What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A cautionary tale of sorts,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

The book that accompanies this letter is one of the great literary icons of the twentieth century. If you haven’t already read it, you’ve surely heard of it. The story it tells—of an anxious, dutiful travelling salesman who wakes up one morning transformed into a large insect—is highly intriguing, and therefore entertaining. The practical considerations of such a change—the new diet, the new family dynamic, the poor job prospects, and so on—are all worked out to their logical conclusion. But that Gregor Samsa, the salesman in question, nonetheless remains at heart the same person, the same soul, still moved by music, for example, is also plainly laid out. And what it all might mean, this waking up as a bug, is left to the reader to determine.

Franz Kafka published Metamorphosis in 1915. It was one of his few works published while he was alive, as he was racked by doubts about his writing. Upon his death in 1924 of tuberculosis, he asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished works. Brod ignored this wish and did the exact opposite: he published them all. Three unfinished novels were published, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, but in my opinion his many short stories are better, and not only because they’re finished.

Kafka’s life, and subsequently his work, was dominated by one figure, his domineering father. A coarse man who valued only material success, he found his son’s literary inclinations incomprehensible. Kafka obediently tried to fit into the mold into which his father squeezed him. He worked most of his life, and with a fair degree of professional success, for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia (doesn’t that sound like it’s right out of, well, Kafka?). But to work during the day to live, and then to work at night on his writings so that he might feel alive, exhausted him and ultimately cost him his life. He was only forty years old when he died.

Kafka introduced to our age a feeling that hasn’t left us yet: angst. Misery before then was material, felt in the body. Think of Dickens and the misery of poverty he portrayed; material success was the road out of that misery. But with Kafka, we have the misery of the mind, a dread that comes from within and will not go away, no matter if we have jobs. The dysfunctional side of the twentieth century, the dread that comes from mindless work, from constant, grinding, petty regulation, the dread that comes from the greyness of urban, capitalist existence, where each one of us is no more than a lonely cog in a machine, this was what Kafka revealed. Are we done with these concerns? Have we worked our way out of anxiety, isolation and alienation? Alas, I think not. Kafka still speaks to us.

Kafka died seven months into the public life of Adolf Hitler—the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch, in which the ugly Austrian corporal had prematurely tried to seize power, took place in November of 1923—and there is something annunciatory about the overlap, as if what Kafka felt, Hitler delivered. The overlap is sadder still: Kafka’s three sisters died in Nazi concentration camps.

Metamorphosis makes for a fascinating yet grim read. The premise may bring a black-humoured smile to one’s face, but the full story wipes that smile away. One possible way of reading Metamorphosis is as a cautionary tale. So much alienation in its pages makes one thirst for authenticity in one’s life.

Christmas is fast approaching. I’ll see with the next book I send you if I can’t come up with something cheerier to match the festive season.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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