mushrooms, forests, peasants, oceans, mountains or anthills – or, failing that, are organised by their forbears, often unintentionally, what’s more. As for Gregor’s parents, they’re the ones who are walled up in their oversized apartment, whose rent they can’t even pay. Inevitably, since the only interior they’ve got is the one drawn up in the eyes of others by the pretty cramped limit of their ugly bodies. They are still confined, whereas Gregor no longer is. As long as he hasn’t reached the real exterior, the other side of the barrier, he remains inside a world that is pretty familiar, all things considered. For his parents, menacing exteriority begins at the door on the street; for the new Gregor, interiority stretches as far as the limits, admittedly still undetermined, of Earth.
The two generations, the one from before and the one from after the general lockdown, don’t localise themselves the same way. To say that Gregor ‘doesn’t get along very well with his parents’ is a euphemism: their ways of measuring things and his are well and truly incommensurable. They don’t just lead to different quantities; their ways of registering distances simply have nothing to do with each other. It’s not all that surprising that in the twentieth century, focused on issues to do with ‘human relations’, people saw Kafka’s novella as a perfect illustration of ‘communication breakdowns’. But they might have been wrong about the distance between Gregor’s way of sizing himself up and his parents’. There is something literally crushing in the way the latter get their bearings in the world – that is, starting with a map.
We start with the Universe, come to the Milky Way, then the solar system, we reach various planets, before overflying the earth, then sliding on to GoogleEarth™ to get to Czechoslovakia, before reaching the space above Prague, over the neighbourhood, the street, and soon the dowdy old apartment block opposite the sinister hospital. At the end of this flyover, localisation of the Samsa parents is perhaps complete – especially if we add in the data from the land register, the post office, the police, the bank, plus, these days, the ‘social networks’. But, in comparison with these vastnesses, Gregor’s poor progenitors are reduced to nothing: a dot, less than a dot, a pixel blinking on a screen. The localisation is final in the sense that it ends by eliminating those it has located using mere latitude and longitude. The pixel has no neighbour, no predecessor or successor. It has become literally incomprehensible. Funny way of getting your bearings.
Having become an insect, and thereby a terrestrial, Gregor gets his bearings quite differently from the way his parents do. He is proportionate to the things he’s digested and left in his wake, and when he moves around, a little clumsily to start with, it is always step by step. Nothing consequently can crush him by pinpointing him from on high and from a distance. In spite of old man Samsa’s raised cane, no force can flatten him or reduce him to a pixel. For Gregor’s parents, he is invisible and his speech is incomprehensible, which is why, in the end, they have to get rid of him (‘it’s lying there dead and done for!’, the ‘all-bones’ charwoman announces with malicious glee). Whereas for Gregor, on the contrary, it’s his parents who disappear, crushed and mute, if they’re localised the old-fashioned way, cramped in their dining room as they are, reduced to their bodies, locked-down in their little selves, jabbering away in a language he can’t stand hearing anymore. That is his line of flight.
If we follow Gregor’s movement, we see that we distribute values in an entirely different way. We literally no longer live in the same world. They, the people from before lockdown, begin with their teeny little self; they add on a material framework which they say is ‘artificial’ or even ‘inhuman’ – Prague, factories, machines, ‘modern life’; and then, thirdly, a bit further down the track, they pack in a whole jumble of inert things that stretch to infinity and which they don’t really know what to do with anymore.
But we distribute our belongings altogether differently. We’re beginning to realise that we don’t have, that we’ll never have, that no one has ever had the experience of encountering ‘inert things’. That experience, supposedly common for previous generations, is something our generation, in a very short time, has gone through the ordeal of no longer sharing: everything we encounter, the mountains, the minerals, the air we breathe, the river we bathe in, the powdery humus in which we plant our lettuces, the viruses we seek to tame, the forest where we go looking for mushrooms, everything, even the blue sky, is the result, the product, yes we really must say it, the artificial result of agencies with which city-dwellers, every bit as much as country-dwellers, have something of a family resemblance.
On Earth, nothing is exactly ‘natural’ if we take that term to mean that which has not been touched by any living being: everything is raised, put together, imagined, maintained, invented, intricately linked by agencies which, in a way, know what they want, or in any case aim at a goal that is exclusively their own, each agency for itself. There may well be ‘inert things’, forms that unravel without a goal or a will. But to find them, we’d need to go to the other side, up above towards the moon, down below towards the centre of the globe, beyond the limes, in this Universe that we can know but of which we will never be able to have personal experience. We know the Universe all the better, anyway, since it’s made up of things that gradually collapse according to laws external to them, making their collapse calculable to the tenth decimal. Whereas we always have a bit of trouble calculating the agents that raise and maintain Earth, since they persist, without obeying any law alien to them, in going back up the slope that others only ever go down. As they always go against the cascade of entropy, with these agents you’re always in for a surprise. ‘Infralunar’ and ‘supra-lunar’ weren’t such bad terms, in the end, for spotting the trace left by this great split.
It would be easy to say that your [tes] parents’ generation sees death everywhere and that the following generation sees ‘life’ everywhere; but the latter term doesn’t have the same meaning for both camps. Those who consider themselves the only beings endowed with consciousness in the middle of inert things, only count as living beings themselves, their cats, their dogs, their geraniums and maybe the park where they go to have a stroll, once Gregor has been thrown out with the rubbish, at the end of the novella. Well, ‘living’, for you [toi] who have undergone metamorphosis, doesn’t just describe termites, but also the termite mound, in the sense that, without termites, this whole heap of mud would not thus be laid-out and built up like a mountain in the middle of a landscape (but the same goes for said mountain and said landscape …). Not to mention that, vice versa, termites couldn’t live for a moment outside the termite mound, which is to their survival what the city is to city-dwellers.
I need a term that says that, on Earth, ‘everything is made of life’, if you understand by that the rigid body of the termite mound every bit as much as the agitated body of a termite, Charles Bridge every bit as much as the crowds swarming onto Charles Bridge, the fox fur every bit as much as the fox, the dam the beaver builds every bit as much as the beaver, the oxygen bacteria and plants give off every bit as much as the bacteria and plants themselves. Bioclastic? Biogenic? In any case artificial in the somewhat unusual sense that freedom and invention are always involved – hence the surprises at every turn. Not to mention the sedimentation that means that the termite mound, Charles Bridge, the fur, the dam and the oxygen hang on a bit longer than those from which they emanate – provided that other agencies, termites, builders, foxes, beavers or bacteria maintain their momentum. Unlike the generation that precedes us with their odd habits, we terrestrials have learned to use the adjective ‘living’ to refer to both lists, the one that starts with termite, and the one that starts with termite mound, without ever separating them. Which is something other peoples never forgot.
We can see how ‘generational conflict’ offers a bit more than a modern testimony to the incommunicability of human beings. I’m tempted to go further and say that it’s really a conflict between geneses and, quite frankly, between engenderings. Because in the end it’s not for nothing that terrestrials find a ‘family resemblance’ in everyone they meet. That is because they all have, or they all had in the past, what we might call engendering concerns. Those are after all, and movingly so, Gregor’s immediate anxieties once he’s become a bug: the
