II.9 "an Animal in Quires"

Although Hooke's Micrographia is drawn into a narrative of scientific discovery created around the Royal Society today, in many ways Hooke's enormous flea -- a plate so large it pops out of the book's binding -- has more in common with Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa. For both, the process of becoming-bug is not a metaphoric analogy between two distanced objects, as with Evelyn's arbor inversa, but a metamorphic capturing that transforms one social configuration into another.