The Vulture (Kafka)

The Vulture (Der Geier) is a short story by Franz Kafka, written sometime between 1917 and 1923.

Plot summary

A vulture hacks at the protagonist's feet until a man passing by asks him why he doesn't do anything about it. The protagonist explains that he is helpless to resist, though at first he tried to drive the vulture away, when he saw that it was about to attack his face he stopped, preferring to sacrifice his feet. The onlooker exclaims, "Fancy letting yourself be tortured like this!", and offers to go and get a gun to shoot the vulture. The protagonist asks him to hurry. The vulture listens to the conversation, then takes wing and thrusts its beak into the protagonist's head, killing him, but also drowning in his blood, as it flows on "filling every depth, flooding every shore." [Kafka, Franz. "The Complete Stories". New York: Schocken Books, 1995. 442-443.]

Analysis

This text has often been compared with Kafka's "Prometheus", with the vulture substituted for the eagle. [Menninghaus, Winfried. "Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation". 2003, page 442.] Vultures were believed by the ancient Egyptians, and later by Renaissance thinkers, to be invariably female, and self-impregnating. [Anderson, Wayne. "Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci, and The Vulture's Tail: A Refreshing Look At Leonardo's Sexuality". 2001, page 6.]

Freud's controversial 1910 text on Leonardo da Vinci psychoanalytically assesses da Vinci's memory of having been visited in his crib by a vulture, suggesting that this maternal-avian creature placed its feather in his mouth; the "single-sexed parentage" of the vision led Freud, working from this version of the memory, to conclude that da Vinci was a homosexual. [Anderson, Wayne. "Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci, and The Vulture's Tail: A Refreshing Look At Leonardo's Sexuality". 2001, page 6.] Freud's text was later discredited, because in fact he had been working from a flawed translation of the da Vinci story, and in fact da Vinci had recalled being visited by a hawk. However, it was not discredited via the mistranslation until 1926. [Anderson, Wayne. "Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci, and The Vulture's Tail: A Refreshing Look At Leonardo's Sexuality". 2001, page 10.]

The title of the text, "Der Geier", is also laden with diverse connotations. The term "geyer" is Yiddish for "peddler", and is a common German surname. Engels' 1850 "The Peasant War in Germany" highlights the life of Florian Geyer, the nobleman who died fighting alongside the peasants in the 16th century Peasants' War, and whose ill-fated Black Company became much celebrated in German-language song and fable.

References and allusions in other media

* Israeli artist Yosl Bergner created a series of etchings inspired by the story named "The Vulture by Franz Kafka" in 1990.

* Jorge Luis Borges selected the story for inclusion in "The Library of Babel", a series of short volumes published by Ediciones Siruela in Spain from 1978 to 1986.

* A comics adaptation of the story, illustrated by Peter Kuper, is included in "Give It Up!".

* A parody of the story appears as part of the short story "The Notebooks of Bob K." by Jonathan Lethem, which is collected in Kafka Americana. In the story the vulture is replaced by the Batman villain The Penguin.

References