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cyborg-pests. In this sense, Smith₂ is not really cooperating with Kafka’s intentions:

Smith₂’s reading is essentially anachronistic.

I am not sure I can hold the view that any essentially anachronistic reading of a fictional text is wrong. Indeed, there is a well entrenched tradition of anachronistic interpretations of theater plays in Western countries, and I do not think this tradition is conceptually wrong or mistaken. But I am quite confident that one wants to keep a sharp distinction between anachronistic readings and non-anachronistic ones.

So maybe Smith₂ is not wrong in imagining Gregor turning into a cyborg-pest, but I take it that his being right is quite controversial.

Smith3

Smith₃ is the Smith we already know, who imagines Gregor to have turned into a cockroach. As I suggested earlier, most readers would associate with Smith₃, this is why I called him a representative of the “average reader”.

Aside: For those who have the intuition that this multiplication of indexed readers is somehow artificial, I have two things to say. First, it is merely a conceptual device to distinguish the different layers of meaning which are intertwined in the complex process of reading fiction. Second, think of some people who have a weak mastery of the language when they read the Metamorphosis in German for instance, and thus make clumsy mistakes: this should help to make these readers less artificial.

11.1.2 Why are the Smiths so wrong?

In order to define a notion of “mistaken reading”, I need to apply the reality prin-ciples. A rough definition will suffice here. The reality principle says that when one reads a text of fiction, one should not in their interpretation depart from reality unless explicitly stated or needed. Note that the definition of the T-fantastic goes towards an even stricter formulation of a reality principle.

Smith₀

One can give a semantic story to explain Smith₀’s mistake. As is commonly agreed, one tacit general rule for fictional imagination minimally requires that one imagines what is said in the text. There are two ways of making sense of Smith₀’s reading as a correct one. But one goes against the tacit general rule, and the other goes against the reality principle.

One scenario would be that the expression “prime number” changes its ordinary meaning in the fiction to denote, say, a cockroach. This is surely possible to imagine such a fiction. And then Gregor would be a vermin, because he is a “prime number” in the fiction. This scenario goes against the general rule that words keep their ordinary meaning in fictional texts, unless there is an explicit mention to the contrary.

The other scenario would need some construction of a world in which prime numbers, while denoting the same set of abstract things as in our world, are vermin.

For example, other numbers would be living peacefully in a mathematical realm, before the prime numbers invade this realm bringing lots of diseases and causing much damage to the live stocks of the numerous population. This is surely possible to imagine such a fiction. But it contradicts the “reality assumption” in many ways, and no explicit mention to go against the reality assumption is made in Kafka’s text.

The same line of reasoning can be used to explain away a vast number of mistaken readings: Gregor turning into abstract objects, artefacts, non-living things, plants and non-vermin-like animals are immediately excluded in the same manner.

Smith1

One can give a pragmatic story to explain Smith₁’s mistake. Indeed, Smith₁ does not take into account all the information available in Kafka’s text. Maybe some want to call it a semantic story, in that it focuses on the inferences drawn by the reader. I call it pragmatic, because it is not a mistake about what is literally said, but about what is meant. There are two ways of making sense of Smith₁’s reading.

One contradicts the reality assumption, and the other does not take into account all the information available in Kafka’s text.

One scenario would be the far-fetched scenario in which a six-legged rodent can walk on walls and this conflict with the reality assumption following which rodents do not have six legs. Naturally, nothing in Kafka’s text mandates the imagining of such a chimera. The other scenario consists in imagining an ordinary rodent, but it clashes with the information about the number of legs, the walking on walls, and the food eaten.

Smith2

The story about Smith₂ is somewhat complex, as hinted above.

In order to “prove Smith₂ wrong” I think Nabokov would insist on the genre of the text. Imagining Gregor to have turned into a cyborg-pest tends to make the Metamorphosis become a science-fiction short story. And, presumably, all the atmosphere of the T-fantastic disappears. Of course, there is still a mystery: how

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can a man turn into a cyborg? But once we have accepted cyborgs into the picture, then the explanation of this fictional event need not follow “the laws of reality” as we experience them. And then, why not explain this metamorphosis by a surgical intervention that happened the night before?²

One can see how unorthodox this interpretation would look like. This unortho-doxy coming from the violation of the genre of the story is not inaccurate as the interpretations violating the general rules of fiction. If the first two Smiths are gen-erally incorrect because the violate some underlying general rules of fiction reading, then Smith₂ isspecifically incorrect in that he merely violates a specific rule in force while reading the Metamorphosis as a T-fantastic story.

Smith₃

Nabokov argues that Smith₃ is wrong.

He has an argument: a cockroach is “flat on both sides and has long legs”, and this is clearly incompatible with the first scene when Gregor has enormous difficulties getting out of his bed. Therefore, Gregor cannot be a cockroach. The closest insect one can think of is a beetle. Therefore Gregor is a beetle.

According to Nabokov, the reason why Smith₃ is wrong is very similar to the reason why Smith₁ is wrong. Based on the reality assumption and some entomo-logical knowledge, constructing a fictional scenario in which a cockroach would have difficulties turning around is as far-fetched as imagining a six-legged rodent.

I think it is fair to say that there is something fishy about Nabokov’s argument.

11.2 Saving Private Smith

The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.

J.B.S. Haldane (This is referring to the fact that 25% of all know animals species are types of beetle.)

I do not think Smith_0,1 can be rescued in any way. Rescuing Smith₂ is a project for the literary theorist, since it has to do with orthodox and non-orthodox readings.

This greatly surpasses my ability in literary theory. Rescuing Smith3 is, I should claim, a philosophical enterprise: it will serve to establish the GBD as a faultless disagreement. I can see four ways of doing so.

2Actually, that would explain the “agitated dreams” which are probably due to the anaesthetic...

11.2.1 The way of the psychologist

Nabokov says Gregor cannot be a cockroach. But maybe Gregor is a very “stupid cockroach”, or at least a strikingly clumsy one: he does not even know he can turn around using his long legs.³

Gregor clearly seems to have a human psychology in Kafka’s story. Indeed, his dehumanisation is very progressive in the story. In the first scene, he has human urges: he wants to talk, he wants to open the door and explain why he is late for work, he can feel the shame and many other human feelings. So it seems possible he has not yet taken up all the reflexes cockroaches have, just as he has not given up all of his human urges.

Now, Nabokov has to tell us more about the psychology of cockroaches and beetles. Maybe he would have had something to say about it, had he been here to help me write this.

11.2.2 The way of the sceptic

Maybe Gregor is a yet unknown insect closer to a cockroach than a beetle, unable to turn around so easily.⁴

Entomological discoveries sometimes happen. Here is one relevant such discovery:

The dictyoptera were a family of insects containing the blattodea and the mantodae.

The various species of cockroaches are part of the blattodea, and the English common noun “(cock)roaches” is usually used to denote the entire family of the blattodea.

Mantodae is the closest family of insects to the blattodea, and the most famous representative of this family are preying mantids. For a long time, this classification of the dictyoptera was thought to be exhaustive.

But, DNA analysis performed in the first half of the 20th century, and then additional phylogenetic evidence in the 60s put the termites into a subfamily of the blattodea, against the former hypothesis that they form a family of their own. It is now acknowledged that termites form a subspecies of social, wood-eating cockroaches;

their common ancestor with the cockroaches is estimated to have lived during the Jurassic or Triassic, that is roughly from 150 to 250 million years ago.⁵

3Thanks to Markus Gabriel for this suggestion.

4Thanks to Paul Égré for this suggestion.

5See [Capinera 2008] entry “Cockroaches (Blattodea)”. Here is one of the introductory para-graph:

The cockroaches (also called roaches) are members of an ancient order of insect.

The order name is derived from the Latin wordblatta, or cockroach. They are closely related to the preying mantids (Mantodea), and often grouped with them (as suborder)

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(a) Diploptera punctata (the Pacific beetle cockroach) – mimic of brown beetles

(b) Prosoplecta (cockroaches) – mimic of la-dybird beetles

Figure 11.1: Two spieces of cockroaches which mimic beetles

I don’t know how much Nabokov knew about all this, but it shows that scien-tific discoveries can change the picture substantively. And the scienscien-tific discovery which led to classify termites as cockroaches was not helped by a scrutiny of natural language.

Now, suppose entomologists found a new kind of cockroach in the future, with smaller legs and rounder body. Then Nabokov’s argument would be made obsolete, and Smith3 would, eventually, be correct. This puzzling relativity about what is fictional inthe Metamorphosis seems to follow from Nabokov’s rigorous stance.

One might thus adopt a sceptical position. We probably cannot know precisely the ultimate nature of Gregor, so that it is more rational to accept both Smith₃ and Nabokov’s interpretation in the light of available “evidence”.

Here is another interesting piece of entomological knowledge to strengthen this sceptic line of response: Some species of cockroaches evolved to mimic some species of beetle. ThePacific Beetle Cockroach mimics the common brown beetle. The Proso-plecta is a cockroach which mimics the ladybird. See Figure11.1 for photographs of these kind of cockroaches. The world of insects would make us all sceptic, if only we knew more about it...

to form the order Dictyoptera. Though the mantids evolved from the cockroaches, they are a specialised group of predatory insects that warrant individual recognition.

Termites (Isoptera) can also be placed in the order Dictyoptera, and are considered by some to be social cockroaches. The order name for cockroaches is given as Blattaria.

11.2.3 The way of the ignorant

Maybe it is fictional that Gregor is a beetle, maybe it is fictional that he is a cock-roach, but it does not really matter for the reader to know.

Nabokov’s implicit premise is to say that entomology can apply as it stands in the real world to the world of the Metamorphosis. So he suggests that an ento-mologist reader is more competent than a non-entoento-mologist reader, when it comes to determining what is fictional about Gregor. This is quite objectionable on two grounds.

First, it is not even clear that Kafka himself had this sort of knowledge, so that Nabokov would have to defend the thesis that the reader should be more knowl-edgable than the author, making the author himself a poor reader of his own work.

Maybe this line of defense is possible, but it is surely counter-intuitive.

Second, the amount of knowledge necessary to read all the fictions we read will inflate without control. It follows that most readers are incompetent readers; and probably, for reasons of time and interest, most competent readers of fiction do not read fiction. There are some good reasons to think that Nabokov agrees with this.

I am not claiming that it cannot be defended on rational grounds, but surely it is a very counter-intuitive view which one might want to avoid.

Ignorance is bliss, when it comes to fiction reading. The way of the ignorant stresses this point in arguing that the practice of fiction reading is not the same as the practice of entomology or any other scientific investigations. Indeed, there is much more leeway in imagining a world of fiction than there is in the scientific description of nature; and this is what the disagreement between Smith₃and Nabokov shows.

11.2.4 The way of the erudite person

Erudite people know of [Haldane 1926]. Haldane was a biologist. In 1926, he pub-lished an article entitled “On Being the Right Size” in which he argues that there is a “right size” for all kinds of living creatures, so to speak. He shows that the size of an animal is a zoological feature which obeys the same laws of evolution than the other biological features; this fact, Haldane remarks, we tend to overlook, making as if the size of an animal did not matter when it comes to zoology. Interestingly, Haldane illustrates his point by appealing to creatures of fiction. Here is the opening of his article:

The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little