Notorious, English, adjective, meaningreputable and disreputable
Franz Kafkaâs Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared, may be a relatively neglected 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 develop 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 incessantly 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 Amerikaâs America.
Preliminaries, or False Starts
Kafka is strange and Amerika even stranger in the way that its text has no interpretation. 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 interpretation 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
Of course, whatever a person does, including artistic activities, has its explanation 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 Berkeleyâs arguments for immaterialism, 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 independently of their historical genesis.
Biographies are interesting in a voyeuristic sense, like Reiner Stachâs monumental biographical Kafka trilogy, but I notice I read them with certain embarrassment: for instance, in the second volume Stach hints at Kafkaâs 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 âFelice has her arm around the motherâs waist.â Actually the mother has her arm around Feliceâs waist. This page is typical of the wordiness of Stachâs writing and shows how dubious biographical interpretations and tales tend to be. Should we really know all this about Kafka in order to read
To read Kafkaâs 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 readerâs curiosity whose background is oneâs 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 author 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 wayward 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 certain 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, âThe Stoker.â 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 mistakes, 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.
Now, I am fully aware of the norm that one should not quote student papers, but because the following quotation illustrates too well my critical points, I cannot resist the temptation: âTo a certain degree, by creating his own conception 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. This sense of superiority enables Kafka to criticize the capitalist and industrialized America through his description of the streets of New York.â5 The very argument Edmond Lau is making here, that Kafka criticizes the capitalist and industrialized America â of course a reading of the novel as old as its publication â contradicts the very impossibility of interpretation I argue for elsewhere. According to Lau, Kafkaâs unconscious feelings are at work together with his conscious intentions: he wants to criticize usa and especially its thin idea of freedom. In fact this is done in the very first paragraph of the book. In this view America, not Amerika, is a megalomaniac project, which breathes paranoia and explains the sufferings of Karl in and around New York as well as his escape to the Oklahoma Theatre as a Freudian wish-fulfilment.6 Lau is convinced and assures us that Kafka wanted to criticize America and its falsely propagated institutions and values. How can we know this? We know that he read material on the American life and social realities before starting to write his book. Of course a reader may speculate about what Kafka wanted to say in his fiction, how his text is related to his own life and person, where he got his ideas, and who are those real life persons who are immortalized as his fictional characters. This may satisfy the readerâs curiosity and entertain him. At the same time Amerika will lose a part of its fascination as fiction. For instance, Reiner Stach writes,
These days we consider whether Kafka intended to depict the erosion of the bourgeois individual overwhelmed by social structures or whether his literary work was only a symptom of this erosion. It makes no sense to speak of Kafkaâs ârealismâ or âdecadence,â especially when these categories are exploited in ideological, heavy-handed arguments. It is indisputable that Kafkaâs work contains experiences that would soon prove highly significant for the history of the 20th Century. [â¦] But how did he gain access to these experiences?7
Stach also writes, âOf course he [Kafka] he could never have written a quasi-political book like Brodâs, even in optimal conditions. Kafka wished not convince or prove, but to give pure literary form to what inspired him.â8 It follows from these two quotations that Kafkaâs work was only a âsymptom of this erosion.â It also logically follows that Kafka was interested in such an erosion of the bourgeois individual, which may or may not be true, who can say? Did he have this concept? Did he like it? The idea of law certainly interested Kafka, but who can say what he meant by the enigma called âthe Lawâ?
Think of Mr. Pollunderâs vast, dark, incomplete country mansion where Karl spends an unforgettable night when he is harassed by the hostâs wild daughter Klara. He gets lost in the house only to discover that he will be kicked out of there. Does this mean Kafka intends to mock the young and wealthy New York ladies and the grand building projects of their parents? Kafkaâs women are what they are both in Europe and usa â rather special creatures.9 Moreover, the description of the big house is a kind of metaphysical nightmare, an empty and dark world that opens up towards the vast universe that blows through the house as a wind from nowhere. It is not a house, it is an allegory, pure gothic: âA breath of dark emptiness met himâ when Karl gets lost in the dark, windowless, never-ending corridor. âWhat purpose could be served by this great, deep chamber? One stood here as if in the gallery of a church.â10 This paragraph resembles us of Edgar Allan Poeâs gloomy houses. It is Karlâs House of Usher.
Less metaphysical, but not much, are the depictions of the Grand Hotel Occidental where Karl works, motor traffic, and finally a political rally. The first is a beehive, the second an enormous machine, and the third a tragedy as the wonderfully popular looking political candidate has no hope of success anyway. He is doomed but they still celebrate him. All that happens in Amerika is or is not a picture of America. Here is one more example of a less than commendable reading of Amerika:
Karl Rossmann, however, refuses to accept responsibility for his desires, and it is a mark of Kafkaâs own immaturity that he allows Karl to be constantly seduced and abused, never to act as seducer or abuser. Compare Karlâs childlike description of sex with Kâs wholly knowing, wholly mutual encounter with Frieda, in The Castle: âShe sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought with their heads
boring into each otherâs breasts; [â¦] like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each otherâs bodies.â11
I am not sure if this describes âwholly mutual sex.â In fact, it looks like two persons attacking each other without caring of the partner or responding to his or her desire. Well, Karlâs rape scene is pretty impressive, too. Again, an unconscious motive for writing this allegedly exists, this is âKafkaâs own immaturity,â accompanied by a couple of inaccurate textual references: Karl viciously attacks Delamarche in the fat singer Bruneldaâs flat, opera singers are supposed to be fat, and this is certainly more than K or Joseph K ever did in The Castle or The Trial. Kâs sex life may be better than Karlâs but then perhaps Karlâs initial account of the rape is a lie.12 And Joseph K and K are certainly not anything like aggressive and abusive persons; on the contrary, both are victims beyond relief or hope. Both certainly try to solve their problems, Karl just runs away from them; when he is abusive it is because his escape road is blocked. He also gets actively and aggressively involved in the case of the Stoker, his new friend.13 Finally, why would Karlâs immaturity make the book look less interesting or the author himself immature? Think of Simplicissimus, or Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668) by Hans J.C. von Grimmelshausen, which may well have been a model for Amerika, something I might suggest were I using the comparative method here. There the young and perfectly innocent half idiot hero wanders from horror to horror during the Thirty Yearâs War. Perhaps Kafkaâs Amerika mirrors another classic where a young innocent hero meanders through the thickets of pain and suffering, namely, D.A.F. Sadeâs Justine, ou Les Malheurs de
Empty Metaphors
My own strategy is as follows: I read Amerika in all its amusing and thrilling detail but avoid saying why that is and what it all means; instead I may say what it looks like to me. Even less do I try to say something about the historical person F. Kafka. I do not know him and I accept that. What am I doing then? I say I savor the text and get my satisfaction out of its wonderfully exciting and mysterious features that prove the unique genius of its author. What amazes me most in Kafkaâs text is its strangeness, its notoriety, in the sense that its richly detailed texture may look like a realistic description of what there is and what takes place, how things look and events turn out; yet, something is wrong. It is difficult to pinpoint what it is however strongly the reader may feel the effect. Very seldom is something truly and openly weird in the surrealist sense but throughout the text the details are somehow unreal, in a way that is difficult to specify, for instance, the action around the hotel elevators where Karl is employed as a lift boy. The description of them grows into a grotesque vision without mercy.
Now, what I want to study in this paper is the ultimate aimlessness of this all. I do not mean the content of the narrative in a psychological sense. Certainly we can say that Karlâs desires are negligible as he only wants to get a job and shelter â it is all very minimalistic indeed. He would have liked to stay in the Grand Hotel Occidental and remain in the custody of the fine women there, the Governess and her secretary Therese. His desires also are negative as he wants to get out of trouble and get rid of his pesky companions Robinson and Delamarche. It is not at all clear that he wants to stay with his uncle Jacob and he certainly runs away from the scary country mansion of Mr. Pollunder and its intrusive inhabitants. Much of this is psychologically ambiguous. As I see it, the unique strangeness of life in Amerika results from its rhetorical features, which at the same time constitute remarkable literary innovation. All this depends on what I call the openness of the rhetoric of narrative. The rest of this paper tries to explain what it is.
Let me provide a summary account of my more concrete aims. Normally in metaphors like âMen are pigs,â we find a target (men) and a source (pigs), but not so in the case of Kafka. He operates at the level of sources without allowing
Travel, including motor traffic, running from the police, walking between cities, and the incessant up and down motion of hundreds of lifts, are both away and towards something. Strangely, travel leads to morally judgmental encounters that display implied guilt and explicit threat of punishment. Accordingly, travel is a key theme and a main metaphoric source here. Metaphors travel, too, from one given meaning to a cascade of new meanings that must be read anew and construed as related to the original target. In other words, what the target loses in this exchange the source gains, as in âMen are pigs,â where men lose their status as men and move over to the category of domestic animals , their looks and behavioral patterns. We may mean bad table manners, as if pigs had any manners, or their looks as pink, hairy, smelly, clumsy sty dwellers, always depending on the context. This is to say, once you meet a source you need an interpretive key, provided by some extraneous cues, if you want to get back to the target or to what is left of it after the attack by the source. Once I am called a pig it is impossible for me to recover my former status â the stigma sticks. Once a pig, always a pig. In other words, you cannot infer from pigs back to men. However, Kafka provides us with no such key and this is the reason why we do not know what he is talking about, or his target. What are those hotel elevators that pump up and down for ever driven by those unruly boys Karl once identified himself with? We cannot tell, yet we feel we should. The customers are beautiful and demanding, the boys who wear stinking uniforms can demand nothing; if this is about social class and class society, the target is worth mentioning. Is this the reason why Kafka does not
Metaphoric tropes travel away from the world of targets into the new, fuzzy and ambiguous world of sources that mock the targets. Their dictionary meanings start looking like shackles in their fixed rigidity we struggle to free ourselves from. Metonyms represent one way of getting out of the traps of language. They work like the lifts in the Grand Hotel Occidental. They provide a set of terms all referring to the same case but in such a way that you can move from one to the other, at the same time not moving at all or changing the world. I say âMy king won the battle against your king,â what do I say? I could have said his army won, but then it is just a metonym that does not add anything to the case as it really is. I could have said âMy kingâs armyâs soldiers won the battle,â but I am still in the same lift that travels between the co-referential meanings. I do not speak about kings or even armies but of a battle that is like the Grand Hotel where the lifts move up and down. They, like metonyms, never produce anything good unlike true travel from one location to another, that is, a metaphor. Travel leads Karl to new places where he faces new challenges and new tasks of reading the case right, which are the necessary conditions of his survival. That is, anyway, the only thing that Karl may want.
When meanings travel from a target toward the chaos of the source, or Karl makes progress towards a new challenge of judgmental confrontation, the task is the same: to make sense of what is said and to see what it all entails. Here the metaphorâs progress towards its interpretation corresponds to Karlâs travel towards his accusers he must make sense of. The source and Karl, they both need to succeed if they want to remain as what they are, a novel cluster of meanings in a text and Karl in Amerika. But how could they do that if no key is provided? What then is the source and what is Karlâs way out? Kafka depicts a meaningless struggle against impossible odds leaving one insoluble riddle behind so that one can face another. This is the true meaning of travel in the case of the extended metaphor that is Amerika, or an allegory that we fail to model.
Notice that here travel is not from target to source, or from one solved critical riddle to another more mysterious one that we can then call in metaphoric names, or to make it a source. No, travel is always between metaphors, from one to another, just like Karl moves from one trouble to another, or perhaps we should say from one attempt to locate a target to another. In this way, we move at the meta-level from one context of motion to another without stopping between them. Karl does not stop before he is stopped, not after his valiant first attempt to defend the nameless stoker on the ship. After that he is
In what follows I use allegory in the sense of an extended metaphor, which entails that its parts are metaphoric as well. Therefore, it may not look like, for instance, that Karlâs mad dash away from the police officers â only to be saved by the deux ex machina in the garb of Delamarche â has any metaphoric meaning, although it must. An allegory is a totality of interconnected metaphors and hence I try to read the details of Amerika metaphorically, too. In a traditional painting, for instance, the allegoric symbolism is defined by convention: apes, dogs, and human skulls all have their conventional and thus identifiable meanings. They refer to and represent their targets. Another example, a book is a book, or the Bible is the Book, which creates an instance of metonymy. There is only one book worth reading, the Bible, and hence the book is the Bible â otherwise we miss the point. The Bible and the book is a metonymic pair under the present set of conventions. However, in the case of Amerika we move and travel outside such well-known conventions. We are now on our own, unaided, traveling along not knowing what accusations will hit us next. Of course, one may say that I already gave a key that opens the lock of Amerika, namely, travel. It is then an allegoric journey, a kind of Pilgrimâs Progress set in ironic terms, from home to nowhere, which should reveal the target. I wish this were true. Alas, it is not. The problem is that this travel is not metonymically related to motion, decline, or progress. On the contrary, this travel makes the same point that I mean when I say a target changes into a source and finds for itself a new meaning, albeit a contested one, in the new set of strange possible worlds, like the world where pigsâ table manners are mentioned. The travel is metaphoric in the very special sense in which the essence of metaphor itself is travel. In this sense, Karlâs travel is the metaphor of a metaphor. Or, Karl when he travels is like Jesus who is God walking on Earth, or perhaps he is like an incomplete sensory image falsely derived from its eternal Platonic realm of ideas as universals. Travel illustrates what metaphor does and how it works in its own rhetorical realms.
Some metaphoric sources do not allow for targets. These are special, deep metaphors whose whole life is dedicated to being sources. The term âpigâ refers and hence pig is a shallow simile-related metaphor, in the role we gave to it earlier, and pigs can have a metonymic role as well. But think of âheart of stoneâ or
Amerika can be understood accordingly: the allegoric narrative is, in itself, a deep metaphor whose reader necessarily misses its target. âHeart of stoneâ and âLight my fireâ are meaningless exactly because we cannot find their targets via similes or metonyms without retorting to a known convention, but Kafka refuses to rely on conventions, which forces the reader to read the allegory as it is, without a target. In other words, deep metaphors cannot be understood as wayward similes that would help us find their source: âWhat a pigâ is an easy case. You say men stink like pigs and they eat like pigs, and then you know the target is a certain kind of man, like in âMen are pigs.â But when you say âLight my fireâ I have no idea what you mean, if I try to find a corresponding simile â it does not exist. I need to listen to the song (The Doors, 1966) and pick up the convention there or ask someone. Amerika works its deep allegories in this same sense.
Textual allegory of the type one meets in Amerika can also be understood in the following way. Sometimes a metaphor displays a clear connection between a target and a source, like in âMen are pigs.â Sometimes this link grows weaker and more negligible, like in âLight my fire,â where the metaphoric elements do not seem to connect in any obvious manner, yet they do so in a way that can be called implicit. âLight my fireâ means âMake me want to make love with you,â or something like that. The emergence of a target is, therefore, a matter of interpreting a background narrative, which can be done in so many ways that the results are necessarily subjective. The same applies to âThat woman has a heart of stone,â which also requires its narrative background, although âheart of stoneâ can certainly be read in a conventional and even stereotypical manner. In that sense the first of the two metaphors is a much better poetic effort, unlike the second that is a mere phrase without much independent interest. When a metaphor is truly banal its effects start sounding like an intentional
We are now interested in metaphors without target, or the target and the source are the same thing. I call this an original metaphor in order to remind the reader of the way such a metaphor is created. In the case of an original metaphor we take a metonymic pair and start piling up meanings on one side of the pair, and we continue until the term is reborn as a metaphor. But what is it a metaphor of? It is possible that the second member of the given metonymic pair looks, say, like the opposite of the metaphorically described member, that is, the given co-referent object has disappeared. This again means that the term is no longer simply a metaphoric expression of an identifiable target. Through its metaphorization the target has disappeared. It has lost its meaning, and along with it, its identity as a target. Of course, it must retain some connection to the original metonymic pair so that it hangs on to this given setting via a narrative that utilizes certain conventions and other standardized associations.
Let me take an example before moving over to Karl Rossmannâs sad adventures in the fictional New York. The metonymic pair is death and the end of life. We know that both refer to the same thing, whatever its definition might be. The basic point about this referent is that the members of the given metonymic pair provide the most basic meanings of what we are talking about. In this sense âdeathâ refers to death or the end of life and nothing more basic can be said about it. We all know what it is. Some obvious metaphors exist â they all work as euphemisms â some colorful like âkick the bucketâ and some less so like âpass awayâ or somewhat less idiomatically âhe is late.â We can however adopt another way to the metaphorization of death. We start by enriching the meaning of death by saying it is the moment of truth that culminates the life of a person and ultimately allows us to say whether a person had a happy and meaningful life, or did one waste it? Aristotle says that a person can be called happy only after his death. The Imperial Japanese Army gave higher medals of honor only to dead soldiers because only a dead man never fails to act like a brave soldier. In some criminal law codes the dying manâs testimonial is taken to be a priori veridical. In this sense we enrich the meaning of death. Next we say death is a transition to a better world that is pure and happy, where one meets oneâs Maker and oneâs own relatives with whom one then joins the chorus of heavenly souls singing the praise of the Lord â depending on your metaphysics and religion. Now we have made death a transition to another realm, a radical metaphoric move, which has severed all its connections to death as the end of life. In terms of a magnificent paradiastole, we make death the opposite of the end of life myth. No end of life exists since what looks like the end
Amerika is an original allegory in the sense that we really cannot tell what its target is. Certainly it is not New York. Now we also know why everything in Amerika is in its own way subtly strange and disturbing. It is because we are not looking at targets, even if it may appear so, but derivative sources. Normally our sources are primary sources and as such readily recognizable as sources, but in the case of an original allegory we utilize derivative sources of metaphors, or metaphors that presuppose the main narrative and derive their meaning from it. The main problem is that we cannot say what the allegory is meant to say and, therefore, we cannot say how the derivative metaphors work.
As I said above, a key derivative metaphor in Amerika is travel, which in this case indicates aimless and circular wandering or something even worse, the eternal but repetitive motion of hundreds lifts going up and down in the hotel. The juggernaut of motor traffic rushes on along the straight and wide roads so that we get a picture of three types of motion and travel. Karlâs wandering leads him from trouble to trouble until in the end he finds his chance for redemption. The Oklahoma Theater emerges as if from nowhere, it is a deux ex machina that may save Karl from further travel. He is a modern Ulysses who, in the end, finds his way back to Ithaca, although we do not know what will happen there. They promise all kinds of good things, most of all inclusion in the mock biblical sense of âYou are all invited and all are chosen.â There is a meaningful position to everyone in that grand theater and its infinitely large production machinery. This theater is a Paradise. Suppose we have here a reference to industrial production and its factories where all are indeed chosen but in what terms, that is another question. However, this is exactly what we must not do, try to guess what the Oklahoma Theater really is. It is nothing but the concluding derivative metaphor embedded in the great allegory that is Amerika.
In the case of the hotel lifts, what makes them appear so odd is their great number, thirty. Imagine a hotel lobby with thirty busy lifts. The traffic is always
[M]otor-cars flew lightly pass one another as they had done the whole day, as if a certain number of them were always being dispatched from some distant place and the same number were being awaited in another place equally distant. During the whole day since early morning Karl had not seen a single car stopping, not a single passenger getting out.16
Cars never stop, the drivers are like ghosts sitting motionless in their vehicles that rush forward like a stampede of metal monsters so that traffic itself looks like the depicted target, not the vehicles and even less the drivers. âNow and then an automobile shot out of the mist and all three turned their heads to gaze after the large monsters, which were so remarkable to look at and passed so quickly that they never even noticed whether anyone was sitting inside.â17
Karlâs travels become meaningful, and this is the only form of travel that is meaningful, because it leads him to trouble. He was guilty of wrongdoing when he left the Old Country and he still is wherever he goes. For him, every road taken is a wrong turn, until the last one that is announced by some angels blowing their horns. What they do is to announce the allegoric nature of it all, an extended original metaphor of something we may be unable to recognize. Amerika is an allegory in the sense that it depicts the Other as a realm that cannot be depicted and travels that explore what is in these realms unknowable, like the house of Mr. Pollunder that opens up into a dark abyss and houses such a female fiend as Miss Pollunder, Klara, an American mimetic expression of the servant women at home who, as Karl sees it, raped him at home. But the American version is also her opposite, a rich, elegant, young, and resourceful lady. The reader travels with Karl, first to a new land and then explores it, and finally escapes to the Oklahoma Theater that is or is not a trap, alternatively an industrial hell or a heavenly paradise. Karl may be able to stay in the sweet land of metaphors or in the end he is on his way back to that of metonymies of work and suffering.
Irony: from Here to Eternity
Karl Rossmannâs worldly desires are deplorably weak but yet oddly persistent. They also are objectless. Mainly he wants to survive, or stay away from trouble, and find and keep a job, but nowhere do they materialize as full desires since they consistently lack a de re object. At this point the key desires are related to the condemnation of him by various other people, and then they judge on his guilt and its consequences. Karl does it, too, but others do it much more. The rule is, to exist is to judge, to judge is to denounce, and to denounce is to punish â it is not a desirable world this one.
To survive is not an object of desire, for the following reason. The agent, when she desires, wants to change her present world into a more desirable one, or in this sense, into better world. In this way she travels from one world to another â desire has the same structure, that of travel as a metaphor. All of them are modelled in the same way. However, when you want to survive you are already surviving, otherwise you cannot desire, and hence you desire the status quo. In other words, you do not want to travel away from this given world where you are surviving just now. On the contrary, you want to remain exactly where you are. Logically speaking, you cannot desire what you already have; you may love or hate it but to desire you cannot. To desire means to change the world into another and better one, but because Karl is in the world where he survives he cannot desire to survive.
So, in this sense Karl remains without desire. What he is going to do is to go on with his life, which he of course finds very difficult to do in the world where he is all the time accused and made look guilty of all kinds of bad things. So he must travel although he may not agree to do so. Basically his travels mean escaping the bad things that harass him day after day. His accusers want to catch him and punish him, so they have their desires. The Head Porter in the Grand Hotel Occidental even wants to torture him, as he actually does. In fact, Karl meets people who insist condemning and punishing him, although he also meets some women who want to help him in the grand hotel. Among men, Robinson is even weaker than Karl and therefore cannot threaten him. He is just pesky. Karl, in the original plan of the book is the man who disappeared, and this must mean him as a recognizable person. But every attack against him diminishes him and weakens him until he responds to the trumpet calls of those angels. This is the end of the road for him, although it also is a new beginning in the train bound for the Oklahoma Theater. He is now dead, we can say so, because Karlâs story has a structure that is isomorphic with the standard account of death. You reach the end that is a new beginning that takes you to
What is irony and how is it related to allegory and its metaphors in this case? The answer is, the metaphors here are original and corresponding desires empty or objectless. Kafkaâs great narrative achievement is a tale about a semantic void, or there is much ado about nothing. Incidentally, this also explains why Amerika as a novel is relatively neglected compared with The Trial and The Castle. Amerika is pure irony and as such a formalistic effort, unlike the two other books which we can read as traditional, albeit expressionistic, novels that contain a plot one can follow. This need not be so: in The Trial no trial emerges and in The Castle the castle is a Fata Morgana, a group of ordinary houses on a hill. These false facts and fake news constitute the ironic frame of these two novel novels. In spite of this, they cannot be compared with Amerika whose ironic aspect is overpowering like it is in all novels that wander so aimlessly. To go around in circles is a paradigmatically ironic idea of travel as is desire without an object. The same is true of course of original metaphors that are really metaphors of nothing and as such void. Such metaphors are like Mr. Pollunderâs house, which is a grand construction without walls. When you explore it you will only find the wind that blows through it as if coming from nowhere.
Let me first explain how I understand the master trope of irony and then how it applies to the case of original metaphor and void desire. We find sarcasms as well as delightful ironies. I drink cheap beer and tell a group of connoisseurs that I absolutely love it. That is a simple sarcasm, if I know what I am saying. On the wall of a cheap bar in a working class neighborhood one can read: âDrink always when you can!â This is a rather sophisticated joke, partially because of its inherent ambiguity and, of course, because of its patent invalidity. Those punters drink always when they can, of course, whenever they have money and they are able to walk in, but even they may recognize the irony. Irony rules any situation where the speaker utters a falsehood knowingly and her audience knows that she knows how it is and also knows what she really thinks about the matter. Irony is about an attempt to mislead when it is not supposed to succeed. It is like masking the truth that need not to be masked and the audience knows it. In this sense the speaker depends on her audience and
Now, I will argue that both the grand allegory of Amerika itself and Karl Rossmannâs related desires are ironic, that is, Amerika as a text is an allegory that may and even should be taken in an ironic sense. The great, final carnival of irony comes along with the idea of the Oklahoma Theater. It is throughout a pure, desperate irony and cursed joke; yet, all along the textual tone is factual, seldom exhilarating but mostly bitter and sardonic, which is not to say that a certain type of reader could not laugh at it â I do. How does this irony work? Kafka is a sophisticated writer, which is shown in how he deals with his metaphors and desires: the first trope misses its target or refuses to recognize one, and the second dismisses its object as if deliberately.
Both metaphor and desire suggest a false impression, namely, that behind the rhetorical trope and the mental episode lurk the terra firma of the real world. That is why the crux of the matter is that both metaphor and desire are designed and exist only for the purpose that they circumvent reality. In the case of desire the agent dismisses the real world and aims at a better, alternate possible world that houses the object of desire. In the case of metaphor he masks what there is by an expression that moves the discourse into another, possibly distant and foreign field of meanings, thus confusing the original issue. But as we already saw, Kafka dismisses such simple opportunities because he writes as if no reality existed. For him, no de re object makes sense and the target of metaphor vanishes leaving us to struggle with original metaphors. Therefore, here lays the deep source of irony, or one of the reasons why Kafka is such a wonderful writer and great literary inventor. The allegory is ironic in the sense that it speaks as if America in Amerika were real and at the same time signals that it is not when no one in the audience knows what that reality would be like. Kafka amasses a load of meanings upon what once was real, New York and America, until it all becomes unrecognizable. The details of the narrative look like errors but are in fact designed to indicate the allegorical development that leads toward the original metaphors that the overall technique generates.
Here is an example: In Grand Hotel Occidental the Manageress declares Karlâs guilt, âThe Head Waiter [â¦] has clearly pronounced your guilt, and I must say it seems undeniable to me. Perhaps you merely acted without thinking, but perhaps too you are not the boy I thought you were. And yet [â¦] I cannot help still thinking of you as a fundamentally decent lad.â20 Karl is here the person who disappears because his attributes get all mixed up. His supporter the Manageress first takes Karl to be Karl and then dismisses his personal identity. He is good and bad, trustworthy and not, he deserves punishment or perhaps not. Karlâs crime was to leave his lift unattended for a couple of minutes while he helps Robinson, but this little error grows into massive proportions when his enemy the Head Porter gets involved. He tortures Karl by painfully grabbing his arm but Karl somehow manages to escape. What does the Head Porter want? He wants nothing, he accuses him of an unspeakable crime, he treats him like shit, he just rages over the case and torments Karl, becoming more and more unreasonable while the situation progresses. He grows when Karl diminishes. For him Karl is a terrible criminal but again Karl is absolutely nobody: even his crime is unmentionable.21 Here lies the irony of the case; Karl is dragged to the limelight as if he were somebody, a bad man, a criminal or something like this, which he is not. The scene develops and spins out of control as if spontaneously without the influence of any of the dramatis personae. How could they influence the proceedings as they do not know what has happened, or even what happens, and they cannot say what they want. As usual, Karl escapes, runs away, and continues his wanderings only to face the threat that a suspicious and paranoid police officer takes him back to the Grand Hotel, where he can only expect to face more torture.
The irony of the situation is created through an original metaphor. What looks like a metaphoric target is Karlâs brief absence from his lift â of course such a target is just an illusion as I explained above. Now Kafka amasses meanings on top of this little event until it becomes metaphoric, or a metaphor of doom, guilt, and suffering when one is facing an insignificant failure. In the same way death as the end of life is an insignificant minor event as such but its metaphoric development gives it all the significances it may need to qualify as the greatest of all events. The same pattern is repeated here. We know Karl is nobody but now he is treated as if he were John Dillinger, a number one public enemy, to an ironic effect. In the case of death we miss the corresponding irony because we feel we must take death seriously and experience it as real and true
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See for instance H. Binder, Kafka â Kommentar zu den Romanen. Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater. Bochum: Winkler, 1976.
See for instance the excellent introduction by D. Shields Dix, âThe Man Who Disappeared: Kafka Imagining Amerikaâ (http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=239).
R. Stach, Kafka, The Decisive Years. Tr. S. Frisch. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005, p. 297.
Amerika. In F. Kafka, Complete Novels. Trs. W. and E. Muir. London: Vintage, 2008.
E. Lau, âFranz Kafkaâs Amerika: The American Dreamâ (http://people.csail.mit.edu/edmond/writings/amerikan-dream.pdf).
See T. Pataki, Wish-fulfilment in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: The Tyranny of Desire. London: Routledge, 2014.
Stach, 2005, p. 294.
Stach, 2005, p. 62.
S. Delianidou, Frauen, Bilder und Projektionen von Weiblichkeit und das männliche Ich des Protagonisten in Franz Kafkas Romanfragmenten. New York: Lang, 2012.
Amerika. Kafka, 2008, p. 257.
K. Kirsch, âAmerica, âAmerikaââ (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/books/review/Kirsch-t.html).
According to Stach (2005, pp. 42â43), and Kafka, The Early Years (Tr. S. Frisch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017 pp. 331â332) Kafka visited prostitutes but had a deep seated fear of impotence and considered sex with women somehow disgusting. He even considered white marriage with Felice Bauer. It is very tempting indeed to say that these facts are relevant to the understanding of the women in his fiction. But such temptations should be resisted.
However, the two chapters, âThe Stokerâ and âThe Nature Theater of Oklahomaâ are exceptional. The first was written and published independently of the rest of the text, so Karlâs active involvement is untypical. And the last chapter was written later and it indeed is different because of the introduction of something like a fantasy element. The recruitment office is fantastic: Hundreds of women on platforms dressed in white as winged angels blow into golden trumpets. Everyone is promised a job. Many are called and all are chosen â what a parody of the Christian idea of salvation this is, if you are willing to see it that way (Matthew 22:14; Amerika. Kafka, 2008, p. 420). Incidentally, picture 51 (a movie theatre) in Stach, 2017, looks much like the recruitment center in Amerika.
R. Barthes has a theory of unreadability: âThe language they founded is obviously not linguistic, a language of communication. It is a new language, traversed by (or traversing) natural language, but open on to the semiological definition of Text.â (Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Tr. R. Miller. London: Cape, 1977, p. 3).
The original tittle of Amerika.
Amerika. Kafka 2008, p. 291. This is just one of many remarkable depictions traffic. The lifts move up vertically, cars horizontally.
Amerika. Kafka, 2008, pp. 283â285. The context here is trucks and cargo transportation.
Stach, 2005, pp. 251, 252.
Another, more general, way of understanding irony is to say it indicates any effort to celebrate an abnormality or discrepancy in what is familiar.
Amerika. Kafka, 2008, p. 352.
Amerika. Kafka, 2008, p. 355.