I always thought that the kernel of Franz Kafka's signature classic, Metamorphosis is not the conversion itself, of man into insect, but of the effect the conversion has on Gregor Samsa's family.
Kafka meant to explore the death of love and subsequent ascendancy of alienation in the age of the bourgeoisie-mercantile complex that was European society between late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
No sooner than Gregor Samsa turns into an insect, he becomes a burden on his family; when Samsa was a man he was the breadwinner. His family lived off him parasitically.
Samsa's value in the family is contingent upon his ability to feed it.
Having been brainwashed into accepting unconditional love within the family structure as the universal norm in all societies, I was shocked to read of the sea-change in the Samsa family when their earning son becomes a dependent and injured son. I was saddened by the father's indifference and hostility toward Gregor, at whom he once throws an apple so ferociously that the apple lodged permanently in Samsa's back and damages his mobility.
What was most difficult to bear was the family's final plot to rid themselves off Gregor to cut their financial loss. Additionally, Gregor had become an acute social embarrassment to the Samsa's.
Samsa's death remains un-mourned; his family is relieved when he dies.
Contemporary renditions and re tellings of Metamorphosis harp on the physical fact of the transformation itself.
The book's complexity has been reduced to the materiality of the "bug".
Take for instance a recent interpretation of the Kafka classic for children. The book cover has the picture of an endearing insect. In an era of the cutesy army of "antz", the bug looks like an appealing bait to hook children with.
The adult versions of Metamorphosis are no less focused on Samsa as a near X-man, a mutant that is misunderstood in a culture where the push is to morph into hypernormal and corporatized entities.
Yet the bug of Kafka's universe, like the cats of Haruki Murakami's, is hard to adapt to any visual medium.
The South African choreographer Arthur Pita has recreated Metamorphosis as a ballet. In a 1969 play, legendary dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov danced away the contortions of Samsa's body when he is in the bug-state.
I can't imagine how Samsa could be played by a dancer. The white swan and the black swan are fine figures to be ballet-ized, but Samsa?
The present view of Kafka's Metamorphosis is sterile and reductive.
A 2012 film version of Metamorphosis, with an insect evoking terror and disgust in the breasts of the characters, promises to be a story of a lunatic asylum, not an authentic reproduction of Kafka's philosophical novel of intelligent pathos:
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