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Gregor Samsa's
dream ... Franz Kafka Google doodle
Anniversary of author's birth honoured with image from classic short
story
Did you feel OK when you woke up this morning? Spare a thought for
Gregor Samsa, that most unlucky of literary heroes. "When Gregor Samsa
woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed … "
Thus Franz Kafka opens one of the most resonant stories of 20th-century literature, about
an ordinary man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an
bug of indeterminate kind – an insect, a beetle, a cockroach – the original
German "ungeheueren Ungeziefer" leaves his exact species ambiguous.
(There has been much debate about this point over the years).
This nightmarish image of the human-insect lodged in our imaginations is
now a Google doodle marking the 130th anniversary of Kafka's birth on July 3 1883 - but so
far, in a machination worthy of the master himself, in almost all of the world
except for the US and UK.
Why should this be? Is it that the powers-that-be at the global search
engine don't feel he has universal appeal, or that he's too weird and European
for English-language readers? That conclusion would seem odd, as Kafka was a
master at finding universal metaphors that have grown ever more powerful with
time. Also, he's not apparently too strange for Australians or New Zealanders,
where the doodle is also on the search page.
And why, anyway, has Google chosen Metamorphosis rather than The Castle
or The Trial to represent the master? John Banville would probably have opted for the
"great and terrible novel of guilt, judgment and retribution",
The Trial, while Guardian blogger William Burrows is not the only reader to believe that The Castle is Kafka at his most
beautiful and most emotional. "The Trial and Metamorphosis are full of
their own depth, and their own complicated sadness, but they don't strike the
heart with the same poignancy as Kafka's final, unfathomable novel," he
wrote.
Perhaps it's the beauty of beetles that was the draw, or maybe it's
because the transformation of poor Gregor Samsa illustrates more clearly than
any other of Kafka's images John Banville's view that"Kafka's work is a perfect illustration of
Freud's conception of the uncanny as the familiar re-presented to us in
unfamiliar guise".
Either way, Google's nod to the great Czech mythmaker seems appropriate
in the creepy-crawly world of modern surveillance, where whistle-blowers Edward
Snowden and Julian Assange are trapped in a no-way-out nightmare reminiscent of
The Trial.
And what would Kafka, the great miserabilist, have made of his sudden
elevation? Judging by one diary entry for 1910, not much. "Today," he
wrote, "I do not even dare to reproach myself. Shouted into this empty
day, it would have a disgusting echo."
By The Guardian
