Discussion - Week Ten - Kafka - A Report to an Academy

[Jim]

This discussion covers the story, A Report to an Academy.


“But over and above it all only the one feeling: no way out.” p. 253

[Zadignose]

I liked this one plenty.

Notable:

-This is the voice of a former ape?
-Humans are crude and animalistic.
-That hyperbolic beginning about how remote his memory is, having gone from an "archway as wide as the span of heaven over the earth" to an unapproachable opening so small that "I should have to scrape the very skin from my body to crawl through." Though, of course, he goes on to give a detailed account immediately thereafter.
-Interesting factoid: apes think with their bellies.
-His ape nature fled out of him so that his first teacher was nearly turned into an ape.

[Ellen]

I liked this one but found it for some reason the most painful of the stories so far. The humor cut too deep.

[Jim]

Ellie wrote: "I liked this one but found it for some reason the most painful of the stories so far. The humor cut too deep."

A lot of sadness. I kept thinking of slave ships, war prisoners, etc.

Particularly poignant - ...there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.

@Zad: Yes, the passage about the "archway as wide as the span of heaven over earth" is some amazing writing and quite an image in itself.

[Ellen]

And there's so much we have sacrificed of who we are to our idea of what it means to be "human" (which, as you point out, is often inhuman)

[mkfs]

A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Not only a nice example of the "noble savage" exposed to, and degenerated by, the vices of society, but also a concise tutorial on how to escape physical or social confinement.

One imagines Kafka aping his lowbrow superiors, learning to drink schnapps and engage in ribaldry.