Kafka's Zoopoetics by Naama Harel

Author:Naama Harel [Harel, Naama]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004170 Literary Criticism / European / German
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2020-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Paradigm of the Despicable Dog

Aside their emblematic role as humans’ best friends, dogs—as per Derrida’s formulation—are also “the fraternal allegory of social poverty, of the excluded, the marginal, the homeless.”10 The paradigm of the despicable dog also has ancient roots. In his illuminating study of the human relationship with other animals, James Serpell suggests that the perception of dogs as unclean harks back to the Hebrew Bible and that it was current in Europe until the seventeenth century.11 The negative approach to dogs in the Bible, both concretely and metaphorically, may be illustrated by the saying, “As a dog that returneth to his vomit, so is a fool that repeateth his folly” (Proverbs 26:11). In fact, the proverb Kafka’s father infamously employed to resent his son’s friendship with the Yiddish theater actor Yitzchak Lowy—“Whoever lies down with dogs gets up with fleas” (LFBV, 21)—reveals not only a prevailing negative attitude of many German Jews toward Eastern European Jews, as indicated by several scholars,12 but also toward dogs.

James Serpell maintains that dogs have been regarded as unclean and despicable because they seem to engage unashamedly in activities that are prohibited or taboo in human culture, such as sexual promiscuity, incest, indolence, and the eating of carrion and feces.13 This idea is already found in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930):

Page 105 →It would be incomprehensible, too, that a man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world—the dog—as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions.14

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