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Franz Kafka
A Report for an Academy
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This translation by Ian Johnston of Vancouver
Island University, Nanaimo, BC, Canada, has certain copyright restrictions.
For information please use the following link: Copyright. For comments or question
please contact Ian Johnston. For
index of other Kafka stories available at this site, please click here.
This text was last revised in June 2015.
A REPORT FOR AN ACADEMY
Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy!
You show me the honor of calling upon me to submit a report to the
Academy concerning my previous life as an ape.
In this sense, unfortunately, I cannot comply with your request. Almost
five years separate me from my existence as an ape, a short time perhaps when
measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop through, as I have done,
at times accompanied by splendid people, advice, applause, and orchestral
music, but basically alone, since all those accompanying me held themselves
back a long way from the barrier, in order to preserve the image. This
achievement would have been impossible if I had stubbornly wished to hold onto
my origin, onto the memories of my youth. Giving up that obstinacy was, in
fact, the highest command that I gave myself. I, a free ape, submitted myself
to this yoke. As a result, however, my memories have increasingly closed
themselves off against me. If people had wanted it, at first the entire gateway
which heaven builds over the earth would have been available to me for my
journey back, but as my development was whipped onwards, the gate
simultaneously grew lower and narrower all the time. I felt myself more
comfortable and more enclosed in the world of human beings. The storm which
blew me out of my past eased off. Today it is only a gentle breeze which cools
my heels. And the distant hole through which it comes and through which I once
came has become so small that, even if I had sufficient power and will to run
back there, I would have to scrape the fur off my body in order to get through.
Speaking frankly, as much as I like choosing metaphors for these
things—speaking frankly: your experience as apes, gentlemen—to the extent that
you have something of that sort behind you—cannot be more distant from you than
mine is from me. But it tickles at the heels of everyone who walks here on
earth, the small chimpanzee as well as the great Achilles.
In the narrowest sense, however, I can perhaps answer your question,
nonetheless, and indeed I do so with great pleasure.
The first thing I learned was to give a handshake. The handshake
displays candor. Today, when I stand at the pinnacle of my career, may I add to
that first handshake also my candid words. For the
Academy it will not provide anything essentially new and will fall far short of
what people have asked of me and what with the best will I cannot speak
about—but nonetheless it should demonstrate the direct line by which someone
who was an ape was forced into the world of men, in which he established
himself firmly. Yet I would certainly not permit myself to say even the trivial
things which follow if I were not completely sure of myself and if my position
on all the great music hall stages of the civilized world had not established itself unassailably.
I come from the Gold Coast. For an account of how I was captured I rely
on the reports of strangers. A hunting expedition from the firm of Hagenbeck—incidentally, since then I have already emptied a
number of bottles of good red wine with the leader of that expedition—lay
hidden in the bushes by the shore as I ran down in the evening in the middle of
a band of apes for a drink. Someone fired a shot. I was the only one struck. I
received two hits.
One was in the cheek—that was superficial. But it left behind a large
hairless red scar which earned me the name Red Peter—a revolting name, completely
inappropriate, presumably something invented by an ape, as if the only
difference between me and the recently deceased trained ape Peter, who was well
known here and there, was the red patch on my cheek. But this is only by the
way.
The second shot hit me below the hip. It was serious. It’s the reason
that today I still limp a little. Recently I read in
an article by one of the ten thousand gossipers who vent their opinions about
me in the newspapers that my ape nature is not yet entirely repressed. The
proof is that when visitors come I take pleasure in pulling off my trousers to
show the entry wound caused by this shot. That fellow should have each finger
of his writing hand shot off one by one. So far as I am concerned, I may pull
my trousers down in front of anyone I like. People will not find there anything
other than well cared-for fur and the scar from—let us select here a precise
word for a precise purpose, something that will not be misunderstood—the scar
from a wicked shot. Everything is perfectly open; there is nothing to hide.
When it comes to a question of the truth, every great mind discards the most
subtle refinements of manners. However, if that writer were
to pull down his trousers when he gets a visitor, that would certainly produce
a different sight, and I’ll take it as a sign of reason that he does not do
that. But then he should get off my back with his delicate sensibilities.
After those shots I woke up—and here my own memory gradually begins—in a
cage between decks on the Hagenbeck steamship. It was
no four-sided cage with bars, but only three walls fixed to a crate, so that
the crate constituted the fourth wall. The whole thing was too low to stand
upright and too narrow for sitting down. So I crouched with bent knees, which
shook all the time, and since at first I probably did not wish to see anyone
and wanted to remain constantly in the darkness, I turned towards the crate,
while the bars of the cage cut into the flesh on my back. People consider such
confinement of wild animals beneficial in the very first period of time, and
today I cannot deny, on the basis of my own experience, that in a human sense
that is, in fact, the case.
But at that time I didn’t think about that. For the first time in my
life I was without a way out—at least there was no direct way out. Right in
front of me was the crate, its boards fitted closely together. Well, there was
a gap running right between the boards. When I first discovered it, I welcomed
it with a blissfully happy howl of ignorance. But this hole was not nearly big
enough to stick my tail through, and all the power of an ape could not make it
any bigger.
According to what I was told later, I am supposed to have made
remarkably little noise. From that people concluded that either I must soon die
or, if I succeeded in surviving the first critical period, I would be very
capable of being trained. I survived this period. Muffled sobbing, painfully
searching out fleas, wearily licking a coconut, banging my skull against the
wall of the crate, sticking out my tongue when anyone came near me—these were
the first occupations in my new life. In all of them, however, there was only
one feeling: no way out. Nowadays, of course, I can portray those ape-like
feelings only with human words and, as a result, I misrepresent them. But even
if I can no longer attain the old truth of the ape, at least it lies in the
direction I have described—of that there is no doubt.
Up until then I had had so many ways out, and now I no longer had one. I
was tied down. If they had nailed me down, my freedom to move would not have
been any less. And why? If you scratch raw the flesh
between your toes, you won’t find the reason. If you press your back against
the bars of the cage until it almost slices you in two, you won’t find the
reason. I had no way out, but I had to come up with one for myself. For without
that I could not live. Always in front of that crate wall—I would inevitably
have died a miserable death. But according to Hagenbeck,
apes belong at the crate wall—well, that meant I would cease being an ape. A clear and beautiful train of thought, which I must have planned
somehow with my belly, since apes think with their bellies.
I’m worried that people do not understand precisely what I mean by a way
out. I use the word in its most common and fullest sense. I am deliberately not
saying freedom. I do not mean this great feeling of freedom on all sides. As an
ape, I perhaps recognized it, and I have met human beings who yearn for it. But
as far as I am concerned, I did not demand freedom either then or today.
Incidentally, among human beings people all too often are deceived by freedom.
And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the
corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime. In the variety shows,
before my entrance, I have often watched a pair of artists busy on trapezes
high up in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked back and forth, they
jumped, they hung in each other’s arms, one held the other by the hair with his
teeth. “That, too, is human freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled movement.”
What a mockery of sacred nature! At such a sight, no structure would stand up
to the laughter of the apes.
No, I didn’t want freedom. Only a way out—to the right
or left or anywhere at all. I made no other demands, even if the way out
should also be only an illusion. The demand was small; the disappointment would
not be any greater—to move on further, to move on further! Only not to stand
still with arms raised, pressed against a crate wall.
Today I see clearly that without the greatest inner calm I would never
have been able to get out. And, in fact, I probably owe everything that I have
become to the calmness which came over me after the first days there on the
ship. And, in turn, I owe that calmness to the people on the ship.
They are good people, in spite of everything. Today I still enjoy
remembering the clang of their heavy steps, which used to echo then in my half
sleep. They had the habit of tackling everything extremely slowly. If one of them
wanted to rub his eyes, he raised his hand as if it were a hanging weight.
Their jokes were coarse but hearty. Their laughter was always mixed with a rasp
which sounded dangerous but meant nothing. They always had something in their
mouths to spit out, and they didn’t care where they spat. They always
complained that my fleas sprung over onto them, but they were never seriously
angry at me because of it. They understood well enough that fleas liked being
in my fur and that fleas are jumpers. They learned to
live with that. When they had no duties, sometimes a few of them sat down in a
semi-circle around me. They didn’t speak much, but only made noises to each
other and smoked their pipes, stretched out on the crates. They slapped their
knees as soon as I made the slightest movement, and from time to time one of
them would pick up a stick and tickle me where I liked it. If I were invited
today to make a journey on that ship, I would certainly decline the invitation,
but it’s equally certain that the memories I could dwell on of the time there
between the decks would not be totally hateful.
The calmness which I acquired in this circle of people prevented me
above all from any attempt to escape. Looking at it nowadays, it seems to me as
if I had at least sensed that I had to find a way out if I wanted to live, but
that this way out could not be reached by escaping. I no longer know if escape
was possible, but I think it was: for an ape it should always be possible to
flee. With my present teeth I have to be careful even with the ordinary task of
cracking a nut, but then I must have been able, over time, to succeed in
chewing through the lock on the door. I didn’t do that. What would I have
achieved by doing it? No sooner would I have stuck my head out, than they would
have captured me again and locked me up in an even worse cage. Or I could have
taken refuge unnoticed among the other animals—say, the boa constrictors
opposite me—and breathed my last in their embraces. Or I could have managed to
steal way up to the deck and to jump overboard. Then I’d have tossed back and
forth on the ocean for a little while and would have drowned. Acts of despair. I did not think things through in such a
human way, but under the influence of my surroundings conducted myself as if I had worked things out.
I did not work things out, but I did observe things with complete
tranquility. I saw these men going back and forth, always the same faces, the
same movements. Often it seemed to me as if there was only one man. So the man
or these men went undisturbed. A lofty purpose dawned on me. No one promised me
that if I could become like them the cage would be removed. Such promises,
apparently impossible to fulfill, are not made. But if one makes the
fulfillment good, then later the promises appear precisely there where one had
looked for them earlier without success. Now, these men in themselves were
nothing which attracted me very much. If I had been a follower of that freedom
I just mentioned, I would certainly have preferred the ocean to the way out
displayed in the dull gaze of these men. But in any case, I observed them for a
long time before I even thought about such things—in fact, the accumulated
observations first pushed me in the proper direction.
It was so easy to imitate these people. I could already spit on the
first day. Then we used to spit in each other’s faces. The only difference was
that I licked my face clean afterwards. They did not.
Soon I was smoking a pipe like an old man, and if I then also pressed my thumb
down into the bowl of the pipe, the entire area between decks cheered. Still,
for a long time I did not understand the difference between an empty and a full
pipe.
I had the greatest difficulty with the bottle of alcohol. The smell was
torture to me. I forced myself with all my power, but weeks went by before I
could overcome my reaction. Curiously enough, the people took this inner
struggle more seriously than anything else about me. In my memories I don’t
distinguish the people, but there was one who always came back, alone or with
comrades, day and night, at all hours. He’d stand with the bottle in front of
me and give me instructions. He did not understand me. He wanted to solve the
riddle of my being. He used to uncork the bottle slowly and then look at me, in
order to test if I had understood. I confess that I always looked at him with
wildly over-eager attentiveness. No human teacher has ever found on the entire
earthly globe such a student of human beings. After he’d uncorked the bottle,
he’d raise it to his mouth. I’d gaze at him, right into his throat. He would
nod, pleased with me, and set the bottle to his lips. Delighted with my gradual
understanding, I’d squeal and scratch myself all over, wherever it was
convenient. He was happy. He’d set the bottle to his mouth and take a swallow.
Impatient and desperate to emulate him, I would defecate over myself in my
cage—and that again gave him great satisfaction. Then, holding the bottle at
arm’s length and bringing it up once more with a swing, he’d drink it down with
one gulp, exaggerating his backward bending as a way of instructing me.
Exhausted with so much great effort, I could no longer follow and would hang
weakly onto the bars, while he ended the theoretical lesson by rubbing his
belly and grinning.
Now the practical exercises first began. Was I not already too tired out
by the theoretical part? Yes, indeed, far too weary. That’s part of my fate.
Nonetheless, I’d grab the proffered bottle as well as I could and uncork it
trembling. Once I’d managed to do that, a new energy would gradually take over.
I lifted the bottle—with hardly any difference between me and the original—put
it to my lips—and throw it away in disgust, in disgust, although it was empty
and filled only with the smell, throw it with disgust onto the floor. To the sorrow of my teacher, to my own greater sorrow. And I
still did not console him or myself when, after throwing away the bottle, I did
not forget to give my belly a splendid rub and to grin as I do so.
All too often, the lesson went that way. And to my teacher’s credit, he
was not angry with me. Well, sometimes he held his burning pipe against my fur
in some place or other which I could reach only with difficulty, until it began
to burn. But then he would put it out himself with his huge good hand. He
wasn’t angry with me. He realized that we were fighting on the same side
against ape nature and that I had the more difficult part.
It was certainly a victory for him and for me when one evening in front
of a large circle of onlookers—perhaps it was a celebration, a gramophone was
playing, an officer was wandering around among the people—when on this evening,
at a moment when no one was watching, I grabbed a bottle of alcohol which had
been inadvertently left standing in front of my cage, uncorked it just as I had
been taught, amid the rising attention of the group, set it against my mouth
and, without hesitating, with my mouth making no grimace, like an expert
drinker, with my eyes rolling around, splashing the liquid in my throat, I
really and truly drank the bottle empty, and then threw it away, no longer in
despair, but like an artist. Well, I did forget to scratch my belly. But
instead of that, because I couldn’t do anything else, because I had to, because
my senses were roaring, I cried out a short and good “Hello!” breaking out into
human sounds. And with this cry I sprang into the community of human beings,
and I felt its echo—“Just listen. He’s talking!”—like a kiss on my entire
sweat-soaked body.
I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which
pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other
reason. And even in that victory little was achieved. My voice immediately
failed me again. It first came back months later. My distaste for the bottle of
alcohol became even stronger. But at least my direction was given to me once
and for all.
When I was handed over in Hamburg to my first trainer, I soon realized
the two possibilities open to me: the zoological garden or the music hall. I
did not hesitate. I said to myself: use all your energy to get into the music
hall. That is the way out. The zoological garden is only a new barred cage. If
you go there, you’re lost.
And I learned, gentlemen. Alas, one learns when one has to. One learns
when one wants a way out. One learns ruthlessly. One supervises oneself with a
whip and tears oneself apart at the slightest resistance. My ape nature ran
off, head over heels, out of me, so that in the process my first teacher
himself almost became an ape and soon had to give up training and be carried
off to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon discharged again.
But I went through many teachers—indeed, even several teachers at once.
As I became even more confident of my abilities and the general public followed
my progress and my future began to brighten, I took on teachers myself, let
them sit down in five interconnected rooms, and studied with them all
simultaneously, by constantly leaping from one room into another.
And such progress! The penetrating effects of the rays of knowledge from
all sides on my awaking brain! I don’t deny the fact—I was delighted with it.
But I also confess that I did not overestimate it, not even then, even less
today. With an effort which up to this point has never been repeated on earth,
I have attained the average education of a European man. Perhaps that in itself would not amount to much, but it is something insofar
as it helped me out of the cage and created this particular way out for me—the
way out of human beings. There is an excellent German expression: to beat one’s
way through the bushes. That I have done. I have beaten my way through the
bushes. I had no other way, always assuming that freedom was not a choice.
If I review my development and its goal up to this point, I do not
complain, but I am not content. With my hands in my trouser pockets, the bottle
of wine on the table, I half lie and half sit in my rocking chair and gaze out
the window. If I have a visitor, I welcome him as is appropriate. My impresario
sits in the parlor. If I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. In
the evening I almost always have a performance, and I could hardly be more
successful. When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific
societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained
female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way
apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her, for she has in her gaze the
madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognizes that,
and I cannot bear it.
On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I wished to achieve. You
shouldn’t say it was not worth the effort. In any case, I don’t want any human
being’s judgment. I only want to expand knowledge. I simply report. Even to
you, esteemed gentlemen of the Academy, I have only made a report.
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