An Exercise in Independence: An Analysis of A Report to an Academy

Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy has often been interpreted as an allegory for the difficulties that faced the Jewish diaspora in their efforts to assimilate into a hostile society or, alternatively, framed as a post-modern exploration of the inadequacy of language and the absurd barriers to true communication.  Careful research has led me to the conclusion that the core motivation for Red Peter’s story lay closer to home for Kafka. I believe that Red Peter’s tragic tale was intended to serve as an allegorical depiction of Kafka’s lifelong struggle with fear and anxiety as a result of his traumatic relationship with his father. In particular, Kafka was deeply scarred by his father’s rigid parenting style and tendency to shame, alienate, and humiliate him.  Kafka desired independence but he also feared it and this tension became particularly acute within the context of his desire for marriage and a family of his own.  Thus, Kafka conceived of Red Peter’s struggle to achieve independence through a miraculous transformation as a metaphor for his personal battle to escape from the burden of his past. These insights were drawn from a close reading of A Report to an Academy alongside a notably angst-ridden letter to his father, written in 1919, less than two years after he completed A Report to an Academy, and was further supported by numerous entries from Kafka’s collected diaries. 

I was initially made aware of the oppressive influence that Kafka’s father exerted over him and the letter that Kafka wrote in response to this influence, in an essay by Philip Roth called Looking at Kafka.  In this essay, Roth explained that Kafka was both desperately desirous of and neurotically paralyzed by the prospect of marriage, as a result of his father’s contempt. A key quotation reminded me of A Report to an Academy: “marriage is barred to me because it is your domain.  Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it.  And I feel as if I could consider living only in those regions that are not covered by you or are not within your reach.  And in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting regions─ and marriage is not among them.”  This quotation was reminiscent of the ending of the second fragment of A Report to an Academy, when Red Peter describes his desperate desire to escape from the ship in which he is caged and return to his natural habitat which is now hopelessly beyond his reach.  Red Peter longs to “squeeze…through an opening which in reality hardly allows you to see through it and which, when you first discover it, you greet with the blissful howl of ignorance!  Where do you want to go?  Beyond the boards the forest begins…”  Kafka’s letter to his father reflected a desperate desire to break through the prison of his loneliness and to establish his own independent life but he suffered from an oppressive dread of all things associated with his father.  Kafka felt that he was “married” to this fear and that it had become an inescapable part of him.  As a result, Kafka felt “barred” from marriage by its association with his father.

He desperately longed for romantic connection and sought it out but his attempts were always met by the disapproval of his father, which led him to break off several engagements against his better instincts.  Roth concluded that Kafka was “the poet of the ungraspable and unresolved whose belief in an immovable barrier separating the wish from its realization is at the heart of his excruciating visions of defeat; the Kafka whose fiction refutes every easy, touching, humanish daydream of salvation and justice and fulfillment with densely imagined counterdreams that mock all solutions and escapes.” While Roth made no reference to A Report to an Academy in his essay, this insight encapsulates the tragic drama at its heart.  It occurred to me that Red Peter’s experience evoked a sense of the complete alienation that Kafka seemed to have experienced as a young child in the face of parental rejection.

Kafka’s letter to his father was written in response to a question that had challenged him immensely.  The elder Kafka asked his son why he was “afraid” of him.  Kafka wrote that, “this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.”  From the very outset of the letter, the parallels to Red Peter’s “report” seemed inescapable.  Kafka begins his account of the origins of his fear with the recognition that his ability to answer this question was constrained by the limits of his “memory and power of reasoning.”  Similarly, Red Peter begins his report to the “honored members of the Academy” with the acknowledgement that, “I could never have achieved what I have done had I been stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the remembrance of my youth.” Red Peter and Kafka peered back into their pasts together and marveled at the achievements that they were able to accomplish in opposition to their natures.  At the same time, they were both haunted by their traumatic upbringings, which overshadowed and frustrated their attempts to enjoy life and find lasting “comfort.”

One such trauma, which Kafka emphasizes in his letter, is of particular interest: an “episode in the early years of which I have little memory.”  Kafka describes how “one night I kept whimpering for water” and his father responded with “several vigorous threats” before he grabbed him and carried him “out onto the [balcony], and left me there alone…in my nightshirt, outside the shut door.” This experience was extremely traumatic for young Kafka and he writes that it was “typical of [his father’s] methods of bringing up a child and their effect,” which “did me inner harm.”  He explains that, “what was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and the extraordinary fear of being carried outside were [two things] that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other.  Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the [balcony,] and that consequently that I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.” Red Peter was captured in a similar manner by an expedition that “had taken its position in the bushes by the shore when I came down for a drink in the evening.”  In both cases, a thirst for water led to capture, isolation, and a “scar made by a wanton shot,” as Red Peter says.  Afterwards, each of them found themselves in a “three-sided cage,” one on a ship and the other on a balcony, separated from their families without understanding why.  In retrospect, Kafka reflected upon the incident and concluded,

that was only a small beginning, but this feeling of being nothing that often dominates me…comes largely from your influence.  What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me, though of course with the good intention of making me take another road.  But I was not fit for that.  You encouraged me, for instance, when I saluted and marched smartly, but I was not future soldier, or…when I was able eat heartily…or even drink beer with my meals, or when I was able to repeat songs, singing what I had not understood, or prattling to you using your own favorite expressions, imitating you…Then I receive encouragement, I am reminded of my worth.

This passage illuminated an interesting parallel between the central role that manners and drinking had in the respective attempts made by Kafka and Red Peter to gain the approval of authority figures.  Like Kafka, Red Peter had to imitate the relish with which his trainer drank and repress the instinctual disgust that he experienced when consuming alcohol. Nevertheless, Red Peter failed in his initial attempt to convincingly imitate his trainer’s joyful drinking and, after initially putting a bottle of schnapps to his mouth, throws it “down on the floor in disgust.” Red Peter realized that, “to the sorrow of my teacher, to the greater sorrow of myself; neither of us…[were] really comforted by the fact that I did not forget, even though I had thrown away the bottle, to rub my belly and grin.  Far too often my lessons ended this way.”  His “teacher” reacted to these failures by “holding his burning pipe against my fur, until it began to smolder in some place I could not easily reach.”  This act was followed by what seemed, in the eyes of a traumatized young chimpanzee, to represent a relatively merciful demeanor: “to the credit of my teacher…he would himself extinguish it with his own kind, enormous hand.”  As a result, Red Peter concluded that “he was not angry with me, he perceived that we were both fighting on the same side against the nature of apes and that I had the more difficult task.”  Kafka, on the other hand, felt lingering bitterness in regard to his father’s tableside admonishments: “since as a child I was with you chiefly during meals, your teaching was to a large extent the teaching of proper behavior at table.  What was brought to the table had to be eaten, the quality of the food was not to be discussed.”  Kafka was frustrated by his father’s hypocrisy, as he noticed his father did not feel compelled to “keep the commandments you imposed on me.”  This realization had a “depressing” effect on him that was reminiscent of the sense of alienation that Red Peter described in A Report to an Academy.  Kafka wrote that he was left with the impression that “the world was for me divided into three parts: one in which I, the slave, lived under the laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never comply with; then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and with their annoyance at not being obeyed; and finally a third world where everybody else lived happily and free from orders and having to obey.”  The first world may be seen as the one that Red Peter found himself in initially; the second, as that which his “teacher” occupied; while the third, was that to which he aspired.  Kafka’s diaries indicate that he often felt a Romantic longing for “the wilderness” and, in an earlier fragment of A Report to an Academy, Red Peter indicated a desperate longing for “the forest.”

Kafka found a perfect metaphor for the inner strife that he experienced as a child in the physicality of Red Peter’s struggle with captivity.  Red Peter was “pinned down” and felt hopelessly oppressed.  The young chimpanzee’s captivity initially produced a frantic and violent confusion but, gradually, as his hysteria and his animal instincts faltered, he sank into a sort of depression.  At his point, he made “uncommonly little noise…from which the conclusion was drawn that I would either soon die or if I managed to survive the first critical period would be very amenable to training.” Reflecting upon his early years, Kafka noted how, as a result of “the impossibility of getting on calmly together” with his father he “lost the capacity to talk.” Silence seemed like the only protest left to him since, as he wrote to his father, “at a very early stage you forbade me to speak.  Your threat, ‘Not a word of contradiction!’ and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since…I kept silent, at first perhaps out of defiance.  Then because I could neither think nor speak in your presence.”  Hinting at a central metaphor in A Report to an Academy, Kafka wrote that, “all your educational measures hit the mark exactly.  There was no hold that I tried to escape.  As I now am, I am…the result of your upbringing and of my obedience.”  The situation seemed hopeless to him, “I was too docile, I became completely dumb.” Red Peter came to a similar conclusion after the initial failure of his confused and frustrated attempts to forcibly escape from his cage. 

Red Peter’s suffering was like that of an innocent child.  He could not comprehend what might have induced his profound reversal in fortune.  One moment, he was in the forest, seeking water to drink.  Suddenly, he was being shot at and when he returned to consciousness after being hit twice, he found himself jammed in a cage that “cut into my flesh from behind.”  The freedom of his youth had become a relic of his past; necessity would drive him forward and force him to develop a new identity.  Looking back from the remoteness of his new life as a “human,” he reflected that, “such a method of confining wild beasts is supposed to have its advantages during the first days of captivity, and out of my experiences I cannot deny that from the human point of view this is really the case.  But that did not occur to me then.  For the first time in my life, I could see no way out.” Here too there are numerous parallels between Red Peter’s plight and that of Kafka’s as a child.  In his letter, Kafka wrote that, “in the place where I lived I was spurned, condemned, fought to a standstill; and to escape to some other place was an enormous exertion, but that was not work, for it was something impossible, something that was, with small exceptions, unattainable to me.” Similarly, Red Peter explained that, “had I been nailed down, my right to free movement would not have been lessened.  Why so?...Press yourself against the bar behind you till it nearly cuts you in two, you won’t find the answer.  I had no way out.” Red Peter was eventually forced to realize that he would not be able to find a “direct way out.”  The gap in the boards, which he “greeted with a blissful howl of ignorance” was, in actuality, an impediment to his escape.  His “way out” would have to be achieved in a more creative manner. 

Red Peter did not expect to achieve “the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides” but “only a way out; right or left, or in any direction.” He began to pay close attention to the men that wandered freely around the ship, searching for clues that might aid him in demonstrating his readiness to comply, hoping to discover a means of escaping from his intolerable agony. As his will began to break, his obstinance gave way to a “profound inward calm” and he concluded that, without it, “I could never have found my way out.” At his point, Red Peter quickly ascertained that there were important differences between himself and his captors. In order to find a “way out,” he would have to bridge the gap between their respective natures and become human; he knew that he would not survive as an ape. To do this, he needed to overcome his attachment to the past.

Looking back on his time aboard the ship, Red Peter ironically stated that his captors “were good creatures, in spite of everything.  I find it still pleasant to remember the sound of their heavy footfalls which used to echo through my half-dreaming head.”  Reading these words, I could not help but attribute them to a sort of Stockholm Syndrome.  This masochistic sense of forgiveness seemed analogous to the reaction formation that Kafka demonstrated in his letter to his father, when he wrote that one “could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me.  Well that did not happen.  Nothing alive can be calculated.  But perhaps something worse happened.  And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not forget that I never, and not for a single moment believe any guilt to be on your side.” Kafka offered numerous qualifications for his father’s behavior throughout his letter and noting that, “you could, I am sure, have been of help to a human being of your own kind with your methods; such a person would have seen the reasonableness of what you told him…and would quietly have done things the way he was told.” Kafka’s true feelings, however, were more complicated. 

Kafka deeply resented his father and could not repress his anger when it came to the condescending attitude with which his father regarded all of his friends and love interests.  His father referred to his circle of friends as “vermin” and compared their relationship to that of a “dog and its fleas.” Kafka employs similar language in A Report to an Academy alluding to his sense that his nature was not akin to his father’s; he described himself in a manner that seems to imply that he was inherently inferior. Kafka felt like a “disinherited son” and explained that, “naturally I became unsure even to the thing nearest to me, my own body.  I shot up tall and lanky, without knowing what to do with my lankiness, the burden was too heavy, the back became bent; I scarcely dared to move, certainly not to exercise.” It was of no small interest that Kafka’s description of his body could have easily been mistaken for that of a young, captive chimpanzee.  Red Peter, on the other hand, reminded me of the elder Kafka’s comparison of his son’s friends, most notably when he described how the crew complained of his “fleas.”  Red Peter explained that, “they always grumbled that they got fleas from me; yet they were not seriously angry about it; they knew that my fur fostered fleas and that fleas jump; it was simply a matter of fact to them.”  This grumbling, however, carried with it an implicit judgement of Red Peter’s “nature” and the potential for contagion by association.  This seemed be an allusion to the humiliation that Kafka suffered at the hands of his father when he compared his friends to “fleas” and also a reference to Kafka’s belief that his father would inevitably be ashamed of any romantic partner that he could produce.  Kafka complained that his father “wanted to see to it that I should not bring any of the physical filth home with me” and expressed unqualified indignity in response to these insinuations, which produced a sense of insufficiency in him.  Kafka felt that his father had confronted the challenge of starting a family with ease as if it were “five low steps,” while Kafka felt as if he were faced with “only one step, but one that is, at least for him, as high as all the other five put together.”  Kafka explained that this particular step was “impossible for him to climb even by exerting all his strength;” it was a “step which he cannot get up on and he naturally cannot get past either.”  In contrast to Kafka, however, Red Peter was able to accomplish a much more challenging transformation through a pure act of will.  Red Peter reported that “with an effort which up until now has never been repeated I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European.  In itself that might be nothing to speak of, but it is something in that it has helped me out of my cage and opened up a special way out for me, the way of humanity.”  As a result, he achieved a measure of freedom, although it was a “freedom that was not to be my choice.”  Nevertheless, Red Peter forged a life for himself that was notably better than the future that had awaited him at the “Zoological Gardens,” which would have been “only a new cage; once there, you are done for.”  Additionally, he was able to “take comfort” from a “half-trained little chimpanzee.” By Kafka’s standards, this was a relatively happy ending.

Kafka wrote A Report to an Academy during mid-1917 as he was preparing to take a significant step and initiate a second engagement with Felice Bauer.  He had broken off their previous engagement on July 12, 1914 and had deeply regretted it.  As before, Kafka would unfortunately renege on his proposal and, once again, broke off his engagement in the final month of 1917.  Subsequently, Felice Bauer married another man in the Spring of 1919 and, before Spring had ended, Kafka became engaged to Julie Wohryzek, whom he had met less than half a year ago during November of 1918.  He was, however, plagued by fear and doubt and, within months of their engagement, he balked (November 1919). Shortly thereafter (within the same month) he authored his letter to his father in an attempt to come to terms with his stifling influence and the fear that it aroused in him.  Writing to his father, he summoned the courage to revisit his three broken engagements and the immense regret and bitterness that he was left with.  Kafka wrote:

Although both girls were chosen by chance, they were extraordinarily well chosen.  Again a sign of your complete misunderstanding, that you can believe that I─ timid, hesitant, suspicious─ can decide to marry in a flash, out of delight over a blouse.  Both marriages would rather have been commonsense marriages, in so far as that means that day and night─ the first time for years, the second time for months─ all my power of thought was concentrated on the plan.  Neither of the girls disappointed me, only I disappointed both of them.  My opinion of them is the same as when I wanted to marry them.

Through his letter, Kafka sought to exorcise his neurotic fixation upon his father’s approval and claim for himself some measure of autonomy.  He was in throes of agony over his third aborted engagement and struggled with the unpleasant consequences and implications of this decision.  In spite of the regret and disillusionment that Kafka felt, he continued to believe that marriage could offer a miraculous redemption for him. Addressing his father, Kafka wrote that “marriage certainly is the pledge of the most acute form of self-liberation.  I would have a family, in my opinion the highest one can achieve, and so too the highest you have achieved; I would be your equal; all old and new shame and tyranny would be mere history.  It would be like a fairy tale.”  Kafka’s complaint took on a notably Oedipal tone as he concluded that his fear of marriage was not provoked by the anxiety of his commitments but, rather, an inability to confront his father.  Kafka’s ruminative nature produced a sort of analysis-paralysis that prevented him following through on his best intentions and filled him with indecision in the face of his father’s judgement.  Interestingly, the word decide is derived from the Latin decidere, which literally means “to cut off.”  By marrying, Kafka believed that he could achieve “self-liberation and independence” by cutting himself off from the “shame and tyranny” of his father’s authority.  If he could have found the courage to follow through on one of his proposals, he believed that “I could be a free, grateful, guiltless, upright son, and you could be an untroubled untyrannical, sympathetic father.  But to this end everything that ever happened would have to be undone, that is, we ourselves would have to be cancelled out.” The vertigo that Kafka experienced when he contemplated such a decision and the language that he used in doing so seemed more applicable to an act of patricide than pre-nuptial angst, but with Kafka, it is as if the two were indistinguishable.  For this reason, Kafka concluded that “to try to get out of this quandary has therefore a touch of madness about it, and every attempt is punished by being driven almost mad.”  Beneath the specter of this madness, Kafka reached out to his father for acceptance and forgiveness, writing that their disagreement was a result of their natures: his father’s instinctual desire to dominate him and his natural desire to achieve independence and form his own family.  As a result, he wrote “you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement.  But I am equally entirely blameless.  If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is─ not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that─ but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches.”  In making this “report” to his father, he asked directly for what he had formerly sought through mimicry and “performance:” his father’s approval and the permission to live his own life and form his own family and, in doing so, to become his “equal.”  In the same manner, Red Peter stood before the “Honored Members of the Academy” to explain how he overcame his fear of his “teacher” and joined the human race, not as an ape, but as an equal. Through the act of telling his story, Red Peter claimed his autonomy and asserted his “self-liberation.”  Accordingly, he explained that “you have done me a great honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life that I formerly lived as an ape.  I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire.  It is now nearly five years since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to the calendar, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause, and orchestral music, and yet essentially alone, since all of my escorters, to keep the image, kept well off the course.” 

A Report to an Academy was, in my opinion, undertaken by Kafka as an allegorical exercise in self-overcoming in preparation for his “self-liberation” through marriage.  Kafka utilized Red Peter as his alter-ego and attempted to rise above the shadow of his father and attain for himself what he wished his father had offered him long ago: “a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of the road.”  The conception and execution of A Report to an Academy occurred during a period when Kafka was working up the courage to escape from the vicious cycle of his past and forge a new life for himself with the women he loved, Felice Bauer.  On August 20, 1916, Kafka drafted a list of the pros and cons of marriage.  One month later, on October 18, 1916, Kafka decided to write to Bauer and ask once more for her hand in marriage.  In his letter, Kafka proclaimed that,

I confront my family unceasingly flailing about me in a circle with knives, as it were, in order simultaneously to injure and defend them. Let me be entirely your representative in this, without your representing me in the same sense to your family. Is this too great a sacrifice for you, darling? It is a tremendous one, I know, and will be made easier for you only by the knowledge that my nature is such that I must take it from you by force if you do not voluntarily make me it. But if you do make it, then you have done a great deal for me…A single word – so great is my confidence in you – will serve as answer.

With this letter, Kafka leapt towards a new hope for freedom, a “fairy tale” that was everything he had hoped for.  An entry in his journal from two days prior read, “is it possible that reason and desire first disclose the bare outlines of the future to me, and that I actually move step by step into this same future only under their tugs and blows? We are permitted to crack that whip, the will, over us with our own hand.”  Kafka had given himself permission to marry, knowing that his father would resist it but believing, nevertheless, that it was his prerogative.  He knew that this would not be well received by his father, but he convinced himself that he was ready for this too.   Kafka allowed this newfound courage to be given voice through Red Peter’s reflections upon his transformative journey: “I learned things, gentleman.  Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns at all costs.  One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition.  My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it, had soon to give up teaching and was taken away to a mental hospital.  Fortunately, he was soon let out again.”  In the guise of Red Peter, Kafka asserted the power of his will and permits himself a little jest, a veiled jab at his father.  Kafka imagined that his new will to power would drive his father a little insane but believed that he would get over it.  After all, it was Kafka’s decision, not his.  Thus, he drove himself onwards towards a new future, one in which he would no longer have to feel alone but, instead, could find the courage to place himself beside his father as his equal and, more importantly, shape his own life and form his own family.  Thus, Red Peter concludes that, “I have achieved what I set out to achieve.  But do not tell me it wasn’t worth the trouble.  In any case, I am not appealing for any man’s verdict.  I am only making a report.  To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report.”