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Franz Kafka and Animals Peter Stine Contemporary Literature, Vol. 22 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) mo- ments 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 'The 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: Fred- erick 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 falseho~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 mean- ing, least of all from psychology, which Kafka dismissed as "mirror- writing . 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 enig- matic 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 luci- dity, 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 intro- specti~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 Green- berg 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 meta- morphosing 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 mem- ory 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 ter- rible," 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 for- gotten." '* 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 man- kind as a whole and of the individual man. Even in the most secret emotions of the individual." l3 Speaking for the ordinary man in the modern era, then, what Kafka had forgotten was an ancestral in- heritance of transmissible wisdom that once offered us wholeness of being (perhaps his sole lapse into mysticism) and has now degen- erated into a tradition in decay. I4 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 Kaka," 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 "for- gotten" their sagacious ancestors of the Hassidic fables, who most sorrowfully reflect our fallen secular state.
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