Our Resident Cockroach
CONTENTS:
A window on rhetoric.
Rhetoric as a window.
Conclusion.
One morning as Gregar Samsa was waking up, he “discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug [ungeheuer].” This is the opening line of a short story named Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. If you have read the story, you might have read Gregor had been changed into a “cockroach,” a “beetle,” or, a “gigantic insect.” Whatever way ungeheuer is decoded, Gregor has morphed into a huge thing, a nasty creepy-crawly thing. Gregor was a traveling salesman. He wandered from city to city.
1
Metamorphosis is alteration, transformation, and change. The change from human to cockroach helps to dramatize how radical a change has taken place. Gregor’s endoskeleton transformed into an exoskeleton. The change means that Gregor is not a skeletal hybrid. Gregor is not the same Gregor that he was before. He lives in a new structure and moves in a new way. His world had been de-theorized. The change is accompanied by a loss of speech. Speech, as a theory, thrives on rhetorical accouterments (tropes of antistrophe—metaphor, simile, synonym) to create practices of acceptable affinities. But Gregor has been de-theorized and de-narrativized, and he can’t speak. [Of course, he is a bug! I know bugs can’t speak.] I’m talkin’ about rhetorical theory. It is impossible for Gregor to speak of what it is like to be cockroach.
Without access to a focus (a theory) on the present and future, Gregor presents a dangerous situation. Gregor’s mother and sister talk guardedly to each other. Gregor tries to keep pace with what he has become. “‘What now?’ Gregor asked himself and looked around him in the darkness.” It was true “he had pains throughout his entire body, but it seemed to him that they were gradually becoming weaker and weaker and would finally go away completely.”
*1. The Third Sophistic Trading Card is exchanged on https://www.facebook.com/thirdsophistic. The translation is from Franz Kafka and Ian Johnston. The Metamorphosis. Auckland, NEW ZEALAND: Floating Press, The, 1987.
2
Gregor lives in a small apartment with his family. The apartment is subsumed by a building. The building is subsumed by a house, which archi-techne-ically speaking, is a theory of rhetoric structured with podiums and multiple figures of the good-political-animal speaking well (that’s Aristotle’s, not George Orwell’s lingo) to anchor the apartment/building/house/rhetoric with well-behaved change to empower the human condition.
The condition of the family apartment is a problem, and Gregor is the cause. He is unhomely. “If he only understood us,” said the father. We could manage the situation. That is impossible, cried the sister. “He must be gotten rid of.”
Father, she says, “You must get rid of the idea that this is Gregor. The fact that we have believed for so long, is truly our real misfortune. But how can it be Gregor? If it were Gregor, he would have long ago realized that a communal life among human beings is not possible with such an animal and would have gone away voluntarily.”
Gregor had tried to keep pace with what he had become. “‘What now?’ Gregor asked himself and looked around him in the darkness.” It was true “he had pains throughout his entire body, but it seemed to him that they were gradually becoming weaker and weaker and would finally go away completely.”
The cleaning woman opened Gregor’s door. She appeared friendly. So, Gregor thought [chose to think] when he heard her call, “Come here for a bit, you old dung beetle.” Gregor couldn’t. He was immobile.
3
The ThirdSophistic.com Trading Card is a warning to us all that unquestioningly accept our rhetorics. I know I already said that in Review of Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, Victor J. Vitanza. Philosophy & Rhetoric 32, no. 2 (1999): 180-84. I am cleaning up that review.
Hey, Victor, you old dung beetle. Victor, do you know how dung beetles navigate. How they move? How they wander?
The sound of wind.
They use the Milky Way. They capture pictures of the sky while dancing on a ball of poop.
Victor. Hello?
Inaudible
Victor. Victor. Hello, it's me…
Fuzzy but the word stranger is distinguishable
Do you want to dance?