Young Karl Rossmann (the protagonist of Amerika) is put out of the parental home and sent to America because of his unfortunate sexual mishap with a housemaid, who "had seduced him and got herself a child by him." Before the coition: "'Karl, oh my Karl!' she exclaimed… while he could see nothing at all and felt uncomfortable amid all the warm bedding that she had apparently piled on especially for his sake…" Then she "shook him, listened to his
heartbeat, offered him her chest so that he could listen to hers the same way." Next she "groped between his legs in so disgusting a manner that Karl's head and neck came thrashing out from among the pillows."But then she '"'pushed her belly against him several times-he felt she was a part of himself and that may be why he was overcome by a terrible need."
This minor copulation is the cause of everything to follow in the novel. Realizing that our destiny is determined by something utterly trivial is depressing. But any revelation of some unexpected triviality is a source of comedy as well. Post coitum omne animal triste. Kafka was the first to describe the comic side of that sadness.
The comic side of sex: an idea unacceptable to puritans and neolibertines both. I think of D. H. Lawrence, that bard of Eros, that evangelist of coition, who, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, tried to rehabilitate sex by making it lyrical. But lyrical sex is even more ridiculous than the lyrical sentimentality of the last century.
The erotic gem of Amerika is Brunelda. She fascinated Federico Fellini. For a long time, he dreamed of making a film of Amerika, and in his Intervista there is a scene that shows the casting for this dream project: a bunch of incredible candidates turn out for the role of Brunelda, women Fellini had picked with the exuberant delight he was known for. (But I say it again: that exuberant delight is the same as Kafka's. For Kafka did not suffer for us! He enjoyed himself for us!)
Brunelda, the former singer, "the very frail woman"
with "the gout in her legs." Brunelda with her plump little hands and the double chin, "immeasurably fat." Brunelda, sitting legs apart, "with the greatest effort, after many tries and frequent pauses to rest," bending over "to tug at her stocking-tops." Brunelda hitching up her dress and using the hem to dry the weeping Robinsons eyes. Brunelda unable to climb two or three steps and needing to be carried-a sight that so impresses Robinson that for the rest of his life he will sigh: "Oh God, oh God, how beautiful she was! What a woman!" Brunelda standing naked in the bathtub, moaning and complaining as Delamarche washes her down. Brunelda lying in that same tub, furiously pounding the water with her fists. Brunelda whom it takes two men two hours to get down the stairs and put in a cart, which Karl then pushes across the city to some mysterious place, probably a brothel. Brunelda in this handcart, with a shawl covering her up so well that a cop takes her for a cargo of potato sacks.
What is new about this portrait of massive ugliness is that it is alluring; morbidly alluring, ridiculously alluring, but still alluring; Brunelda is a monster of sex on the borderline between the repugnant and the exciting, and men's admiring cries are not only comic (they are comic, to be sure, sex is comic!) but at the same time entirely true. It is not surprising that Brod, that romantic worshiper of women, for whom coition was not reality but a "symbol of feeling," could see no truth to Brunelda, not the faintest shadow of real experience but only the description of "the horrible punishments in store for those who… do not follow the path of righteousness."
7
The finest erotic scene Kafka ever wrote is in the third chapter of The Castle: the act of love betwen K. and Frieda. Scarcely an hour after seeing that "unprepossessing little blonde" for the first time, he is embracing her behind the bar, "among the beer puddles and the other filth covering the floor." Filth: it is inseparable from sex, from its essence.
But immediately thereafter, in the same paragraph, Kafka sounds the poetry of sex: "There hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours in which K. continually had the feeling that he was going astray, or that he was farther inside the strange world than any person before him, in a strange world where the very air had in it no element of his native air, where one must suffocate from strangeness and where, in the midst of absurd enticements, one could do nothing but keep going, keep going astray."
The length of the coition turns into a metaphor for a walk beneath the sky of strangeness. And yet that walk is not ugliness; on the contrary, it attracts us, invites us to go on still farther, intoxicates us: it is beauty.
A few lines later: "he was far too happy to be holding Frieda in his hands, too anxiously happy as well, because it seemed to him that if Frieda were to leave him, everything he had would leave him." So is this love? No indeed, not love; if a person is banished and dispossessed of everything, then a tiny little woman he hardly knows, embraced in puddles of beer, becomes a whole universe-love has nothing to do with it.
8
In his Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton speaks severely about the art of the novel. He complains that the novel is incurably hobbled by mediocrity, by banality, by everything that is contrary to poetry. He mocks its descriptions and its tiresome psychology. This criticism of the novel is immediately followed by praise of dreams. Then he ends by saying: "I believe in the eventual fusion of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak."
Paradox: the "fusion of dream and reality" that the surrealists proclaimed, without actually knowing how to bring it about in a great literary work, had already occurred, and in the very genre they disparaged: in Kafka's novels, written in the course of the previous decade.
It is very difficult to describe, to define, to give a name to the kind of imagination with which Kafka bewitches us. The "fusion of dream and reality"-that phrase Kafka of course never heard-is illuminating. As in another phrase dear to surrealists, Lautreamont's about the beauty in the chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine: the more alien things are from one another, the more magical the light that springs from their contact. I'd like to call it a poetics of surprise; or beauty as perpetual astonishment. Or to use the notion of density as a criterion of value: density of imagination, density of unexpected encounters. The scene I cited, of the coition of K. and Frieda, is an example of that dizzying density: the short passage, scarcely a page long, encompasses three completely distinct existential discoveries (the existential triangle of sex) that are stunning in their swift succession: filth; the intoxicating dark beauty of strangeness; and touching, anxious yearning.
The whole third chapter is a whirlpool of the unexpected: within a fairly tight span come, one after the other: the first encounter between K. and Frieda at the inn; the extraordinarily realistic dialogue in the seduction, which is disguised because of the presence of a third person (Olga); the motif of a hole in the door (a trite motif, but it shifts away from empirical plausibility), through which K. sees Klamm sleeping behind the desk; the crowd of servants dancing with Olga; the surprising cruelty of Frieda, who runs them off with a whip, and their surprising fear as they obey her; the innkeeper, who arrives as K. hides by lying flat under the bar; the arrival of Frieda, who discovers K. on the floor and denies his presence to the innkeeper (meanwhile amorously caressing K.'s chest with her foot); the act of love interrupted by the call from Klamm, who has awakened, outside the door; Friedas astonishingly courageous gesture of shouting to Klamm, "I'm with the surveyor!'; and then, to top it all off (and here empirical plausibility is completely abandoned): above them, on the bar counter, sit the two assistants; they were watching the couple the whole time.