Modern Language Review

In this book Naama Harel reassesses Franz Kafka’s animal stories not only as allegories for human behaviour, but also as literal representations of animals. Thus, she argues, ‘Kafka complicates the nonhuman experience, the human experience, and the differences between them’ (p. 162). The book is divided into three parts which focus on different stories and themes. Analyses of ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘A Report to an Academy’ comprise the first part of Harel’s book, wherein she discusses interspecies transitions. She then looks at ‘Jackals and Arabs’ and ‘Researches of a Dog’ to study the power relations constructed by anthropocentric hegemony. She concludes with a discussion of ‘The Burrow’, ‘Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse People’, and the fine line between ontological and performative hybridity. Harel’s ‘zoopoetic’ approach to Kafka’s works assesses two aspects of these stories that have taken a back seat to more allegorical readings. First, it allows her to examine ‘human–animal dynamics’ within the stories, and second, it allows her to show how these stories actually ‘explore the experience of nonhuman animals’ (p. 10).

As Harel understands it, ‘zoopoetics’, a term coined by Jacques Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I Am, rejects the role of fictional animals as simple allegories for human behaviour, thus dovetailing with the trend in recent Kafka criticism to eschew allegorical interpretations. Zoopoetics enable Harel to investigate Kafka’s animals qua animals, to show that Kafka’s reader ‘is already far away from the continent of man’, as in the remark of Walter Benjamin that serves as the book’s epigraph. Kafka even insisted to the publisher of ‘Jackals and Arabs’ and ‘A Report to an Academy’ that the stories are not parables but rather animal stories (Tiergeschichten). Going beyond the well-known fact that Kafka was a vegetarian, Harel points out his ‘identification with nonhuman animals’ at the beginning of Part ii, as depicted in The Blue Octavo Notebooks, wherein he refers to himself as a ‘hunted animal to be slaughtered’ (p. 82). Linguistically, Kafka’s ‘lexical differentiation of comparable human and nonhuman terms’ inverts the conventional German usage of words designated for animals or humans respectively, which [End Page 140] Harel carefully marks throughout the book (p. 84). Her work offers a fresh perspective on Kafka’s animal œuvre using zoopoetics, tracing the way Kafka shakes human–animal boundaries ‘that are [only] seemingly rigid and absolute’ (p. 157).

By positioning Kafka’s animals as other, Harel uses a rich pool of thinkers to show how more recent theory provides a framework for understanding ‘Kafka’s ultimate otherness’ (p. 14). For instance, in the first part of the book Harel compares Red Peter’s transition into humanity, in ‘A Report to an Academy’, to Franz Fanon’s liminal state between Martinique and French culture. Just as Fanon realizes that becoming white occurs through mastering language and behaviour, Red Peter gives his report using language as a ‘human’ in simian form. Because Red Peter retains simian characteristics and inclinations after his humanization, he ‘belongs to neither the oppressed nonhumans nor the human oppressors’, and this is Fanon’s liminal plight in Black Skin, White Masks in a nutshell (p. 75). Such connections between Kafka’s fictional animals, nonhuman otherness, and human otherness are persuasive. Harel finds Kafka’s works simultaneously depicting ‘nonhuman’ experience and relating to human experience. The result is the ‘humanimal’, both the human as animal and the animal as human. Harel shows how in Kafka’s works the otherized animal becomes similar to the human, while the human becomes dissimilar and animalized. The reader enters a post-anthropocentric arena as Harel contextualizes Kafka’s works with posthumanist theory.

Relying on such a wide array of sources, Harel can discuss each only briefly. Indeed, at times the sheer number of critical references swamps Harel’s own analyses, and pertinent connections are restricted to passing notice. For example, she begins her...