Perhaps the greatest challenge known to the human experience is the halting of the cycle of suffering and impermanence. As outlined in Buddhist theory, suffering and impermanence are inevitable facts of sentience. Upon closer examination, one realizes that they are also inextricably and bidirectionally linked: impermanence, by disabling a stable sense of self, causes pain; in turn, pain causes impermanence through the loss of self-expression or self-concept. From these two relationships, a cycle emerges: transience leads to pain, which causes transience, which causes pain, and so on.
All too commonly, people mistakenly try to break this cycle by avoiding pain, but this is impossible, for avoidance only magnifies pain, and pain is an evolutionarily hardwired response. Thus, a different approach is wanted in healing the suffering/impermanence cycle. Paradoxically, one may achieve this goal by embracing pain-induced impermanence. While Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain illustrates how pain subjects language to transience, Giles Deleuze’s “He Stuttered” offers creative stuttering as a potential solution to Scarry’s dilemma, harnessing the transience of language to create and heal. Furthermore, by depicting what occurs when creative stuttering is silenced, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis extends the theory derived from Scarry and Deleuze to demonstrate that it also holds true in reverse— the impairment of creative stuttering further injures the afflicted. Taken together, Scarry, Deleuze, and Kafka’s works reveal the necessity of embracing impermanence when healing from suffering and halting the suffering/impermanence cycle.
Pain produces impermanence by destroying self-expression. According to The Body in Pain, pain “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” decomposing formal structure into “pre-language cries and groans” (Scarry 4, 6). The destructive power of pain can be further developed beyond the superficial stifling of expression caused by physical discomfort; psychological pain, while not always physically silencing the sufferer, often leaves one at a loss for words to express such immaterial agony. In “He Stuttered,” Deleuze explains that language pushed to its descriptive limits may become “so strained that it starts to stutter” and one is left with “[i]nadequate means” of self-expression (113). In fact, when words fail as they do in portraying pain, the linguistic terrain may become so warped that one is left feeling “like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself” (Deleuze 109). Invoking the imagery of a foreign traveler and depicting how language is “inadequate” at the time “when the self must be destroyed,” Deleuze’s diction suggests that instances of limited language (such as psychological and/or physical suffering) subject both self-expression and self-concept to instability (113). Because language is what brings thought and emotion into reality, pain-induced impermanence of language can manifest in impermanence of being, and in turn create more pain.
While suffering is detrimental because it breaks language into incomprehensible fragments, Scarry hints that it is this initial destruction which permits subsequent creation of expression. When pain destroys language, “to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself” (Scarry 6). It logically follows that the preceding language must be broken into its fundamental units before it is rebuilt into something new. Deleuze similarly asserts that the initial decomposition of language is prerequisite to its reinvention, and goes on to define this creative process.
By describing a method of creating language, Deleuze’s “He Stuttered” may be taken as a potential response to Scarry’s dilemma. Expanding on Scarry’s concept of redefining language after reverting to the basics, Deleuze defines the rebuilding of expression as “creative stuttering” (111). He explains that, embracing the instability of language (such as when in pain), “[c]reative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle… what puts language in perpetual disequilibrium” (Deleuze 111). Notably, it is this disequilibrium which renders language malleable: “[c]an we make progress if we do not enter into regions far from equilibrium?” (Deleuze 109). Only by throwing the confined structure of language out of its stability– to subject it to transience– is it possible to transcend the constraints of the original form. Deleuze exemplifies creative stuttering through poetry, in which words are repeated, halved, multiplied, combined, and otherwise manipulated to derive previously unportrayable meaning out of a repurposed familiar; in other words, poetry creates “the foreign language within the language” by rearranging the fragments of the destroyed language into a nearly new one (113).
Scarry implies that this very creation of language catalyzes healing, or at least reduces the effect of the pain: when “pain is transformed into an objectified state, it… is eliminated” (5-6). By retrieving a more precise portrayal of pain, creative stuttering places it in a shared space where it can be validated, addressed, and healed. Therefore, creative stuttering may heal pain and disrupt the cycle of suffering and impermanence. In order to achieve this, however, one must embrace impermanence as it is what allows for the reinvention of language in the first place.
An examination of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis reveals that the conclusion drawn from Scarry and Deleuze that impermanence precipitates healing also holds true when reversed; denying impermanence leads to undoing because creative stuttering is rendered impossible without transience. For Gregor Samsa, a troubled businessman who wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug, creative stuttering takes two sequential forms in an attempt to express, validate, and heal his pain. However, his family’s rejection of the impermanence of his language and his self silences both of these forms and accelerates his death.
Gregor’s first attempt at creative stuttering is through speech, but by disregarding Gregor’s fractured attempts at communication, the Samsas resist transience (of language) and contribute to Gregor’s detriment. Recall that according to Scarry, because pain destroys communication, the sufferer is unable to accurately convey their experience. Taking Gregor’s transformation as a manifestation of his “pangs of conscience,” his consequent acquisition of “an animal’s voice” represents pain’s destruction of language (Kafka 11, 16). Gregor’s pain-induced metamorphosis leaves him with an “irrepressible painful squeaking” that “distort[s]” his words such that “people [do] not understand” them (Kafka 6, 17).
Yet while Gregor’s pain destroys his language, it is his family’s dismissal of his attempts at reconstructing a broken communication— in other words, creative stuttering— that leads to his ultimate undoing. As Scarry outlines, the sufferer’s fragmented attempts at expression are met with doubt, ultimately “amplif[ying] the suffering of those already in pain” (7). Not only do the Samsas doubt Gregor’s language, believing they “must try to get rid of the idea that this is Gregor,” but “no one… [thinks] that he might be able to understand others,” effectively cutting him off from verbal expression in both directions (Kafka 69, 33). The impermanence of language that befalls Gregor is rejected as lack of language, destroying all hopes of using speech for creative stuttering and emotional expression. By thus shunning impermanence, Gregor’s family triggers his detriment. Indeed, Scarry asserts that “[w]hatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability” (4). By preventing the expression of pain, the transient structure of language under pain and resulting social doubt lead to continued, and in some cases life-threatening, suffering. With his speech silenced, Gregor turns to creeping as a means of creative stuttering, but this too is rendered impossible by his family’s rejection of his transient identity.
Before exploring how this rejection of creeping leads to Gregor’s downfall, it is important to establish the association between creeping and creative stuttering, for unlike speech, creeping may be more difficult to conceptualize as a form of creative stuttering. With some reflection, however, the connection becomes clear. Both creeping and verbal creative stuttering follow a staccatoed cadence, weaving fragments of expression into a whole; walking has also long been hailed to stimulate deep thought or revelation, as does creative stuttering. Deleuze himself presents the interrupted gait of someone walking in pain as an example of creative stuttering in which “saying is doing” (107). In Kafka’s prose, the association between creeping and creative stuttering/healing is first established when, after standing on his many legs for the first time, Gregor “believe[s] that the final amelioration of all his suffering [is] immediately at hand” (26). Gregor’s relief as he adopts creeping indicates that it serves the healing purpose of creative stuttering. This link is further strengthened by Gregor’s later response to emotional pain: “overwhelmed with self-reproach and worry, he began to creep and crawl over everything”; later, “totally surprised, [Gregor] began to scamper here and there” (Kafka 48, 59). Creeping appears to be Gregor’s chosen coping mechanism in times of intense emotional pain, serving as a means of self-soothing or healing not so different from creative stuttering.
As with his speech, Gregor’s creeping is prohibited due to his family’s avoidance of him (a symbol of their transient fortune), and this inability to creatively stutter leads to his death. The first time Gregor creeps around the apartment, Mr. Samsa forces him back into his room, in the process injuring one of his legs (Kafka 26). That Gregor’s leg is harmed is significant in that it represents the impairment of creative stuttering (in this case, creeping) and the associated damage that occurs when impermanence (Gregor’s transformation) and creative stuttering are shunned.
This pattern of rejection of impermanence, suppression of creeping, and decline of the afflicted develops throughout the novella as the Samsas’ treatment of Gregor worsens. For example, the reappropriation of Gregor’s room as a storage closet signifies the family’s neglect and prohibition of his creeping/creative stuttering. Gregor is forced to move the discarded items “because otherwise there [is] no room for him to creep around” until he is “tired to death,” representing the destruction that occurs when denial of impermanence inhibits creative stuttering (Kafka 61).
Moreover, Grete’s violin music is likened to sustenance for Gregor while he is starving and unallowed to creep, indicating that his family’s rejection of his impermanence starves him of emotional expression and leads to his death. When Gregor is unable to creep during the lodgers’ stay because of his family’s shame, Grete’s violin-playing— another form of creative stuttering— “so seize[s] him… as if the way to the unknown nourishment he craved was revealing itself to him” (Kafka 64). This “nourishment” Gregor “craves” is the emotional expression that Grete possesses in the moment of her recital, and his lack of this can be attributed to his inability to creatively stutter through creeping. Notably, Gregor’s appetite declines with his maltreatment and his malnourishment hastens his death; paired with the likening of emotional expression to nourishment, it is clear that Gregor’s death results from his inability to express his pain through creative stuttering/creeping. By being gradually disabled from creeping, creatively stuttering, and expressing his pain, Gregor is brought to his death. Thus, Gregor’s story reveals that Deleuze’s creative stuttering works both ways, producing healing when abundant and destruction when deficient.
By depicting the detriment which results when rejection of impermanence inhibits creative stuttering, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis extends the discourse between Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Deleuze’s “He Stuttered” to reveal that not only does creative stuttering catalyze healing, but silencing creative stuttering leads to destruction. Furthermore, as a semi-autobiographical text, Kafka’s novella itself exemplifies creative stuttering as healing through impermanence (Strauss 662). By deconstructing and re-imagining his early-life emotional pain, Kafka creatively stutters through the words of The Metamorphosis in an attempt to heal, thereby exemplifying how embracing transience— of language, identity, narrative— is, paradoxically, the path to healing the cycle of suffering and impermanence.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Giles. “He Stuttered.” Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W.
Smith and Michael A. Greco, U of Minnesota P, 1997, pp. 107-14.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis, translated by Ian Johnston, Planet Ebook,
1999.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP,
1985.
Straus, Nina Pelikan. “Transforming Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis.’” Signs, vol. 14, no.
3, 1989, pp. 651–67.
