The unlikely duo become me in my presentation; more characters to swallow; to be possesed by; to channel; transmit; translate from body to body; Franz Schinaatra... perhaps. Now the phantasy can finally happen; all singing all dancing toe tappin' sidewalk flyin' ~ the musical of border patrol guards line dancing, stripped down for the one-man solo for my presentation.
The novel {Amerika} more explicitly humorous and slightly more realistic (except in the last chapter) than most of Kafka's works, but it shares the same motifs of an oppressive and intangible system putting the protagonist repeatedly in bizarre situations.
Not to raise myself to any level of being a 'protagonist' in my own adventure of enquiry {though I guess that I am de facto}, the oppresive and intagible system is present all around me, esepcially given the 'texuality' of the citytext - often of rules and discrepancies unbeknownst to me e.g. how even though the traffic signals show the 'white man'/O Illuminated One, Strolling, vehicles continued to keep crossing my path causing alarm and confusion at what I thought was their total lack of respect for my pedestrian rights. Later, I discovered, when eplaining my own 'road rage' of the afternoon, that vehicles do have this right in the state & city of New York- but the pedestrian always maintains the 'right of way' when the white man is illuminated.
Although Kafka never visited America, he crossed over to the land of red, white, and blue
through a portal of secondary sources. “Kafka read American travel books, attended lectures,
collected printed materials, and spoke with returning emigrants,” E. L. Doctorow explains in the
Foreword of Amerika, “all for the purpose of writing a realistic novel authenticated with ‘up-todate’ American detail” (Doctorow ix).
Likewise, I had never visited America, not before the CEP at least, but the seeds had been sown, the dream has been living inside of me for a long time before the CEP was even a known part of the Dartington degree. Indeed, just like Kafka and all modern day immigrants and tourists alike, we are all draw like moths to a flame by the mythology of this city like no other.
Part of my enquiry and investigation was about the confrontation of these phantasies with the everyday reality of being in the city "that never sleeps" . Both Kafka and I gathered our infomation is vastly similar ways, albeit I also have the knowledge powerhouse that is the World Wide Web at my disposal, but I still read a number of guidebooks, collected a vast amount of printed material e.g. newspapers, leaflets, flyers, postcards, business cards etc. from my journies around the city, and have spoken with a number of 'returned migrants' both in the city and back in Britian about their experience of being-in-the-city and their status as {im}migrants.
However, where Kafka and I part company is over the 'attention to realism' and 'up-to-date detail'. Whereas Kafka like so many writers of his historical context both as well as mine/Ours, his concern is with the portrayal of some 'truth' or in other words, as accurate an American 'world' as he can write having no first hand experience of the context. Whereas my enquiry was with first hand experience, but with the primary concern with the hyperreal, postmodern and symbolic source of American and New York 'mythology'- again in the Barthesian line of flight.
Specifically, within Amerika, a scorned individual often must plead his innocence in front of remote and mysterious figures of authority.
In the story, the Statue of Liberty is holding a sword, and some scholars have interpreted this as a "might makes right" philosphy Kafka may have believed the United States holds {Wikipedia}:
As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America
The irony of the sword replacing the torch rings masonic bells, yet the interpretation is what I find most intriguing. That the supposed materialized 'image' of America, of the photograph medium of the message, caused a misunderstanding, a misreading, resulting in the rewriting of the now symbolic archetype of liberty, freedom, opportunity and NYC/USA.
by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven (Kafka 3).
Kafka’s description of a Statue of Liberty that holds a sword rather than a torch leaps out as themost striking part of the opening paragraph. Controversy arises as to whether the factual error serves an intentional, symbolic purpose or whether it exists merely because of an unintentional misinterpretation of “contemporary photographs taken from a considerable distance and blurring all details” (Spann 76). Regardless of the intentionality of the mistake, however, the fact remains that Kafka consciously chooses to place a sword rather than anything else in Lady Liberty’s hand.
{Extract from http://people.csail.mit.edu/edmond/writings/amerikan-dream.pdf}
In a similar manner can I relate and compare my recent video and audio work about the 'blurring all details' of recognition and familiarity in order to achieve a simulated 'new' sound and image.
Writing style
Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic peculiar to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in English, so it is up to the resourceful translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text. {Wikipedia}
A shared writing style; an aversion to the punctuation and short sentences {albeit from my writing 'past'. The recent adoption of more 'creative' use of lesser known punctuation marks has caused some institutional backlash, but not as much as during my adolescence when my teachers would force me rewrite entire paragraphs of seemingly endless setences over and over again, reducing the length till they achieves some ersatz 'crystallization' of which I despsed more than anything. My damnations each night are aimed at this reductivist world, this Occam's Context I wish I could splice with my razor on a darkened night...
Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings.
Frank Sinatra:
Born in December 1915, Sinatra was the only child of Italian immigrants Natalie Della Garaventa and Antonino Martino Sinatra.[7]
A pastiche I thought I would never attempt: to use the Broadway hit "New York, New York" during my presentation and future performance of *this* time of mine in NYC.Yet, Broadway is a major part of the performance context and history and world-wide theatrical status of NYC and therefore is it not inimical that a student of performance ought to parody the hell out of the ludicruous and decadent form of the Broadway musical as best they can?
Made some more sonic experiments by ripping a Youtube verison of the popular hit {actually written and recorded first by Liza Minelli} then taking the very first few bars, the famous opening sequence, then applying the following modifications, mutations, translations:
Reverse ~> Slow Tempo {-100%} ~> Wah-Wah ~> Delay
= a Euphoria/Trance/Chillout break-down and a 'complete' mutation of te original; has become 'a whole other' to that of the initial mp3 first worked with. It's on the left hand player, have a listen. Towards the end of the track I often hear a slight fantasmic trace of the famous opening bars, but perhaps this is an audible projection from my countless kareoke sessions here in the apartment now there's no one around to hear me practice...
I am particularly drawn to the lines in the 2nd verse of
"These small town blues/ Are melting away/ I'm gonna make a brand new start of it/ In old New York"
which could prove an interesting Goat Island approach of reperforming the song but shifting the beginning middle and end to different parts of the presentation¬performance playing the with the recognisable structure, offering fantasmic allusions
perhaps even play the song under the 'blankets' of city noise or Audicity/effects pedal modification...
