Building Animal – Logical Animal

On Franz Kafka’s Der Bau

Abstract

This essay analyzes Kafka’s Der Bau [The Borrow] from the point of view of the animal as long as possible and avoids premature allegorical interpretations. Particularly through deleted passages, it becomes clear that Kafka increasingly excludes species-related definitions during the writing process. In stark contrast to Josefine die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse and Forschungen eines Hundes, this ‘building animal’ has no conspecifics. By making the burrow the exclusive object of its behavior and self-reference, it can be understood as a ‘logical animal’ whose environmental structure, as has been repeatedly established in research, can be compared to Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of subjective biology: The world appears as a closed environment in which only meaningful stimuli occur. The burrow thus functions as a structural coupling between animal and environment and, in a sense, replaces the animal’s self-relation. Therefore, the contradiction between animal behavior and rational monologue can only be resolved by arguing that the building animal within the diegesis does not ‘truly’ speak, but rather represents a speech function that rationalizes the animal’s behavior. As a result, its paranoid reflection appears as a form of ‘reason gone mad’, and the animal’s thinking itself becomes visible as behavior.