First off, let's throw this talk of entomologists right out. Kafka was an insurance clerk, not an entomologist. He did not study bugs for a living or as a hobby. This talk of domed stomachs is all very sketchy anyways, given the lack of detail in the text and the presumed inability of Gregor to view his stomach with any sort of clarity, being, you know, a freaking cockroach with compound eyes and a neck that doesn't bend and good stuff like that.
Now, put yourself in Kafka's place. He was a city boy, life-long. What arthropod lives in urban areas? That's right, cockroaches. Kafka would have had mucho contact with the buggers, but very little with other kinds of beetle-things. Furthermore, cockroaches belong in Kafkaesque narratives because they're mundane and everyday. A giant cockroach fills us with unease and other Kafkaey emotions, but a big shiny beetle with wings and stuff would actually be kind of cool, and at least a little awe-inspiring. Only a cockroach yields the correct vibe of ridiculousness and bleakness. Cockroaches are repulsive and uninspiring, and beetles aren't either.
Gregor the insect, while he's alienated, is also alienated in a very particular way; everyone accepts him as part of their society, even if he doesn't quite fit in. There's nothing of the exotic or extraordinary here.
3 comments:
I agree that the entomologist-criticism is taking this whole extended metaphor a bit too literally (I was just citing that to get your goat), and if you like to think of Gregor as a cockroach, I see no reason not to: you make a strong case for the storied roach as the quintessential modern and urban insect, and one that tends to generate a reflexive revulsion in human beings (as my scream-like-a-girl Hue-House-bathroom anecdote aptly illustrates). But Corngold's translation of "monstrous vermin" still satisfies this idea (and the German does not specify "cockroach")--a roach is the quintessential "vermin," a despised and loathed insect that only seems to exist to torment and disgust humans, which we work hard to exterminate. The older translation (the Muirs, I believe), use the more neutral "gigantic insect." "Monstrous vermin," while it might be *slightly* more "elevated" than "big cockroach," clearly conveys the revulsion and the sense of utter *pestitude*--this is something to be exterminated or eliminated and despised.
Again, I've read a number of translations of this opening sentence, and I've never come across one that specifies "cockroach" (and it sounds like the German does not allow for such "inarguable" specificity). If you have such a published translation to hand, please share.
I looked around for said translation, and I think that it comes, not from a translation, but from Mel Brooks' The Producers (which I saw as a young boy).
It's actually a really funny scene; they're looking for the worst play they can find, and the first one he picks up starts out "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach."
At which point he throws it down and proclaims: "Nah, it's too good."
Anyways, that must have stuck in my mind as an actual translation rather than a Brooks-ification.
Oh--that figures. Mel Brooks would have a ball with _The Metamorphosis_, but alas, Kafka's German is not so specific. But again, your reasoning for why cockroach evokes the particular unease that this narrative evokes makes perfect sense. It's not definitively NOT a cockroach. And the cleaning lady keeps calling him a "dung beetle"--which is maybe more rural, but still pretty degrading.
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