Perhaps it is because I have just finished the delightfully written To the Lighthouse, but reading Kafka’s ‘A report to an academy‘ this week for the up-coming modernism unit I am struck by the ambiguous narratorial position of the ‘former ape’ giving the report. Kafka’s brilliant conceit positions the speaker on the limits of humanity, which the story constructs as a position of authority and dignity, a liminal centrality. This is not a talking ape, neither is it a human talking about an ape. It is a human, who was formerly an ape, reflecting on “his” previous experience. The former ape clearly senses a continuity of selfhood between his former and current state (working from the English translation, we assume he is a “he” because he wears trousers), between “my existence as an ape” and his current state, and indeed he talks of “my previous life as an ape”.
This raises fascinating questions about the relation between language, humanity and animality, with the idea of man as the ‘speaking animal’ going all the way back to Aristotle’s zoon logon echon and the bestowal of language on humanity in the complex mise-en-scène of the spoken word in Genesis 1 and Adam co-naming the animals with Elohim, all the way through the animal rationale and down to contemporary debates. Is syntactic language what “makes us” human? It also raises questions about the translatability of experience across species, and provides a very fruitful site of reflection for colleagues and students working in areas like critical animal studies.
What interests me in this post is the way that the speaker is positioned neither fully inside nor fully outside the normal limits of human discourse. This is by no means an unusual position in modernist literature (or the literature of other periods, for that matter). The first comparison that comes to mind is Lucky’s extraordinary monologue in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:
Lucky is treated and named as an animal (remember Pozzo’s “Think, pig!”, in French the alliterative “Pense, porc!”).
Those who speak from the limits of the human frequently speak the truth that others cannot, or dare not, utter, somewhat in the manner of the Shakespearean fool. It would make a fascinating student research project to explore the liminarity of discourse across modernist literature, perhaps with Kafka’s ‘A report to an academy’ as a main reference.
See the Independent article ‘Kafka’s Monkey: Finding the Inner Ape‘,which discusses an adaptation of the story being staged at the Young Vic (London) in 2014:
See also Kari Weil, ‘A Report on the Animal Turn’, differences 21:2 (2010) 1-23. Weil discusses ‘A report for an academy’ throughout the article, but here is the paragraph in which it is introduced:
But how do we bring animal difference into theory? Can ani-
mals speak? And if so, can they be read or heard? Such questions have
deliberate echoes of the title of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay
in postcolonial theory, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” where she warns that
the critical establishment’s attempt to give voice to dispossessed peoples
will only result in their speaking the language of Western intellectuals
or being further dependent upon Western intellectuals to speak for them.
Her essay may serve as a warning to some who, for example, would try
to teach apes to sign in order to have them tell humans what they want.
Long before the existence of the Great Ape Project, the problematic was
exposed in Franz Kafka’s 1919 story “A Report to an Academy.” Red Peter,
the story’s narrator and protagonist, is presented as a representative of a
minority or subaltern group: he is an ape. But the appropriateness of any
of these designations is immediately brought into question as we learn that
he is an ape turned human who has been singled out by the “academy” to
give a report about his former life. Such a report, he admits, he is unable
to give. His memory of his life as an ape has been erased as a result of his
efforts to adopt the manners and language of his human captors. Instead,
he can only describe the process and progress of his assimilation from
the moment of his capture to his current success as an artistic performer
who smokes, drinks red wine, and converses like an “average European.”
Have a look also at this documentary about Koko the ‘talking’ gorilla:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwCrXVUm_Q
Finally, here is Judith Butler on Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes:
