Chapter 8 Lost in Kafka’s America Notorious, English, adjective, meaning reputable and disreputable Franz Kafka’s Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared, may be a relatively ne- glected work. Whether this is true or not, I find the text rich and stimulating. Young Karl Rossmann lands in America and then runs away from everything that is America, as it is depicted in Amerika, all the way to Oklahoma Theater. Among other significant places is the Grand Hotel Occidental where Karl tries to settle down, unsuccessfully of course. All his desires are meek and weak, and the surroundings are nothing but overpowering. He is a virtual Mann ohne Eigenschaften; hence he is the person who disappeared. In this chapter I de- velop a theory of metaphor without target, that is, original or empty metaphor, which corresponds to desire without object. Sometimes metaphors, like those in America, do not allow a cognitive interpretation in the sense that we could say what they are metaphors of although we know what they say. They are what I call original or empty metaphors. Hence, we cannot interpret Amerika in the sense that we tell what it all means, or indicate what the object Kafka talks about is. The Grand Hotel Occidental has thirty lifts that move incessant- ly up and down like pistons; what does this mean? It means what you want it to mean, that is, nothing. Nevertheless, it is a fitting picture in Amerika’s America. Preliminaries, or False Starts Kafka is strange and Amerika even stranger in the way that its text has no in- terpretation. In other words, it does not interpret itself. Or, it does not say what it says. It is just a text and should be approached as such. Of course one may suggest any number of interpretations and then try to say what it all means but this is bound to be subjective: we say what kind of impression the text makes upon us. But some of these impressions are more interesting than others. It is as if one said what the text looks like and then recommends a certain vision. Of course, any reading, including the present one, must offer some kind of in- terpretation of the text at least in the sense that one explicates what is said in the text and analyses some aspects of it. But it is a different matter to identify © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/97890044�0305_009 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Timo Airaksinen - 9789004410305 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:17:22PM via free access <UN> Lost in Kafka’s America 145 the reasons of why the author said it, what the author wanted to say it, and what the purpose of his writing project was. Also, one can try to locate some more or less hidden references to the author’s life, life-world, and personal characteristics in his texts.1 This second strategy is to overwork the connection between Kafka’s biography, or his life, his actual experiences, and their overall circumstances.2 For instance, Kafka was an anxious mind, hence his fictional characters are often anxious and troubled. He knew what anxiety is and hence he wrote about it. This is the methodology I want to avoid. Literary scholars may like it and use it for their benefit, but from the philosophical point of view I rather avoid it. Notice that I might say that Kafka’s text looks like, say, a pas- sage to hell, but I do not say he wanted it to look like a passage to hell or this is what the text is all about. I write about how I see the text, not how it was meant to be seen or should be seen. Some fiction looks socially and psychologically programmatic, I know, but not Kafka. Of course, whatever a person does, including artistic activities, has its ex- planation but in many contexts such explanations are beside the point. The product may be more interesting than the process of production. And the product can be seen and appreciated independently of the process. Sometimes we read better when we do not know much about the author. The same is true of philosophy: in order to appreciate George Berkeley’s arguments for imma- terialism, I need not know who he was. It is relevant to know something, for instance, that his works were written in the early 18th century, but do we really need much more? To a certain degree philosophical texts function indepen- dently of their historical genesis. Biographies are interesting in a voyeuristic sense, like Reiner Stach’s monu- mental biographical Kafka trilogy, but I notice I read them with certain embar- rassment: for instance, in the second volume Stach hints at Kafka’s incestuous desires towards his sister. He does not index the word nor does he elaborate.3 Why should we know this fact? He also makes a funny mistake on the Picture 38: he says that “Felice has her arm around the mother’s waist.” Actually the mother has her arm around Felice’s waist. This page is typical of the wordi- ness of Stach’s writing and shows how dubious biographical interpretations and tales tend to be. Should we really know all this about Kafka in order to read 1 See for instance H. Binder, Kafka – Kommentar zu den Romanen. Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater. Bochum: Winkler, 1976. 2 See for instance the excellent introduction by D. Shields Dix, “The Man Who Disappeared: Kafka Imagining Amerika” (http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=239). 3 R. Stach, Kafka, The Decisive Years. Tr. S. Frisch. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005, p. 297. Timo Airaksinen - 9789004410305 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:17:22PM via free access <UN> 146 Chapter 8 his text with interest, sympathy, benefit, and pleasure? Stach reads like faction, or a type of historical novel rooted in fact. We might even call it a fantasy biog- raphy. He imagines so much psychological detail it makes me uncomfortable. How can he know all of this? Should I really base my reading of Kafka on it? To read Kafka’s fiction with the intention of saying what he wants to say is suspicious. Of course it is a key convention in literature that a novel contains narrative elements that tell something about something. It may even have a plot that is somehow recognizable or familiar to the reader. However, in the case of Kafka, that he should say something else than what he is saying is a kind of fallacy of over-interpretation. To explain my own approach, let me first sketch the problems of such a strategy. It feeds on the reader’s curiosity whose background is one’s inability to read novels as fictional pseudo-narratives that ultimately turn out to be empty, or the text as text. One somehow wants to get more, to peek into the mind of the author and get an account of his hidden thoughts and intentions as if it were obvious that she had some, as if she could not write a text without embedding some messages in it. Alternatively, one says the hidden meaning is unconscious thus creating an hierarchy of hidden messages: the text is just a surface that hides the narrative messages of the au- thor when a certain portion of them are invisible even from the point of view of the author himself; that is, they remain unconscious but yet undoubtedly real. For instance, in Amerika, Kafka wants to tell the reader in a critical tone about the miseries of the German speaking immigrants in New York.4 Perhaps he even wanted to warn his compatriots of dangerous Irishmen such as way- ward Robinson. In this sense, it is as if his book contained a message to its readers. The next question is biographical: what did Kafka know about New York and how did he get the information? Such questions can be answered to a cer- tain degree so that the required detective work becomes an engaging pursuit. Certainly Amerika tells something about Karl Rossmann and his adventures in America sometimes in a realistic tone, excluding of course the last chapter about the Oklahoma Theatre but definitely including the first one, “The Stoker.” However, even in that case one may ask why Oklahoma and where did he get the idea of that obscure state. The book also contains all kinds of factual mis- takes, which may well be deliberate, like the Statue of Liberty wielding a sword, no harbor piers in New York, a bridge between New York City and Boston, high hills around New York, and mountains like the Rockies between New York and Oklahoma. Also, Karl is given a ticket to California by his uncle, Senator Jacob, but this is never mentioned again although Karl needs to get away and escape. 4 Amerika. In F. Kafka, Complete Novels. Trs. W. and E. Muir. London: Vintage, 2008. Timo Airaksinen - 9789004410305 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:17:22PM via free access <UN> Lost in Kafka’s America 147 Now, I am fully aware of the norm that one should not quote student pa- pers, but because the following quotation illustrates too well my critical points, I cannot resist the temptation: “To a certain degree, by creating his own con- ception of America, Kafka takes the role of master and creator, producing for himself a feeling of power and superiority over the supposed land of freedom.