Franz Kafka and Others

Home , Amerika (novel), At Night (short story), The Stoker, The Trial

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 untouched 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. But "above all the method", Kafka might have said again: the fusion of the actual America with an absurd and fantastic America which conveys markedly the real one. Both Chaplin and Kafka have a way of making the strange and unidentifiable detail become the entire scene at which the innocent foreigner looks with a certain detachment, but which nevertheless catches him up, buffets him about, and ejects him untouched, ready for another innocent look and another pathetic and ridiculous involvement. The detached eye bestowed by the protagonist's fortune, good or bad, of being an outsider to the adult world,

5 Parker Tyler, "Kafka's and Chaplin's 'Amerika' ", Sewanee Review, LVIII (1950), pp. 299-311. Note that in this otherwise fine article Mr. Tyler assumes that Amerika, published last, was Kafka's last written novel rather than his first. 1016 Edwin M. Moseley a figurative foreigner, in any case free of any vested interest in his strange surroundings, is a primary characteristic of the picaro, what- ever form he may happen to take: the original Renaissance rogue, Fielding's natural man, Byron's ostracized Childe Harold, Dickens' innumerable children, Chaplin's tramp just come to new shores, or Kafka's innocent voyager. As the genre of the novel developed, the picaresque series of adventures through different facets of the society became the journey of learning, with the central character not only having a detached look but also developing insights into the society and into himself with each new look. Kafka's Karl both retains his strange innocence in a new world and develops significantly. The American details, then, are both literary in their origin (Franklin, Whitman, Dickens) and topically visual in their origin (photographs from periodicals and perhaps the Chaplin films). Of these sources, both Dickens and Chaplin could have helped to convey the nightmarish quality of the innocent's experience in a new world: Martin Chuzzle- wit's and the Tramp's literally American experiences and David Cop- perfield's childlike experiences with strange adults. Even more so, the photographs looked at with deliberate disregard of the familiar descriptions of meanings become as strange as a dream in which separate components are visually clear, but not welded together in an overall pattern of unifying interpretation. The structure which contains these literary and visual details is, then, a series of picaresque adventures through many aspects of the society and, in part, a journey of learning through which any innocent must naturally go. Specific American material, the literary and the visual; a picaresque tradition to write in; a model to imitate, are of course not so important as sources for Kafka's final achievement as his perhaps unconscious sense of the archetypal journey of learning or his conscious creation of an archetypal coming-of-age story. This creation he could attain, for he was after all a man moving from birth to childhood to adolescence to maturity and even on toward death, as all men must move, English or Czecho- slovakia^ nineteenth-century or twentieth, European or American. The universality beyond American details and beyond literary tra- ditions points to more essential sources for details and structure, oddly enough neglected by most critics of Kafka. This is the wealth of legends and fairy tales which a child may be introduced to specifically at some forgotten point, but which, even if not taught, evolve in the child's awareness as they evolve in the awareness of early man and primitive man. The child's tale demands and gets at once a willing suspension of The A merican Dream become Nightmare 1017 disbelief. It is by its very definition fantasy, not the actuality of experience, but by its persistence through all cultures, through all times, it is close to the fears and desires of every man, hence the very reality of experience. It is the recurrent dream, verbalized with no embarrassment by and for children and repressed into the forgotten dreams of adult men. The reader of Amerika constantly has the satisfying and disturb- ing sense that he was known a certain scene before, that he has heard this part of the story somewhere: an Alice in Wonderland trial, with the ship's servants rushing in to disrupt procedures like fallen cards; a rich uncle appearing out of nowhere like some deus ex machina; endless tasks from dawn till night as if the hero were enslaved; a Gothic castle with winding corridors, white-bearded servants bearing candelabra, a dark chapel through which the wind blows, inhabited by monsters and tricksters who put the hero continually through tests; a Cinderella-like deadline of time after which all will be lost if the protagonist does not flee; a striking clock at midnight, baying hounds, a cap that significantly fits only the hero; two companions of ill repute who feed upon the hero under the guise of helping him - reminiscent of Pinocchio's Cat and Fox or of Huck Finn's Duke and King; the "Little Match Girl" story of Therese, at once like Grimm and Dostoyevsky in its frantic, desperate mood; recurrent trials in which authoritative men indict and kind women slyly help; the tower which the hero must ascend past all distractions and temptations, the fight which he must ultimately have in order to win the captured woman and gain freedom, himself. The tower, the fight, the woman, Kafka handles grotesquely and satirically on the very surface of his story: Karl is a mock-Siegmund destined to free - or is it to be captured by? - the repulsively female Brunelda. But this conscious inversion of myth, this conscious replacing of hero with non-hero, is not so important to Kafka's texture as are the threads of fairy tale and legend that persist in showing through the specifically American, the traditionally literary, fabric and, indeed, in taking it over at times with all of the nightmarish anxiety and suspense that characterize especially the Germanic fairy tale. The pervasiveness of these threads points to the strongest source for the fantasy, the grotesquerie, the child-like wonder of Amerika. Charles Neider's Frozen Sea is a comprehensive Freudian analysis of Kafka and his works, an analysis that the works themselves tempt the reader into. Kafka knew the works of Freud and used Freudian details consciously with both serious and mocking intention. Neider would not have needed to tell Kafka that "Karl Rossman's problem 1018 Edwin M. Moseley is sexual", that he "strives to achieve heterosexual stability".6 The Freudian detail is a dream component, and it is ironically a main component of the fantasy of fairy tale. Kafka's fun in keeping the obviously male and female symbols always on the surface - the box, the salami, the cane, the sword - has somehow about it a child-like innocence and nakedness respected and ridiculed in Karl. For four chapters, over half of the book, Karl vacillates between the roles of seduced and seducer like some boy kept in girl's clothing. The servant girl seduces him, has a child by him, and Karl is sent away as if he were the unwed mother in a melodrama. The stoker pushes him upon the bunk, men attempt to steal or to rifle his box, they cut up his salami, they press their knees upon him or hold him between their legs. An Amazon-like girl defeats him in wrestling. The touch of a man's bare chest at once excites and repels him. He pulls the covers up to his chin against the advances of the girl who sits on his bed. But gradually he becomes the strong male to Therese's guilefully delicate girl, the man desired by the archetypal woman Brunelda, the unafraid facer of Fanny on the pedestal at the entrance to the Great Nature Theater of Okla- homa. Still, the evolution of Karl into independent man is not complete, for at the very end, when he and Giacomo are on the way to the West, the men across from them in the train tweak their legs whenever they get a secret chance, and Karl suffers in silence. His adventures have moved him on the way to manhood, but the ambivalence of his early position is not altogether resolved. The entire book may be said to fall into the pattern of the archetypal hero's journey of learning - the alien traveler in a strange land; the trials, the tests, the labors; the temptresses, the monsters, the captors, along the way; dark castles and old inns and places of endless labor where he is confined along with other young voyagers; a tower to climb, a princess to rescue from its height; a climactic fight; the insights of pride and humility; and then the earned freedom to enter a Utopia where everyone lives happily ever after - or where the hero is martyred for the happiness of everyone else. These patterns are hardly American. They are as timeless as the story-telling that grows out of and fulfills the needs of men. But what is somehow American is the inversion and mockery of these heroic patterns, American perhaps because the dream, promising so much, is so dramatically denied by the discovered reality. Recall Dickens' dreams "of cities growing up, like

8 Charles Neider, The Frozen Sea: A Study of Franz Kafka (New York, 1948), p. 87. The American Dream become Nightmare 1019 palaces in fairy tales, among the wilds and forests of the West" reduced to nightmares of "fever, ague, and death", which he documents by long descriptions of prisons of solitary confinement and long lists of brutalities done to slaves. Not that comparable confinements, comparable brutalities, did not exist elsewhere, perhaps everywhere in one way or another in Dickens' time, but the American promise was blatantly justice and liberty, and to the European Romantic, any denial of them was a traumatic disappointment. Kafka has Karl discover very soon that where justice and discipline are at odds with each other, discipline wins out — the very generalization that is supposed not to be true in America. He has him discover later that where there is no good will, there can be no justice - again, this in an America theoretically free of the arbitary judgments of kings and aris- tocrats. After his climactic fight with Delamarche, a mock-heroic fight in that what he takes to be blood turns out to be water and particularly since it is really a fight to escape the clutches of a female figure rather than to rescue her, Karl learns his chief lesson from the American student, himself a mockery of the dictum that working all day and studying all night will get one anywhere. The lesson is that one need not be fastidious in his choice of masters, since no leader, popularly elected or not, ever achieved freedom for anyone, that furthermore there is no such thing as absolute freedom, that freedom is after all the recognition of necessity, however awful that necessity may be - a strikingly un- American idea. This lesson prepares Karl to accept without a fight his real designation of "European intermediate student" (which is what he is) rather than his dreamed-of identification of "artist" or "engineer".7 I am called "Negro", says Karl to the man in the anteland of the Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma, who is employing persons according to their ability and not according to their dreams - "Negro" perhaps because that is the low man on the American totem pole, as Dickens had only too clearly pointed out, or because it is simply a loss of identity for the European Karl, a giving up as to any search for individual freedom and success. He enters the West, but the rocks and valleys and streams, however Whitmanesque on the surface, are a "breath of cold- ness" chilling "the skin of one's face". Kafka's original choice of title, Der Verschollene ("The Man Who Disappeared"), becomes clear. The

7 Note the first lines of Whitman's "Passage to India" in Leaves of Grass: "Singing my days,/ Singing the great achievements of the present,/ Singing the strong light works of engineers." The quotations from Amerika are from Edwin Muir's translation (New York, 1946). 1020 Edwin M. Moseley point may be the impossibility of justice, of liberty, of identity, in America as elsewhere. Indeed, the point is that Kafka is writing about Everyman's dream becoming everywhere his nightmare. An interesting contrast to Kafka, who sends the innocent Karl to the adult world of America, is Nabokov, who sends the literally adult European on a journey with the literally adolescent American Lolita. Nabokov achieves an inversion whereby the sophisticated, cultured European adult starts out as seducer of the naive, tasteless American and ends up figuratively and literally seduced by all she is and stands for. One is left wondering if there is any such thing as a fresh and youthful America of promise. American novelists who utilize American journeys for their structure tend always to seek the true America somewhere else in the vast land, but find it forever receding. Even James Fenimore Cooper, in his pioneering stories of the frontier, felt the East constantly encroaching on the primeval land that his characters entered, and Mark Twain's frontier pictures were as violent and full of death as Dickens'. Only when Huck Finn and his slave Jim are alone, naked on their raft, floating down the Mississippi at night, is the Eden of a peaceful moment achieved, but this is a moment within, if it exists at all, while the actual America recedes beyond the shores on either side and into the fog and dark. Nathanael West's A Cool Million, or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin sends the young man of his title to "go out into the world and win your way" and mocks his adventures with even greater grotesquerie than Kafka, reminding one even more emphatically of Chaplin, with whose works West, long associated with Hollywood, was entirely familiar. Jack Kerouac, the chief spokesman for the once so-called Beat Generation, sends his characters "on the road" in frantic searches for truth, for complete freedom of expression, for lost fathers whom they never find in Denver or Los Angeles or San Francisco, though they repeatedly start over again in their form of American search. If the journeys of Europeans to America or of Eastern Americans to the West are quests for rejuvenation, for purification, for starting a new and completely free life, the journeys of Americans to Europe are no less quests for rejuvenation and purification, but to be achieved through return, through getting back to roots, through turning time back from the mechanical and industrial to such age-old values as faith and love and beauty. Writers as diverse as Henry James and Edith Wharton, on the one hand, and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the other, have dramatized this search with high artistic The American Dream become Nightmare 1021 success and similarly found it frightening and disappointing. Journeys to Europe tend to be made, not by young foreigners coming to strange shores, but by characters advanced in years or experience or both, by characters already corrupted by buying and selling or wounded by war, characters who want to be cleansed or made whole again. It is ironic that the European protagonists of journeys to America arrive with a youthful sense of promise and the American protagonists of journeys to Europe arrive fatigued, hurt, and impotent. The tendency in fiction to reveal the failure of quests both to new America and to old Europe suggests that the dramatized searches have much less to to with ex- tensional settings than with intensional problems. A change of scene does not solve a character's personal problems or abolish the society's mistaken attitudes. Kafka knew that both journeys, the innocent's seeking fulfillment or the guilty one's seeking absolution, ended eventually in death, the only certainty. "Rossman and K", he wrote in 1915 with reference to the protagonist of Amerika and the protagonist of The Trial and The Castle, which followed, "Rossman and K, the innocent and the guilty, both executed without distinction in the end, the guilty one with a gentler hand, more pushed aside than struck down." 8 What was in store as the precise end of Karl's American dream: a finality of death true to the mock-heroic tone of the entire book, that is, a finality without the promise of resurrection or of the ennoblement of sacrifice for others, the continuum of a nightmare from which there could be no salvation through the deus ex machina of waking? If Amerika seems incomplete in its final details, it is nevertheless complete in the revelation of theme, in the sustaining of the ultimate atmosphere, indeed in its structure as a function of its revealed theme. To Kafka, the American dream had become fully the universal nightmare, a never-ending one from which we are not awakened by voices human or divine.

8 Max Brod (ed.), op. cit., p. 132.