Kafka's Screwball Tragedy: Investigations of a Philosophical Dog

Written toward the end of Franz Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author’s oeuvre. Kafka didn’t give the story a title, writing it in the autumn of 1922 but leaving it unpublished and unfinished. It was published posthumously in 1931 in a collection edited by his friend and biographer Max Brod, who named it Forschungen eines Hundes — which could also be translated as “Researches of a Dog,” to give it a more academic ring.

The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to his work, which concerns knowledge. “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks.

But Lacan’s term was less about targeting the mismanagement of the modern university and more about highlighting the broad shift in the structure of authority — where knowledge and power combine to establish systems of administration operating in the name of reason and technical progress. And this is where Kafka’s dog comes in, to question this new order, to excavate the underside of its supposed neutrality, to propose another way of thinking, even, perhaps, a way out.

Narrated by the dog himself, the story follows him on his various escapades in theory. He recounts how his curiosity and investigative instincts were first awakened by a psychedelic concert, the song and dance show of the musical dogs. He then turns to the major mystery of the canine world — where does food come from? — and devises a number of eccentric experiments to test the food source. He conjectures about a rumored breed of dogs that miraculously floats in the air. The dog ceaselessly asks questions, but receives no answers. He speaks about his search for colleagues to join him on his quest, but everywhere he confronts a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to his research: the silence of the dogs. The word that could transform dogdom is missing, he laments.

Later the dog undertakes a truly radical project: In order to penetrate the enigma of nourishment, he fasts. This experiment ends badly, with the investigator nearly dying. He awakens to a kind of vision in which a beautiful hunting dog is singing to him; or rather, the melody seems to be floating in the air of its own accord. The story concludes with a summation of the dog’s philosophical discoveries, which could be called, not without irony, Kafka’s “System of Science” — a system whose pinnacle is the science of freedom, which is the story’s final word.

The entry for “dog” in Gustave Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas” reads: “Especially created to save its master’s life. Man’s best friend.” Kafka, a true Flaubertian, upends this cliché about canine fidelity to authority. Kafka’s dog is not man’s best friend, but the truth’s; and he does not save his master’s life, but risks his own in seeking to free himself from domination and reveal the hidden forces at work in his world. Along the way of this fraught quest, some of the questions the dog will grapple with are: Can one actually be friends with the truth? What kind of dissident science might be built around it? and, Who are his comrades in this struggle?

“Investigations of a Dog” was never one of Kafka’s more popular stories, and, despite the attention it has received, it is a work that I believe still remains to be discovered. Critical judgment has been mixed, sometimes reserved; it’s been called “one of the longest, most rambling, and least directed of Kafka’s short stories.” And it has also proved something of a puzzle for interpreters.

One of these puzzles is the story’s comedy. “Investigations of a Dog” is a unique example of Kafka’s humor in that it’s the jokiest of all his fictions; indeed, the whole story is essentially one long joke. Like a shaggy-dog story — the narrator is even of a “woolly” breed — the tale leads you on and on, moving from one misadventure to the next, but without any climax or resolution, until it just trails off. But if the punchline is never explicitly stated, as soon as one gets it it’s apparent everywhere, in the dog’s various encounters, the mysteries he confronts, his entire research program. And the punchline is this: Dogs do not see human beings. Humans are the elephants in the room, as it were, the invisible masters of the universe, and this massive gap in canine perception is what, from the reader’s (presumably) human perspective, leads the dog into all kinds of funny traps and pseudoproblems. “Recently I have taken more and more to casting up my life, looking for the decisive, the fundamental error that I must surely have made; and I cannot find it.” This blindness is the fundamental error on which the dog’s investigations rest.

Thus the mystery of the fantastical concert is explained as soon as one realizes that the dog has stumbled onto a performance of trained circus dogs; their upright posture, which so scandalizes the puppy, is part of the act, the loud music is produced not by the dogs themselves but by an organ grinder or other human performers, and the labyrinth of wooden bars in which the dog gets caught are simply chair legs, which, at ground level, appear as an impenetrable maze. Or again, the enigma of nourishment is easily solved when one understands that the dogs are being fed by an invisible hand, throwing scraps to hungry hounds. Likewise, the Lufthunde or air dogs are the pampered lapdogs of the bourgeoisie, toted around in well-to-do ladies’ arms, or nowadays in designer pooch purses. And in the episode with the hunting dog, it’s as if Laska had wandered into the story from “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy’s dog warning Kafka’s dog to clear the field, for Levin and his shotgun are on the way (“Anna Karenina” contains a couple of daring scenes where the point of view shifts into the hunting dog’s stream of consciousness).

The whole thing is extremely well constructed, but the problem is: How should we interpret this joke? Is “Investigations” nothing but an extended intellectual gag? Is the story really a satire on philosophy, poking fun at the follies of metaphysical speculation? Would an author such as myself risk looking ridiculous by taking the dog’s philosophical quest too seriously? The story is a brilliant exercise in what Viktor Shklovsky called estrangement or defamiliarization (ostranenie), but what is being defamiliarized here? In a sense, what the story throws into relief is the setup of Kafka’s own fiction.

In a letter to Milena Jesenská, Kafka sets out what might be considered the fundamental formula of his fiction, writing of “3 circles: an innermost circle A, then B, then C.” C is the subject who lives under an incomprehensible injunction from A that makes its life impossible, an impossibility it negotiates through the various gatekeepers, go-betweens, managers, and messengers that comprise B — little others who run about in place of the remote and inaccessible A, le grand Autre (Andere in German) or big Other.

If we regard “Investigations of a Dog” in light of this formula, two things stand out. First, the story radicalizes the distance and withdrawnness of the central authority A to the point of its virtual disappearance. There is no mysterious Castle, no inaccessible Law, no unreachable Emperor. A has now effectively vanished. Meanwhile B is flourishing, in the form of the accelerating progress of scientific knowledge that rules over dogdom, the Dog University — though this has taken on some of the opacity of A by virtue of its own success, the sprawling and unmasterable accumulation of knowledge. And what about C, the subject?

Here Kafka makes another turn of the screw. It’s as if the more intractable and invisible domination becomes, the more imperative is the striving for freedom. In the original setup, C suffers from an obscure injunction that renders life unlivable. The dog, too, experiences his calling as an obscure injunction, even a monstrous, unachievable task, but he is far less beholden to some external agency or power than most of Kafka’s agonized heroes: Instead of seeking official permission or status he is the one who authorizes his own investigations. And he looks for others to join him in his philosophical quest to radically transform dogdom. Indeed, the dog is the bringer of the plague, like Freud supposedly said to Carl Jung on their voyage to America. Or better, he is the Kafkian agent who tries to bring a sense of the Kafkaesque to a world that would rather know nothing about it. Kafka’s dog is the intrepid researcher who interrogates the gaps in the edifice of knowledge, which point to the unbearable unspeakable secret of — the dogs’ domestication.

We need a new phrase to capture Kafka’s brand of dark humor: a screwball tragedy. “Investigations of a Dog” is a theoretical burlesque where research involves singing into a hole, dancing with the earth, conjecturing about flying dogs, and undergoing an extended bout of food deprivation. It’s a literalization of what Hans Blumenberg called “theory as exotic behavior,” in his study of the oldest joke about philosophy, the story of Thales and the Thracian maid.

Philosophy, from the very beginning, appeared as an eccentric, “exotic” practice, divorced from everyday life and its pragmatic, down-to-earth concerns. The stargazing Thales (the so-called first philosopher) falling into a well and being laughed at by a servant girl is the specimen joke of philosophy, the joke told by and at the expense of philosophy to capture its own strangeness and distance from life. In Blumenberg’s words, “The interaction between the protophilosopher and the Thracian maidservant … became the most enduring prefiguration of all the tensions and misunderstandings between the lifeworld and theory.” As Blumenberg shows, the history of this joke, with its many variations and interpretations — its retellers sometime siding with Thales, sometimes the maid — is coextensive with the history of philosophy itself. Kafka’s tale may also be considered a part of this history, and, in a way, it constitutes another retelling of the joke. But if the dog’s oddball investigations literalize the exoticism of theory and its remoteness from daily life, Kafka’s story is also a literalization of Socrates’s reply to the joke.

They say Thales was studying the stars, Theodorus, and gazing aloft, when he fell into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of him because, she said, he was wild to know about what was up in the sky but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet. The same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy. It really is true that the philosopher fails to see his next-door neighbor; he not only doesn’t notice what he is doing; he scarcely knows whether he is a man or some other kind of creature.

Indeed, who knows, perhaps the philosopher is not a man but a dog.

What is remarkable in Plato’s presentation is the way that Socrates, in the face of ridicule, ups the ante. He does not try to defend the value or usefulness of philosophy. (This starts with Aristotle, who recounts how Thales was able to make money from his stargazing by successfully predicting olive harvest yields, and continues to our day with the promotion of philosophy as commercially exploitable critical thinking skills.) Instead, he radicalizes the consequences of Thales’s fall. It is not just the physical ground beneath his feet that the philosopher loses, but the metaphysical ground of being and thought: he no longer knows who or even what kind of beast he is. What if, in Kafka’s case, the cogito were a dogito?

This brings us closer to the heart of Kafka’s humor. But what is screwy about the dog’s investigations — and what I mean to convey with “screwball tragedy” — has to do with their faltering trajectory, their persistently thwarted yet ever-revitalized character, the Kafkian mixture of necessity and impossibility, indispensability and hopelessness, perseverance rendered in its pure and empty form. Throughout his theoretical adventures, the dog keeps tripping over himself, he is both propelled and stymied by an insurmountable inner — what exactly? The idea of screwball tragedy is illustrated perhaps most purely by one of Kafka’s variations on the Don Quixote story.

One of the most important quixotic acts, more obtrusive than fighting the windmill, is: suicide. The dead Don Quixote wants to kill the dead Don Quixote; in order to kill, however, he needs a place that is alive, and this he searches for with his sword, both ceaselessly and in vain. Engaged in this occupation the two dead men, inextricably interlocked and positively bouncing with life, go somersaulting away down the ages.

Kafka presents here a highly original philosophy of life as a continually failed suicide. In this quixotic suicide, the dead subject comes bouncingly alive through its vain attempts to find the last little bit of life to extinguish, and this repeated failure is the missing “place that is alive,” the seat of an exuberant, and uncanny, vitality. The somersaulting vivaciousness of a Don Quixote, split from himself, sword drawn yet forever missing its nonexistent target, takes the form of a double negation, or rather, a repeatedly failed negation. This failed negation is the Kafkian expression of positivity and life, and the source of a twisted metaphysical humor. As Kafka puts it later on in his notebooks, “One cannot not-live, after all.” Unlike the logic of logicians this “cannot not” is not simply the same as “can”: It means that the “can” can only assert itself through the detour of a more primordial impossibility that both impels and undoes it. Kafka’s Don Quixote can only live by constantly failing to kill himself; the flipside of this is that Quixote is unkillable because he is already dead, and so he keeps “somersaulting away down the ages.” “More obtrusive than fighting the windmill” is this eternally failed negation.

Tilting at windmills is, of course, the Cervantine image for fighting imaginary enemies, and this famous episode epitomizes Don Quixote’s self-styled literary existence, the life he lives through the imitation of already faded (“dead”) chivalric literature. Kafka’s quixotic suicide takes this idea of simulated existence one step further. Virtual or symbolic life is now its own delirious enemy: The Kafkian Don Quixote tilts at himself.

Kafka’s characters are all, in different ways, victims of themselves, they are their own worst “imaginary” adversaries. But they also come alive precisely through their failure to cancel themselves out, by spinning around (or tumbling over) their own impossibility, by failing to not-live. If animals, crossbreeds, and uncanny nonhumans appear so frequently in Kafka’s work — if a dog should embody the thinker — it’s because they are the best spokescreatures for this internally divided being, which only misrecognizes itself by thinking of itself as a superior and masterful creature, as “human.”

Kafka’s protagonists are possessed by an exceeding drivenness, and “Investigations of a Dog” is the story of the drive to philosophize, the theory drive — with the added twist that the philosopher should become reflexively aware of the structure of this drivenness, which is why the story can provide clues for understanding Kafka’s other stories, the general form of his fiction. Kafka’s dog cannot not-think. Despite his concerted efforts, the canine philosopher cannot think himself and his world, he fails to break through the wall of silence (this is the tragic aspect of the story), but he also cannot not-think these things (the screwball one), and so he pushes ahead with his idiosyncratic inquiries and iconoclastic methods, persisting in what he calls his “hopeless but indispensable little investigations.”

The dog presses forward, as if the true way were less a path to be followed than an obstacle to be stumbled over. One of Kafka’s aphorisms goes: “The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.” (This could be read as a rejoinder to the Thales joke: instead of gazing at the heavens, the theorist focuses on the ground, but the ground has become treacherous, a tripwire for the thinker.) Here we may once again recall Freud. Freud’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle is about the self-destructive and self-sabotaging tendencies of psychic life — is not death drive Freud’s name for the quixotic suicide? It concludes with the quotation: “What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping… The Book tells us it is no sin to limp.” “Investigations of a Dog” contains a number of images of flying and levitation, a dreamed-of transcendence, but it’s this internally inhibited or arrested movement that best captures the faltering course of the dog’s investigations. Limping, stumbling, or, more acrobatically, “somersaulting away down the ages”: These are physical images of thought contending with its own impossibility, a word that has a special valence for Kafka.

“According to ancient lore, dogs are supposed to recognize angelic presences before humans can see them,” writes Alberto Manguel in a remarkable essay on Dante’s dogs. But not Kafka’s dogs. They are deprived of this gift of extrasensory perception, they have no special sense for the beyond; indeed, they fail to apprehend the reality right before their eyes. Manguel compares the mystery of God for human beings to how humans must appear to dogs: “To this framing orthodoxy belong the savage examples of God’s judgment, the gratuitous demonstrations of God’s mercy, the divine hierarchies of bliss, and the infernal gradations of punishment: all beyond human understanding, much as our erratic behavior must be beyond the understanding of dogs.” God is to man as man is to dog. (As early as the 17th century Francis Bacon wrote: “For take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a god.”) Yet for Kafka’s dogs there is no man-God. His dogs are top dogs, masters of their realm where knowledge reigns supreme. Max Brod summed up the story as a “melancholy travesty of atheism.”

But there’s another way of looking at it. Kafka turns Manguel’s line about the special angel sense of dogs around. His dog has a nose not for the emissaries of the other world, but for the fractures in this one. While submitting to the progress of science and the canon of canine knowledge, the philosopher dog sniffs out the trail of their inconsistencies and distortions, their fissures and gaps. “I bow before their knowledge … but content myself with wriggling out through the gaps, for which I have a particularly good nose.” Following the logic of the shaggy dog joke, these gaps would be the telltale signs of an “other world”: the hidden masters, the invisible human owners, the unnoticed gods of the dogs. But what if this idea of hidden masters were itself a comical ruse, and the truth is that it’s not invisible outside forces that are in control but we who are doing it to ourselves?

We, human beings, are self-domesticating animals, the wild and ever-resourceful architects of our own cages. And — paradoxically — it’s the very wildness of our self-domestication that points to a freedom that remains untamed. This is why our investigations into freedom are both indispensable and hopeless.

Aaron Schuster is a philosopher and writer who lives in Amsterdam. He is the author of “The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis” and “How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science,” from which this article is adapted.