things move around

Let’s face it - Metamorphosis, despite being some crazy whacked-out shit, gets a bit heavy at times, and there’s nowhere near enough sex in it. Written at a time when opium was the jolliest dope in town, it doesn’t exactly sell the Life of a Roach. I can’t think why, then, two of the three blurbettes on the back cover of The Roaches Have No King reference Kafka’s Bohemian bad-trip-athon.

Perhaps for the same reason I just have. Hmm.

First, the sex. It oozes from the pages like jism from a teenager’s todger. The chitinous narrator (named Numbers, after the book of the bible from which he derove his first meal, of library paste) bigs up the no-strings, fuck-loose and fancy-free style of his species in contrast to Hom. Sap’s ineffectual (and unevolutionary) emotional posturing. If yoomans would only spend more time biffing each other silly, and less time composing sonnets about it, then life would be a lot easier for us all. This is the first and best example of the book’s Big Joke: the truth is, of course, that our two species misunderstand eachother equally. Witness Numbers getting hot under the carapace about a female accomplice as they lurk atop a bathroom cabinet,

Stroking Kotex’s foreleg I said, “I’ve never told you this but I’ve always liked the line of your clypeus, the fine gleaming mandibles, and your dark brown kitchen eyes, all two hundred of them.”

She pushed me away, then tossed me a tiny dose of pheromones. The huge erection it aroused made me lose my balance and nearly fall down the face of the mirror. She laughed. “That’s all you understand. Sometimes I wonder if we’re any better than humans.” Immediately I was back on six legs. It was the first time a female had ever said something repugnant enough to quell my excitation.”

which is as fine an evocation as any of traditional urban amor propre. I’ve always been a mandibles-man myself, as it happens.

As the novel scuttles along, and times worsen for the colony of roaches who infest the same apartment as Ira Fishblatt, so the coitus becomes more grotesque, extending to the sub-duvet rape by Numbers of the sleeping subject of his ire - Ruth, Ira’s cohabiting lover. Waking literally lightheaded the next morning, he has a revelation:

Then it came to me. The missing weight was my spermatophore. My excitation had been so?wild that I had ejaculated into my?beautiful Ruth without realizing it.

I was thrilled. A perfect consumnation to our new love.

proving that when it coms to the scrummage, two hundred eyes are no less blind than two. Oh, and Weiss manages to stave off the temptation of the sole, obvious pun for the full 250 or so pages; but some of us aren’t so clever. They’re not called cock-roaches for nothing.

Life is good, chez Fishblatt, until “the Gysy Woman” ups and leaves. Her it was whose slovenly kitchen-habits had sustained the roach colony in a bountiful, blissful, harmony. There, that’s the backstory; keep up, damnit!

Any story with this much sex in it must also be highly biblical. Numbers’s generation are all hatched in the spines of old, sweetly-pasted books, and take their names and modus operandi accordingly. His contemporaries include his bessie friend Bismarck, Barbarossa, Clausewitz, Miller, Julia Childs, and Reud, “squeezed from the spine of Beyond the Pleasure Principle” before he could complete his reading. A form of roach-madness, called “imprinting,” occurs when individuals take on the entire character of their hatching-tomes; become what they eat. There are other hazards, too:

Some citizens had been affected profoundly, tragically. Many books had been opened so few times that air never permeated the pages. Infants who chose these books were destroyed. We held an annual commemoration for the many lost in Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegan’s Wake.

And as Numbers battles his own creeping metamorphosis into a vengeful Old Testament roach-god, things begin to really fall apart. In the end, the last of his doomed tribe, he exacts a foul punishment on Ira, whom he by now loathes as his neighbour, by splicing Ira’s blow with particles of sodium hydroxide, and watching his schnoz disintegrate as he haemorrages across his fastidiously tidy living room.

By elevating Blattela Germanica to the sophisticated brutality of Homo Sapiens, Weiss manages to eke out a tart point. But since I like my empathy a little more dewy-eyed, I think I’ll stick with Franz.

“Don’t leave the roach, man, that’s the best part” - Gary Snyder (misquote).