On the Feral Poetry of Fran Lock

 

Fran Lock in human and hyena form

 

 

Fran Lock likes to describe her poetic practice as feral - by which she means "omnivorous, opportunistic, accretive and excessive" [1]. 

 

Hers is not a poetry which germinates in "periods of quiet sustained reflection", but one cobbled together with a certain violence and a needs-be-as-needs-must attitude born of her working-class background. 

 

But is it any good? Based on the work I've read so far, I'd say it is ...

 

Or, at any rate, I'd say that - as a Deleuzian - it appeals to me, because, like Kafka, Lock is not attempting to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience, so much as construct a minor literature. 

 

In other words, she problematises everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar use and overlaid with doxa. 

 

Raised with a strong sense of her Irish heritage, Lock carries English away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign tongue within it; not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

 

It's no surprise that Lock is also interested in therianthropy, because writing at its best always effects a becoming-animal (be it insect, hyena, or great white whale) [2] and transports us from the land of Oedipus to that zone of indiscernibility wherein we can lose our domesticated human selves and experiment with wild forms of otherness.  

 

She doesn't always succeed, but that's okay; Lock has learnt to assume the risks of failure and embrace her "moments of humiliated over-reach", continually pushing not only beyond her own comfort zone but her own competence. 

 

It's better, she argues, to be thought ridiculous than boring and if that alienates some readers and critics, she doesn't care; "I’m not a branch of the service industry, and nobody said my relationship to the people encountering my work had to be gentle or friendly."  

 

That's a statement that makes an old punk very happy ...

 

 

Notes

[1] Fran Lock, 'T. S. Eliot Prize Writers' Notes', on the Poetry School website: click here. All lines quoted here are from this text. 

 

[2] Admittedly, and somewhat disappointingly, Lock refers her idea of becoming animal (understood in terms of literal transformation) back to the American author Charles Hoy Fort and his book Wild Talents (1932), and not to Deleuze and Guattari's more philosophical notion developed in Mille Plateaux (1980). 

 

 

Bonus: to watch Fran Lock briefly talking about her work, her relation to language, and animal transformation fantasy, click here. 

 

 

I am grateful to Chloe Rose Campbell for introducing me to the work of Fran Lock. 

 

 

On Curbing One's Enthusiasm for Kafka's Drawings

 

"One of these days I’ll send you a few of my old drawings, to give you something to laugh at. 

These drawings gave me greater satisfaction [...] than anything else." [1]  

I.

 

What constitutes a doodle? 

 

I have to agree with Larry on this one: the beauty of a doodle is that it invites interpretation [2]. If more than merely a scribble, a doodle is not a detailed drawing possessing clear representational meaning. 

 

Sometimes, even the person producing the doodle has no idea what it is they've drawn. For a doodle is often composed of simple abstract lines and shapes, produced randomly without any conscious effort. 

 

A doodle is often made, in fact, while one's attention is elsewhere; such as speaking on the phone, for example, or bored out of one's mind sitting in a business meeting.  

 

Personally, I don't think there's anything foolish about these drawings and that they may very well warrent investigation by those interested in the workings of the brain. But, having said that, I'm not sure they always deserve to be framed and put on the wall, or published in a book - even when the doodler is a famous author, for example.

 

Which brings us to Kafka ...

 

 

II. 

 

In 2019, hundreds of drawings by Kafka were discovered in a private collection that had been locked away for decades. And three years later, they were published in a big book by Yale University Press, with an introductory essay by Judith Butler, in which she describes the drawings as "images that have broken free of writing" [3].

 

Kafka himself had instructed his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy the drawings. But, as is so often the case, his wishes were ignored, proving yet again that if you are a writer and you really don't want your juvenilia, marginalia, and unpublished (often unfinished) works to see the light of the day after your death, then you had better make sure you destroy this material personally before it's too late to do so.   

 

Still, it is as it is and we are where we are; the drawings survived and have now been placed within the public arena, so we can all pass judgement upon them ...    

 

 

III.

 

I suppose the first thing to say is that  these images - by the criteria outlined above - are not naive doodles, even if Kafka himself dismissed them as such and did, in fact, consign many of them to the rubbish bin. They betray just a little too much skill and attention to detail and it should be remembered that Kafka had, whilst a student (1901-06), taken drawing classes and attended lectures on art history. 

 

Max Brod could certainly see the ingenuity (and the humour) of the images and rightly recognised that they would one day have great fascination for lovers of Kafka's work (although whether that justifies his preserving them against Kafka's wishes remains debatable).

 

But, whilst I do like many of the pictures, I'm not sure they quite merit the praise that has been poured over them by various commentators who, whilst unanimously agreeing that Kafka possessed genius with a capital G, disagree about whether he understood words and pictures as entirely independent of one another, or existing on a single plane and walking arm-in-arm, as one reviewer put it [4].      

 

For me, they're good and have a certain dynamism. I also love the fact that, as Andreas Kilcher points out, most of the figures are not fully elaborated bodies:

 

"They are not fleshed out and situated in three-dimensional space, they do not have fully devel­oped physiques. On the contrary, they are generally free-floating, lacking any sur­roundings, and in themselves they are disproportional, flat, fragile, caricatured, grotesque, carnivalesque." [5]

 

But they're not that good and I'm not sure how seriously we should take them as artistic statements in their own right. Nor do I think them vital for an understanding of his written work. 

 

And so, as ever, one might do well to curb one's enthusiasm before forking out £35 for a copy of the book (particularly when, with Christmas just around the corner, you can probably persuade a loved one it would make a lovely gift).  

 

 

(Yale University Press, 2022)

 

      

Notes

 

[1] Kafka writing in a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in February, 1913. See Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (Schocken Books, 1973), p. 189. 

      In this same letter, Kafka rather amusingly claims: "I was once a great draftsman, you know, but then I started to take academic drawing lessons with a bad woman painter and ruined my talent."

 

[2] See the third episode of season ten of Curb Your Enthusiasm, 'Artificial Fruit', (dir. Cheryl Hines, 2020): click here and here for scenes discussing what does and does not constitute a doodle.

 

[3] See Butler's introduction to Franz Kafka: The Drawings, ed. Andreas Kilcher with Pavel Schmidt, trans. Kurt Beals, (Yale University Press, 2022). 

[4] Benjamin Balint, 'Graven Images' in the Jewish Review of Books (Spring, 2022): click here. 

 

[5] Andreas Kilcher, 'Discovering Franz Kafka's Nearly-Lost Drawings', trans. Kurt Beals, Literary Hub (1 June, 2022): click here.  

 

 

Odradek

 

"At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs. "

 

"One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of."

 

- Kafka, description of Odradek in 'The Cares of a Family Man'

 

 

I. 

 

Many critics and philosophers rank Kafka alongside the greats of modernist literature. But, whilst I wouldn't wish to echo Joseph Epstein's dismissal of him as overrated [1], I have nevertheless often found some of Kafka's short stories a little ... not boring exactly - but disappointing.  

 

That's not the case, however, with 'The Cares of a Family Man' [2], in which the world is introduced to the fantastically strange character called Odradek ...

 

 

II. 

 

As the narrator of the tale confesses, Odradek is a name of uncertain origin; it might be Slavic; it could be German, but it's very possibly neither. Confusion over the etymology of Odradek's name, however, is really the least of it - for it's not even clear what Odradek is ... 

 

For whilst they - and I think it probably best we use the gender-neutral pronoun here in its singular sense - can stand up and speak and even laugh, they're also a non-human object who looks rather like a star-shaped cotton reel with bits of old coloured thread wound round in a tangled manner (see Kafka's own description above).  

 

Odradek, however, is nobody's spool and they have a vital presence in the family home; perhaps more vital even than the narrator's and the latter is concerned not only that Odradek undermines his position as husband and father - despite having no real purpose or role - but that Odradek will ultimately outlive him and thereby have the last laugh, extracting what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object:   

 

"He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful." [3]

 

 

III.

'The Cares of a Family Man' has, as one might imagine, more interpretations than one can shake a stick at; certainly more than I can possibly discuss here - or would wish to, as all the usual readings - Marxist, Freudian, Existentialist - are predictable enough (often very clever and insightful, but unsurprising). 

I think, if anything, I favour a more occult (and object-oriented) musing on the story over and above a political, psychological, or lazy metaphorical attempt at interpretation; a musing that doesn't seek to identify Odradek in the full-light of day (or by the natural light of reason) and which acknowledges that objects are ultimately mysterious (and alluring) because of their withdrawl from human perception.

As Anya Meksin notes, we are asking the wrong questions if we ask what Odradek symbolises or represents: 

 

"The story stubbornly resists an adequate correlation between Odradek and any existing entities or concepts in our world. It is as if the little text has somehow transcended the very system in which symbolism is possible, just as Odradek has somehow transcended the logic of the physical world. Odradek is a metaphysical rupture in the reality of the family man, and the story is an epistemological rupture in the reality of the reader." [4]

 

Ultimately, Odradek is a messenger from the secret realm of objects; not so much a realm humans deny the existence of, but casually dismiss as less interesting than their own. Such anthropocentric arrogance has no place here, however. I maintain that objects not only exist independently of us upon a democratically flat ontology, but, despite our conceited claims of human exceptionalism, we too ultimately have our being upon this plane.   

 

That's what Odradek reminds us: material reality is essentially meaningless; consciousness is epiphenomenal; life is just a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Readers of a certain age will doubtless recall the Unigate ads on TV in the 1970s which warned viewers to watch out in case there was a Humphrey about [5]. 

 

Well, an Odradek does more than steal your milk; they negate all the illusions, and lies, and convenient fictions upon which human life is built and once you discover, like Kafka's humble family man, that there's one living in your house there are, says Anya Meksin, only two options: "immediate suicide, or continuing along as best we can, given the circumstances" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Epstein's article 'Is Franz Kafka Overrated?' in The Atlantic (July/August 2013): click here. 

      For those who might be interested, the critic David L Ulin responds to this piece by Epstein in 'Why Kafka Matters', Los Angeles Times (24 June 2013): click here. 

 

[2] Die Sorge des Hausvaters was written between 1914 and 1917 and published in a collection of Kafka's short stories published by Kurt Wolff entitled Ein Landarzt [A Country Doctor] (1919). 

      The English translation - 'The Cares of a Family Man' - can be found in Kafka's Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Everyman, 1993), pp. 183-85. The story is also in The Complete Stories, (Schocken Books, 1971) - a book that can be found as a pdf online thanks to Vanderbilt University. The opening quotations at the top of this post are both taken from the latter edition, p. 468. 

 

[3] Kafka, 'The Cares of a Family Man', The Complete Stories, p. 469.

 

[4] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread', essay on Mauro Nervi's Kafka Project website: click here. Meksin's excellent essay is worth reading in full. 

 

[5] For those readers who are either too young or now too old and forgetful, the British milk company Unigate produced a series of TV ads in the 1970s featuring mysterious characters called Humphreys whose only visible presence was was a red-and-white striped straw. 

      The campaign, devised by John Webster, is best known for the slogan: "Watch out, watch out - there's a Humphrey about!" written and sung by musical genius and creator of the Wombles, Mike Batt. 

[6] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread' ... click here.

      I don't actually share Meksin's conclusion. Rather, like Camus, I don't see why suicide should be considered in the face of life's absurdity - for there is no more meaning in death than in life. And there's no reason either why a meaningless life should not be a happy and passionate one; the trick is to affirm the void and thereby consummate nihilism, as Nietzsche would say.    

 

 

On the Uncertain Duty of a Writer

 

 

Someone told me the other day that, as a writer, I have a duty to always say what I think. 

Aside from the fact that I don't feel under any such obligation, I'm not sure it's possible to speak one's mind and then simply turn spoken words into text; certainly it's a far more difficult task than non-writers imagine. 

 

For as Kafka pointed out, whilst thought, speech, and writing all emerge from (and proceed into) the same darkness, we write differently to how we speak; speak differently to how we think; think differently to how we feel - and, indeed, think differently to how we think we think and how we think we ought to think.     

 

To put this in a Nietzschean nutshell: We knowers are unknown to ourselves - and that's why it's only naive or stupid people who are sure of themselves and their opinions; who pride themselves on their sincerity and believe they can instruct others on their duty. 

 

Writers, like quantum particles, are bound by the principle of uncertainty. 

 

 

Travels in Hyperculture With Byung-Chul Han 2: Is There an Alternative to Tourism?

(Polity Press, 2022)

 

 

I. 

I closed part one of this post with a question that Byung-Chul Han puts to his readers: "When the 'here and now' becomes a repeatable there and later, will we have gained something or lost something?" [a] 

 

To put this slightly differently: should we celebrate becoming hypercultural tourists, or should we discard our Hawaiian shirts and seek out an alternative way of being in the world? Might we, for example, endeavour to become pilgrims - walking the earth and giving form to the formless, making the fragmentary whole, as Zygmunt Bauman [b] would have it? 

Well we might: but probably this would be futile. For hyperculturality is an evironment that produces (and allows for) a particular type of tourist - not pilgrims. Bauman, says Han, remains a romantic thinker who fails to recognise what is so unique about the hypercultural tourist; one who "knows neither longing nor fear" [41]. 

 

Unlike pilgrims, for example, hypercultural tourists always remains in the here and now; they are not "on their way to a counter-world, to a There" [40]. 

 

Having said that, I still wonder if there is an alternative to tourism ... Or must we all learn to laugh like Odradek [c] and accept ourselves as patchwork individuals with multicoloured natures? 

 

 

II.

 

It's obviously important to get terms straight: to understand that hyperculturality is a contemporary phenomenon that is uniquely different to interculturality, multiculturality, and transculturality ...

 

According to Byung-Chul Han, the first two of these things are historically "connected  with nationalism and colonialism" [53] and, philosophically, they "presuppose the introduction of an essentialist notion of culture" [53]. 

 

As for transculturality, which is all about transgression and the crossing of borders, that also has nothing to do with hyperculturality, wherein different cultural forms are simply placed side by side in a "borderless hyperspace" [56] and one is afforded the opportunity (as a tourist) to browse. 

 

Hyperculture also differs from multiculture "insofar as it involves little remembrance of origin, descent, ethnicity or site" [56-7].    

In sum: 

 

"Contemporary culture is marked not by the trans, the multi or the inter but by the hyper. The cultures between which an inter or a trans would take place are un-bounded, de-sited, and de-distanced: they have been turned into hyper-culture." [56]

 

Hyperculturality also "presupposes certain historical, sociocultural, technical and media processes" [57] and is linked to "a novel experience of space and time, a type of identity formation and a form of perception" [57]. 

 

 

III.

 

One of the things I like about hyperculture is that it doesn't regard appropriation as something sinful. 

 

Indeed, hyperculture desires and requires an intense level of appropriation in order to effect a dynamic process of transformation and engineer difference. Nothing is seen as alien and off-limits or has protected status; nothing belongs to anyone. Everything exists for consumption ...

 

One might ask at this point how hyperculture differs then from late capitalism; is it not just the cultural logic of the latter in much the same way as postmodernity was formerly described by its critics [d]? 

 

I'm not sure Han addresses this question. Though he does say that supermodernity - unlike postmodernity - is not ironic; it contains "an affirmation that the ironic mode cannot grasp" [68]. It's also friendlier, says Han. Which is nice, I suppose, as friendliness promises "maximum cohesion with minimum connectedness" [69].   

 

 

IV.

 

Perhaps, in the end, the tourist is simply another kind of wanderer; a figure that Nietzsche praised in Human, All Too Human (1878-80) [e]. Both wanderer and tourist move in a de-sited world and lack any final destination. However, whilst acknowledging the similarities, Han ultimately rejects this comparison:

 

"The wanderer's form of existence [...] does not resemble that of the hypercultural tourist. His way of walking still lacks the leisureliness that characterizes the tourist. And the world of the 'wanderer' is still peppered with deserts and abysses." [75]

 

Despite everything, says Han, Nietzsche "remained a pilgrim" [76] at heart and his wanderer remained on the path of struggle and suffering (a via dolorosa). 

 

And despite Nietzsche's remarkable far-sightedness, "he could not yet have suspected what kind of culture would emerge [...] He did not develop the idea of a hyperculture." [65]

V.

 

Han closes his study with a section entitled 'Threshold'. In it, he makes yet another return to Heidegger; if Nietzsche didn't quite see what was coming, Heidegger saw it emerging and rejected it outright:

 

"For him, hyperculture would be the end of culture as such. He repeatedly laments the loss of the homeland [Heimat]. The media, too, are blamed for the disappearance of the homeland, and ultimately also for the disappearance of the world." [77]

 

It's mass media - and now social media - which has carried people away into illusionary worlds that are not worlds, turning them into tourists. There's nothing primordial (from the perspective of Being) about surfing the internet. 

 

For Heidegger, the world has material reality - its a place of rocks and trees and meadows in bloom, as well as jugs and bridges and things made by hand - it's not a simulation made up from signs and images which we stare at on a screen, rather than dwell within. 

 

As a Lawrentian, of course, I'm naturally sympathetic to Heidegger's construction of a simplistic and romantic counter-world, as Han calls it; it might lack plurality and diversity, but at least it includes books, animals, and silence. 

 

Ultimately, one has to choose: to be a pilgrim-wanderer who crosses thresholds in silence but with a face "contorted in pain" [83]; or a hypercultural tourist "smiling serenely" [83] and chatting endlessly. Homo dolores, or Homo liber - I'll let you decide ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 37. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] Byung-Chul Han refers us to Bauman's text Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, (Blackwell, 1995). As we will see, Han doesn't seem convinced by Bauman's attempt to resurrect the pre-modern figure of the pilgrim; one that re-theologizing thinkers and those looking for a fixed abode or home in the traditional sense often fall back on  

[c] Odradek is the strange creature in Kafka's short story 'The Cares of a Family Man' (see Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Everyman's Library, 1993), pp. 183-85. 

      Like many other critics and thinkers, Han is fascinated by Odradek's hybrid identity and the fact he has no attachment to any site, or home. He writes: "Odradek's identity is not controlled by any teleology [...] he is not part of any purposive horizon [...] it is an identity that is cobbled together from various parts" and his laugh "has something ironic, mocking or uncanny about it" [48]. 

      However, although Odradek's nature "does somewhat resemble the patchwork structure of hypercultural identity" [49], he is not, concludes Han, a hypercultural tourist in the full sense.   

[d] I'm thinking here of the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson and his 1991 study Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press). For Jameson, postmodernism is a form of mass-popular culture driven by capitalism that also obliges us to consume.

 

[e] See aphorism 638, in Section 9 of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. 

Help! I'm Turning into a Tapeworm (Don't Tell Me Not to Worry)

Teresa Zgoda: Taenia solium (tapeworm) everted scolex

Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

The above image by Teresa Zgoda, revealing the anterior end of a pork tapeworm, is truly the stuff of nightmares. No wonder then that after coming across it, a friend of mine experienced a metamorphic dream in which he had the head and short neck of the creature atop his still human body. 

 

As he described what had happened to him in his dream, it became clear that there was no point my telling him not to worry, as, clearly, he was profoundly disturbed by this - and perhaps rightly so; for if transforming into a macroparasite isn't troubling, then what is?

 

Besides, don't worry is such a crass response; insensitive and inadequate; dismissive and minimising. When people are upset, they want to be able to express their worries and fears and they want, perhaps, to be offered some explanation for why they are feeling as they do. 

 

They certainly don't want to hear the words don't worry, never mind, or calm down. Nor do they want to be told to get over it, as if their emotional distress were something trivial and slightly embarrassing (something they either have to justify or apologise for).          

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, what do you say to a man who is worried about becoming-tapeworm? Who has seen himself (in his dreams) with that terrifying attachment organ, the scolex, where his head should be and fears his body is becoming whiter and flatter and more ribbon-like by the day?     

 

I'm not a psychiatrist, or dream therapist, and I'm afraid my only experience in these matters is as a reader of fiction ... 

 

One thinks of Gregor Samsa, for example, who famously wakes up one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a large insect (commonly depicted as a cockroach). Initially assuming this to be a temporary change and that he will soon be back to normal, Gregor is, at first, philosophical about what has happened to him. Unfortunately, however, he doesn't recover his human form and things end tragically for him [1]. 

 

One also thinks of Marda West, in Daphne du Maurier's extraordinary short story 'The Blue Lenses' (1959), in which everyone appears to suddenly lose their human features and is seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality. Again, this might sound amusing at first, but any comic aspects quickly give way to horror [2].      

 

I would advise my friend, therefore, to take his dream seriously. But I would also remind him that our humanity is nothing originary and autonomous; in fact, there are no free-living organisms - we are all parasites living off the lives of others ...

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring, of course, to Franz Kafka's novella, Die Verwandlung (1915). There are many English editions of this text available, but I would recommend the translation by Susan Bernofsky, that comes with an introduction by David Cronenberg; The Metamorphosis (W. W. Norton and Co., 2014).

      For my analysis of the case of Gregor Samsa, see the first of my becoming-insect posts: click here.

 

[2] See Daphne du Maurier, 'The Blue Lenses', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 44-82. For my reading of this tale, click here. 

 

 

This post is for my friend Síomón Solomon.

 

  

Becoming-Insect 1: The Case of Gregor Samsa

There's more than a grain of truth in the following statement by Richard Mabey:

"I think we may be lucky that insects are too small and remote ever to have entered our understanding in the way that birds and flowers have. If we saw their lives for what they really are I think it might be too much for us to bear."

And yet, sometimes, one can't help looking at the bees, bugs and beetles with a mixture of admiration and envy and thoughts of becoming-insect; i.e., of entering an alien life free from all compassion and compromise, but with its own inhuman beauty. Not that this ever ends well, as the cases of Gregor Samsa and Seth Brundle demonstrate ...


1: The Case of Gregor Samsa

One might argue that Gregor Samsa doesn't in fact become-insect in the very special sense that Deleuze and Guattari mean by the term. For his is primarily a change at the molar level of form - a metamorphosis - whereas becoming-animal is a demonic event played out at the molecular level of forces that enables one to: "stake out the path of escape in all its positivity ... to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone ..."

However, as Deleuze and Guattari refer in their own work to this case as an example of becoming-animal - albeit one that fails due to Gregor's refusal to take his deterritorialization all the way - I'm not going to press the issue here. Let's just agree that Kafka's tale doesn't simply concern an imaginary identification with an insect taking place in Gregor's mind; it's neither a mad fantasy, nor a terrible dream.

His, rather, is an essential transformation of the kind that troubles Freudians and theologians alike and one misses the point of the story if one fails to appreciate this. The six-legged critter that Gregor becomes isn't archetypal nor mythological; nor is it in need of any dreary psychoanalytic interpretation (it doesn't merely signify oedipal anxiety, for example).

On the other hand, as Walter Benjamin points out, neither is it particularly rewarding to read the story too naturalistically and become obsessed with classifying what kind of animal Gregor becomes. English translations sometimes indicate a giant cockroach, but the German terms used by Kafka - ungeheuer Ungeziefer - are non-specific and suggestive of many types of unclean animal or vermin, not just those that belong to the class of creatures we usually think of as the worst sort of creepy-crawly.         

It's doubtless because he wanted to keep things vague that Kafka also prohibited illustrations for his book. In a letter to his publisher he insisted that images of Gregor post-transformation were not to be included, even if depicted from a distance or in shadow. But it's clear from his own descriptions that Gregor was some kind of large insect scuttling about and Kafka uses the terms Insekt and Wanze [bug] in his correspondence when discussing the story.  

Interestingly - and I think rather amusingly - despite Kafka's wish for indeterminacy and Benjamin's dismissal of readings that attempt to root themselves in taxonomy, Nabokov - who was not only a great novelist, but also a great entomologist - claimed he knew exactly what species of insect Gregor turned into; basically, a big beetle just over 3 feet long.

What's more, in his heavily annotated copy of Kafka's novella that he used for teaching purposes, Nabokov even provided an illustration: 

Whatever type of pest he became, sadly, Gregor the Mensch-Insekt, is allowed and encouraged to die a lonely, sordid death by his family, raising the question of where true horror and monstrosity begins.


Notes

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, (University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

Josh Jones, 'Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway', essay on openculture.com (Oct 21 2015): to read, click here.
 
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Michael Hofmann, (Penguin Books, 2007)  
 
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, (Collins, 1973). 

Readers interested in a related post to this one, which also refers to the case of Gregor Samsa, should click here. 

To read part two of this post on becoming-insect: the case of Seth Brundle, click here.  

Vermin (With Reference to the Case of Gregor Samsa)

 Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, 

fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

The word vermin is an ugly term for an ugly phenomenon; a qualitative noun that doesn't innocently describe a type of unclean animal or a class of sub-human subject, but identifies, classifies, and characterizes as such. 

A morally pernicious term that is effectively a mortal judgement passed; a death sentence. For to designate as vermin is to make fit for extermination. 

It includes wild birds and beasts that are thought to carry disease or in some other way endanger or threaten to disrupt human enterprise with their destructive activities; pesky insects and parasites that swarm and infest; and, lastly, people perceived as dirty, despicable, and problematic (Jews, gypsies, immigrants, the homeless, the unemployed, and the poor in general). 

Thus, if when applied to animals the term betrays mankind's innate sense of supremacy or speciesism, when applied to our fellow men and women it manifests our murderous racism and xenophobia. 

The Nazis, of course, had a particular penchant for portraying their opponents and those they feared and despised as Ungeziefer and Untermenschen - i.e. not worthy of sacrifice or society; Lebensunwertes Leben. 

And so vermin is a word that makes me particularly uncomfortable; one that I would never use and do not like to hear used. It reminds me at last of poor Gregor Samsa; what happened to him might happen to any of us, so there's surely a lesson to be learned here.