Amerika
Amerika, [1] Kafka’s first, unfinished, and least read novel, follows the bizarre wanderings of a young man by the name of Karl Rossman after he is sent to America by his parents as punishment for impregnating the chamber maid. Kafka, of course, is famous for portraying enigmatic and nightmarish worlds in which man is relentlessly and inexplicably persecuted; so famous, actually, that it may be impossible for us to appreciate the strangeness and originality of his art. Imagine reading The Trial if you had never heard of Kafka: How ordinary, even banal, that fictional universe would at first seem until slowly, page by page, the nightmare began its insidious encroachment. As in most paintings by Magriette (and very few by Dali) there is no violent distortion of the objects and people which constitute the dream. [2] The surface anatomy of the world remains intact and concrete and only becomes fantastical through its arrangement and multiplication. Bureaucratic procedures, to cite the inevitable example, are the ne plus ultra of tedium but take on the quality of a nightmare, and even of a religious allegory, when made labyrinthine and finally exploded to infinitity.
Amerika does not stray far from this pattern: The first problem to beset Karl Rossman when he steps off the ship that has brought him from Europe to New York is a mislaid umbrella. Suspecting that he has left it in his berth, Karl returns below deck, gets lost, and then befriends a stoker whom he eventually follows to the captain’s room to assist in a labour dispute. In the course of the rather petty and amorphous confrontation that ensues, a visiting State Councillor recognizes Karl as his own nephew. The problem is that the man’s full name is Edward Jakob and while Karl does indeed have an Uncle Jakob living in Europe he is Jakob by first name only—his surname is Bendelmayer. Such conclusive disproof of their kinship, and Karl explains it all quite clearly, has no effect at all on the whimsical Councillor. How, he asks, can you doubt that I am your uncle when I know everything about you? And then he cites from memory all the details of Karl’s affair with the chambermaid and even produces a handwritten letter from the latter alerting him to Karl’s arrival. As though the matter were now completely settled, the two set off amid hearty congratulations to begin their new life together. And on this surreal note the chapter closes. In the next, Karl is living in a luxurious Manhattan apartment where his every whim is satisfied by his doting “uncle.” All seems well, but one night, while staying at a country house in the company of his uncle’s business associate (on an invitation Councillor Jakob seemed only mildly disinclined to sanction) Karl discovers that his benefactor is subject to sudden, unaccountable changes of heart. The knowledge arrives in the form of a letter in which the Councillor utterly repudiates Karl for his unforgivable impropriety in accepting an invitation to which he, Karl’s uncle, was obviously opposed. And a moment later, having been rudely expeled from the house by his hosts, Karl finds himself out on the street… The remaining pages continue this downward trajectory. Karl falls in with a pair of parasitical drifters (Robinson and Delemarche) who help themselves to his food and money and steal his only photograph of his parents. Abandoning them, he takes a job as a liftboy in a respectable hotel and almost achieves a kind of precarious contentment—until Robinson, roaring drunk, turns up asking for Karl and then vomits in the lobby. There is an inquiry into the incident led by a Head Waiter hostile to Karl and Karl is ultimately fired. Having nowhere else to go, he moves in with Delemarche and Robinson who are now living with, and completely in the thrall of, an obese dominatrix named Brunelda; the first, Delemarche, as her lover; the second, Robinson (having been brought low by their sadistic mistreatment) as a servant who sleeps on the balcony like a dog. The last completed chapter [3] ends with Karl contemplating whether or not to accept an offer to replace Robinson as servant to Delemarche and his lover. Enigmatic works of art seldom lend themselves to a single interpretation and the dutiful reader of editorial forewords to Kafka’s novels will encounter several. According to one, Kafka was an existentialist and a pessimist who sought to portray the universe as an incomprehensible and hostile place in which the individual was lonely, perplexed and threatened. Another perceives in the persecution of his characters by vast and mysterious forces a religious allegory where the protagonist’s guilt, as in Christian theology, is presupposed, and the multiplying complications which stand between him and the resolution of his predicament are a symbol for the impassable gulf between God and his fallen creations. Borges, to mention still another interpretation, opined that, “the first of Kafka’s precursors is Zeno’s paradox of motion,” and therefore saw all three novels as elaborate Eleatic parables. It must be said that, for all his metaphysical and philosophical trappings, Kafka runs the risk of depressing the causal reader. [4] In Amerika, as in his other novels, we follow a character who is rudely and unjustly thwarted at every turn and before too long the aura of hopelessness can become oppressive. And while the comic absurdity of his characters and situations cut the gloom a little, there is something else seldom discussed, something less philosphic and mystical, perhaps, but also more enduring, that saves Kafka from being a depressing writer and actually makes reading him an unexpectedly uplifting experience: The unwavering, almost invincible, reasonableness of his characters in the face of unrelenting injustice and absurdity. In this sense Karl Rossman recalls Lewis Caroll’s ever-pragmatic little Alice, who likewise meets the stubborn absurdity of her world with equally stubborn reasonableness—even to the point of becoming unreasonably reasonable. After all, raising one logical objection after another against the flapdoodle spouted by a talking egg is just another kind of absurdity. And the same is true of Kafka’s heroes: The injustice and absurdity of their world is a force of nature. It is utterly unamenable to reason, unanswerable, unremitting—but not one of his protagonists ever throws up his hands and walks away. Instead, he redoubles his efforts, redoubles his reasonableness. The final effect is equal parts ridiculous, courageous and tragic—like a man who strides down onto a beach to stop the advance of a tsunami with calm and ever-more-meticulously-reasoned appeals to the rapidly withdrawing tide. The effort is futile, of course, but its very futility is what makes it heroic: A single human being obstinately retaining his humanity against the crushing opposition of an irrational cosmos. The connection may seem a little tenuous, but somehow I am always reminded of the equally heroic retention of good manners revealed by the last words of Mary Antoinette. “Pardon me, Sir, I did not mean to did it,” she told the executioner whose foot she had accidentally stepped on while climbing to the scaffold. [1] Why Kafka chose to spell America with a penultimate K is open to debate. Interestingly, The Statue of Liberty, as described by Karl, also holds a sword instead of a torch. Michael Hoffman believes he perceives a critique of American jingoism in this. But perhaps it is all simply to remind us that this is not the real America but a parallel world, or shadowland, which exists only in the mind of a Czech author who never had, nor would, set foot on its shores, and therefore beholden not to natural law but to the strange and elastic laws of imagination.
[2] The Metamorphosis is an obvious exception but even here Gregor’s transformation is treated less as a terrifying disruption of reality than a sort of social embarrassment which the family must conceal in order to maintain the appearance of middle-class normality. [3] In the last unfinished chapter Karl Rossman is absorbed into a vast and nebulous theatrical group. Hoffman writes that, "Kafka used to hint smilingly that within this ‘almost limitless’ theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, a standby, his freedom, even his old home and his parents—as if by some celestial witchery." Presumably, then, the "happy ending" was to take place not in reality but in the bathetic form of a theatrical simulacrum. [4] It is a measure of the pessimism assumed to characterize Kafka that Michael Hofmann, in the introduction to his 2004 translation of Amerika, can both agree with Edwim Muir that it is Kafka’s “most delightful work,” and later, while trying to extrapolate a probable ending to the unfinished novel, surmise that its cyclical structure of wandering, adoption and expulsion, “guarantees doom.” |