![]() According to this method, “In the Penal Colony” belongs with the law and punishment works of Kafka’s earlier period (“The Judgment,” The Trial, “The Stoker” 1), while “A Hunger Artist” belongs with the art and asceticism theme of his later works (“Investigations of a Dog,” “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk”). I will therefore break my thematic sequence slightly at this point to explore the victimization of the human animal, in its body, its feelings, and its instincts, in the interest of cultural values.īecause of their puzzling nature, and because they fall into chronological clusters, Kafka’s fictions are usually read in thematic or allegorical groups. I will present Kafka as a pornologist implicated in obsessional fantasies of cultural cruelty, yet shrewd enough to unmask their affinities to traditional cultural virtues (for example, scientific procedure, political order, spiritual ambition) and to unmask our enthrallment to them as libidinal perversion. ![]() ![]() Kafka’s critical tool in unmasking the hypocrisies and absurdities of cultural violence is pornology, because pornology functions as a parody, a travesty, a reductio ad absurdum of cherished intellectual and spiritual habits, and celebrates, in the libidinization of thought, the ultimate anthropocentric triumph over the vanquished beast. ![]() In spite of their human victims, these too are animal stories, demonstrations of the oppression and suppression of all that is creatural in the human-the body, feeling, pain, libido-in the ostensible interest of the twin demigods of human culture, rationalism and idealism. The Fate of the Human Animal in Kafka’s FictionĪlthough Kafka’s mature literary output includes four fully developed animal narrations (“A Report to an Academy,” “Researches of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk”) that explore increasingly feral ontologies and attempt to produce a virtually “species-specific” fiction, it is two nonanimal stories, “In the Penal Colony” and “A Hunger Artist,” that develop most fully the philosophical (or, perhaps, antiphilosophical) implications of cultural violence. ![]()
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