Franz Kafka and Animals Peter Stine Contemporary Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Winter, 1981), pp. 58-80. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-7484%28198124%2922%3A1%3C58%3AFKAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B Contemporary Literature is currently published by University of Wisconsin Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/uwisc.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.org Sun Dec 9 09:06:07 2007

FRANZ KAFKA AND ANIMALS

Peter Stine

"I am separated from all things by a hollow space," Kafka wrote in his diary in 1911, "and I do not even reach to its boundaries."' And in another entry of 1913: "Everything appears to me constructed. . . . I am chasing after constructions. I enter a room, and I find them in a corner, a white tangle."2 Such strange (yet vaguely familiar) moments are faithfully recorded in the Diaries, which Kafka clung to as a mode of self-rescue; for he experienced the present as a "phantom state" in which the self, flickering and unknowable, forever merged into its opposite under the exigencies of living. Sensing that this instability cursed his relationships with bad faith or the danger of merging into the other, Kafka was to renounce them out of love.3 And as a writer, his discovery that language might pursue the self but never reach it led him to envision this failure to reach the goal of self-knowledge as our common fate, and to posit an "indestructible" self permanently hidden from us as his only article of faith.4 "What one is," he wrote, "one cannot express, for one is just that; one can ' T h e Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, 1948), p. 180. ?Quoted by Erich Heller in Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Spectrum Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 99. 3"Whoever renounces the world," Kafka wrote "must love all people, for he renounces their world too. As a result he begins to have an idea of what is the true human nature that cannot be loved, provided that one is its equal." Quoted in Wilhelm Emrich's Franz Kafka, trans. Sheema Zeban Buehne (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968), p. 52. 4''Man cannot live without a permanent faith in something indestructible in himself," Kafka told Max Brod. "At the same time this indestructible part and his faith in it may remain permanently concealed from him. One of the forms in which Contemporary Literature XXII, 1 0010-748418110001-0058 $1.0010

C 1981 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

communicate only what one is not, that is to say f a l s e h o ~ d . "From ~ this level of submersion in reality, at which the real was hidden and to communicate thought was to lie, there was no rescue into meaning, least of all from psychology, which Kafka dismissed as "mirrorwriting . . . the description of a reflection such as we, who have sucked ourselves full of earth, imagine; for no reflection actually appears-it is simply that we see earth wherever we turn."6 Kafka investigated this condition by writings whose mark of integrity is their resistance to interpretation. "Our art," he wrote, "consists of being dazzled by the Truth. The light which rests on its distorted mask as it shrinks from it is true, nothing else is."' This aesthetic was continuous with the unknowable self in all its enigmatic purity. "We burrow through ourselves like a mole," Kafka wrote Max Brod, "and emerge blackened and velvet-haired from our sandy underground vaults, our poor little red feet stretched out for tender pity."s His art, far from neurotic, reflects a higher lucidity, offering us the wisdom of a clairvoyant stutterer, due, as he says, to his habit of "introspection, which will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed intros p e c t i ~ n . "For ~ Kafka there was no escape from this. Man's "own frontal bone bars his way," for the present is perpetually invaded by a dizzy recapitulation of those discarded "selves" receding into oblivion. Kafka's challenge as an artist, then, was to discover a strategy that allowed "the exchange of truthful words from person to person." What his inner dreamlife struck upon was the process of metamorphosis-an image that was commensurate with the opposite yet integral modes of being that exist within a single searching mind. W. B. Yeats remarked at the dawn of a modern age that the truth can be embodied but not known, and Kafka's animal world became his prize embodiment of human truths that evade the grasp of this concealment may be expressed is the belief in a personal God." See Brod's Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken, 1947), p. 172. SQuoted from the Diaries in Emrich, p. 43. 6Emrich, p. 221. 'The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir with notes by Philip Rahv (New York: Schocken, 1970), p. 151. XLetters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), p. 17. 'The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1949), p. 202.

KAFKA

( 59

analysis. "I am here," he wrote drolly in the autobiographical He of 1920, "giving a clear explanation: everything that is said about me is false, if it follows on the assumption that I, as a human being, was the bosom friend of a horse. How strange that this monstrous assertion is spread abroad and believed!"'O Under this dispensation Kafka regarded the ability to forget as vital to survival in the modern world, a way of editing a metamorphosing self for the sake of a parodic wholeness of being. Such a saving amnesia allows us (momentarily) the sensation of being on firm ground, an "efficiency" that Kafka admired, for instance, in Felice Bauer. Once sealed through repression, such lapses of memory perform on a personal level the task of ordering the psyche once reserved for a viable and interdictive tradition. Of course this was no option for Kafka, with his burden of consciousness. "Lying is terrible," he told Milena, "a worse spritual torture does not exist."" Any learning for this soul-voyager was an act of recovery, a reversal of time into the past, and here again Kafka turned to his animals, which Walter Benjamin has aptly labeled "a receptacle of the forgotten." For Kafka the private man, what had been forgotten was that alien territory that underlies his superb asceticism, his body or "animality," that mode of being that eluded him and is a projection of his lost self. Yet the animal world is more than a droll metaphor for Kafka's own warped and hidden depths. There is, he wrote in 1913, "a complete harmony . . . between the development of mankind as a whole and of the individual man. Even in the most secret emotions of the individual." l 3 Speaking for the ordinary man in the modern era, then, what Kafka had forgotten was an ancestral inheritance of transmissible wisdom that once offered us wholeness of being (perhaps his sole lapse into mysticism) and has now degenerated into a tradition in decay. I 4 From this perspective, "A Hunger Artist" becomes not simply a

'*

'OQuoted in Emrich, p. 167. ' 'Letters to Milena, ed. Willy Haas, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Schocken, 1953), p. 221. "See Walter Benjamin's "Franz K a k a , " in his collection, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 132. I am very indebted to Benjamin's brilliant train of thought in this essay, especially on the place of "forgetting" in Kafka. I3Diaries 1910-1913, p. 316. 14''Either you conceal what you know about me," says the Hunter Graccus, with his burden of ancient wisdom, to the normal world, ". . . or you actually think that you can't remember me, because you confuse my story with someone else's."

spiritual autobiography, but a glimpse of what Christian asceticism looks like to a world that has "forgotten" or evolved beyond it, and one might say the same relation holds between the Mosaic Law and the First Commandant's torture machine in "In the Penal Colony." Yet among all of Kafka's creations it is the animals, having "forgotten" their sagacious ancestors of the Hassidic fables, who most sorrowfully reflect our fallen secular state. By meditating in his own voice upon the spiritual anxieties generated by the conditions of their "earth," now a "distorted mask" of our own, Kafka evokes the feeling of endless introspection minus any clarifying doctrine that has harrowed us since the turn of the century. His animals emerge as indicators of the far pole of dispossession from ourselves and each other, and we stand in the same relation to them as God does to us. "We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come from God's head," Kafka told Brod. "There is hope, plenty of hope-but not for Ultimately this inward nihilism is the most hopeful thing about Kafka, even if he experienced it as a departure from prevailing norms and hence "failing to prove one's worth."I6 At least we can say of his animals that they betoken a vulnerable self escaping the coercion of a modern world in which social organization is fate. "I have never been under the pressure of any responsibility," Kafka wrote, "but that imposed on me by the existence, the gaze, the judgment of other people." l 7 Whether these tribunals took the form of his own family or secular institutions, Kafka found them stifling, yet out of some deep integrity had to breathe their polluted air. In A Letter to His Father he admits: "My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast." l 8 Of the injured working-class clients who entered the official maze of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute he remarked: "How modest these men are. . . . They come to us and beg. Instead of storming the institute and smashing it to little pieces, they come and beg."" In both cases the supplicants have suffered an injustice, but they I5Brod, p. 75.

" I A m a Memory Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Nahum Glatzer

(New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 164. " I A m a Memory Come Alive, p. 192. ''Letter to His FatherlBrief an den Vater, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1966), p. 87. IyBrod, p. 82.

are under the bondage of a nostalgia, or impersonal guilt before an ancestral past, forgotten yet extending into the present in the form of what Kafka called "an artificial, miserable substitute . . . for forebears, marriage, and heirs."20 As the innocent yet curiously selfless figure of K. in the novels makes clear, this mode of guilt is more ontological than psychological, a ground of existence that bears the weight of vast eras of time. "You think my sense of guilt is a crutch, a way out," Kafka told Felix Weltsch. "No, I have a sense of guilt simply because for me it is the most perfect form of repentance, but you do not have to look very closely to discover that this sense of guilt is really only a longing for the past."21 Kafka's animal world takes us far back in time, to the prehistoric, where flighty introspection and anxiety in empty space become harbingers of our present age of pseudo-belief. With this compressed perspective in mind, then, I would like to trace the parabolic movement of Kafka's thought from families to whole traditions in the animal stories that spanned his career. We might speculate that Kafka, in turning to his family for subject matter, needed the animal world for fear of violating his own sense of wholesomeness while exploring under the rock of repression. His remarks to Brod make it clear that, for him, to write out of bad or perverted passions ("I have hundreds of wrong feelingsdreadful ones-the right ones won't come---or if they do, only in rags; absolutely weak") was to let them get the upper hand.22 Kafka's celebrated writer's block may have been the exercise of a moral faculty; and it is revealing that only when he turned to the animal world, with The Metamorphosis in 1912, did his imagination find its sanction. Prior to its composition, Kafka confessed to Felice that "when I didn't write, I was at once flat on the floor, fit for the dustbin." 2 3 We recognize this as the fate that befalls the hero in this story, which becomes a vehicle for Kafka to review his own failure, "a general load of fear, weakness, and self-contempt" before his father, now described from the rock-bottom reality of a despicable insect, a metamorphosis that both seals the failure and disassociates him personally from any charge of disrespect. Upon completing the 'ODiaries 1914-1923, p. 207.

" I A m a Memory Come Alive, p. 96.

'"rod, p. 75.

23[ A m a Memory Come Alive, p. 55.

story, Kafka is reported to have buoyantly asked of a friend on the streets of Prague, "What do you think of the terrible things that go on in our family?" 24 In The Metamorphosis, then, Kafka grieves about living under the invisible constraints of a family, and the enabling condition is Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis into a gigantic insect: "It was no dream."25 Gregor's body is so alien to him that his transformation has no effect upon his mental life, which initially sets in motion droll and terrible ironies. Gregor imagines his family will take his change "calmly, he had no reason to be upset" (p. 98); he need only "put [his] clothes on" and race tardily to the office. Once in control of his legs, he breaks forth into the normal world where his eager enslavement to routine evokes a wonderful "Ugh!" as the chief clerk vanishes down the stairs. It is only when his Father drives this literalization of "troubled dreams" into his room with a newspaper -"Shoo!"-and locks him there as a prisoner, a more forcible and telescoped version of his life as son and servant of officialdom, that Gregor starts to touch reality. Indeed, his metamorphosis is less a tragedy than a naked clarification of all Gregor's relations to the world, a restoration of Truth-in particular, the hidden rage of the Father who has been battering on him like an insect. And yet Gregor is as far removed from this "dazzling" recognition as the gap between his consciousness and his numerous waving legs. Having toiled for years to bail his parents out of debt, he now feels "guilt and shame" (p. 112) that they must work and finds "cheerful" the news that his Father has been duplicitous about finances and has been hoarding his son's contributions. There might be hope had Gregor experienced anger, had he in fact been guilty of the venality the chief clerk accused him of earlier, but he has no individual thoughts apart from his filial loyalty. Aware of being increasingly comfortable with his state of insecthood as he crawls the walls, Gregor need only hear his Mother talk wistfully of his old desk to renounce this adjustment. The fear of losing "all recollection of his human background" (p. 116) will culminate in his obedience to his Father's wish that he die out of simple consideration. I4Quoted by Erich Heller in his Franz Kafka, Modern Masters Series, Viking, p. 1. '5Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N . Glatzer (New York: Schocken Paperback, 1971). p. 89. All page references in the text refer to this edition.

Kafka wrote of his father that "perhaps the strangest of all my relationships with him is that I am capable of feeling and suffering to the utmost not with him, but within him."26 For Gregor and for his creator metamorphosis is a kind of secret rescue from the loss of self into others, the attending alienation a form of liberation even if it does no good. Gregor's only real pleasures and resentments-what we might call his real or hidden self-arise out of that admittedly despicable, forgotten, yet indestructible side of being, his animality. This is reflected humorously in Gregor's first sight of garbage, whereupon "his legs all whizzed towards the food," and in his discovery of the autoerotic freedom of crawling the walls and hanging from the ceiling: "one could breathe more freely, one's body swung and rocked lightly; and in the blissful absorption induced by the suspension it could happen . . . that he let go and fell plump on the floor" (p. 115). Such are the freakish and regressive antics of a sexuality too long deferred. When Grete comes to dispossess him of his room, Gregor, whose sex life as a man (when not studying timetables) consisted in gazing at an innocently lewd picture of a lady on his wall, with rare self-assertion "crawled on the lady muffled in so much fur . . . which was a good surface to hold on to and comforted his hot belly" (p. 118). In this way Kafka, who, perhaps inflamed by the presence of Felice, speaks of his "unhealthy sexuality" at this time, of "coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together" (and who indeed had a loathing of the flesh until he met Milena in 1919), is able to draw the link between repression and pornography without propagating it in human terms. What we witness instead is a kind of trans-Freudian comedy as Gregor breaks free on three occasions into the domain of his Mother's livingroom, only to be repelled with increasing violence by the "giant soles" of his advancing Father. Such humor is not psychological, but rather (as the pun on "giant soles" implies) ontological: "The noise in his rear sounded no longer like the force of one single father" (p. 104). Indeed, Gregor is dealing with all fathers through time-these primal scenes take us back to the dawn of creation. At one point Gregor is trapped between his Mother, who has fainted in his room in a swamp of petticoats, and the stalking wrath of his Father, and suffers bombardment with apples for bumbling into this tableau that parodies the Biblical Fall. Under this cosmic burden of the past, 2 6 1Am u Memory Come Alive, p. 93.

64 1

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Gregor might very well choose to forget his "animality" and embrace his "human" consciousness. But it isn't easy. Gregor touches on reality only when he acknowledges his pain and its causes through his body, a result of the social reorganization of the household. The ministrations of Grete, which start to lapse into neglect and indifference, soon oppress him. A bony charwoman becomes his keeper, and now just an "old dung beetle," he grows more rebellious as he moves toward starvation. Hunger is real. And yet his Father's obsequiousness before the three lodgers, followed by his violent purging of them, only anticipates his son's urgencies and extinguishes them. Grete's violin-playing stirs in Gregor another hunger, "an unknown nourishment he craved" (p. 131), for Kafka (following Schopenhauer) uses music to refer to a blissfully undivided state of being. Gregor's reward for sending his sister to the Conservatorium, however-he "would then raise himself to her shoulder and kiss her on the neck" (p. 131)-would divide it again. At last Gregor accepts the family verdict upon him, cooperates with their desire he be gotten rid of, and expires "thinking of his family with tenderness and love" (p. 135). There is no resistance to fate here, for what else could have happened given this family and this metamorphosis? Nothing is more surprising about Kafka than the serenity with which he views his own failure and explores that theme for all of us. Gregor, as he discovered with bleeding jaws that first morning, did not need a locksmith to get out of his room. As Nabokov was fond of reminding his pupils at Cornell, he was a species of dung beetle that could fly and might have zoomed out the window at any time. All of Kafka's animal stories are different, and in the ensuing four years none would entertain a metamorphosis from human to animal worlds within a single soul: instead the two worlds converse across an abyss. That "tremendous world I have inside my head" was perhaps exorcised in The Metamorphosis, and Kafka was now ready to project his conflicts into the modern world as conflicting modes of being that preserve our fall from grace. "Far, far away world history takes its course," he muses in his diary, "the world history of your soul."*' We might guess two matters intervened now to rarefy Kafka's self into an empty mirror, to lead him beyond his own family to its equivalent in the world at large: tradition in decay. First, there was the failure of his long and tortured relationship with *'I Am u Memory Come Alive, p. 202.

KAFKA

65

Felice and his yearning for a normal life of marriage that would only have put him in paralyzing competition with his father, eroding his destiny as a writer. "My one fear," Kafka wrote her in 1913, "is that I shall never be able to possess you. At best I would be confined, like an unthinking faithful dog, to kissing your casually proffered hand, which would not be a sign of love, but of the despair of the animal condemned to silence and eternal s e p a r a t i ~ n . "Here ~~ a human gesture of intimacy, a kiss, only leads Kafka back to the world of animals, not to be regretted, but rather as he says elsewhere, "the earthly reflection of a higher necessity," a privileged vantage point from which he might penetrate the contemporary world at the price of always remaining anguished and complementary to it. "If, like you, one dies for a while," Kafka wrote Oskar Pollak, "one has the benefit of suddenly seeing clearly in either a pleasant or ugly light all the relationships that inevitably look so hazy when one is inside them. But the survivor also has that strange experience. " 2 9 The second matter that likely tilted his attention to larger vistas was the unacknowledged presence of World War I on his mind, the atavistic slaughter going on during this span in 25,000 miles of trenches that criss-crossed the stage of a once-proud Europe. (The Trial was launched with the outbreak of hostilities in August, 1914.) Kafka maintained a pregnant silence about the war in his Diaries, except to record an impulse to become a soldier; yet no event more clearly suggested that a whole tradition was committing suicide, and his animal stories would be ceaselessly involved with measuring the consequences. It is tempting, if audacious, to see this very trench warfare with a defunct past at the heart of Kafka's unpublished story of 1914, "The Village Schoolmaster" (or "The Giant Mole"), an investigation of the obstacles in communicating the "forgotten" element in modern society. Once again that element, unspecified, "related to fundamental axioms of whose existence we don't even know" (p. 180) and issuing from the bowels of the earth, takes an animal form, a giant mole that was seen in a village and is already in danger of sinking into oblivion. The only first-hand account of the mole was made by an obscure old schoolmaster in the district, whose labors have been dismissed as rumor by the public and a joke by the scholarly community: "The soil in your neighborhood is particularly " 1 A m u Memory C o m e Alfr,e, p. 81.

'9Lerrers ro Frlends, Frrn~lly,und Ed~rors,p. 9 .

black and rich. Consequently it provides the moles with particularly rich nourishment, and so they grow to an unusual size" (p. 169). The narrator, a man of business with mild curiosity, comes with a filial air to the aid of the schoolmaster by duplicating his original research-"I found that we actually did not agree on certain important points, though we both believed we have proved our main point, namely, the existence of the mole" (p. 171)-but this provokes hostility in the schoolmaster, a pamphlet which competes with his own labors and, as it were, eclipses them. Kafka shows us how the search for truth turns, in the hands of fallible secular man, into multiple perspectives and dissipating rivalries born of conceit, mistrust, and ignorance. Once he grows alarmed that the narrator "wanted to rob him of the fame of being the first man publicly to vindicate the mole" (p. 172), the schoolmaster is devoured by an ambitious narcissism, while his discovery starts to fade into limbo, that polluted air of pseudo-belief that is the fate of all our ancestral past, not "completely forgotten," yet outside the radius of "trivial interest that had originally existed" (p. 174). Not much can be salvaged from this realm: the narrator's pamphlet is fated to be wryly disregarded by a prestigious journal as a recirculation of the schoolmaster's-"An unpardonable confusion of identity" (p. 174). In this droll way Kafka anticipates the entropic effects of information flow in our era, in which, devoid as we are of any mediating authority, a public response of inert uniformity can be expected even in the face of the miraculous. But Kafka suggests a deeper issue: a new gap between generations that widens the ontological impasse. Once recognizing that his solicitude has only injured the schoolmaster, the narrator backs off, but only by way of a dizzying reflection on the "mendacity" of the old and our "terror" as they rise up before us in a voice of firm conviction: "it is as if even the self-evident had degrees of validity, and their words now were more self-evident than ever. But the final deceit that lies in their words consists in this, that at bottom they have always said what they are saying now" (p. 176). This deceit is not intentional, but a kind of accident of time; the terror the old evoke stems not from their wisdom, but from its loss in transit and under fluctuating circumstances. Against the accelerations of time only a fool may adopt the trappings of wisdom, and the schoolmaster proves he qualifies by taking refuge in a childish daydream of his metamorphosis from rustic obscurity to tawdry public acclaim in the city. About the urban world, however, only the narrator can

speak with authority, and he warns the old man of what he will lose under the weight of modem institutions: "Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye to recognize it" (p. 180). For Kafka it is ultimately the way work and life are organized in society that confers destiny. "After all," he wrote to Felix Weltsch, "our nervous system does take in the entire city."30 At last sight the only link between the "forgotten" element and the modern world (we too by now have all but forgotten the mole) is the deepening senility of the old schoolmaster, now a sanctimonious guru smoking his pipe, an empty pantomime, a presence who has become a torture to endure: "As I contemplated the stubborn brittle old fellow from behind, while he sat at the table, it seemed an impossible idea ever to show him the door" (p. 182). Kafka carried over this sense of a persecuting yet unknowable link with our ontology in the animal stories written during the war years, in particular with his wondrous piece, "The Cares of a Family Man." Odradek comes from so far back in our ancestral past that he is pure creature, a playful blob of oblivion, an unraveling skein of universal relatedness. "At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread around it; to be sure, they probably are only old, broken-off bits. . . . But it is not just a spool, for a small wooden cross-bar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to it at a right angle. With the aid of this latter rod on one side and one of the extensions of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs" (p. 428). This puckish fellow spans that infinite realm from shining star to homely spool, and there is an intelligibility to him even if it is inaccessible to us: "the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished" (p. 428). Thus we have no way to reclaim or even define Odradek; he is, in Walter Benjamin's phrase, "the form which things assume in obli~ i o n . " ~This ' loss of meaning is manifest in what we know about him: he has "no fixed abode," he laughs "the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it," a laugh that sounds like "the rustling of fallen leaves" (p. 428). All the family man can do is respond with intellectual blanks that ease the faint vexation of blank memory. 'O

Lerrers ro Friends, Familj, and Editors, p. 40.

31Benjamin,Illuminarions, p. 133.

Reaching back to our origins, Odradek is diminutive, "rather like a child," yet in terms of time is the father of us all, and appropriately he lurks in the same attics and stairways that house guilt in the novels. At last glance the family man, that enviable paragon of normalcy, is unnerved at the prospect of being himself just a temporary aberration in the skein of eternity. "He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful" (p. 429). After Odradek, Kafka starts to reduce the evolutionary gap between his animals and the human world and sharpen the antagonism between them. Unlike his contemporary D. H. Lawrence, he did not idealize the primitive as an access to wholeness of being, but he did investigate the impulse with devilish innocence. Brod tells us that Kafka quoted a favorite passage of Kierkegaard's: As soon as a man appears who brings something of the primitive along with him, so that he doesn't say, 'You must take the world as you find it,' but rather, 'Let the world be what it likes, I take my stand on a primitiveness which I have no intention of changing to meet with the approval of the world,' at that moment as these words are heard, a metamorphosis takes place in the whole of nature. Just as in a fairy story, when the right word is pronounced, the castle that has been lying under a spell for a hundred years opens and everything comes to life, in the same way existence becomes all attention. The angels have something to do, and watch curiously to see what will come of it, because that is their business. On the other side, dark, uncanny demons, who have been sitting around doing nothing and chewing at their nails for a long time, jump up and stretch their limbs, because, they say, here is something for us, and so on.32

What the primitive does, then, is to stir traces of theological crisis, now replayed in terms of secular magic and fairytale. (We might think of Kafka's angels in The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, whose wings are tied to their shoulders, or his swamp-demons of sexuality, like Lena in The Trial, who has webs between her fingers.) The primitive forges a creative isolation from things and offers a heightened level of attention that can penetrate the negative theologies of our era, but by itself is no theology at all. Kafka remarked to Brod about his daily work: "Insurance is like the religions of primitive peoples who believe they can ward off evil by all kinds of manip~lations."~.~ 32Quotedin Brod, p. 171

33Brod,p. 74.

Of course in his real work, writing, magic lies in the gift of language, bequeathed to his animals to shape parables lacking any doctrine. Kafka7s strict vegetarianism, a rite he always associated with the early Christians and their persecutions, was another instance of modern spiritual mimicry: "What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people."34 His eschewal of meat, then, was double-edged-a respect for the primitive and a refusal to be polluted by it. Once at a Berlin aquarium, Brod tells us, Kafka began speaking to the fish in their illuminated tanks: "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore." 3s These matters are taken up in Kafka's magical tale, "Jackals and Arabs," in which a man "from the North" is visited by a swarm of jackals as he falls asleep on an oasis. They have awaited him for "endless years" so that he might be recruited as a messiah to deliver them from Arabs. These vile nomads lack any "spark of intelligence," they "kill animals for food" (p. 408), and their meat-eating ways have cleared the desert of carrion. Speaking with aggrieved dignity, the jackals seem to have natural justice on their side-until Kafka reminds us of what we have forgotten about them as his asceticism takes hold. For once the jackals reach a proposal, the man from the North finds "two young beasts behind me had locked their teeth through my coat and shirt" (p. 409). He protests only to be told this cannot be helped: "We are poor creatures, and we have nothing but our teeth; whatever we want to do, good or bad, we can tackle it only with our teeth" (p. 409). So much for primitive adaptability, and the head jackal tries to allay our uneasiness by delivering a speech which is ecologically superb-"We want to be troubled no more by Arabs; room to breathe; a skyline cleaned of them; no more bleating of sheep knifed by an Arab; every beast to die a natural deathM-but humanly repulsive-"no interference till we have drained the carcass empty and picked its bones clean" (p. 409). Once the jackals start to sob, Kafka uses them to echo the human forces of repression that would silence them ("cleanliness, nothing but cleanliness is what we want"), as a single word splits apart into two opposing worlds that cannot be reconciled. This recurs moments later as visual pun when the man from the North is offered a pair of sewing scissors that the jackals have adopted for

the purpose of assassinating Arabs. Such a confusion of realms, however, only exposes their impotence (jackals are dumb as well as murderous), and suddenly an Arab appears from nowhere to crush the conspiracy with a crack of his whip (man regains as sadist what he has lost as carrion). We learn this is happening all the time ("that pair of scissors goes wandering through the desert and will wander with us to the end of our days"), just as it is going on in the barren places of every human psyche. We are left gazing awe-struck at what we have lost as the jackals, once thrown a piece of "stinking carrion," forget everything else and are lashed into ecstasy in pursuit of primitive cleanliness. But apes are another matter, as we learn from "A Report to an Academy," in which a performing ape reports to a learned body of mankind on his former life, now reduced to a fleeting nostalgia, "only a gentle puff of air that plays around my heels" (p. 250). Such a puff of air plays around us, too, and in imagining how the ape learned to forget his origins, Kafka gives us a replay of the civilizing process compressed into five years that have enabled the ape to "reach the cultural level of an average European" (p. 258). Once a native of the Gold Coast, the ape was visited by technology (hunters with guns) at a watering hole, and the nature of his wounds, one in the cheek and the other "below the hip," is a wry commentary on civilization and its discontents. Access to the human world is viewed as a sexual wound, even a castration, as the ape's penchant for pulling down his trousers makes clear: "As for me, I can take my trousers down before anyone if I like; you would find nothing but a well-groomed fur and the scar made . . . by a wanton shot" (p. 252). His traumatic past has been sealed by amnesia and the wall of language, for "what I felt then as an ape I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it" (p. 253), but the direction of humanity is plain. The ape is locked up where he can only "squat with knees bent" facing a ship locker, miming the act of human defecation. He experiences only one feeling-"no way out . . . I had to find a way out or dieM-and is faced with only one solution: "Well, then, I had to stop being an ape" (p. 253). To do this, he must renounce the heaven of his former freedom for its laughable equivalent in the human world: "self-controlled movement" or acting. Over eras of time mankind has learned this as part of the Darwinian drama, and now, in the modern era in which Dostoevskian self-consciousness has turned act into acting and all human gestures are losing their traditional supports, our experience

by a wide curve of irony begins once more to approximate the ape's. That the first human gesture the ape learns is a handshake, is likely to fill us with the same wonder that led Kafka to describe his encounter with daily life as "a seasickness on dry land."36 It is no accident, then, that the breaking of the ape begins at sea by a sailor who acts out the process of drinking schnapps. "After theory came practice," but this isn't easy. The ape is disgusted by schnapps. A burning pipe held against his fur, which is simply a necessary cauterization "against the nature of apes," at last enables the ape to break into the human world "as an artistic performer" by getting drunk and blurting out a brief but unmistakable "Hallo!" This dismal triumph for mankind is merely a matter of survival to the ape: "I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason" (p. 257). Unlike all those invited to join the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, provided they play themselves, the ape must play man and graduates to variety shows as his teachers file into mental hospitals. Yet imitation is only the pragmatics of the void: the ape is a success "provided that freedom was not to be my choice" (p. 258). As with all of Kafka's animals, a wistful and selfreferential sadness remains for what has been lost, captured in the anguish the ape feels for a female chimpanzee that awaits him in his room: "By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it but I do, and I cannot bear it" (p. 259). Nor could Kafka, and freedom was not to be sacrificed in his art ever again. In 1922, after a lapse of six years, Kafia returned to the animal world with "Investigations of a Dog," which reflects a new metamorphosis of mind. By now Felice and Milena had passed through his life as failed experiments in personal happiness. "I am too far away, am banished," he wrote to Brod, thus echoing what he had said upon the breakup of his second engagement in 1917-"What I have to do, I can do only alone. Become clear about the ultimate thing^."^' This impulse could only become more urgent, for Kafka was dying of tuberculosis (he referred to the cough as the "animal" in him) and was ready to write from entirely inside the animal world, 36''I have experience," Kafka wrote in an early note, "and I am not joking when I say that it is a seasickness on dry land." See Benjamin, p. 130. 371Am a Memory Come Alive, p. 168.

abjuring as he had in life personal relations for the isolation of writing, "a sleep deeper than that of death."38 It was perhaps because "Investigations of a Dog" approximated so closely the conditions of his own life that Kafka declined to publish it. In 1915 he had written to Felice, "Are you aware, and this is the important thing, of a continuous relationship between yourself and a reassuringly distant, if possibly infinite height or depth? He who feels this continuously has no need to roam about like a lost dog, mutely gazing around with imploring eyes."39 This was now his theme: yet gazing into vast, empty vistas was not an activity Kafka could view as entirely wholesome, touched as it was with fancied self-pity, perhaps, and lacking the full backdrop of reality. We might spy this same objection in Kafka's own severe opinion of his story in the Diaries: "I have just been reading the beginning. It is ugly and gives one a headache. For all the truth it contains, it is bad, pedantic, mechanical, a fish just able to gasp on a sandbank."40 Kafka's mute and gazing dog, then, has his own fate, the expansion of a "little maladjustment" into a full-fledged metaphysical riddle, soon divorcing him from the legendary community of dogdom ("All of us in one heap!") and setting him on his investigations. A traumatic episode out of childhood started it, naturally, an encounter with seven dogs conjuring music from the air and walking on hind legs. "They were uncovering their nakedness, blatantly making a show of their nakedness" (p. 284). Before this version of the Fall, the dog retreats into a mental "labyrinth of wooden bars," thus establishing his asceticism, the conversion of sexual fear, perhaps, into an investigation of "what the canine race nourished itself upon," what has crumbled away "like a neglected ancestral inheritance" (p. 287) and been sealed by shame and silence. Kafka at once leaves reductive psychology behind: a mother's practical advice to her child ("Water the ground as much as you can") is elevated to a more serious inquiry: "Whence does the earth procure this food?" (p. 288). This inquiry pursues the unknowable, generating pedantry and headaches: yet any solution for Kafka lay in the hieroglyphic sprawl of ordinary experience and the dog is pledged to "lap up the marrow" of life even if it might be poison. Other dogs he finds along the way only prove to parody real spiritual pursuit, for instance the 381Am a Memory Come Alive, p. 140.

3yIAm a Memory Come Alive, p. 75.

40Brod,p. 154.

KAFKA

/ 73

"roaring dogs," whom he finds "self-complacently floating high up in the air," and whose "dumb senselessness" violates the obligation of silence with "an almost unendurable volubility" (p. 295). So much for modern gurus. Where, then, are his real colleagues? "Everywhere and nowhere" (p. 298): that is, in the collective domain of lapsed memory, and this leads the dog to his pivotal insight about the universal progress of dogs, bogged down now under a silence that has behind it the wisdom of centuries: "Our generation is lost, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier ones. I can understand the hesitation of my generation, indeed it is no longer a mere hesitation; it is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times; and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time" (p. 300). Amid this uncertainty ("My life is a hesitation before birth," Kafka told Brod in 1922), the dog can only improvise his own religious rituals. "God can only be comprehended personally," Kafka warned Gustav Janouch. "Each man has his own life and his own God. His protector and judge. Priests and rituals are only crutches for the crippled life of the soul."41 Science, for the dog, can only offer food in abundance: it begs the question. Traditional rituals, with their attempts to "attract food from above," seem tempting, but the dog finds them to be in decay, mere escapism, an effort to "take flight from it [the ground or reality] forever" (p. 304). A t last the dog resorts to fasting (a more disciplined version of his earlier traumatic asceticism), but he can conquer neither physical hunger nor the ensuing guilt that aligns him with an ancestral past beyond his reach. "It was they who involved our dog life in guilt . . . but I bow before their knowledge, it came from sources of which we know no longer . . . and I shall never actually overstep their laws, but content myself with wriggling out through gaps for which I have a particularly good nose" (p. 309). Perhaps, but to his consternation the dog learns that even his asceticism is now an empty gesture, for contemporary sages have cast prohibitions on fasting that leave him "only a dog laying here helplessly snapping at the empty air" (p. 311). Polluted by false hope he starts to vomit blood. Still he rejects his body, the solicitude of a lean healthy hound whose melodies craze him into hallucinations of beatitude. At last his investigations return to music, the 4 ' G ~ ~Janouch, t a ~ Conversations wid1 Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences, introd. Max Brod, trans. Goronwy Rees (New York: Praeger, 1953), p. 93.

74

1

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

"ultimate science" that prizes "freedom higher than anything else" (p. 316). (Perhaps those seven dogs earlier were not sinning? Perhaps their music did not conceal a desperate strain? Perhaps his asceticism was a mistake?) The dog ends by coming full circle, with a pledge that seals his isolation as it confirms his campaign of selftranscendence: "Certainly such freedom as is possible today is a wretched business. But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession" (p. 316). In a companion piece from this time, "The Burrow," Kafka explores the dynamics of anxiety that accompany such freedom as is available to us. According to Dora Dymant, he had in mind a premonition of his return to his parents, which would have destroyed his "burrowed" existence in Berlin.42At least we can say of the "mole-creature" in "The Burrow" that he is cut off from his own kind, free in a maze born of fear and narcissism without end. The mole is aware there are "some ruses . . . so subtle that they defeat themselves" (p. 325), yet cannot resist offering living proof as he burrows deep in the earth. Once in this "forgotten" realm, he is able to convert every perspective into its opposite: "stillness" is deceptive in the burrow, "prudence" forces him to risk his life in more safeguarding action, the tour de force of his old false entrance must be abandoned for a new one. Such a logic of insecurity now impels him into the danger of "out there," in order to confirm his own impregnability, where he spies on his own house with "the joy of being in a profounder slumber and simultaneously of keeping vigilant guard over myself" (p. 334). So that even though the mole finds the prey better outside, and his strength returns, he is "not really free," for he is sustained by "how steadfast a protection my burrow would be if I were inside it" (p. 335). Moreover, his sallies above the ground are merely "the mark of a restless nature, of inner uncertainty, disreputable desires, evil propensities" (p. 339), and hence worthless. Reality may or may not be filled with lurking dangers, but they must be imagined to justify the work of a lifetime, and forced by this obsession into a sequence of schizophrenic projections, the mole now prowls around the entrance like "an enemy spying out a suitable opportunity for successfully breaking in'' (p. 337). Here he has metamorphosed into his own dreaded opposite. Kafka often called himself "Chinese," and never was his genius

42See 1 A m u Memory Come Alive, p. 238.

KAFKA

75

for illuminating the central axiom of these spiritual ancestors more clear: the mind is a monkey.43 The burrow is more than a refuge, however; for it and the mole "belong so indissolubly together" (p. 340) that it has become a false self that fears the hidden or "indestructible" one that Kafka felt was required in order to live. "It is a new world, endowing me with new powers, and what I felt as fatigue up there is no longer that here" (p. 341). This replaces an ancestral past with an absurd optimism belied by the desire to die easefully in a place where "my blood can ebb" into the soil and "not be lost." Just how fragile this modern self is becomes clear when the mole is disturbed by an enemy from within, a "whistling noise" that seems to threaten the heart of his burrow, the Castle Keep: "I am concerned here with some animal unknown to me" (p. 347). Whistling is prearticulate music, an intimation in Kafka of unity of being, but this invasion of the unknown only fills the mole with alarm and busies him with "technical" renovations and escape tunnels that all but wreck the burrow. Any tranquility he had formerly possessed proves to be false consciousness as the whistling gets louder. "Unbeatable" in the past, his false self now cracks under the strain: "what was once the place of danger has become a place of tranquility, while the Castle Keep has been plunged into the melee of the world and all its perils" (p. 352). Having become his own armour, the mole erroneously regrets that "instead of thinking only of my defense . . . I should have thought of the defense of the burrow" (p. 355). Recalling his "younger days" above ground when he heard just such a burrowing noise from below, the mole reaches the brink of enlightenment "where I no longer wish to have certainty" (p. 358)-yet he is unable to see a link between the whistling and his own lost self, and the noise of that "single big beast" heading toward his edifice evokes a final oscillation of consciousness. "But all remains unchanged" (p. 359). 43Kafka concluded a postcard sent to Felice from Marienbad in 1915: "I imagine if I were a Chinese and were about to go home (indeed I am a Chinese and am going home), I would make sure of returning soon, and at any price. How you would love it?" See Elias Canetti's Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 97. Of course Kafka's animal stories, featuring insects and the magnification of small creatures, find an ancient precedent in the literature of the Chinese. Kafka spoke in laudatory terms of Chinese Ghost and Love Stories (edited by Martin Buber) where such stories do appear.

In an extraordinary letter to Brod in 1922 that recast these issues, Kafka accused himself as a writer of "devil worship," of creating "a whole planetary system of vanity" as a surrogate for living, of having "not fanned the spark of life to a flame but simply used it to illuminate my Never was a genius more sensitive to the dominant modem urge toward idolatry of self: it is the basis for Kafka's elevation of life over art, what enabled him to declare, "I despise Literature, but I am it."45 But he concludes that letter to Brod by imagining a "nonexistent" writer who might yield up his corpse to the grave: "Although it will never happen now, I am writer enough to enjoy or-and this amounts to the same thingto tell this story, using every one of my senses in the process and completely forgetting my self, for in the final analysis writing depends not on vigilance but on the ability to forget one's self."4h Kafka's demurrals aside, never does this literary credo find a more pure manifestation than in his last animal story, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk." For here he vanishes into his own creation, evoking an entire world devoid of human wisdom, one which becomes an uncanny metamorphosis of our own as we lose our old supports. "I shall never grow up to be a man," Kafka lamented to Brod. "From being a child I shall immediately become a white-haired a n ~ i e n t . " ~This, ' as we are told in "Josephine the Singer," is exactly the path of spiritual growth among the Mouse Folk, and one need not gaze too long and selflessly (mouselike) upon the modem world to recognize it as our own. The narrator, a sympathetic "opponent" of Mouse culture, yet able to "sink in the feeling of the mass," proceeds with a patient and wondrous analysis of the power that Josephine holds over the nation. This power resides in her "piping," what remains of a decayed tradition of singing, an ability now shared by all. Singing is the voice of music, always in Kafka an intimation of undivided being. What might have been the dividend of a viable tradition is reduced now among the Mouse Folk to mere daily speech. Josephine makes "a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing" (p. 361); indeed, "we admire in her what we do not admire in ourselves" (p. 362). For Kafka, in the absence of God the miracu441Am a Memory Come Alive, pp. 223-4.

45Letter to Felice of August 14, 1913; cited in Heller, p. 54.

461Am a Memory Come Alive, p. 224.

47Brod, p. 37.

KAFKA

1 77

lous takes up residence in the commonplace-and the narrator wryly recognizes this by comparing the talent of his tawdry heroine to cracking nuts in public: "it turns out that we were too skilled in it and that this newcomer to it first shows us its real nature, even finding it useful in making his effects to be rather less expert in nutcracking than most of us" (p. 362). No doubt the commonplace is mirrored in Josephine's personality: she is vulgar ("She actually bites"), vain ("She believes . . . she is singing to deaf ears"), clearly an idiot, but that is the point. Under the modem dispensation, in which all of us are holding counsel in empty space, only an idiot can offer help and it does uncertain good. "All advice seems to me to be at bottom a betrayal," Kafka told Janouch. "It is a cowardly retreat in the face of the future, which is the touchstone of our present. "4s But this does not deter Josephine. Insulated by her own conceit, she makes large claims for her art and herself as a saviour; in national emergencies she rises up "like a shepherd before a thunderstorm" (p. 366) to rally the Mouse Folk. Yet the narrator dismisses these Messianic claims by noting that the Mouse Folk "save themselves, although at the cost of sacrifices which make historians-generally speaking we ignore historical research entirely --quite horrorstruck" (p. 366). What, then, is the ground for Josephine's appeal? Her piping is "a message from the whole people to each individual," allowing the Mouse Folk merely respite from an existence of constant peril and massive death, an occasion to "dream . . . at ease in the great warn bed of the community" (p. 370). "For all this, doubtless," the narrator tells us, "our way of life is mainly responsible" (p. 368). And Kafka stunningly recreates the life of the Mouse Folk as animals to account for Josephine. A tragically brief childhood, incessant work, over-population, the bloody depredations of enemies, a sudden and premature agedness of spirit-under these conditions, we are told, "a little piping here and there, that is enough for us" (p. 369). It could not be otherwise: "Who knows, there may be talents for music among us; but if there were, the character of our people would suppress them before they could unfold" (p. 369). Too great a gap exists between the "unexpended, ineradicable childishness" of the Mouse Folk that indulges Josephine and their "infallible practical common sense" that ultimately dismisses her. Only in the degree to which the social 481A m a Memory Come Alive, p. 192.

78

1

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

conditions of the human world start to approximate those of the Mouse Folk might we draw a parallel between the two: our state of constant warfare, our eschewal of history, our early loss of innocence, our collapse of tradition into mass culture, our hunger for massive doses of nostalgia to retain a sense of continuity. Kafka's generation possessed at least a vestigial piety, but much avant-garde art today-that which sardonically brackets and inflates the dreck of mundane existence, such as the work of Andy Warhol and Donald Barthelme-might be viewed as human "piping." We can discern a part of its appeal in what we are told of Josephine's art. "Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated" (p. 370). What eludes Josephine, any "unconditional devotion" to and "permanent recognition of her art," reflew only a decay of tradition among the Mouse Folk and a resulting fall into the quotidian that makes her appeal possible. She is a mere byproduct of that decay, mere rumor and folly, and she can vanish at the end and "be forgotten like all her brothers" (p. 376). Josephine, then, enters the only heaven available to the Mouse Folk (and perhaps to all of us): the redemptive depths of oblivion. We must take seriously, then, Kafka's choice of just such a heaven for himself when he willed that all his works be destroyed at his death. Impelled as an artist with a Messianic urge to "raise the world into the pure, the true, the immutable," he fell wondrously short of his goal and in the pursuit became a scapegoat for mankind instead.49The modem age was his only sacred text, shifting under the gaze of a metamorphosing self, and animals offered him a means for endless reflection on that present without presuming to grasp it. "Everything appears to me to be an artificial construction of the mind," he concluded. "Every remark by someone else, every chance look throws everything in me over on the other side, even what has been forgotten, even what is entirely insignificant. I am more uncertain than I ever was, I feel only the power of life."s0 This power is reflected in the enigmatic clarity of his prose, and yet 4y"If I were to define the writer," Kafka wrote in 1922, "I would say: he is a scapegoat for humanity, he enables people to enjoy sin without-or almost without -a sense of guilt." I Am a Memory Come Alive, p. 225. 50Diaries1910-1913, p. 309.

KAFKA

1 79

where did that prose lead? "I am not of the opinion that one can ever lack the power to express perfectly what one wants to write or say," he tells us; then can say of a friend: "Words came out of his mouth like a walking stick."s1 Language will never be more than a lurching probe of life, and Kafka's led into the far recesses of the negativity of our era, both private alienation and coercion by emerging social norms that are the beneficiaries of our guilt under the evacuated heavens. For this saintly genius, all was a temptation to despair that made his own works suspect. W. H. Auden shrewdly observed that "one should only read Kafka when one is in a eupeptic state of physical and mental health," and has a hunch that he wished his works destroyed because he "foresaw the nature of too many of his admirers."52 But another reason suggests itself. If writing was an "act of prayer," all of Kafka's work reduced to a serene and secular act of attention: he regarded himself as a failure, and everything else followed, including his sense that he was like a banished animal dreaming of home. Wayne State University 5'Quoted in Brod, p. 39. 52W. H. Auden, "The I Without a Self," in Franz Kafka: A Collecfion of Criticism,ed. Leo Hamalian (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 43.