Amerika (Paperback)

Politically and militarily we are divided into doves and hawks, left wing and right, as if it were impossible to possess both wings for balance and flight. In these metaphoric matters there is barely any room for the nuances of "thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird"—to borrow a phrase from that insurance executive Wallace Stevens. Might is certainly right in flight, and the machine in the garden becomes even more pervasive in the devastating effects of a Daisy Cutter—a pastoral munitions to eradicate ethnic cleansing. Warthogs, drones, stealth fighters and bombers with laser-guided tomahawk and cruise missiles fill the air and amphitheatre of war, as once again the United States unleashes its increasing power, precision, inventiveness, and global responsibility.
Perhaps one should draw a distinction between the United States and America, between a nation founded on democratic ideals and a superpower facing realities of terrorism and targeting from abroad. Early on in his first novel Amerika (written 1912-14; first published in 1927), Franz Kafka recognized this schizoid duality when his protagonist aboard ship spots the Statue of Liberty on the horizon: "The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven." While commentators generally point out the displacement of the Lady of the Harbour's torch by a more militant sword, one should also note not only the loftiness of this "new" gesture, but also the freedom associated with the prevailing winds, however ironically intended. In contrast to the heights of this sublime vision, protagonist Karl Rossmann immediately returns to the depths of the ship in search of his forgotten umbrella amidst labyrinthine passages. Chaplinesque Karl loses himself in vestiges of Europe before embarking or disembarking on his discovery of America.
Originally Kafka titled this unfinished novel The Man Who Disappeared. Karl disappears not only from Europe where the sixteen-year-old boy has been seduced by his housekeeper whom he impregnates, but also from America. Kafka questions the identity of his protagonist as well as that of the United States. Amerika is a fragmented picaresque novel that owes much to Dickens and Mark Twain. No sooner does Karl arrive in New York than he is adopted by his uncle Jacob, a senator. Karl's room at his uncle's place overlooks the following urban scene:

"From morning to evening and far into the dreaming night that street was the channel for a constant stream of traffic which, seen from above, looked like an inextricable confusion, for ever newly improvised, of foreshortened human figures and the roofs of all kinds of vehicles, sending into the upper air another confusion, more riotous and complicated, of noises, dust and smells, all of it enveloped and penetrated by a flood of light which the multitudinous objects in the street scattered, carried off and again busily brought back, with an effect as palpable to the dazzled eye as if a glass roof were being violently smashed into fragments at every moment."

Kafka had never visited New York, but clearly the modern metropolis with its chaotic traffic, rooftop vistas, and myth of the new, visits him. Bombarded from above by its fragments, Karl is soon dismissed from his uncle's household and forced onto the open road where he encounters rogues and other unsavoury characters. Amerika depicts utopia and dystopia: like all of Kafka's anti-heroes, Karl is on trial and has to work out his guilt in the face of authority that is not always the equivalent of justice. By the end of the novel, his sense of duty takes him to "The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma." Karl progresses from the labyrinthine streets of New York to the open road of Oklahoma, from the Statue of Liberty to the gigantic women dressed as angels blowing their trumpets inviting everyone to the Theatre of Oklahoma. The trumpets are not in harmony, however; confusion abounds, and the women dressed as angels are accompanied by men costumed as devils. Kafka prophetically announces the tragicomic duality of America: Oklahoma is the site of both the grand musical and the tragic bombing by Timothy McVeigh when 168 Americans lost their lives. The American sword is double-edged and cuts both ways, but what else is new?
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada)

Kafka's first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossman who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents. --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.