Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier by Naama Harel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier by Naama Harel Carsten Strathausen Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier. By Naama Harel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Pp. 204. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0472131792. The premise of Naama Harel's insightful study of Kafka's animals is deceptively simple. What happens, she asks, if we refuse to interpret these figures allegorically—a critical tradition that has reigned supreme for most of the twentieth century and was due, in part, to Max Brod's heavy-handed editorial interventions into the unpublished manuscripts he inherited after Kafka's death—and instead read them straightforward, and literally, as stories about animals? What if the speaking ape Red Peter (from "A Report to an Academy") is not considered an allegory about Jewish assimilation or [End Page 611] about the human history of slavery, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, transcendence, etc., but rather considered a living being that, like all beings, stands for itself and not for something else? The idea is not as far-fetched as it might appear. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, exhibitions and performances of "learned apes" dressed like people and imitating basic human behavior (drinking, smoking, shaking hands) became increasingly popular in Western Europe and the US, which prompted well-known psychologists and anthropologists like Wolfgang Köhler and Lightner Witmer to test apes' cognitive abilities and signs of language use. Roland Reuß, the editor of the ongoing facsimile edition of Kafka's works, even found an advertisement for a learned ape show in the Prager Tagblatt (which Kafka read diligently) from March 1917, right around the time he wrote and published "A Report to an Academy." There is little doubt that Kafka, an avid reader of journals and magazines, was familiar with the subject and had heard of the most famous cases like the chimpanzees "Sultan" and "Consul Peter," both of whom are considered possible prototypes for Kafka's "Red Peter." As Harel points out, "the only difference between these performing apes and Red Peter is that the latter also learned to speak" (52). Harel is certainly not the first scholar to suggest nonallegorical readings of Kafka's animal stories. She herself notes that "the allegorical conception of nonhuman animals in fiction has been replaced in recent scholarship by a zoopoetic approach" (5). Still, with regard to Kafka, Harel is the first scholar to pursue this zoopoetic approach in a comprehensive and systematic manner across the board, with individual chapters dedicated to close readings of "The Metamorphosis," "A Report to an Academy," "Jackals and Arabs," "Researches of a Dog," and "Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse Folk." Her focus throughout remains on the myriad ways in which Kafka succeeds in undermining "the species barrier, creating a liminal human-animal space" that Harel refers to as "humanimality" (13) or "aspecies being" (133). The "gigantic vermin" identified as Gregor Samsa, for example, exhibits so many contradictory biological traits that its being cannot possibly be identified in scientific-entomological terms (as Nabokov and others have demonstrated). Instead, "it becomes clear that his verminous existence is not forced on Gregor from outside, by nature, but from his immediate human environment, namely his parents and sister" (46). Another example is Kafka "drawing attention to the anthropocentric premise of ordinary language" (138) by speaking of "hands" rather than "paws" to describe the aspecies protagonist in "The Burrow." This word choice prompts readers to assume that the protagonist is human until that fiction becomes increasingly untenable as the story progresses. A similar hermeneutic process occurs when Kafka prompts his readers to think of the protagonist Josefine as a mouse when, in fact, the only support for that reading is the ambiguous title of the story, "Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People," and the equally ambiguous reference to people's "fur" that seems to designate mice [End Page 612] yet might also function as "a synecdoche for a fur coat" worn by humans (150). In both cases, Kafka simultaneously invites and frustrates our efforts to maintain the species boundaries we are used to, implicitly making the point that species identity is neither biological nor objective but based on cultural...