Amerika (4 page)

4. See
Amerika in der deutschen Literatur,
ed. Sigrid Bauschinger et al. (Stuttgart, 1975). The volume includes a characteristically insightful essay by Walter Sokel on
The Missing Person
. See also
Das Amerika der Autoren
, ed. Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan (Munich, 2005).
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5. See Heinz Hillmann, who also examines the relationship between
The Missing Person
and Holitscher's book, in “
Amerika:
Literature as a Problem-solving Game,” in
The Kafka Debate,
ed. Angel Flores (New York, 1977), pp. 279–97. Mark Harman, “Biography and Autobiography: Necessary Antagonists?” in
Journal of the Kafka Society
10, nos. 1–2 (1986), pp. 56–62; and Mark Harman, “Life into Art: Kafka's Self-Stylization in the Diaries,” in
Franz Kafka (1883–1983): His Craft and Thought,
ed. R. Struc (Waterloo, Ont., 1986), pp. 101–16.
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6. Kafka,
Letters to Milena,
ed. Willi Haas (New York, 1962), p. 196.
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7. Kafka,
Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors
(New York, 1977), p. 98.
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8. See Wolfgang Jahn, “Kafkas Handschrift zum
Verschollenen,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft
(Stuttgart, 1957), p. 549.
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9. The German title,
Der Verschollene,
presents a challenge for translators, since it is impossible to do justice in English to all nuances of the original.
Der Verschollene
is both characteristically succinct—consisting solely of a noun derived from the past participle of a verb and the masculine definite article indicating the gender of the missing person—and paradoxical, for it raises a meta-fictional question about the provenance of this story about a youth who has gone missing without trace, especially since the infinitive of the verb in question, namely,
verschallen,
means “to cease making a sound” or “to fade away.” See
Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch
(Gütersloh, 1972).
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10. See Camill Hoffmann's early review of “The Stoker” in
Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption
1912–1924 (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 47–49.
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11. Heinz Politzer,
Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), p. 123.
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12. For a discussion of the critical reception of
Der Verschollene, see Kafka-Hardbuch,
vol. 2, ed. Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 407–20.
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13. See Mark Harman, “Making Everything a ‘little uncanny': Kafka's Deletions in the Manuscript of
Das Schloß,
” in
Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka,
ed. James Rolleston (Rochester, N.Y., 2002), pp. 325–46.
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14. See Mark Anderson, “Kafka and New York: Notes on a Traveling Narrative,” in
Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism,
ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York, 1989), p. 149.
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15. Kafka's pun on the double meaning of the word
Laufbahn—
“career” or “racetrack”—in a letter about Robert Walser anticipates a comparable conceit in the theater chapter of
The Missing Person
. See
Robert Walser Rediscovered,
ed. Mark Harman (Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 139–40.
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16. The theater chapter at the end of the novel is prefigured by a brief fragment—probably written in early February 1912—in which Karl corrects the words of a servant who has introduced him as an actor by saying that he merely wants to become one. See
Der Verschollene: Apparatband
(Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 49, 71–73.
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17. Karl adds that this negative verdict confirms what he has already read about the United States. If Kafka is referring obliquely here to Holitscher or Soukup, he—or at least his hero Karl—is endorsing stinging critiques of the American system. Some early critics detected a strong element of social criticism in the novel. For instance, the philosopher Adorno argued that Kafka's insight “into economic tendencies was not so alien . . . as the hermetic method of his narrative techniques would lead us to assume.” See Theodor W. Adorno,
Prisms
(Boston, 1977), p. 260. One German scholar even asserted that the novel “mercilessly” uncovers “the hidden economic and psychological mechanism of this society and its satanic consequences.” See Wilhelm Emrich,
Franz Kafka,
trans. S. Z. Buehne (New York, 1968), p. 276. Others rejected the idea that the novel represents a critique of American—or capitalist—society on the grounds that its true theme is “not the reality, present or future, of a civilization far away from Kafka's Prague, but the growth, both personal and intellectual, of Karl Rossmann.” See Politzer,
Parable,
p. 124.
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18. While
The Missing Person
challenges notions of realism in a way those two more conventional portrayals of the robber-baron era do not, its dissection of the American dream can be as caustic as those of Dreiser and Wharton. If Karl Rossmann were a first-person narrator and more given to introspection, he might sound like Wharton's Lily Bart toward the end: “I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.” Of course, while there is some ambiguity in Wharton's treatment of Lily Bart's death, Kafka leaves the ultimate fate of Karl Rossmann entirely unsettled. See Edith Wharton,
The House of Mirth,
ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York, 1990), p. 240.
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19. For an exploration of Kafka's interest in film, see Hanns Zischler,
Kafka Goes to the Movies,
trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago, 2002).
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20. Similarly if, as some critics have suggested, the fictional Occidental Hotel owes something to Holitscher's description of the Atheneum Hotel at Chautauqua, New York, Kafka darkens Holitscher's uncharacteristically euphoric account of an American grand hotel, where lowly elevator boys converse freely in the lobby with affluent guests. For instance, a graduate of Columbia University and medical student, who was working temporarily as a porter at the Atheneum and was described by Holitscher, may have metamorphosed into the overworked medical student known as “Black Coffee,” from whom Karl Rossmann learns a lesson about the pitfalls of such extreme absorption. Moreover, if there is an echo of Soukup's caustic description of the ships transporting immigrants across the Atlantic (“a storehouse in which human beings are exported as wares to America”) in the description of the stoker's quarters in the novel (“a bed, a closet, a chair, and the man were packed together, as if in storage”), Kafka can be said to introduce his own touch—a hint of humor—without thereby eliminating all traces of the social criticism that is far more emphatic in Holitscher and Soukup.
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21. Kafka had read about the Taylor system of work measurement in Holitscher's travelogue. See Holitscher,
Amerika Heute und Morgen,
12th ed. (Berlin, 1923), pp. 292ff.
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22. Ibid., p. 367.
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23. Ibid., p. 338.
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24. As we know from his diaries, Kafka also had conversations in Prague with another American cousin, Emil Kafka (1881–1963), and listened attentively to his description of the Chicago mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck and Co., where he worked. Since he had a relative working at Sears, Kafka must have read with interest Holitscher's description of the “metallic din” emitted by the Sears, Roebuck building, “which hovers above the coal dust and the Illinois fog like some uncanny music of the spheres, desolate and cold like the whole of the modern world and its civilization” (ibid., p. 308). It's worth juxtaposing a photograph of the vast Sears typing pool in Holitscher's travelogue with the description of the busy telegraph room in Uncle Jakob's business in
The Missing Person
.
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25. In late fall 1911, when Franz Kafka was working on a draft of his American novel, Otto Kafka took his new American wife, Alice Stickney (daughter of a then-prominent American family and a possible model for the fictional Klara Pollunder), to visit his relatives in Kolin, Bohemia. It's likely that Kafka heard reports of his relatives' impressions of these two American visitors. Otto Kafka was evidently fond of a saying one could easily imagine on the lips of Karl Rossmann's American uncle: “One must learn to obey before one commands.” A no-nonsense, self-confident individual, he never allowed himself to be cowed, even by powerful and well-connected opponents; he sued his business partner, General Coleman T. Du Pont (a former postmaster general and member of the well-known Du Pont industrialist family)—a headline in the
New York World,
29 January 1918, read: “Kafka Threatens Du Pont with Suit.” Several years later he sued the Mexican foreign minister, Adolfo de la Huerta—“Names de la Huerta in $2,500,000 Suit” ran a headline in the
New York Times,
13 June 1922, p. 21. In a letter dated September 1918 to the assistant U.S. attorney general petitioning for his release from prison, where he was held unjustly on suspicion of being an enemy spy, Otto Kafka mentions that he began life in America “as a porter with a corset concern at $5 a week”; although Karl's American uncle does not mention having worked as a porter, he does take great pride in the fact that he employs a large number of porters. See Anthony Northey,
Kafka's Relatives: Their Lives and His Writing
(New Haven, Conn., 1991), pp. 52–56.
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26. Borges suggested that Kafka is “closer to the Book of Job than to what has been called ‘modern literature,' ” and that his work is “based on a religious, and particularly Jewish, consciousness.” See Jorge Luis Borges,
Selected Non-Fictions,
ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York, 1999), p. 501.
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27. See, for instance, Robert Alter, “Franz Kafka: Wrenching Scripture,”
New England Review
21, no. 3 (2000), pp. 7–19.
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28. Rossmann's hybrid name links him with a large number of hybrid half-human, half-animal or half-insect creatures in Kafka's fiction, ranging from the bug-man Gregor Samsa to Bucephalus in “The New Advocate,” a lawyer and steed, who in a previous incarnation was the battle horse of Alexander the Great, and also with the narrator of the sketch “The Wish to Be a Red Indian,” who imagines himself riding on the American prairie on a horse that is gradually vanishing underneath him.
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29. As several critics have suggested, that odd theater, with its religious trappings, conjures up Holitscher's sketch of the charismatic sects in Chicago, where “on Sundays the dear Lord has a different face and a different name at every five paces” (pp. 285–89), and his description of how land is handed out to settlers in Winnipeg, Manitoba (pp. 131–37).
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30. Max Brod, “Afterword,” in
Amerika
(New York, 1954), p. 299.
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31. Karl's American uncle uses a similar image to describe the way Karl's parents have treated him: in banishing him to America, they pushed him outside like a cat that has made a nuisance of itself.
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32. Kafka asserts to Milena Jesenská, a Gentile, in a letter of August 1920, that he and Milena's Jewish husband “both have the same Negro face.” Kafka,
Letters to Milena,
trans. Philip Boehm (New York, 1990), p. 136. For a discussion of Kafka's self-image as a Jew, see Sander L. Gilman,
Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient
(New York, 1995).
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33. See
Der Verschollene: Apparatband,
p. 85.
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34. Kafka is scarcely implying that Karl's parents are without means, especially since we subsequently learn that Karl's father has a business that is sufficiently prosperous to employ a considerable number of people. See
Letters to Milena,
p. 13.
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35. Here Kafka seems to imply that he harbors a comparable feeling toward his own parents; indeed, as Hartmut Binder has pointed out, he used the phrase “poor parents” similarly in a letter to Felice Bauer of 13–14 January 1913, concerning his sister Valli's marriage: “My parents (here I cannot resist the temptation to call them ‘my poor parents') were delighted with the festivities.” See Hartmut Binder,
Kafka-Kommentar
(Munich, 1982), p. 85.
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36. Although Karl Rossmann is interviewed at what seems like a hiring fair, Kafka never once uses the word
einstellen
(to hire). Instead, in the course of this short chapter he uses the word
aufnehmen
or variants thereof—i.e., “to be admitted or received”—some thirty times.
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37. Kafka's German biographer Reiner Stach adds that Kafka's prose in
The Missing Person
“makes both things and people emerge in exaggeratedly sharp contours, as though seen under neon light.” This seems just about right. See Stach,
Kafka: The Decisive Years,
trans. Shelley Frisch (New York, 2005), pp. 117–18.
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38. Nicholas Murray,
Kafka: A Biography
(New Haven, Conn., 2004), p. 224.
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39. For instance, the Prague-born critic Heinz Politzer praised the first sentence in the original German for its controlled and “intricately patterned periods” but censured the second as “artless, not quite coherent, and inconclusive.” Politzer,
Parable,
p. 123. However, indicting Kafka for being inconclusive surely amounts to condemning Kafka for being Kafka. Besides, modern writers such as Joyce and Beckett have taught us to appreciate the way Kafka can slip into the consciousness of Karl Rossmann without inserting the kind of transitions one would expect in a nineteenth-century novel.
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