Franz Kafka: Amerika.
SECOND
SPEAKER: “As sixteen-year-old Karl Rosmann, who had been sent to America by his
poor parents because a maidservant had seduced him and had a child by him, was
entering New York harbor in the ship, which had already slowed to a crawl, he
beheld the long-since sighted Statue of Liberty in sunlight that had suddenly
become more glaring. Her sword-bearing
arm was thrusting skyward as though she had only just raised it, and the open
air was wafting freely about her form.”
FIRST SPEAKER:
Is this really the beginning of a book by Franz Kafka?
SECOND
SPEAKER: “…and the open air was wafting freely about her form…”
FIRST
SPEAKER: For we don’t encounter the “open air” anywhere else in his work,
either earlier or later. The novel
called Amerika, as edited by Max
Brod, and recently republished by Samuel Fischer, has remained an exceptional
case. Max Brod is well-informed enough
to report:
SECOND
SPEAKER: “Franz Kafka worked on this book with infinite gusto, mostly during
the evening and well into the night.
Kafka was conscious of the fact that this novel was more sanguine and
‘lighter’ than anything he had written before.”
FIRST
SPEAKER: Amerika is indeed a
lighthearted book, even though a Trial
is always pending for its young exiled hero; he is as unsuccessful as Josef K.
and K. in the novels called The Trial
and The Castle; he is met with and
sorely tested by a series of mishaps. To
be sure, from time to time, the impression of humorousness, of occasional downright
innocence, seems to be based on an optical illusion. The deranged world in which Karl Rossmann
finds himself is no less hostile, no less horrifying, than any other world ever
devised by Kafka’s magical imagination.
But here whatever in The Trial
and The Castle comes across as a
manifestation of utter inscrutability and darkness is shrugged off by the
reader as evidence of Karl’s childishness.
On almost every page, the reader is inclined to argue to himself: Naturally these things aren’t the way that
Karl Rossmann is perceiving them. If Karl were older, more rational, more
experienced, then everything would become clear to him and make perfect sense
once again. In other words, the
reader believes that the confusion isn’t actually a part of the book’s reality
but merely the byproduct of an infantile perspective on it. And in his relish for yarn-spinning Kafka
does indeed often make young Karl Rossman react to his world in a manner that
is innocent and indeed downright foolish, and the relations between certain
things in that world undoubtedly would take on a different appearance if they
were encountered by a more “rational” person.
But one mustn’t forget that this selfsame blind gullibility, which
causes Rossmann to slide helplessly from one mishap to the next, is also
constantly facilitating his access to the world. In the end he makes quite a bit more headway
than the savvy and the streetwise. On
the other hand, one admittedly may infer that innocence will not get a person
very far in this American world, for as Günther Anders has remarked, in Kafka’s
work it is women and chance alone that can ever be of any assistance, such that
it is pointless to exercise one’s own initiative. But this remarkable [----] is not
emphatically thematized until those two great novels, The Castle and The Trial. In these books it is not children, but rather
clever, full-grown men who are confronted by a world that they are aiming to
come to grips with, and there are no longer any such things as a redeeming
court of highest appeal, the hope of an exit, and an exculpatory legal
minority. As I have already said, Karl
Rossmann’s struggle to find a place in society and a foundation for his
existence is more humble and more dedicated, albeit no less despair-ridden. And he imparts his first scrap of insight in
the following despair-ridden sentence:
SECOND
SPEAKER: “It’s impossible to fight back without a good will.”
FIRST
SPEAKER: It is only because owing to his youth and lack of experience he is
inept at asserting his rights and hasn’t got a clue about how to make use of
them that he is the only one of the heroes of Kafka’s three novels who manages
to attain his goal. Admittedly, he is
spared nothing. On the ship that is
taking him to New York he chances to meet his American uncle. Everything seems to fall miraculously into
place. He is introduced into a new way
of life and into the operations of the shipping agency that has brought his
uncle great wealth and social distinction—until one fine day he accepts an
invitation to a party at a country house near New York, a party that takes a highly
peculiar turn. He instinctively realizes
that his loyalty towards his uncle is being tested; he wants to go back home
before it is too late and is then prevented from doing so. A letter from his uncle is delivered to him:
SECOND
SPEAKER: “You have decided to leave my house this evening in defiance of my
will, but you must then abide by this decision for the rest of your life.”
FIRST
SPEAKER: Thus begins the young man’s Via Dolorosa, a quest for gainful
employment whose stations are the highway, a hotel, and the horrifying asylum
offered by the singer Brunelda, whose tyrannical domination is gamely endured
by her lover Delamarche and the diminutive Ire Robinson. But Karl is repelled by everything base and
vulgar, and his hope of finding a respectable occupation never fades. In Kafka’s world, whose hopelessness is
otherwise irresolvable, there turns out to be exactly one permissible solution:
in the celestial-cum-terrestrial project
called the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Karl’s bitterness and disappointment
lose their weightiness; he is able to forget about everything that has happened
to him so far. The promise barked out by
an advertising poster seeking personnel for this theater heralds a kind of Promised
Land:
SECOND
SPEAKER: “The great theater of Oklahoma is calling you! It is calling you today alone, only
once! Anyone who misses this opportunity
will miss it for all time! Anyone who
cares about his future should be one of us!
Everyone is welcome! Anyone who
wishes to become an artist, step right up!
We are the theater that can find a use, a place, for everyone! To anyone who has decided to join us we
extend our congratulations right here and now!
But do hurry, lest you miss our midnight deadline! At twelve o’clock sharp all offers will be
closed once and for all! Let anyone who
doesn’t believe us be damned!”
FIRST
SPEAKER: Karl’s belief that he is destined to be welcomed somewhere compels him
to answer the advertisement; his naïve confidence in the possibility of a life
in a community was never greater, and this naïf attains the simplest and most
elusive of goals: he gains acceptance.
To be sure, the world with all its disorder remains in place as a system
of resistances, but people who, like Karl Rossmann, have stumbled upon this
choice are vouchsafed security and tranquility.
A banquet reminiscent of a religious rite draws together those have been
accepted into the theater. They find the entrance, in contrast to the man who
in Kafka’s parable of the doorkeeper is told:
SECOND
SPEAKER: “This entrance was intended for you alone. I am now about to close it.”
FIRST
SPEAKER: The book concludes with Karl’s departure for Oklahoma and a panoramic
description of a primeval landscape.
SECOND
SPEAKER: “They traveled two days and two nights. It was only now that Karl was finally getting
a sense of America’s vastness. He gazed
indefatigably out the window, and his comrade Giacomo jostled against him there
for a long time, until the lads sitting across from them and intensively
preoccupied with a game of cards finally got tired of playing and spontaneously
dislodged him from the window seat. Karl
thanked them—Giacomo’s English was not universally intelligible—and over the
course of time they became much friendlier, as one cannot help becoming towards
one’s compartment-mates; although their friendliness was often quite
bothersome, because, for instance, whenever they dropped a card and went
searching for it on the floor, they would pinch Karl or Giacomo in the leg with
the utmost force. Giacomo, ever freshly
taken aback, would then let out a shriek and thrust his leg into the air; Karl once
tried to reply with a kick but otherwise patiently put up with it all in
silence. Everything that was happening
inside the tiny compartment, which even with its window open was brimming over
with smoke, made a poor showing by comparison with what was to be seen outside.
On the
first day they traveled through a range of tall mountains. Massive blackish-blue wedges of rock were
drawing ever closer to the train; one leaned out one’s window and tried in vain
to locate their summits; dark, narrow, crevice-ridden valleys opened up; with one’s
finger one traced the vector along which they disappeared into the depths; next
came broad mountain rivers racing along the hilly terrain below in mighty
undulations and propulsively refracting themselves into a thousand rivulets;
they surged along their courses beneath the bridges traversed by the train, and
they were so close that their chilly breath made one’s face shiver.”
FIRST
SPEAKER: In 1913 Kafka published the first chapter, “The Stoker”; the following
year he wrote the succeeding chapters—then he suddenly stopped working on the
book and did not take it up again. The
novel remained unfinished, but we know that Kafka intended to give it an upbeat
conclusion, that “little Karl Rossmann” was supposed to rediscover “a vocation,
liberty, security—indeed, even his homeland and parents,” in the nature theater
of Oklahoma.
Kafka had
never been to America, and the America of his imagination was bound to fail to
resemble the actual country in many respects.
Thus Karl is at one point interrogated by a policeman in a manner that
would have been less credible in the New York of circa 1900. But this is of no consequence. In Amerika,
Kafka quite convincingly created and disclosed to his hero a world full of vast
expanses and vivid colors, full of joy in each and every act of observation and
in the rich depiction of particulars.
This world is already no longer the natural world: its causality seems
perforated, and the actions of its characters do not always any longer arise
from motives as psychology has given us to understand them, even though
everything that happens is “rationally” explicable and linked to everything else
in a highly detailed network of collateral logic. The
divide between reality and unreality that is made much of in the two other
Kafka novels is not yet discernible here, but even in this first book reality
is decidedly dysfunctional.
This
“dysfunctionality” is most plainly visible in the pure, pellucid style of the
work, which orients itself towards the slightest minutiae in an almost pedantic
fashion; indeed, the magic of Kafka’s work would be unintelligible in the
absence of the peculiar phenomenon of his style and its manner of
representation.
But we
are not about to be fooled into appending yet another appraisal and
interpretation to the innumerable existing appraisals of Kafka’s literary
merits and innumerable existing interpretations of Kafka’s oeuvre. Now that the “pro and contra” hullaballoo of
the immediate postwar years has ended, we can make good use of this first
interval of silence by rereading him. True
justice can be done to literary writers only in silence, for when all
interpretations have fallen into obsolescence and all explanations have been
consumed, their work is explicable in terms of the inconsumable truth to which
it owes its existence.
THE END
Translation
unauthorized but Copyright ©2019 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Ingeborg
Bachmann, Werke, edited by Christine Koschel, Inge von
Weidenbaum, and Clemens Münster (Munich: Piper, 1978), Vol. IV, pp. 316-322.
The
essay was broadcast only once, as part of the Hessian Radio Frankfurt cultural
affairs series “Das Buch der Woche,” on December 9, 1953.