Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is probably the most famous novella in history about waking up as a giant bug. It goes something like this: traveling salesman Gregor Samsa awakes one morning from uneasy dreams to find he is waking up as a giant bug. He thinks, this won’t be good for my job; it isn’t: his boss drops by his house, complains a lot, sees that Gregor Samsa is a giant bug, and flees — so far, pretty funny. But then Gregor’s still a bug: he’s still a bug when his sister feeds him food scraps; he’s a still a bug when his sister plus mom empty his room of furniture, when they see him, when the mom faints, when the dad gets pissed and throws an apple into his back; he’s still a bug when his family needs money and all get jobs; and when they get new lodgers, and his sister is playing violin, and Gregor sneaks out to hear it, and spooks the new lodgers, who say they’re leaving, making his sister finally say they have to “get rid of” both “it” and “the idea that this is Gregor,” and Gregor hears, and decides to starve himself to death, collapsing on his floor, rotting apple still in his back, thinking of his family with love, rejected and alone, even then, bug!
A classic Kafka detail is that he “was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends,” something Rivka Galchen says “sounds more like anxiety than hilarity.” Another view is that he needed to work on his delivery; he had the punchlines: the lone defender of a brutal execution machine — which kills by slowly inscribing a phrase on its victim, supposedly leading to pre-death enlightenment — uses it on himself with the phrase “be just,” only to be quickly stabbed to death; an artist renowned for starving himself for weeks at a time turns out just to be a picky eater; a country man lives a whole life waiting for a gatekeeper to let him into the Law, and only as he is dying, does he think to ask the gatekeeper why he hasn’t seen anyone else trying to enter there — no one else could, says the gatekeeper, as he shuts the gate, it was made just for you.
There are others, but The Metamorphosis isn’t one of them. In a speech about Kafka’s funniness, David Foster Wallace compares great jokes and great short stories and says their effect feels “like the venting of a long-stuck valve,” going on to say that “what Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.” What’s strange about this story is the valve is never vented. After Gregor dies, his family realizes they’re better off without him — it could be a funny punchline, but it’s not delivered like one. Kafka dilates; Gregor lingers; the pressure stays, and so do we.
Reading Kafka can feel like being stuck in concrete. As Theodor W. Adorno puts it, in Kafka’s work, “everything is as hard, defined and distinct as possible . . . nowhere in Kafka does there glimmer the aura of the infinite idea; nowhere does the horizon open. Each sentence is literal and each signifies . . . Each sentence says ‘interpret me’, and none will permit it.” This is one of the powers of deadpan: we are conscripted into the world of the joke. But one problem with jokes is that they’re never funny forever. Once the novelty of the conceit wears off, the pressure starts to build, and we look for an escape, if not a punchline, then an allegory will do, something above the text that we can grab on to and use to pull ourselves out.
This goes both ways, naturally. Thus the emergence of Trans Kafka, dutifully documented by Britta Kallin, and well summarized by Joy Ladin’s statement that “I’ve never read a more compelling description of what it feels like to be trapped in the wrong body.” The idea of being trapped in the wrong body can be genuinely horrifying, where here horror is being distinguished from terror chronologically: terror is the worrying something bad will happen; horror is the knowing it has. For this reason, terror goes hand in hand with dread, horror with despair, the belief that something good won’t happen, the feeling it will never be otherwise. The strange despair The Metamorphosis evokes is the one of being stuck in a joke with no punchline, waiting for the pressure to be released, wanting everything to go back to the way it was. But it’s never going to be like it was. No man can step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he woke up a giant bug.
So, if we go looking for possible resonances with the trans experience, we’ll find not just the feeling of being “trapped in the wrong body,” or the social rejection that attends it, or the shame that induces, but also the inability to return to a world where transition was unthinkable. One day we wake up from our uneasy dreams. And then we’re there, in reality, where we’ll quickly find that while transition is not salvation, it is something you can do; that’s what distinguishes Gregor’s situation from a trans one: the possibility of change, the opportunity to experience, and then internalize, what Wallace calls “the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.”
No such luck for Gregor. What’s so truly horrific about his situation is that there’s nothing to be done. Gregor woke up dead. And that’s one reason why The Metamorphosis feels as if it’s arrived from another world: what we experience in the unfolding of Kafka’s novella is nothing less than the experience of death, precisely that which we cannot experience. Ha, ha.