Kafka intended this to be the first chapter of a novel which he called Missing, Presumed dead and which he worked on during 1912. He abandoned the novel in January 1913, though he allowed this chapter to be published as a pamphlet later that year. Fifteen years later Max Brod arranged the manuscript and fragments into a novel which he titled America, and which was published in 1927.
America is the least Kafkaesque of the three novels in obvious ways, namely that the young single male protagonist is not trapped in the classic, Kafkaesque, and claustrophobically oppressive Central European location, he is in… big bold America!
In this opening chapter, he is on a transatlantic liner which has just arrived in New York harbour and surrounded by the hustle and bustle of one of the busiest ports in the world on a beautiful sunny day.
And he is not a man. The protagonists of the other novels are fairly successful professional men in their late 20s. The hero of America is only a boy, with a boy’s naive, superficial understanding of the world.
The stoker
Karl Rossmann is 16. He was seduced by the family servant (she being an eccentric 35-year-old) who got pregnant, she had the baby and Karl has been packed off to start a new life in America to hush up the scandal.
In fairly quick succession four things happen.
1. Karl is up on the observation deck of a transatlantic liner, with his suitcase all packed and ready to disembark along with thousands of other passengers, as the ship pulls into New York harbour. Suddenly Karl realises he’s left his umbrella down in his steerage bunk, so he asks a fellow passenger to look after his suitcase for him while he runs back to his steerage cabin to get it. But, in the only really Kafkaesque moment in the chapter, once he’s gone below he gets hopelessly lost in the maze of corridors and staterooms and alleys and so on. That sense of being lost.
2. He arrives gasping for breath, and demoralised, in a strange corridor and knocks at random on the first door he comes to. It is opened by a big brawny man who is also packing his belongings into a case and announces that he is a stoker on the ship. He describes the life of a stoker and soon starts lamenting the way his life was made a misery on the trip by his overseer, a Romanian named Schuber. The stoker had pushed Karl out of his way as he packed, pushing up onto his bunk and Karl was beginning to fall asleep, when there’s a loud clumping in the gangway outside. It’s the ship’s band coming back to their rooms which, the stoker explains, means that all the passengers have left (the band plays music after the ship has docked and while the passengers disembark). The stoker realistically points out that whoever was looking after his suitcase will have probably taken it or left it behind for someone else to steal: either way it’s probably gone. The stoker grabs his bags and tells Karl: ‘Come on, I’m going to see the bosses and put my case against the Romanian’.
3. So Karl is dragged by the stoker along a further maze of corridors to the captain’s cabin. They knock and enter despite a steward trying to stop them. This is the longest part of the chapter and it’s weird, but weirdly bad, I think. There are half a dozen other officers and some officials and civilians from the port authority standing around in the cabin. In front of all these, the stoker makes his case to the captain about being bullied by his Romanian boss. The odd thing is that, as the stoker hesitates and stumbles and falters in making his case, Karl childishly and naively comes to his rescue, picks up the stoker’s story (from everything he heard him say back in his cabin) and tries to support him. Why? Because he’s an impressionable 16-year-old boy who has been touched by the plaintive grievances of this simple working man? Even odder and more improbable is the way the captain and all the other officers listen to them both, despite the way they hesitate and eventually run dry. n fact the alleged bully, Schuber, now appears, having been summoned by the captain to put his side of the story.
This is, frankly, a completely implausible description of an oddly boring and inconsequential subject.
4. Suddenly one of the civilians, an elegant man who’s been swinging a bamboo cane during this tedious disquisition, steps forward and announces that he is Karl’s uncle! Yes, he is his mother’s brother who emigrated to America years ago and has now risen to the giddy heights of being a Senator, Senator Jacob!!
Oddly, inappropriately, peculiarly, the Senator proceeds to tell the assembled roomful of sailors and port officials, the stoker and even the stoker’s antagonist, Schuber, who has arrived to put his side of the argument, the whole story about how little Karl was seduced by the family maid (as he tells it, Karl in an interior monologue, gives us a really detailed and disturbing description of his seduction – it wasn’t at all fun, it really was like a rape).
To my bemusement the whole room of tough and serious officials seems to be suddenly relieved and full of celebration at this touching family reunion, even the poor old stoker. Karl realises this dramatic reunion scene has distracted everyone away from the stoker’s story, and putting his grievance, and feels boyish guilt. He kisses the stoker’s hand and apologises that he couldn’t do more for him. (Why?) Then he accompanies his newfound Uncle Jacob to a ladder on the side of the ship, down to a boat which has been ordered up specially for them and will ferry them ashore.
Thoughts
Is America rubbish? Was Kafka right to want his friend Max Brod to burn it?
Why did Kafka make the hero of his first attempt at a novel a 16-year-old? And a distinguishing feature is the way this 16-year-old keeps up a silent interior monologue of comments on the main action, on what he’s doing, or saying, or on what other people say?
The Stoker comes over as like a piece of boy’s fiction, in which we are taken into the mind of an adolescent who finds lots of things about the adult world dazzling and puzzling and new.
Except that it comes over as rather a bad description of the adult world. The appearance of the captain and his officers in their wardroom is reasonably plausible i.e. I can sort of accept it as a piece of novel-ish description. But the idea that a lowly stoker could burst into such a company and then start blurting out his grievances against his manager – while the senior officers all stand around in embarrassed silence – is more weird than plausible. And then that these gentlemen would stand in further polite attention while the stoker’s case was taken up by a 16-year-old boy from steerage?
In The Trial every single event and symbol and image is brought into alignment with the amazingly powerful force-field of the central idea that Joseph K. is the victim of a vast, universal conspiracy, in a universe which seems to be collapsing into ever-deeper shabbiness and humiliation. Every detail, no matter how random, contributes to the dominant themes.
But here in The Stoker there is no clear theme and so all the odd details – that Karl has to run to fetch an umbrella of all things, or that he and the stoker are roused to action by the arrival of the ship’s band outside his cabin door – these elements just seem wilful and arbitrary. Odd and bizarre.
The oddity puts me off trying to read America.
Related links
Related reviews
Dates are dates of composition.
- The Stoker (1911-12)
- America (1911-12)
- The Metamorphosis (1912)
- In the Penal Colony (1914)
- The Trial (1914-15)
- Max Brod’s afterword to the Trial
- The Castle (1922)
Books & Boots 