Love-Letter for Gregor Samsa
I like to think that I would not mind if my girlfriend was turned into a giant bug. I do have to admit that it would not be easy. People are not kind to bugs—I make my attempt to be kind, but this mostly consists of not killing them or removing them from situations where they are bound to die or suffer. I do not make active provisions to feed them, as Nagarjuna recommends in his Precious Garland. At times I have spent money on initiatives for social reform to ensure the better industrial treatment of bugs, but this is quite abstract. And then of course there is a lot of time spent in loving attention to and contemplation of bugs in the environment around me, which does them precisely no good at all, so far as I know. Actually caring every day for a giant intelligent bug would be a more difficult concern: it would be financially taxing and intellectually confusing and socially stigmatizing, and there would always be a risk of violence. I still think that I would be privileged to attempt it.
It is a wonderful thing, reading Kafka’s The Transformation and seeing the best aspects of Gregor’s attitude to his new body. His initial lack of concern with the matter is underdetermined and can be read as repressive terror or as over-attachment to human social norms, but it struck me as charming. To wake up very different than you were before poses a great number of challenges: you have to learn how to move and sense and communicate in a new way, which will inevitably involve experimentation, clumsily trying things which worked before and hurting yourself until you find what works now. Gregor takes this task on from the get go, and it is painful to watch him injure himself attempting to stand upright or to turn a key in a lock, but these are the difficulties of any transformation. I do not see why I should interpret his decision to try to continue living, both in his aims and in his movements, in the way that he has lived before as a rejection of his current form when, initially, he displays no such rejection. In fact, he expresses delight whenever he finds that his body has some new capacity: of walking on all his legs instead of upright, of enjoying rotten food, of climbing on the walls and on the ceiling. To me this is heroic. Look how he finds joy in the perfections of the body, that good Spinozist! Look how he so wonderfully plays the beetle!
Of course, this is not what The Transformation really describes. All of this is there, but it is a story of horrific abuse and the stifling of these strivings of joy, to the point of the complete extinction of that wonderful bug. It is one thing to live in an unadapted manner before one learns how to adapt to what one has suddenly found oneself to be; it is another to be forced into the most unadapted situation, and to view any adaptation as a prospect to be repelled by, until you are led to the point of total extinguishment. This happens all the time to people who find that they are not what they are supposed to be and it is always terrible, especially because transformations of this kind are our common lot.
All the characters in The Transformation are forced to change. Their new economic circumstances require that they live differently than they have lived before, just as I would have to if my girlfriend could not pay rent on account of being a beetle. At first, Gregor’s mother, father, and sister remain stuck in their old ways, but over time they adapt and become new, and the book ends with a description of Grete’s new body as a young woman. But these are changes that the world around them is prepared to capture and make use of, whereas Gregor’s change is accepted only in Grete’s deceptive manner, whereby she accomodates his new form only to determine by that form that this is not Gregor at all. None of the members of the family make any attempt to communicate with Gregor, and it is Grete who in the end declares that he is not there to communicate with in the first place. In time they do accept that it is possible to wake up and find oneself working class and no longer petty bourgeois, but they never really accept that it is possible to wake up as a beetle.
I have been reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death recently, and so I am immediately aware that the refusal to accept such a transformation dovetails nicely into the refusal to accept the possibility of one’s death. Gregor’s new form centres his animal vulnerability, his foreclosure from the sphere of speaking humans who determine the meanings of their lives in a rational and discursive manner and by so doing do not feel at the mercy of a sudden stroke of fate which can put them in the grave, even as this is what they always are. Becker describes human beings as being in a condition of duality, between a symbolic capacity to define oneself as though one were a god and an animal vulnerability to one’s corporeal limitations and eventually to death—a duality which makes neurosis inevitable and demands comfortable illusions. To set the terms on one’s vulnerability is one such comfortable illusion: my son may be able to die, but he will not die as a beetle, or a gay man, or a trans woman, or some other category onto which I project the fullness of my total helplessness before death and creation.
Still, this is not the duality which mosts interests me. It is possible to make this mental dynamic the single totalizing symbol of all mental life, and certainly to interpret Gregor in this way, and paint his initial lack of comment on his new condition as being guided by a proposition like, “Well, I may be a beetle now, but I am not a beetle who is irresponsible at my job.” Perhaps that aspect is always live. But there is another aspect, which is simply that of being any creature in the creation in which, as the Psalmist of Ascents says, one lives before the God who “turns the rock to a pond of water, flint to a spring of water.” As has been shown in the study of ecology, we living beings do not emerge in cybernetically steady states as fixed components of an ecosystem, but as participants in a chaotic dynamic combinatorial state in which we are constantly reassembled in a new order and in new roles. One way in which this happens is that we die, and our death participates in processes which are never pinned down from the start. The duality I mean is that we are never thrown into our new roles newly-formed, and are still shaped by systems which have ceased to apply, like this insect salaryman.
There is a lot of courage required to play a part which is never ultimately stable. Zhuangzi understood this in depicting Master Pajama’s praise of Mr. Tai, who according to Brook Ziporyn’s translation, “falls asleep on the spot without ceremony and wakes to where he is all wide-eyed, sometimes thinking he’s a horse, sometimes thinking he’s an ox. Such understandings are what are most real and reliable, such virtuosities are what are most deep and genuine. For it is precisely this that keeps him from involvement in the nonhuman: in regarding others as wrong on account of their nonhumanness.” Would that there were a Mt. Tai in Gregor’s family! There is something heroic in being prepared to wake up, every day, as a beetle, in part because this is the perpetual reality of a world in which you will die, and in part because when this occurs to the people around them you will not become their tormentors. Yet while I admire this attitude with all my heart, the virtue of waking up as an ox is not in knowing, all of a sudden, how to be an ox when one was not an ox yesterday. It is a beautiful product of the vulnerability of other creatures that they do not know what they are doing at first, that they are clumsy even with what they are. It is wonderful when they become good Spinozists and experience the joy of what they did not know that their bodies can do, but this is not a given from the start. I have to say that if I wake up as a beetle tomorrow I will have no idea what I am doing or what to do, and I may have trepidations about the task and I may have lots of attachments to previous tasks which are no longer viable, and so I may be a very awkward beetle. In other words I would be a Gregor Samsa—and if my girlfriend wakes up as a beetle, while I hope to be vastly better about it than the Samsa family, I will not be without my own awkwardness.
I make no apologies for this condition and require no apologies from anyone else. I will write more about Becker later, but while I like him, it is my greatest bone to pick with him that he makes awkwardness and maladjustment the condition only of humans, consigning non-humans to a state of “natural equanimity.” Never has there been any such a thing, and God willing, never shall there be! Nothing is quite suited for its place; even the continents shift and clash together, and their shapes are formed by arrangements they no longer exist within. It is because these parts are not fixed, because they are subject to that dictum—“before the Master whirl, O Earth, before the God of Jacob”—that there is such room for play, to make an attempt at something you do not fundamentally know how to do, something which may in the end be doomed, and yet not be condemned for the attempt. You can still try, good Gregor Samsa, to tell your sister how you love to hear her play the violin, even though she will not listen to you and your mandibles cannot make the noises you intend. I do not judge you for your attempt to go to work or for your crawlings on the ceiling, I do not judge you because you were stoned to death with apples or because you died with so little sympathy for yourself, even though I wish for much better for you and hope to live by a principle which would not consign you to this fate. Joy-and-love is ever an abstract principle which we do not understand yet, the capacities of the body are always ones which we do not yet know, and all of this is ever awkwardly applied in practice. That awkwardness is the best inheritance of all my fellow creatures.
In the nightmare of the dark,
let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days,
teach the free man how to praise. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats