Acerca De El Simio En La Literatura

Bestial Representations of Otherness:
Kafka’s Animal Stories
Matthew T. Powell
Walsh University

The grotesque in Kafka is most evocatively expressed in his animal stories. In his use of
animal protagonists, Kafka locates an opportunity to explore the tension between human
and non-human — the same tension that exists between self and other. By playing off
this tension between what is “theself ” and what is “not the self,” Kafka is able to explore
the ontology of otherness. He enlists animal stories in order to clarify the space between
self and other that is critical to maintaining notions of identity.
Keywords: Kafka / animal fables / otherness / grotesque / identity

O

ne of the most complex and befuddling characters in Kafka is Odradek. A
thing more than a person, anidea more than a being, Odradek is so confounding that even the narrator of its story finds it impossible to adequately
describe it. The best the narrator of “The Cares of a Family Man” can manage is to
attempt an explanation for the existence, nature, and appearance of Odradek, for
this character is not so much a static object as a dynamic presence, whose occasional
and random appearancesmerely hint at the possibility of something meaningful.
As a result, the fundamentally enigmatic character of Odradek presents as much
a problem for the reader as it does for its narrator, mainly because it does not
appear to exist within any traditional category or norm. It is described in terms of
an inanimate object, but it is also given the ability to talk and converse. It appears
both smalland fragile, yet has the ability to appear and disappear of its own volition. It is, as far as one can tell, a tragic, unfortunate creature, yet also quite likely
immortal. When the narrator poses the question of whether Odradek can “possibly
die?”, he is forced to admit that since it has no direction, purpose, or goal in life
it is unlikely to meet an end. This “flat star-shaped” objectresembling a spool for
thread is incomprehensible and absurd.
Odradek is all distortion and deformation. It is completely ludicrous and
uniquely uncanny. It is a rejection of both classical form and conventional norms.
And yet, there it is, placed directly on the doorstep of this modern “family man,” (in
the German, Hausvater) who is compelled by its very presence to puzzle over the
nature andpurpose of such a creation. In Odradek, Kafka does not merely hint at

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the presence or possibility of the grotesque, he meditates on the very riddle of its
existence. The grotesque in Kafka is much more than literary experimentation or
aesthetic choice; it is — I will argue — essential to his effort to explore the nature
of othernessin the modern Western world.
The grotesque in Kafka is most evocatively expressed in his animal stories.
In his use of animals as protagonists, Kafka finds the opportunity to explore the
tension between human and non-human — the same tension that exists between
self and other. In this “borderland between [hu]man and animal” (Caputo-Mayr
278), Kafka draws upon an extensive and ancient traditionof animal fables. Animal
stories, as Egon Schwarz argues, have their “roots in a prehistory when consciousness had not yet learned to distinguish between man and animal, when people
still believed the possibility of slipping from one to the other, entirely according to
desire or need” (84). The animal story relies upon the notion that animals have specific, predetermined characteristics (e.g.,dogs are obedient and apes are mimetic by
nature), whereas humans are a dynamic complex of characteristics. The projection
of animal characters onto human situations and predicaments allows for a measure
of clarity on our own existential dilemmas by the displacement of human desires
and weaknesses onto the “related but somehow inferior animal” (82). It is the
“inalienable mixture of human...