Amerika (3 page)

Kafka playfully acknowledges his own prior readings about America when he has Karl compare his impressions of an ostensible Irishman called Robinson with a warning he read somewhere that newcomers should be wary of the Irish in America: Holitscher asserts that the Irish produced the most successful type of “political padrone, boss, slave-holder, and vote catcher” and even records a passenger in steerage asking hopefully: “How long do you have to live in America before becoming an Irishman?”

Kafka himself had a number of American relatives, such as his uncle Otto Kafka, who may have been a partial model for Karl Rossmann's American uncle, and a namesake cousin, Franz or Frank Kafka, who left for America at the same age as Karl.
²⁴
Like the uncle in the novel, Otto Kafka was a self-made man who, after a series of colorful adventures in South Africa and South America, emigrated to the United States, where he eventually accumulated sufficient wealth to buy a home near the Rockefeller mansion at Tarrytown, New York. Yet we need to approach these tantalizing biographical items warily, since it is difficult to distinguish between biographical sources, Kafka's readings about America, and his own inventions. And while the tone of a letter from Otto Kafka to the U.S. assistant attorney general (cited by Anthony Northey in his thoroughly researched 1991 study
Kafka's Relatives
) is indeed comparable to the voice Kafka attributes to the fictional uncle, there is also something almost generic about such rags-to-riches stories.
²⁵

As the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges suggested
²⁶
—and as critics such as Robert Alter have specifically shown in the case of
The Missing Person
²⁷
—Kafka wove numerous religious, and in particular Old Testament, motifs into his portrayal of Karl's American adventures, raising questions for us as readers. To what extent is a metropolis such as New York, with the hundred thousand “eyes” of its many Babel-like skyscrapers, at the mercy of those winds and of the “restlessness” wafting in from the sea? What, for instance, are we to make of the mysterious gales blowing through the vast mansion that Karl visits outside New York, especially near the chapel? How should we read images such as that of “a glass roof stretched over the street . . . being violently smashed into fragments at every moment”?

However dark the plight of his heroes, Kafka himself never loses his sense of humor. In
The Missing Person
that humor is often hidden between the interstices of his sentences. The discrepancy between Karl's relentlessly sober perceptions and the often-ludicrous events in which he is caught up make it difficult for us not to chuckle in spite of our increasing empathy with the hapless young hero. Take, for example, his exchanges with the ostensible Irishman Robinson, which are punctuated by precise descriptions of the latter's messy eating habits, or the description of the bathing rituals of Brunelda, a grotesque character whose Wagnerian-sounding name turns out to be quite apt. Moreover, Karl's lack of a strong sense of identity gives rise to a number of comic scenes, especially those featuring his dubious companions Delamarche and Robinson. Worth mentioning in passing—since the names of Kafka's characters can be telling—is the meaning of the surname of the servant who seduces Karl: Brummer (Buzzer), or “noisy fly,” an appropriate, if unsettling, name for her, especially since the
Ross
in Karl's surname
Rossmann
means “steed” or “horse.”
²⁸

Readers may well be puzzled by the fascinating but enigmatic last completed chapter. Heightening the enigma is the gap in the novel just before this chapter: after a brief account of Karl's entrance into a brothel-like institution with an industrial-sounding name, Enterprise Nr. 25, the narrative breaks off, and then without any transition we find ourselves reading a poster in which a mysterious theater advertises its openings. When Kafka finally sat down in 1914 to write this chapter (which Max Brod entitled “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma,” even though it had no title in the manuscript), he may have been attempting to do with
The Missing Person
what he had already done with
The Trial,
namely, first write a final chapter and then try to fill in the missing parts. However, as in the case of
The Trial,
he never did fill in the gaps. So inevitably readers will come away from this chapter, and indeed from the novel as a whole, with divergent interpretations, depending on which level of meaning they choose to emphasize: the social, the meta-physical, the psychological, the apotheosis or parody of the American dream, and so on.
²⁹

There are two alternative versions of how Kafka wanted to end this never-completed novel. According to Brod, he intended to conclude it in a conciliatory fashion, and he used to hint smilingly that within “this ‘almost limitless' theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, some backing, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some paradisiacal magic.”
³⁰
Perhaps. But on the other hand, in a diary entry of 30 September 1915 Kafka explicitly compared the fates of the heroes in
The Missing Person
and
The Trial:
“Rossmann and K., the innocent and the guilty, both executed without distinction in the end, the innocent one with a gentler hand, more pushed aside than struck down.”
³¹
Characteristically ambivalent about the kind of ending he wanted, and having worked on the novel on and off for three years, he may at some point have changed his mind about Karl's fate.

In the chapter featuring the Theater of Oklahama (Kafka consistently misspelled the name of the state), the “biggest theater in the world” claims that it can take on all who apply. But how credible is the organization? Will it finally allow Karl to reach a degree of fulfillment? Some critics claim that the theater represents a model of religious redemption; others, a social utopia; others still, a surreal version of the American dream. Finally, what are we to make of the decision by Karl, who has lost his identification papers, to identify himself as “Negro,” the nickname he claims was given him in previous positions (which Kafka never got around to describing)?
³²
The insertion of the word
negro
into the text was a deliberate act on Kafka's part, for he had originally written “Leo”—perhaps an allusion to an alter ego, Leopold S., who engages in a transparently autobiographical, if enigmatically fragmentary, dialogue with a character named Felice S. in a diary entry of 15 August 1913—then went back and changed the name nine times to “Negro.”
³³
Certain signs indicate a turn for the better—for example, Karl has a couple of promising encounters with figures from his past—that might seem to bear out Kafka's purported plans for a positive ending. However, a grim image in Holitscher's travelogue—a photograph depicting a lynching with a group of grinning white bystanders, which Holitscher sarcastically entitled “Idyll aus Oklahama” (Idyll from Oklahama), with the same misspelling as in Kafka—might make one lean toward a darker interpretation of this chapter and of Karl's final journey.

The multilingual Kafka was acutely aware of the challenges facing translators and of the need to negotiate between sometimes conflicting linguistic and literary claims. Though he praised his first Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, for her faithfulness to his German, he also asked “whether Czechs won't hold its very faithfulness against you.” His comments on her Czech rendering of the first two sentences in the novel are particularly revealing, since this is one of the trickier passages in the book. What, for instance, are we to make of the ambiguous statement that Karl has been sent to America by his
“arme Eltern”
(poor parents)? Kafka was not happy with Milena's decision to eliminate the ambiguity of “poor” by inserting the adjectival phrase “financially needy,” suggesting that Karl's parents are impoverished. He emphasized that
arme
(poor) “here also has the secondary meaning: pitiable, but without any special emphasis of feeling.”
³⁴
Could this reference to Karl's “poor parents” be an ironic, or even sarcastic, comment by the narrator? Perhaps. But Kafka disclosed another interpretative possibility when he revealed to Milena that the expression mirrors Karl's feelings toward his parents: “an uncomprehending sympathy that Karl, too, has with his parents.”
³⁵

Kafka also commented on the
“freie Lüfte”
(literally, “free airs”) blowing about the Statue of Liberty. He noted that the German phrase is “a little more grand” than Milena's Czech rendition as “free air”—like English, Czech cannot easily use the word
air
in the plural. But then he added, with his characteristic awareness of the inherent limits of translation, that “there's probably no alternative.” I ended up choosing the phrase “free winds,” which like Milena's Czech term is less elevated than the original German, partly because I wanted to retain that simple but resonant word
free.

In general I have sought to keep the interpretative options open and to follow Kafka whenever he chooses to be ambiguous and whenever he flouts conventions. For instance, in describing the mysterious Theater of Oklahama, he avoids straightforward German verbs such as
einstellen
(to hire), and I have sought to make the English text comparably elusive.
³⁶
The same goes for the punctuation, which some readers may find a little unsettling. Kafka employs it rather erratically—for example, some questions are followed by question marks, others not. Here we must keep in mind that, with the exception of the “Stoker” chapter, he never revised the manuscript for publication and that we cannot know precisely what he would have changed had he done so. For stylistic reasons, he preferred to use punctuation sparingly, and I have tried to be comparably thrifty. After all, at least in the original German, the very lightness of the punctuation helped to create prose that is often full of sharply observed detail—as in the first chapter—yet still flows with seemingly miraculous ease.

Max Brod corrected obvious slips, such as a bridge stretching from New York to Boston, a sudden shift in the U.S. currency from dollars to pounds, and conflicting indications as to whether Karl Rossmann is sixteen or seventeen; these editorial corrections were adopted by Edwin and Willa Muir, who used Brod's edition as the basis for the first English translation (1938). The more recent German-language editors of Kafka's novels have refrained from making such changes, on the grounds that it is preferable to offer readers as close an approximation as possible of the state in which Kafka left his texts. Although I have usually followed the editors of the German critical edition in retaining idiosyncratic features of the original manuscript, I have silently rectified several minor inconsistencies, such as Kafka's somewhat erratic spelling of
New York
(sometimes as one word, sometimes as two, sometimes linked by a hyphen) and
Occidental Hotel
(in the original the spelling of the former word is generally lowercase), while retaining the names of a tycoon's son, who is called Mak and subsequently becomes Mack.

The greatest challenge for me as a translator lay in endeavoring to re-create in English a style that would mimic such seemingly disparate traits of Kafka's prose as its “provocatively ‘classic' German,”
³⁷
its meticulous attention to detail, its “flowing vivacity,”
³⁸
and its modernist adherence to the restricted perspective of the main character. Although some critics who are native speakers of German have found Kafka's style in
The Missing Person
jarring,
³⁹
such criticism fails to acknowledge the startling modernity that is often hidden under its surface conservatism. There certainly is something very modern about the way he tells the story, switching back and forth between indirect interior monologue and an unobtrusive narrator, who occasionally winks to the reader over the hero's head, thereby alerting us to the irony and humor beyond the awareness of the all-too-earnest young hero.
⁴⁰

Although Brod's once widely accepted portrayal of Kafka's works as religious allegories has not aged well, he may not have been too far off in claiming that this novel can yield a new interpretation of Kafka, and also—I would add—a new appreciation of neglected qualities in his writing.

—
MARK HARMAN

Elizabethtown College

NOTES

1. Kafka,
Letters to Felice
(New York, 1973), p. 267. Here, as elsewhere, the cited translations have been modified whenever appropriate. Early versions of this preface were presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference and at Duke University.
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2. Brod sought to make the purported salvation of the young hero the centerpiece of his argument that Kafka was a writer with an ultimately positive faith in man and in the possibility of divine grace. Many subsequent readers have rejected Brod's sunny insistence that the hero's “misfortune is kept in check by his child-like innocence and touchingly naïve purity.” See Max Brod, “Nachwort” in Kafka,
Die Romane
(Frankfurt, 1969), p. 254.
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3. In a passage in his famous letter to his father (1919), Kafka explains that he gave Franklin's autobiography to Hermann Kafka partly “because of the relationship between the author and his father” (p. 218), and elsewhere in the same letter he connects his own largely imaginary travels to his need to avoid spaces that his father already occupies: “Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach” (p. 231).
The Basic Kafka
(New York, 1979). See also John Zilcosky,
Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing
(New York, 2003).
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