A Bug's Life

 

A man, not an insect.

Everybody thinks that Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about a man who turns into a giant insect. This is a good example of how everyone misreads parables. I suspect denial.

To begin with, people do not turn into giant insects. When an author describes something impossible as happening, this tells us we must understand the thing as symbolic, not literal. Not a complicated principle.

Second, Kafka never says that Gregor Samsa turns into a giant insect. What he actually says, in German, is “monstrous vermin.” A “monstrous impure, unholy, and/or defective and undesirable animal or human,” to work out all the connotations of the original German. 

Kafka always forbade any illustration of Gregor. Any drawing would be an immediate falsehood.

Artists usually show Gregor as a cockroach. But cockroaches have six, not “many” legs. Gregor makes frequent reference to “many” legs, all moving independently. Nor is he a centipede or caterpillar; centipedes and caterpillars do not have rounded shells, as Gregor does; they would not need to struggle, as he does, to turn or to roll over. Kafka has deliberately given Gregor features that do not correspond to any real physical insect or other bug.

And then there is the apple. Gregor’s father bombards him with apples. One lodges in his back.

This Is not realistic. Why apples, of all things? And how could one lodge permanently in his back, and cause him great suffering?

The apple too must be symbolic.

The need to resort to symbols is usually to express some emotion. As T.S. Eliot pointed out, one cannot convey an emotion to a reader by simply stating it. The experience of an emotion is purely subjective; you therefore cannot know whether what I call “love” is the same thing you feel as “love.” Ask any anxious fiancée.

Therefore, in order to convey an emotion to a reader, you must find and describe some object that evokes that emotion; what Eliot calls an “objective correlative.” Hope, Emily Dickenson wrote, is “that thing with feathers.” Love, Robbie Burns wrote, “Is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June.”

And depression is like thinking of yourself as a “monstrous vermin.”

Gregor shows all the symptoms of depression. Before the transformation, he has been, according to the office manager, lax at his job, and has not been bringing in any sales. For everything that happens, he blames himself. He blames himself for missing work, even if sick. He takes it upon himself entirely to make up for his family’s misfortune over the past five years. He blames himself for his family’s disgust at his appearance. He is more upset at his mother’s fainting than at his own slow death by starvation. He loses interest in food—this is not explained, but is a common depressive symptom. He is unable to get out of bed. Towards the end of the tale, he cannot move out of sheer disappointment.

The apple? Like any great author, Kafka is a great psychologist, and is able to tell us exactly where depression comes from. It comes from a narcissistic parent. This apple is as old as Eden, and it always hits you in the back, comes from the person you most trust, your parent. It is the apple of original sin, which passes down, generation by generation. A parent given over to vice inflicts depression on a child. Samsa Senior, we discover if we read attentively, is wholly given over to sloth, greed, gluttony, and wrath.

The next important and mysterious story element is Gregor’s sister Grete. Having been his lone ally, having taken care of him, why does she lose interest and then turn on him? Why is she in the end the one who wants him dead?

Because, in an abusive family, if one child is driven to depression by persecution, another will be favoured and trained into narcissism; and so the apple of sin is passed on, generation to generation. There will be an Abel, and there will be a Cain. Like Grete, the spoiled child will usually be of the sex opposite to that of the dominant narcissistic parent. Because narcissists are also into lust, along with the other vices. And narcissists do not respect family responsibilities. They may not act out their sexual fantasies—unless they are stupid—but they will favour their little trophy child, just as Gregor adores the woman in the picture on is wall. A caveat: this will occasionally vary if the dominant narcissistic parent has homosexual tendencies. Which is intrinsically common among narcissists. But that is a sidebar here.

Grete is the golden child, allowed to lounge around, go out for entertainments, devote herself to the violin. Nothing is asked of her, in stark contrast to Gregor. She is being groomed for narcissism. She even craves a little responsibility, and so is fiercely possessive of Gregor.

Another sidebar, but shown in the story: when one parent is a dominant narcissist, the other parent will inevitably be conspicuously passive, submissive. This is the only pairing that works with a dominant narcissist. But the submissive parent will be narcissistic too, in his or her way, like Echo in the original legend of narcissus, or like the oddly absent fathers of Snow White or Cinderella in the fairy tales. Their submissiveness is a strategy to avoid responsibility for their acts—a licence for self-indulgence without guilt.

The spoiled child will generally choose the path of narcissism at adolescence. In the end, whatever grooming is done, one must still choose to be a narcissist, because it is a moral issue. Just as, whatever the grooming, one still chooses at adolescence whether to be promiscuous, and are still responsible for that choice. Grete succumbs at adolescence to both lust and narcissism, and this is why she turns on Gregor. He has interfered with her chance to get something going with one of the bearded lodgers. 

Kafka leaves us with her parents thinking of a marriage for Grete. The original sin thereby reproduces itself, like one of Richard Dawkins’s selfish genes.

Kafka offers no escape, no solution. Gregor finds respite in art, in the violin music, or in the picture on his wall, as Kafka did in writing; but this aesthetic escape, real as it is, is only transitory. The only solution is religion Kafka does not get that far here. As, perhaps, he did not in life.