Monthly Archives: March 2013

“This is the way the world ends (x3)… not with a bang but a whimper.” There’s something     profoundly unsettling in the notion that something as dramatic as the end of the world could manifest as a fizzle. Some horrors are so inexplicable as to transcend experience and expression rendering them, perversely, almost anti-climactic. “This is hell,” writes Levi, “and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen” (p. 22). Eliot’s inspiration (if that’s the right way to describe his fixation with moral paralysis) is at least partly attributable to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, whose central character, Kurtz, appears in the opening line of “The Hollow Men,” and comes to symbolize a genocidal imperial policy in African. There are numerous common points between Conrad, Eliot, and Levi, and Dante’s Inferno is an explicit anchoring point for each text.

Conrad offers a template for the genre of genocide, conveying “the horror” of mass killing not in screaming indignation but in clinical, detached, almost banal observation. Despite the centrality of Kurtz (or rather the idea of Kurtz) the point is that there is no single or comprehensible cause for industrial-scale murder. Rather it is an army of book-keepers, accountants, steam-boat pilots, brick-makers, surveyors, pilgrims, rubber sellers, and so forth that spread the “germs of empire.” These hollow men… like the “papier-mache mephistopholes”… might be called genocidal nerds. For Levi these are the capos, the doctors, the camp administrators, or petty functionaries whose dedication to an unquestioned individual “duty” combines, with obscene banality, to create a holocaust. Like Conrad’s novella, the terror of Levi’s testament resides in its inability to name “the horror” — to identify the monster that haunts our imagination. If only something would go bump in the night… if only a monster would show its face and emerge from behind the barbed wire perimeter of the bizarrely ordinary world of industrial murder. The “Belgian Free State,” and “Arbeit Mach Frei,” resonate today as abominable lies uttered by and for “hollow men” and “sordid puppets.”

Morrissey once asked: “has the world changed or have I changed?” Were Gregor to pose this question, the answer would hardly keep us in suspense. And yet he barely notices his mutation, rather like the early scenes in Shawn of the Dead where pre-zombie life is almost indistinguishable from zombie “life.” What does it mean?

As Josella Tan points out, there’s an irony in the idea of metamorphosis — maybe it’s the world that changes after all. Gregor has literally crystallized into what he more or less always was: an insignificant insect. His greatest ambition, after all, is the “real, true, ordinary state of affairs” (p. 33). Here comes another irony: his family has been so parasitic on him that only his buggish immobilization shakes them into action, spurring father and mother back into the world of work, and his sister in pursuit of marriage. They have lost their livelihood, but now stand a chance at real life, something that Gregor first figuratively, than literally, loses.  I’m reminded of a slogan  I read once in an ad for IKEA office furniture: “when work is a pleasure, life is a joy.” Unhappily for Gregor the opposite is also true, and his mundane  job as a traveling salesman puts him into constant contact with humans, but not with humanity. As Gregor laments, it is a “human contact that is always changing, never lasting, never approaching warmth” (p. 28).

Because the story is so clearly allegorical there are multiple interpretations that are available. There is no easy or obvious meaning in his sudden status as a bug, so let’s just relax and examine the many possible themes it can generate.