Kafka's Zoopoetics

Front matter

BEYOND THE HUMAN-ANIMAL BARRIER

NAAMA HAREL

Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction: Kafka and Other Animals

Part I: Interspecies Transitioning Chapter 1. The Metamorphosis of the Human/Animal Binary Chapter 2. A Transspecies’ Report to an Academy

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 find dogs, jackals, leopards, a tiger, a panther, a vulture, a cat, and a mouse; a few unspecified animals, such as a mole-like and a marten-like; mythological creatures, including sirens and a dragon; a kitten-lamb crossbreed; and several humanimal protagonists: a human transformed into vermin, a man who used to be a horse, and an ape turned into a human being. Nonhuman animals’ abound also in Kafka’s personal writings. In a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, Kafka formulated his ultimate aim: “I strive to know the entire human 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 reveal unique and enduring identifications 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 Ziirau. “But I truly suffered 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 figures of his unconscious a bestiary just as immense as a medieval one. He felt within him a beetle or a hibernating cockchafer; a mole that dug tunnels through the ground; a mouse that fled the moment man arrives; a slithering snake; a worm squashed by a human foot; a fluttering bat; a parasite insect that fed on our blood; a sylvan beast that lay desperate in a filthy 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.”

Kafka’s fascination with animality, within and beyond humanity, did not escape his attentive early readers. In his essay on the tenth anniversary 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.”’ In a similar vein, Theodor Adorno notes that “the flight through man and beyond into the non-human—that is Kafka’s epic course.” Joachim Seyppel’s 1956 study, arguably the first full-length essay on Kafka’s nonhuman animals, underscores their central role in his writings:

There is in particular one theme which has so far escaped accurate and detailed analysis: the animal theme. There are in his writings countless references to animals, human-animal comparisons, allusions 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. There are hardly any stories in which Kafka did not include at least one significant reference to creatures of the animal kingdom.’

In their 1975 book on Kafka, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define his writing as “essentially animalistic.”° In some contemporary scholarship, Kafkas work has been celebrated as unveiling a “creaturely realm” that is “marked by a sustained engagement with animality,” and Kafka himself hailed as a harbinger of animal studies critiques of anthropomorphism and as “the most thoroughgoing bestiarist of the modern period.” In fact, the neologism “zoopoetics” was coined by Jacques Derrida in reference to

“Kafka’s vast zoopoetics.”®

Resisting Allegorization

Despite the prominence of nonhuman animals throughout Kafkas writing, their representation has been predominantly regarded as a mere allegory of intrahuman matters, such as Judaism and Zionism, modern alienation, metaphysical concepts, and psychoanalytic ideas. In Die Funktion der Tierfiguren im Werke Franz Kafkas (1969), the first book dedicated to animal representation in Kafka’s work, Karl-Heinz Fingerhut concludes that Kafka’s animal figures are depictions of human attributes and ciphers of human thoughts.” The allegorization of Kafka’s animal stories is abundant in contemporary criticism as well, deriving from a widespread tendency to allegorize both animal stories and Kafka’s stories.

Nonhuman animal figures in literature have been interpreted first and foremost allegorically, that is, as representing something else. “Animals have served literature well. They have stood as allegorical figures to represent human nature and as a rich body of metaphors for the inanimate as well as the animate,”!

° maintains Mary Allen in the opening of her pioneering 1983 study Animals in American Literature. Yet reading nonhuman animals as standing for something else replaces a reading of them as standing for themselves. Allegorization is therefore an act of exclusion, as another pathbreaker in the field of literary animal studies, Margot Norris, states in her 1985 Beasts of the Modern Imagination: “Nowhere in literature were animals allowed to be themselves, to refer to Nature and to their own animality without being pressed into symbolic service as metaphors, or as figures in fable or allegory.”’’ More recently, Susan McHugh, in her critical study of animal stories, points out that “although animals abound in literature across all ages and cultures, only in rarified ways have they been the focal point of systematic literary study,”'? while Mario Ortiz-Robles notes that “from the earliest epics, fables, parables, and plays, animals have donned a great variety of guises to become the privileged presences that show us how to be human.”

‘The systematic exclusion of nonhuman animals from literary discourse despite their ubiquitous presence throughout the literary canon may be explained by a famous psychological experiment called “The Invisible Gorilla.” In this experiment, subjects were shown a short video of two groups passing basketballs around and asked to count how many times the players in one of the groups pass the ball. Halfway through the video, someone in a gorilla suit strolls into the middle of the screen, pounds his chest, and then walks out of the frame. Focusing entirely on the given assignment, about half of the subjects missed the gorilla. When asked if they had noticed anything unusual, whether they had spotted anything walk through the scene, even more specifically—if they had seen a gorilla, the answer was no. This experiment demonstrates selective attention, also known as inattentional blindness, such that we fail to see things we are not prepared to see."

“The Invisible Gorilla” first came to my mind while teaching a course on animal stories. When I mentioned Moby Dick, several students were surprised, for they could not recall any nonhuman figure in the book. Like the preoccupied viewers who had not seen the gorilla in the video, the students—preoccupied with the allegorical and symbolic functions of the whale—failed to notice the tremendous whale Moby Dick in Moby Dick. Literary critics are no different: they tend to read through nonhuman protagonists in literature, and thus these literary animals become invisible. Yet, unlike the invisible gorilla experiment, animal stories are read without any specific instructions. So why is the reader's attention so selective? What distracts the reader from the nonhuman figures? In a single word, the answer to these questions is anthropocentrism.

The term “anthropocentrism” was coined in the 1860s, amid the initial controversy over Darwins theory of evolution, to represent the view that humans are at the center of the universe. In animal studies and posthumanist theory, anthropocentrism is regarded as an ideology of human exceptionalism, which operates to “maintain the centrality and priority of human existence through marginalizing and subordinating nonhuman perspectives, interests and beings.”!° An overarching anthropocentric ideology directs our attention to specific things (humans) and away from others (nonhumans). Asking “What do they represent?” and “What do they stand for?” When dealing with nonhuman animals in literature, we often ask “What do they represent?” and “What do they stand for?” assuming that they cannot simply represent and stand for themselves, as they are neither important nor interesting in themselves. As numerous scholars have pointed out, nonhuman animals are typically invisible in the literary discourse, which projects upon them categories and values derived from human society.” The anthropocentric tendency to view nonhuman animals—neither the same as humans nor totally dissimilar—figuratively goes far beyond literary practices. “We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves,”'* Donna Haraway observes, echoing Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous saying, “Animals are good to think with.”””

Scholarly interest in nonhuman animals and their relations with humans has expanded considerably over the past few decades in various academic disciplines. In what is known as “the animal turn,” nonhuman animals have moved beyond the confines of the natural sciences, spreading to the humanities and social sciences, and have been brought within the scope of cultural, political, and ethical considerations. Engaging with various theoretical and critical approaches, the cross- and interdisciplinary field of animal studies (also known as human-animal studies or critical animal studies) has been energized since the 1990s by poststructuralist and posthumanist theorists. The subfield of literary animal studies, which emerged from the interplay between literary studies and animal studies, explores the representation of nonhuman animals in literary texts, as well as the cultural origins and impacts of fictional animal representations.”' In this way, the allegorical conception of nonhuman animals in fiction has been replaced in recent scholarship by a zoopoetic approach, which “revisits, examines, perplexes, provokes, and explores the agency of the nonhuman animal.””

Resistance to the allegorical reading of Kafka’s animals, however, is not limited to animal studies and posthumanist critique. Alongside the overall tendency to allegorize animal stories, there is also a pronounced inclination to allegorize the work of Kafka. It seems that the enigmatic nature of his fiction has led many of Kafka’s commentators in this direction. Max Brod, Kafka’s lifelong friend and posthumous editor and publisher, canonized the Jewish interpretations in the 1920s and 1930s, and gradually, as James Rolleston says, “It became evident that whatever worldview came to dominate the Western intellectual scene—existentialist, structuralist, postmodern—Kafka’s writing seemed to respond eagerly, as if pioneering the new trend.””? A similar observation can be found in Susan Sontag’s renowned essay “Against Interpretation’:

The work of Kafka . . . has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God.”

The allegorical approach to Kafka’s stories has been widely criticized in recent Kafka scholarship, which rejects allegorization as a barrier— rather than an aid—to understanding, pointing out that Kafka’s narratives have no simple allegorical key and therefore are not allegories at all.” As early as 1934, Walter Benjamin claims in his influential essay on Kafka, that “his parables are never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings. . . . Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points.” While Adorno also recruited Kafka to his ideological agenda, arguing that his work deals with the materialist mechanism of modern society, the main contribution of his landmark essay on Kafka was the rejection of Brod’s approach, according to which there is a one-to-one correspondence between Kafka’s fictional universe and extradiegetic ideas. As Adorno notes, in Kafka’s texts “Each sentence says ‘interpret me, and none will permit it.”” In fact, even Max Brod, who is identified with the allegorical approach to Kafka’s work—and the Jewish allegories in particular—argues in his biography of Kafka that “Kafka never is allegorical, but he is symbolical in the highest sense.”* Likewise, Albert Camus claims in “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka,” the appendix to The Myth of Sisyphus:

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread from another point of view.”

Heinz Politzer has famously coined the term “open parable” to describe Kafka's poetics, asserting that his stories indeed have meaning that exceeds the literal text, but that this meaning is evasive, and that the stories are therefore paradoxical: an unsolvable riddle. This approach has had a profound impact on Kafka studies. Relatedly, Gerhard Neumann labels Kafka's prose a “sliding paradox” (gleitendes Paradox) to refer to the way his writing confronts us with paradoxes; through devices like semantic displacements or alienating metaphors and the countering of reader’s expectation, Kafka leads his reader into a space where all rigid concepts begin to slip.’ Roland Barthes similarly emphasizes:

Introduction T

Kafka’s truth is not Kafkas world (no more Kafka-ism), but the signs of that world. Thus the work is never an answer to the world’s mystery; literature is never dogmatic. By imitating the world and its legends, the writer can show only the sign without the signified: the world is a place endlessly open to signification but endlessly dissatisfied by it. . . . Kafka’s narrative authorizes a thousand equally plausible keys—which is to say, it validates none.*”

More recently, Paul Haacke notes in his essay on Kafka’s political animals:

Kafka’s stories do not communicate an explanatory message in the voice of a didactic authority, and they are not presented in the form of teleological narratives that lead to a resolute moral, maxim or conclusion. Instead of providing examples for the purpose of instruction or guidance, they remain ambiguous, paradoxical, and open to multiple or conflicting interpretations.’

Paradoxically, this resistance to interpretation has become the most useful key for interpreting the work of Kafka.* In the conclusion of his Idea of Prose, entitled “Kafka Defended against His Interpreters,” Giorgio Agamben states that “the only content of the inexplicable—and in this lies the subtlety of the doctrine—consists in the command—truly inexplicable— ‘Explain!”*> Agamben’s words echo Kafka’s short piece “Prometheus,” which tells four different legends seeking to explain the myth, but eventually concludes: “There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable” (CS, 432). This metatextual theme can be traced in many of Kafka’s writings; for example, “On Parables” (“Von den Gleichnissen”) dramatizes the situation of those trying to find meaning in texts, stating, “In effect, all these parables merely attempt to say that the inconceivable is inconceivable, and we know that already” (KSS, 161). Likewise, the closing sentence of Kafka’s story “The Test” (“Die Priifung”) is “He who does not answer the questions has passed the test” (CS, 442). The priest’s words to Josef K. in Kafka’s novel The Trial (Der Prozess), “What is written is unchanging, and opinions are often just an expression of despair at that” (T, 157), can also be read as reflecting Kafka’s skeptical approach to interpretation.

Moreover, the inability of Kafka’s protagonists to reach the destination of their journey has been often read as equivalent to readers’ inability to reach their own destination in the journey of reading, which is supposed to culminate in finding the meaning of the story. This is, of course, central in Kafkas novel The Castle (Das Schloss), as well as in numerous short stories and fragments. The reaction of the policeman to the narrator’s request for directions in the short story “A Comment” (“Ein Kommentar”) may reflect Kafka’s reply to his commentators:

He smiled and said, “you want me to tell you the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I can’t find it myself.” “Forget about it! Forget about it!” he said, and with a broad swing of his body he turned away, like people who want to be alone with their laughter. (KSS, 161)

In the same vein, Kafka's brief story “Advocates” (“Fiirsprecher”) concludes:

So if you have started out on a walk, continue it whatever happens; you can only gain, you run no risk, in the end you may fall over a precipice perhaps, but had you turned back after the first steps and run downstairs you would have fallen at once—and not perhaps, but for certain. So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs wont end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards. (CS, 451)

The antiallegorical approach to the work of Kafka has also influenced the way his animal stories are read, and the critique that allegorization is counterpoetic has also brought about a growing interest in Kafka’s nonhuman animals per se. Drawing attention to Kafka’s statement in his diary, “Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing” (D, 398), Deleuze and Guattari apply this antimetaphorical approach to the nonhuman animals in Kafka’s oeuvre:

Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all designation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word. The thing and other things are no longer anything but intensities overrun by deterritorialized sound or words that are following their line of escape. 1t is no longer a question of a resemblance between the comportment of an animal and that of a man; it is even less a question of a simple wordplay.*°

Even within the allegorical framework, many literary scholars have long rejected the reduction of the text to the allegorical level. In his classic Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), William Empson states:

Part of the function of an allegory is to make you feel that two levels of being correspond to each other in detail and indeed that there is some underlying reality, something in the nature of things, which makes this happen. . . . But the effect of allegory is to keep the two levels of being very distinct in your mind though they interpenetrate each other in so many details.*”

Similarly, Angus Fletcher, in his extensive study of allegory, asserts that the literal level of many allegories is free of the usual allegorical intention, so that the work is no longer felt to be strongly iconographic. In such cases, the diegetic level of the narrative is to be taken in a completely literal way, becoming sufficient unto itself.** Northrop Frye also problematizes the very notion of allegory, arguing that every literary analysis is allegorical to some degree, as it exceeds the diegesis and refers to the actual universe; hence, he distinguishes a limit case of naive allegory, namely a work that is “so anxious to make its own allegorical points that it has no real literary or hypothetical center.”

Animal fable, in which the literal level is by definition subjected to the thematic level, seems to be such a limit case; but even the reduction of this limit case has been challenged. Reflecting on the role of nonhuman animals in animal fables, Emmanuel Levinas states that “men are seen as these animals and not only through these animals; the animals stops and fill up thought. An allegory is not . . . a poor man’s symbol.“ If even in animal fables the nonhuman animals should be taken into consideration, this must be even more so in complex texts such as Kafka’s animal stories. The poetic critique of allegorization thereby intensifies the animal studies critique, inasmuch as the reduction of literary nonhuman animals to intrahuman concepts fails to notice the complexity of both the literary text and the nonhuman animals.

Embracing Humanimality

‘The innovative zoopoetic approach to literary animals seeks to critically examine human-animal dynamics and explore the experience of nonhuman animals. The outlying position taken against the exploration of nonhuman experience presumes that such experience does not exist. The Cartesian doctrine, according to which nonhuman animals have no mental experience, not even the simplest experiences of pain and pleasure, as they are nothing but “machines made by the hands of God,”*! has long been abandoned and scientifically refuted.“ The common contemporary argument against representing nonhuman experience is now epistemological rather than ontological; it is concerned with denying, not the existence of nonhuman consciousness, but our ability to access it.

Indeed, the representation of nonhuman experience in fiction poses a unique challenge. In contrast to other artistic forms, the literary representation is restricted to a verbal account, and as such encounters stumbling blocks when depicting nonhuman focalization, which is inherently nonverbal. Unlike most other societal minorities, nonhuman animals cannot tell their own story; hence their representation is inevitably performed by humans.“ “How is it possible to be true to animal experience, even if that were the wish,” Gillian Beer asks, “if your medium of description is written human language?”* The fundamental challenge of nonhuman representation in literature was addressed already in 1927, in E. M. Forster’s famous treatise on the novel:

Since the actors in a story are usually human, it seems convenient to entitle this aspect People. Other animals have been introduced, but with limited success, for we know too little so far about their psychology. There may be, probably will be, an alteration here in the future . . . and we shall have animals who are neither symbolic, nor little men disguised, nor as four-legged tables moving, nor as painted scraps of paper that fly. It is one of the ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject-matter. But the help has not been given yet, and until it comes we may say that the actors in a story are, or pretend to be, human beings.*°

Since Forster wrote these words we have witnessed significant developments in cognitive ethnology that substantially contributed to the scientific knowledge of nonhuman animals. This knowledge, as Cary Wolfe notes, can be transferred from scientific to literary accounts:

Given what we have learned in recent decades about many nonhuman animals—the richness of their mental and emotional lives, the complexity of their forms of communication and interactions— many scholars now think that we are forced to make the same kind of shift in the ethics of reading and interpretation that attended taking sexual difference seriously in the 1990s (in the form of queer theory) or race and gender seriously in the 1970s and 1980s.“

In fact, animal literature should have not waited for a scientific breakthrough. First, as Konrad Lorenz shows, realistic animal fiction at the turn of the twentieth century—achieved by careful empathic observation and not by scientific knowledge—has largely influenced animal science, and not vice versa.“

More importantly, realistic writing of nonhuman animals is merely one possibility—among other options—for creating nonhuman figures who are more than merely “little men disguised,” in Forster’s terms, or “absent referents,” in Carol Adams's formulation.” Literary accounts are not restricted to realistic representation, and mimesis is neither the exclusive nor necessarily the preeminent manner of depiction in literature. As Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey assert in their study of nonhuman animals in literature:

What literature can do—as can probably no other discipline—is to reconnect us with the world of animals. No matter how much we may learn about animals from disciplines such as psychology and biology (for they have much to teach us), that knowledge cannot replace the insights that can come from the disciplined exercise of our imagination.”

The fact that the protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, for example, abruptly transforms from male to female with no explanation certainly does not mark gender issues as irrelevant to the novel. In like manner, species issues are essential when discussing Gregor Samsa’s overnight transformation from human to nonhuman in Kafkas “The Metamorphosis,” regardless of the nonrealistic nature of this transformative event.

Literary nonhuman animals, including anthropomorphized ones, should raise questions about human/nonhuman dynamics and illuminate the nonhuman condition. Anthropomorphism, in other words, is not equivalent to anthropocentrism. Narratives that use anthropomorphism and do not represent nonhuman animals faithfully may have—beside anthropomorphic elements—other elements that deal with the nonhuman experience, as well as human-nonhuman relations and dynamics. “There are degrees of personification,” I. A. Richards argues in his epochal Practical Criticism (1929); “it can range from a mere momentary loan of a single human attribute or impulse to the projection of a complete spiritual being.”*! Various contemporary scholars have recognized the literary spectrum of anthropomorphism, falling between the pure mimetic and the completely anthropomorphized representation.” As Erica Fudge observes:

Anthropomorphism might actually serve an ethical function: if we don't believe that in some way we can communicate with and understand animals, what is to make us stop and think as we experiment upon them, eat them, put them in cages? By gaining access to the world of animals, these books offer a way of thinking about human-animal relations more generally, and potentially more positively.”

Consider, for example, the Aesopian fable “The Man and the Lion Traveling Together”:

A man and a lion were traveling along together one day when they began to argue about which of them was stronger. Just then they passed a stone statue representing a man strangling a lion. “There, you see, we are stronger than you,” said the man, pointing it out to the lion. But the lion smiled and replied: “If lions could make statues, you would see plenty of men under the paws of lions.” y P P

This fable, which on the literal level deals with human-animal power relations, has been largely read as a fable about power relations within humanity. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips, for example, famously referred to it in his 1845 preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: “You remember the old fable of “The Man and the Lion, where the lion complained that he should not be so misrepresented when the lions wrote history. I am glad the time has come when the ‘lions write history.” Nevertheless, such reading, which sees the lion as standing for subordinate groups, deprived of self-representation, should not exclude nonhuman animals, who inherently cannot represent themselves. The anthropomorphized lion, who anticipates here the contemporary critique of the canon, radically exposes cultural representations as anthropocentric practice that merely reflects the perspective and interests of the dominating humans.

Like Aesop’s lion, as well as many other anthropomorphized animals, Kafka’s anthropomorphized figures can also be read in a nonanthropocentric way. Following the Kantian account of imagination as “another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it,” Hannah Arendt contends that it is a misunderstanding to class Kafka with the surrealists. Arendt describes Kafkas storytelling as the construction of models, comparing them to blueprints, “which sometimes in a page, or even in a single phrase, expose the naked structure of events,” and can be understood only “by those who are willing and able to realize by their own imagination the intentions of architects and the future appearances of buildings.”*” Paradoxically, Kafka’s nonrealistic depiction of social reality is regarded as peculiarly truthful; hence Georg Lukács holds that “Kafka belongs with the great realist writers.”°’ Correspondingly, Kafka’s nonrealistic portrayal of nonhuman animals, who intertwine both human and nonhuman traits, should be viewed as a truthful alternative to the anthropocentric human-animal contradistinction. Like Woolf’s case of gender fluidity, Kafka’s species fluidity implies the radical suspension of the human/animal binary. Standing on the threshold between humanity and animality, Kafka’s fictional creatures undermine the species barrier, creating a liminal human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.”

Species fluidity in literature at the turn of the twentieth century, which is part of the larger phenomenon of animal abundance in the literature of this period, has been broadly recognized in literary animal studies as post- Darwinian.” Inspired by Darwin's theory of the mutability of species and intensified by Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysical anthropocentrism, as well as Freud’s mapping of the unconscious, the notion of the animalized human struck at the normative thinking and imaginary at the turn of the twentieth century.” In his memoir Conversations with Kafka, Kafka's friend Gustav Janouch tells an anecdote indicating that Kafka himself viewed his humanimal writing as a product of the zeitgeist. Janouch had presented to Kafka David Garnett’s Lady into Fox, a British metamorphosis novella published in 1922, suggesting that Garnett had imitated Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Rejecting the idea of plagiarism, Kafka’s reply was: “But no! He didn’t get that from me. It’s a matter of the age. We both copied from that. Animals are closer to us than human beings. That’s where our prison bars lie. We find relations with animals easier than with men.”*! Alongside the post-Darwinian zeitgeist, Kafkalogists have also related the poetics of Kafka to his sociopolitical condition as a German Jew living in Prague. Examining Kafka’s writing through a sociohistorical prism, Pavel Eisner, in his 1948 Franz Kafka and Prague, depicts Kafka as living in a “triple ghetto”:

In the eyes of the Czechs, the German Jew was a stranger in three senses: as a Jew, either owing to creed or to unmixed blood; as a generally comfortable, prosperous and, often enough, rich citizen, in the midst of a crowd of proletarians and small bourgeois; and thirdly, as a German.”