Of Cinema, Food, and Desire: Franz Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog"

Abstract

I. Food, Film, and a Desire to Nothing but Literature'Office life is a dog's life.' 'Yes, Kafka agreed, 'yet I don't . . . bark at anyone and I don't bite either. As you know-I'm a vegetarian. We only live on our own flesh.1Shortly after his early retirement in 1922 Franz Kafka went to live with his sister Ottla who was renting a summer cottage in rural community of Plana outside of Prague. There he worked in her vegetable garden, took long walks in woods with landlady's dog (Binder 1975, 358)2 and wrote one of his most accomplished and intricately reflexive short stories, Investigations of a Dog. Completed a few months after A Hunger Artist, Forschungen eines Hundes represents both final installment and culmination of Kafka's literary exploration of spiritual and socio-cultural significance of eating and food. Keying in on this largely underappreciated but abiding concern in this paper, I will read this overtly autobiographical tale as an ironic Bildungsnovella in which Kafka views trajectory of his creative development through prism of his own aesthetics.3 I will explore, more specifically, how strikingly cinematic quality of central event around which he spins this alimentary parable-about a canine nutritional scientist-is subtly informed by his ambivalence about emerging cultural phenomenon of early film. Narrated from perspective of dog, who traces vagaries of his obsessive dedication to this arcane field of inquiry back to crucial but inscrutable-and remarkably cinematic-experience that determined course of his life, canine protagonist offers a suggestive reflection on his creator s aesthetic breakthrough and subsequent writing in which eating, food, and largely subliminal vestigial effects of cinema are inextricably intertwined.Kafka's prodigious literary accomplishments in final years of his life are a testament to power of imagination under sign of not-eating. As if nourished by his advancing tuberculosis, which ravaged his body as it gradually starved him to death, Kafka wrote in last two years of his life some of his most acclaimed stories, his third novel, The Castle, as well as his genial pair of hunger parables. It is prophetically ironic that Kafka had actually considered in 1923-while living in Berlin with his young lover, Dora Diamant-immigrating to land of milk and honey where two open a restaurant and begin a new life, far away, as it was, from dire material conditions and chronic food shortages of inflation-wracked German capital (Diamant 2003, 49). In devoting himself to real business of food in this imagined eatery in promised land, Kafka fantasized achieving with Dora domestic happiness that always had been denied by ascetic demands of his literary pursuits, his desire to be but His literary ambitions, Kafka told Hermann Bauer, his prospective father-in-law, are simply at odds with everything in his life, including his ability to bring home bread: My job, he indulges,is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. . . . I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else. . . . Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs or delays me. . . . I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. (Kafka 1976, 230-31)4Kafka drafted this letter in summer of 1913 in heady period of writing and reflection that followed his celebrated creative breakthrough and engagement to Felice Bauer. Similar formulations of this new-found confidence in his ascetic drive are recorded in his diary and letters of August and September, 1913, in which he begins to push his unstinting identification with literature and his hermetic writing process to an extreme. It took several more years for him to understand this myth of his existence, his system of obsessions and the fundamentalist logic of purity, which in Reiner Stach's words, would enhance his life on a narcissistic level but consume all of its vitality (2005, 321ff, 421ff). …