Daniel Zhavoronkin – Final Reader Response

Ah yes, the story that can be summarized, ‘guy turns into cockroach, the end’. Metamorphosis, and all the other works of modernist literature we’ve read this semester all play out like nasty fever dreams. And pretty much all of them have this underlying vibe of this diagram:

(src : https://roughlydaily.com/tag/baudrillard/)

This disorienting chart, along with many other seemingly more incoherent diagrams on google images is an example of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. This one in particular displays how you can jump between Wikipedia pages through links, starting from the page of “Waffle House” and ending with “New Car Smell”. 

If you click the source link to the first diagram, you get a quote by Baudrillard that reads “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.” Now, back to Kafka and his esoteric contemporaries, his metaphor for the cockroach has a multitude of interpretations. The loss of humanity by isolation from what used to be his time-sensitive routine, or isolation from society when one reveals a non-conformist character as portrayed by how his family couldn’t find humanity within him after his metamorphosis, and so on. Our neurotic friend kafka Kafka also  intended “The insect is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance,” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/kafkaesque-review-kafka-komix-1538084649). The help of some mental gymnastics can lead you to a whole new array of meanings for the symbol of the cockroach. Picking apart this text has led me down a couple of wormholes of my own, and this leads to trouble coming back to reality to convey a reasonable response. I mentioned ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, which is a long and confusing text written during the recent era of post-structuralism, and one of the ideas to take away from it is that we learn from our own contemporaries, who learn from past contemporaries, and so on. This behavior repeats itself in almost anything you can think of (rhythms in jazz evolve into hip hop, landlines evolve into supercomputer phones) and so on. This creates abstraction, and drives us further from the sources of things. Because we are not in the author’s head or their time period, a text riddled with metaphors like this one make me bang my head against the table and toil over the 3 possible explanations I have over why Samsa’s dad beat him with a newspaper. I think about how my day-to-day behaviors and speech patterns are so different from that of someone in the past, and what external influences cause this. Sparknotes can give a ‘reasonable’ explanation and summary of metaphors, but we will never have a true meaning to each and every word. Leo Strauss posed the idea of esotericism in ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’, meaning that there is meaning between the lines of great works, which hides itself from the masses and unintentionally reveals greater messages given careful interpretation. The guy below explains it better than i do: 

If we really take into consideration everything Kafka has experienced, from the psychologically damaging relationship with his father, his life as a Jew in Prague, and the many undocumented events in his life that inevitably affect the outcome of what he chooses to write, can we reach a meaning to Metamorphosis that doesn’t just look good on paper, but is true? I could go on and on with this, and come to no conclusion.