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Lessons of the Un-Kafkaesque in In "Jackals and Arabs"
Abstract
In the same year as the Balfour Declaration (1917), Franz Kafka wrote an important short story, Jackals and Arabs and published it in "Der Jude," the leading Zionist journal of the time. The story which unambiguously references the Zionist project in Palestine, dramatizes an encounter between a European travelling through the desert, his Arab guide, and a pack of jackals. A seemingly objective narrator presents the Arab as cynically abusing his position of power over a wretched, downtrodden pack of jackals who clearly represent the Jewish community. Throughout the story, the jackals do not tire of speaking to the traveler of their disgust with the Arab's filth and ask him to kill the Arab. Despite the story's disturbing racist overtones, and despite its relevance to the brewing conflict in Palestine, the vast majority of literary critics have failed to note the political and historical context of the story. In their decontextualization of Kafka's text, most literary scholars have argued that the Arab should be read as symbolizing the Czech or the Gentile, rather than taken at face value as a Palestinian Arab. Relying on extensive research, I argue that Kafka's story and the critical work surrounding it, are deeply informed by a Zionist narrative whose goal is the physical and symbolic erasure of the Palestinian. I demonstrate that Kafka--the quintessential author of the marginalized--invents a new Other: a fictional Arab who stands in stark opposition to the real one; an Arab who is an oppressor rather than a victim of colonialism. Furthermore, the paper maintains that by evading a contextual discussion of this invented Arab, scholars have missed a ground-breaking reading of the parable, which actually allows us to see Kafka in a completely new light: the un-Kafkaesque. Kafka gives us a fascinating example of the oppressed in a crucial transitional period in which he is transforming into an oppressor--an Other who is in the process of creating the Other of the Other. To continue to avoid any discussion of the disfigured figure of the Arab in Jackals and Arabs is like reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness without discussing the Belgian genocide of the Congolese, or like reading Camus' The Stranger without seeing the sacrifice of the Algerian subject.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Cultural Studies