An ‘axe for the frozen sea’ : Estrin’s magic agential realism, insect thigmotaxis, and the problem with Kafka

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate how Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams: the Half Life of Gregor Samsa constitutes the first piece of magic agential realist literature about insects. The term ‘magic agential realism’ has been coined from an observed coincidence in the literary commitments of Estrin’s novel to the literary genre of magic realism and the posthumanist assumptions it shares with the agential realism of Karen Barad. Given Kafka’s axiom that a literary work ought to function as an ‘axe for the frozen sea within us’. A further claim will be defended is the claim that Estrin’s Insect Dreams is the magic agential axe that shatters the frozen sea of liberal humanist representationalism within Kafka. In providing us with a book that affects us like a disaster and like a suicide (both of which are evoked and exceeded by the ever-more pressing concerns of posthumanism), I will demonstrate how Estrin both fulfils the literary criteria laid out by Kafka to Oskar Pollak and opens up the possibility of re-configuring ethics in order to account for insects through the observed phenomenon of thigmotaxis.