Just as Genet denied having written, with Les Bonnes (The Maids), a “plea for the cause of domestic servants” (“I suppose there exists a union of household staff — that is no concern of mine”), Kafka never had any intention of pleading the animal cause.1
And yet, just as Genet’s play makes the unspoken truths of the servile condition stand out, Kafka’s fable brings to light some of the burning questions that the animal condition poses to human morality. These questions, however, do not emerge in the manner of abstract formulations: they arise from the new situations invented by the writer. Kafka’s story defines no principles and formulates no prescriptions; it invites us to a particular form of moral phenomenology, through a series of imaginative variations.
In the case that concerns us, one could determine as follows the questioning likely to orient our reading of The Metamorphosis. Take a given moral relation between a man and his family. What becomes of this relation: - if this man loses the use of speech, but not consciousness; - if this human takes on the appearance of an animal; - if his appearance is particularly repugnant?
What is the link between the bodily envelope to which the existing being is chained without recourse and the relation that is forged with others? Supposing that Gregor is no longer a human, what power does this new status confer over him?
There is no need, for such a reading, to attribute to Kafka any philosophy of the animal whatsoever: it is enough that the imaginative apparatus of his narrative carries these interrogations within itself. It is precisely because Gregor’s transformation subjects him to an estrangement from humanity that is never fully completed that the story allows us to go beyond the dividing lines hastily traced by a humanist metaphysics bent on defining “what is proper to man.” The behind-closed-doors confrontation of the chimera Gregor — neither entirely animal nor entirely man — with his family allows us to explore the shadow zones and blind spots of our morality.
Phenomenology of the abject
Can the terror and aversion aroused by vermin be subjected to a moral evaluation? In turn the parents, the lodgers, and Gregor’s sister succumb to it. The attitude of the latter undergoes a significant evolution. One can certainly yield to the facile readings, moralizing or sentimental, and harshly judge the transformation of an attentive sister into a “wicked fairy.”
In reality, her behavior obeys anthropologically plausible mechanisms: disgust and fear of the foul beast. Grete undergoes an ordeal that she first takes on with a semblance of devotion, overcoming her repulsion (chapter II); impoverishment and nervous wear finally get the better of her tolerance. Can Kafka fault those who do not have the strength of soul of saints to cherish a hideous and foul-smelling creature? Is Gregor’s promiscuity not effectively a “perpetual torment” (p. 88)? Has the story not done everything to convince the reader that, as Grete says, cohabitation is intolerable (p. 89)? Just as his animal nature prescribes that Gregor eat rotten food, human sensibility forbids Grete a lasting compassion, a fortiori a true love for the abject animal. The Metamorphosis is therefore not the edifying tale of the persecution of an ill-favored beast, but the aporetic encounter of two “natures” closely delimited by their sensibility.
Disgust is not alone at issue. Despite his conciliatory attitude, Gregor arouses more diffuse anxieties. Everything happens as if his first metamorphosis into vermin concealed another: that of the insect into predator. When Grete, having arrived in her brother’s room earlier than expected, finds him reared up on his legs (p. 59), it is indeed the idea of an aggression that prevails: “Someone unconnected with the matter might have thought that Gregor had lain in wait for his sister and had wanted to bite her” (p. 59).
The phobia of contact, the anguish of being devoured, bear witness to an archaic fear: that of the return to the original indistinction. Distinguishing the object from the abject, Julia Kristeva is thus able to write: “The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. […] Of the object, the abject has only one quality — that of being opposed to I. But if the ob-ject, by being opposed, balances me within the fragile web of a desire for meaning […], on the contrary, the abject, a fallen object, is radically an excluded thing and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”2
Now these fears are doubtless at the very foundation of the subject’s capacity to symbolize and of the formation of moral ideas. As Paul Ricœur recalls, the idea of defilement is the representation of “something almost material, which infects like a filth, which harms through invisible properties and which nevertheless operates in the manner of a force in the field of our existence, indivisibly psychic and bodily”3. The thought of defilement may seem, to a secular consciousness, the trace of an obsolete moral representation, for “what is defilement […] no longer coincides with what for us is evil” (ibid., p. 188). It bears witness to a “stage at which evil and misfortune have not been dissociated, at which the ethical order of wrong-doing is not discerned from the cosmo-biological order of ill-being — suffering, illness, death, failure” (ibid., p. 189). It nonetheless remains the case that “the fear of the impure and the rites of purification are in the background of all our feelings and all our behaviors relating to fault” (ibid., p. 187).
The relation to the repugnant animal thus exposes with an unusual clarity the close intrication between sensory perception and moral representations — in other words, the bodily anchoring, become invisible through the force of habit, of the ethical relation, its presuppositions occulted. A relation might perhaps be conceivable if Gregor had the appearance of an amiable Labrador, but the protagonist of The Metamorphosis has the bad taste to transform himself into a repulsive animal, into a repugnant monster apt to bring about in those who come near him a form of panic, a generalized derangement of the affects.
“The silence of the beasts”
In Western metaphysics, it is the possession of language — logos, “language” and “reason” — that marks the impassable limit between man and the whole of the animal kingdom. Thus, Diderot reports the remark of Cardinal de Polignac, pretending to address a great ape in the King’s garden: “Speak and I baptize you”4. But would the fate inflicted by man on animals still be acceptable if the animal revealed itself to be our neighbor? What horrible duties — and what unbearable prohibitions — would an insect endowed with reason and feelings impose upon man? There remains only to pray that speech may never come to the beasts, and above all not to vermin…
Gregor’s metamorphosis affects not only his physical appearance, but his phonatory organs: even before being seen, he can no longer make himself heard nor make himself recognized by his speech or his voice. Yet not everything is so simple. A man who lost the use of speech would not for all that lose his humanity; it must further be taken as established that the comprehension of language is likewise denied him. This logical leap is very quickly accomplished by the Samsa family: “As they did not understand him, no one thought, not even his sister, that he might understand the others” (p. 53). By deciding, from the very first day, to no longer speak to him, his family collaborates in his metamorphosis: it confines him within the animal identity.
If Gregor no longer speaks, he gives his family every means of understanding that his intelligence exceeds, at the very least, animal instinct. Grete perceives her brother’s efforts to get himself to the window (p. 58) or to conceal his odious appearance by burying himself under a sheet. The family dogma of Gregor’s stupidity is therefore tainted with bad faith, as the dénouement seems to confirm. After a scandal provoked by the “public” eruption of the vermin during Grete’s concert, the family council seems to conclude that Gregor is definitively incapable of understanding the situation:
“‘If he understood us,’ said the father, half as a question; from the depths of her tears, the sister waved her hand violently to signify that this was not to be thought of. ‘If he understood us,’ repeated the father, closing his eyes to register his daughter’s conviction that it was impossible, ‘then an agreement might perhaps be possible with him. But under these conditions…’” (p. 88)
A false dialogue, which is a matter of self-persuasion. Is it not astonishing that, after several months of cohabitation, no member of the family has sought to settle the matter once and for all? Grete’s rhetorical ruse is more patent still, when she hastens to declare: “But how could it be Gregor? If it were him, he would long ago have understood that human beings obviously cannot live in the company of such a beast, and he would have left of his own accord” (pp. 88–89). This discourse, held in the presence of her brother, is in reality addressed to him. The bargain is clear: if it is a beast, let it be eliminated; if it is a man, let him disappear of his own accord! The party concerned does not need to be told twice and withdraws into his room to let himself die. Thus, it is not because Gregor would no longer have access to language that relations with his family are compromised; it is because his family wants to break off all contact with him that it decrees that Gregor is devoid of language, and consequently of humanity.
The same reasoning seems to be at work when it comes to ruling on Gregor’s identity. The debate rages on the evening preceding his death. The terms are set out by Grete, at the end of her strength:
I do not want, faced with this monstrous animal, to pronounce my brother’s name, and so I say only: “we must try to get rid of it” […] It must disappear. You just have to try to rid yourself of the idea that it is Gregor. We believed it for so long, and that is precisely where our true misfortune lies (p. 88).
The problems raised by Grete have nothing absurd about them in themselves: does there not come a moment when the change of qualities amounts to a change of substance? Does so complete an organic metamorphosis still allow one to posit the permanence of identity? But the logic of the argumentation also reveals its specious character. On the identity of the beast depends the latter’s fate. Now, the primary truth is that Grete “cannot take it any longer” (p. 88). The ontological decision is in reality conditioned by a prior decision: that of eliminating the animal, commanded by an almost Darwinian survival reflex. It is because Gregor must be “got rid of” that the idea of his humanity must be “got rid of.”
In fact, the temptation to murder is always latent, as the scene of the “stoning” of Gregor by his father illustrates. Rather than blaming the lack of love of the Samsa family, it is legitimate, under these conditions, to ask what constrains it to undergo the “torment” of his presence. In short: why not kill Gregor? The story answers this, through the voice of the father: “Gregor was a member of the family” and “family duty” — literally: “the commandment of family duty” — required that one “overcome one’s aversion” (p. 73)5. The untranslated word, “Gebot” (commandment), refers any German-speaking reader to the Decalogue: no one, to the very end, allows himself to transgress this “thou shalt not kill.” Grete herself masks her desire to murder with euphemisms: Gregor must be “got rid of” (loswerden), he must “disappear” (p. 88).
The whole difficulty consists in eliminating Gregor without having to answer for a murder. Throughout the third part, this unspoken will translates into a policy of abandonment: Gregor is forgotten in his hovel, given over to his filth, increasingly conscious of being undesirable. This strategy of indirect murder culminates in Grete’s invitation, pushing her brother to suicide. Nothing forbids us from thinking that the relief felt at the discovery of the corpse comes from the fact that, delivered from the burden of Gregor, his family is also delivered from the murderous impulse it was becoming ever more difficult to resist.
This hesitation over Gregor’s fate comes, in the negative, to recall the obvious fact that “thou shalt not kill” does not apply to the animal. It is impossible to kill the “vermin” that Gregor has become only because it is to some degree anthropomorphic. This particular insect has a “face” (Gesicht), which everything leads us to believe recalls certain features of the vanished child. Absent this hint of ontological continuity, the beast would be withdrawn from all ethical prohibitions. A phenomenological approach might even note that the very size of the animal is doubtless not unrelated to the Samsa family’s restraint: if Gregor had had the dimensions of an ordinary beetle, would it not have been infinitely easier, more tempting, to get rid of him, just as it is easier to crush an ant than to slit the throat of a mammal?
The forbidden sacrifice
One can liken Gregor’s status to a category of archaic Roman law exhumed by Giorgio Agamben — that of the homo sacer6. The expression originally designated a condemned man whom it was not permitted to “sacrifice” (that is, to kill according to a precise juridical or religious rite) but whom anyone could strike down with impunity — in other words, a being whose status placed him in an indeterminate zone, falling neither under natural laws nor under human or divine law. This zone of indistinction, Agamben, taking up a medieval notion, calls the ban, a term that designates “both exclusion from the community and the command and the insignia of the sovereign”7. The ban is that space into which the homo sacer is cast and which manifests the sovereign power of exclusion.
Gregor’s position within his family is not without connection to this undefined status of the homo sacer. The character is literally placed under the ban of his family, confined to the space of his room. The father does not enter it, but the two leaves of the door separating it from the living room materialize his authority. Even ajar, as at the beginning of chapter 3, it nonetheless constitutes an impassable border. Each of Gregor’s transgressions is mercilessly punished and exposes him to a death without trial, casts him into a juridical and moral no man’s land: when he ventures into the living room to win the favor of the chief clerk, he must retreat under the virtually murderous assaults of the pater familias. Father Samsa seems reinvested with the fullness of his power, including the vitae necisque potestas, that power of life and death that a father exercised over his child in archaic law. Gregor is in a position always to fear for his life: “At any moment the cane, in his father’s hand, threatened him with a murderous blow on the back or the head” (p. 44).
Gregor’s uncertain fate in turn illuminates the ambiguity of the ethical and juridical status of the animal. If the first juridical border is the one that separates man from beast, other borders run within the very group of animals, according to their place in the scale of the living and their role in human society. Violence toward a domestic animal is most often the object of a moral evaluation (when it is not punishable by penal sanctions); the slaughter of livestock is subject only to regulations, while the elimination of insects is the object of no debate. Now, what of an animal like Gregor who belongs at once, by his anatomy, to the eliminable insect, by his behavior and his size, to a domestic animal, and to a man by certain features and by his history?
The horror comes at once from the fact that Gregor’s form arouses the desire to murder and from the fact that it prevents the satisfaction of that desire. Kafka creates not only a biological monster, but also a moral and juridical one.
The dénouement of the story has sometimes been likened to a sacrificial schema. Now the idea of sacrifice presupposes an at least symbolic dignity of the animal: according to Élisabeth de Fontenay, despite its cruelty, the ancient practice of sacrifice elevated the animal to a dignity it has lost with modern times. In any event, such recognition is forbidden to the foul insect. To be sure, the disappearance of the beast has the liberating effect of sacrifice: the death of the emissary-insect, symbolically charged with all negativity, finally opens the future of the family. Yet the ritual forms are absent from the story. Gregor is not killed, he is left to croak; he will, in all likelihood, be thrown in the garbage after his death, which contravenes all sacrificial rite. A philological accident? The word “Ungeziefer” (“vermin”) has as its origin the root tiber (which would give the word “atoivre” in Old French) designating an impure animal, unfit for ritual sacrifice. Rather than a sacrifice, the dominant schema is that of a recovery: Gregor is a parasite of which one must rid oneself in order to regain vigor and health, in the image of Grete, who blooms again after the ordeal.
What man does to man: echoes and resonances
One then understands some of the resonances of Kafka’s story for the contemporary reader. The paradox of such a text is that, evoking nothing in itself that might resemble the realistic representation of a given problem, constantly playing on the blurring of ontological borders, it finds itself particularly apt to evoke, by associations of ideas, all the situations in which the definition of the human is at stake. Two examples will show this: the fate inflicted on the animal can evoke now the model of the disabled person, now the mechanism of political or racial exclusion.
The incipit of the story resembles the account of a birth. The parents wait behind the door for the appearance of their son, prey to anxiety and dire forebodings. Gregor is locked away under double turn of the key in his room, as in a womb: he has every difficulty getting out of it, but when the child appears, his aspect provokes horror and consternation: “The father clenched his fist with a hostile air, […] then looked around the room with a bewildered air, then hid his eyes behind his hands and began to weep so that his chest heaved” (p. 39). Would the description have been very different had it been a matter of evoking the impotent rage of a father discovering that he has engendered a monstrous child? Grete soon enters her brother’s room as into that of a “gravely ill person” (p. 50). After the stoning by the father, the image of the disabled person is explicit: “Gregor had now lost forever a part of his mobility, and […] it took him, to cross his room, like an old invalid, long, long minutes” (p. 73).
If there is in every ethical relation, as Lévinas underscores, a structural asymmetry between me and the other, this appears with a particular brilliance when it makes us the hostage of an “other” — or a guest — not only useless, but harmful, cumbersome, disgusting. Hence the apparent inversion of values: “This beast persecutes us, drives away the lodgers, manifestly intends to occupy the whole apartment and to make us sleep in the street” (p. 89). The feeling of persecution experienced by Grete can be read as the symptom of a relation in which the mute solicitation of the powerless beast is lived as a harassment that imperils the vital foundations of the self. The relation to the animal, and a fortiori to the parasitic and abject animal, comes in a sense to reveal the asymmetry of the ethical relation already present in the case of a human “other.” The duties toward Gregor are not inscribed in the perspective of an exchange: faced with this life that is only a “burden” (p. 30), duty itself becomes torture. But any human life can, following an accident, an illness, or the mere process of aging, one day be nothing but a pure and simple biological persistence. Through Gregor, Kafka subjects to a disquieting interrogation the stability of our moral taxonomies — without, naturally, being in a position to imagine the atrocious answers that, less than a generation later, Nazi eugenics would bring to them.
The displacement of borders between man and animal can also be politically decreed. Is it possible to read The Metamorphosis today without retroactive reference to History, and in particular to the extermination of the Jews? George Steiner does not think so; he considers that “that very word ‘vermin,’ Ungeziefer in German, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance, for it is thus that the Nazis were to call those they destined for the gas chamber”8. The stereotypes of Jewish ugliness and parasitism were already current at the time of The Metamorphosis; Ernst Pawel considers that they certainly played a role in the problematic relationship that Kafka maintained with his body. The echoes do not lack for whoever looks for them: down to this use of euphemism (“get rid of,” make “disappear”) that was in force to designate, without naming it, the extermination of undesirable populations9. One will observe, moreover, that one of the rare times Kafka makes explicit reference to the manifestations of antisemitism (eight years later, in November 1920), it is again the image of the parasitic insect, in this case the cockroach, that comes from his pen:
Every afternoon now, I walk in the streets; one bathes there in antisemitic hatred. I have just heard the Jews called prašivé plemeno [“mangy breed” in Czech] there. Is it not natural to leave a place where one is so hated? (No need for that of Zionism or national feeling [Volksgefühl].) The heroism of staying nevertheless resembles that of the cockroaches [Schaben] that nothing drives from the bathrooms.10
One will not for all that conclude that Kafka sought to give in this story an allegory of the Jewish condition, and still less a representation of antisemitism, which would be pure anachronism. It seems more interesting to invert the terms of the question: by giving body to a nightmare that there is every reason to think was then more intimate than political, the writer described certain processes that would come to know the political realization we know. Soon, millions of men would wake up transformed into “monstrous vermin.” The story furnishes a narrative model of exclusion penetrating enough to illuminate historical situations past and to come: perception of the other as parasite, banishment (room, ghetto, camp), abandonment (or active elimination). The author of Le Silence des bêtes (The Silence of the Beasts) recalls, without lapsing into a shocking conflation, the feeling of a “strange community of destiny” that many deportees experienced with slaughterhouse animals (op. cit., p. 747). In both models, the exploitation of the animal motif is of a nature to problematize the ethical relation. Without sketching any dogmatic answer, the text invites us to meditate on the nature of our duties and on the “destiny allotted to those we hold to be merely alive” (É. de Fontenay, ibid., p. 13); it also invites a reflection on the way in which the animal metaphor can constitute an operator of dehumanization within the human community itself, casting a disquieting light both on the bond that humanity maintains with itself and on the lightness with which it treats animal life.
The strange sympathy
The originality of Kafka’s writing consists in making us live Gregor’s experience from within. When Claude David writes that the reader’s whole sympathy goes to Gregor’s family and can only turn away from the beast11, he misses the specificity of the literary experience. What would be the fecundity of a work that brought us only to reproduce our perceptual categories and our moral certainties? The moment the narrator identifies himself with Gregor12, the reader’s vision finds itself magnetized by the consciousness of the animal. The choice of the narrative perspective that governs the story up to Gregor’s death transports us into “a sphere of new perception” (Shklovsky13) and constrains us, even if temporarily, to “feel with” the beast — that is, to enter partially into sympathy with it, which is precisely what Gregor’s parents cannot do: only art allows one to step outside one’s natural limits in this way. Think of the incredible meticulousness with which Kafka reproduces the motor difficulties of the beast: standing upright, taking a corner quickly when in danger, reaching a window! Who can doubt the ethical reach of this mental displacement? The metamorphosis is also the one the reader has undergone in transporting himself, even if partially, into the body and the condition of a foul beast.
At the heart of this identification lies the experience of anguish, which the story expresses with a striking economy of means and efficacy, that anguish everywhere present but which culminates on the last evening when the repudiated beast finds its way back to its room to die there. The following passage ought to be reread by those who persist in making Kafka an impassive prose-writer:
“He was barely inside his room when the door was hastily slammed shut and locked with a double turn of the key. This unexpected noise behind him gave him such a fright that his little legs gave way beneath him. It was his sister who had rushed forward in this way […], and while turning the key in the lock she called out to her parents a ‘Finally!’ ‘And now?’ Gregor wondered, finding himself in the dark. He was not long in noticing that he could no longer move at all” (p. 90).
Rare are evocations as overwhelming as this of the vertigo that seizes the creature at the moment a door closes behind it. Is it the anguish of the man condemned to death, of the abandoned child, or of the animal led to the slaughterhouse? Is Gregor at this moment more man or more beast? He seems above all to reconnect with an original experience of anguish — the one that results from the creature’s confrontation with its mortal destiny, the one that forbids Pascal’s man to “stay at rest in a room” — in which the very distinction between consciousness and feeling, between the human and the animal, might be abolished:
For anguish, one cannot say it often or diversely enough, is truly what is common to men and to beasts, to the family that is come to arrest at dawn, to the deer that hears the sound of the horn in the forest, to the pig that is going to be slaughtered, to the patient who awaits the result of a medical examination, to the dog that you and I have led to the veterinarian: the same lost looks before the great leap into the unknown.14
The ethical and metaphysical question that Kafka’s story poses therefore has little to do with the determination of a “proper to man.” It is no more a matter of knowing the animal than of speculating on human nature: in the description of anguish, what emerges is indeed a community of the living — that is, a community of the suffering. This empathy with the animal is assuredly not Kafka’s last word; it is certainly not the unique theme and stake of a story as complex as The Metamorphosis; it nonetheless bears witness to that work of transubstantiation that literary writing accomplishes. It would be naïve to think that, thereby, something of the animal mystery has been lifted; but it would be vain to deny that this voyage into animality has contributed to “breaking the frozen sea within us”15.
Notes
This work takes up again, in abridged form, a chapter of a long study published in 2004 under the title “L’animal et l’homme dans La Métamorphose de Kafka” (The animal and man in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis), in L’animal et l’homme (M.-Ch. Bellosta, ed.), coll. “Un thème, trois œuvres,” Belin Sup, 2004, pp. 189–277.↩︎
Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection (Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection), coll. Points, Seuil, 1980, p. 9.↩︎
Philosophie de la volonté, II: Finitude et culpabilité (Philosophy of the Will, II: Finitude and Guilt), Aubier, 1988, p. 188.↩︎
Le Rêve de d’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream), Suite de l’entretien, in Œuvres philosophiques, Garnier, p. 273.↩︎
La Métamorphose (The Metamorphosis), Garnier-Flammarion.↩︎
G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life), éd. du Seuil, 1997.↩︎
Ibid., p. 36.↩︎
G. Steiner, Langage et silence (Language and Silence), 10/18, pp. 144–145. In 1978, Darquier de Pellepoix, former Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, could still declare to L’Express: “At Auschwitz, only lice were gassed”; likewise, the word “cockroaches” was a usual designation of the Tutsis during the recent genocide in Rwanda.↩︎
On condition that one not forget, as Agamben does, that the Nazis did not content themselves with letting the Jews and Gypsies die, but deliberately killed them.↩︎
Letter to Milena, in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, vol. IV, p. 1102, translation modified. Through a kind of internalization of the racist insult, Kafka describes the Jew in the very terms and images of antisemitism — just as, to a certain extent, Gregor’s metamorphosis is the “realization” of the paternal insults suffered by the writer.↩︎
Preface to the Folio edition of La Métamorphose, pp. 12–13.↩︎
“Point of view with” or “internal focalization” in critical jargon.↩︎
Critic, founder of the group of Russian Formalists of Saint Petersburg, to whom we owe the concept of “defamiliarization.”↩︎
É. de Fontenay, op. cit., p. 697.↩︎
“[…] One should read only books that bite and sting you. If the book we are reading does not wake us with a blow to the skull, what is the use of reading it? […] We need books that act upon us like a misfortune that would make us suffer greatly […]. A book must be the axe that breaks the frozen sea within us” (Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904, OC, III, p. 575).↩︎