What’s worse than waking from unsettling dreams to find you’ve been transformed into a giant beetle? Waking from unsettling dreams to find you’ve become a meme.
A year or so ago, my brothers and I started a WhatsApp thread to share and chronicle a trend we saw emerging in some of the nerdier corners of the world wide web: the increasing use of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in memes lampooning everything from hypochondria, to crap jobs, to overbearing parents, to the general cheek-puffingly tedious nihilism of modern life.
As worldly denizens of the new medium, we found this blending of high and low art terribly lol, grouping it alongside other esoteric favourites like Fourth Crusade or Tony Blair memes. But, after I reread the famous novella, I began to realise that its postmodern preponderance, and use for a variety of comic ends, isn’t surprising at all.
The Metamorphosis, or Die Verwandlung (its original German title), was first published in 1915. It tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa and his unfortunate transformation one morning into a giant creature. Already much put-upon, Gregor finds himself shunned by an increasingly appalled family whose rejection forces him to deeply consider his past worth, present state and future happiness.
The story is one of Kafka’s most famous and has been adapted for the stage, radio and film, as well as inspiring sequels, prequels and innumerable reference in a wide variety of other forms: poems, songs, comic books, video games, inter alia. Its influence is so prodigious, in fact, that there’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to ‘The Metamorphosis in popular culture.’
If an artistic work’s success is tied to its staying power, or the number of other works it has inspired, then Metamorphosis deserves its place alongside the greats.
If an artistic work’s success is tied to its staying power, or the number of other works it has inspired, then Metamorphosis deserves its place alongside the greats. Another marker, arguably, of its genius is its apparent simplicity.
The greatest works of literature arrive so fully formed they appear to have been inevitable, and it’s hard to imagine a world without them. Their plots, now time worn, are reborn as tropes or devices. A literary trope, in its most effective form, allows summary of a complex set of ideas using one simple image—just like a meme.
Franz Kafka used the floor plan of his own bedroom for that of Gregor Samsa’s
The difference between Metamorphosis and, for example, Great Expectations, another trope-tastic and oft-adapted story, is the former’s ability to continually embody the zeitgeist. In fact, it seems to get more and more relevant as time goes on.
Metamorphosis’ meme-ability begins, conveniently, at the beginning or, more specifically, with its opening line. Perhaps no other sentence in literature is at once so vivid and yet so vague. Gregor is variously described as having woken from unsettling/uneasy/troubled dreams… to find himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin/insect/beetle…
No writer, least of all one so scrupulous as Kafka, would be content to have their words mistranslated. However, by using the German Ungeziefer, which literally means ‘unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice,’ rather than anything more specific, he must have wanted to avoid any definition that was too clear-cut.
The unwillingness to definitively label Gregor might resonate with those modern readers well-versed in debates about fixed pronouns. But it eerily contrasts with the detailed description of his appearance: his “armour-like back”, “slightly domed” brown belly and many “pitifully thin” legs. The combination, of arresting image and indeterminate word, is a winning admixture in the age of irony.
Kafka’s memorial in Prague
So, the template is there, but Metamorphosis isn’t being repeatedly mined by meme-lords purely for its opening sentence. Instead, it’s the relevance of all its themes to the present discourse that keeps Gregor’s fate in the current internet discourse.
At first, the hapless young man believes his altered state is a consequence of ill health. The armchair, or in this case bedstead, hypochondriac is nothing new to me or, I would imagine, you. Nor is the purported cause of this malaise: stress accrued working an all-consuming, always-disappointing, mind-numbingly crap job.
Gregor toils away to pay off his parents’ debts. Instead of thanks, all he gets from them is more grief. Pig-headed parents banging on the bedroom door is a trope as old as time, but it is the especial intransigence of Mr and Mrs Samsa, and Gregor’s inability to escape, that makes the arrangement ripe for contemporary satire.
Like Samsa the younger, many millennials are currently living under the same roofs as their mother and father while working a job that will never offer enough financial security to enable them to move out. This often incurs resentment and the feeling for many young people that they are living in a kind of arrested state, trapped in their rooms, unable to stand on their own feet, just like a giant beetle.
Like Samsa the younger, many millennials are currently living under the same roofs as their mother and father…
But rather than any one motif, the power of Metamorphosis to make good memes comes down, like all great art, to its broader comment on the futility of human existence. The success of the story compared to the writer’s other work is often attributed to the belief that it perfectly encapsulates the Kafkaesque.
This oft-misused word is generally agreed to mean a pervading anxiety caused by things that are recognisable but not real, precisely detailed and yet dreamlike, and how they can make an individual feel victimised by large impersonal forces that they can’t help but feel are personally targeting them.
Set aside for a moment Gregor’s fate and, if there’s a better literary equivalent for describing the internet’s (and especially social media’s) effect on our lived environment then I’ve yet to come across it.
Over recent months, we’ve all spent a lot of time in our rooms bemoaning a state of arrested development while peering nervously out through a crack in the door. The image of a beetle in bed is a funny one and highly cartoonish on its own, but it’s the feelings of hopelessness, resentment, self-abnegation and low self-esteem that make Metamorphosis ripe for a good meme-ing.
What Kafka and his digital disciples are saying is that sometimes, especially now, we can all be Gregor Samsa. And that’s ok.
