Introduction
The 1920s, when the Austrian writer Franz Kafka came to German-language literature, were quite turbulent. Like all his generation, who entered literature on the eve of the First World War, Kafka lived with a constant feeling of deep hostility of the soulless, technicalized and bureaucratized world to human nature. This was expressed, in particular, in the theme of alienation in his novel The Metamorphosis (Murray 62). These years were no less turbulent in the United States, which was reflected in American literature, in particular, in the novel by the American writer Nathanael West The Day of the Locust, the main theme of which is alienation and despair in American society at that time. It is of interest to compare and contrast the expression of the topic of alienation in the works of the aforementioned writers in order to understand the common features and differences in the perception of the topic of alienation in the society of Germany and the United States of the pre-war era.
The Tragedy and Comedy of Alienation
Kafka appeared able to express the special features of the worldview of his era and his country. Operating not with concepts, but only with artistic images and metaphors, he outlined the contours of space and time of his contemporary world. The Metamorphosis rightfully occupies a central place in Franz Kafka’s work. He makes a stunning impression literally from the first phrase: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into horrible vermin … His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked” (Kafka 5). The very fact of the transformation of a human into an insect, presented in the classical narrative manner at the beginning of the story, causes a feeling of aesthetic shock. This is not so much because the situation seems too implausible, but because the idea of an insect of human size involuntarily causes a feeling of physical disgust.
The Metamorphosis is the most vivid expression of Kafka’s tragic outlook and worldview. The situation of “transformation” in this story, as in his other works, admits different interpretations. At the same time, the most banal reading lies almost on the surface. This is alienation in the family and society, the loneliness of a sensitive person, capable of compassion and self-sacrifice, absolute loneliness, caused, moreover, by the realization of his dissimilarity from others, his distinction (Robert 19). Kafka sharpens precisely this doom of the hero with the help of a terrible metonymy: he conveys the complete spiritual isolation of the hero through the incredible metamorphosis of his appearance. It would seem that the interpretation of the work lies on the surface, but Kafka himself puts in it a double meaning. On the one hand, this not understanding in the family and society, fear of realizing that a person is not like everyone else, a terrible feeling of all-consuming longing and fear of own powerlessness. On the other hand, Kafka conveys the doom of a protagonist through the disgusting metamorphosis of his appearance. The writer himself notes how defenseless a person is in front of the surrounding reality.
By transforming Samsa into a ‘centipede,’ the writer strove to show that a person’s true position in the world is determined by his tragic and irresistible loneliness. The individual exists in some kind of environment, society. He goes to work and feels like a small, but necessary ‘cog’ in a company or institution. He communicates with his loved ones – father, mother, sisters, brothers, friends – and believes that he is dear to them. However, all this is a delusion, an illusion – in reality, a person lives as if in a desert, or in a vacuum. Gregor Samsa – a living, thinking and feeling person – suddenly lost his self-esteem (Minar and Sutandio 125). The writer wants to show the cruelty of a totalitarian state, which can result in the existence of a person in such conditions. Kafka emphasizes that in this environment human alienation occurs day after day. The totalitarian structure of the world suppresses the desire to love in every member of society, and also destroys the desire for solidarity and mutual assistance.
The tragedy of the eternal loneliness of a person unable to live in this world is the content of alienation in Kafka’s work, and it resonates with the theme of alienation in the works of another writer of that era, Nathanael West. This American writer, located on a different continent from Kafka, also portrayed the theme of human alienation in contemporary American society during the Great Depression. Although the social conditions of Germany and the United States at that time differed quite strikingly, the loneliness and alienation of the individual has many similar characteristics. Some critics have called West’s novel a radical challenge to modernism in literature – modernists avoid mass culture, while West portrays it and makes it an integral part of the novel (Barnard 29). In addition, West’s use of grotesque images and situations defines this novel as satirical. His brutal critique of life around Hollywood and the mentality of the masses portrays America as sick with vanity and violence. The mood of the novel is not just melancholic, like Fitzgerald’s in The Great Gatsby, but almost hopeless.
Describing and critically analyzing the idea of the American Dream, West created a truly meaningful work that became the foundation of the American vision of pursuing the desire. Despair, alienation, hopelessness are usually not the epithets that come to mind when hearing about Hollywood, but this is exactly the case with West. His narration crushes with its hopelessness and tragedy, at some point taking the shape of grotesque. Hollywood is one big dummy, fake – from plasterboard house decorations to its faceless cardboard inhabitants. The main characters of the novel came to Hollywood to fulfill their cherished desires. Tod Hackett dreams of becoming a famous artist, Faye Greener wants to become a great actress, bathe in the rays of glory and luxury, Homer Simpson just wants human happiness, love. An indicative quote from the work sounds as follows: “I can know nothing; I can have nothing; I must devote my whole life to the pursuit of a shadow. It is as if I were attempting to trace with the point of a pencil the shadow of the tracing pencil” (West 122). Hollywood invitingly beckons everyone – novice actors, rogues, adventurers, but not everyone succeeds in walking through its millstones.
Like work of Kafka, The Day of the Locust is a kind of dystopian parable. Lacking a specific plot, the novel, however, exacerbates negative traits to the point of unreality, to the point of impossibility, creating a depressing tragedy. However, while Kafka directly portrays the tragedy and loneliness of the individual, West conveys the theme of alienation by attempting to camouflage through “self- typification” – a rejection of individuality in order to dissolve in the faceless Hollywood crowd of mediocrity.
In particular, this is expressed through the image of laughter – a successful comedian must present himself to the public as an aesthetically understandable object of ridicule, and this requires typification. It kills the tragic and turns it into material for comedy. “Reflexive laughter” is characterized by the refusal of the individual to postulate his own subjectivity (Barnard 32). Most clearly this type of laughter in the novel is expressed in the acquaintance of the protagonist of the novel, a dwarf Abe Kusich. He wore the then fashionable Tyrolean hat and spoke in popular noir cliches and Moe Howard’s comedies. This choice of Abe’ self-presentation indicates that he is guilty of his own caricature, turning himself into a familiar type. Researchers believe that in this way Abe is trying to distract others from his own otherness (Barnard 34). This is highlighted by the constantly audible laughter of Abe, which appears to be a continuation of the joke he uttered, but in reality is a joyless and mechanical laugh at himself, an ‘invitation’ to typify the dwarf by the bohemian society of Hollywood.
Conclusion
Today, the problem of alienation is mainly subjectively manifested in feelings of fear, loneliness, in the atrophy of high humanistic values, in the widespread apathy and indifference. There is associated increase in drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, and so on. The main indicator of alienation is the presence of a sense of powerlessness in a person’s worldview, a feeling that the fate of an individual has gotten out of his control and is under the determinative influence of external forces. Secondly, the idea of the meaninglessness of existence prevails, showing the impossibility of obtaining a rationally expected result by any action. In addition, the world is “saturated” with a sense of loneliness, exclusion of a person from social ties; there are feelings of loss by the individual of his true “Self,” destruction of the authenticity of the personality, that is, self-alienation. All this is the result of those social and personal processes of “typification” and dehumanization that took place in the era described by Kafka and West, which destroyed the characters in their works – physically and tragically in Kafka and morally and satirically in West.
Works Cited
Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis. Hesperus Press, 2002.
Minar, Karla Sharin, and Anton Sutandio. “Shame and Alienation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.” Poetika, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 123-133.
Murray, Jack. The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Céline, and Onetti. Stanford University Press, 1991.
Robert, Marthe. As Lonely as Franz Kafka. Schocken, 1986.
West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust. Woolf Haus Publishing, 2020.
Zainab, Mohammed, Khaja Moinuddin. “Alienation, Bureaucracy and Self Identity in the Best Known Works of Franz Kafka.” Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 22, no. 7, 2017, pp. 22-28.