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Kafka's Zoopoetics 2RPP Kafka’s Zoopoetics 2RPP 2RPP Kafka’s Zoopoetics Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier Naama Harel University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor 2RPP Copyright © 2020 by Naama Harel All rights reserved Tis book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published April 2020 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-472-13179-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12651-4 (ebook) 2RPP It is possible to read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all. When one encounters the name of the creature—monkey, dog, mole—one looks up in fright and realizes that one is already far away from the continent of man. —Walter Benjamin,“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” 2RPP 2RPP Acknowledgments A part of the research for this book was carried out for my doctoral disser- tation at the University of Haifa. I am thankful to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for the research fellowship at the Institute for German and Dutch Philology at the Free University of Berlin, and the Bucerius Institute for Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa for the fnancial support during my PhD studies. I would also like to express my gratitude to my dissertation adviser, Gabriel Zoran, for his valuable guidance. Tis book received funding from the Judith London Evans Directorship of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Co- lumbia University, and I thank them for their support. I am also grateful to the Humane Society of the United States for my research stay in their Summer Retreat Program for Animal/Humane/Environmental Studies in Shin Pond, Maine. Some of the ideas in this book have been shared with several research groups, including the Wrzburg Summer School for Cultural and Liter- ary Animal Studies, the Animal Studies Workshop at Emory University Center for Ethics, the Research Forum on the Human-Animal Bond at Tel Aviv University, and Columbia University Seminar on Human- Animal Studies. I am indebted to the participants for their feedback and observations. I extend special appreciation to Ariel Tsovel, whose insights nourished and inspired the early stages of my scholarly work, and to Gil Anidjar, who read the manuscript with scrupulous attention and provided precious comments. Further thanks are due to friends and colleagues, who advised and assisted me in the course of writing this book, among them 2RPP viii Acknowledgments Abdul- Rahim Al-Shaikh, Amir Banbaji, Simon Cook, Carrie Freeman, Yoav Kenny, Kevin Levin, Anat Pick, November Wanderin, and Felice Naomi Wonnenberg. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the gracious permis- sion of Luis Scafati to use his artwork, which visually embodies Kafka’s zoopoetics, for the cover of this book. An early version of chapter 2 originally appeared as “De-allegorizing Kafka’s Ape: Two Animalistic Contexts,” in Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri, eds., Kafka’s Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings (Lan- ham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2010), 53–66. An earlier version of chapter 4, entitled “Investigation of a Dog, by a Dog: Between Anthro- pocentrism and Canine-centrism,” was published in Margo DeMello, ed., Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing (New York: Rout- ledge, 2012), 71–87. 2RPP Contents Abbreviations xi Introduction: Kafka and Other Animals 1 Part I: Interspecies Transitioning Chapter 1. Te Metamorphosis of the Human/Animal Binary 21 Chapter 2. A Transspecies’ Report to an Academy 49 Part II: Humanimal Power Relations Chapter 3. Slaughterous Anthroparchy, Jackals, and Arabs 81 Chapter 4. Speciesist Researches of a Dog 102 Part III: Between Ontological and Performative Hybridity Chapter 5. Te Burrow of the Indeterminable 119 Chapter 6. Josefne the Singer, or Performing Humanimality 143 Conclusion: Te Kafkaesque Humanimal Machine 159 Notes 165 Bibliography 181 Index 201 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11325807 2RPP 2RPP Abbreviations Te following abbreviations are used in this book: A America: Te Missing Person. Trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books, 2011. BON Te Blue Octavo Notebooks. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991. CS Te Complete Stories. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir and Tania and James Stern. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. D Te Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910– 23. Trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. E Die Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003. KSS Kafka’s Selected Stories: New Translations, Background and Context, Criticism. Trans. Stanley Corngold. New York: Norton, 2007. LF Letters to Felice. Trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. LFBV Letter to the Father / Brief an den Vater: Bilingual Edition. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. New York: Schocken Books, 2015. LFFE Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1977. LM Letters to Milena. Trans. Philip Boehm. New York: Schocken Books, 1990. M Te Metamorphosis: Translation, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Trans. Stanley Corngold. New York: Norton, 1996. 2RPP xii Abbreviations PP Parables and Paradoxes: In German and English. Trans. Clement Greenberg, Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, Willa and Edwin Muir, and Tania and James Stern. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. T Te Trial. Trans. Mike Mitchell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. WPC Wedding Preparations in the Country, and Other Posthumous Prose Writings. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. London: Secker and Warburg, 1954. 2RPP Introduction Kafka and Other Animals Nonhuman protagonists are ubiquitous in Franz Kafka’s oeuvre, from his early stories down to the very last one. Among them we fnd dogs, jackals, leopards, a tiger, a panther, a vulture, a cat, and a mouse; a few unspecifed animals, such as a mole-like and a marten-like; mythological creatures, including sirens and a dragon; a kitten-lamb crossbreed; and several hum- animal protagonists: a human transformed into vermin, a man who used to be a horse, and an ape turned into a human being. Nonhuman animals1 abound also in Kafka’s personal writings. In a letter to his fancée, Felice Bauer, Kafka formulated his ultimate aim: “I strive to know the entire hu- man and animal community, to recognize their fundamental preferences, desires, and moral ideals, to reduce them to simple rules, and as quickly as possible to adopt these rules” (LF, 545). His diaries and letters also re- veal unique and enduring identifcations with nonhuman animals. “I am thriving among all the animals” (LFFE, 150), he declares in a letter to his friends Max and Elsa Brod, while visiting his sister on a farm in the village of Zrau. “But I truly sufered to the full the anguish of all animal nature” (LFFE, 216), he writes to another friend; and in a letter to Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator and intimate friend, Kafka states: “Fundamentally I was still only the animal, belonged still only in the forest” (LM, 159). In his biography of Kafka, Pietro Citati notes: He sensed an animal within him. Again and again, composing with the fgures of his unconscious a bestiary just as immense as a medi- 2RPP 2 Kafka’s Zoopoetics eval one. He felt within him a beetle or a hibernating cockchafer; a mole that dug tunnels through the ground; a mouse that fed the moment man arrives; a slithering snake; a worm squashed by a hu- man foot; a futtering bat; a parasite insect that fed on our blood; a sylvan beast that lay desperate in a flthy ditch or in its den; a crow gray like ashes with atrophied wings; a dog that snarled and bared its teeth at anyone who disturbed him, or barked nervously running around a statue; a twofold animal with the body of a lamb, the head and claws of a cat.2 Kafka’s fascination with animality, within and beyond humanity, did not escape his attentive early readers. In his essay on the tenth anniver- sary of Kafka’s death, Walter Benjamin maintains that “the world of his ancestors was as unfathomable as the world of realities was important for him, and we may be sure that, like the totem poles of primitive peoples, the world of ancestors took him down to the animals.”3 In a similar vein, Teodor Adorno notes that “the fight through man and beyond into the non-human—that is Kafka’s epic course.”4 Joachim Seyppel’s 1956 study, arguably the frst full-length essay on Kafka’s nonhuman animals, under- scores their central role in his writings: Tere is in particular one theme which has so far escaped accurate and detailed analysis: the animal theme. Tere are in his writings countless references to animals, human-animal comparisons, allu- sions to animal life, fables, and animal motifs; there are important works in which the human person has been transformed into an animal, or vice versa. Tere are hardly any stories in which Kafka did not include at least one signifcant reference to creatures of the animal kingdom.5 In their 1975 book on Kafka, Gilles
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