Kafka and his Zoo.
Perfection, Happiness, and Suffering.
ABSTRACT
Professional and nonprofessional philosophers have sometimes resorted to allegories taken from the animal
world in order to elucidate their crucial points. Of particular interest are Hobbes’ Leviathan and Swift’s Gulliver
which have been given fair attention to, but the point of reflecting on the human condition through animality has
not been considered very thoroughly. I first wish to reflect on them from this point of view and argue that both
authors have been deeply worried about the fundamental imbalance of human nature which they saw being
composed of an animal and a divine part. I then turn to the animal world of Franz Kafka. It is seldom noticed
how deeply he was fascinated with the merging of humanity and animality: man turning into an insect in the
Metamorphosis; the parable of the jackals in Jackals and Arabs; an ape turning into a human being in the Report
to an Academy; a human being in an animal cage in The Hunger Artist; a mysterious, hyperrational burrowdigger in The Burrow; and finally, a virtual zoo in The Castle. It will be argued that Kafka’s unique addition to
the Hobbesian and the Swiftian tradition is the profound understanding of suffering. He presents us with two
distinct vision of suffering, through his animals: one is the pure, passive suffering of the creation which begins
with acceptance and ends with meaning. The other is the zoo-like, humanistic, power-ridden animality
represented by the Castle which turns out to be a parable about Hell.
1. Animality and Divinity
Regardless of culture and age, human imagination has ever been fascinated with animals.
Animals populate folk tales and religious mythology alike. It is especially religion which has
everywhere exploited the possibility of explaining the otherness of gods in forms and shapes
of animals. Animality proved to be the most suitable carrier and transmitter of the idea that
Being can be intelligent, conscious, volitional, even perfect, and at the same time also
inhuman or transhuman. From this perspective, the greatest event in religious history was the
breaking of the golden calf as the representation of God. From that moment on, the religions
of the Book have always abhorred the idea of comparing animality to deity. Instead, animality
has become for them the symbol of the underworld, the negation of Heaven, the home of the
Devil, in this way preserving something from the ancient significance of animality as
transhumanity yet completely relegating it to the world of negative otherness.
In particular, the Christian Bible ends with God’s victory over the Dragon and the
Beast. The Apocalypse is full of enigmatic animals and other strange actors in the great
theatre of creation, building especially on the Book of Ezekiel, but in its final vision,
animality is a symbol of everything hostile to God and his cause, his people, his church. Thus,
it is no more a representative of the Devil, it is also a representation of all evil powers,
intentions, plots, false religions, beliefs, and teachings; historically, Rome and the Roman
Empire; and later, corrupted religion and heresy.
Given the force of these images that have shaped Western civilization so profoundly, it
is somewhat surprising that philosophers have paid scant attention to the explanatory potential
of the metaphor of animality. Of course, many philosophers thought it to be their duty to fight
metaphors in the name of reason. No wonder that it was the most practical field of
philosophy, that is, moral and especially political philosophy, which rediscovered the
potential of arguing in and with images. By this it opened up the gates for literature. This is, I
believe, an especially promising field of research where political philosophy and fiction
merge.
2. The Leviathan and The Gulliver: The Two Natures of Man
I think there are two great visions in classical theory and literature that have set the stage for
Kafka’s zoo. The more famous one, at least within political philosophy circles, is of course
Hobbes’ Leviathan. Though the front page of the book depicts a human person with a crown
1
and not a brute of whatever shape, the title is an unequivocal reference to the Bible in which
the Leviathan is mentioned several times. According to Peg Birmingham,1 the particular
verses Hobbes had in mind were those to be found in the Book of Job, chapter 41 where God
addresses Job and makes him admit his utter powerlessness facing the Leviathan. It is here
portrayed first as a monster of the sea, the creature of God, yet at the end it is called the king
of the children of pride, that is, it looks like a distinctively human power. Hobbes exploited
this latter sense of the image, preserving both the mortality and the deity aspect of his
Sovereign by calling it a mortal god. By this Hobbes returns to the pre-Christian and preJewish approach of animality which, here again, conveys not only an aspect of inhumanity,
instinctivity, and the sheer terror of physical strength but also an aspect of
incomprehensibility, perfection, divine nature. But what is at stake is not just the Leviathan. It
is each and every human being. Hobbes’ philosophical revolution does not merely consist in
inventing collective personality and deducing it from the social contract. His vision of human
nature is perhaps as important as are his political conclusions. For when characterising the
state of nature, that is, the fundamental interpersonal relationships, he emphasises both its
social and antisocial aspects, though in the political philosophical tradition much of the
original message has become obfuscated. We are usually told that in Hobbes’ view homo
homini lupus est, and seldom that his De Cive declares that it is equally true that homo homini
deus est. In other words, much as the Leviathan itself, we are all peculiar creatures in whom
there is a fundamental imbalance between animality and divinity. We all are little leviathans.
Every human being is an unresolvable, living paradox. We are, to correct the received
translation of the Choir’s words of the Antigone, not wonderful but awful – that is, aweful –
creatures. We are not simply exceptional – we are exceptions.
The other vision of human nature which brings animality and divinity to the centre and
combines them in a largely forgotten way is much less used in political philosophical
textbooks but it is well-known as a literary masterpiece. This is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, in particular, the Fourth Travel. The intelligent, virtuous, and perfect horses are
famously contrasted with the nasty, vicious, irrational yahoos. In Swift’s philosophically and
theologically educated imagination the ancient myths and poetic devices, which expressed the
paradox of humanity in the images of centaurs, satyrs, and fauns, that is, beings literally
composed of human and animals parts, have become refined instruments by which we can
begin to analyse the paradox itself. Commentators have ever been split between the so-called
hard2 and soft3 interpretations of the Fourth Travel, that is, between judging it to be either a
utopia or a dystopia. The reason why this split remains incurable seems to be the Hobbesian
insight about human nature as involving a fundamental imbalance. Quite understandably, we
are constantly driven by the desire to resolve that paradox, either in the way the horses
organised their society, or in a way that begins with a rejection of the ’horsian’ solution.
This is not the place to discuss which solution Swift himself would have chosen. Most
probably, he was indifferent, only keen on being as consistent as possible about the
consequences of either solution. For if we choose or believe to be able to choose, as Gulliver
himself chose or thought to be able to choose, the life and society of the horses, we must
abandon much of what we cherish in our corrupt but enjoyable society, and to follow
Mandeville’s bees to poverty and honesty, to cite another famous allegory from the animal
1
Birmingham, Peg. „Arendt and Hobbes: Glory, Sacrificial Violence, and the Political Imagination,” Research
in Phenomenology, 41 (2011), 1-22.
2
E.g. Hammond, Eugene R. „Nature – Reason – Justice in Utopia and Gulliver’s Travels,” SEL 22 (1982): 44568.
3
E.g. Nichols, Mary P. „Rationality and Community: Swift’s Criticism of the Houyhnhnms,” The Journal of
Politics 43 (1981), 1153-69.
2
world. And worse, we shall have to think of ourselves as the horses do as being perfect and in
need of no scientific, philosophical, and indeed, moral progress. But this is exactly the life of
animals as deities. Perfect, naturally rational or rationally natural, omniscient and absolutely
closed and ignorant. But if we choose to reject such an option, Swift tells us, then we face the
option of the yahoos. They, too, are perfect in the sense of perfect viciousness, whence for
them no moral progress is conceivable, either. The yahoos represent the Judeo-Christian
vision of animality. They are like the collective incarnation of the seven grave sins, as
represented by the seven heads of both the Dragon and the Beast in John’s Apocalypse. Can
we keep a balance between the two options? Swift, as I suggested, leaves this question
unanswered but invented the rarely discussed the figure of Gulliver, who is a deeply confused
and torn soul, in constant anguish, desperation, and frustration.
The Leviathan, at least in Hobbes’ hopes, provides a solution for Gulliver. It is perfect,
absolutely rational, yet based on the most elementary instincts of human nature: fear and
pride. It is an elaborate balance of animality and divinity, springing out from the imbalance of
the same two components that pervades human nature as it appears in us individually. Swift
agrees with Hobbes about our nature being torn between these two extremes but he is
skeptical about Hobbes’ conclusions. His Gulliver does not draw philosophical consequences
from his experiences with the horse-yahoo dichotomy. He is desperate to belong to the horses
and rejects the yahoos absolutely. But he miserably fails to become a horse, he cannot make
even an ass, and ends up as an outcast, that is, the most asocial and unpolitical being in the
whole creation. With Gulliver, an entirely new dimension is added to the relationship between
animality and divinity, and this is enduring, incurable suffering. Hobbes’ savages suffer from
fear and continue to fear the Leviathan, thus fear accompanies us throughout our life. But this
is a passion which, notwithstanding its pervasiveness, is containable, managable, exploitable.
Swift’s horses do not suffer at all, they are just increasingly perplexed about Gulliver’s
fervent desire to become something he is not, and his fear not to be counted as a yahoo which
he, as the horses conclude, is, after all. The yahoos do suffer a lot but they are utterly
unconscious of it. We may say that they only feel pain or pains, but have no concept of
suffering. None of these societies have a sense how and why Gulliver is in total anguish.
3. Kafka’s Zoo: The Suffering Animals
My basic contention is that it is Franz Kafka who brings us closest to understanding how
suffering is related to the problem of animality and divinity.4 My focus will be The Castle, his
last and unfinished piece of work, but his other writings also deserve attention from this point.
Of course, unlike Hobbes, Kafka does not use his images to substantiate a philosophical
argument, and unlike Swift, he does not aim at a direct, though ambiguous, social criticism of
human society. He seems to be more within a sort of a mythical tradition, his whole oeuvre is
but a series of myths, and it is astonishing to see how deeply he is interested in the animal part
of ancient mythology. It is beyond my proper subject to speculate about Kafka’s Jewish roots
influencing his ambivalent relationship towards animality, that is, his religious instincts
revolting against a deification of animals, yet his human instincts making him fascinated with
the secret life and otherness of animals. However, it would be unreasonable to dismiss a
hypothesis about such influences altogether.
His Metamorphosis, to begin with, is a direct reference to the most elaborate tenet of
ancient mythology, if not theology. This is that our most profound desires, our conceptions of
the good life as condensed in a single concern or purpose, have the potential of becoming
4
Jane Bennett writes that Freud noted that „the boundary between animate and inanimate” is particularly apt for
producing uncanniness and adds that such an effect is expected from the boundary between human and animal.
See „Kafka, Genealogy, and the Spiritualization of Politics,” The Journal of Politics, 56 (1994), 650-70.
3
everlasting. Not as gods or as other deific figures, of course, but in some ever-recurring
natural form such as a tree, a flower, or an animal, or in some unchanging element of nature,
such as a star or a rock. Thus, philosophically speaking, what we wittness is not a change of
something but only of its form. From this perspective Gregor Samsa’s transformation, though
it takes place at the very beginning, and not at the end, is only a change of shape, not of
essence. The essence is, therefore, that he has ever been an insect, a bug, a form of animal life
that is usually associated with dust, soil, and decay, and which recalls, in a religious context,
Psalm 22:6 „I am a worm and no man,”5 and from Kafka’s own oeuvre, the decaying,
decomposing Gracchus, the hunter or the hunger artist whose final days in his cage resemble
much of Samsa’s life in his confinement, or the formless, hyperrational, solitary burrow
digger. Samsa’s form of life is similar to that of the yahoos, coupled with a total
insignificance, absolute impurity, devoid even of the yahoos’ social capabilities. Though he is
still a thinking and conscious being, his existence is reduced to almost nothing, to the
periphery of life. There is no hope, no return, but we may wonder to what he could return at
all. Thus, one of Kafka’s most powerful and recurrent image of animality is in line with the
general European tradition which abhors animality to the extreme. But by saying that for
Kafka, as for many of his predecessors, animality is possibility within human nature, we also
imply that the animal form is an expression of a state of mind or consciousness as the psalm I
cited also made it clear. The great invention of Kafka consists in using the image of animality
to consider, beyond reason, passion, virtue and vice, another fundamental human capacity, the
one of suffering, and thereby tieing up animality and divinity in a new, modern way.
For Gregor Samsa is not merely a form a life reduced to pure inferiority. He is also a
symbol of pure suffering. By this I mean absolute passivity, or passio which is not simply
physical pain which we can either alleviate or at least protest against. Nor is it spiritual or
emotional torment, for the centre of this is always our personality, our ego, that is, a self that
cannot help being active, until the final moment of, say, suicide. But Samsa cannot kill
himself. This is a thought that never occurs to him. Animality excludes suicide, much as
divinity does it, too. Pure, absolutely passive suffering is beyond any action and any word. It
is something unspeakable, of which we are hardly conscious of. We almost need animals to
come close to our own suffering and articulate it, though articulation does not happen in and
by words and gestures. Such suffering is more a condition than a concrete pain or feeling
which we can express and describe. This is how Kafka in another story, once again, featuring
yet another abominable race, is able to talk about thisal race figures. This is the Jackals and
Arabs. At the key moment when the traveler asks the speaker of the jackals what they desire,
the old jackal exclaims
“Cleanliness – that’s what we want – nothing but cleanliness.” Now they [the animals]
were all crying and sobbing. „How can you bear it in this world, you noble heart and
sweet entrails? Dirt is their [the Arabs’] white; dirt is their black; their beards are
horrible; looking at the corner of their eyes makes one spit; and if they lift their arms,
hell opens up in their arm pits.”6
Whatever the meaning of the conflict between jackals and Arabs is, whatever cleanliness and
purity amounts to here, whatever the whole story is all about, the animal part of the world
here is compressed in a single cry. We cannot bear it any more, our whole world is nothing
5
This is often cited in the Christian tradition of Good Friday. Jesus as God becoming almost literally the most
powerless creature imaginable, hence, an animal form of life representing the highest intention of God – this is a
new perspective on animality and divinity in Christian theology as well.
6
http://www.kafka-online.info/jackals-and-arabs-page2.html
4
else but a continuous desperation. This recalls another, this time Christian, tradition that
originates in Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:19-22) where he writes that
Creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God [and that]
the creation itself shall be set free from slavery to corruption” (…). We know that all
creation is groaning in labor pains even until now.
But creation, that is, nature, is also us, hence it is especially our own animal nature that suffers
most, by which we can have an access to the pure suffering so much needed to wipe out our
egoism and make us capable of receiving pure grace, the enlivening touch of the Creator.
Animality is thus, for Kafka, not just an inferior inhuman state. Contrary to the ancient
tradition in which the result of the metamorphosis into an animal form of life was final and
irreversible, Kafka’s animals, even the venominous bug that Samsa became, are suffering
beings and their passio, their passivity and helplessness is also an unspoken and silent, but
just because of this also a very loud, even screaming, desire to be saved, to be let free.
This is what Edvard Munch, the painter of The Silent Scream, noted in his diary in
January 1892:
I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of
melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped, and leaned against the
railing, deathly tired. Looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a
sword over the blue-black fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there,
trembling with fear. And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature.7
4. Suffering in Political Philosophy
All this may sound like existentialism, a philosophy not really interested in the public sphere,
let alone politics. Gulliver became, after all, an outcast, and upon his enforced return to
England he remained a recluse. But we may recall, for instance, the enormous political
potential of Marxism in history and we can find in Marx’ writings a clear expression of an
almost Kafkaesque idea of an inarticulable suffering, here, of course, that of the proletariat:
As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal
functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up,
etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.
What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.8
In other words, the worker’s existence is reduced to sheer animality, for it is only the form
that remains human, the essence is animal. Yet again, the very concept of alienation or
enstrangement is nothing but an expression of nothingness, a relation of non-relation or the
constantly frustrated relation between a human being and her humanity, and in this sense just
that silent scream, unconscious suffering, that Kafka’s animals all represent. And who could
deny the liberative but also destructive power of the animal part of human nature so
conceived? For suffering, though entirely passive in animals, becomes a sweeping force in
human beings.
It’s not, as was said, just the Benthamite calculus of pleasure and pain. Nor is it the
more elevated and sublime Kantian theory of morality with its today most popular formula of
7
Taken from: http://lukecore.hubpages.com/hub/The-Scream-by-Edvard-Munch-a-critical-analysis
Marx, Karl. The Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm
8
5
humanity, to quote Christine Korsgaard’s term, which prescribes that we should consider all
our fellowmen ends in themselves and never as instruments, implies not only a duty to respect
each human being for being a human being but also a duty not to endure his or her suffering
because suffering is fundamentally inhuman. Suffering can capture us and push us beyond our
humanity and degrade us to animality. By and in suffering nature treats us as her instruments
which in intolerable. Both radically political Marxism and radically moral Kantianism are
profoundly hostile to suffering which both consider animal in the old Christian-Jewish
religious sense and in need of abolition.
But how this possible? Retrospectively speaking, if we asked Hobbes, he would
probably say that the best antidote to all such suffering is the power of the Leviathan. Though
he exalts its animal features, he does not celebrate it for its animal perfection which, as we
maintain, does not exclude suffering. On the contrary, it is reduced, in the end, just to
suffering. Hobbes presents us the sovereign as a divine being that cannot, by definition,
suffer. This is one of its remarkable properties. Its members may perish but it lives as long as
the will to maintain it lives. There is nothing it cannot do. It is sheer power and nothing but
power. And power so conceived is immune to suffering. By participating in that will we are
also powerful and hence do not suffer any more. That is the perfection and the glory of the
Leviathan, and that is exactly why it is divine.
Of course, neither Marx, nor Kant would subscribe to such a solution. Marx would
probably trust material progress, whereas Kant would opt for moral progress. Both of them
would find a place within the Swiftian utopia/dystopia, however, but if we spoke to Swift
himself, he would probably smile and point to both the horses and yahoos, leaving the choice
to us. The horses know no suffering, hardly have pains, and absolutely no emotional and
spiritual torments. It’s just that we must be perfectly rational, virtuous, and good, that is,
divine; which, being Gullivers, is not an option for us but rather, a source of an even greater
suffering. The other option is an immersion in the negative side of animality as represented by
the yahoos who, as was said, do have pains, and sometimes have bad moods like spleen that is
totally inexplicable to the horses, but the yahoos remain, so to speak, comfortable with their
life, they seem to fit in nature as a bad but still hilarious, joke. We can, thus, perhaps forget
about our suffering, the price of which is the life the yahoos have. If we do not want to forget
but are unsatisfied with the Marxian and the Kantian hopes as well, as were many of the
philosophers of the first half of the 20th century, who seem to have converted to a Hobbesian
belief in power and the power of power to give meaning to suffering, then we have a very
good reason to consider Kafka’s thoughts on this subject.
5. The Castle
Kafka’s most developed account of this subject, that is, the interrelations of animality,
divinity, suffering, and perfection, is undoubtedly to be found in The Castle. Its
interpretational history is rich, and there is no chance here even to allude to the major views
of it. But what is missing from all these views is, as far as I can tell, a consistently applied
approach especially to the Herren society or more broadly, the castle officers, as an elite
similar to the horses in Swift’s Fourth Travel the reading of which, by the way, Kafka had
finished just before he began to write The Castle.
Let me first give some textual evidence to support this claim. On the most general
level, as I tried to show, the motive of animality is a red line throughout Kafka’s whole oeuvre
which itself is a strong reason to look for it in this last great novel, too. In particular, figures
belonging to the lower cast of the castle society behave themselves much like dogs. K.’s
assistants, sent by the Castle, are practically indistinguishable from one another. Their major
responsibility is to guard the castle from K.. Nevertheless, K. treats them usually harshly,
6
often cruelly, whereas their main activity seems to consist in watching, being always around,
but of little help. Similarly, castle servants behave like unruly dogs whom Frieda, K.’s lover,
must chase in the stable with whips and who cause much trouble to her for regularly making
the inn a complete mess.
Officials, too, are often comparable to animals. And to not too noble ones, for that.
After his interview with the official Bürgel K. wittnesses the process of distributing the files
to the officials who are just waking up and demanding their portions. The air is full of sounds
similar to those of hens and cocks which are just being fed and which make much noise in
their cages. In this scene, the servants are the feeders and the officials are merely the chickens.
Dogs and chickens, with Klamm, the highest ranking official on the top who is called by her
former mistress, now inn-keeper Gardena, an ’eagle,’ to emphasize K.’s nothingness, but
ironically also ’degrading’ Klamm to the status of the king of the chickens.9 Frieda, Klamm’s
actual mistress abandons him easily for K., the nothing, but maintains that her new and
already consummated relationship to K. is somehow Klamm’s work. She attributes to Klamm
the power of a pet that children may simultaneously idolize and treat carelessly. Village
inhabitants generally acknowledge that castle officials need much care and tenderness. They
sleep a lot, they are particularly sensitive to change and the unusual, and they have their
sexual needs which have to be satisfied much like the natural needs of any domestic animal.
Finally, when Barnabas, Olga’s brother enters the castle offices, he cannot speak, cannot talk,
but holds a document in his hands and watches in awe as the officials are doing their jobs
behind the desks. Not a single movement is comprehensible to him, much as we, upon visiting
a zoo, are merely wondering what those animals behind the fences, may think and why they
are doing just what they doing.
Given the complex symbolism of the castle, its inhabitants have been compared by
commentators to semi-gods and semi-devils, to mythical figures, symbols, to children and
sometimes also to animals.10 Based on the previous findings, this latter suggestion is the most
fitting one, and the castle ’society’ can be considered another version of the horse society. But
it is also divine, as other commentators noted. Both societies are self-contained, hyperrational,
convinced of their own perfection and infallibility, living in a strict caste system, though not
at all aggressive or tyrannical, on the contrary: vulnerable on many counts. But there is a
fundamental difference between them, and this is exactly the point Kafka so forcefully makes.
This difference is that despite its perfection and the awareness of this perfection the castle is
essentially unhappy and this unhappiness makes it suffer to its very essence. The question is:
is this the kind of animal suffering, the self-conscious, utterly passive kind of suffering of
animals or of Gregor Samsa which brings them close to divinity?
To answer this question let me first substantiate the point about the castle’s profound
unhappiness. Bürgel, the official with whom K. tries but fails to converse, reveals the secret of
the castle which K., for being half in sleep, does not notice:
It [an accidental interview with an official during night] is a situation in which it will
soon become impossible to refuse a request. Strictly speaking you are desperate but
even more strictly speaking you are very happy. Desperate because (…) once [the
request] is made you must grant it even if (…) it positively wrecks the official
9
And Frieda lets K. watch Klamm through a hole on the door, like an object or animal whose behavior is, again,
mysteriously uninteresting. Klamm sits like an eagle in his cage and does not do anything. There is also a
historical allusion to the Habsburg Eagle in the metaphor.
10
Ritchie Robertson („Introduction” to Franz Kafka: The Castle, transl. by Anthea Bell, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009, xi-xxvii) mentions similar analogies, wheres W. G. Sebald („The Undiscover’d Country:
The Death Motif in Kafka’s Castle,” Journal of European Studies, 2, 1972: 22-34) refers to the zombie-like
behavior of the assistants.
7
organization. (…) Yet all the same we are happy. How suicidal happiness can be!
(emphasis added).11
The official who is trapped in and by the situation and feels that he must help the client in
ways officially forbidden to him is not motivated by benevolence. The hidden motive is his
unfulfillment, his profound unhappiness. It is the official, and through him, the castle that
desires to be saved, even killed. For whereas the Swiftian horses are content with their being
horses, that is, the most perfect beings ever created, and they are happy, at the height of his
revelation Bürgel talks about happiness being suicidal. When the castle grants the request of a
client it also implies that it did not know what the client wanted or needed. That is, it was not
omniscient. Hence the reference to suicide, and the foreboding that happiness supersedes
perfection understood as absolute knowledge, and may consist just in its denial.12 Of course,
all this is impossible. The castle will never grant a request. And thus remains doomed to
suffering.
Thus, the perfection of the castle and its officials is a desperate, profoundly unhappy
type of perfection. As Bürgel explained, the way of being, indeed, the essence of being for the
castle officials is not what they do but what they are waiting for. Hence their cruel, truly
animal, custom of abusing village women is a sign of their deeply hidden, unspeakable,
unarticulable, adolescent, and yet authentic and sincere yearning for happiness. Sortini’s
summoning letter to Amalia is said to have been written in nasty and brutal terms, in a style
absolutely different from the official, impersonal but polite, style. The reason is not what Olga
suggests that the officials simply do not know the courtly style of the world. The reason is
something else. It is that these letters and verbal orders (for Klamm is as rude as is Sortini in
expressing his desires) have an animal scream-like or howl-like nature just the voice of an
utterly unhappy nature about which both the Apostle and the painter talked. As a perfect
society, the castle is gentle and polite. As an unhappy society, it roars.13
In contrast to Swift’s anthropology which integrates perfection and happiness in an
animal mind, though topped with a fundamental incapability of understanding happiness by
gaining knowledge, Kafka’s animals are albeit perfect and omniscient (for the question of
what an animal should but doesn’t know is senseless: every animal is omniscient), yet
profoundly unhappy. In one sense, this looks pure suffering since the castle is incapable of
doing anything about it. But this incapability is not caused by nature or the Creator. It stems
from its perfection, from the awareness of being perfect, and ultimately, from its obligatory
happiness. For if perfection lacks happiness, it is not perfection. Therefore, perfect beings
must be happy. What a ’must’! According to the traditional theology about hell, the devil and
the damned souls do not wish to leave it, despite the sufferings they endure there. The reason
is simple: they regard their place to be perfect and cannot admit that they suffer. Yet they are
in an eternal anguish for guessing that their perfection is not happy and this is just in what
their suffering consists. Thus, there is indeed something suicidal, or lethal, about happiness,
says Bürgel, suggesting that the castle’s happiness might not be perfect but its imperfection is
inconceivable.14 If a castle official granted a request of a client he would have to
acknowledge, in the first place, that the client can have unpredictable desires. This is,
11
Franz Kafka: The Castle, transl. by Anthea Bell, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 235.
Bürgel’s bitter truth is prefigured, and literally pretasted when K. drinks from Klamm’s cognac which first
impressed him with a fine smell but proved to be a poor quality.
13
Most commentators relate sexuality to power. See Speirs, Ronald Speirs; Sandberg, Beatrice. Franz Kafka
(MacMillan Press, 1997) and Arneson, Richard J. „Power and Authority in Franz Kafka’s The Castle,” in Franz
Kafka’s The Castle (New York-New Haven-Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1988), 107-24.
14
That the novel, and indeed, almost Kafka’s entire ouevre, is strongly imprinted by images of death and decay,
is often observed. In relation to this novel, the topic is extensively discussed in Sebald, The Undiscover’d
Country. I also referred to Kafka’s diaries and notebooks on which the devil is often mentioned.
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however, against the thesis of omniscience. This is why the castle will never commit suicide,
after all. But thereby it is condemned to eternal existence.
What we get is, thus, that Kafka’s castle society is a highly elaborated and
sophisticated version of a traditional understanding of the Hell and that its animal population,
the zoo, conveys the old truth about animality being fundamentally hostile to divinity. But it is
also at variance with Kafka’s previous idea about the mystical and potentially positive power
of pure suffering, again, connected with animality.
We are thus left with two visions of suffering. The first is the absolutely passive and
empty one which cannot even express itself but groans and labors. This is the state of the
universe which is most adequately and on the highest level represented by the animal world.
Through animals, we can have a glimpse at the purpose of suffering which starts with
acceptance and ends with meaning and salvation. Animals have no choice whether or not they
want to suffer but they are a proof that we have been given sufficient strength to endure
suffering. This is the state of the village and its people who are hardly more than serfs, in the
Marxian sense of the proletariat, but who are capable of rejecting the perfection of the castle.
They suffer a lot and have miserable lives, and they have their own viciously superstitious
bargains with the castle as well, especially the sacrificing of their virgins to the animalofficials. Yet they are not inferior animals like the yahoos, either. They are capable of
suffering because they can accept it.
The other vision is suffering without hope, without the strength of accepting it. As the
castle society demonstrates, a world which does not know and cannot know suffering for
thinking itself as being omniscient, perfect and hence happy, is too weak to bear the truth. Yet
it also groans and roars and dreams of suicide which it will never commit because it would
presuppose an acknowledgement of suffering. The castle is, thus, an animal society or world
is a perverse sense, that is, a zoo. A zoo is perfectly organized, its inhabitants may live a
happy life, yet there are so many people who get sad when they visit a zoo and look at the
animals. For what they can watch there are not animals any more but human souls
incarcerated in animal bodies. The zoo is, then, the Leviathan. It is an omniscient and
omnipotent, perfect, and, compared to the unhappiness of the state of nature or war, happy
society. There is no logical possibility of its being unhappy.
The tragedy of K. consists in just not realizing the hellishness of this logic. He
experiences human and animal happiness in Frieda’s arms, on the floor of the inn, that is, in
much an animal and painful, humiliating, dirty way. But this miserable, emphatically
imperfect, yet somehow happy, experience is already a catastrophic misunderstanding: he
accepts Frieda’s love in order to learn about the castle, not wanting to realize that Frieda
chooses him and a life with him to forget about the castle, that is, the zoo. She literally runs
away from it and no less desperately abandons K. in the end. For K., to her horrification,
becomes part of the castle. His endless power-ridden speculations, solitary and dialogical,
about the castle and its nature lead him to the hell but not with the only good and liberating
news, namely, that you, poor souls, suffer. Newcomers in the hell always bring the same
devastating news: we admire your perfection. Even if the man enters the gates of the Law, to
cite another scene Kafka was alway fascinated with, he can’t bring salvation, for he does not
come to abolish the Law, but to confirm it.
During the interview with Bürgel K. falls asleep and dreams. His dream is a
mythological rape, with Bürgel as a Greek god being raped by a human being, K.. It’s the
symbol of our profound desire to become happy by becoming perfect, omniscient, allpowerful and happy, briefly, gods as we imagine them. But these gods also suffer because
they cannot die, because they cannot really suffer. And they cannot profess all this, for this
would be contradicting their godlike perfection. If K. were wise to see this, he would notice
that Bürgel as a Greek god does not behave like a perfect being but like an animal, a pet, a
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doll, in the end, as an inanimate object. Hence, the only aspect missing from him and from the
hell, full of gods and souls in their full, glorious, and horrible perfection, is suffering. They
refused to acknowledge that we were created to suffer, and were given the power not to
abolish but to articulate it, on behalf of whole creation.
We may again ask the question of how Kafka’s views on suffering bear on political
theory. Marxism, Kant-inspired liberalism, as well as utilitarianism, the perhaps three most
influental modern utopias, are all very concerned with suffering. Marxism promises a
liberation from suffering by technical and material progress. Modern liberalism gives the
concept of human dignity absolute priority and justifies all measures and policies to alleviate
suffering based on that. Utilitarianism and utilitarian governing is explicitly aimed at the
greatest happiness to the greatest number. In this context, Kafka’s significance lies exactly in
providing us with a very sophisticated vision of suffering. It is, indeed, in some sense a
defining feature of the human condition and therefore remains a perennial concern of
mankind. But material progress does not eliminate alienation; euthanasia justified by human
dignity remains still a horrible and painful perspective; and government-granted happiness
appears to be an inherently contradictory notion. Still, we do not cease to strive for a total
elimination of suffering and Kafka confirms that we shall never give this up. But he,
especially in The Castle, shows us that a total victory over suffering is an option we should
avoid. For this is attainable by a consciousness of perfection, omniscience, absolute power
which would, in the end, transform our world into hell. In the postmodern world, we often
say, self-congratulingly, that nothing is perfect for everything is relative. But we are inclined
to believe in democracy, human dignity, a possibility of eliminating all oppression and
inequality sometimes as strongly as the castle officials believe that the castle is unsurpassably
perfect. Yet they dream of suicide.
6. Conclusion
Animality is a very effective tool to illuminate and analyse the human condition. Hobbes and
Swift both exploited it to make their points. They agree that animality is a pervasive feature of
human nature. They also note that has divine connotations as well and human nature also has
a divine part. As animals we also suffer, and this is a theme Kafka was obsessed with and
could explore with unprecedented poignancy. But as divine animals, we have a chance to
articulate our suffering. And by articulating suffering we are immediately tempted to abolish
it for good. Kafka shows, however, that such an abolishment is not within our power. The
most we can do is to become perfect, omniscient, and happy as the Hell is perfect, omniscient
and happy, in its own way. But it is hell, nonetheless. Behind and beyond its own
consciousness, it desires not to be. For it has literally tantalizing pains which it can never
admit. The castle is Hell, populated with animals, organized in an absolutely unnatural order.
That is, a zoo.
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