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By Stuart Mitchner
This is an anniversary year for Franz Kafka, who died on June 3, 1924, a doubly noteworthy centenary, given the immensity of the author’s posthumous presence, which suggests that if ever a writer was born on the day he died it was Kafka. No wonder, then, that a photograph of his face dominates the January 24 entry in A Book of Days for the Literary Year (Thames and Hudson 1984) when all he accomplished on that day in 1913 was to interrupt work on a book he never finished. Originally titled The Man Who Disappeared, it was retitled Amerika after his death by his best friend and executor Max Brod, who is best known for ignoring Kafka’s wish that all his unpublished writings be destroyed.
Unmasking the World
In the preface to Expeditions to Kafka: Selected Essays (Bloomsbury 2023), Princeton University Professor Emeritus Stanley Corngold finds Kafka’s relevance to the flow “of (forever-) current life” in the following “pandemic-appropriate” comment: “There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”
The world my wife and I unmask every night on television is often Kafkaesquely relevant to “current life,” as happened last week with “Bisquik,” the Season Five finale of Noah Hawley’s series Fargo, which has inspired thoughts of a 21st-century American ending for Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which a 400-year-old version of Gregor Samsa, the “monstrous vermin” at the center of the story, is invited to join his family for a home-cooked meal offered in the spirit of reconciliation.
Kafka in Amerika
Train-window views of “masses of blue-black rock,” “narrow, gloomy, jagged valleys,” and “broad mountain streams rolling in great waves down to the foothills” form the landscape in the last paragraph of the book Kafka interrupted on January 24, 1913. Published by New Directions in October 1940, Amerika has the Dickensian ambiance of Great Expectations and David Copperfield and a narrative line inspired by Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, one of Kafka’s favorite books, “from which he liked reading passages aloud,” according to Max Brod’s afterword. At the center of Kafka’s boyishly naive vision of the American West is “the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,” which Brod says was intended to be the concluding chapter of a work Kafka wanted to end “on a note of reconciliation.” Brod recalls that Kafka used to hint “smilingly” that within “this ‘almost limitless’ theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some celestial witchery.”
Another hint of the ending Kafka had in mind can be found in the first volume of Reiner Stach’s acclaimed biography, Kafka: The Early Years (Princeton Univ. Press, translated by Shelley Frisch). While describing Kafka and Brod’s visit to Longchamps, the Paris racetrack that seated “more than one-hundred thousand spectators,” Stach mentions the “automatic scoreboards, huge stonewalled and canopied bleachers, and even a presidential box in a separate multilevel pavilion.” These were among the components Kafka “committed to memory” and would “return to” in his vision of the Theatre of Oklahoma.
Vermin and Varmints
Focusing on the famous first sentence of The Metamorphosis in which Gregor Samsa “found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin,” Corngold explains this use of a plural term for a singular object by noting that in American westerns “vermin” is pronounced “varmint.” After tracing “varmint” back to “vermin,” Merriam-Webster cites this choice example of usage: “The sheriff in the movie gets revenge on the dirty varmint who killed his brother.”
Fargo’s Roy Tillman, the “I-am-the-Law” sheriff played with psychopathic intensity by Mad Men star Jon Hamm, is a definitively monstrous varmint. A more Kafka-friendly monster in the same series is the wandering 15th-century Welsh “sin-eater” Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), hired by Tillman to kidnap his estranged wife Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (a heroic performance by the true star of the series, Juno Temple). After being viciously abused by Tillman, Dot has escaped into happy marriage and motherhood while developing combative instincts comparable to what Kafka prescribes in his diary on March 9, 1922: “Mount your attacker’s horse and ride it yourself.” When the dust of chaos clears after Munch and his henchman attempt to accost a supposedly “helpless” housewife, Munch is minus an ear and the other man is dead.
Against Expectations
A year after the imprisoning of Tillman and his profoundly damaged and misguided son (blinded with hot irons by Ole Munch in a haze-shrouded scene right out of King Lear), the audience is primed for the return of the sin-eater, who indeed shows up in the living room of the adversary he calls “the Tiger.” Viewers expecting to unmask the writhing, Sturm und Drang rapture of the conventional Fargo denouement are mesmerized instead by the tension of a scene in which the housewife and mother quietly but firmly takes command of the narrative, serving up chili and biscuits instead of the expected mayhem.
And what better evidence of Kafka’s relevance to the flow “of (forever-) current life” than the fact that Dwight Garner quotes the March 9, 1922 entry in the January 21, 2024 New York Times Book Review, putting a literary charge into the way Christopher Hichens’s rebuttals “use the attacker’s horse for one’s own ride.”
Against the Stereotype
Eleanor Rose’s bright, cheerful cover design for Expeditions to Kafka not only denies Kafkaesque expectations but rises above them, much as this season’s denouement of Fargo boldly denies mere carnage. Regine Corngold’s 2016 photograph for Expeditions is titled “Josephine,” after Kafka’s last story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” which ends with Josephine’s disappearance and some haunting questions: “Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory? Was it not rather because Josephine’s singing was already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom prized it so highly?”
Good and Evil
Asked in a January 16 Hollywood Reporter interview about the prevailing decency of that closing scene, Fargo’s creator Noah Hawley said he is “struggling the way so many of us are struggling, with how we move past what feels like this entrenched enmity between Americans for other Americans, where everyone feels aggrieved, everyone thinks the other one has injured them.”
A year before the release of the fifth season of Fargo, Hawley published “It’s High Noon in America,” an article in the December 19, 2022, online Atlantic subtitled “In our popular culture and in our politics, we’re returning to the Old West.” For his epigraph, he quotes one of his most diabolical creations, V.M. Varga from the third season of Fargo: “The problem is not that there is evil in the world. The problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?”
I’d like to think that Franz Kafka, as the saying goes, would take Varga’s twisted aphorism and run with it from Prague all the way to Fargo.
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