Category Archives: teaching

“The Metamorphosis”

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Franz Kafka, The MetamorphosisPerhaps the oddest thing about Franz Kafka’s celebrated short story, “The Metamorphosis,” is how stubbornly it resists the notion that it is an allegory or extended metaphor. Though dreams are invoked in the very first line–“Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams” (28)–the notion that the protagonist’s transformation itself is anything other than real is soon roundly denied: “It was not a dream” (28). Of course, we might still want to read the tale allegorically, but not without pausing to consider the thoroughly matter-of-fact tone in which the whole affair is described. Nobody finds it particularly remarkable that Gregor has turned into a cockroach (or dung-beetle or whatever precisely it is). And, horrific though the change is, everyone is determined that life must go on regardless. At first, Gregor himself even holds out the hope that he might still take the train and continue work as before. The closest he comes to surprise at his fate is the observation that “It’s not yet going as well as I thought. But I’m fine now. Oh, the things that can come over a person!” (36). Which is putting it mildly indeed. In short, the only real surprise is the general lack of surprise that pervades proceedings.

There is little thought or investigation into how or why Gregor has suffered this fate. Nobody evinces either wonder or real curiosity. It’s not even an issue for Gregor himself, while his family shoo away any investigators (the doctor, say) whose role it might be to look into the causes of this strange phenomenon. Gregor’s sister instigates an experiment to see what kinds of food the bug might like–“to try out his taste she brought him a large selection” (46)–but the family never tries to find out, for instance, whether he can really hear or understand what they’re saying. They do end up leaving the door to his room open in the evening so that he can vicariously participate in their company. After all, “family duty towards him commanded that they should swallow their disgust, and put up with him in patience, just put up with him” (59). His changed circumstances ultimately constitute an irritation, an inconvenience. His parents and sister will have to adapt their lifestyle and routines, not least because Gregor had been their provider and breadwinner. But the problem itself is to be neither addressed nor eliminated. It is simply a matter of fact.

Gregor’s metamorphosis does induce a series of other changes: his father, for instance, who previously was somewhat bug-like himself (fat, idle, slovenly, parasitic), takes a job at a bank; his sister and mother likewise find ways to replace Gregor’s lost earnings; the family loses some of its servants and takes in lodgers, accelerating their slow decline and loss of status. But ultimately no one learns anything–and nor, I think, is the reader encouraged to believe that there is any kind of moral or lesson here. We are no longer to believe in any over-arching explanatory narratives. Indeed, we see that those who try to impose such lessons (the chief clerk, for example) are motivated by the most petty of self-regarding interests. It is better, Kafka suggests, to acknowledge simply that we are in a world governed by chance and statistical regularities, in which the odd exception or irregularity should not unduly disturb our everyday habits. We are in a world, in short, best described in terms of biopolitics: patterns, probability, general expectations governing generations and populations rather than exemplary individuals. Occasionally, shit happens. But the only thing we should understand is that there is nothing really to understand. Nothing to see, move along please.


The Waste Land

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The Waste LandThe final stanza of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land encapsulates much of what has gone before. It comprises four languages, multiple allusions, abrupt transitions and changes in register and tone:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon–O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata

Shantih shantih shantih

What is this, then? A monument to erudition and scholarship, that only the elite could (or should) decode? Or a cry of despair and doubt that contemporary culture will ever cohere again? In truth, it is both: Eliot claims to diagnose the crisis of an entire civilization, and also (hesitantly perhaps) to offer some kind of solution, drawn from the long history of that culture itself. The fear, however, is that the cure is simply a repetition of the initial disease. For what difference is there really between the “ruins” that litter the “waste land” and the “fragments” that Eliot wishes to “shore[] against” them? What keeps a fragment from becoming a ruin? Indeed, is Eliot not complicit in the ruination he laments? As Maud Ellmann eloquently puts it: “Because the poem can only abject writing with more writing, it catches the infection that it tries to purge, and implodes like an obsessive ceremonial under the pressure of its own contradictions” (273).

So for all that the poem apparently concludes with the calm of quiet benediction–Eliot gives “The Peace which passeth understanding” as a translation for the Sanskrit incantation that makes up its final line (26)–something of the stench of decay and corruption, dismay and disillusion, lives on. Indeed, the fear is that the text has only accelerated the process that it sets out to delay if not reverse. The three “shantihs” cannot prevent London Bridge’s thrice-announced “falling down” of a few lines earlier. Or is it that something more sinister is at work? Does Eliot not so secretly welcome the ruination of London Bridge, on which he has earlier noted crowds of somnolent and short-sighted commuters, who for all intents and purposes have already given up on life: “I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and frequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (7). Isn’t it worth an apocalypse, laying waste to this banal and meaningless excuse for an existence so as perhaps to start all over again? For Eliot surely speaks also through the voice of the pub landlord whose invocation “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” becomes less of a warning and more of a threat with every iteration (10).

It may merely be a matter of what we want from the text–any text, no doubt, but perhaps this text more obviously than most. Ultimately, it’s up to us how (or even if) we read The Waste Land today. Lawrence Rainey has a quite marvelous essay about the poem’s publication history that ends up with the only slightly tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the most faithful approach to the poem doesn’t get caught up in the intricacies of the text itself. Noting that “generations of students have been exhorted to look closely at the poem,” he articulates by contrast what he calls “the modernist principle of reading,” that “the best reading of a work is often that which does not read it at all” (111). Close reading, he tells us, is merely one approach among many–and if anything a sign of the way in which modernism has been hi-jacked by the academy, turned into a sport for professors.

But Eliot’s poem anticipates this question of the reader’s desire. The line “Why then Ile fit you” comes from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie, where it is a response to the request for some amusing entertainment for the king: “I’ll give you something that will suit your wishes,” is how our editor glosses its meaning (64). Poetry is endlessly malleable, a mere transient representation, it is implied, as though to get the poet off the hook for any offence (or ruination) he or she may cause. We get what we want out of literature: if we want to see it as a puzzle to be deciphered, then so be it; but if (à la Ellmann) we now prefer to think of it as a “sphinx without a secret,” then that is fine, too. We can take the fragments that language offers us and turn them to our advantage; we can play among the ruins. Isn’t this the shift from Eliot’s time to our own? The fragmentation that modernism saw in anguished terms has simply become our everyday reality, our happily postmodern condition. The twist, however, is that in The Spanish Tragedie a staged drama (a play within the play) becomes deadly as it turns out to be all too real: amid the “meere confusion” of its polyglot “unknowne languages” (63) it serves as cover for a revenge plot whereby the maddened Hieronymo kills the men who have murdered his son, and then kills himself, too. Is there something similarly suicidally murderous in The Waste Land? And if so, should we take the affects that literature provokes a little more seriously, and perhaps its talk of ruins more literally (if less literarily)?


The Prince

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Machiavelli, The PrinceFor a political writer renowned for his commitment to realism–to real politik, indeed–it’s remarkable, and surely significant, that Niccolò Machiavelli should open and close The Prince with a couple of extended metaphors. The resort to literary tropes frames what is otherwise often taken to be the founding text of a political “science” that simply tells it as it is, without ideology or obfuscation. After all, Machiavelli himself tells us in his preface dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici: “I have not ornamented this book with rhetorical turns of phrase, or stuffed it with pretentious and magnificent words. [. . .] For my intention is that this should be a book without pretensions” (5). The frame, however, turns out to be rather more decorative than this preface (itself in point of fact hardly lacking in rhetoric) admits. And it’s perhaps precisely because this surprisingly gilded frame is in tension with what it contains that it’s worth further investigation.

On first sight, the metaphor with which the book concludes is conventional and, however disturbing, frankly not that interesting: “Fortune is a lady,” Machiavelli reports. Hence “it is necessary, if you want to master her, to beat and strike her” (76). Yet it’s precisely the conventionality of the image, or rather conjunction of images–of both the fickleness and the subservience of women–that reminds us that for all his originality and scandalous novelty, for all of what Louis Althusser terms his “solitude,” there are plenty of ways in which Machiavelli is very much of his time, part of the crowd.

The book’s opening metaphor is rather more complex, not least because it is also a self-referential comment on the status of Machiavelli’s theory itself. It’s worth quoting at length:

I hope it will not be thought presumptuous for someone of humble and lowly status to discuss the behavior of rulers and to make recommendations regarding policy. Just as those who paint landscapes set up their easels down in the valley in order to portray the nature of the mountains and the peaks, and climb up into the mountains in order to draw the valleys, similarly in order to properly understand the behavior of the lower classes one needs to be a ruler, and in order to properly understand the behavior of rulers one needs to be a member of the lower classes. (6)

This is an image of an image, of the ways in which images are produced: it is a representation of the proper process of representation, an analysis of how best to analyze. Moreover, it concerns the proper perspective or point of view from which images, representation, and analysis should be drawn. One might ask immediately from which standpoint is this image itself drawn, which after all takes in both the mountain and the valley and purports to compare both. Doesn’t this already indicate the strange slippage in Machiavelli’s work: that he presents it as though envisaged from the valley, from the humble advisor; and yet he needs endlessly to imagine how things look from the mountain, to identify with the view of the prince.

At issue here is the place of the book and Machiavelli’s theory itself. Why would the virtuoso, the man gifted with virtù, need a guide like this at all? He who is sovereign should surely not have to depend on another; he who is decisive should not waver by looking for advice. The book is called The Prince, not “The Prince and His Advisor.” The prince should be singular, independent, and free. And yet it seems he is always haunted by his shadow, by the man who can see from the valleys and acts as a mirror in which the ruler can see his own reflection but in that same moment is divided, distanced from his own image of himself. Equally, as the prince follows the advisor’s counsel, so he begins to reflect him, to take on the attributes and characteristics of the lower man. A strange and dynamic symbiosis emerges, in which the true source of influence and power becomes increasingly obscured.

However much Machiavelli tries to resolve this tension, it persists and even colours his infamous reputation. Who, after all, is more fully Machiavellian, more the “Machiavellian type”: the heartless prince or the sinister advisor? Marlowe’s Duke of Guise of Shakespeare’s Iago? Nixon or Kissinger, Blair or Campbell, Bush or Rove? Should we fear the cruel autocrat or the eminence grise? Is it enough to say that one could not subsist without the other, that the prince is thereby doubled, his sovereignty fatally split? Or perhaps it is more to the point to note that sovereignty is always split, always both lacking and excessive, and that without that essential fissure it would not exist. And would it be too quick to identify this doubleness at the heart of sovereignty, enabling and yet undoing its basic claims, with the perpetually unresolved tension between constituent and constituted power?