(or, as someone else noted, my weekly cheap shot/two-fer posting!)

Kafka’s “A Report for An Academy” distinctly reminds me of Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In both, Kafka’s ape and Poe’s “Ourang-Outang” both successfully pass as human beings, while their actual identities as animals remain concealed. In Poe’s story, the brutal murder of a mother and her young daughter remains a mystery because no witness can seem to identify the sounds heard from the apartment in which the crime took place. There are many speculations on the criminal’s voice—one man claims “the shrill voice was that of an Italian,” while another, convinced the voice belonged to a man, “could not distinguish the words uttered. They were loud and quick – unequal – spoken in fear as well as in anger. The voice was harsh – not so much shrill as harsh” (201). Notably, none of the witnesses distinguished between the sounds of a human and that of an animal. When Dupin discovers that it was an Ourang-Outang that committed the crime, its startlingly human linguistic qualities are recognized as the clue that sidetracked the case. In fact, the reason for the Ourang-Outang’s escape to begin with results from it imitating its owner shaving. Actually, the idea “imitation,” or “appearances v. the real” seems to be the point of interest for this week’s reading. Kafka’s ape realized he could “be human” literally because he said so: “I cried out a short and good “Hello!” breaking out into human sounds. And with this cry I sprang into the community of human beings, and I felt its echo—“Just listen. He’s talking!”—like a kiss on my entire sweat soaked body” (5). The ape became human because language made him so; by talking or sounding like ‘one of us,’ the ape was no longer separate, but related.
Throughout How to do Things with Words, J.L. Austin repeatedly argues that speech is actually an action, and further that some words imply specific action (i.e. christening a ship). When Austin states, “there is something which is at the moment of uttering being done by the person uttering,” it is clear that when the ape utters his first human words, he is doing more than just uttering—he is becoming something else (60). Since apes and humans do not speak the same language, when Kafka’s ape begins to speak ours, he could transcend his identity as an ape in order to be recognized as human. Following Austin’s logic, Kafka’s ape can, in truth, pronounce himself human simply by saying that he is human.
Similar to Austin and Kafka’s arguments, Butler notes that gender, too, is discursively fabricated. Butler argues that gender is a repeated act, “at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established” (Gender 178). What this says is that in order to “be” female, or “be” male, we must repeat these constructions regularly, as they are not stable identifications. Gender, just like Kafka’s ape insisting upon its humanness, relies upon the doer “saying” he or she is a male or female through one’s “socially established” alignment with gender identifiers (obviously ‘socially established gender roles’ is another contested issue altogether, but I will avoid that here).
Nietzsche says, “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (Preface pt. 13). The deed, then, is Kafka’s ape convincing the Academy that he is a human while at the same time persuading them that he was an ape. Actually, he can be neither or both, as the two identities are only “discursively fabricated.”