915, and artists of all stripes were in the throes of a single mission: to reject all things traditional, identifying many social codes and expectations as tools of the bourgeois to maintain a status quo that kept them decisively in charge. Gregor Samsa’s position as proletariat or lower class is evident, and arguments along the lines of social class can certainly be teased out of the story. What if the message, however, is more than something about class friction? What if Kafka is saying something about the Modernist movement itself?
Perhaps the metamorphosis was caused, not by capitalism, but by blind commitment to rejecting tradition? We derive meaning from relationships, after all, even if the ties in those relationships aren’t personal interactions per se but conventions forged over time. We have relationships with ancestors who lived a hundred years ago, for example. We may not even know their names, but we live out the values they passed on. What happens when we don’t? What happens when we edit out those values, choosing instead a blank sheet on which to compose our own values? Base proclivities can be strong. The animal inside each of us – Freud might call the Id – is fierce and defiant. Without tradition, it is unfettered. Without values, it is unleashed. In this framework, the hedonism of the 20th century and now should make sense. In 1915, the metamorphosis into a bug was horrifying. Now, many young people are calling themselves furries and identifying as animals. The new metamorphosis is being championed as liberating, but I have my doubts. The spiritual malaise Kafka and his contemporaries experienced is, today, more pervasive. The cockroaches are many, and they do not even know why they are so sad.
