The elusive bug

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:

 

Of bugs and mice

During the day / Gregor crawled back and forth / along the walls / and the ceiling, would sound like a line from Dr. Seuss, but these are telling the story of Gregor Samsa, the man-turned-beetle in Franz Kafka's Metamorphossis.

Matthue Roth, a writer and video game designer, has a kid's version of Kafka, My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs.

According to the New Yorker, the kid's Kafka isn't a cross between Shrek and Go The F**k to Sleep, but an engaging children's book in the tradition of Lewis Carroll's, Roald Dahl's, or Neil Gaiman's fairy tales. 

Children may have a more sensible encounter with the Kafkaesque universe than adults, who have known to have been spooked out by the omnipresence of the Freudian unheimleich in our day-to-day living, something that Kafka excelled in bringing out in his writing.

What scared adults--the notion that evil is banal--might just enchant children:

We are sure, as mature people with 401(k)s and digital subscriptions to the Times, that we will never be stalked by an amorous, sparkly vampire, but we are not sure that we won’t be charged and prosecuted for a crime we aren’t even sure we committed. We can tell our children that there is no Big Bad Wolf, but we can’t assure them that they won’t be prevented from reaching their goals by an unseen bureaucracy intent upon burying them in paperwork. In this way—not the bloody, but the banal—Kafka’s work becomes more spooky than the original Brothers Grimm, in which Snow White’s evil queen is forced to dance to death in scalding iron shoes. And though this might be taken as an argument for sheltering kids from Kafka, consider that the urge to avoid feeling fear altogether is stronger in grown-up humans than in small ones. “Grownups desperately need to feel safe,” Maurice Sendak said in 1993, “and then they project that onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are… they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something.” Perhaps Kafka’s works can be best confronted by children, who have that empyrean way of digesting the surreal and decoding symbols, who are braver, in their innocent beliefs, than we can ever be.