Franz Kafka and Others

The American Dream become Nightmare: Franz Kafka and Others EDWIN M. MOSELEY "The thing a young writer is likely to do", wrote Thomas Wolfe just after he has published his first novel, "is to confuse the limits between actuality and reality. He tends unconsciously to describe an event in such a way because it actually happened that way, and from an artistic point of view I can see now that this is wrong. It is not, for example, important that one remembers a beautiful woman of easy virtue as having come from Idaho or Texas or Nova Scotia. The important thing really is only to express as well as possible the character and quality of the woman of easy virtue. But the young writer, chained to fact and to his own inexperience, as yet unliberated by maturity, is likely to argue: 'She must be described as coming from Kentucky because that is where she actually did come from'." 1 Franz Kafka, who died at the young age of 41, was never a young writer "chained to fact and to his own inexperience", even in his first novel Amerika, begun in 1912 when he was 29. Kafka had, of course, never been to America, which he chose as his setting, but he achieved impressively the reality of it without recourse to the actuality of firsthand experience. Already in this first novel there is the easy movement between the factual detail and the detail that can be read only as exag- geration for effect, as guide to allegory, as pivotal symbol, the very interweaving of actuality and reality that has come to be called literary expressionism. Any descriptive detail taken out of Kafka's context is possible, though in context it is clearly improbable and, from our knowledge of the actuality of America, deliberately inaccurate. Ironical- ly, it is the conspicuously unreal detail, such as the sword substituted for the torch in the Statue of Liberty's hand, that contributes most forcefully to the reality which Kafka wants to convey. The result is closest, not to the whirling stars in an expressionistic sky by Van Gogh nor to the limp watches of Dali's early surrealism, but to the "magic 1 Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel (New York, 1936), pp. 21-22. The American Dream become Nightmare 1013 realism" of Ben Shahn or Henry Koerner. In the work of the "magic realists", every detail, undersized or oversized, unexpected or predic- table, has a stark literalness that, combined with every other starkly literal detail, contributes to the total impression of actual world made dream world, nearer to truth than any photographing of the actual world could conceivably come. Students of Kafka have been imaginatively interested in the sources of his American details. Franklin's Autobiography, Whitman's Leaves of Grass (especially the section entitled "Passage to India"), Dickens' American Notes, his Martin Chuzzlewit, partly set in the America of the Notes, even Forster's nineteenth-century life of Dickens, describing in detail the English author's two journeys to America, have been discussed fruitfully as the sources for details which Kafka borrows with respect or mocks and parodies.2 Kafka's diaries, as well as the biographi- cal reports of his personal friends, give evidence that he knew these works firsthand and enjoyed them. Examination of the analogies between these narratives and Amerika might lead one to conclude that Kafka was writing about American narratives rather than writing his own American tale. He used and mocked essentially Franklin's account of himself as the innocent making his way to success in the new America and Whitman's hymns to the promise of a new world through a mysterious wedding of pioneering discovery, natural brotherhood, and technical progress. He used and imitated seriously Dickens' highly uncomplimentary narrative of his journey to the new world which dramatically denied the freedom, the justice, the natural abundance, promised by its familiar slogans. The imagery of Dickens' American Notes is of dreams and promises pursued and denied: dreams "of cities growing up, like palaces in fairy tales, among the wilds and forests of the West", but the reality of "a breeding place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope"; of a Mississippi which he trusts never to see again "saving in troubled dreams and nightmares".3 Some literary historians have contended that the essential ideas of European Romanticism, such as the deification of Nature and of Natural Man, would hardly have 2 See particularly Mark Spilka's comprehensive "Amerika: Its Genesis" in An- gel Flores and Homer Swander (eds.), Franz Kafka Today (Madison, 1958), pp. 95-116. See also Rudolf Vasata's "'Amerika' and Charles Dickens" in Angel Flores (ed.), The Kafka Problem (New York, 1963), pp. 134-139, and Lienhard Bergel's "Amerika: Its Meaning" in Flores and Swander (eds.), op. cit., p. 123. 3 Charles Dickens, American Notes, in Works, XXVIII (New York, 1905), pp. 151, 203, and 223. 1014 Edwin M. Moseley been possible without some vague awareness of America as an un- touched world, as the natural home of the intuitively good man, simple in his tastes, humble in attitudes and gestures, loving of his fellowman, and unconsciously sacrificing for others. Dickens, certainly an Eng- lish Romantic in his assumptions about the nature of Man, of Nature, and of Society, came to America knowing that the American dream had been corrupted in the East by commercialism and in the South by slavery, but hoping to find in the unsettled West at least the promise of a free society. He was vastly disappointed, but claimed in 1868, some 25 years later on the occasion of his second journey to the United States, that he was favorably impressed with "the amazing changes" he saw around him on every side. He had in mind at least the legal abolition of slavery and perhaps the increased sophistication of the Eastern seaboard. Kafka had pointed to David Copperfield, not Dickens' American narratives, as the chief source for "The Stoker", his first chapter, and for the novel which followed. "A sheer imitation", he wrote in his diary in 1917. "The story of the trunk, the boy who delights and charms everyone, the menial labor, his sweetheart in the country house, the dirty houses, et al." are details in both Dickens and Kafka which critics have meticulously compared. "- but above all the method", he emphasized. "It was my intention, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I should have taken from the times and the duller ones I should have got from myself." 4 The "sharper lights" from his times needs no literary source. For Kafka, as for every other European, America was in his awareness, not only as the historical and the literary new world in which life might begin again, but specifically as an everyday topic in the newspapers, in magazine articles and photographs, and, even by Kafka's time, in the movies. Many of Kafka's scenes are like photographs or films observed outside the context of experience or indeed with a pretended lack of orientation as to meaning. Imagine a familiar photograph of traffic on Wall Street, of the stock exchange, of a mass demonstration of workers, of the Automat at the rush hour, of tenements on hot summer nights with families sitting on the landings of fire escapes, of the floor at a major political convention, of a racetrack with people lined up at betting 4 Max Brod (ed.), The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923 (London, 1949), p. 188. For a careful examination of the details mentioned in this quotation, see E. W. Tedlock, Jr., "Kafka's Imitation of David Copperfield", Comparative Literature, VII: 1 (Winter, 1955), pp. 52-62. The American Dream become Nightmare 1015 booths. Kafka's Amerika is full of these scenes described meticulously, component by component, deliberately without the rationalizations that aim at having them make sense. It is as if they were seen by a man from another planet - though evidently they are strange enough to Karl from another continent or, as part of an adult world, to Karl just out of a child's world. What one takes for granted with the familiar labels and in a familiar context assumes the strangeness of a dream if known names for identifiable outlines are missing. Photographic details, the components of actuality, get at the reality of the matter if they remain unexcused by the conventional generalizations: machine-like move- ments, speed, bigness, oppressive crowding, remain their naked selves without the rationalizations of "efficiency" or "progress" or "democracy" tacked on. Kafka's Karl, like Dickens' David, retains for a long time a disarming naïveté enabling him to see details for what they are. This naïveté is the advantage which the innocent voyager has, at least in the early stages of a journey of learning; when he begins to understand the accepted generalizations ("the American dream", say) or even the usual denials of them (that is, to be aware that "the dream" has become "a nightmare"), the child's ability to shatter illusions, to make ridiculous the components of adult respectability, begins to disappear. When tradi- tional meanings are understood, the tone of a book, as in David Cop- perfield, may change from unadulterated childhood wonder to adult pathos and sentimentality. Parker Tyler, a stimulating critic of the cinema, has conjectured that Kafka saw some Chaplin films.5 The similarity of content, as with Dickens, is of course apparent; Chaplin's protagonist was frequently the innocent foreigner coming to the land of promise hoping to start a new life.

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