Franz Kafka
La Metamorfosi

Gregor Samsa, waking up one morning from uneasy dreams, found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He lay on his back, hard as a shell, and if he lifted his head slightly, he could see his convex, brown belly, divided by arched ribs, on top of which the blanket, ready to slip off completely at any moment, could barely stay put. His numerous legs, pathetically thin compared to the rest of his body, waved helplessly before his eyes.

Frank Kafka, Die Verwandlung.

Franz Kafka posthumously cannot separate his current fame (even in negative and paroxysmal terms) from the contribution made by his friend and official biographer Max Brod. Deprived of the assistance of the latter, the name "Kafka" would not even resound in the dustiest pages concerning the literary contribution to the twentieth century; at most, a sparse and mediocre presence would be felt thanks to some brief tales themed around hyperbolic anxieties. A very discreet Franz Kafka, psychotic, confused, and depressed, who would have "soiled" with sad stories some booklet or paper in the Czech territory, first oppressed by the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, then included in the fragile Republic of Czechoslovakia.

Yet our Franz wanted all this. Any unfinished work of the author was to be, by his testamentary will, burnt and erased from the earthly realm. A misleading, absurd, and inconceivable act, confirming the precise Kafkaesque intention to separate literature, even though considered the moral and existential elevation of the author, from his official and remunerated job at the insurance company. A very particular hobby, therefore. And then there is the famous and arduous relationship with the father-master, a strong and determined character, opposed to the small physical stature and weak character of the son: Hermann Kafka, whose difficult idyll with the son will be a constant generalized within the latter's works, did not love the literary ambitions of the son.

The Metamorphosis represents one of the few works published during Kafka's lifetime, specifically in 1915. The plot touches on the absurd and the paradoxical and contributes to plunging an already unreal situation into the most resounding negativity. Gregor Samsa (a strategic literary distortion of the real surname "Kafka." This stratagem is a unique feature of Kafka's work, understood as a primary immersion of a real context—here, the surname of the author—into an imaginary situation, a striking example being Josef K. in The Trial, ed.) a simple employee, discovers upon awakening his transformation into an insect, a transformation that is not justified. The inhuman reaction to this unspeakable monstrosity takes a back seat to Samsa's paradoxical fear of not being able to get to work. The man-cockroach metamorphosis involves the subject in the analogous degradation and annulment of any human motor and intellectual capacity, precisely seen in the difficulty of the new insect to jump down from the bed, to articulate any movement, to rationally and generally understand his new "invertebrate" condition, attempts that cause a severe delay. This delay is sanctioned by the family and the employer who comes to his residence to understand the inexplicable unpunctuality of the subordinate. The dramatic and anguishing climax is hyperbolized by the numerous attempts of humans to break down the door of Gregor's room and by their own suspicions about a probable poor health condition of the not-yet-seen new insect barricaded inside his human nocturnal residence.

The shock at the sight of cockroach-Gregor Samsa is remarkable: the mother faints, the father cries, the employer is horrified. The worst, however, has yet to know its absolute rock-bottom. Samsa is isolated from the family, becomes a burden, almost absurdly the unreality of the metamorphosis is overshadowed by the economic-social consequences derived from it (Gregor's profession was the only one sustaining the family). Samsa's sister is the only one who takes care of him, bringing him food, unlike the other members who are hostile and disgusted: an attempt to escape from Gregor's room results in the mother fainting and the insect being injured by the father throwing an apple, subsequently lodged in his back.

The cockroach initially finds pleasure in its new state, eating rotten and stale food, walking on the walls of the room. But it is not enough: the family's hostility, the loneliness felt due to the retention of human intellectual/moral faculties within the "Insectuality", provoke in the protagonist a sense of anguish and desolation, also maximized by the father's attempt to get rid of him. Samsa's death comes after his refusal of food and the worsening of the never-healed wound due to the ancestral throw of the apple. The corpse is thrown away by the maid, the figure of Gregor is forgotten by the family who moves to a new dwelling and thinks of financial-economic recovery through an arranged marriage to be imposed on the daughter.

Within a short but intense tale is encapsulated all or almost all of Kafka's philosophy, centered on the smallness of Man, on his moral, spiritual, material misery. Kafka is one of the genius minds of the modernist/post-decadent matrix to nullify any positivist conception of the Human and its science, eternally perfectible, embraced by infinite and uncontrollable progress. It is the end of certainties and securities, it is the beginning of existential darkness and the cursed subconscious, of the malignant obscurity of the soul, of the spirit. Man is so degradable as to transform into the antithesis of the Beautiful and the Perfectible, an insect, a nauseous, horrifying, anti-aesthetic living being, a celebration of Crisis and Evil. But even this is not enough to explain it all: at the beginning of the story, it seems that the insect-Samsa is enormous, gigantic, massive. The man metamorphosed into an insect, who, however, has not relinquished large material dimensions, almost to preserve that ancestral humanity still shining. At his death, the cockroach is so small (a condition also due to the lack of nourishment) that it can be swept away by the maid like a grain of sand; the insect-man has lost his last yet noble residue of Human, the insect is an insect and nothing more. It is the annulment of nothing, the degradation of the degraded, the metamorphosis of nothing into nothing hyperbolized. A cancellation of human rationality in its smallest details, man returns to a decidedly lower and more repugnant state of nature compared to the same hypothesized by the modern seventeenth/eighteenth-century contractualist politologists/thought leaders.

However, Man is not led to discover, to marvel at this "new" condition, this neglected reality: Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis is less shocking and concerning compared to the problem of getting to work in these humiliating and animal-like conditions. Paradoxically, the Human retains within itself traces of an original animality that too often tends to prevail over that rationality upon which Homo Sapiens bases its DNA. Samsa is already an insect before actually becoming one, and what ensues is the self-conviction of the Human/Samsa of his inferior moral condition. Indeed, the material metamorphosis into a cockroach that surpasses or at least matches the already present "insectual" condition of consciousness does not even scandalize or horrify the subject much. It is possible to affirm that the Human/Samsa pre-metamorphosis was a larva, a container of an already pre-defined animal state, he possessed its salient ancestral characteristics forced surely to assume a well-defined and circumscribed material/physical form.

Kafka will delve deeper into the aforementioned themes in much more substantial and corpulent works such as The Trial and The Castle, which will depict a humanity based on Nothing, Mystery, Death, and moral/material Nullification, an intellectual and literary work that almost prophetically anticipates the erasure carried out by the Nazi and Stalinist Totalitarianisms. Certainly, early 20th-century modernism, especially the masterpieces arising in the darkness of the era of dictatorships and crises, emphasizes with fervent conviction the falsehoods that positivist thinkers/sociologists extolled as positive truths. Art in general would bow to such counter-ideals, illustrating in a revolutionary way, breaking with an antiquated recent and remote past, arguments aimed at demonstrating the "smallness" of Man in the face of the great dilemmas of society, unable to be resolved validly through formulas and theories excluding the possibility of a subconscious-inspired morality.