"The transformation scene, where man is becoming insect and insect has become at least man and beyond that - a flying, godlike, shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful creature"
About this Quote
A grotesque upgrade disguised as a fairy-tale reveal: O'Donoghue frames metamorphosis as both humiliation and apotheosis, yanking the reader between Kafka and kindergarten wonder. The sentence pivots on a cruel symmetry - "man is becoming insect" while "insect has become at least man" - as if identity is a set of clothes being traded in a dim locker room. That "at least" bites. Humanity is treated as the minimum viable dignity, not a pinnacle, which is classic O'Donoghue: reverence punctured by a hidden thumbtack.
Then he overfeeds the image with liturgical adjectives: "flying, godlike, shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful". It's almost too much, and that's the point. The language performs the seduction of transcendence, how easily we can be talked into worshipping a transformation that might actually be a loss, a death, or a prank. "Diaphanous" and "shimmering" belong to stained glass and lingerie ads; the sacred and the commercial blur, hinting at how modern culture sells redemption as visual effect.
Context matters: O'Donoghue came out of the National Lampoon/SNL pipeline where high style often exists to mug the audience. This reads like an elevated description meant to undercut itself, a parody of earnest myth-making and New Age "becoming" rhetoric. The subtext is that metamorphosis is not enlightenment; it's instability. The joke isn't that change is impossible. It's that change is easy to romanticize, especially when the most monstrous outcomes can be narrated as "beautiful" if the prose glows hard enough.
Then he overfeeds the image with liturgical adjectives: "flying, godlike, shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful". It's almost too much, and that's the point. The language performs the seduction of transcendence, how easily we can be talked into worshipping a transformation that might actually be a loss, a death, or a prank. "Diaphanous" and "shimmering" belong to stained glass and lingerie ads; the sacred and the commercial blur, hinting at how modern culture sells redemption as visual effect.
Context matters: O'Donoghue came out of the National Lampoon/SNL pipeline where high style often exists to mug the audience. This reads like an elevated description meant to undercut itself, a parody of earnest myth-making and New Age "becoming" rhetoric. The subtext is that metamorphosis is not enlightenment; it's instability. The joke isn't that change is impossible. It's that change is easy to romanticize, especially when the most monstrous outcomes can be narrated as "beautiful" if the prose glows hard enough.
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