Economy
Robert Stolarik/The New York Times/Redux
The College of Mount Saint Vincent overlooks the Hudson from the northwest corner of Riverdale, a residential neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. The campus is set on a 70-acre estate that was purchased by the Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest in 1848. However, the irascible and promiscuous Forrest accused his wife of infidelity in 1850, and the couple divorced without ever occupying the estate. The Sisters of Charity bought the property in 1855 and moved the Academy of Mount Saint Vincent, as it was then known, up from Manhattan to Riverdale. Today it is a liberal arts college with neo-Romanesque architecture and a landscaped grotto that evokes Vermont more than the Bronx. The most popular undergraduate and graduate programs there are in nursing.
I started teaching at the college in 2013. My first class was world literature, a semester-long survey course that sampled canonical texts from the Bible to the works of Matsuo Basho and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I had been out of the classroom for nearly a decade and was thrilled to be back.
On a Saturday afternoon in October I reread Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis." The main character, Gregor Samsa, is a traveling salesman who lives at home with his parents and his younger sister, has a picture of a fur model on his bedroom wall that he framed himself, and thinks only about work — no surprise, then, that he is transformed into a “monstrous vermin.” I thought, if you spend your entire life committed only to doing work you don’t care about and have no life of your own, you may as well be a giant dung beetle. I expected my students to see the ways that work can dehumanize us. I marked a few passages to focus on in class.
“So what is Gregor concerned about on the morning we meet him?” I asked my students breezily on Monday. “Not being able to get to work,” someone offered. “Right,” I said, and thought, I know where this is going. “And is that what you think makes sense for him to be concerned about?” I asked. Sure, they nodded. I insisted, “I mean, is that what you would think about if you woke up and realized you had been transformed into a monstrous vermin?”
They stood firm. “I mean, he does have to go to work,” someone else said. Others agreed. I got theatrically testy: “Seriously — that’s what you would think about if you woke up as a giant dung beetle with a bunch of wavy little legs you couldn’t really control and a hard shell? Getting to work?”
There was a pause. Then another hand went up: “His parents are old. They can’t work. His sister is like 17 — she can’t support the family.” This was Elise T., an English major. She was confident and smart, and her classmates apparently agreed with her. While I absorbed her response, all 20 students looked directly at me; for the first time that semester, no one was looking down or away.
Elise’s response struck me as a reverse Norma Rae moment. At the dramatic heart of the 1979 movie, Norma Rae, played by Sally Field, shuts down the machine at her table and stands up on it with a handwritten “UNION” sign, and her co-workers all gradually shut off their machines and stand with her. But unlike Norma Rae, Elise was leading her classmates to stand with her for work, no matter the circumstances. Their reading of Gregor’s response to his metamorphosis seemed to go something like this: Whether you wake up feeling refreshed or whether you wake up from troubled dreams to find yourself changed into a monstrous vermin, you go to work. Or you get someone to cover your shift. But you don’t get allegorical or ontological or whatever. You just go to work. That was their position: They understood Gregor’s response, and they agreed with him.
My miscalculation was, at least in part, a result of having spent the previous 10 years working as a union organizer. I had assumed that my class would put themselves in Gregor’s position and say: Forget work — get me a doctor! But they all seemed willing to accept that work had dehumanized Gregor. Most of my students are from working-class families; 40 percent of the students at Mount Saint Vincent are nursing majors; about half commute to school from the Bronx or nearby. If work turns you into a monstrous vermin, they seemed to think, well at least you’ve got a job.
As an organizer with the union I got people agitated about their situations so that they would fight to improve their jobs and their lives. That training made me want to get these students riled up and indignant too — but I wasn’t in a union hall; I was in Founders’ Hall, teaching a story written in German by a Jewish insurance agent from Prague in 1915. I was teaching world literature. I felt a little destabilized, so I dove back into the story. “So what is going on then? What do you make of this story?” I asked them vaguely.
One thing about the students at Mount Saint Vincent — a Catholic university founded by the Sisters of Charity — is that they are charitable. Someone bailed me out: “It’s the theme of humans and beasts. In 'The Odyssey,' Circe turns Odysseus’ men into swine. So which one is Gregor: human or beast?”
Bless your heart, I thought. “That’s right,” I said. “In Euripides, Jason calls Medea a monster,” someone else offered, and I nodded. “The narrator from 'Notes from Underground' calls himself a worm,” another chipped in helpfully, and we were back into a discussion of themes in world literature.
Later, driving home from class, I thought about my students’ response to Kafka. In January 2008, Elise and her classmates were sophomores in high school. From 2008 to 2010, the number of jobs in this country declined by 8.7 million — about 6.5 percent of the entire labor force. That was when these students were applying to college: at the bottom of the trough of the Great Recession. And next year they will be entering the job market themselves.
What are these students hearing about the world in which they are becoming adults? Lots of different things, to be sure — some directly, some indirectly, through their families and communities. One of the things they may have heard, or felt the force of, is this: On March 12 of this year, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan was interviewed by the conservative radio host Bill Bennett. Bennett asked Ryan about the problem of “poverty and lifting people out of poverty.” Ryan said, “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney now famously said to a private party of donors in Florida, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
My questions about Gregor Samsa may have brought to mind Ryan’s and Romney’s words and seemed like a trap. No one wanted to stand up for Gregor Samsa because that might have meant they were associating themselves with a “tailspin of culture” in which “generations” of people didn’t work or even think about working, believing they were “victims.”
Mariah S.
Nursing student
In Kafka’s story, Gregor’s younger sister, Grete, takes care of her brother after his transformation. She brings him food, airs out his room and then decides to move his furniture out of the way so he will have more space to scramble around. But on the day that she and her mother are moving his furniture, Gregor panics. He comes out from under the sofa where he has been hiding and stands up on his back legs to protect the picture of the fur model on his wall. Grete sees him, tries to steer her mother out of the room and Gregor follows. Gregor’s father comes home to find his family upset and Gregor in the hallway. The father assumes his son has become an aggressor and he throws apples at Gregor to force him back into his room. One apple lodges in Gregor’s plated back and rots there, giving him an infection that is probably what kills him at the story’s end.
I wanted to get my students to talk about this scene and relate it to things we had read earlier in the semester. I thought they would get the reference to the book of Genesis, so I started by asking, “What does this scene remind you of?”
Nothing. They looked down at their books or at the ceiling. “You don’t have to give me a detailed comparison,” I said. “Just tell me what comes to mind when you think about this scene. The father and the son? The apple?”
The polite silence in the room began to rub shoulders with awkwardness and then sidled up to embarrassment.
“What happens in the Garden of Eden?” I asked, but that gave them the answer to my original question, which left no room for them to do anything but state the obvious. So no one spoke.
“OK, I’m sure you get this, but it is worth spelling out,” I said. “The point of contact between the father and son, or offspring, is an apple in both the Bible and in ‘The Metamorphosis’. The father punishes his child for a transgression in both stories. And death is the punishment, although in both cases it is delayed.” A few people appeared to be writing this down.
I had no real plan to get the discussion back on track, but I kept talking. “This is an interesting moment in the story,” I said. “This is the only moment of physical contact Gregor has with anyone in his family. His father hitting him with apples!”
I saw that Mariah S., whose braces gave her a slight lisp, was looking steadily at me. I knew she was a nursing major because she was one of a number of students who sometimes wore a clean white uniform with orange hems to class.
There were a few ways out — a few ways I imagined the conversation could go. There was more to say about the book of Genesis, and there were other comparisons they could make to things we had read. Mariah looked pensive. Then she said, “His sister takes care of him. But like you said about the contact. She never touches him. But she could have — she could have touched him.”
Salim C., another nursing student, agreed. “Yeah, no one touches him,” he said. “But his sister brought him food, you know, what he liked. She could have touched him.”
I saw Susan K., another nursing student, nodding. Mariah and Salim had clearly said something that resonated with the others.
“And what would that do?” I asked. “What would that mean for Gregor’s sister to touch him?”
From the other side of the room Jackie P. said, “It might have made him human again.”
The real drama of Kafka’s story, now that I think about it, is what the family members will do with Gregor. Can anyone, even in his own family, actually touch him now that he is a monstrous vermin? What will happen if they do?
What struck me about the class discussion at Mount Saint Vincent was the confidence that Mariah, Salim and Jackie had in talking about caregiving. No one in class responded when I asked them about literary allusions. But they spoke up with calm certainty about how Grete cares for her brother and what the effect of her touch may have been.
I had thought, in teaching Kafka, that there was an either/or, a firebreak, that my students would see in Gregor’s transformation: Should he expect to be cared for or should he go to work. But the students, especially the nursing students, broke down my dichotomies and crossed the firebreak. Humanity is salvaged in moments, in bits, by connection with others, by the touch of familiar humanity.
The real drama of Kafka’s story, now that I think about it, is what the family members will do with Gregor. Can anyone, even in his own family, actually touch him now that he is a monstrous vermin? What will happen if they do?
What struck me about the class discussion at Mount Saint Vincent was the confidence that Mariah, Salim and Jackie had in talking about caregiving. No one in class responded when I asked them about literary allusions. But they spoke up with calm certainty about how Grete cares for her brother and what the effect of her touch may have been.
I had thought, in teaching Kafka, that there was an either/or, a firebreak, that my students would see in Gregor’s transformation: Should he expect to be cared for or should he go to work. But the students, especially the nursing students, broke down my dichotomies and crossed the firebreak. Humanity is salvaged in moments, in bits, by connection with others, by the touch of familiar humanity.
The real drama of Kafka’s story, now that I think about it, is what the family members will do with Gregor. Can anyone, even in his own family, actually touch him now that he is a monstrous vermin? What will happen if they do?
What struck me about the class discussion at Mount Saint Vincent was the confidence that Mariah, Salim and Jackie had in talking about caregiving. No one in class responded when I asked them about literary allusions. But they spoke up with calm certainty about how Grete cares for her brother and what the effect of her touch may have been.
I had thought, in teaching Kafka, that there was an either/or, a firebreak, that my students would see in Gregor’s transformation: Should he expect to be cared for or should he go to work. But the students, especially the nursing students, broke down my dichotomies and crossed the firebreak. Humanity is salvaged in moments, in bits, by connection with others, by the touch of familiar humanity.
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