«One morning, upon waking from uneasy dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself in his bed turned into a monstrous bug. He was on his back, on the hard shell of his shell, and, if he raised his head a little, he could see his domed belly, brown and divided by arched grooves ... His many legs, pathetic compared to what his legs had been , they stirred with helplessness before their eyes »(Franz Kafka).
«That morning, upon waking from an uneasy dream, Jim Sams, intelligent but by no means profound, was turned into a gigantic creature. For a long time he remained on his back (it was not his favorite posture) and looked with dismay at his distant feet and his few limbs. Only four, naturally, and completely still. The brown legs for which he already felt a certain nostalgia would have stirred happily in the air, though uselessly ”(Ian McEwan).
They are similar texts, yes, but not the same. They fascinate and repel. The first of them, that of the start of The Metamorphosis , supposes an " animalization of man: from so much living under infrahuman conditions , Gregor Samsa becomes a beetle," says the professor and translator in the prologue of the Prague writer's book in the Alliance edition. And he clarifies that transformation: "the debasement to which the contemporary world subjects man can make one wake up one morning transformed into a filthy bug, into a hybrid that is not animal, nor man."
Ian McEwan Quite the opposite. An animal becomes a man. In the first pages of La cucaracha (Anagrama) the reader assists the behavior of a bug that delights by savoring a piece of Margarita pizza without olives near a bricklayer, bumps into several still hot doughs and checks that his head can rotate 180 degrees With little effort. The cockroach becomes a man.
This kind of tribute to Kafka but reversing the change must have been the purpose of explaining the constant mutations or pirouettes that British society is facing before Brexit , in which the convictions to get carried away by fear of the risk of vertigo or the fascination with the unknown. Maybe before the two possibilities. Or mixed.
«One day a cockroach wakes up and encounters a giant creature and this is the prime minister. It is a political satire. My cockroach is a brexiter . We have a prime minister with a high or expensive level of education who sees his way through a way very similar to that of a cockroach, who ignores Parliament, or who tries to ignore it, who goes beyond the law and appeals to its essence in the same way as Trump. It seems absolutely abandoned with no return to a form of low-level populism, ”Ian McEwan (Aldershot, 1948) recently said.
In the novel, that man who was a cockroach “had submitted to the collective spirit. And now it was a tiny element of a plan whose magnitude could not be understood or understood by any individual ». The cockroach-man, or the cockroach-man, wakes up to a reality in which an assistant , at half past seven in the morning, treats him as "prime minister" and remembers that a cabinet meeting awaits him at nine o'clock and A press conference at noon. “In the space where he had laid delicate tongs before, the unhealthy mass of compact tissue moved and his first words sprouted. 'It's okay'". Someone might remember the 2001 scene . A space odyssey in which a caveman, the leader of the strongest tribe, strikes a bone at the skeleton of an animal while it rumbles So spoke Zarathustra from Richard Strauss. In the Stanley Kubrick movie that animal that will end up being a man finds pleasure in destruction. And every time he insists with greater momentum.
Ian McEwan's novel is nonsense. A funny reaction, that laugh that sometimes arises in an incomprehensible situation, which overflows. The cockroach is also Gulliver, who wakes up in Liliput, a Land of Neverland where dwarf beings have taken him prisoner. Everything is magical and everything is real. Like Brexit, like McEwan's book, like Jonathan Swift's novel. Everything is possible. McEwan has parodied that roller coaster that his country has become. Every morning, for months, there was an even bolder pirouette than the previous one.
“ When the nation is torn apart, constitutional norms are set aside, Parliament closes so that the government cannot be challenged at a crucial moment and ministers lie about it blatantly in the old Soviet style, and when many Brexists in high positions They seem to yearn for the economic catastrophe of not reaching an agreement and English nationalist extremists are attacking the police in Parliament Square, a writer is forced to wonder what he can do. There is only one answer: write ». That's what McEwan said and that's what he has done. Ridiculing the prime minister, Boris Johnson, James Sams in the book . Obsolete with his idea, he ignores all suggestions not only from the opposition but also from his party. Thus, he will not hesitate to get rid of his Foreign Secretary for questioning his policy: something more than an affair, a story of harassment is published in a newspaper. With little sneer, the premier tells him: «I know how these things were before. A few smoothies behind the filing cabinets. But times have changed. Too and all that. Cynicism goes further. Not only does he ask for his resignation letter but he offers his comb so that, accompanied by a bearded policeman with an automatic rifle, when he leaves 10 Downing Street, he appears apparent before a cloud of photographers. All very british .
Trump is not lacking in this sarcastic and funny mockery. The British prime minister hears, at the bottom of a telephone conversation with the president, "shouting and shooting, whinnying of horses (...) ". Nor does Brussels get rid of derision as a result of a bitter controversy over the "Moldovan ice creams", which is not a trivial matter, since in the struggle to adapt the ingredients of the Moldovan product to the European Union legislation created diplomatic tensions between the West and Russia. And so.
The sense of British humor, that we do not lack.
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