words to inspire before you expire
“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.”
—from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Good morning, class.
I’ve made it clear that my favorite eras of literature are modernism and postmodernism, mostly because they break the rules. I’m not a natural rule breaker in real life, but I love rule-breaking when it comes to literature—I want my novels weird, thought-provoking, discomforting, and rebellious. That’s why my favorite novels from the list include Ulysses and The Great Gatsby, and that’s why I think novels like To the Lighthouse, As I Lay Dying, and All the King’s Men should be included on the list of books everyone should read before they die. The same goes for the German novel The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, one of the weirdest and most challenging novels I’ve ever read.
The plot is half of what makes The Metamorphosis good—Gregor Samsa, an average man trying to support his parents and younger sister, wakes up one morning to discover he has transformed into a giant bug. There’s no explanation, no meaning (no rules) . . . just the terrible event itself is enough to propel the story forward. Gregor’s first impulses are to think about his job and how he will continue to support his family, and how to adjust to this sudden ailment. He doesn’t give himself time to think about much else—he doesn’t have time to waste.
Gregor can’t communicate with his family (or his employer), and the members of the Samsa family are all forced to adjust to Gregor’s metamorphosis, too. This includes feeding Gregor, who now only likes rotten things like spoiled meat or old fruit. Cleaning becomes quite an issue, because Gregor can no longer clean his room in his current state; Gregor’s sister Grete becomes accustomed to cleaning while he hides under the bed, worried about scaring her by showing himself. Of course, the hardest adjustments involve the family getting by without Gregor working. Mr. Samsa’s old age and Mrs. Samsa’s asthma are obstacles to overcome in order to get jobs, while Grete at 17 years old can only do so much.
The story doesn’t waver from this approach. The Metamorphosis is the most absurd family drama ever written, about how a family deals with the weight of their dutiful Gregor’s untimely transformation. Any truly fantasy narrative would capitalize on the strangeness of the fantasy, but instead, Kafka makes his story about the regular struggles of everyday life—just with an added wrinkle. Few novels can pull this off well, so for that alone, The Metamorphosis deserves to be on the list.
(Side note: the use of fantasy elements combined with the mundane realities of life is a literary technique called magical realism. Most fantasy stories are about escape—fantasy as a way to abandon the struggles of everyday life—and magical realism is the exact opposite. Magical realism happens when you are magically transformed into a bug and still have to pay your bills, for instance. It’s an amazing storytelling sub-genre and is one of the hallmarks of modern and postmodern literature.)
Author Franz Kafka
The other half of what makes The Metamorphosis so good is how Kafka manages to take an absurdly mundane plot to show intimate and vulnerable truths about humanity and loneliness. Gregor’s transformation and the events that follow are sometimes funny and sometimes horrifying; Kafka toes the line between those extremes in order to convince us how sad Gregor’s story is. His transformation may or may not have stripped him of his humanity, as he simultaneously thinks with the instincts of a bug and with the care and concern of a brother and son. Without the ability to communicate, he suffers alone and watches his family suffer, too. It’s not much of a spoiler to see that The Metamorphosis has barely a shred of a happy ending.
So, The Metamorphosis becomes this concoction of strange and boring, with a dash of depressing. No, it’s not a delightful story, but it never set out to be and never needs to be. Instead, The Metamorphosis is a story born out of a very human place about a seemingly inhuman creature, and it’s absolutely worth reading by everyone.
Next time, we’ll jump into my experience of reading Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection, Men Without Women. I’ll discuss my complicated experiences with Hemingway, as well as what I liked and didn’t like about his short stories—I can only promise you that I’m biased, and that my next lecture won’t be so typical.
Until then,
Prof. Jeffrey
Hello again, class.
I would put E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India in the same boat as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River—a novel on cultural clash, with one nation invading another and a set of characters caught in the racial, international chaos. But where Greene and Naipaul are too cynical and become trapped by racist misrepresentations, Forster’s treatment of racial and cultural tension is careful and even kind, without being naive to its origins or consequences. For that, I enjoyed A Passage to India and highly recommend it.
A flag map of the British Raj, the British rule over India between 1858-1947. A Passage to India takes place in the 1920’s, during the period of the British Raj.
I had never even heard of A Passage to India before seeing it on the list, so I imagine most don’t know the story. In the fictional town of Chandrapore, the English Mr. Fielding and Indian Dr. Aziz befriend Mrs. Moore, who has come to visit her son Ronny, Chandrapore’s city magistrate. Mrs. Moore has brought her young friend Adela, who is potentially her son’s fiancee. This newly formed group decides to visit the Marabar Caves, and what happens there forces the subtle racial tensions within them to explode, affecting the entirety of Chandrapore.
In A Bend in the River and The Quiet American, the protagonists are limited by their own racism, which is shown as an ingrained trait as natural as our own desires. But the treatment of race in A Passage to India reminds me of To Kill a Mockingbird—it shows racism as a disease. It infects many characters, but not all, and the ones who rise above such racism are punished by the society affected by the disease.
Specifically for A Passage to India, we move between the minds of each character and see their own struggles with race and racism. Characters like Mrs. Moore and Aziz have a poetic and compassionate view of the world, while Mrs. Moore’s own son thinks with bureaucracy and practicality, even with matters concerning marriage. Ronny views the Indian population as a group who needs governance, while Mrs. Moore believes her role in India is to show kindness to others. In each character, the topic of race—of psychology, humanity, and nationality, too—takes a subtly different form, and each character believes in their own version of racial truth.
E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India. Portrait by Dora Carrington, oil on canvas, 1920.
The story itself can’t have much said about it—it’s well-balanced and careful, to the point that it’s forgettable. The strength in A Passage to India is E. M. Forster’s total understanding of society and of human nature.
I’m willing to bet that most white writers handle race and racism poorly. Forster shouldn’t be any different, but he is (though that opinion is from another white writer, so take that opinion with a grain of salt). I think, in part, that his careful and compassionate management of race stems from understanding the nature of an outsider, which comes from being a minority himself—though the larger public didn’t know, Forster lived his life as a homosexual man. In England at the time, homosexuality was considered illegal activity, so Forster’s identity was a crime. He could easily imagine the loneliness and stress of being considered criminal by nature, much like the Indians in his novel tend to feel around the English.
Don’t get me wrong: race and sexual orientation compare very little, even in the larger scope of societal treatment. Forster’s hidden minority hardly matches the visibility of racial tension. But the feeling of being an outsider, even in a place one considers home, is something Forster likely knew very well—and it translates to the subtleties of A Passage to India. It feeds into the natural cynicism of the plot, highlighting the inability to rise above prejudice, but Forster handles that cynicism with more grace than most authors do. It made A Passage to India good.
Next up, I’m finishing the His Dark Materials Trilogy, which I’ve been reading for some time now. I won’t say much yet . . . except that I haven’t felt this good about a series since I read Harry Potter. But I’ll save the rest for later!
Until next time,
Prof. Jeffrey
“All alone, outside the pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. The rock was like bleached bones in the moonlight. Down in the valley, the coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight. At the edge of the precipice he sat down. The moon was behind him; he looked down into the black shadow of the mesa, into the black shadow of death. He had only to take one step, one little jump. . . . He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow . . .
He had discovered Time and Death and God.”
—from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
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