Unnatural: Adorno on Kafka's Nature Theatre of Oklahoma

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Southeastern Oklahoma landscape: photo by Raecoli, 2005

Personnel is being hired for the Theatre in Oklahoma! The Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma is calling you! It's calling today only only! If you miss this opportunity, there will never be another! Anyone thinking of his future, your place is with us! All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theatre that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place! If you decide to join us, we congratulate you here and now! But hurry, be sure not to miss the midnight deadline! We shut down at midnight, never to reopen! Accursed be anyone who doesn't believe us!


Franz Kafka: from Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), c. 1913 (incomplete novel, published posthumously as Amerika, 1927, translated by Edwin Muir, 1946)

Scrap and salvage depot, Butte, Montana: photo by Russell Lee, October 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

If one wakes up in the middle of a dream, even the most troubling, one is disappointed and feels as if one had been cheated of what is best. Yet there are as few happy, fulfilled dreams as, in Schubert’s words, happy music. Even the most beautiful ones retain the blemish of their difference from reality, the consciousness of the mere appearance [Schein] of what they grant. That is why even the most beautiful dreams are somehow damaged. This experience is unsurpassable in the description of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma in Kafka’s America.


Theodor W. Adorno: from Minima Moralia, 1951, translated by Dennis Redmond, 2005

Scrap and salvage depot, Butte, Montana: photo by Russell Lee, October 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Kafka's world of images is sad and dilapidated, even where it sets its sights high, as in 'The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma' -- as though he had foreseen the migration of workers from this state...

Through reification of the subject, demanded by the world in any event, Kafka seeks to beat the world at its own game -- the moribund become harbinger of Sabbath rest. This is the other side of Kafka's theory of the unsuccessful death -- the fact that the mutilated creation cannot die any more is the sole promise of immortality which the rationalist Kafka permits to survive the ban on images. It is tied to the salvation of things, of those which are no longer enmeshed in the network of guilt, those which are non-exchangeable, useless. This is what is meant in his work by the phenomenon of obsolescence, in its innermost layer of meaning. His world of ideas -- as in the 'Natural Theatre of Oklahoma' -- resembles a world of shopkeepers; no theologoumenon could describe it more accurately than the title of an American film comedy, 'Shopworn Angel'. Whereas the interiors, where men live, are the homes of the catastrophe, the hide-outs of childhood, forsaken spots like the bottom of the stairs, are the places of hope. The resurrection of the dead would have to take place in the auto graveyards.


Theodor W. Adorno: from Notes on Kafka, in Prisms, 1967, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, 1967

Scrap and salvage depot, Butte, Montana: photo by Russell Lee, October 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

The Princeton Radio Project had its headquarters neither in Princeton nor in New York, but in Newark, New Jersey, and indeed, in a somewhat improvised manner, in a disused brewery. When I traveled there, through the tunnel under the Hudson, I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature Theatre in Oklahoma. Indeed, I was attracted by the lack of inhibition in the choice of a locality that would have been hardly imaginable in European practices.


Theodor W. Adorno: from Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America, 1968, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 1998, translated by Henry W. Pickford, 1998

Everett Glnn, 6 South Oklahoma St., Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, seven-year-old truant newsie. Said mother told him to stay home. Says he gets up at 4 a.m. some days to sell: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 15 March 1917 (U.S. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress)