Existential Dread Among Us: The Prescience of Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Why Any Study of World War One Should Include a Reading of Kafka’s Famously Creepy Story
“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”
Thus begins Kafka’s infamously strange and surreal tale, The Metamorphosis.
“He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections.”
Some authors are remembered for one work; some for many. Some authors have land on best-of lists, or even best-of-all-time lists. Some win major awards.
But the authors that you know had a major impact are the ones whose names have become adjectives.
Shakespearian
Dickensian
Orwellian
Machiavellian
Kafkaesque
“Kafkaesque” is a word we now use to describe uniquely absurd bureaucratic systems that create a sense of faceless dread for the humans who must deal with them. The Department of Motor Vehicles in your home town might be Kafkaesque. A visit to the hospital, sadly, is often Kafkaesque too.
I once had to go to a county government building in my hometown to settle a tax bill and had a wonderfully weird and Kafkaesque experience. It took all morning and will always come to mind whenever my kids and I watch the scene in Zootopia with the sloths.
And though Kafkaesque reaches its zenith of expression in Kafka’s famous piece, The Trial, it is also most definitely at work in The Metamorphosis, a story in which the main character, Gregor, wakes up having transformed into a giant bug…and then immediately begins to fret that he’s late for work.
“What should he do now? The next train went at seven; if he were to catch that he would have to rush like mad and the collection of samples was still not packed, and he did not at all feel particularly fresh and lively. And even if he did catch the train he would not avoid his boss’s anger as the office assistant would have been there to see the five o’clock train go, he would have put in his report about Gregor’s not being there a long time ago. The office assistant was the boss’s man, spineless, and with no understanding.”
The Metamorphosis allows us to live inside Gregor’s head as he slowly comes to accept that he will no longer be able to provide for his sister and parents because, while he was once a traveling salesman, he is now some kind of giant cockroach or something.
The story only grows more dark and surreal from there. Gregor, his usefulness to his family as a financial provider taken away, slowly becomes alienated from his sister and parents. Their meager attempts at compassion for Gregor and his situation quickly turn to disgust at him, and then spite.
In the end, they can’t wait for Gregor to die, which he does, alone in his bedroom.
The Metamorphosis has been the subject of many detailed attempts at interpretation, most famously by Nabokov, who argued that the story works best if you don’t try to make it an allegory, but instead imagine it as an actual happening and simply watch the behavior of the characters. Watch how Gregor’s father and sister quickly lose interest in him now that he can’t provide for them. Watch how they can’t help but treat him like an insect and, eventually, can’t wait for him to just die already.
But I like to treat the story as an allegory. I like to read The Metamorphosis and think about how Gregor worked for years at a soul-sucking, deeply Kafkaesque employer and then looked on helplessly as his physical form became as inhuman as his soul. I see this story as Kafka telling us, quite plainly, that the modern, faceless, soul-less bureaucracy that was Gregor’s working life is not a life for humans, and that the people who submit to the bureaucracy are committing a tremendous act of self sacrifice, one that is not fully appreciated by their families or society at large.
And maybe one that they, themselves, don’t appreciate.
I can read The Metamorphosis as tragedy or comedy, and it very much depends on whether I choose to believe Gregor is a victim of an oppressive world that only views him as a workmule, or a weakling who should have stood up for himself long ago.
I can read The Metamorphosis one way if I imagine Kafka being somber as he wrote it, and another way entirely if I imagine him laughing.
I can read it yet a third way if I put this story in its time and place. The Metamorphosis was first published in Austria in 1915, but Kafka did the bulk of the writing in 1912.
Two years before World War One broke out.
I read this story, and think of what was to come for Europe, how the whole continent was about to blow up. I can read The Metamorphosis and hear Kafka telling us that something terribly wrong is afoot, that there is an existential dread among us, one that must be expunged, and will be expunged, one way or another.
The idea of The Metamorphosis as social commentary on the unique conditions and mindset of Europe right before World War One is, to me, the most interesting way to view it. When historians talk about the causes of World War One they speak of the rise of nationalism, the destabilizing effect of a united Germany, and a tangled web of alliances that blew up when a Serbian radical assassinated Archduke Ferdinand.
To me, none of those explanations are adequate. To me, it’s clear that something bigger was afoot in the culture all throughout Europe, but especially in the German-speaking nations. Whatever that something was, it’s something I think we should strive to understand because I feel like there are eerie parallels between Europe in 1914 and America in 2018.
It’s that general sense of unrest and angst. The feeling that all the paths to a meaningful life that worked for generations prior aren’t working for the generations alive now. When I look at America now, I see a nation that is safer, cleaner, richer, healthier, and more brimming with opportunity than the America of my childhood (I was a child in the 1970s and 1980s). The America of my childhood had high and rising crime compared to now. We all, as in every one of us, had levels of lead in our blood (primarily from auto exhaust) that today would be considered so unsafe as to be poisonous. Computers were primitive and expensive, cars were much more dangerous than they are today, rivers in the industrial Midwest were so polluted they caught on fire, the crime rate was much higher than it is now, and the threat of nuclear annihilation through mutually assured destruction was ever-present.
So why does the America of today seem so much more rancorous and angry than any version of America in our lifetimes?
I think it’s a complicated question, one that is related to the issues Kafka was struggling with when he wrote The Metamorphosis. Unrest, absurdity, angst, and, more than anything, loneliness.
The Metamorphosis is a profoundly lonely story. After he becomes a bug, Gregor finds that all his social ties turned out to be loose, uncommitted, and easily severed. Because he is no longer useful to the people in his life, they no longer have any use for him.
How widespread was this feeling in Europe in 1914? How lost and displaced did people feel as the old ways of monarchical governance fell and radically new ways arose, as the automobile transformed the cities, as the telephone transformed business, as a new generation steeped in the radical ideas of the 19th century came into adulthood?
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe The Metamorphosis is Kafka’s loneliness, and the fact that it was printed right before World War One broke out is just coincidence.
But there’s no denying that the loneliness of The Metamorphosis is haunting to read about in 2018, a time of rapidly rising anxiety, depression, and opioid abuse, symptoms of a society that is clearly feeling the same angst and existential dread that Kafka captured so hauntingly in his story.
