One of my professors likes to refer to herself as a “theory goober,” and claims that one will know if one is part of said goober collective if they find themselves laughing at literature jokes and puns that nobody else finds amusing, or if one realizes that they’re bouncing around like a rubber ball at the thought of employing multiple theoretical lenses to a single text to analyze it more fully. If this were the only criteria, I’d still be a bona fide goober, as this conversation between a few friends of mine went down several months ago over Skype (and I’d been drinking at the time as well):
Friend #1: So I found out there are huge cockroaches here in my new apartment. Guess how I realized this. Go on.
Me: I have no idea.
Friend #1: They were crawling through my apartment.
Me: Really?
Friend #1: I smashed one of them, too. I grabbed a book off my shelf and whacked it, and it wasn’t until afterwards that I’d realized I’d picked my copy of The Metamorphosis.
Me: What? What?!
Friend #1: Yeah.
Me: That is fucking meta!
Friend #2: …What’s “meta”? What are you guys laughing about? I don’t get it!
However, I’m beginning to believe that there are several avenues leading straight into theory gooberdom, and not all of them are humorous. Some are quite unnerving. This afternoon, after having finished rereading my copy of The Metamorphosis (Why is it always with Kafka? Odd…), complete with yet another meta instance, this time a tiny bug (some Pentatomidae, I think) crawling over my monitor and perching itself atop my finger and wiggling its antennae at me while I scrutinized the scutes on its belly (shut up, I know I’m weird, but it was little and really cute), I logged on to a few communal review sites to update my list of read books and enter a short analysis of my own.
At that point, I was already feeling extremely gutted. Kafka always reaches into my brain, tugs at a bunch of nerves, stimulates a few slabs of grey matter and makes me feel like shit. It’s a part of his charm, really, the masterly way he illustrates so vividly just how bleak and hopeless a life can turn out to be. I never approach his work expecting anything but despondency as the end result. Despite his incurable bleakness, there’s a fascinating array of human behavior to be found between his first and last sentences, and I don’t see anything wrong with approaching a non-uplifiting text for the purpose of self-expansion. Seriously, if literature was assigned the sole purpose of exhilarating the masses, we’d find nothing but children’s stories and Chicken Soup titles in bookstores. These things most certainly serve a purpose, but so do the depressing works of literature that teenagers, way before they even give a shit, are forced to read in high school.
Maybe it’s just me, but I appreciate it when a work takes a running start and kicks me right in the teeth.
What I discovered were several short paragraphs attached to extremely low ratings, and I found myself almost angry with them. Here I was, curled up on the couch, feeling like my heart was bleeding out of my chest for poor Gregor and someone else was saying (and I paraphrase here) “omg this book was so retarted he was just a bug thats gross.”
You know you’re a theory goober when you immediately scowl at the screen and think Just a bug? Just a bug? What is wrong with you? I could give you at least four different interpretations that illustrate how far beyond “just a bug” this story goes. How could you miss all of this? How could you miss the Marxist trappings of Gregor’s financial situation, or the Althusserian interpretation of his family life, or the Freudian analysis that could be extracted from his relationship with his parents, or the Lacanian approach to his relationship with himself?
You may actually have gone beyond the realm of mere goober when you find yourself becoming irritable over someone else’s opinion of a nearly hundred-year-old novella. It’s a good thing my name isn’t Dr. Bruce Banner, because I probably would have splintered the coffee table that doubles as my desk, and it’s a really nice piece of furniture.
Below are a few highlights. I decided to ignore most of the ones that employed such phrases as “AP English” and “had to write a paper” because, honestly, high school isn’t really the environment where one fosters a love of literature. Sometimes it manages to happen (I still love you, Aldous Huxley), but most of the time the mind is occupied with other things, some hormonal and some not, and nobody really enjoys being forced to read, no matter how well-written or significant the text. I can still remember quite vividly having to bite my tongue during my ninth-grade discussion of A Separate Peace, because all I wanted to do was shout “Gene and Finny need to get a room!” from my seat in the back of the class. High schoolers, you’re getting a reprieve here. Everyone else… I really have no idea if you picked a bad translation, were reading the novella on an off day, or if something else might have been the issue. Subjective opinions are always acceptable, but some of these were so out-there that I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through the minds of their authors.
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I learned what existentialism is. I can understand why this approach to life and living seems to be self serving and pessimistic in its nature. Reading this posed quite the contrast with another book I was reading at the same time, that being “The Broken Heart: Applying the Atonement to Life’s Experiences” by Bruce C. Hafen. It makes me wonder what might have happened if Kafka, who was born in 1883 and was alive when the Gospel was restored, had been exposed to the Gospel by an inspired teacher. How would his view of life and one’s approach to living with others have been altered?
[Please tell me you didn't just say that all Kafka needed to cure his life-long neuroses was Christ.]
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This book is so retarded. How did it become a classic?? It’s about a guy who randomly wakes up and sees that he has turned into a cockroach over night. Yet, he is still set on catching the next train and going to work so he doesn’t lose his job. What the heck?!!! How was he planning on working in his state. Like, people would think it was kind of weird if a random cockroach walked into their office.
[Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me present to you Exhibit A: The Ignorant Literalist.]
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[redacted] made me read this and wants to discuss it with me! I agree with Einstein that there is too much perversity about Kafka (I had to google Einstein and Kafka for [redacted]) An older son supports his younger sister and elderly parents as a traveling salesman. One morning he wakes up and has discovered that he is now a big beetle-like bug. Okaaaay….
[This one struck me as amusing because, at first, I assumed the reviewer to be a teenager reading the book for her boyfriend. As it turns out, she's just a few years shy of my mother's age, and now I'm confused as all hell about this review. Why was she Googling Einstein and Kafka for [redacted]? Is [redacted] her child or grandchild, and if so why would they be reading Kafka at such a young age that someone else had to Google Einstein and Kafka for them? What does she mean by “perversity”? I… My head’s starting to hurt… Is that blood? Is my nose bleeding? Oh, god, am I having an aneurysm?]
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I didn’t like the way it ended. I wanted things to work out for the main character. I don’t think he deserved any of the flack he got, but I really liked it. I would have given it more stars since it beautifully written and good, I just know that this will bother me forever.
[This one-star review is as close to perfect as I'm ever going to find. She got it. It disturbed her, and it's going to stick with her for a long time for the same reason it will be sticking with me until I die. I'm only including it here because it saddens me that some people equate "unnerving" with "bad."]
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Read this in high school and can still (25 years later) remember being totally grossed out by it. A young man turning into a cockroach! ICK. Don’t know what I’d think from an adult POV b/c I’m not willing to read it again.
[Why are you reviewing a book you haven't read in twenty-five years? That would be like me logging on and giving a single star to Sammy the Seal and writing "Oh my god, seals don't hang out in bathtubs or go to school! ICK. I read this while learning to sound out words phonetically and it was so stupid that I'll never look at it again!"]
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“PLOT? who needs plot? He is a cockroach! I am an ~existentialist~! Life is meaningless! It is plodding and marginally amusing, emphasis on marginally! What do you mean, you hate the ending? I am an ~existentialist~! Life is meaningless!”
[Can I just say "shut your piehole" to this one? This is my website, right? Okay. Hey. You. Yes, the snarky little punk with the tilde fetish -- shut your piehole.]
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Quite simply the worst piece of writing I have ever undertaken. Although one can show Kafka respect for exploring the abstract and attempting (but unsuccessfully) pushing the bounds of writing styles, this is not a piece of literature to be respected. A story filled with biblical, philosophical and societal nuance references in an attempt to allow the reader to draw their own meaning from the book. Although it’s a noble idea, if the writer sits down to write a story without having an intent to infuse a direct purpose for the story there is no purpose for that piece of literature to exist in society.
[Well, thank you for clearing up the role of literature in society for the rest of us, Captain Prescriptivist.]
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I did not like this book at all.. The man is either very intelligent and I did not get it or he is completely out of his mind I will stick to the second thought.
["The author is too intelligent for me" is a cop-out. I should know, since I've done this myself a number of times. You should stop it, and so should I.]
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Fans of Kafka are pretty much insufferable to hang around. You know them. They hang out at parties swigging down bourbon and talk about metaphysics or the true meaning behind their favorite Cure song on end until you awkwardly step away.
What I’m moving towards is- this book sucks.
[It's Scotch, you jerk. Scotch, clove cigarettes (I like mine with menthol, too - minty and sweet), and Robert Smith is hot. Now I'm going to be all kinds of paranoid about people hating me the moment I walk into a room. Thanks, assmunch.]
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I hate you and your stupid genre, Kafka.
["Genre"? I've heard people employ the phrase "Kafkaesque" when referring to something that's unnerving, overly depressing or shows signs of self-loathing, but I never really thought of him as having pioneered an entire genre. Does this refer to existentialism, magical realism, absurdism, or something else?]
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In my trawling of the one and two-star ratings, I found quite a few reviews that basically centered around the insect imagery and didn’t travel far beyond that one point. Apparently a lot of people have a physical revulsion associated with insects (uh, obviously this isn’t a problem for me — is that little bug crawling on my table again?), and are therefore unable to read the text without being distracted by the six-foot Ungeziefer. I absolutely don’t agree with this, but phobias are often hard-wired and difficult to argue against. So ist das Leben, I suppose.
Another common sentiment I found, and one that’s a bit more troubling to me, was the constant “there’s symbolism in here but I don’t get it” angle, usually in conjunction with “this makes no sense!” These bother me quite a bit, as it signifies a lack of interest (or experience) in anything beyond realist literature. There appears to be little interest or understanding in anything more abstract; take the story in a direction outside the realm of real-world possibility and, for some people, the whole house of cards comes falling down. It’s kind of sad, and more than a bit annoying. Where is the variation, the exploration, the expansion? For some, it is apparently nowhere.
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