Maybe this is you, too. I am slowly reading my way through the classics. Sometimes I think I already know the story because I can recite the movie by heart—like the one about the girl and her friends who go to see the wizard. Sometimes the story is surprisingly funny, enthralling, and profound—like the one about the men who hunt whales. Sometimes the story is not at all what I expected—like the one about a man who turned into a bug, which turned out to be about something else entirely, and twice over.
By the time I finally picked up Kafka’s book, little did I know what lurked inside. A man had definitely turned into a bug, but as I turned each page, I mainly saw a sister’s trials and transformation under the shadow of her monstrous big brother. This masterpiece was hardly about poor Gregor Samsa at all. Grete’s was the real metamorphosis.
Nobody primed me to decipher the text with a ladies’ mind. And, I don’t approach fiction by male authors with a smirk, as if daring them to exceed my lowliest expectations. Nothing of the sort. And, given what Kafka I’d already read, I expected genius from Metamorphosis. And so, it was. In my hands, there, in my lap on the sofa. Then, validated by the last line, I clapped the thing shut, jumped up, and shouted through the wall towards Kevin in the other room, “How surreal! It’s about the sister! This girl’s life is a story about a man!”
I was unnerved, ecstatic. I simply couldn’t be the only person to see it like this. And whatever was happening in the story and, especially, to its interpretation in the zeitgeist seemed like Kafka’s design—as if he knew his story about a girl living in patriarchy would be received as one about a man, making it a work of performance art, too.
Naturally, I headed to the library for answers. As soon as I started digging, I hit the jackpot.
In 1989, Nina Pelikan Straus published, “Transforming Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.” In it, she quotes a fellow scholar who calls the story “a literary Rorschach test” adding that “Kafka critics have hitherto been looking into the mirror of his works to find reflected there the images of their own interpretative attitudes.” This paper offered better insight into my mind (as a reader) than into Kafka’s, but it was a jackpot nonetheless.
In the first six decades after its release in 1915, over ten thousand interpretations of Metamorphosis were published, spanning religion, philosophy, psychology, politics, and sociology. Nearly all the reflections in the mirror were men’s. The man who turned into a bug held the spotlight, the wheel, the sympathy, the concern, the symbolism, the gravitas, the humanity. Gregor was taken so seriously, as a sort of hero, that his sister Grete was cast as the villain. Right. Nabokov (author of Lolita) argued that Kafka intended for Grete to play the villain. So, as the whole world began to sing Kafka’s song, Metamorphosis was about capitalism, men’s alienation, oedipal fantasy, and so on.
But, eventually, because of all that interpretation, Metamorphosis developed into something else, more than the sum of those interpretations. Its truth became what Straus showed me: inkblots, a mirror, and everything that could be seen.
The most recent example I’ve encountered is Frans de Waal’s true-to-form opening thoughts in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? To start his 2017 book, de Waal describes trying to empathize not with a man who turns into a bug, but with the bug itself. How alien to my own reading experience.
By the late 1980s, the larger truth that Straus revealed included what Straus herself saw in those pages—a structure that hinges on Grete at least as much as Gregor, and a commentary on the gendered oppression of Grete, Gregor, their parents, their servant, and everyone living in a patriarchal society. Everyone, even the “winners” suffer in patriarchy because, as Carol Gilligan teaches us, patriarchy is the withholding of love. And as bell hooks teaches us, patriarchy is inextricably tangled up with capitalism and with European and white supremacy.
Like people the world over, Franz Kafka was disturbed by the stories we tell about sex, about what being male or female means. Grete was burdened with caring for her terrifying brother. His metamorphosis is a nightmare because so much of the family depends on him – patriarchy makes it so, burdening him because it limits what women can contribute. Women are sidelined in patriarchy. Even fictional women by readers of fiction. Grete was overlooked, diminished, or disparaged in decades of reflections on Metamorphosis. Gregor’s grotesque business overshadows the fact that his sister, too, metamorphoses and hers, too, is not by choice.
But by the time I opened the book with the story that everyone knows is about a man who turned into a bug, I knew nothing of the decades of humanity that had been shining on it. When I finally peered at the words, I only saw what I could see: a story about a girl’s metamorphosis. My own reflection felt so true that I leapt to the conclusion that my take must have been Kafka’s true meaning or purpose for the story. Not only that but the fact that the mainstream made the story about Gregor, not Grete, was even more mind-blowing: this was the very patriarchy in the story being enacted in the world! Grete was being overlooked and subordinated, as the art lived on in us. Kafkaaaaa! You dawg!
Wow. I really went wild. But can you blame me? I was shocked to the core and my response matched.
When Straus showed me the mirror, the high wore off, and I could see what I was doing. But that only freed me up for another high. Another revelation.
I had been treating Kafka’s text exactly like people treat the facts of human evolution. I had been doing what people have long been doing to nature, to life itself, to themselves and one another.
People look at the facts of human evolution—the fossils and artifacts, so much of the genome we share with chimpanzees, bonobos, bananas, and fruit flies—and see nature’s true meaning or purpose for themselves and one another. They see old bones and they think of death and violence or they see the same bones and they think of life, and what it takes for life to live: love. Or who knows what they see. But they don’t merely, objectively, like, ever in a million years see only old bones. When they look at the remains of our natural history, people often see what their guide (an anthropologist, a biologist, a geneticist, a science communicator, a journalist, a teacher, a professor, etc.) sees. Or, they see what’s all around them. Of course they do. Of course we do. We see what we already know.
And so… given the male-dominated history of the science of and discourse on evolution, the story of human evolution has been narrowly focused on men, as distinctively created, to the exclusion and subordination of women. This is what those people knew already. And it’s been like this for so long that, despite massive argument among scientists and scholars, we’re still living in it. From Darwin’s superior, white, male hero’s journey, to the “killer ape,” to Man the Hunter, and all throughout sociobiology and evolutionary psychology which represents how human evolution is popularly understood, today, human evolutionary history has always been and still is a white, masculine fantasy.
It’s “just science” or “just how we evolved” or “just human nature” that men and women are distinct in their core essences and that patriarchy rules despite societal progress. That these stories are compatible with evangelical beliefs greatly helps with their mainstream endurance. And, as long as people believe we did it, we cracked the laws of nature everybody! then we’ll have these stories. As long as people believe that arguing over plausibility is a scientific enterprise, then we will have these stories. As long as people believe that we can argue over plausibility, as a scientific enterprise, because we know enough about how evolution works, then we will have these stories. And as long as people believe we know enough about how evolution works that we earned the right to treat unverifiable stories about our ancestors, and about the supposed evolved inner essences of theirs that we carry inside of us, as scientific facts, then we’ll have these stories. Whew. So, because the zeitgeist is relying on 150-year-old, “survival of the fittest”-themed evolutionary biology (and so are lots of public intellectuals), our story is still, after all these years, and with all these products of evolution on this planet, one about an ape who turned into a Man.
I thought my mind-blowing experience reading Kafka would help me to argue that human evolutionary stories like Darwin’s superior, white, male hero’s journey, to the “killer ape,” Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer, Man the Sexy Provisioner, the Aquatic Ape, and, our current moment’s unquestioned favorite, that we evolved to be “tribal” or “xenophobic”, are not and can never be the facts of human evolution.
I thought my Kafka experience could help me convey that the facts of human evolution, like his text, are inkblots, mirrors, and everything else and, as a result, we’ve built up a thick layer of meaning on top of them. In this STEM-above-all world, much of that meaning is passing as science. But, no matter how beautiful or sublime that meaning might be, it is not science. And whether that “science” is offered like a cup of tea or launched like a Molotov cocktail, it’s all 100% bullshit. That includes the belief (not evolutionary fact) that war is human nature. And it’s in this bullshit about “human nature” that we’re stuck living out our bullshit-shaped lives, or … unnecessarily, tragically not.
So, because I thought it could be so helpful, I crammed a brief distillation of my Kafka revelation, complete with Nina Pelikan Straus quotes, into the end of a talk about human evolution. It was a Darwin Day event, where at least a hundred undergrad students had come to earn extra credit from the kind professors who invited me to campus. (Don’t worry. I kept all the darkness about bullshit out. I stuck to the reading experience. The inkblots.)
After the talk and Q&A were over and I was packing up my laptop, a student with handwritten questions approached me. He read the first two off his notepad. One was about gorillas. The other, bones. He was a switched-on first-year. After we chatted about both, he looked back down at his notepad and read a third thing to me, in a new, agitated tone. “I just read Metamorphosis in high school. It’s not about the sister; it’s about capitalism.” After setting me straight, he looked pleased, like he felt taller than just a moment before. Maybe because he was standing taller than before. I said, “Yes. Sure. Like I said, it’s a literary Rorschach test. So what it’s about depends on who’s looking at it.” His face soured. “It’s about capitalism,” he said, and walked away.
A professor who had been eavesdropping suggested to me that perhaps this student did not know what a Rorschach test was. I could see how that, if true, would be a barrier to our mutual understanding. The older I get, the harder it is grasp what lingering cultural-historical touchstones I share with 18-21 year olds. Still, I had projected 30-foot images of inkblots behind me as I shared these ideas. Maybe that didn’t matter. Our eyes and ears have a penchant for closing when we encounter ideas that contradict our own. We can be so overwhelmed, or trapped in our minds and emotions that we lose our sense and our senses. Maybe we stop taking in more information to protect ourselves from the suffering it will cause. Like when something stinks and we scrunch up our nostrils which physically blocks more stinky molecules from touching our brain. That’s a bit how that student’s face looked before he walked away. New ideas stink because they force a reckoning. I imagine him processing thoughts like, despite my acing that exam on Metamorphosis, is she saying it's not possible to decipher the one true meaning of anything because no such thing exists in the universe? We make it all up? Isn’t that post-modernism? This book that I like so much might be…oh god help me…a feminist book?
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| The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach test, according to Wikipedia. |
Believe me when I say that I understand how literary criticism is not the typical way into human evolution, especially not on Darwin Day. And I could get out some records and listen to Pink Floyd and the Kinks and The Clash rail against the ignorance, bigotry, and anti-intellectualism that institutionalized education can cultivate and is doing in front of our eyes with its hyper-emphasis on STEM to the disparagement of the humanities and the arts. We’re being fooled into believing that data rules over critical thinking and wisdom. I wasn’t asking anyone to replace their interpretation of Metamorphosis. I was merely revealing that there are many ways to interpret the story. I didn't expect that to be the obstacle! Instead, I thought Kafka would be my clever, easy way in to arguing something much more challenging. And, no, I was not going to argue that just like Metamorphosis, there are many ways to interpret the human evolutionary story. It's the opposite. Scientifically speaking, there aren’t any ways. The facts, like the fossils, are true, but they themselves don't make up a story. That's extra. And none of those stories are true, in the scientific sense, not even the prevailing patriarchal one, because evolution just doesn't work like a story, to my mind. Kafka's text and the fossil record are profoundly different things. If only more people knew what truths they both hold.
