@Whoever Did That Illustration, I Just Want to Talk...

Disclaimer: I've already made a post this week. It's less angry than this. Go read it if you want. Or stick around for some quality anger spurred by Erin's post about what kind of insect Gregor is.

When I started reading The Metamorphosis, I imagined Gregor Samsa as some kind of dragonfly. That was just my automatic definition of "insect". Obviously, I was slightly confused when Gregor didn't just fly out of bed when he woke up. Somehow, I didn't process that this meant he didn't have wings, so I asked some people in my class what kind of bug Gregor was. They told me they had imagined some kind of beetle. Since then, I've pictured Gregor as a cockroach. (For some reason, the beetle interpretation didn't settle with me. I just couldn't imagine it.)

But then I saw the cover illustration. 

I couldn't believe it. A drawing of Gregor's insect form, on the cover, of all places. I was enraged. In my opinion, this drawing is as egregious as the spoilers on the back of Mrs. Dalloway. Kafka left Gregor's insect form up to interpretation on purpose. Who thought they had permission to decide what it was? 

I am aware that people have put ideas out there as to what kind of insect Gregor is. The general consensus seems to be a cockroach or a beetle, as seen in the comic Mr. Mitchell passed around the first day we talked about The Metamorphosis. It's one thing to circulate a common idea, but it is a far different thing for an illustrator to place an appalling drawing on the cover of our copy of The Metamorphosis. A common image circulating is not directly associated with someone beginning the story. A reader may see it before starting the book, but it is not tied directly to their experience of reading the book for the first time. But the cover is the first thing a reader is going to see and putting an illustration like this one on it immediately ruins any unique and untouched interpretation the reader could have of Gregor's insect form.

Kafka leaves Gregor's insect form ambiguous on purpose. An important element of his writing is that it disconnects us. Everything feels off about The Metamorphosis. It's surreal. It's just like a dream -- something fundamental is wrong, but we can't place what it is. We're just barely disconnected enough from the alternate dream reality that it feels wrong. Not knowing our main character's form is that fundamental thing that's wrong in The Metamorphosis. It rips away our grounding for the story; we no longer have a base for understanding it. We're floating in space, grasping for something that will bring us back to the reality we so desperately want but cannot get. Gregor's form is what we're searching for. If we could just know what he is, we could understand. We could look at everything else.

But we don't know. And that is Kafka's choice as a writer. Everything about The Metamorphosis makes readers feel odd, and losing our base for the story intensifies these feelings. We lose a clear definition of our main character, and therefore our starting point. So we each find our own starting point that we create from the minimal details provided by Kafka. Everyone has their own idea of what Gregor is, and that's a key experience of the story because it means each reader has a slightly different interpretation of the story, depending on how grotesque they imagine Gregor to be. The cover illustration rips that away from readers, forcing all of them to imagine Gregor as a beetle from the minute they start the story. 

But let's take a step away from the ambiguity and assume that readers have gained some amount of grounding by deciding what kind of insect Gregor is. From the first sentence of the story, Gregor is described as a "monstrous insect" (64). Not just an insect, but a monstrous insect. The tone of The Metamorphosis is nightmarish and frightening, and reading the word "monstrous" is only going to cause images of disgusting bugs to appear in readers' heads. As the story continues, the descriptions of Gregor make the reader's image of Gregor's insect form more revolting, adding to the tone of the story.

By depicting Gregor as a simple beetle on the cover of The Metamorphosis, that disgust and the reader's personal image of him is taken away. He becomes more human -- he is clean, he is something we know. He's not oozing bodily fluids around the room; he's just a nice pet beetle that cleans up after himself. The details that Kafka provides us as a description of Gregor clash horribly with the illustration on the cover (which is an offense in itself -- if you are going to do illustrations of a book, at least read it so you know what the scene and characters are supposed to look like). The illustrator is attempting to normalize our interpretation of Gregor. They're bringing us back to the ground, they're trying to give us that base that we aren't meant to have.

How many times can I say it? We're not supposed to have a base -- this is the kind of alternate reality experience Kafka wants us to have. We're not supposed to understand what's happening and why it's happening because that's not what Kafka does. He rips you out of your comfort zone and makes you experience the strange and unnerving. By planting what kind of insect Gregor is in readers' brains through a cover illustration, we're not experiencing Kafka's true alternate reality. We're too quick to jump to the conclusion of what Gregor is. The illustration doesn't allow us our imagination, and especially not the imagination that would lead to the kind of image Kafka wants us to have of Gregor: the one that would intensify the tone and feeling of the book.

So, to whoever decided to put this abominable illustration on the cover of my book: I hope you know what you've done. You've ruined reading The Metamorphosis, and I hope that haunts you until the day you die.