*Insect Enemies* (Detail), 2024, by Tessa Farmer for *Kafka: Making of an Icon* at The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford in 2024 © Jessica Chaundy for Bodleian Libraries and Tessa Farmer

In Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), Gregor Samsa finds himself turned into a ‘monstrous vermin’, to take the generic German term ‘Ungeziefer’ literally. Kafka is careful not to specify exactly what sort, but – given he has six legs – Gregor evidently becomes an insect, and the most popular English translation is ‘cockroach’. Gregor’s changed state operates metaphorically in casting him as an outsider, but also with great literal power. Kafka explores what it might involve to be an insect and experience the reactions of other humans. When Gregor’s boss sees him ‘the suddenness with which he took his last step out of the living room would have made one believe he had burned the soul of his foot’[i]. His family are appalled as well as shocked, and even his sister – the most sympathetic character – starts to refer to Gregor as ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ towards the end of the story. Had he turned into a cat, or even a hamster, one suspects his family might have retained more affection for him. Why is it, then, that so many people dislike insects? And does it matter?

The first page of Franz Kafka’s most famous story *Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis)* with its puzzling opening sentence of Gregor Samsa waking up from uneasy dreams and finding himself transformed into an insect. MS. Kafka 18A. fol. 1r © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

The lack of respect and empathy may not be innate or universal[ii]. The typical four year old is fascinated rather than repelled by insects, though they soon take on the responses of their parents. The Jian practice of sweeping insects from the walker’s path is part of a respect for all of life. That contrasts with the Western and biblical view of insects as being at the bottom of a ‘chain of being’, a natural hierarchy that places humans at the top. Fear and disgust – whether learned or innate – may play a part in that, but the obvious additional factor is that insects are not thought of as sentient beings. They lack many of the major brain structures seen as being involved in producing human emotion, and their nervous systems are relatively rudimentary: we have around a hundred thousand bee-brains-worth of neurons in our heads. Does that reduce insectoid responses to reflexes, or is there more to it than that?

Geraldine Wright, Hope Professor of Entomology at the University of Oxford, has explored the potential sentience of bees[iii]. Her research uses the concept of cognitive bias to show that bee judgements are altered by stress – that they are capable of responses equivalent to seeing a glass ‘half empty’ as opposed to ‘half full’. She did that by training bees to associate given scents with a positive (sugar) or negative (quinine) taste outcome. After learning these odour-food associations, the bees would extend their mouthparts in anticipation of food when the first odour mixture was presented, and retract them at offers of the second mixture. Half the bees were then subjected to the stress of being shaken in a manner designed to replicate a badger attack on a bee colony. Invited to taste food with mixed scents, the pre-stressed bees were more reluctant. In the case of a 50-50 mixture between the positively and negatively associated odours, the unshaken bees tended to take the chance, effectively predicting a good taste in ‘half-full’ manner; whereas the shaken bees tended not to – they had become pessimists who interpreted the ambiguous odour as half-repulsive, rather than half-appetizing. Wright interprets that as evidence of emotion in bees, and that is linked to sentience. Perhaps it would be too much to equate this with human emotion, but similar experiments have shown parallel results in mice and dogs, and the stimulation of negative reactions from the bees is sufficient to put them in the same category. Moreover, bees also operate at a social level, and Wright points out[iv] that a bee colony has as many neurons as a mammalian brain, making them intelligent enough as a totality to farm, collect food, look after their young, and have a dance language. So there seems no rational basis for favouring, say, hamsters over cockroaches on the grounds that one is sentient and the other is not.

This question may be secondary in the context of The Metamorphosis, for Gregor shows evidence of human thinking in his insect form – he has, for example, the sensitivity to keep himself largely out of sight when people enter his room. And he is still affected by his sister playing the violin, asking himself: ‘Was he an animal, when music had such an effect upon him?’ The responses to Gregor arise from instinctual or culturally conditioned attitudes, rather than from an assessment of mental capability. So what might cause such irrationally negative feelings toward insects – entomophobia, as it is termed?

*Insect Enemies* (Detail), 2024, by Tessa Farmer shown in amongst entomology texts at *Kafka: Making of an Icon* at The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford in 2024 © Jessica Chaundy for Bodleian Libraries and Tessa Farmer

Insect ecologist and philosopher Jeffrey Lockwood describes experiencing a panic attack when faced by an enormous a swarm of grasshoppers, and suggests that was triggered by their overwhelming numbers. Beyond that personal anecdote, he advances a two-fold answer[v]. ‘One, I think evolution has set us up over millions of years of contact with insects and small scurry things for these creatures to draw our attention. And so I think we are evolutionarily primed to be keenly aware of insects in our proximity. But then, once they have our attention, how we respond to them I think is largely a matter of cultural influence. And of course, in the modern world we have very little experience with positive encounters with insects.’ Questionnaire data has demonstrated that such negative perceptions of insects are related to the pathogen disgust category not to the fear category[vi]. That might also be supported more anecdotally: Brooke Borel’s research[vii] has shown that people loathe bed bugs more than mosquitos, even though it is the mosquito, and not the bed bug, that is associated with pathogens. The explanation may lie in how intimately the bugs interact with us, not just drawing our blood but effecting an ongoing psychosexual invasion of our beds. Likewise, cockroaches repel us, even though they and are clean and don’t bite – perhaps because they scuttle in the dark.

More than half the world’s population now live in cities, and Yuya Fukano and Masashi Soga note that although some groups of insects are vectors of pathogens, the majority pose little risk, particularly in cities - and yet despite the lower risk of infection, perceptions of insects tend to be more negative among people living in urban areas[viii]. They hypothesised that two factors explain this. First, ‘urbanization increases the extent to which people see insects indoors, and insects that are seen more often indoors induce stronger feelings of disgust than insects seen outdoors’; and, second, ‘urbanization reduces people's natural history knowledge about insects, and decreased knowledge results in a broader range of insects eliciting feelings of disgust.’ Both those hypotheses were supported by large-scale questionnaire surveys, leading them to conclude that while psychological mechanisms shaped by past evolutionary pressure to avoid pathogen infection may underlie the prevalence of insect disgust, this is being reinforced by urbanization.

So does the disgust, however caused, matter? A second paper by Fukano and Soga [ix] identifies three reasons to believe that it does. First, ‘at a time when insects on Earth are rapidly declining, the prevalence of entomophobia poses clear challenges for their conservation and management … our society tolerates the ongoing decline of insects and does not fully understand the need for conservation and restoration efforts. This is despite the fact that insects are vital for human survival and well-being … There are over 1.5 million described species of Arthropoda, and although they account for approximately 80% of the total number of species in the animal kingdom and provide fundamental ecosystem services, they are the recipients of only 10% of conservation funding’. People tend to invest in conservation for animals that they find attractive. Second, insects are major triggers for specific animal phobias: in the United States, the lifetime prevalence of such phobias is estimated to be some 5%, and they impose considerable psychological, social, and economic burdens. Third, aversion to insects thwarts their uptake as a potentially nutritious, environmentally sustainable, and ethical food source. Entomophagy – eating insects – remains unusual, especially in Western nations, and one of the major barriers against it is those negative perceptions.

In conclusion, The Metamorphosis taps into a relevant and ongoing issue: people tend to respond to insects with disgust. Kafka exploits this brilliantly as a literary device, but it is also a problem for the world in terms of conservation and health. We need to be more understanding than Gregor’s family were able to be.

References

[i] All Kafka quotes from Metamorphosis, 1916, as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 1933

[ii] See, for example, the roundtable discussion (chaired by Tim Coulson) on ‘Insects and the Psychology of Disgust and Repulsion’ at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 23 May, 2024

[iii] Geraldine Wright et al: ‘Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive biases’ in Current Biology, 2011

[iv] In the discussion as at (ii) above

[v] Jeffrey A. Lockwood: ‘The infested mind. Why humans fear, loathe, and love insects’, Oxford University Press, 2013

[vi] Davey et al: ‘A cross-cultural study of animal fears’, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 1998

[vii] Brooke Borel: ‘Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World’, University of Chicago Press, 2015

[viii] Yuya Fukano, Masashi Soga: ‘Why do so many modern people hate insects? The urbanization–disgust hypothesis’ in Science of The Total Environment, Volume 777, 2021

[ix] Yuya Fukano, Masashi Soga: ‘Evolutionary psychology of entomophobia and its implications for insect conservation’ in Current Opinion in Insect Science - Volume 59, October 2023

KAFKA, INSECTS, AND DISGUST

References