(c) by CLARENCE BROWN

By the time you read this, I'll be, Deo volente, crossing the Rockies. I'm setting off to drive solo across America--something I've done three times before. It's in my genes, I think. The moment my parents got married in 1928 they climbed into a Ford roadster and drove slam across North America, conceiving me somewhere just this side of the Mississippi. I can't help it.

Anyway, I like to travel over the surface of this country and reacquaint myself with the way it really is. As soon as the interstates take me past Chicago, I'll poke around on slower roads.

"The way it really is?" A pompous phrase, but what I'll find will at least be more real than the pictures on TV.

It will be more real, I hope, than Amerika, Franz Kafka's one comic novel, which was left unfinished, like all his novels. It was published posthumously in 1927 and given the title by his friend Max Brod. That it has no ending is probably inevitable, since Kafka's purely mythical America was essentially unfinishable. He never set foot on our soil, and nothing liberates the comic imagination like ignorance.

His hero is a youth named Karl Rossmann. Unlike most of Kafka's heros, burdened by some nameless guilt, Karl is quite specifically guilty--of having fathered an illegitimate child by a woman twice his age. Who seduced him! At least this makes him a perfect Kafka character: he is himself the victim of the sin he is accused of committing. But innocence only deepens his sense of guilt.

It will seem a contradiction to say that it is a comic novel and that the Amerika where it is set is a nightmare. But Kafka's readers seldom realize that he dealt with nightmares by making them funny.

When Gregor Samsa wakes up in the first sentence of the Metamorphosis and finds that he has been transformed into a giant insect, his next thought is that it's raining, and he's late for his train, and that being an insect is a damned nuisance. . . . People who read this with solemn reverence are missing something. When he read his work aloud to friends, Kafka himself choked with laughter .

What did Kafka know about America? Like every educated European, he'd read Franklin's Autobiography and revered the scientific genius of Edison. And he knew that America, whatever else it was, was BIG.

All of Kafka's nightmare fictions vary between a terrible confinement (a cage or a burrow), and an equally terrifying spaciousness: the infinite realm where guilt can never be atoned, quests never achieved. But the country that actually did stretch across an entire continent from one ocean to another was big in a way that could scarcely be conceived in the cozy confines of a little landlocked central European country.

Karl's experience begins like that of millions of immigrants, with a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. This, however, is Kafka's Statue of Liberty, so she is holding aloft not a lamp but...a sword.

Everything else is threatening, too: the much too tall buildings, the cruel uncle to whom Karl has been sent for punishment, and who very soon kicks him out of the house for some lapse of respect, and the weird denizens of Amerika.

But imagine how threatening the Keystone Kops would be if you really were being pursued by an open car full of baton-waving maniacs. The spirit of slapstick is a greater influence on Amerika than Franklin and Edison. At one point Karl deals with a traffic jam by walking through the cars, in one side and out the other. Pure Buster Keaton. If I run into one in Fargo, I mean to try it.