K. Robert Schaeffer
The Stasis, or Prison Literature Defined
Had this idea for a poem once, or maybe a story, or who knows what—this fictional series of Kafka's early, discarded takes on the famous first line of his Metamorphosis. Things like: "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find a curious mole on his inner left forearm." Every day, hunched over the tiny desk of my cell, scribbling down more ideas, month after month. "...awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a tandem bicycle," "...hurtling through the vacuum of space, painfully contorted and pretzeloid," "... awoke from dreams burdened by a lifetime of failures to find himself miraculously changed into a self-motivated man." False starts, shaken resolve, crumpled drafts. Maybe it was an issue of intention: did I really care about improving Samsa's circumstances, or was it merely about drawing more attention to their absurdity, taking my own suffering out on him? After all, Samsa's one of the archetypal inmates of modern literature. Not a hero, per se. Just a standard of conduct. Maybe the problem was that his story could only be told one of two ways, Kafka's way or the alternative: "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a deep, dreamless sleep to find himself his same old self." An anti-climax. No big twists or transformations, Samsa the same way he'd been for years and years, locked in his little room and forgotten by the world, fed by a crack under the door, wallowing in his own stink and memories, that dead-end sales slog and that fraught family life, a simple trick of the mind conjured to enliven his endless chain of days, the blank and merciful slate of sleep his only respite, his only relief. Maybe that version wouldn't have interested Kafka, so mundane and uneventful, but it has been told millions of times by everyone in prison who has ever picked up a pen. I'm telling it now.
K. Robert Schaeffer is originally from Oley, Pennsylvania. Incarcerated since 2009, he’s won five awards in the PEN Prison Writing Contest, including a 2019 PEN/Bunker award for first prize in fiction and, most recently, a 2021 first prize in drama for his play The Stairs. His essay “Tarkovsky by Countlight” appeared in the Gettysburg Review. He’s currently at work on a series of stories and plays set in Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione.