Cockroach Solidarity: On Elizabeth R. McClellan’s "The Later Life of Herr Samsa’s Picture"
Gregor Samsa by Rich Johnson
Micro Review of:
“The Later Life of Herr Samsa’s Picture”
By Elizabeth R. McClellan
The Future Fire, Issue 2023.64
January 2023
Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a kind of dream or nightmare—it’s a work of psychological anxiety, not a call for revolution. Or, at least, that’s the usual interpretation. Elizabeth R. McClellan’s poem “The Later Life of Herr Samsa’s Picture” takes a different approach: It crawls into the margins of Kafka’s story and drags out a parable about feminist working-class queer solidarity, all the more precious for being found in such an unlikely place.
McClellan’s poem is a notional ekphrasis—a poem about a work of art that doesn’t exist. Here, that artwork is a framed advertisement showing “a woman in furs / flushed warm, with the smooth lips / of someone whose water was always clean.” Kafka mentions the image twice in passing. At the beginning of the story, he explains that Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, cut the picture from a magazine to frame it, oddly clinging to ephemera. Then later, as a bug, Samsa clings to the picture literally, sticking his viscous body against it and leaving putrid gunk on the glass.
But McClellan’s speaker doesn’t see that trace as repulsive. A working-class radical who finds the discarded picture, she admires the skill that went into carving the frame. She recognizes ads are “dreams they sell us to keep us quiet” but wonders what the owner’s investment in the image was. Was it bourgeois aspiration? Was it a reminder of “sister, lover, wife,” or aspirational in another way? The speaker speculates that Samsa saw himself in the picture of the woman: “Such things are not unheard of.”
McClellan is genderqueer; the implication is that Samsa’s transformation is a metaphor for dysphoria, or perhaps for the pain leveled upon other marginalized identities: disabled, autistic, woman, Jew (Kafka was Jewish), working-class. McClellan looks at Metamorphosis and sees solidarity skittering everywhere, just as the speaker looks at the framed ad and sees the labor that went into creating it.
The speaker’s comrade and lover is less perceptive though. When he sees the picture in her apartment, he sneers: “Furs and fine ladies / then, instead of revolution?” The speaker sneers back, pointing out his “grandfather’s linen handkerchiefs” that he carries as patriarchal inheritance. In response, the offended leftist dude “shot me a look that was not solidarity.” Just so in Kafka’s story Samsa’s family withholds empathy and solidarity, oppressing their (queer?) child and ultimately killing him.
Certain segments of the left are quick to denigrate pop culture fandoms—especially those (the Kardashians, fashion magazines, romance novels) associated with women and queer people. McClellan suggests, however, that passion—such as Samsa’s for that mysterious picture—doesn’t always propel you to be a good salesman. Sometimes it whispers of solidarity, like “subversive pamphlets tucked behind her frame.” And sometimes it transforms you into your wrong, disgusting, right, unique self.
Elizabeth R. McClellan is a domestic violence attorney by day and a poet in the margins. They are a 2021 Rhysling Award Nominee whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Dreams & Nightmares, Illumen Magazine, Rejection Letters, Utopia Science Fiction, The Wondrous Real, and many others. They are a disabled gender/queer demisexual poet writing on unceded Quapaw and Chikashsha Yaki land. They prefer to be found on Twitter @popelizbet or on Patreon at ermcclellan.
Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer with bylines in The Atlantic, NBC Think, the LA Times, and numerous other venues. He’s also a poet sometimes; he’s published in The Toast and Five Fleas, and won an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Wergle Flomp poetry contest. He scribbles at Everything is Horrible.