There’s a cockroach in my kitchen. We surprise each other in the mornings. By the time I get my slipper, he has maybe one, two moments to live. But he’s faster than me by a millisecond. Just that much and he runs under the cabinet. Gregor, I think, your time will come. Because it will. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day, one day my little friend, the party will be over.
I’m a rather clean person and I prefer a neat and tidy house. But I live by a stream in the tropics. That means the insect life is ubiquitous. So around me, insect death must also be. This is disturbing, of course, because I’d like to be a good Zen Buddhist. I’d like to harm none. And I’m not so arrogant that I can’t imagine myself in Gregor’s position. Wasn’t that Kafka’s point?
We have to be careful when we metamorphose human beings into something else. It’s an old, dark form of magic and, like all sorcery, comes with certain consequences. I think of Circe turning Odysseus’ crew into pigs:
She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth,
inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence.
Only Eurylochus stayed behind – he sensed a trap…
She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion – cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine –
but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thought of home.
Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly
she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties,
all of them bristling into swine – with grunts,
snouts – even their bodies, yes, and only
the men’s minds stayed steadfast as before.
So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing
as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,
common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.
(Odyssey, Book 10, lines 253-268)
She’s a sorceress, certainly, and in some readings an immortal goddess. But in Greek myth, even the gods are subject to the peregrinations of consequence and fate. For example, in later retellings, Circe herself falls in love with Odysseus, a love which, in this story as in life, seems more like a double-bladed sword than a sorcerous wand. Unrequited love is maybe one of the most poisonous, wrenching potions we can drink. And yet I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t voluntarily drink it—only the odd Eurylochus, waiting in the front yard, unwilling to enter, the voice of bitter fear that says, I’d rather feel nothing than go through that.
At first, we think Eurylochus is wise. But he isn’t. Perhaps his voice still echoes in language of post-millennial generations that seem to have given up on romance. But they probably haven’t, at least not as a broad demographic. This despite endless overheated magazine articles about kids not moving out and not developing the social skills of their parents. Say it with me: the kids are alright. Human psychobiology being what it is, they may just be waiting for the right potion in the right bowl, offered by the right sorceress in the right economic circumstances. Circe’s out there, kids. She’s on an island, not on Tinder. And she’s cute. Your destiny might lie more in the realm of sus domesticus than homo sapiens, but I believe in you.
Still, what love could be less requited than one that transforms a human into an animal? Were Odysseus’ men really pigs at heart? Was Circe really that powerful? In Madeline Miller’s retelling, the crewmen of Circe are swine from the start, in essence if not in form. It’s a bad trope that has been part of a long misandrist literary tradition, going back at least as far as John Chrysostom’s homilies on the book of Matthew: “[T]hese men are swine; even as when the pearl is trampled under foot, it is not so trampled, because it is really contemptible, but because it fell among swine.”
The tradition finds its apotheosis in Victorian phobias about men’s sexual needs and the simple binary that takes physicality as the natural province of the devil—the absolute scullery level of Christian morality. But it’s still around and we’ve seen genocidal war propaganda dehumanize people by means of this same metamorphosis. It’s undeniably black magic when political rhetoric transforms a human being into a farm animal or a cockroach to be swatted. Love becomes hate. Man becomes beast. Or worse.
Thankfully, unlike Madeline Miller, Homer leaves the romantic aspect ambiguous. But what do we do? In the transformations of our lives, in every segment of every day, what potions do we drink? What is our human proportionality, our inner ratio of person to creature, especially when love’s “wicked drugs” get involved? And how do we apply this calculus to others?
Literature and popular culture keep asking. William Gibson, creator of the cyberpunk genre, made it about cybernetic implants and the identity dissolution that seems to accompany an overly online existence. But he’s posing the same old questions about human emotion versus human intention. In All Tomorrow’s Parties, he wrote: “[Laney] had always taken it for granted that he possessed some stable core of continuous selfhood, but now he suspected that this might be another of those illusions the node [data] had enabled him to outgrow.” As the character’s humanity gave way to the ethereal grip of digitality, he became less than human. Laney’s desires had outstripped his willingness to acknowledge his own humanity. He’d forgotten himself.
A decade earlier, Mike Pondsmith, in the Cyberpunk roleplaying game, took inspiration from Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, and created a game rule for it: “When a character installs too much cyberware, they lose ‘Humanity’ points. Drop too low and they succumb to cyberpsychosis—a dissociative state where they become violent, detached from human empathy, and essentially a mindless killing machine.” A clear example of man into beast in a world where machines are fetishistically becoming the object of all desires.
The implications are inherently Shakespearean. Lear says to Kent, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (1.1.124), a transmogrification meant to justify Lear’s uncontrollable rage. In order to act inhumane towards Cordelia, he has to become something inhuman. And so Shakespeare poses one of his perennial questions: where do we locate our humanity? How savage do we want to be to each other by means of such transformations in the service of emotions we don’t fully appreciate or understand? Or, in High Pondsmithian: how many humanity points do we actually have left? How much of myself can I replace before I’m no longer me? And how does that make me feel?
Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is also deliberately ambiguous on this point, even if it’s central to the story. Did Gregor Samsa become a giant cockroach because of who he essentially was (like Madeline Miller’s men being always-already pigs) or because the importunities of life had slowly replaced his parts, altering his nature, detaching his human empathy until he reached the scullery level of cockroach-psychosis? Of course, Lear was a dangerous king. So naturally, he transformed into a dragon. Gregor Samsa was a lowly clerk, a technician, so naturally . . . Now I hunt Gregor in my kitchen. Though, to someone else, I think I must be Gregor Samsa.
But this was about unrequited love and the inner convolutions that cause us to behave in ways other than human. How much of Circe’s Pramnian wine can I drink before I become an animal? How much emotion can I endure before I forget myself? When do I reach the point at which I say, “I’d rather feel nothing than go through that”? I think most people reach that point sooner than they expect. Maybe the post-Millennials are right.
We think Eurylochus can’t be wise. At least, we don’t want him to be. We look in the mirror and say, “I believe in you.” We affirm the power of love. We like the taste of sorcerous barley wine and ask for seconds. But we don’t know how much we’ve already changed. We don’t anticipate the degree to which our “continuous selfhood” has already been displaced—not through a wraith-like transformation into a digital persona or through a royal draconic invocation, but through the very sad, very human experience of self-forgetting. Because if an immortal goddess can fall in love, she can suffer heartbreak. And if she can, so can we.
Now we wonder about new taxonomies. We ask, “What rough beast am I becoming? Who was I yesterday? And will I forget this pain in some timeless animal life to come? Do I want to forget?” There’s a man standing in the front yard with a bitter look on his face. He seems to know something. I wonder what it is.