Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

(««non-human, traumatic experience).

      • “(…) he [Gregor’s father] lifted his feet uncommonly high, and Gregor was dumbfounded at the enormous size of his shoe soles (…) An apple thrown without much force grazed Gregor’s back and glanced off harmlessly (…) The serious injury done to Gregor” (««human experience, conscious suffering and persecution).

      • “ ‘We must try to get rid of it,’ (…) ‘He must go,’ cried Gregor’s sister, ‘that’s the only solution, Father’ … True, his whole body was aching, but it seemed that the pain was gradually growing less and would finally pass away.” “ ‘And what now?’ said Gregor to himself, looking round in the darkness’ ” (««experience of being out of place in the human world).

      • “Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath” (««non-human existential experience, agony).

      • “(…) the charwoman arrived early in the morning (…) She thought he was lying motionless on purpose (…) her eyes widened (…) ‘Just look at this, it’s dead; it’s lying here dead and done for!’ (…) ‘Dead?’ said Mr. Samsa (…) Indeed, Gregor’s body was completely flat and dry (…) ‘I should say so,’ said the charwoman, proving her words by pushing Gregor’s corpse a long way to one side with her broomstick” (««human consciousness of being perceived and treated as a thing; Freudian impersonal “Es;” reification; annihilation to the brute matter).

      *

The narrative in Metamorphosis is mostly composed of sentences from a first-person perspective, quoted from Kafka’s Metamorphosis and completed by a minimum of additional closely related phrases, with almost no meta-comments. The story reports on several core stages of physical, functional, and mental transition of a young adult male Gregor Samsa from his recent human to his present transhuman condition. One morning he awakes in the form of a huge beetle as a reincarnation of the complete human individual. The order of the narrative ←41 | 42→corresponds to the gradual experiential evidence increasing Gregor Samsa’s certainty about his abrupt, mysterious transfiguration.¹¹⁰

The protagonist wakes up from his dream, in the same way as a patient wakes up from a coma after undergoing an operation: it is finally over, it is a fait accompli. However, this awakening is just the beginning – the beginning of the end, to be exact. The end to which leads the martyr nature of the human ego and identity¹¹¹ confronted with his animal embodiment. That embodiment lacks its natural interactive attitudes. There is a human self locked inside of that, and there the world of the reality of life outside, and all interconnections between the two sides go ignored.

Despite the broad polysemy¹¹² as an integral element of horror of this superficial, physiognomic, but with time also organic, functional, experiential, mental and behavioral degradation of a human imprisoned in a caricaturally huge insect body, it is possible to consider, as part of a mind experiment, Gregor Samsa’s case as an allegory of a radical posthuman experience. However, in this forced experience, nothing leads to the development of his identity and no factors which extended – and literally materialized – Samsa’s self-identity in the ‘ecological’ manner, as the experiential deep ecology theory suggests (post-egoic interrelations with the universe of life, belongingness to the natural oikos, a biotic symbiosis or communion with fellow organic lifeforms, sympathizing with them, etc.). None of these postanthropocentric¹¹³ ideals apply to the Samsa’s experience.

      In contrast, Samsa’s metamorphosis implies a brutal degradation and collapse of his identity. A gradual decline of an “ego” trapped in a body, which in no way resembles Samsa’s original body nor human body. Samsa’s entire identity is inserted into another, primitive living organism, imprisoned and suppressed. ←42 | 43→The new body prevents his previous identity from any kind of manifestation and ability to function in the human world. Living and functioning in a primitive organized bodily microcosmos was a very devastating experience for human beings, Kafka’s message suggests.

At the same time, up until the very end, Samsa deals with the dual-perspective (or at least transitional between his original, i.e., human first-person experiential perspective, and the experiential first-perspective imposition forced on him by his animal embodiment) of his transfiguration: first-person view from within, as a result of a proprioception (as if his former human neural system cooperates with his new animalistic body) and the “clinical”¹¹⁴ view from outside. Later on, Sartre described a very similar experience when thinking about the alienating stare of others when they watch us in the same manner as a naturalist’s eyes a netted insect. Samsa has absolutely no control over his transformation; he is just a passive observer. Instead of being preoccupied with his current life, Samsa mourns over the life he has lost.

The reader of Metamorphosis is dealing with an account of three processes, progressing and interwoven with each other, which progress over the span of just a few months. The first process is a forced dissociation of an ego and its old and new embodiment. The second process is the progressing disintegration of Samsa’s personality. The third process is the desynchronization of Samsa’s life, cognitive and social functionalities. The horizon of his life has been narrowed to four walls of his room, soon stripped bare of all objects by his family, and turned into a prison cell. He no longer has access to human reality. He is unable, by any means, to settle in the insect reality. However, there is also no place for him in some sort of third, transhumanistic reality between that which is human and that which is insectile. Each paragraph of Metamorphosis renews the drama: initially rebelling against his imprisoning, he finally gets even more excluded from his familiar, human habitat.¹¹⁵ At the same time, his strange embodiment does not offer him any safe shelter, any familiar housing as it is, or as it should be, with a living organism’s exterior.

The state in which Gregor Samsa finds himself seemingly bears the stamp of schizophrenia, of which the basic symptom is a duality, the loss of selfhood on behalf of doubling and the presence of two subjects in one body (dividuum),¹¹⁶ ←43 | 44→foreign and hostile towards each other. The clarity of mind and self-awareness which Samsa retains till the very end are sometimes also observed in “eloquent, educated” schizoid patients. They “are aware of what they have lost. For those patients, the new reality is strikingly different from their former one. The order of things is completely disturbed. People are no longer the same as they were before. Things and other human beings become increasingly peculiar and foreign, and ultimately lose all their connection with the patient.”¹¹⁷ And on the other hand, there is no connection on the patient’s side as well,¹¹⁸ as he is going to quickly and completely forget his past, like Gregor Samsa (but “what about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense,” he rhetorically asks).

At all costs, he is trying to rip off this preposterous guise,¹¹⁹ which isolates him from others and additionally makes them repulsed by him in the same way as vermin can. But those closest to him do not want to see a human underneath this hard shell of an insect. Would that be Gregor? Impossible: “…Gregor was a member of the family, despite his present unfortunate and repulsive shape, and ought not to be treated as an enemy, that, on the contrary, family duty required the suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but patience.”¹²⁰

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