International Research Journal of Applied and Basic Sciences
© 2013 Available online at www.irjabs.com
ISSN 2251-838X / Vol, 6 (4): 492-495
Science Explorer Publications
Metamorphosis: A Žižekian Barren of Desire
Ismaeil Jangizahy‫٭‬1, Shahram Afrougheh2
1. M.A student of English Language, Islamic Azad University, Boroujerd branch, Iran.
2. Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, Post Graduated Department Boroujerd branch, Islamic
Azad University, Boroujerd, Iran.
Corresponding Author email: [email protected]
ABSTRACT: In this modern world man is trapped in a kind of chaotic and psychic world which he
unconsciously loses his real self. The Metamorphosis is a story of Gregore, a hard worker man which his
entire struggle is to fulfill his family’s desire. One morning after uneasy dream he awakes and finds
himself as a bug. This change occurs in response to Gregor’s mysterious being that shows itself in a
form of monstrous vermin. This change is the logical consequence of Gregor’s reduction to a real self
(being, essence) and his consequent destruction are conditioned by a parallel change is to fulfill the
longing of Other. In Žižek’s view it is the ideology of Other cause the subject follow the Symbolic order
rules and given enjoyment to it. The enjoyment of the Other seems all the more powerful and all the more
threatening. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance,
but something that has to be constructed. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gregore’s family behavior is
like an Other and they desires him to submissive what they wants. Obviously in this story by challenges of
the industrial world the character doesn’t have any psychic solace and he has inner dispute while he feels
guilty for what he unfulfilled.
Keywords: Desire, Enjoyment, Ideology, Psychology, Unconscious
Abbreviation: TM- The Metamorphosis
INTRODUCTION
The main character of The Metamorphosis is Gregor Samsa, who is the son of middle-class parents who
interested only in the material side of life and vulgarians in their tastes. Some five years before, old Samsa lost
most of his money, whereupon his son Gregor took a job with one of his father's creditors and became a traveling
salesman. His father then stopped working altogether, his sister Grete was too young to work, his mother was ill
with asthma; thus young Gregor not only supported the whole family but also found for them the apartment they are
now living in. Gregor is mostly away traveling, but when the story starts he is spending a night at home between
two business trips, and it is then that the dreadful thing happened and he changes to big giant.
Gregor was struggling to get out of bed and go to work long before his metamorphosis into a bug. He
already felt like a shell of a man, trapped in a Symbolic order of a traveling salesman’s job that he hated but could
not leave because he had come to believe that he owed it to his parents and sister to support them. He had to be
the strong man of the household because they were all so seemingly helpless. Only the person who could free him
or herself from the shackles of institutionalized economic, political, religious and social conformity had a chance to
survive at a level of existence higher than that of the bug.
Before the awakening, he undergo troubled dreams- a dream in symbolic order, being a slave. The
knowledge that awakens him from these dreams is not arrived at by cognition but through revolutionary
experience- the reality of nature law that he is a free man- and it is not an accession of information but a
modification of the sensate being. He is enslaved both by the physical laws of nature and by such psychic laws.
Desire and Individual
In a modern society, the heroes of Kafka’s novels are face with unusual events that change their behavior
and mind view about what is around of them. From Žižek’s view the man in such society, knows what he does but
he does not ignore it. Žižek basic theory is concern on psychology which mixes it with political elements. From his
view a man lives in risky society. From viewpoint of this critic the risks in modern society are artificial, in another
word we live in psychic world that we just answer to ourselves:
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What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a
fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is
structuring their reality, their real social activity. (Žižek 2009)
He opens the door of truth to us and declaims that our reality is distorted by other but from some society’s
exchange values we know it well and ignore it. Žižek’s adoption of psychoanalysis to understand political
phenomena wherein subjects know not what they do stands in a long tradition of psychoanalytic social theory.
Alternatively, Gregore does not know how social obligations dictate his daily routines and transform the way he
chooses to interact with Other. Most of the time he worried about his family (Other) and feels the guilt of
transforming into something useless that can no longer support them. And the most important of all, he cannot
make his sister’s dream comes true, he feels so protective towards his sister. After transferring, it is his sister,
despite their relationship, that condemns him to abandonment and death. Despite all of her kindness and care at
the beginning of this crisis, at the end it is she who decides:
Parents dear, said his sister, striking the table with her hand by way of introduction, ‘it can’t go on
like this. I will not utter my brother’s name in front of this monster, so I will simply say: we must try to get rid
of it. We have tried everything humanly possible, looking after it and putting up with it; I don’t think anyone
can reproach us in the slightest for that. (TM 68)
It is she who gives up hope completely and declares that she no longer believes that her brother exists.
This compulsion results in overwhelming guilt and anxiety. On one hand, we are guilty both when we fail to live up
to the superego’s injunction and when we follow it: “superego draws the energy of the pressure it exerts upon the
subject from the fact that the subject was not faithful to his desire that he gave it up” (Žižek 1994: 68). On the other
hand, we are anxious before the enjoyment of Other. Given our inabilities to enjoy, the enjoyment of the Other
seems all the more powerful and all the more threatening. The other all too easily threatens our imaginary balance:
“the desire with regard to which we must not 'give way' is not the desire supported by fantasy but the desire of the
Other beyond fantasy” (Žižek 2009).
Gregor depends on no inner guide such as a self for his sense of who he is and what he might do. Indeed,
his transformation cries out to be read as an expression of his unconscious, as symptom of a fundamental aspect
of which he is that he has not made conscious. Prior to his transformation, Gregor has sought self-esteem from
thinking of himself as the caretaker of his family, an identity that his family at first welcomed with praise. The issue
of dependence in this family is one of the dynamics that throughout the story remains unconscious:
A person may be momentarily incapable of working, but that is just the right time to recall his earlier
achievements and consider that later, once the impediment has been removed, he will certainly work with
all the more vigor and concentration. After all, I am so very much indebted to our esteemed employer, as
you very well know. On the other hand, I have the care of my parents and sister. (TM 40)
Here Gregor face with kind of traumatic events which is rooted in his unconscious mind. The returning
traumatic dream surprise Gregor because he cannot be understood it in terms of any wish or unconscious
meaning. It is a return of the event against the will of what he inhabits. Trauma points toward its enigmatic core; it is
the delayed or belated uncertainty of the event. The overwhelming immediacy of the event which returned
repeatedly in traumatic dreams produces its belated uncertainty. Indeed the belated return of the event makes it
difficult to have access to our own experience. Gregore lived for many years in desire of his family to be a money
maker:
Gregor’s concern at the time had been only to do his utmost to have his family forget as quickly as
possible the financial misfortune that had brought them to a state of utter hopelessness. And so he had
begun to work with an especial passion, turning almost overnight from a little clerk into a commercial
traveler, who naturally enjoyed very different opportunities to earn money, and any successful deal he
made could promptly be transformed as a commission into hard cash, which could be laid on the table at
home to the astonishment and joy of the family. (TM 48)
He consciously wants to support his family but in other face he is institutionalized by socio-economic
qualification of his family. He trapped in Symbolic order of Other’s desire (family) and ignores his real self as a free
man. In real he is just a slave, an animal who just given a name and is useless now, and after a hard struggle with
his ego one day wakes from his Symbolic dream of Gregor and find his real conscious.
Desire and Society
The thing that he encounters in the dream, the reality of his desire- in our case, the reality of Gregor
sacrifice for family, implying his fundamental guilt of couldn’t does properly his duty: “Whenever they began to
discuss this need to earn money, Gregor would always first let go of the door and then hurl himself onto the cool
sofa next to the door, for he burned with shame and sorrow”(TM 50), it is more terrifying than so-called external
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reality itself and that is why he awakens: to escape the real of his desire, which announces itself in the terrifying
dream. He escapes into so-called reality to be able to continue to sleep, to maintain his blindness, to elude
awakening into the realm of his desire.
It is exactly the same with ideology. Žižek holds that ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to
escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy construction which serves as a support for our
reality itself, an illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable,
real, impossible kernel. The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us
the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.
It is precisely that only in dream we face with the real of our desire. Our common everyday reality, the
reality of social universe which in it we play the roles of kind-hearted, and decent people, turn on to be an illusion
that rests on certain repression, on overlooking the real of our desire. So, this social reality is nothing more than a
brittle or fragile that can at any moment to be torn aside by an intrusion of the real. The realization of desire is not
fulfilled or satisfied our desires, instead it is coincides with reproduction of desire. Gregor realized his desire to
make his possible to postpone his satisfaction of desire by in hallucination.
This is because the characters in Kafka’s novels usually seem to remain outside the system, like the
metamorphosed insect-man, which is an artistic representation. In the place where the normal people enter
identification and subjectivation, the deformed insect-man is denied; in the place where a normal subject receives
interpellation, the insect-man is simply confused:
Gregor’s gaze then turned towards the window, and the murky weather one could hear the raindrops
striking the windowsill made him quite melancholy. ‘What if I went on sleeping for a while and forgot all
these idiocies,’ he thought, but that was quite impossible, as he was used to sleeping on his right side and
in his present state he was unable to get himself into this position. (TM 29)
But perhaps this discordant man may reveal to us that Kafka’s self-contained fictional world itself
expresses the power of an institution. The institution wants to persuade its inmates that there is nothing outside,
that there is no possibility of escape and nowhere to escape to. Yet this is an illusion, and one might say that it is
the illusion that an ideology seeks to generate. Ideology, that is, seeks to persuade us not only that it is true but
also that it is the only truth, and that any thought that disagrees with it is literally unthinkable. The institution that is
the society, with its attendant ideology of subservience to industry officials, seeks to persuade people that there is
no space beyond its domains."Gregor Samsa's transformation into vermin presents self-alienation in a literal way,
not merely a customary metaphor become fictional fact [...] No manner more drastic could illustrate the alienation of
a consciousness from its own being than Gregor Samsa's startled and startling awakening" (Sokel 216). The truth
of the matter is, Gregor did not wake up as an insect, and he had been one for as long as his parents pawned him
off as the homo of his nuclear family. When he awakes, he is not awaking merely from sleep, he is waking up from
the slave that he was during his life- a slave to a machine that sold his existence for less than his returns. But note
that by Gregor waking up; it is a milestone towards his demise.
CONCLUSION
Metamorphosis or changing to something completely different might be used as a tool for the modern man
to react against the modern machinery society. In this regard, metamorphosis is a kind of escaping and exclusion
from the public, or the social mass. Consequently, metamorphosis can be considered as a way of searching for an
identity in the cruel social system. Moreover, metamorphosis and exclusion from society definitely affects the whole
social life of a person.Modern machinery societies changed human being to robots and mindless machines which
should accept and obey the social rules. Samsa has changed to a bug while other people have adopted
themselves with the current social situation and cannot visualize and accept any kind of metamorphosis or change.
As a result, this change is the change of human being, the change for proving that he is still a human being, and
the change by which a person will know his own self. The change of form of Gregor in to an insect is the psychic
element and change of nature of the other characters of the story is realistic element. This story is like
metamorphosis of Gregor’s desires that does not fulfill in realistic world while he found himself in fantasy one.
While in psychology dreams are disguised symbols of repressed desires and therefore offer direct insight into the
unconscious or real self or soul, Kafka brings to stage an insect instead of underdog man.
REFERENCES
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Kafka F. 2009.The Metamorphosis.Transl. Joyce Crick. United State: Oxford UP,
Sokel Walter H. 2002.The myth of power and the self: essays on Franz Kafka. Detroit, Michigan: WayneUP,
The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso, 1994.
Žižek S. 2009.The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso,
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