Marc Estrin

The Wound That Will Not Heal 

Saturday, June 1, 2002

Source: World and I, June 2002 v17 i6 p246.

Title: The Wound That Will Not Heal - European modernism's darkest figure of exile and dehumanization is back but with a powerfully affirmative subtext: the possibility of authenticity, newness, and transformation.(Insect Dreams: the Half-Life of Gregor Samsa)_(book review)

 Author: STEVE DOWDEN

Subjects: Books - Reviews

 People: Estrin, Marc

Nmd Works: Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (Book) - Reviews

Electronic Collection: A87868547

 RN: A87868547

Full Text COPYRIGHT 2002 News World Communications, Inc.

Steve Dowden chairs the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Brandeis University. He is the author of books and essays on modern German literature and most recently has coedited a collection of essays entitled German Literature, Jewish Critics, which will be published in August.

 Book Info:INSECT DREAMS

The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa

Marc Estrin

 Publisher:New York: Blue Hen Books, 2002

469 pp., $26.95

Inventive, puckish Marc Estrin has produced a novel--a first novel, as it happens--that stands apart from business as usual in contemporary fiction. Insect Dreams is a historical tale of sorts, exploring events and ideas from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second. What sets it apart is the special angle of vision from which the story unfolds: his protagonist is a roach, Gregor Samsa of Prague.

Gregor's original home was Kafka's long story The Metamorphosis, first published in German in 1915. In it a young traveling salesman awakens from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a verminous insect of some sort, a roach or a beetle. Exactly what manner of beast Kafka's creature might

be has never been known, but Estrin has generously cleared up the puzzlement. We learn with certainty that Gregor is a cockroach who stands at about five foot six. Moreover, we learn with relief that he has survived the maltreatment his family dealt him.

Kafka's readers have long supposed him dead, his carcass swept out with the garbage by his parents' odious cleaning woman. Miraculously, Gregor has survived those traumatic times. Still, as Faulkner once pointed out, the past is never dead; it's never even past. Gregor carries the past with him. It is lodged permanently in his back and oozes brown fluids, a souvenir of fatherly authority. His own dad threw an apple at him in anger, administering a wound that will not heal.

The father's side of the story is not hard to understand. Gregor was quite an embarrassment to the family and a nuisance to have around the house. Worse still, the transformation cost him his job and its income to the family. Small wonder his father lost his temper. What father would be pleased with a son who grows up to be a shiftless parasite, lounging all day, every day, alone in his room? Such a son plainly lacks not only ambition but a proper sense of responsibility. (Kafka's sense of humor remains underappreciated, but Estrin has a fine sense of it.)

The novel dwells on Gregor's injury, which afflicts him at crucial moments in the action. The wound inflicted by that apple--ancient emblem of guilty knowledge vis-a-vis an all-powerful Father-- accompanies the roach throughout his new wanderings in Vienna during the time of Hitler's ascendancy and then

in the United States during the Depression and Second World War.

The gift of transformation

Estrin's Gregor is a roach strongly drawn to figures of paternal authority. Though none is as nasty as his true father, each relationship is ambivalent. The father who returns him to life is Amadeus Hoffnung, an eccentric Viennese collector of oddities. His "Wunderkammer" becomes so expansive that he begins

charging admission. Soon human curiosities find their way to him, and his curiosity cabinet becomes a freak show. Gregor is nothing if not a curiosity of nature and so rapidly becomes a star attraction in the Tails of Hoffnung Circus, his freaks being the "tailings" of humanity.

Hoffnung is the most benevolent of the father figures. He is exploiting Gregor, but under his tutelage Gregor becomes not only a celebrity but a public intellectual, hobnobbing with Robert Musil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other Viennese heroes of the contemplative life. Gregor gradually develops a sense of mission for himself in the twentieth century. He has learned from

Hoffnung--whose name means "hope"--and from talking with Musil that his otherness should be regarded as a gift: he is an original in a world of mass duplicates. He is privileged to stand apart from the common run of modern humanity, and his unique perspective makes it possible to see the world in a fresh, critical, and hopeful way.

In an otherwise gloomy discussion of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Musil informs Gregor that he is the hope of modern man:

""Cockroaches, you surely know, demonstrate incomplete metamorphosis. You are as larval as you can be, not wormlike, but comparatively larval nonetheless."

""And so, unlike Western humanity, which both you and your friend Professor Spengler might agree is 'finished,' you, Herr Cockroach, are unfinished. . ..""

""Like the Art of the Fugue," observed Amadeus."

Now, this is indeed an arresting thought and one that is certifiably Viennese. Yet the thinker most associated with it does not appear in the novel. Musil's friend and admirer, Elias Canetti, famously argued that the problem with modernity is that human beings have lost the ability to transform themselves.

According to Canetti, great writers are the "guardians of transformation," and for him Kafka was among the greatest of writers. Estrin's Gregor Samsa plainly embodies what Canetti referred to as "the gift of transformation."

"We don't need you to go back," Musil assures Gregor. "We need you to go forward from the larval state, from a unique place which carries the capacity for real change." Musil clarifies Gregor's mission for him. He is a pest and must make the most of it. He must act as a gadfly, not unlike Socrates, and do

what he can to help midwife transformation in the world. It will be Gregor's task to bug some important people.

Bugs in dark times

Adolf Hitler is one figure of paternal authority that Gregor easily resists. Apart from being a cockroach, which not everybody holds again him, Gregor is also Jewish in an anti-Semitic society. Like most important Viennese intellectuals, he emigrates. He makes his way to New York City, where he finds a job as an elevator operator. Here he meets Alice Paul, the feminist activist, and Charles Ives, the insurance executive and composer.

Alice initiates Gregor into American life, both intellectually and erotically. Through her he learns about life for women in Depression- era America, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and other momentous events of the era. He shares her social sympathies, and he falls hard for Alice. For her part, she is unprejudiced and open to love between species, but there are limits. Their one

attempt at lovemaking brings disappointment and sorrow, driving the frustrated blattid briefly to consider plastic surgery. Estrin, evidently a man of sunny disposition, tends to look on the bright side: "The one good thing that could be said was that they did not have to worry about birth control." But in the end Alice, too, must inflict a lasting wound on poor Gregor. She has her calling, and he must remain true to his own. And besides, how could any erotic liaison between a normal, healthy woman and a large insect work out? Alas, it cannot. Alice breaks Gregor's heart but not without educating it first.

Charles Ives, another emphatically American figure, offers Gregor an education of another sort. He takes Gregor and Alice to a baseball game and explains the American mind to them: "Kill the ump!" Ives continued. "We don't like transcendent authority. We want to make and interpret the rules. So the ump is the perfect target. He embodies the rules, and enforces them." He may as well be talking about his technique as a composer or Estrin's as a novelist.

Like Kafka, Ives was an insurance man by day and an artist by night, a composer of highly original music. Estrin, who according to the dust jacket is a cellist, weaves some of his finest passages around the idea of music and art. In chapters strongly reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Estrin explores works real and imaginary by Ives. His "Insect Sonata" was composed as a gift for Gregor, because this living embodiment of the possibility of self-transformation restored Ives at a time when he was mired in self-doubt and depression.

Estrin's lengthy description of the piece's first performance, like Mann's virtuoso descriptions of Adrian Leverkuhn's imaginary works, is highly engaging and even stirring. The pianist Nicolas Slonimsky, known for his audacious avant-gardism, performs the premiere:

"This was Slonimsky's singing debut, for when are concert pianists ever asked to sing? "For God!" he bellowed out, "is glorified in man," a line from Browning's long dramatic poem Paracelsus. As Beethoven had needed the human voice to bring the Ninth to culmination, so Ives had transcended the limits of

the piano sonata. Some wonderful singer might have been engaged to enter here, as a flute player does at the end of the Concord Sonata, but no. Ives specifically notates "No helpers allowed!" as if to demand that the performer demonstrate--in his or her own person--the ability to metamorphose and transcend."

For God is glorified in man

Ives takes Gregor on as a "risk assessor" in his insurance gency. Through connections he makes there, he gradually ascends to the White House, as an adviser to FDR, and from there to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico. In Roosevelt and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Gregor meets two new father figures. He takes it on himself to warn the president about Hitler and the murderous

activities of Himmler's SS. He is also moved by the plight of the American Japanese in California, who are being herded into concentration camps. Gregor can be relied upon to see the point of view of those in exile, those who look different, those oppressed by the wielders of power. Roosevelt, though willing

to hear him out, stays on his own politically expedient course.

Gregor is particularly moved by the ritual suicide of a young American whom he meets by chance on the streets of Washington, D.C. Josh Miyaguchi sets himself ablaze on the steps of the Capitol in protest of the "relocation" of the Japanese. The scene is brief but pivotal, for it anticipates and sets the tone

for the conclusion, which is as surprising as it is inevitable. With the passing of Roosevelt, Gregor moves to Los Alamos, still in his capacity as risk assessor, seeking to irritate and advise Oppenheimer and his colleagues at the Manhattan Project. Gregor does his best to speed the creation of the atomic bomb.

The conclusion of Estrin's tale is best left obscure. Let it be said only that it turns on the novel's central themes of knowledge and guilt, transformation and transcendence, themes that engage Oppenheimer as deeply as they do Josh Miyaguchi or Gregor Samsa.

Transformation and transcendence

An epilogue is appended to the novel proper. It is presented by Rudolph Bernard, M.D., a fictional mask for the novelist. He offers some comments and observations on Gregor's story, presenting him as a figure related to Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Till Eulenspiegel. Since Estrin has taken the trouble to invite such comparisons, it may be worthwhile to ponder them.

How does Gregor resemble Don Quixote, who reimagines the world to suit himself? Or Don Juan, who defies the moral order as a matter of will and desire? Or Till Eulenspiegel, the trickster who delights in transforming order into chaos? The common denominator must be this: each refuses to accept the world as it is. And none of them actually succeeds in changing it.

Some similar thought appears to underlie Estrin's aesthetic as a novelist. Convention and rigidity are under attack. His storytelling-- loose and expansive, historical and imagined, funny and sad--is a seriously ambitious work of art as well as a fine entertainment. One senses a moral urgency in his writing, yet this urgency never collapses into a "message" that he is trying

to put across.

Witold Gombrowicz, a novelist with a disposition similar to Estrin's, once wrote that "the purpose of literature is not to solve problems but to set them." Despite the messianic overtones of Gregor's mission, Estrin's ethic in Insect Dreams is not founded on asserting positions but rather on openness and exploration. He asks how the world between 1915 and 1945 might look to Gregor Samsa, the ultimate outsider, and follows the track of the possibilities that present themselves. This nonmethod gives the book its feel of spontaneity and life, its energy, its freedom from the deadening conventions of ordinary fiction.

The New York Times reviewer of Ives' "Insect Sonata" writes, "It is an extraordinary hodgepodge, but something that lives and that vibrates with conviction is there. ... It is genuine, if it is not a masterpiece, and that is the important thing." The same can be said for Insect Dreams. 

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