An American in Paris

Today I woke up late. Ambulances at the hospital across the street from my host family’s home had cried out at least until 2 a.m., at which point I had put in earbuds. After eating breakfast and sitting, looking over the developments from the past night, the conclusions, the theories, the still-unknowns, etc., I walked out into the streets of Paris.

I was greeted by Paris itself—its pedestrians, its deranged motorbike drivers, its gray drizzle and dark costume. The streets had not changed. The air was not different. It was Paris. I went into a bookstore, where I picked up a Kafka collection. I got a sandwich from a store and ate it in a small square. In the square there was a man who was talking loudly into a telephone and a woman who was carrying a lot of plastic bags. On my walk back, I saw two young girls, probably aged four and six, engaged in a game which consisted of slowly running (in the way of young children) back and forth along a row of square blocks in the pavement just in front of the glass façade of a showroom for antique video game machines, the kinds you see in older pizzerias.

I started reading Kafka in the afternoon. It was a different experience reading it in French. French is a language built on context, and I was worried that the inimitable clarity of language that Kafka’s writing had always held for me would be lost in the translation. It wasn’t, though, and I realized as I read that I had only read Kafka in English, which was itself a translation, so I was only used to a diluted Kafka experience anyway. I read through The Metamorphosis and found a bit what I was looking for today.

The Marxist reading of The Metamorphosis is a tale of the alienation of a laborer in capitalist society. Gregor Samsa works as a traveling salesman. In the novella, he makes his distaste for his job known. Additionally, the majority of his anguish does not come from being an unidentified vermin but from first his boss being mad at him for shirking his work and second his family clearly hurting from losing his flow of income—in essence, from the precariousness of a laborer in the free market.

A more popular reading of The Metamorphosis is one in which Kafka is expressing his alienation in the dominantly anti-Semitic milieu Kafka found himself in. But I found a Zadie Smith reflection that I think comes closer to a more profound reading. She starts by quoting the author: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” For Smith, the alienation is not from his community due to his ethnicity and religion but from community writ large because of his humanity. I quote Smith: “Kafka's horror is not of Jewishness per se, because it is not a horror only of Jewishness: it is a horror of all shared experience, all shared being, all genus. In a time and place in which national, linguistic and racial groups were defined with ever more absurd precision, how could the very idea of commonness not turn equally absurd? …What does it mean, to have a people? On no subject are we more sentimental and less able to articulate what we mean. In what, for example, does the continuity of ‘blackness’ exist? Or ‘Irishness’? Or ‘Arabness’? Blood, culture, history, genes?”

We have become so interrelated that we must define ourselves by increasingly specific boundaries. I’m not a Floridian, I’m a Tampanian. I’m not a Jew, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, and a secular one at that. At some point, this act of self-definition crosses over into self-parody. At some point, we’ll all be floating on little islands of identity.

At the end of The Metamorphosis, Gregor dies in his room to save his family the cost of his dead weight. His family rejoices. They take a trolley ride into the country and buy a new, smaller and cheaper apartment. They look at Gregor’s sister and realize she is beautiful and that they should find her a husband. Gregor had ceased to be human through his symbolic alienation. This is the risk that we face, that we are forced to face in today’s world.

The people who killed so many Parisians and the people who killed so many Iraqis and the people who killed so many Lebanese were all people. Nobody but humans could be capable of such horrors, of such pure cruelty. And the people who died across the world, they were people too. If we continue to carve these rickety identities for ourselves, we will continue to find ourselves in the situation of mourning and numbness and despair that we find ourselves in today. The world is bursting at the seams with people, all kinds of people, and the communities that we used to be able to carve out are now pushed up against one another. They bleed into each other, subsume one another, band together, but more than anything, they seem to fight. The pressure is too high when we maintain these borders around our identities.