Or The rest of us clothed.
Remember, Creative Writing 101, the idea of creating a new version of The Metamorphosis, most typically a la the cockroach? Someone has actually taken his idea the whole way, and according to this review, done it well.
At first, it seems like Kockroach is going to be one of those blandly “transgressive†novels so beloved by sheltered upper-middle-class white guys who aspire to be shocking… The second chapter is even more off-putting than the first…However, after about 30 pages of such throat-clearing, Knox finally cheeses it with the intrusive speech patterns awready and moves on into the story proper. At that point, things get really good, really quick.
Thirty pages, huh? When you’ve got stacks of books you want to read by the bedsides and every armchair in the house? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s Monica Drake’s Clown Girl (introduction by Chuck Palahniuk) that “calls on the masters, Charlie Chaplin, Kafka and da Vinci for inspiration.” Here’s the self-described idea:
Using the lens of clown life to illuminate a struggle between artistic integrity and an economic reality, Monica Drake has created a novel that embraces the high comedy of early film stars — most notably Chaplin and W.C. Fields. At the same time Drake manages to raise questions about issues of class, gender, economics and prejudice. This debut novel is an stunning blend of the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty. The novel resists easy classification, but is completely accessible to a general audience.
From Chapter 1.
This wasn’t the clown I set out to be.
Once my plan in clowndom was to defeat physics and defy gravity by using sheer strength to balance in positions seemingly impossible in the Newtonian world. I choreographed a silent adaptation of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” costumed and lit as a live equivalent of black-and-white film. The show was glorious in its melancholy, physical beauty!
“The Metamorphosis”—the story of a man turned into an insect—was the story of all humanity! When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. Self-expression was the antidote to verminville; I practiced and practiced until I was Kafka’s tale incarnate.
But productions are expensive. I needed cash. A software company came out of nowhere and hit me in my sore spot. They offered big cash for a few hours of work, a few tricks. A party. Corporations don’t care about bodies defying gravity, human teeter-totters, and translated literature. Kafka? No. They want silly walks, balloons, and juggling. The money’s there.
What a grueling job I’ve picked, Kafka wrote. Day in, day out…
Something Milena Jesenka said of Franz (from Kafka’s Milena), in a letter to Max Brod:
Frank is incapable of living. Frank will never get better. Frank will die soon.
The fact that the rest of us are apparently capable of living because at some time or other we have taken refuge in lies, in blindness, enthusiasm or optimism, or some conviction or other, or pessimism, or something else. But he has never sought refuge in anything. He is as absolutely incapable of lying as he is of getting drunk, He hasn’t the slightest refuge, anywhere, nothing to shield him from those things we are protected against. It’s as if he were naked and the rest of us clothed. And all that he says, or experiences, cannot be called real…His life is conditioned by circumstances. It’s as if he lived for the sake of living, a totally unadorned existence, bereft of all those elements that help embellish or disfigure life. And there is nothing in the least heroic about his asceticism, which makes it all the greater and more exalted, of course. Heroism is nothing but lies and cowardice. He isn’t somebody who has dreamt up his asceticism as a means to some end. His asceticism is imposed by his terrible clarity of vision, his integrity and his inability to compromise.