This month features Franz Kafka, 'Investigtions of a Dog', in The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, 0141186461, Penguin £7.99 |
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To write about Kafka is, I would say, to get him wrong.
His stories demand interpretation almost as much as they resist it; this is how he tantalizes and disconcerts. And perhaps the most disconcerting thing about Kafka’s stories is how short a step, within them, takes one from no-particular-interpretation to a grand, all-encompassing, all-limiting interpretation. Or in other words, from indolence to fundamentalism. If X is Kafka then Y is his father; if X is the Jews then Y is Yahweh; if X is humankind then Y is God; if X is modern man then Y is the inhumanity of the modern beaurocratic state.
And all of these interpretations are in themselves wrong, and yet there is always a chance that one combination of them might touch the truth closer than any other.
But it is in the touch that we come closest to Kafka: when we brush past rather than walk up to him; when what we get is a glimpse, not a totality – a cosmology.
It is a truism of literary studies, the rallying call at the end of a million term papers, that ‘What is important now is to go back and re-read such-and-such a text, in light of this-or-that new approach’. And yet, with regards to Kafka, it is a truism that happens to be true: there is always and only the going back, the hope of the next glimpse.
‘Forschungen eines Hundes’ was written in the summer of 1922, towards the end of Kafka’s life (1883-1924). Translated as ‘The Investigations of a Dog’ it is one of a clutch of stories (‘A Fasting-Artist, ‘The Burrow’) which share an amazing density along with what feels like an improvisatory lightness. Kafka, here, is juggling with black holes, and making it look easy.
‘The Investigations of a Dog’ is narrated by an old hound who has dedicated his life to the subject which has, since their earliest days, preoccuped dog-kind: food. More exactly, inquiring into the origins of food.
Kafka’s dogs do not perceive either men or women – although, for the reader, there is no doubt that men and women are invisibly there and are the most likely source of the food. This blindness is one of the main eccentricities of Kafka’s view of the dog view of the world. Even more eccentric is that his dogs, so far as we are shown, have no dominating sense of smell. When they wish to communicate, they don’t sniff, they bark; when they water the ground, it is not to spread news of their sexiness, but to bring forth food.
This, in one of Kafka’s most straightforward jokes, is ‘the little rule with which mothers wean their young and send them out into life: “Wet everything as much as you can.”
(I am generally wary of people who claim Kafka is a hoot – he makes me anxious and annoyed far more often than he makes me laugh.)
‘The Investigations of a Dog’, like many of Kafka’s stories, gives a strong sense of progressing, sometimes very fast, without actually moving forwards. By the end of the story, the dog – unable to perceive people or understand ownership – is no closer to discovering where his food comes from.
In a letter written nine years earlier, Kafka imagined receiving food from an invisible source.
‘I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellars’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For the extreme concentration known no effort. The trouble is that I might not be able to keep it up for long, and at the first failure… would be bound to end in a grandiose fit of madness.’
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