Kafka’s America and Spaces of Hope (Philosophy of Dwelling Series, Part 3)

I was recently asked to write something (for one of those old school ‘paper’ journals) about Adorno’s time in America, and I’m going to share, here, some tidbits of what I decided to do with that.

It centers around two very obscure little references in Adorno’s writings to an equally obscure tail-end to one of Kafka’s novels. Sounds obscure, I know. The novel was Amerika, and the tail-ending has to do with the ‘Great Natural Theater of Oklahoma’.

Adorno and Oklahoma in the same sentence? Who can resist?

Adorno referred to this story (which is really just a final ‘fragment’ of Kafka’s novel) in two places that I’m aware of – ‘Notes on Kafka’ (from the collection of essays titled Prisms) and Minima Moralia (my favorite).

Everyone who knows something about Adorno knows that he was deeply pessimistic about modern society (check out what my new friends at Militant Esthetix say about Adorno). But in this case, I believe his references to the Great Natural Theater, and to Kafka, are an example of Adorno’s willingness, at times, to look beyond the dismal, towards an anticipation of some sort of redemption.

Adorno slips up. Occasionally, just occasionally, he looks on the bright side.

Adorno sometimes looked on the bright side.

And the ‘bright side’ turns out to be, for both Adorno and Kafka, spaces, dwellings, spots here and there amidst the rubble where we somehow manage against all the odds to make life meaningful, to live well, to ‘dwell’.

It isn’t what comes to mind when you think of Adorno, but the dusty American West (Oklahoma) became the site of a complex inter-cultural exchange: Adorno in America reading Kafka in Europe, who is writing about an America that he has never seen (anyone who’s been following my conversations with David Richardson about Marfa, Texas, will have some background into why I love this kind of resurrection of hopeless spaces and places in the American West).

Adorno and Kafka viewed America as theater, well, ok, more like a freak show, but also as a vast stage for congested and contrasting allegories of loss and hope, despair and redemption.

Let’s look at the story.

In the final fragment of Kafka’s Amerika, Karl Rossman has stumbled upon an employment advert (I love how the British say ‘advert’, so I do it too) for the Great Natural Theater of Oklahama (sic, and by sic I mean that’s how Kafka spelled it, and we’re not sure if it was intentional or not) and is sort of mesmerized by its claim that ‘everyone is welcome’.

I think we can be pretty sure that it was Kafka himself who was mesmerized by what he took to be this very special, mythical fact about America, that everyone is welcomed.

Interviews take place at a horseracing track, and this is where things get David Lynchy. With actors dressed as angels and devils, musicians and empty stages, it is a kind of haunting, carnivalesque atmosphere.

After anxiously navigating his way around the obstacles presented by his ambiguous immigrant status, Karl, to his own astonishment and delight (having harbored dreams of becoming an engineer), is hired as a ‘technical worker’.

Yay Karl. Now if you’ve read Kafka, you’re expecting something ominous, and this is part of what makes the whole interview process at the horsetrack feel creepy, even, I would say, a little suspenseful. Is this really some weird covert FBI deportation round-up?, I’m thinking to myself as I read.

In its closing paragraphs, Karl and the other new hires (which include unemployed families with children and other immigrants), are hurried onto the train destined for Oklahoma. As a child’s stroller is negotiated onto the train by a father and the transport leader, Karl wonders to himself ‘What kind of homeless, dubious people were coming together here, and were being received so well and being protected!’

An entire car was apparently dedicated to the theater and as people boarded Karl overheard the hiring personnel say to the conductor ‘All these belong to the Theater of Oklahama’ (sic).

From the standpoint of Kafka’s oeuvre, this story stands out. It’s just very unlike him to conclude one of his works with such sentimental tones: ‘When the train began to move they waved their hands out the window as the children pushed up against them and found it all funny’.

Many of Kafka’s stories narrate the confrontation of an individual with anonymously oppressive and overwhelming mechanisms (think The Trial, , The Judgment, In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis, and so on), but this chapter seems to revel in a different scenery and storyline.

The last lines of the novel have Karl and his companions traveling for two days by train across a landscape that impresses upon him the ‘largeness of America’. They observe mountains and valleys and streams that, as they opened the windows to put their heads out, ‘were so close that the breath of their coolness made everyone’s face shiver’.

This is Kafka looking on the bright side.

In a way, Kafka idealized the grandeur and promise of the American West, and his story’s innocent subject, Karl, appears in the end to experience that landscape as strangely welcoming and redeeming.

…On the first day they traveled through mountains. Blue-black stone masses traveled in sharp outcroppings by the train, they bent out the window and tried in vain to see their summits, dark narrow valleys opened up, they pointed to the places where they disappeared with their fingers, broad mountain streams hurried up in great swells along the hilly ground, from which a thousand small foaming wells drove up, they burst out under the bridges the train traveled over and they were so close that the breath of their coolness made everyone’s face shiver.

Kafka’s ‘blue-black stone masses […] summits, dark narrow valleys’ provide the backdrop for the ending of a story about an unlikely sort of salvation encountered amidst the strange and shadowy world of the Natural Theater somewhere in the expanses of an otherwise bleak and barren Oklahoma.

I would say that Kafka’s Amerika documents a mythic and distorted geography, both natural and social, confounding every familiar reader’s expectation by finding redemption in the dark spaces.

Now, redemption in dark spaces is a slightly different genre of political fantasy than that of revolutionary desire, the kind of political phantasmagoria most commonly associated with Marxism, for example. It’s a fantasy that isn’t holding its breath for some sort of escape, and instead hopes to find ways to live well, or something like it, in a bad place.

For some reason, the visual allegory that comes to mind for me is the apartment of Sebastian in Ridley Scott’s neo-noir sci-fi classic, Blade Runner (one could also substitute it for something from Lynch). Sebastian epitomizes, doesn’t he?, just that sort of struggle to live well, or something like it, in a bad place.

He is the only one to inhabit a large, and largely abandoned, building, and his flat and its furnishings conjure a carnivalesque, slightly nightmarish, but still welcoming and highly personalized space, not altogether unlike what Kafka attributed to the Nature Theater in Oklahoma.

More could be said , for sure, about Blade Runner as an allegory of the predicament of dwelling. Without belaboring the point, it foresees a Los Angeles that has become pure spectacle, pure multiculture, and where advertising, or the commodity form, is ubiquitous. Its depiction of the future city captures a great deal of what we find ourselves addressing, today, when we talk about the problems and trademarks of modern dwelling.

Well, and of course there is the terrifically postmodern theme of coming to terms with one’s own ontological displacement, of settling into the insecurity of one’s own status. Am I human? Am i a replication, a ‘replicant’? Does it matter? Isn’t the question, really, that which Roy Batty voices in the moment of his death? Not whether I am ‘real’ but what the quality of my life has been. Not what I ‘am’ but how I have lived. Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean.

In any case (ok, that digression was really an excuse to add some more pictures) I have a theory about how important this fragment by Kafka was to Adorno. When you read the final lines of Minima Moralia (since in this post we’re apparently preoccupied with last lines), you can observe that Adorno could very well have just put down his copy of Amerika when he wrote, for example, that in the face of despair ‘perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light’.

In both cases (Kafka’s blue-black, craggy mountain-tops and hope-amidst-despair themes, and Adorno’s rifts, crevices and redemption-amidst-an-indigent-and-distorted-world themes), the point seems to be that, in a deranged world, salvation (if there is such a thing) will only be found among the distortions.

I’m going to put on the hat of a literary critic for just a moment and look more closely at Adorno’s two allusions to the Great Natural Theater. What emerge are two seemingly distinct claims. In Minima Moralia (the first reference), Adorno writes this:

If one wakes up in the middle of a dream, even the most troubling, one is disappointed and feels as if one had been cheated of what is best. Yet there are as few happy, fulfilled dreams as, in Schubert’s words, happy music. Even the most beautiful ones retain the blemish of their difference from reality, the consciousness of the mere appearance [Schein] of what they grant. That is why even the most beautiful dreams are somehow damaged. This experience is unsurpassable in the description of the nature theater of Oklahoma in Kafka’s America.

Here, Adorno’s reading of the Natural Theater fragment appears to emphasize a certain kind of melancholia attached to the wish, one whose source is the discrepancy, never quite vanquished, between the dream’s bliss and the reality that contrasts with it.

The mistake would be to accommodate this reading to the commonplace idea that wishful thinking is illusory. Instead, an interpretation informed by the full scope of Adorno’s thought (I’m just asking you to trust me about this; no real evidence being supplied to support it) would suggest that fantasy is not ideology.

One could argue, for example, that fantasy’s function is critical, not ideological, when it is permitted to cast an incriminating light on reality, to reveal the deficiency or lack in reality (which is to say, from the place of its lack reality gives rise to fantasy). A fantasy can be both false and true.

From this perspective, to say that ‘even the most beautiful dreams are somehow damaged’ is not to say that dreams fail to satisfy because their dream-status contains the mark of their unreality. It is instead to say that the dream’s empowerment, its redemptive quality, depends on the degree to which it is able to retain within it the trace of a loss.

A dream is useless when it pretends to replace bad reality; on the other hand, a dream is critical, it serves the same function as criticism, when it is able to preserve the consciousness of its distance from reality, when it knows it isn’t real, when it knows that it is a copy, or that it is semblance. Distance is the dream’s critical leverage. it allows the dream to say to reality (I’m anthropomorphizing a bit here) you may be real, but I’m here to remind everyone that you could be different, that there is nothing necessary or necessarily natural and inevitable about this particular reality, and that perhaps some other reality is better than this one.

It’s in this way, I think, that Kafka’s little dream-scape at the conclusion of Amerika works, as long as it remembers a certain distance, as long as it retains some of that shadowiness, like the blue-black of the summits, the dark narrow valleys, the barren but mythically endowed vistas of Oklahoma, the cohabitation of angels and devils.

Adorno’s second reference to the Natural Theater appeared in ‘Notes on Kafka’.

Its context was Adorno’s study of the ‘unsuccessful death’ so common throughout (and typically characteristic of) Kafka’s stories, i.e., that unique form of misery that is far worse than death insofar as one is all but dead but cannot die, like a living skeleton.

This, as well as Kafka’s tendency to ‘reify the subject’ by making persons into animals or pawns of an ominous mechanism, is ‘the other side of Kafka’s story of the unsuccessful death’, which Adorno described as a way of beating the world at its own game.

Beating the world at its own game. Kafka capitalized on an unintended and sort of surreptitiously utopian byproduct of the reifying effects of modernity. In Adorno’s words, the ‘other side’ of the image of the unsuccessful death consists of just this: ‘the fact that mutilated creation cannot die any more is the sole promise of immortality’.

The implication is that in the realm of the derelict there is a kind of subversive disengagement from the instrumentalism that governs social being. Once I’m so thoroughly commodified, there’s nothing else that can be done to make use of me. I become obsolete, and then, as an obsolete thing, I am finally no longer used. I am simply an object, resting in my thinghood.

In the remainder of the discussion of the unsuccessful death, Adorno linked the “negative utopianism” of the Natural Theater (its ‘places of hope’) to the problem of interiority and dwelling, which I have written about so much on this blog:

It [the other side of the unsuccessful death] is tied to the salvation of things, of those that are no longer enmeshed in the network of guilt, those that are non-exchangeable, useless. This is what is meant in [Kafka’s] work by the phenomenon of obsolescence, in its innermost layer of meaning. His world of ideas – as in the ‘Natural Theater of Oklahoma’ [Adorno corrects Kafka’s misspelling here] – resembles a world of shopkeepers; no theologoumenon could describe it more accurately than the title of an American film comedy, Shopworn Angel. Whereas the interiors, where men live, are the homes of the catastrophe, the hideouts of childhood, forsaken spots like the bottom of the stairs, are places of hope. The resurrection of the dead would have to take place in the auto graveyards’.

Here, Adorno’s reading of the Natural Theater is more explicitly linked to some kind of salvation-on-the-sly than it was in Minima Moralia. Oklahoma has now become a locale of despair and disrepair where the melancholia of uselessness, itself a kind of unsuccessful death, gives way to the ‘other side’ of its withdrawal from enmeshment within networks of instrumentality.

There is immortality in this kind of death.

A number of transitions have taken place as we move from the first to the second allusion to the Great Natural Theater. The transition that interests me, however, is the one from Adorno’s preoccupation with Kafka’s ‘other side’ of unsuccessful death to his interest in the way Kafka’s rhetorical flirtations with some notion of redemption tends to settle upon metaphors for the spaces and places in which we dwell, improbable ‘places of hope’ like America, Oklahoma, the spot at the bottom of the stairs, the auto graveyards, all spaces that defy the destruction of interiority and offer, in its stead, curious forms of refuge.

Kafka’s metaphors designate something like obsolescence within the human geography of the modern, or, to borrow Marc Auge’s term in a more recent context, ‘non-places’ .

Right alongside Kafka, Adorno approached these spaces almost idealistically as shadowy, near-mystical presentiments of redemption amidst refuse. Adorno’s enthrallment with Kafka’s gothic America, saturated with the kinds of encounters between melancholia and redemption that can be found in the gothic South of a Flannery O’Connor, need to be seen as sources of what I am calling his philosophy of dwelling.

As I look ahead to future posts in this series and for this blog in general, one of the things that I am inclined to explore is the idea, which I have to think is Kafkaesque and Adornian, that to dwell in the particular kind of predicament that we, as moderns, find ourselves in, is to carve out ‘places of hope’ amidst otherwise overwhelmingly obtrusive mechanisms, systems, institutions, processes, and so forth.

~ by Shane Waggoner on January 6, 2009.