The Kings of America

Pt. 1- Franz Kafka’s reversal of the dream

If our desires reach out for the things that we were created to have and to make and to become, then we will develop into what we were truly meant to be. -unknown

As a youth I was given the complete collection of Horatio Alger Jr.s fifty-two million volumes of the same story, names changed only because they had no {little} potential of coming true.

They were old books, but if I remember,collected and published as a set in the nineteen-oughts, so old, but not first editions. I suppose my father had come across them somewhere and purchased the set for me.

Now I learned a lot about “me” in reading those books. First I suffered through the entire set because of its romantic possibilities which as an eleven year old I guess I very much hoped was true.

Secondly, I learned that never again would I suffer through horrid formulaic writers who could not do anything but change the name and write the same story over and over. No more genre writers for this jerk.

Or so I told myself….but I read Dickens,for the most part, English versions of Horatio Alger. And then Dickens threw everyone for a loop at the end of his life where faith in honesty and hard work did not pay off in a trilogy of three of the best true-to-life books ever written, Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Bleak House.

Someone learned I had been reading Alger, Jr. and suggested I read Kafka’s version of the Horatio Alger story. And indeed Kafka, even more than Dickens, upset the applecart on the great expectations, we as a society are supposed to believe true.

All of the hard work and all of the innocence never materialize. Indeed in Kafka’s Amerika, it almost seems a paraphrase of Alger’s hero, until the honest hard-worker is blamed for, and fired for another’s wrong-doing

Some will say Kafka could never conclude any of his novels. But how would you suggest they be concluded? The happy-ending after all? Barring that, the conclusion is the ultimate dissatisfaction and knowledge there is not going to be the happy ending.

Kafka’s Amerika has been Amerika to many of Americans. But yet..George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia (despite american english’s proclivity to pronounce “h’s” should still be pronounced “‘omage”) “Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves.

“Many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. “

The issue that Orwell was describing in the first days of excitement of the “anarchist” revolution in Spain was a new hope in life of equitableness that had infused Catalonia to no longer feel themselves “snobbishly” subdued. If the only hope is the hope presented by Alger that we are supposed to believe in, when it does not become available we sink into mental decay.

And the political system–the democracy, if you will–ceases to offer the hope it needs to offer to survive. It offers only the Kafkian frustration and it itself loses the conclusion it supposes it should have.

“I had been opposing a great national & social principle without knowing it.-Lefcado Hearn