Franz Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person - Review

Kafka's Nightmare of Modernity is a Comic Masterpiece

To anyone familiar with Franz Kafka's other two great novels - The Trial and The Castle - Amerika: The Missing Person will come as something of a surprise. A much lighter, blisteringly satirical work, it has more in common with Charles Dickens and Mark Twain (in his Diaries, Kafka described his novel as an imitation of David Copperfield). One section of the book might even have been penned by P.G. Wodehouse. The overall tone of the novel may be overtly comical, yet it curiously presages the author's later work and lays the groundwork for his peculiar brand of absurdist pessimism.

Written between 1911 and 1914, Amerika was the first novel that Kafka attempted, under the title Der Verschollene (The Missing Person). The first chapter of the novel was published in Kafka's lifetime as The Stoker and is included in many short story collections of his work. The title by which the novel is now most widely known, Amerika, was supplied by Kafka's close friend and publisher, Max Brod, who is credited not only with saving the writer's works for posterity but also in promoting this work and effectively creating the modern literary icon who is Franz Kafka.

There have been previous translations of Amerika (including a respectable attempt by Willa and Edwin Muir from a mucked about manuscript by Brod), but the recent version by Mark Harman is the one I would most recommend. In a similar vein to his previous excellent translation of The Castle for the Schocken Kafka Library, Harman takes as his source the restored definitive text of the novel and remains unswervingly truthful to its author's intent, avoiding the tendency to overlay it with his own interpretation (as the spiritually-minded Muirs were often wont to do). Harman's English language version of Amerika has an intoxicating pace and fluidity, and at times it reads like the screenplay of a rumbustious silent film comedy, with incredibly strong echoes of Chaplin's Modern Times. This is probably not an accident, given that Kafka was something of a technophile and loved the new medium of cinema.

The fact that Amerika is a galloping good-natured comedy from start to finish makes it virtually unique in Kafka's generally dense and gloomy oeuvre. The abundance of knock-about humour doesn't however diminish it as a great work of literature. Indeed, spliced into the hilarious set-pieces and surreal comic interludes are some serious themes which still continue to preoccupy us all. Foremost of Kafka's concerns is the breakneck pace of change and how this is likely to impact on both individuals and society. The creeping dehumanisation resulting from this relentless march of progress is brilliantly, almost terrifyingly, brought home in the deliriously funny segment centred on the Hotel Occidental, a monstrous edifice which resembles a monolithic, hyper-efficient machine whose employees are essentially no more than mindless dones charged with carrying out the most mundane of duties for a privileged clientele who appear just as robotic in their speech and behaviour. It is a dystopian vision that is uncannily similar to that which Fritz Lang gives us in his film Metropolis.

As in his other novels, the central character, a goofy innocent named Karl (a mocking self-portrait), is a mere cog in an unfeeling cosmic machine, entirely at the mercy of influences and events that are beyond his power to understand, let alone control. Some obvious resonances with both The Trial and The Castle can be seen in Karl's aimless peregrinations across the United States (a beacon of modernity), buffeted this way and that by the slings and arrows of savagely capricious fortune. As in a nightmare, events repeat themselves, each time imbuing us with a greater sense of helplessness and unease. The recurring episodes of acceptance and rejection to which Karl is subjected form a never-ending series of calamities that are both tragic and hilarious. Just like his close cousin K. in The Castle, we are assured that he is on a journey that can never end. The path which seems to be leading you on to your life's goal will inevitably take you back to where you started from. Kafka's protagonists are eternally trapped in an Escher-like vision of Hell.

In common with Kafka's other two novels, Amerika is unfinished and the last third of the published book consists of fragmentary sketches that are completely unconnected. Oddly, as you read the book, this seems not to matter. By this stage the narrative has become so diffuse, dreamlike and fantastic that we readily accept the transition from a sustained but crumbling plot to random incident. The final instalment - which shows Karl apparently finding lasting happiness as a glad member of a relentlessly expanding theatre company - gives the novel a satisfying resolution which The Trial and The Castle are denied, although what it shares with these two later works is a grim sense that Karl's ultimate fate is going to be far from chipper. The Hollywood-style happy ending is itself a joke, a sick, twisted mockery of a young man's self-delusion. Does he even suspect that he is surrendering his identity and freedom to a faceless corporate monolith? You can see Kafka smiling sardonically as you ingest the dubious sweetness of the final page, a poisoner watching his hapless victim. In the novel's closing sentence the writer's words express what we suddenly feel - a chill to make one's face quiver.