3 ‘Earth’ is a proper noun

      For the moment, the thing that’s making life impossible for us is this generational conflict so perfectly described in the tale of Gregor Samsa. In a way, since lockdown, every one of us has been living through it in our own families.

In Kafka’s novella, there is the family of wire figures on one side – the obese father, the asthmatic mother, the infantile sister – to whom must be added the tedious ‘chief clerk’, two young and horrified maids, the ‘all-bones’ charwoman and the three interfering lodgers. And then there’s this Gregor whose transformation into an insect foreshadows our own. He is thicker now, heavier; he has more trouble walking, at least at first; his more numerous legs hamper him; his rigid back makes a dull sound when it hits the floor, but he can connect with many more things than they can – to say nothing of the fact that he can climb up to the ceiling … And so, he feels more at ease, as there’s nothing in his peregrinations as a creature who can pass through walls that doesn’t remind him of his competence fairly freely to build nests, domes, bubbles, atmospheres, in short interiors that are not necessarily comfortable, but are always chosen by those who’ve formed them – engineers, urbanists, bacteria, mushrooms, forests, peasants, oceans, mountains or anthills – or, failing that, are organised by their forbears, often unintentionally, what’s more. As for Gregor’s parents, they’re the ones who are walled up in their oversized apartment, whose rent they can’t even pay. Inevitably, since the only interior they’ve got is the one drawn up in the eyes of others by the pretty cramped limit of their ugly bodies. They are still confined, whereas Gregor no longer is. As long as he hasn’t reached the real exterior, the other side of the barrier, he remains inside a world that is pretty familiar, all things considered. For his parents, menacing exteriority begins at the door on the street; for the new Gregor, interiority stretches as far as the limits, admittedly still undetermined, of Earth.

      The two generations, the one from before and the one from after the general lockdown, don’t localise themselves the same way. To say that Gregor ‘doesn’t get along very well with his parents’ is a euphemism: their ways of measuring things and his are well and truly incommensurable. They don’t just lead to different quantities; their ways of registering distances simply have nothing to do with each other. It’s not all that surprising that in the twentieth century, focused on issues to do with ‘human relations’, people saw Kafka’s novella as a perfect illustration of ‘communication breakdowns’. But they might have been wrong about the distance between Gregor’s way of sizing himself up and his parents’. There is something literally crushing in the way the latter get their bearings in the world – that is, starting with a map.

We start with the Universe, come to the Milky Way, then the solar system, we reach various planets, before overflying the earth, then sliding on to GoogleEarth™ to get to Czechoslovakia, before reaching the space above Prague, over the neighbourhood, the street, and soon the dowdy old apartment block opposite the sinister hospital. At the end of this flyover, localisation of the Samsa parents is perhaps complete – especially if we add in the data from the land register, the post office, the police, the bank, plus, these days, the ‘social networks’. But, in comparison with these vastnesses, Gregor’s poor progenitors are reduced to nothing: a dot, less than a dot, a pixel blinking on a screen. The localisation is final in the sense that it ends by eliminating those it has located using mere latitude and longitude. The pixel has no neighbour, no predecessor or successor. It has become literally incomprehensible. Funny way of getting your bearings.

Having become an insect, and thereby a terrestrial, Gregor gets his bearings quite differently from the way his parents do. He is proportionate to the things he’s digested and left in his wake, and when he moves around, a little clumsily to start with, it is always step by step. Nothing consequently can crush him by pinpointing him from on high and from a distance. In spite of old man Samsa’s raised cane, no force can flatten him or reduce him to a pixel. For Gregor’s parents, he is invisible and his speech is incomprehensible, which is why, in the end, they have to get rid of him (‘it’s lying there dead and done for!’, the ‘all-bones’ charwoman announces with malicious glee). Whereas for Gregor, on the contrary, it’s his parents who disappear, crushed and mute, if they’re localised the old-fashioned way, cramped in their dining room as they are, reduced to their bodies, locked-down in their little selves, jabbering away in a language he can’t stand hearing anymore. That is his line of flight.

      If we follow Gregor’s movement, we see that we distribute values in an entirely different way. We literally no longer live in the same world. They, the people from before lockdown, begin with their teeny little self; they add on a material framework which they say is ‘artificial’ or even ‘inhuman’ – Prague, factories, machines, ‘modern life’; and then, thirdly, a bit further down the track, they pack in a whole jumble of inert things that stretch to infinity and which they don’t really know what to do with anymore.

      But we distribute our belongings altogether differently. We’re beginning to realise that we don’t have, that we’ll never have, that no one has ever had the experience of encountering ‘inert things’. That experience, supposedly common for previous generations, is something our generation, in a very short time, has gone through the ordeal of no longer sharing: everything we encounter, the mountains, the minerals, the air we breathe, the river we bathe in, the powdery humus in which we plant our lettuces, the viruses we seek to tame, the forest where we go looking for mushrooms, everything, even the blue sky, is the result,