Midsummer Dream House

 

KAFKAESQUE

In Prague, tourists are drawn to an astronomical clock which dates from 1410. I shot a video of it through the rain when I was there. Besides telling time, the Orloj (clock) shows astronomical signs, old Czech time, phases of the moon, and a parade of Jesus’s Apostles. The clock face itself is framed by figures representing Vanity, Greed, Death, and Lust. Watching my rain-soaked video, I try to make sense of all of these working parts, but I’ve never quite mastered it all. Franz Kafka would have walked past this clock in the Old Town Square on the daily, and I wonder if he recognized and understood all of the aspects of the clock. Did he, like me, find it overwhelming and confusing? Would it be correct to call it… Kafkaesque? I’ve always associated the words nightmarish, complex, surreal, phantasmagorical, and bizarre to define the word Kafkaesque. These words also apply to an experience I had in a college discussion of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” thirty-eight years ago which still haunts me.

If you haven’t read the story, it centers around Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes up one day transformed into an insect (cockroach or dung beetle depending on the translation) with numerous uncontrollable little legs. He has to deal with his new situation as well as his family’s reactions. The other humans in his life did not understand his screechy speech, but to Gregor it sounded normal. Of course, there are many intellectual/academic interpretations of this story. Since the author is Franz Kafka, and I’ve studied some Kafka, I believe the central theme is that Gregor Samsa wished to withdraw from his human responsibilities, mostly helping to support his family. I always thought it was touching that he paid for his sister, Grete’s, violin lessons at the Conservatorium. After his metamorphosis, her violin lessons go away and his parents’ situation becomes lean.

Gregor’s contribution to his sister’s musical interests was a good investment, because as it turned out, she would be the one to feed and take care of him after his transmutation. This ended when Grete and their parents were forced to return to work. They were too busy to pay much attention to him and he became lonely. Other humans, uncomfortable with Gregor’s transformation, avoided him. This human reaction is taken straight out of reality: how many times have we seen or experienced people not knowing what to say or do in response to a death, divorce, or crisis, and then they say or do nothing? I have, and it makes the hurt hurt more.

Gregor ultimately dies, and no one but the charwoman will tend to his body. The reader is left to wonder what might have happened to his corpse, but Kafka extends the nightmare by placing a butcher’s assistant in the building. It seems that his place of employment specializes in sausages.

I wrote about the twentieth century classroom experience before, in a travel essay about Prague in which I explored Kafka’s legacy there. As I think about this short story, the surreal classroom experience bubbles up again. Not three years before that class, during my senior year of high school, my father suffered a massive stroke which turned everything upside-down for my family.

In college, I kept my focus on school, and signed up for that summer Short Story course to earn some required English credits. We read and discussed anthologies full of short stories and I grew an appreciation for the genre. It was an intellectually inspiring six weeks, except for the day we sat down to discuss “The Metamorphosis.”

I explained how after my father had a stroke, people were different towards him. In a nutshell, in that class I compared the reactions of people around Gregor Samsa as cockroach to reactions of people around my father post-stroke. My father’s best work friend, a church deacon, would visit often and engage Dad in one-sided conversations which Dad appreciated. Visits from family dropped off, though, except for my sister and her family, occasionally. I could see it most clearly in the reactions of her three elementary-school-aged kids: this man looked like Grandpa, but everything was different about him. Not knowing what to do, they retreated and avoided interacting with him at all. I don’t blame them—they were kids. I wasn’t navigating this situation well myself. Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a bug alienated his family, and with my father it was his new inability to walk, talk, feed himself, or change television channels. I imagined that my father felt like Gregor the bug on the inside, and like Gregor he could not express feelings.

I thought my connection between Gregor Samsa and my father was profound and personal. It was unlike anything I had ever shared in a classroom situation before. I looked at the students’ faces. A few looked back at me, but most were studying their notes or their shoes. They were retreating from the discussion. I looked over at the professor expecting some kind of reaction or at least a thank-you-for-sharing. I got nothing.

I felt like a cockroach now.

I finished the course because I needed those three credits. I never offered anything in that classroom again, not to punish them, but to save myself from having to relive anything like that Kafkaesque experience. My father’s stroke and its aftermath taught me to always do something for people suffering loss or crisis, even if it’s a simple note. My “Metamorphosis” experience taught me to consider even the most preposterous interpretation of literature or life as valid.

As a reference librarian in a college, I help students research literary criticism to support their ideas in the required ten-page research paper. They rarely select “The Metamorphosis” for this task. Once, though, a student brainstormed out loud to me about Gregor Samsa’s story: “I just don’t understand what it means!”

“Well,” I said, sensing I was about to step into a Kafkaesque phantasmagoria, “I can tell you what it means to me.” She invited me to continue, so I gave her a nutshell version of my 38-year-old college comments. Rather than studying her shoes, she watched me, nodding and understanding. When I finished, she exclaimed, “OH! I get it now!” That statement validated the Kafkaesque classroom situation that has burdened me for 38 years. It was a long wait.

Recently, I read the story again to make sure my facts and references here checked out. It occurred to me upon that recent reading that Gregor was not the only Samsa to go through a metamorphosis. Grete and her parents are described as benefitting from their new working lives necessitated by Gregor’s inability to work. Once he was gone, they seemed optimistic. They looked to the future and thought about finding a husband for Grete. They were blooming, or is it blossoming, but Gregor Samsa’s life seemed even more tragic.

 

Creative Nonfiction by Margaret Montet

 

 

Margaret Montet’s narratives of place blend memoir, research, and the arts. She’s a college librarian and completed the Pan European MFA Program at Cedar Crest College specializing in Creative Nonfiction. Margaret blends these skills when teaching music history courses to older adults and public speaking to college students. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Bangalore Review, Pink Pangea, Library Journal, Mature Years, America in WWII, Edible Jersey, and other fine periodicals and anthologies. Her collection of travel essays, Nerd Traveler, was published in July, 2021, and Brooklyn Family Album will be published in September 2024.