by Douglas Shields Dix
(A reply to this article by Dr Smolin can be read here )
Introduction
“The problem is not that of being free but of finding a way out…”-Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure
Between 1911 and 1914, Franz Kafka wanted to disappear. More precisely, he desperately sought a way out of the existential predicament of his life as he had been living it then, and towards a life that would yield him the necessary conditions to allow him to follow his chosen path of writing. It was during this period that he came to realize that the only true way out was through writing itself. He imagined other ways out, and even experimented with several, but in the end he closed all the doors he had opened, forcing himself to cross the threshold of the only door he would or could ever open–that of literature. It was during this period that he most despaired of ever becoming a writer, and yet it was during this period that he finally succeeded in becoming one to his own satisfaction (and he was always his most demanding critic). This particular passage in his life is worth dwelling upon because it gives a key to his later work, even if the novel he intended to be his initiation into serious literature during this period was ultimately abandoned, and even held in low esteem by its creator, who referred to it later in his diary as the “lowlands of writing” (in comparison to his having finished, in one sitting, the first piece of writing he felt justified his calling himself a writer-the story Das Urteil/The Judgment).
That uncompleted first novel was entitled, in its early form, Der Verschollene, which might be rendered in Czech as “Zmize**lý” or in English, The Disappeared One, The Man Who Disappeared, or even The One Who Went Missing, although the novel is most often known by the more familiar title given it by Kafka’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod, when he published it in 1927–Amerika. It is the least read of Kafka’s novels, has received the least amount of critical attention, and is rightly considered by critics important primarily as an indication of the future path Kafka’s writing would take, and not as a work to be considered as being on the same level as Der Prozess/The Trial or Das Schloss/The Castle. While I will not differ terribly much with the general critical consensus surrounding this work, I have two different but related reasons for considering this novel anew: first, to explore how this rather bizarre work fits into the trajectory of Kafka’s development as a writer-especially during a critical period of his development when he might well have given up his efforts in discouragement; the second, to consider the veracity of Kafka’s imaginative projection of life in the United States of America. I believe that despite the fact Kafka never set foot in America, his novel was uncannily prescient about certain aspects of the country that advertised itself, particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as “the promised land.” These reasons are related because I would submit that Kafka used the exercise of writing the novel to imagine opening a door to a way out for himself–departing for America, or at least departing for somewhere else, anywhere else (as a character in one of his parables proclaims, “weg von hier, nur weg von hier”-”away from here, just away from here”); however, his own honesty brought him to close that door both in his lived reality and in his literary reality.
This second reason may seem dubious, or even perverse, for Kafka’s writing does not posit itself as a realistic nor naturalistic representation of reality, but rather as something closer to an expressionist “x-ray” or photographic negative of the deeper wellsprings of social and psychological reality, which it accomplishes through a technique that traces and abstracts reality as it attempts to portray the deeper motivations that surge below the surface of daily life.
Following the French theorist Jacques Lacan, I term this technique a form of “anamorphosis”-a distortion of representation which obliquely presents a truth that cannot be represented directly. Kafka’s writings reveal truths about the human condition that are less about the specific psychological reality of a given character or the specific social reality of a given society than a tracing or “blueprint” (as Hannah Arendt termed it) that the reader needs to complete through an application of the blueprint to their own reality. Consequently, it would seem that a reader would do better to turn to writers like Proust or Joyce to view a given reality meticulously represented in a realistic or naturalistic way, and, in regard to the United States, a writer such as John Dos Passos in his novel Manhattan Transfer (1925) or his later U.S.A. Trilogy (1930-36) might be a better place to view a realistic representation of the reality of American society during Kafka’s epoch. Kafka’s portrait of American reality is distorted from the very opening scene of the novel, where the Statue of Liberty slides into view wielding a sword in the air rather than a torch, and such distortion rules the novel all the way to the faulty geography of the last scene which places “high mountains” erroneously somewhere between New York City and Oklahoma. Nonetheless, the strange and often absurd depictions of America in Kafka’s novel do in fact anamorphically point to certain truths about the country on a different level of representation than the realistic–that of the Americanism of America. What I mean by this will become clearer below, but for now it will suffice to cite the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari, who saw Kafka’s novels functioning “as a dismantling, an analysis, a prognostics of social forces and currents, of the forces that in his epoch are only beginning to knock on the door.” Among the forces that Kafka’s novels prognosticate, which Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere describe as “diabolical powers,” are cited Fascism, Stalinism, and…Americanism. The first two come as no surprise under the label “diabolical power,” but it has taken a half century longer for the reality of the third to become self-evident: that self-evidence is accelerating apace in the current epoch, although the signs have been there for significantly longer. What I will be suggesting in this essay is that, as is almost always the case in Kafka’s writings, Kafka’s hypersensitivity towards his own singular reality, which tormented him to the point of despair, brought him beyond the particular to a near-universal view of his epoch and the powers of the future knocking at the door; indeed he enacted what Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed as the visionary power of poets–to become the “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” With Amerika Kafka proved to be uncannily prescient in regard to Americanism, tracing the lines of the shadow its particular futurity was just beginning to cast.
Kafka’s Crisis and the Writing of Amerika/Der Verschollene
“Kafka is in ecstasy, writes whole nights through. A novel, set in America.”-Max Brod
Kafka began writing the first, subsequently destroyed draft of Der Verschollene in late 1911, although he had a novel very much like it in mind for much longer: a diary entry from January 19, 1911, states, “Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once.” For Kafka, the “European prison” might be taken as a projection of his own life during this period, which he saw increasingly closing in upon him. The primary issue he faced during this period was how to create for himself the necessary time to write when his family and society expected him to make a living, marry, and raise his own family. This conflict was already on his mind when, in March, 1911, he approached Rudolf Steiner, who was in Prague giving lectures on anthroposophy. Kafka clearly hoped the older man would give him some answer to his plight, and in his description of this visit we can see the basic outline of Kafka’s predicament. He explained to Steiner how his form of writing would not allow him to make a living by writing alone, as his work progressed too slowly, was not marketable, and therefore he worked at an insurance office. He explained how he was torn between his duties to the outer world and his “inner duties,” and that while he had an interest in anthroposophy, he had strong doubts as to whether he could add a third element to the other two dominant elements of his life, so he asked Steiner’s opinion. Kafka ended his account of this visit with rather a detailed description of how Steiner blew his nose–there is no description of how Steiner answered him. By the fact Kafka showed no further interest in anthroposophy we can assume what the answer (or non-answer) was: it’s likely Steiner realized that Kafka’s life already had a direction (literature), and it needed no further elements taking his attention away from that task. Kafka could not admit this to himself yet, and so he continued fluctuating between various alternatives as a way to avoid the obvious conclusion, which he would only reach after a considerable period of crisis.
For Kafka, the crisis truly began following the purchase, by his father and brother-law, of an asbestos factory in November, 1911. Kafka himself was listed as a partner, but clearly he expected to be a silent partner. His father had different expectations. Already by mid-December he was describing in his diary a serious argument with his father, and by late December, he describes himself as being in “torment” about the factory. The added time the factory would demand from him, beyond his six hours per day at the insurance company, seemed unbearable to him. This crisis would come to a head in 1912, bringing Kafka to a suicidal despair, but also bringing him through the crisis and laying the foundation for some of his most important work. It was at some point in early 1912 that he began the first, later destroyed draft of Der Verschollene (hereafter Amerika). In May, 1912, he wrote in his diary, “How I hold fast to my novel against all restlessness, like a figure on a monument that looks into the distance and holds fast to its pedestal.” We will never know whether this version was more like the earlier novel he projected with dual protagonists, or more like the version of the novel that exists now, but the novel clearly represented for Kafka, consciously and unconsciously, a split between an imaginative projection of a possible way out of his crisis in terms of an escape to America, and an enactment of the actual way out in terms of his establishing himself as a writer. On the level of an imaginative projection of an actual, physical escape, the possibility would not be without precedent in Kafka’s family history, as Kafka did have three paternal cousins who were living in the United States at that time, and two maternal uncles had spent a significant amount of time there. However, there are no indications that Kafka ever seriously took steps to embark upon this adventure, and during his life he never traveled farther than Germany, Austria, France, and northern Italy. On some level Kafka already knew the only way out was writing itself, but he would have to explore several other possibilities of escape before he could fully take on this task.
Of these possibilities, several were various ideologies Kafka explored during this period, including the aforementioned anthroposophy, Zionism (which Kafka began exploring during this period under the influence of Brod), and even nature worship: in July, 1912, he went to Jungborn in the Harz mountains to a natural therapy sanatorium with controlled diet, open-air treatment, and…nudism. The thought of Franz Kafka cavorting about in the nude like a faun confounds the imagination-apparently even for Kafka himself, who wrote to Brod that he was uncomfortable with the nudism, and that he was known at the spa as “the man with the swimming trunks” because of his refusal to strip fully naked. While he did continue his novel while at the spa, the spa and its nature philosophy turned out to be another dead-end for him. Around this time he broke off the first version of the novel for unknown reasons–he merely complained to Brod about the factory and about his writer’s block. However, in August Kafka would be presented with a possibility that would act as a catalyst to his fully embracing his destiny as a writer, while it simultaneously allowed him to act out the very crisis he was facing through its representation in another person: on August 13, Kafka met Felice Bauer for the first time.
Many critics and biographers have discussed the fact that Felice represented for Kafka more than simply a woman he considered marrying. In his diary he described her at one point as a “representative of the world,” and this indeed she was–a representative of precisely the demands of Kafka’s family, class, and society, and therefore an embodiment of his conflict with that society, and his crisis with himself. That Felice was more an imaginative projection for Kafka than a real woman of flesh and blood can be seen quite clearly: having only met her once for a few hours at Max Brod’s domicile, between the time he writes her his first letter on September 20, 1912, and the time he actually meets her again, five months later, on March 23, 1913, Kafka would write her 250 pages of letters. Clearly she acted as a catalyst or muse for Kafka, for the writing of these voluminous letters corresponds precisely with the advent of Kafka’s true fulfillment of his vocation as a writer: two days after writing Felice his first letter to her, Kafka had his most powerful experience of writing yet: over the night of September 22-23, he wrote his story Das Urteil/The Judgment, an experience that he felt verified his vocation. Several critics have noted that the story itself actually posits, in a transformed way, the conflicts Kafka was then facing, as the story creates a symbolical division between two of its characters, one present, one absent-the son who intends to marry, and who is caught in a terrible oedipal struggle with his father, and the bachelor “friend” in Russia, who, while not literally a writer, has been taken by many critics to suggest the possibility of a bachelor’s life as a writer elsewhere. That the son goes willingly to his own death, following his father’s verdict, has multiple meanings, but certainly it echoes the death-in-life Kafka feared he might face if he followed the injunctions of his own father and society. While the story only sets out the choices facing Kafka without working them through (or perhaps working them out in the negative choice of the son’s death), the writing of the story itself functioned to bring Kafka over a threshold to the positive choice of coming to see himself as a real writer. That Kafka did indeed make a choice becomes clear, for as soon as he finished this story, he embarked on a new version of his novel, and could declare the first chapter, “The Stoker,” finished by October 2 of that year. While Kafka’s relationship to Felice would be ruled by self-abnegation, self-disqualification, and dithering over its five year course prior to its final dissolution, during the same period he would embark upon and complete some of his most important work.
Despite this success, it was not to be an easy struggle for him. Kafka was battling forces that would take him away from writing more than ever (perhaps precisely because he knew now that he could write), and this conflict reached a peak on October 7, when Kafka wrote a suicidal letter to Max Brod. He was in despair over the loss of his time that would occur because of the need for him to take over for two weeks at the asbestos factory, and he saw the conflict in the bleakest, most black and white of terms: “…only two possibilities remain open…either to jump out of the window once everyone has gone to sleep, or in the next two weeks to go daily to the factory and to my brother-in-law’s office” (the window Kafka mentions no longer exists, as the elegant apartment building was torn down to make way for the aesthetic monstrosity of the Hotel Intercontinental). The intensity of Kafka’s feeling can be seen in the final lines of the letter: “And yet, now in the morning, I must not conceal this, I hate them all, one after the other, and think that in these fourteen days I shall scarcely be able to summon up the good-mornings and good-evenings…” Brod was so alarmed by the letter that he showed it to Kafka’s mother, hiding these final lines, and his mother intervened enough in the crisis to lessen Kafka’s burden at the factory, and prevent this potential suicide from actually occurring.
After this crisis passed, his work on Amerika progressed rapidly, so that by the second week of November Kafka had completed the sixth chapter, or roughly 2/3s of the novel. Kafka wrote to Felice, on November 11, “After fifteen years of despairing effort (except for rare moments), this is the first major work in which, for the past six weeks, I have felt confidence.” However, the letter continues by suggesting the inverse relation between Kafka’s ability to write, and his relationship with Felice: “It must be completed, as I feel sure you will agree, and so, with your blessing, I would like to transfer the brief periods I otherwise spend on writing inaccurate, alarmingly incomplete, imprudent, dangerous letters to you, to this task around which, until now at any rate, everything, no matter what and from where it came, has calmed down and taken the right turning. Do you agree?” Kafka did not actually curtail his letters to Felice–the flood of letters continued to be echoed by the flood of writing during this period, although he did break off his novel again to write rapidly, between November 17 and December 5, Die Verwandlung/The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s second key work to be completed. Following the end of this work, Kafka proclaims to Felice that he will go straight back to the novel; however, given he had already finished six chapters, between December, 1912, and August, 1914, Kafka only completed the seventh chapter of the novel, and a few fragments of another chapter that was left incomplete. For whatever reason, Kafka again seems to have largely abandoned his novel in this period of twenty months, and even when he takes it up again, in the summer of 1914, it coincides precisely with the beginning of his writing a new novel, Der Prozess/The Trial. It would seem that he desired to finish the earlier novel to have it over and done with, and, indeed, he finally broke off the writing of Amerika for good in October, 1914, carrying on with The Trial.
This fallow, unproductive period between the spring and early summer of 1913, and the late summer of 1914, coincides with Kafka’s coming to face the concrete reality of his epistolary romance in the shape of a living, breathing woman who obviously wanted him to make good his promises, and who, as we have seen, represented for Kafka “the world”-in other words, who represented the non-literary world. He visited Felice twice in Berlin during the spring of 1913, and these visits culminated in his proposal of marriage in June, 1913. Kafka was already warning her by summer that, as his wife, she could only expect to have one hour of his time daily, and, as if to enact this reality, Kafka broke off his usually profuse correspondence with her for an entire month in September, 1913. Felice apparently began to realize the nature of the man she had been corresponding with, as she evidently also cooled the relationship off-enough so that Kafka renewed his marriage proposal in January, 1914, and when he visited Felice at the end of the following February, she had ready for him a solid argument against their getting married. By April these obstacles had been surmounted enough for Kafka to meet Felice in Berlin, and in May, Felice came to Prague to help Kafka look for an apartment, and Kafka traveled to Berlin, and made his engagement official. This engagement lasted all of six weeks before Kafka went to Berlin in mid-July, and the engagement was broken off following a meeting at the Askanische Hof attended by his friend Ernst Weiss, and Felice supported by her friend Grete Bloch (who had revealed to Felice negative passages about her in Kafka’s letters to Grete), and even Felice’s sister, Erna. It seems that while Felice actually broke off the relationship, Kafka’s passivity and inability to defend himself at this meeting were the real cause: from a later account of the meeting it seems Kafka’s self-defense actually supported Felice’s contentions, and Felice merely arrayed against Kafka many of the charges his letters had already raised against himself as a marriage partner. However, coinciding with this break commences the end of a long fallow period in Kafka’s writing life, when his attention had apparently been primarily taken up with his correspondence with Felice, and the beginning of the furious activity of completing the last chapter of Amerika, In der Strafcolonie/In the Penal Colony,and the commencement of Der Prozess/The Trial. Paradoxically, his greatest burst of literary activity that autumn came in October, which coincided with his renewed letters to Felice (and to her friend Grete, with whom Kafka began an epistolary dalliance). Having completed the final chapter of Amerika, and much of Der Prozess, Kafka was again quite fallow until just after the point when he became engaged to Felice for the second time, in July, 1917, after which he wrote Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer/The Great Wall of China, Der Jäger Gracchus/The Hunter Gracchus, and Ein Bericht für eine Akademie/A Report to an Academy. Of course, in the end, their engagement was finally broken off for good.
I go on at length detailing the curious relation between Kafka’s writing life and his amorous life with Felice because I am trying to emphasize the nature of the correlation between the two, as I believe it has an analogy with Kafka’s strategy in writing Amerika. Felice was clearly a muse as long as she was at a certain distance: the periods of copious letters written to her coincides with the periods of great creative ferment; therefore, a woman for Kafka becomes a muse if she is somehow “over-the-horizon,” or “coming-ever-closer-without-arriving” (a bit like death, it would seem…). Once she is in danger of arriving she becomes an embodiment of society (especially Felice with her rather bourgeois outlook, it must be said), and therefore a problem and a trap, and the writing ceases. In this crucial period Kafka ambivalently wavered between two possibilities: the possibility of accepting marriage as a way out from the torments of his self-expectation in regard to his writing, and the possibility of his writing being a way out of the “normal” life his family and society expected him to embrace. Kafka could not stand the normative structure of intimacy on offer in his society, and yet, unlike writers such as D.H. Lawrence or Anaïs Nin, would or could not embark upon the project of “reinventing love” (to borrow a phrase from Rimbaud). This ambivalence is reflected in Amerika.
The novel clearly represents Kafka imaginative projection of a way out: why else would he have imagined the story of a young man who “disappears” to America, and his adventures there? While Kafka may not have been thinking specifically of disappearing to America as an answer to his problems, he certainly was considering, at least abstractly, the possibility of disappearing from Prague–for example, in one of his letters to Felice, he proclaims that if she will not marry him, he will move away from Prague. As Max Brod wrote in his forward to the novel, “…Franz Kafka was fond of reading travel books and memoirs…he had always a longing for free space and distant lands.” Through the benefit of hindsight, we can see that for Kafka, America would have been as impossible a destination as Palestine, but certainly he must have at least considered both destinations at different points in time, just as he also considered anthroposophy, nature worship, and, even, the kind of “tending one’s own garden” that one finds at the end of Candide (Kafka, in the spring of 1913, took to gardening two hours a day in Nusle: gardening appears to have been one possibility available to troubled geniuses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during its period of dissolution, for Wittgenstein would also become a gardener’s assistant in a monastery). Just as his relationship with Felice was a psychological working through of his problems, his writing of Amerika was also a way to work through his wavering between the possibilities of escape, which may be represented as a choice between what might be nominated an “extensive escape” (through actual physical departure) and “intensive escape” (through an escape within himself, through what the critic Maurice Blanchot has termed the “essential solitude” of writing).
As will be seen from a discussion of the novel itself, Kafka’s projection of such an escape was ambivalent from the start, for from beginning to end what he imagines happening to his protagonist Karl Rossman is a series of absurd and often terrible incidents that function more as a cautionary tell against going to America, rather than a story of the opportunities and successes awaiting someone in the “promised land.” Certainly the words and images that were coming from America in that period revealed a land of hope and opportunity: between 1900 and 1920, 4,500,000 people immigrated to the United States, of which 22% were from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire–equaled only in number by immigrants from Italy. This means that during the twenty year period coinciding with the time Kafka was writing, upwards of 1,000,000 of his fellow residents of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were leaving for the United States. Be that as it may, Kafka’s depiction hardly revealed a welcoming land–rather it revealed a land where the unwary would be taken advantage of at every opportunity, where the wealthy trod upon the poor, where the only way forward was through corruption and sycophancy, where politics, commerce and daily life were deliriously frenzied, where a subterranean degeneracy and perversion threatened to unleash itself on unsuspecting victims at any moment. In short, Kafka’s novel depicted something closer to the wayward reality than the illusory dream.
I believe there is an analogy between the way Kafka framed his possible marriage to Felice and how he depicted a possible escape to America in this novel: in both cases the ideal was represented first as a possible way to proceed, but having set up the ideal, in both cases Kafka disqualified himself by imagining the worst possibilities. When Kafka wrote to Felice or even her father about his suitability as a marriage partner, he would list all the reasons he was not suitable. In the same way, beginning with a general ideal of America, Kafka’s novel goes through a series of episodes revealing the real behind the ideal, as if he were trying to talk himself out of the possibility of America being an escape route from his existence. In both cases, the actual working through of the conflict occurred via writing, as the only way out for Kafka would be the line of escape represented by literature. Kafka finally did become “the man who disappeared,” but this disappearance was intensive: like one of his late stories, Ein Hungerkünstler/The Hunger Artist, Kafka was to disappear into his writing.
The Shape of Amerika: Not-So-Great Expectations
“David Copperfield. ‘The Stoker’ as sheer imitation of Dickens, the projected novel even more so. 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., but above all the method. 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. Dickens’ opulence and great, careless prodigality, but in consequence passages of awful insipidity in which he wearily works over effects he has already achieved.”-Franz Kafka, Diary
It may seem rather strange that Kafka took as his model for Amerika the Charles Dickens of David Copperfield and Great Expectations, as Kafka wrote in his diary entry (above) on October 8, 1917. The “careless prodigality” of Dickens was, of course, at least partially due to the fact that most of his novels were serialized for publication in magazines, so Dickens was attempting to draw out the story for as long as he possibly could (a technique practiced by Balzac as well). This in itself speaks to the difference between Dickens and Kafka: Kafka, while he desired publication, acknowledged that his writing would never have a popular audience. Certainly there is some family resemblance between David Copperfield and Amerika in the basic plot outline of the young man who must make his way in the world, and even in some of the sudden turns of plot or grotesqueries that both young men encounter along the way, but Kafka understates the difference between himself and Dickens, and what he speaks of as the “sharper or duller lights” are significant indeed. While both protagonists get themselves into (and out of) quirky or difficult predicaments, in Dickens the protagonist moves ultimately in a definite direction that finally yields him a reward for his virtue, while in Kafka there is no sense of progression or of an ultimate direction: his protagonist, Karl Rossman, drifts from one situation to another in an aimless, passive manner like a leaf blown in the wind–although the wind, in this case, seems to be issuing from the barely-suppressed libido of most of the other characters. It is this last aspect that is most striking about this novel (and Kafka’s later two novels), as the description of the first chapter which now follows indicates.
“The Stoker”–the first chapter of the novel, and the only section published during Kafka’s lifetime–is exemplary of these strange, libidinal intensities that seem to flow in all directions from the very first page. In the first paragraph the reader is immediately given the motivating reason for Karl’s voyage to America in the first description of him as a boy of sixteen “who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him” (that this was not such an absurd event may be seen by the fact that Kafka’s cousin, Dr. Robert Kafka, was said to have been seduced at age 14 by the family cook). This fact sets the blueprint for the majority of relations which follow in the book, which almost all seem to have either a latent or overt libidinal content. Karl’s first encounter with this force occurs immediately. He is ready to disembark from the ship in New York harbor when he realizes he has left his umbrella below deck. He goes down, gets increasingly lost, and begins to “pound unthinkingly” on a little door. The stoker who opens the door immediately sweeps Karl into his cabin, and then into his bunk, getting in beside him. The homoerotic undertones are quite clear, but Karl seems naively innocent of the stoker’s motivations, and only registers his discomfort at the man’s closeness to him in a distracted way: in fact, as the critic Stanley Corngold has observed, distraction is a key facet of Karl’s sensibility throughout the novel–it seems to be caused by a combination of his youthful inexperience, and, on a deeper, darker level, is his own way of repressing what is actually happening to him, and consequently allowing it to happen in certain cases. Karl’s “reading” of his own experience seems to be a model for the reading of the novel itself, for the reader also never quite knows what is happening in any direct way, but is led to suspect that almost all of the characters have ulterior motives, with subliminally libidinal undertones.
The chapter is a series of such distractions for Karl: Karl goes in search of his umbrella, encounters the stoker, and then becomes so distracted that he forgets he has left his trunk on deck. Then, he becomes so distracted by the case of the stoker, who claims to have been bullied by the head engineer, that he goes with him to the captain to plead his case, seemingly forgetting that none of this has anything to do with him, and that his umbrella and now his trunk are still lost. After he has addressed the captain and the stoker begins to tell his story, Karl allows himself to be distracted yet again by the view outside the window, only realizing afterwards that in the moment of distraction he had allowed the stoker to become too impassioned and imprecise in his account, so that no one in the room is sympathetic to his case. Finally, the ultimate distraction comes when a stranger suddenly asks his name, and Karl discovers that he is in the presence of his uncle, now a United States senator, who has come expressly to find him on the ship after receiving a letter from the servant who had seduced Karl, and, to Karl’s embarrassment, proceeds to tell the whole story (embedded within this story, Karl remembers how it actually happened, and the seduction itself seems to have been the result of a distraction and passivity that is very similar to the scene in the stoker’s cabin). The end of the chapter confirms the libidinal tension that has reigned throughout, with a handshake between Karl and the stoker that seems strangely sexual (“Karl drew his fingers backwards and forwards between the stoker’s, while the stoker gazed round him with shining eyes, as if blessed by a great happiness that no one could grudge him”), and, when on the boat taking his uncle and he ashore, Karl looks at his uncle and wonders if he “would ever be able to take the stoker’s place,” as if the stoker had actually acquired a position of intimacy during their brief encounter! It is a grand entrance to Kafka’s bizarre fictional universe.
While the episodic train of events leading to an unexpected resolution has the general structural shape of a Dickens novel, the subterranean sexuality that pervades Kafka’s novel is striking, and continues throughout the book, characterizing Karl’s relations with his uncle (who is jealous when Karl chooses to visit the country house of Pollunder, his uncle’s friend), his relation to Pollunder (who holds Karl’s hands on the way to his uncle’s country house, and who at one point pulls Karl between his knees), his relation to the manageress of the hotel Karl goes to work for as an elevator boy (who makes it clear she likes to be “awakened” early in the morning–and who Karl feels his duty to “see” on his day off), his encounter with a hotel porter (Kafka’ biographer, Frederick Karl, goes so far as to describe this encounter as something close to a rape: “What is occurring without actual sodomy is a form of rape, the seizure of the person and the crushing of him or her into humiliation”), and to the bloated, ex-opera singer Brunhelda, who Karl is forced to attend to as a sort of personal servant–and this list only includes the apparently unwanted liaisons. The shape of the novel is already indicated largely in this list of libidinal encounters, as the novel does not really progress in a specific direction as one would expect from a novel by Dickens, but rather seems to drift as aimlessly as Karl himself, although Kafka’s final chapter, which will be discussed below, does reach a culmination of theme, if not truly a culmination of plot.