Islands of Control: Spatial and Psychoanalytical

Constructs in ’s Fiction

Sarah Jozefiak B Des (Arch)(Merit), M Arch (Hons1)

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy in Architecture

November 2017

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training

Program (RTP) Scholarship

Statement of Authorship

I hereby certify that the work embodied in the thesis is my own work, conducted under normal supervision. The thesis contains no material which has been accepted, or is being examined, for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and any approved embargo.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I thank my supervisors, Michael Ostwald and Mark Taylor, for their efforts over the years. I am especially thankful to my primary supervisor, Michael Ostwald, for his professional guidance, patience and persistence in getting this thesis to where it is. I am also thankful for the assistance I have had with the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship (formerly Australian Postgraduate Award). The stipend allowed me to fully immerse in and undertake this research. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle. In particular, my friend and mentor, Michael Chapman, has been a great source of inspiration and encouragement over these years. I am also indebted to my colleague, neighbour and good friend Cathy Smith. Finally, the other friends, family and talkback radio that have been the most invaluable support in the duration of this thesis. I wholeheartedly thank James Valentine for his irreverent and witty lunchtime talkback show, always a most anticipated and welcome time in the day which greatly helped to alleviate the social isolation that is inevitably experienced in the long due course of a PhD thesis. My beloved and wonderful Carrington neighbour, Sam 'Sambo' Ryan, and my friend Katie Cadman, for both looking out for me. Finally, I am most indebted to both my father, Eddy, and my fiancé, Damien, for the never-ending love and support they have given me. How very

lucky I am. Thank you, everyone.

Abstract

The fictional stories of Czech author Franz Kafka are renowned throughout the world for capturing the sombre and anxious zeitgeist of the early twentieth century in Europe. Kafka’s fiction was produced in the years immediately before the First World War and against a backdrop of emerging modernity. This dissertation critically examines several recurring spatial constructs — involving interiors, furniture and possessions — in Franz Kafka’s short stories, (1925), and (1915). These spatial constructs are identified and interpreted using a combination of theories drawn from three areas: architecture, psychoanalysis and literature. The primary architectural theories which are employed for this purpose are Anthony Vidler’s theory of the architectural uncanny, and Emily Apter’s thematic history of cabinet typologies. The psychoanalytical theories are drawn largely from Sigmund Freud’s On the Uncanny (1919), and his concept of dream symbolism developed in On the Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915). Finally, literary theory, including the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s model of ‘enstrangement’, is used to develop the notions of langue and parole to assist in constructing the connection between Freud and architecture, which is a precursor to the analysis of spatial constructs in Kafka’s fiction.

The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first develops the theoretical framework for the central argument, looking at the uncanny and how it occurs in literature, architecture and psychoanalysis, before developing a theoretical nexus between the three. The second part examines the spaces of Kafka’s life and dreams, including connections between the two. The third part examines spatial constructs in his fiction, focusing on The Trial and The Metamorphosis. Through this process, the dissertation uncovers a particular recurring spatial structure, called, for the purposes of the present research, an ‘island of control’. This structure is nested at multiple scales and functions as a type of fortification, providing moments of personal power for the main protagonist in Kafka’s fiction, which are inevitably breached. By understanding the

i role played by these ‘islands’ in Kafka’s fiction, a new insight is offered into how architecture is used to aid narrative and character development, and further our understanding of the uncanny in architectural theory.

ii Contents

Abstract i

Introduction

1. Kafka and the crisis of the emerging Modern interior 1

Part I Critical Theory

2. Models of Kafkan spatiality 43

3. Rethinking the Freudian architectural uncanny 60

4. Architecture, Langue and Parole 96

Part II Spatial Biography

5. Mapping home: a spatial biography of Kafka 139

Part III Case Study

6. Islands of Control 178

Conclusion

7. Conclusion 255

References 267

iii List of Figures

Chapter 1

Fig. 1.1: Daniel Libeskind, Berlin Jewish Museum.

Fig. 1.2: Film still, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920.

Fig. 1.3: Daniel Libeskind. set design for Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Chapter 2

Fig. 2.1: Benjamin’s ellipse

Fig. 2.2: Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘states’

Fig. 2.3: Deleuze and Guattari’s states

Fig. 2.4: Laplanche and Pontalis’ dualisms in Freudian theory

Fig. 2.5: Plan diagram for the architectural structure presented in Kafka’s fable

Fig. 2.6: Plan diagram of Freud’s spatial analogy of repression and the preconscious

Chapter 3

Fig. 3.1: The uncanny as a black and white linguistic and phenomenological equation

Fig. 3.2: The linguistic meaning of heimlich/unheimlich, as underpinned and generated by Freud’s psychological concept of repression and his description of the ‘return of the repressed’

Fig. 3.3: ‘A slippage between waking and dreaming’: the mechanism of the architectural uncanny as according to Vidler

iv Fig. 3.4: ‘A slippage between waking and dreaming’: the confused homology between reader and narrative space

Fig. 3.5: ‘A slippage between waking and dreaming’: the confused homology between writer and narrative space

Fig. 3.6: Freud at his study desk, 1938

Fig. 3.7: Freud’s study and writing desk with antiquities, 1938

Fig. 3.8: Diagram of the slippage between the patients’ interior mind and Freud’s own that occurs via the process of free association

Fig. 3.9: A diagram of the actual ‘impure’ transaction that occurs between patient and psychoanalyst

Fig. 3.10: Diagram showing the relationship between the spatial configuration of Freud’s practise, and his spatial analogy for the mechanism of repression

Fig. 3.11: Diagram illustrating the hypothesis.

Chapter 4

Fig. 4.1: Conceptual diagram for Shklovsky’s theory of meaning in a literary motif or word

Fig. 4.2: A model for a Freudian dream element

Fig. 4.3: Binary model of Saussure’s langue and parole as described by Macey

Fig. 4.4: Theoretical model for an architectural langue and parole

Chapter 5

Fig. 5.1: Map of showing Kafka’s addresses over his lifetime

Fig. 5.2: Timeline of Kafka’s lived spaces and wider urban changes in Prague

Fig. 5.3: Spectrum of architectural experiences for Kafka

v Fig. 5.4: Ignác Ullmann, 1866, Prague apartment building at the corner of Národni Avenue and Perlová Street. A typical residential floorplan in Prague, showing rooms situated in an enfilade and accessible sequentially.

Fig. 5.5: A possible layout of Kafka’s room according to Brod’s description

Chapter 6

Fig.6.1: Citadel of Tiryns, Argolis, Greece

Fig. 6.2: Prague Castle

Fig. 6.3: Fortification strata in the Citadel of Tiryns, Kafka’s parable Before The Law and Freud’s analogy for repression

Fig. 6.4: Hand drawings by Kafka from his diary

Fig. 6.5: Plan of Metamorphosis interior

Fig. 6.6: Plan of The Trial interior.

Fig. 6.7: Comparison of Metamorphosis and The Trial interiors and elements.

Fig. 6.8: Comparison of Metamorphosis and The Trial interiors, Kafka’s parable Before The Law and Freud’s spatial analogy for repression.

Fig. 6.9: The first ‘island of control’: the room.

Fig. 6.10: Ottomar Starke, cover illustration for the first edition of The Metamorphosis, 1916

Fig. 6.11: The second island of control: picture and window frames

Fig. 6.12: Hand drawing by Kafka

Fig. 6.13: El Greco, Lady in a Fur Wrap (ca. 1577–1580)

Fig. 6.14: The third island of control: the wardrobe

Fig. 6.15: Kafka’s drafted images from his report ‘Measures for Preventing Accidents From Wood-Planing Machines’, 1910.

Fig. 6.16: The fourth island of control: the writing desk

Fig. 6.17: Hand drawing by Kafka of himself at this writing desk

vi Fig. 6.18: The fifth island of control: the bedside table

Fig. 6.19: The sixth island of control: the arm chair

Fig. 6.20: Freud’s chair for patients

Fig 6.21: Hand drawing by Kafka

Fig 6.22: Hand drawing by Kafka

Chapter 7

Fig. 7.1: Hand drawing by Kafka from his diary

Fig. 7.2: Hand drawing by Kafka from his diary

Fig. 7.3: ‘Jens Peter Müller, “the most beautiful man of the new century”, according to the novelist Erich Kästner.’

vii Chapter 1. Kafka and the crisis of the emerging

Modern interior

Introduction: the space of experience

In March 1915, in a dispirited frame of mind, Franz Kafka moved out of the family home in search of ‘a room and a vegetarian diet, almost nothing more.’1 For the next couple of years he would occupy a number of simple rooms and small apartments around Prague, until sickness required him to return to live with his parents, from 1917 until his death in 1924. The last room that Kafka occupied during his brief period of autonomy was at the Schönbörn Palace — a site within the Hradčany district and at the base of the Hradčany (Prague Castle) itself. In his simple room, beneath the layered fortifications and walls of , Kafka found a place that he deemed appropriate to his sense of self, describing the moment as ‘the fulfilment of .’2 This room had no kitchen or bathroom but, in Kafka’s words, it somehow embodied ‘isolation in decaying grandeur.’3

It was in this ‘cold, stale and ill-smelling’ room on the second floor of the former palace that Kafka finally became ill with tuberculosis, a sickness that would eventually consume his life.4 With his body now frail and sickly, and forced to return to his parents’ apartment, he closed the windows to his ‘unhealthy room’5 for the very last time and noted ‘how similar it must be to dying.’6 At this instant, both the defences of his body and the privacy of his domestic space

1 Franz Kafka diary entry from 9 March 1914, in Sander L. Gilman, Frank Kafka (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 97. 2 Franz Kafka quoted in Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97. 3 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97. 4 Biographers Ronal Hayman and Sander Gilman both note this room and moment where Kafka had suffered a tubercular haemorrhage, awaking in the early morning hours with a mouthful of blood. 5 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97. 6 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97.

1 were effectively breached, a point which Kafka dramatizes through the conflation of closing the windows of his room and closing his eyes, before drawing his final breath.

On returning to his parents’ apartment, Kafka dwelt in ‘a small room sandwiched between his parents’ bedroom and their living-room, with access from both, so that it served more as a passageway.’7 As a domestic space it was deeply compromised and permanently in danger of being invaded, as biographer Elias Canetti notes from Kafka’s diary entries. 8

Visitors in his room are intolerable to him. Even living together with his family in one apartment is a torment: ‘I cannot live with people; I absolutely hate all my relatives, not because they are my relatives, not because they are wicked … but simply because they are people with whom I live in close proximity.’

It was in this room, however, that Kafka paradoxically found ‘complete freedom of movement.’9 The ‘tensions that needed to find release in his work’10 were derived from the lacklustre condition of his room in the musty Schönbörn Palace; the condition of which led to his ill-health. Thus, despite the constant anxiety he felt about his personal space being compromised or assailed by his parents (a condition exacerbated by his tormented relationship with his father), Kafka felt finally free in this last space to write. This contradiction — between Kafka’s dreamed-of but ultimately unproductive room in the palace and his productive, but nightmarish room in his parents’ apartment — dramatises the complex relationship between Kafka’s literary production and space. The rooms that caused him the most anguish also provided him with the very means of creative release. The most detrimental environments provoked Kafka to write as a means of exorcising his maladies. In this sense, as Canetti observes, ‘his room is a shelter; it becomes an outer body, one can call his “forebody”.’11

7 Idris Parry, ‘Introduction,’ in The Trial (London: Penguin Group, 1994), xii. 8 Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 27. 9 Ronald Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka (London: Phoenix Press, 1981), 281. 10 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 281. 11 Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial, 27.

2 The idea that an interior with contradictory properties — a room that is both friend and foe — is necessary for creative production is not a new one in architectural or literary theory. In 1862, Charles Baudelaire described his own dialectical and diametric working conditions in a poem entitled ‘The Twofold Room’. Baudelaire’s interior begins as ‘a room just like a daydream’ with ‘no artistic abortion [sic] on walls’; yet halfway through the poem, a ‘terrible, heavy thump’ on the door suddenly transforms the room into an antonymous ‘hovel’ with ‘dingy windows’, containing ‘manuscripts riddled with cross outs or left half done.’12 As architectural theorist Charles Rice notes, for Baudelaire this room was ‘a context for the immaterial, irreal experience,’ and at the same time ‘the context for his work, for his relation to the productive cycle.’13 Baudelaire’s ‘twofold room’ encapsulates some of the oppositional properties of the modern interior and its doubleness, a quality that includes not only a spatial reality (Baudelaire’s hovel) but also the condition of the interior as an image (a daydream) ‘that can be imagined, dreamed and inhabited as such.’ 14 The example of Baudelaire — where the ‘image’ or phenomenological experience of an interior is inherently linked to creative synthesis and the ‘productive cycle’ — is replicated, to a large extent, in the life and work of Franz Kafka.

For Franz Kafka, the connections between life, space and creative production were diametric, complex and, at times, fraught. The spatiality of Kafka’s fiction has long been considered an important feature, with a range of theories on the subject being proposed by scholars, spanning from Modernist pioneer Walter Benjamin, through to the mid-1970s constructions of philosopher and anti-psychiatrist Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (see Chapter 2). However, the influence of his real-life domestic working spaces on Kafka’s creative production is a connection that has not yet been extensively explored in the past. Given the previously cited case of Baudelaire, and that of Virigina Woolf in her

12 Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 1 13 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 1 14 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 2

3 book-length exploration of the role of space in creative endeavour and writing15, the role of domestic spaces in Kafka’s creative production cannot be ignored. In a manner which is similar to that of Woolf and Baudelaire, Kafka had specific (and at times complex and paradoxical) conscious and unconscious spatial demands that needed to be met in order for him to be creatively fruitful. Thus, the focus of this dissertation becomes the examination and understanding of the connection between Kafka’s real-life lived spaces, and the influence of, and connection to, these spaces in his works of fiction.

The experience of space

The idea of spatial doubleness — the noumenal existence of space together with its subsequent ‘image’ as produced through empirical and phenomenological encounter — is one that connects architectural theory to a wider interdisciplinary setting.16 In 1945 the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau- Ponty proposed that architectural space was not defined in terms of its own physicality, but maintained an additional dimension of espace vecu (meaning lived space). This lived space—the ‘mythical space, the space of dreams, schizophrenia, and of art’17 — is based on the corporeal relationship that the subject has with his or her world. The body is ‘not in space like things,’18 but rather it subjectively inhabits and haunts space. Gaston Bachelard’s classic phenomenological text, The Poetics of Space, furthered this argument about the way in which the body defines spatiality. In his analysis of the house, Bachelard demonstrates that espace vecu is, in addition to corporeal Cartesian movement, is also the product of the ‘daydream’ where ‘memory and imagination remain

15 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Camberwell: Penguin, 2009) 16 Immanuel Kant proposed the base idea of objects and space as ‘noumena’, a thing-in-itself, an object that has no personal affect or experience attached to it; ‘phenomena’ is the act of experience which, for the human, defines an object. 17 Kanishka Goonewardena, Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2008), 38. 18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty as quoted by Guiliana Bruno in Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 208.

4 associated’.19 It is through the empirical experiences of the bodily senses, in concert with necessary elements of the mind’s poetic imagination and daydreams, that the ‘image’ of space is constructed.

Since Merleau-Ponty proposed this idea, there have been many developments in the theory of experiential space, or the spatial ‘image’ double. However, a key moment in this way of thinking is linked to the work of architectural theorist Anthony Vidler, whose discursive history of architectural space specifically accounts for this ‘doubleness’ in psychological terms. Vidler argues that underlying all modern spatial experience is a prevailing sense of ill- ease and anxiety. This is the uncanny — a ‘sense of the modern unhomely, a phantom, unsettling double that arises out of the cosiness and protection offered by the domestic interior.’20 First conceived of in literature, the uncanny was enabled and activated in the fictional tales of E. T. A Hoffman, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and, as illustrated above, the work of Baudelaire. For Vidler, the ‘favourite motif’ of the uncanny ‘was precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence.’21 The underlying mechanism, Vidler explained, was that ‘on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same.’22

As a ‘domesticated version of absolute terror,’23 the uncanny was, in its first incarnations, a sensation experienced in the privacy of the domestic interior. Yet, along with the domestic interior, the uncanny and its sense of estrangement was also born out of the development of the great cities of Europe, and arose in parallel ‘with the alienating and anxiety-inducing forms of experience in the

19 Neil Leach, ‘Gaston Bachelard’ in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 85. 20 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 49. 21 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 3. 22 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 3 23 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 3.

5 burgeoning metropolis’ 24 . The forms and structures of the modern city demanded new and unfamiliar points of reference; the familiar place of the city centre was, at the same time, growing to operate in an apparently frighteningly unfamiliar manner, in response to industrialisation and new modes of capitalism. Vidler concluded that the spatial uncanny was the result of architectural space perceived as both familiar and unfamiliar and enabled through individual interaction between spaces and subject.25 For Vidler,

[t]he uncanny is not a property of the space, nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.26

Thus, the uncanny is a quality assigned by the viewer (or reader). The uncanny is a matter of spatial perception, which is constituted in the spatial ‘image’ at hand, as it is affected by the viewer’s (or reader’s) previous lived experiences; espace vecu.

Vidler identifies an important moment in the history of uncanny spatial experience, and of the estrangement triggered by modernity, as the point when the condition became medicalised. Vidler argues that, ‘[t]hus psychologised, the uncanny emerged in the late nineteenth century as a special case of the many modern diseases, from phobias to neuroses, variously described by psychoanalysts, psychologists, and philosophers as a distancing from reality forced by reality.’27 The uncanny no longer belonged solely in the realm of phenomenology. In addition to being a type of alienation, as described by writers from Rousseau to Baudelaire28 — a ‘quintessential bourgeois kind of fear’29 — it was now a psychoanalytical construct, a mechanism of the psyche whereby

24 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 49. 25 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 49. 26 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 11. 27 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 28 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 4. 29 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 4.

6 reality was removed from the conscious mind for reason of the trauma that it caused. At this point in time, the search was no longer for what was uncanny, but rather to find how something becomes uncanny. While the uncanny was still a spatial condition, it was now an ‘interior of the mind.’30

Marking the uncanny and its debut as a matter of clinical psychoanalysis was Freud’s 1919 essay, On the Uncanny31, which described the device as it occurred in contemporary fiction.32 Drawing on the short horror stories of E. T. A. Hoffman, Freud theorized that experience of the uncanny was provoked by the return of a familiar phenomenon (image, person, object and/or event) made strange by the process of psychological repression. Tracing the etymology of the word Heimlich — homely, of the house, a familiar and comfortable space — Freud demonstrates that its antonym unheimilch (unhomely) represent something familiar but at the same time foreign or strange. The unheimlich is not just something strange or odd, but the return of a repressed phenomenon that, by virtue of both its familiar and strange qualities, induces fear and anxiety. Since that time, Freud’s essay has been celebrated as an exemplar of the psychoanalytical criticism of literature. However, Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ seems to incorporate, albeit in unstated form, many observations on the nature of anxiety and shock that he was unable to include in his more clinical studies of ‘shell-shock’ victims.33 Vidler, discussing Freud’s essay, notes that ‘underlying the complex argument of the essay itself, there seems to have been a larger, socio-psychoanalytical interest.’34 While Freud concludes that the uncanny is a literary device subject to modes of artistic exploitation, the nature of the

30 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 31 Sigmund Freud, ‘On The Uncanny’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 218-252. 32 ‘On the Uncanny’ sees Freud elaborate on the short stories of E. T. A Hoffman and his popular publication Der Sanmann [The Sandman]. The story narrates the experience of a boy who falls in love with a mechanical doll, and as a result is punished by the doll’s father by having his eyes burnt out. From this story Freud identifies two psychoanalytical avatars that produce uncanny phenomena: the gaze and the double. These notions are developed in later chapters. 33 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 7. 34 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6.

7 mechanism would nonetheless subsequently inform Freud’s theoretical explorations of trauma, shell-shock, and later, the dark terrain of the ‘death drive’.35

In his conception of the uncanny, Freud provides a means of theorising psychoanalysis and understanding its prevalence in non-clinical analysis. Freud posited that the uncanny could, as a subject of aesthetics, arise from the viewing of art or from the reading of literature. Vidler extends Freud’s considerations to include the experience of architecture, noting that the architectural uncanny arises out of the experience of unfamiliar aesthetic settings, including modernist interiors, architecture and urbanism. It also arises through the deliberate description of interior, architectural and urban spatial settings in fiction. Again, this points to a connection or relationship between the real or ‘lived’ experience of space, and its deliberately reconstructed literary counterpart. This argument itself relies on a type of spatial doubling between real-lived space and that of the production of creative fiction. Thus, the affect of space on Kafka, and on his resulting creative process of writing, may be understood by way of the uncanny.

Kafka and Freud: critical connections

The relationship between Kafka and Freud, or more correctly between the former’s tales and the latter’s theories, is a theme that permeates the present dissertation. The early years of the twentieth century were marked by several momentous events which reinforced the heterogeneity of cultural and political identities that imperial expansion brought, and the scientific management that industrial expansion enforced upon the working class.36 Exponential growth in technological transformation and industrial expansion was typically attributed to an ‘acutely burgeoning metropolis of alienating and anxiety-inducing forms,

35 In addition to Vidler’s account of architecture in terms of the uncanny, the art theorist Hal Foster simultaneously rewrote the history of early twentieth century avant-garde art, investigating through the closely associated Freudian paradigm of the death drive. See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993). 36 Hal Foster, ‘Primitive Scenes,’ in Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), xi.

8 captured in a sense of estrangement from sure foundations that was coupled with a sense of the march of progress.’37 Growing up in Prague, Kafka himself was not immune to these anxieties about modernity and the war, which, he observes, were ‘tormentingly gnawing into [him] from every angle,’38 and his writing grew to reflect these concerns. While Freud was constructing the laws that were to account for the workings of the dark parts of the mind, Kafka’s fiction was creatively reconfiguring these anxieties into lawless fictional spaces, as part of a wider circle of Expressionist writers and artists exploring the new conditions of this psychoanalytical zeitgeist and the crisis of emerging modernity.39

In 1900 Freud published Interpretation of Dreams, followed by Three Theories of Sexuality in 1904, and Kafka is generally thought to have encountered Freud’s work prior to 1911. 40 For example, when writing The Judgement in 1912 Kafka notes in his diary that he ‘thought of Freud’41, and without Freud perhaps would not have been so fascinated by his own dreams. As records in a 1911 diary entry, ‘[n]othing but Kafka’s dreams seemed to interest him anymore.’42 That Kafka both knew of, and drew on, Freud’s theories is not a new observation; a number of theoretical and contextual connections have been made between Kafka and Freud. Both authors were simultaneously producing works within the German speaking Austro-Hungarian and Bohemian empires before the First World War. Both Kafka and Freud were Jewish and subject to levels of anti-Semitism, or at least experienced the anxiety that the threat of persecution aroused. Despite this, both individuals at some

37 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 49. 38 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 185. 39 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 8. Most notable are the architectural sets and mise-en-scene of the Weimar and German Expressionist cinema. There are also a number of connections to be drawn between film, Freud, and Kafka, in social and artistic senses. As Giuliana Bruno notes, the birth of film coincided with the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, and many Expressionist films subsequently went on to investigate the themes of Freud’s work. 40 William J. Dodd, "Kafka and Freud: A Note on in Der Strafkolonie," Monatshefte 70, no. 2 (1978): 134. 41 Hayman, K: Biography of Kafka, 1. 42 Hayman, K: Biography of Kafka, 1.

9 point in their lives showed an interest in understanding Jewish identity and culture.43 Importantly — and a property of their lives to which psychoanalytical value might be attached — both Kafka and Freud had difficult relationships with dominant fathers. As Hayman notes, ‘Freud’s father was hardly less contemptuous about his son’s failings; and for Freud it provoked an inexorable scientific drive towards the discovery of laws that motivate human behaviour.’44 For Kafka, his difficult relationship with his father provoked him to write fiction, but in contrast to Freud, he found solace in the realisation that he would never ‘discover’ the law.

One of the most important theoretical connections between Freud and Kafka is found in Kafka’s daytime employment at the Prague Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute. In that bureaucratic position, Kafka worked as a high-ranking legal clerk in charge of accident prevention. Along with great compassion, Kafka displayed impressive ingenuity and technical skill in the propagation of safety measures and accident prevention schemes. As Walter Sokel writes, one of his most considered contributions was the proposal of a psychiatric trauma centre for returning veterans of the First World War. In Sokel’s words,

[t]he liberal-humanitarian roots of ideal accident prevention in Kafka’s thinking appear with particular vividness in his conception of and fervent propaganda for a psychiatric hospital for psychically traumatized veterans of World War 1. Through the most up to date psychiatric treatment, shell shocked and other victims of modern warfare could and would be restored back to health and renewed functioning in society.45

In his official capacity Kafka dealt with the same problems found in Freud’s clinical theories of traumatic neuroses, a concept at the forefront of modern

43 Like Kafka, Freud struggled with his Jewish identity, internally as well as through external conditions of anti-Semitism. Freud joined the Jewish organisation of B’nai B’rith in 1897 at the age of forty-two; Kafka demonstrated interest in Yiddish theatre, studied Hebrew, and it is noted he maintained a lifelong yearning to move to Palestine, a place he dreamt of as ‘home.’ 44 Hayman, K: Biography of Kafka, 57. 45 Walter H. Sokel, "Review of Franz Kafka: The Office Writings," Hyperion 5, no. 2 (2010): 171.

10 psychiatry and a form of illness that was common following the war.46 Thus Kafka worked with theories about trauma and its repetition, the notion of fort-da, 47 and consequently Freud’s closely related theories of the uncanny. 48 As Sander Gilman argues, ‘Kafka knew his Freud, and Kafka certainly knew his Kafka’49. Gilman goes so far as to suggest that the often-speculated connections between Kafka’s life and his fiction were, in fact, carefully reconfigured by Kafka in accordance with the Freudian paradigm. Thus Gilman writes,

[Kafka] provides a detailed ‘reading’ of his own tale to reveal the mechanisms by which he (or his unconscious now made quite conscious) writes his texts. This rather reductive account seems mechanical because it is the conscious awareness of the creative process that Kafka wishes to capture in his description of the relationship of art (his tale of Georg) to life (the fictions he has spun about Felice) […]. Kafka’s life in his writing and this writing seems surreal, Freudian, hysterical, but is quite controlled — more Mozart than Beethoven. 50

Similarly, psychoanalytical scholar William Dodd argues that ‘although Kafka does not provide a testimony that Freud was a strong presence in other works,

46 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture XVIII: Fixation Upon Traumas: The Unconscious’, in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970), 224. 47 ‘Fort-da’ was the term Freud used to describe the repetition of trauma. Freud first noticed the phenomenon in his grandson. When the mother left the house, the child picked up and repeatedly threw a cotton reel out of the cot, with the words ‘for!’ and ‘da!’ until the mother’s return. Freud postulated that the trauma of the mother’s absence was being repeated with the ‘fort-da’ game, which led into his larger theories concerning the repetitive trauma of shell-shock, or war neuroses and the compulsion to repeat. See Ian Buchanan, ‘fort/da’, in A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 48 This concept of ‘connection’ would later have implications for the historical avant-garde and surrealist movements. In the preface to Compulsive Beauty, a rewriting of surrealist history according to the mechanism of the uncanny, Foster notes that Andre Breton was an assistant in a neuropsychiatric clinic in 1916, and ‘there he tended a soldier who believed that the war was a fake, with the wounded made up cosmetically and the dead on loan from medical schools. […Here] was a figure shocked into another reality that was also somehow a critique of this reality.’ It is in this same way that Kafka’s fiction operates. Thus, Kafka’s fictional double K. is a figure of reality shocked into another realm. For Breton, Kafka’s fiction ‘flashes the capital question of all times: where are we going, to what are we submitted, what is the law?’ At the same time, it doubles as a mastered mockery and critique of the real lawful bureaucracy that Kafka worked in. See Andre Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemount (Sydney: Pathfinder, 1978), 367. 49 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 65. 50 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 65.

11 the internal evidence, particularly in The Trial on which Kafka was working when he wrote , is powerful and persuasive.’51

There is no doubt that Freud was a presence in Kafka’s work life and fictional writings, although scholars’ attitudes vary on what was Kafka’s opinion of Freud’s constructs. Gilman asserts that Kafka ‘understood his Freud, he understood Oedipus as a cultural phenomenon, he read his psychology’,52 yet it appears in some remarks that Kafka ‘did not think much of it.’53 Such a fact might suggest that Kafka would not purposefully reconstruct his stories to suit a Freudian paradigm. However, given the scholarly consensus of the evidence of Freud’s theories in Kafka’s work, Kafka’s ambivalence towards Freud only serves to highlight the fact that Freudian constructs are unconscious but omnipresent drivers of creative production. There is evidence which shows that Kafka’s stories follow a Freudian paradigm, regardless of whether this was intentional or not.

If, for Kafka, his fictional narratives were consciously or unconsciously carefully revised to suit Freudian constructs as they became manifest in his own life (as a type of outlet for a traumatic repetition) then it might also be imagined that the spatiality concealed behind the narrative is also a traumatic reconfiguration. Are the labyrinthine spaces that form the backdrop to Kafka’s warped fiction in fact reconfigured spaces that form the backdrop to his real life? Does the spatiality of Kafka’s fiction — the famous ‘Kafkaesque labyrinth’ — bear any resemblance to the spatiality of Kafka’s lived reality?

A number of scholars have pointed to spatial relationships between Freudian theory and Kafka’s fiction. For example, Dodd argues that there is an implicit Freudian value in the spatial and mechanical articulations of Kafka’s work, and suggests that the dark recesses of The Trial parallel the dark recesses of Josef K.’s mind (the novel’s protagonist), and this is where the ‘real’ trial is

51 Dodd, "Kafka and Freud: A Note on in Der Strafkolonie," 134. 52 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 10. 53 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 10.

12 taking place. Dodd argues that ‘[t]he succession of oppressive interiors — attic rooms and corridors — into which Joseph K. is increasingly drawn after his arrest, is a playful allusion to the structure of the Freudian interior.’54 Similarly, biographer Ronald Hayman writes of Kafka’s need to project anxieties into all of the spaces of The Trial, and notes that the reason ‘doors and windows are so important in his work is that they offer ways of imaginative escape and access to territory he can imaginatively appropriate.’55 The unexpected corners of the labyrinth play an important role in evoking terror and embodying anxieties into every space, for ‘if the proceedings had been made to take place in a courtroom, the danger would have appeared to be circumscribed; as it is, he can find a new threat at any moment, in any corner, behind any door.’56

Given that both Kafka and Freud wrote in German, were of the Jewish faith, resided contemporaneously in the same geopolitical region of the Austro- Hungarian empire, and both men had difficult relationships with their fathers, these multiple connections between Kafka and Freud may indicate they were of a similar cultural persona and life experience. Of particular significance for this dissertation are spatial affects and resonances that can be drawn between Kafka’s fiction and Freud’s theories, and the psychoanalytical value that can be attributed to Kafka’s work through this process.

Who was Franz Kafka? The problem of biography

‘Has there ever been so convoluted a mind revealed in utterance?’57 This question, from biographer Idris Parry, is both an inquiry into the nature of Franz Kafka’s mind and a commentary on its intricacy. Parry concludes that ‘nobody else could be so tormented by fear’58 as Kafka. Meno Span, another biographer,

54 Dodd, "Kafka and Freud: A Note on in Der Strafkolonie," 134. 55 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 284. 56 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 188. 57 Idris Parry, introduction to The Castle (London: Penguin Books, 1997), ix. 58 Parry, introduction to The Castle, ix.

13 observes that ‘Kafka lived a tragic existence’59, being a ‘highly sensitive modern man harassed by ancient and modern ills.’60 John Hibberd writes that the life of Kafka was ‘a tragedy mingled with farce, almost as strange and terrible as that of any of his fictional heroes,’61 and, in a particularly vivid description, Hibberd imagines Kafka as ‘this creature writhing on the ground, as a modern tormented by eagles tearing at his vitals which never cease to grow.’62 Hibberd concludes that while Kafka was a ‘genius writer’63, his diaries, writings and actions reveal him to be a ‘man unfit for life’ and ‘who failed miserably in all his endeavours’64. Scholar Sander L. Gilman points out, from the first biography, ’that of his friend Max Brod, to the more recent biographies of Hartmut Binder, Rotraut Hackermüller, Ronald Hayman, Frederich Robert Karl, Peter Alden Mailloux, Ernst Pawel, Marthe Robert, Klaus Wagenbach, Reiner Stach and Nicholas Murray, each biographer has sought to present a Kafka that made sense in his or her Kafkaesque system.’65 Kafka’s biographers depict him, at one extreme, as an inert ‘hypochondriac’66, an ‘introvert’,67 and ‘neurotic’,68 and at the other, as a sinister character with ‘psychotic’, ‘abnormal’, ‘pathological’, ‘perverse’ and ‘schizophrenic’ 69 tendencies. Such biographical portraits of Kafka present him as depressive and self-obsessed. Yet, Hibberd also writes, with unintended irony, that ‘few people knew [Kafka] well.’70 One person who did was Kafka’s lifelong friend and editor Max Brod, a person who

59 Meno Spann, Franz Kafka (Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 17. 60 Spann, preface to Franz Kafka, i. 61 John Hibberd, Kafka in Context (London: Studio Vista, 1975), 6. 62 Parry, introduction to The Castle, xii-xiii. 63 Hibberd, Kafka in Context, 6. 64 Hibberd, Kafka in Context, 6. 65 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 9. 66 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 14. 67 Hibberd, Kafka in Context, 6. 68 Daryl Sharp, The Secret Raven: Conflict and Transformation (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980), 7. 69 Sharp, The Secret Raven, 7. 70 Hibberd, Kafka in Context, 6.

14 Hibberd observes has offered ‘a sympathetic account of Kafka as man and writer which in part corrects Kafka’s own self-analysis.’71

In the biography Franz Kafka, Brod writes, ‘I have experienced over and over again that admirers of Kafka who know him only from his books have a completely false picture of him.’72 Brod argues that by constructing an image of Kafka ‘from his books, and above all from his diary, such a totally different, much more depressing, picture may be drawn.’73 Scholars who exclusively follow this approach will construe that Kafka ‘must have made a sad, even desperate impression in company too.’74 Yet, Brod asserts, ‘the opposite is the case’75 and his presence was a positive one.

The richness of his thoughts, which he generally uttered in a cheerful tone, made him, to put it on the lowest level, one of the most amusing of men I have ever met, in spite of his shyness. He could be enthusiastic and carried away. There was no end to our joking and laughing — he liked a good, hearty laugh, and knew how to make his friends laugh too. More than that, if one were in a tight corner, one could unhesitatingly rely on his knowledge of the world, his tact, his advice, which hardly ever failed to be right. He was a wonderfully helpful friend.76

In his description of these everyday interactions with, and impressions of Kafka, Brod evokes the image of a man who was socially astute, kindly and even altruistic.

These two sets of conflicting biographical observations — the former from Parry, Span, Sharp and Hibberd and the latter from Brod — present a polarised account of Kafka as an individual. Both the unsympathetic and the positive accounts have value and inadequacy. For example, while Brod rejects the majority view held by scholars for the reason of their empirical distance, Brod’s

71 Hibberd, Kafka in Context, 6. 72 Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 41. 73 Brod, Kafka, 41. 74 Brod, Kafka, 39. 75 Brod, Kafka, 39. 76 Brod, Kafka, 39-40.

15 own ‘portrait-from-life’ 77 is necessarily partial and contains an element of embellishment. For example, Brod writes that the first time he met Kafka, while walking home together,

Kafka quoted a passage from Hofmannsthal: ‘The smell of damp flags in a hall.’ And he kept silent for a long time, said no more, as if this hidden, improbable thing must speak for itself. That made such a deep impression on me that I still remember to this day the street and house in front of which this conversation took place.78

However, Ronald Hayman argues that Brod’s memory cannot be correct, because ‘the Hofmannsthal phrase […] occurs in Das Gesprach uber Gedichte which was not published till 1904.’79 Hayman also notes that for Brod’s account to be credible, ‘either Kafka must have quoted another Hofmannsthal phrase or the memory belongs to a later period of the friendship.’80 Whilst Brod’s purpose is at least partially to demonstrate that other scholarly accounts of Kafka are misguided fabrications, there are nonetheless discrepancies and inaccuracies in his own work. Additionally, given Brod’s work was deliberately intended to counteract the negative scholarly perception of Kafka, and was produced in an era where hagiographic biographies were common, we might conclude that Brod’s work was biased in its own right.

William Heinemann, the publisher of Franz Kafka: Complete and Unabridged, notes in the introduction to that work the difficulties faced by Brod in reconstructing Kafka’s life 81 , and also that the proliferation of biographical interpretations of Kafka present a confronting number of ‘critical readings of […]

77 Brod, Kafka, 41. 78 Brod, Kafka, 44. 79 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 38. 80 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 38. 81 The body of autobiographical information that is available has been the product of Brod’s lifetime efforts to preserve, recover, transcribe and publish Kafka’s writings. Despite those efforts, Brod was unable to recover many of his diaries; they were destroyed by Kafka or confiscated and presumed destroyed by the Gestapo. Difficulties also confronted Brod in ordering and interpreting Kafka’s material, with Brod’s later edition of The Trial featuring the rearrangement of chapters. Such reordering and interpreting of Kafka’s work implies that Brod’s interpretation, agenda and editorial whim shaped the information. See William Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka Complete and Unabridged (Great Britain: Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, 1976), ix.

16 wildly varying quality and intent’.82 Thus, in terms of any third-person account, be it Brod’s or that of any other scholar more removed from personal experience, there are many levels of interpretation required. Perhaps no one account of Kafka’s life is closer than any other to developing an objective ‘truth’ about his psyche. The same is also true of the many commentaries provided about the spaces Kafka inhabited and experienced. This lack of both consistency and veracity poses a challenge for understanding Kafka’s psyche in the context of his lived spaces.

A reasonable or objective approach to this problem might be to undertake a close reading of Kafka’s own, first-hand autobiographical writings. But even his diary entries and letters present substantial ‘bibliographical complexities’83, as they contain multiple slippages between his recollection of daily thoughts and nightly dreams, alongside fragments of his fiction. As Heinemann observes, the purpose of Kafka’s autobiographical work is fundamentally unclear, drifting between being ‘a record of events experienced, an oblique commentary on reality, or an attempt to crystallise perception.’84 For example, in his journals and letters, Kafka manifests a ‘talent for integrating invention with reality’85, to such an extent that ‘the autobiographical and the fictional are so intertwined that it is futile to try and unravel them.’86 In these works Kafka ‘inadvertently demolishes the notional border that divides life from art’, or the border between the real and the imagined, resulting in what might be called the ‘reconstructed unreal’.87 These interpretive complexities and textual slippages that define the nature of Kafka’s biography are also characteristics of any attempt to reconstruct his spatial experience and attitudes to architecture. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for researchers interested in spatial structures (interiors, and

82 William Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka: Complete and Unabridged (Great Britain: Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, 1976), xx. 83 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iiv. 84 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iiv. 85 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iiv. 86 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iiv. 87 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iiv.

17 elements of furniture) in Kafka’s fiction. It is a challenge because there can never be a definitive answer, Kafka did not leave behind a linear, transparent literary and personal legacy. The places he inhabited, and those he wrote and dreamed about, all merge in different and complex ways. However, this also offers an opportunity for a new insight or interpretation. As Gilman notes about the plethora of biographies available on Kafka:

what is most remarkable about the bountiful interpretations and biographies is that every critic was right and every biographer was right! Kafka turns out to be as much an Expressionist as a Zionist as a mystic as a pre- and post-Communist Czech as an Existentialist as a post-modernist as a post-colonialist as a (Whatever he will be next month.) Kafka’s work and his life seem to lend themselves to infinite readings and finite exploitations. 88

Franz Kafka, 1883-1924: A biographical summary

Franz Kafka was one of the most prolific and renowned European authors of the early twentieth century. He was born of German Jewish parents in Prague, on July 3, 1883.89 According to the biography by Calvin S. Hall and Richard E. Lind, Franz ‘was the eldest of six children born to Hermann and Julie (Löwy) Kafka who were married in 1882.’ The two sons born after Kafka, Georg (b. 1885) and Heinrich (b. 1887),90 both died in infancy91. Franz Kafka also had three younger sisters: Gabriele, known as ‘Elli’ born in 1889; Valerie, or ‘Valli’, born in 1890; and Ottilie, ‘Ottla’, in 1892. 92 The German Jewish family background represented an ethnic and political minority in Prague at the time, as well as across the greater Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a result of this, Hall and

88 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 9. 89 Calvin S. Hall and Richard E. Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature: A Study of Franz Kafka (Chapel Hill: The University of California Press, 1970), 95 90 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, xi. 91 Brod, Kafka, 9. 92 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, xi.

18 Lind note that ‘Franz was raised as a German and a Jew’,93 but ‘the family spoke both Czech and German.’94

Hermann Kafka, ‘a butcher’s son’, had migrated ‘to Prague a few years earlier from a small Jewish community in the provinces of South Bohemia as a poor travelling salesman.’95 In Prague, he was soon betrothed to Julie Löwy, ‘the daughter of a fairly prosperous brewer.’96 Franz’s mother, Julie, was, according to Brod, ‘quiet, pleasant [and] extremely clever.’97 Despite this, Brod notes that the rest of the Löwy family line mostly consisted of ‘scholars [and] dreamers, inclined to eccentricity, and others driven by this inclination to the adventurous, the exotic, or the freakish and reclusive.’98 In the first years of their marriage, Hermann ‘set himself up with growing success as a seller of “fancy goods” (walking sticks, umbrellas, threads, fashion accessories, haberdashery)’99 and eventually established ‘a successful wholesale haberdashery warehouse in Prague,’100 where he was regarded as ‘a domineering boss.’101 In addition to rearing a number of children and maintaining the home, Julie also ‘helped her husband in the business.’102 Over time, the family rose in social and economic standing, and eventually ‘lived in comfortable circumstances.103

Franz Kafka and his sisters were ‘brought up according to the rules prevailing among the upwardly mobile middle classes, by a governess, maidservants, and a cook.’ 104 Typically, in the evening, when his parents

93 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 94 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, trans. Idris Parry (Camberwell, Vic: Penguin Group, 2010), np. 95 Klaus Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague: A Travel Reader, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1993), 21. 96 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 21. 97 Brod, Kafka, 4. 98 Brod, Kafka, 6. 99 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 21. 100 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 101 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 102 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 103 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 104 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22.

19 returned from the shop, the family ‘had a late meal, and then played their habitual game of cards.’105

Much has been written about Franz Kafka’s complex, difficult and fraught relationship with his father. Kafka biographer Klaus Wagenbach writes that Hermann was ‘a man of overbearing character.’106 Similarly, Hall and Lind go so far as to describe Hermann as a ‘domineering man’.107 Max Brod wrote that ‘of all the impressions of Kafka’s childhood the one that is of outstanding importance is the grand image of his father — exaggerated in its grandeur as it undoubtedly is by Kafka’s natural genius.’108 Brod describes the relationship between Kafka and his father as ‘distressingly stagnant and painfully scabbed over.’109 At one point the grievances that Kafka had towards his father culminated in the ‘world famous’110 Letter to My Father of November 1919, described by Brod as being ‘indispensable to an understanding of the inner personality and life’111 of Franz Kafka. Brod writes that

[i]t is hardly a work that one can call a letter anymore, it is a short book, but one that cannot yet be published — at the same time it is certainly one of the most remarkable and, for all its simplicity of style, one of the most difficult of documents dealing with a life struggle. It is not easy to get to the bottom of the whole affair.

Brod further argues of the letter that, ‘in some passages it is easy, naturally, to find some correspondence with the theme of psychoanalysis’ 112, indicating Kafka’s knowledge of the subject and expressing interest into how it might afford an explanation for his own life circumstances.

105 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 106 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 107 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 108 Brod, Kafka, 15. 109 Brod, Kafka, 16. 110 Brod, Kafka, np (bookjacket). 111 Brod, Kafka, np (bookjacket). 112 Brod, Kafka, 16.

20 Kafka only ‘attended German schools and the German University in Prague.’113 The family spoke German at home, and ‘all of his [personal] writing was done in German.’114 However, later in life, at his own initiative, ‘Kafka learned French and […] some English and Italian’.115 Additionally, throughout the course of his employment, Kafka was required to speak and write in Czech, and thus ‘acquired a thorough knowledge of the Czech language and its literature.’116 Deleuze and Guattari have subsequently argued that the political agenda of Kafka’s fiction comes from the point of view of the German Jewish ethnic and cultural minority in Prague.117

Kafka’s schooling saw him attend Deutsche Gymnasium, in Prague Aldstadt, from 1893 to 1901. This was ‘a humanist grammar school that did not teach art, music, or modern languages.’118 At this institution Kafka was viewed as ‘a modest, reticent pupil with average results (although his marks in mathematics were invariably dreadful).’119 After completing his schooling and receiving his Abitur (leaving certificate) in 1901, Kafka attended the German University, with the intention of studying German literature. However, he soon ‘opted for law’, as it was ‘a subject which, along with medicine, offered the best employment opportunities for Jews.’120 With this decision, Kafka was, once again, in dispute with his father Hermann, who ‘seemed not to come to terms with the fact that his son was not going to be a businessman’121 and work in the family shop. For Franz Kafka, the choice of law was ‘merely the tiresome choice of a bread-and- butter job that would leave him writing (already his “main yearning”) as

113 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 114 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 115 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 116 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 117 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 118 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 119 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 120 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 121 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22.

21 unhampered as possible.’122 Franz Kafka commenced at the university in 1901 and ‘completed his course in law at the German Karl Ferdinand University in Prague […] in the shortest possible period of eight terms,’123 earning ‘a doctorate in law in 1906.’124

It was during his time at the German University where, as a member of a literature group in 1902, Franz Kafka first ‘met his lifelong friend, Max Brod.’125 Brod was an ‘editor, critic and novelist’ who introduced Kafka ‘to the literary circles of Prague’ 126 and is largely credited with fostering and encouraging Kafka’s writing over the course of his lifetime. In the year that Kafka took his degree, with the support of Brod he entered a short story, The Sky in Narrow Streets, for a competition run by the Viennese periodical Ziet.127 Kafka’s fiction was eventually published for the first time in 1909. After struggling with his writing for many years, Kafka made an excursion to Brescia with Brod, where, at ‘Brod’s suggestion, he and Kafka wrote competing accounts of it: it was a deliberate ruse to get Kafka’s pen flowing, as his [Brod’s] own always did.’ 128 Both accounts of The Aeroplanes at Brescia129 were subsequently published: Kafka’s appeared in the ‘Prague newspaper Bohemia (29.9.1909) and Brod’s in a Munich periodical in mid-October.’130 In the same year, for Kafka, ‘a short story was accepted by a Prague journal and he read to Brod the opening chapters of an unfinished novel, Wedding Preparations in the Country.’131 In addition to being a mentor to Kafka, ‘Brod and Kafka planned to collaborate on a novel, to be

122 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 123 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 22. 124 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 125 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 126 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 127 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 128 Malcom Pasley, ‘Notes’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin, 1992), vii. 129 Franz Kafka, ‘The Aeroplanes at Brescia’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, ed. Malcom Pasley (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin, 1992), 1. 130 Pasley, ‘Notes’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, ix. 131 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi.

22 entitled Richard and Samuel’, although only the first chapter was published.132 Under Brod’s guidance, Kafka developed his writing and produced a couple of small publications. In addition to his writing, after 1910 Kafka began to keep diaries, in which, along with recording his personal thoughts and musings, he also documented ideas and drafts for his fiction. It is in these diaries that the relationship between the two — life and fiction — becomes clear. For example, Kafka began his diaries at ‘a time when he also developed an interest in the Yiddish theatre, becoming a friend of the actor Itzhak Löwy.’133 As such, the ‘contact is recognisable in the episode of the “dog musicians” in — a story that can, at one level, be read as allegorical autobiography.’134 The connections and boundaries between his life and writing have since been the subject of much scholarly attention.

After graduating, Kafka’s role by day was as a lawyer in the field of worker’s insurance and compensation. ‘After graduating and undergoing the obligatory Gerichtsjahr (the year that law graduates spent being inducted into court procedure)’135, Kafka worked in the law for two years, including a brief stint at the first Prague branch of an Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali136, before accepting a position with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague.137 At the Workers Accident Institute, Kafka ‘held the same position until illness forced retirement near the end of his life.’138

For Kafka, there were several advantages to a bureaucratic role, including ‘its security and hours of work’139. Compared to the Assicurazioni Generali, where ‘he had to work eleven to twelve hours a day’,140 the working day at the

132 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 133 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 134 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 135 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 136 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 137 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 138 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 139 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 140 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25.

23 government Worker’s Institute was considerably shorter, being ‘only six and a half’ hours, although ‘he had to work Saturdays as well.’141 Because Kafka usually finished working by early afternoon he ‘had the rest of the day for writing and other intellectual and cultural pursuits.’ 142 This time was subsequently ‘devoted to long walks “back and forth through the city, across the Hradcin [castle], around the Cathedral, and across the Belvedere.”’143 Some of Kafka’s varied intellectual interests at the time included attending ‘political meetings by the Social Democrats, the Realists (the party of the future state founder, Masaryk), and anarchists.’144 A particular site that Kafka gravitated towards was the Café Louvre, where evening lectures were hosted ‘in the hospitable salon of the pharmacist’s wife Berta Fanta’145. The salon hosted lectures ‘about the most up-to-date themes of the day: quantum theory, psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity.’146 It was in the salon where Kafka also encountered the work and theory of architect Rudolf Steiner, who ‘came to deliver a series of lectures in Beata Fanta’s house’147; as well as that of famed Modernist and architect Adolf Loos. Ayad B. Rahmani argues that this latter event is significant because ‘it is likely that Kafka received an earful on the subject — how ornament is a kind of crime in the same sense that an act of violence represents a breakdown in one’s ability to control excess emotion, that it too signals a form of inability to control an excess in expression.’148 It was likely that in Loos’ lecture Kafka was shown ‘images of houses, plans, elevations and other graphic views that collectively

141 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 142 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 143 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 144 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 145 Spelt Berta Fanta in Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 146 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 25. 147 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 193. 148 Ayad B. Rahmani, Kafka’s Architectures: Doors, Rooms, Stairs and Windows in an Intricate Literary Edifice (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2015), 13.

24 confused him, given that he was never trained to understand architectural drawings.’ 149

Kafka’s ‘literary “take-off”’ eventuated in ‘late 1912’150, when he, ‘at the age of twenty-nine […] discovered a style of writing that was uniquely his own.’151 The first ‘Kafkaesque story’, The Judgement, ‘was written in a burst of creative inspiration during one sitting.152 Thereafter, a rapid period of production, saw the completion of the “Metamorphosis”, and several chapters of a novel set in America, of which only the first chapter was eventually published as ‘’.153 In 1914 another ‘burst of activity’ resulted in the unfinished novel The Trial, along with many other stories, ‘of which only “In the Penal Colony” appeared during his lifetime.’ 154

Publisher Kurt Wolff expressed several ‘reservations’ about the ‘“painful” nature’ of Kafka’s work, which ‘were fully shared by the author’. Kafka acknowledged that the world events and political atmosphere of the time (dominated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the months prior, which saw Austria-Hungary declare war on Serbia, sending most of the European continent into the First World War) were ‘extremely painful.’ 155 Nonetheless, despite the dark territories represented in Kafka’s oeuvre, his short story ‘Metamorphosis’ was published by Kurt Wolff in 1915. While Kafka remained continuously engaged in literary activity throughout the rest of his life, prior to his death very few of his works had been published.

Max Brod also played a crucial role in Kafka’s personal life, by introducing him to his first fiancée, Felice Bauer. Along with the difficult relationship he had

149 Rahmani, Kafka’s Architectures, 13. 150 Malcom Pasley, ‘Editor’s Preface’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin, 1992): vii. 151 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 152 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 153 Pasley, ‘Editor’s Preface’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, vii. 154 Pasley, ‘Editor’s Preface’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, vii. 155 Pasley, ‘Editor’s Preface’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, vii.

25 with his father, Kafka’s ‘emotional life was dominated by his relationships […] with a series of women’156. In August 1912, at Brod’s apartment, Kafka ‘was introduced to Felice Bauer, a Berlin secretary’, who would play ‘a large part in his life for the next five years.’ 157 The pair were engaged twice, in 1914 and 1917, but never married.158 It has often been speculated that the tumultuous relationship between Felice and Kafka had an impact on his writing. For example, it was only ‘a month after meeting her’ that Kafka ‘wrote to her the first letter of what was to be a voluminous correspondence’,159 which also coincided with the autumn of the year when ‘he began both and Metamorphosis.’160 In 1913, Kafka went to see Felice in Berlin and in the same year The Judgement was written and the ‘short story dedicated to her was published in Brod’s yearbook, Arcadia.’161 It was also around 1913 that ‘Kafka is believed to have fathered a child’162 during an affair with Grete Bloch a friend of Felice. However, apart from a brief note in a letter by Grete to a musician friend, ‘there seems to be no other evidence of the boy’s existence or of Kafka’s paternity.’ 163 Nonetheless, Kafka had been in correspondence with Grete for months prior to the alleged conception, which had become ‘increasingly intimate’164 and thus eventually led to the dissolution of Felice and Kafka’s first engagement. Despite this, a second engagement occurred, before their ‘ambivalent relationship’ was finally terminated for good in 1917 following Kafka’s diagnosis with tuberculosis.165

156 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 157 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 158 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 159 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 160 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 161 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vi. 162 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 163 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 178. 164 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, xv. 165 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96.

26 Despite his illness, Kafka went on to have relationships with at least three other women in his lifetime. In 1919, despite ‘parental disapproval’166, Kafka was ‘engaged briefly to a girl he met at a summer resort’, 167 or more likely ‘convalescing at the same pension’168. In the course of his quick engagement to Julie Wohryzek, ‘they found a cheap one-room flat in Prague-Wrschowitz’ and ‘the banns were published.’ 169 However, ‘two days before the wedding they lost the flat’, and Kafka ‘decided against marrying.’170 Soon after, in 1920, Kafka met and became attached to a young writer and translator, Milena Jesenká-Pollak,171 a ‘married woman living in Vienna with her husband.’ For two years, Kafka and Jesenká172 ‘wrote fervid and frequent letters to each other but they had few meetings.’173 Finally, as the tuberculosis took its toll, Kafka found ‘a devoted companion’ in ‘Dora Diamant, [sic] a young Jewish woman from Poland.’174 According to Hall and Lind, Dora Dymant [sic] was ‘a young German girl’ that he lived with and who cared for him175 until close to his death. Eventually, Kafka returned to his parental home, where he had for the most part lived ‘throughout his life except for brief periods when he occupied bachelor quarters in Prague, visited his sister in the country, or was a patient in various sanatoria.’176

On June 3, 1924, Kafka eventually succumbed to illness and died at the age of 40 in a sanatorium outside of Vienna.177 On June 11 he was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Prague. He was ‘survived by both his parents and three

166 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, xvii. 167 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 168 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, xvii. 169 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 242. 170 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 242. 171 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 172 Name as according to Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 173 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 174 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 175 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 176 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 177 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95.

27 sisters.’178 His father Hermann died in 1932 (age 79), his mother Julie in 1934 (age 78)179 and his sisters were, according to Hall and Lind, ‘murdered by the Nazis in 1944.’180

Kafka’s ‘genius as a writer and his immense influence on twentieth-century thought are now recognised throughout the world,’181 due in large part to the efforts of his friend and literary executor Max Brod, who published most of Kafka’s work posthumously. While ‘only some forty stories and fragments’ were published in Kafka’s lifetime, his literary output was much more extensive, with the current ‘critical edition of his work’ expanded to ‘sixteen volumes’182. His ‘failure to be published was not for want of a publisher but was due solely to Kafka’s own reluctance to have his writing appear in print.’183 Knowing that he was dying, Kafka ‘asked’184 or ‘instructed’185 Brod ‘to destroy his manuscripts upon Kafka’s death.’’186 Kafka’s last note to Brod, ‘was probably intended to, and certainly did, place Brod in an agonizing predicament.'187

But everything else of mine which is extant (whether in journals, in manuscript or letters), everything without exception in so far as it is discoverable or obtainable from the addresses by request (you know most of them — it is chiefly … and whatever happens don’t forget the couple of notebooks in …’s possession) — all these things without exception and preferably unread (I won’t absolutely forbid you to look at them, though I’d far rather you didn’t and in any case no one else is to do so) — all these things without exception are to be burned, and I beg you to do this as soon as possible. 188

178 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 179 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 180 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 95. 181 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 182 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 183 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 184 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 185 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 186 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature, 96. 187 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 188 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix.

28 It has been argued that the note, with its ‘hesitation’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘hints’ about the location of his work are all ‘recognisably the essence of Kafka’ and that ‘the paragraph is by no means the work of a man determined that his manuscripts should be destroyed.’189 Brod ‘could not bring himself to obey this inimitably tentative request’190 to destroy the writings and thus ‘undertook their publication instead.’191 Brod went on to edit and publish ‘Kafka’s unfinished novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) and ‘other shorter works appeared posthumously in a more sporadic fashion.’192 Brod’s reasons for not complying with Kafka’s wishes were published in his postscript to The Trial193, citing the ‘recollection of a conversation three years before Kafka’s death’194 about his literary intentions, to which ‘Brod had replied “If you seriously think me capable of such a thing, let me tell you here and now that I shall not carry out your wishes.”’ 195 Brod ‘was, in effect, to devote his entire life to the preservation, recovery, transcription and publication of Kafka’s writings’, yet ‘for all his devotion much is known to have been lost’:196 burned or destroyed by the hands of Kafka himself when he was alive. It has been claimed that ‘Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work’197. In addition, ‘an unknown quantity’ were ‘confiscated by the Gestapo’ and thus must be presumed destroyed.198

In recent times, many of Kafka’s original writings and documents are still tied up in legal disputes with his estate. According to investigative journalist Elif Bautman, from Brod’s possession ‘about two-thirds of the Kafka estate

189 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 190 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 191 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 192 Penguin Books, preface to The Trial, np. 193 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 194 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 195 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 196 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, iix. 197 Elif Batuman, ‘Kafka’s Last Trial,’ The New York Times Magazine (Sept 22nd, 2010). 198 Heinemann, introduction to Franz Kafka, vii.

29 eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library.’ 199 The remainder of Kafka’s work, ‘believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts’, had been retained by Brod in until his death in 1968, ‘when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe.’200 The National Library of Israel is now disputing the legality of Hoffe’s will, which ‘bequeath[ed] the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters.’201 The library claims ‘a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will.’ 202 The case has stirred the question of ethics over Brod’s decision to override Kafka’s written will, and the manner and power of his editing with the ability to selectively present Kafka’s original work, thoughts and,

in particular, the nature of his political views and alignments.

Research aim

The overarching aim of the dissertation is to understand Kafka’s relationship to architectural space, form and structure. In recent years, Kafka scholarship has paid increasing attention to the spatial properties of his fiction, investigating the inherent values or meanings that they may embody. From these studies it emerges that Kafka may have been connected to architecture in a number of ways. ‘For the Kafka reader it should come as no surprise that Kafka thought in architectural terms’ writes architectural scholar Ayad B. Rahmani, continuing that

no sooner than his stories begin we see their characters confronted with walls and doors, corridors and rooms, not so much to reach functions but more to bang against physical resistances, the purpose of which is to grow intellectually, or at least become more aware of one’s existence in the world.203

For Rahmani, in Kafka’s work the ‘house does not merely serve as a place of habitation but as a place whose architectural elements stand as objects of

199 Batuman, ‘Kafka’s Last Trial’ 200 Batuman, ‘Kafka’s Last Trial’ 201 Batuman, ‘Kafka’s Last Trial’ 202 Batuman, ‘Kafka’s Last Trial’ 203 Rahmani, Kafka’s Architectures, 3.

30 resistance’204. Rahmani describes the architectural settings of Kafka’s fiction as ‘much like an obstacle course whose hurdles make an athlete stronger, more aware, more alert.’205

A similar view is developed within the present dissertation about the potential meaning or use of architectural elements in Kafka’s fiction. However, unlike Rahmani, who connects Kafka’s fictional spatial configurations to the works and ideologies of key historical twentieth-century Modernists, including Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, this dissertation aims to understand how spatial elements within Kafka’s fictional interiors are connected to his everyday waking life, and how their repetition or reiteration in his fiction may be understood in psychoanalytical terms. The process of examining interior topographies of Kafka’s fiction, which this dissertation undertakes, eventually uncovers a series of elements which it describes as ‘islands of control’.

An ‘island of control’ is a recurring, nested spatial structure which is found in Kafka’s fiction. The primary ‘islands of control’ uncovered in this dissertation in The Trial and The Metamorphosis consist of six items within an interior topology: the room, the frames of windows and pictures, the furniture cabinet, the desk, the bedside table and the sofa chair. Rahmani suggests that architectural features, like walls and doors, are not intended to control access, but serve as ‘objects of resistance’206 in Kafka’s fiction. This present dissertation uncovers a similar and particular spatial construct of this nature, involving interiors, furniture and objects, which serve as a type of personal power, or temporary fortification, for the main protagonist within the narrative. These islands function as a means to repel, or as a type of psychological bastion presented in spatial form. In a sense, the islands identified in this dissertation are also a type of ‘obstacle course’207 in Rahmani’s terms, because each ‘island’ is encountered in the due course of the narrative. However, in contrast to Rahmani’s theory, that the

204 Rahmani, Kafka’s Architectures, 3. 205 Rahmani, Kafka’s Architectures, 3. 206 Rahmani, Kafka’s Architectures, 3. 207 Rahmani, Kafka’s Architectures, 3.

31 architectural obstacles serve to strengthen the main protagonist, the findings of this dissertation demonstrate that these ‘islands’ inevitably fail, leading to the exposure of the ultimate ‘final bastion’, the body itself (see Chapter 7).208 Also in contrast to Rahmani’s view, the historical accounts of the function of these interior items converge with their psychoanalytical meaning, which connects with their purpose in the course of Kafka’s narrative. Significantly, Kafka’s three most important stories each commence with the protagonist in a confined bedroom space and end with his death, a pattern that highlights two important aspects of the uncanny and requires the navigation of a series of spatial constructs, each of which function as self-contained spaces, or islands or control (see Chapter 3).

The earliest of these three works, the short story The Judgement (1912), was Kafka’s first ‘successful’ work, representing a ‘complete opening of body and soul.’ 209 The story details the relationship between a man, Georg Bendemenn, and his father. The story opens with Georg, in his bedroom, writing a letter to a friend. He then decides to check on his father in an adjacent room. In the conversation that ensues, his father accuses him of (amongst various other, real and imagined slights) deceiving his friend in business, not grieving the death of his mother and subsequently not taking care of his father, wishing him to death also. At the end of the story, the father ‘sentences’ Georg to death by drowning, after which Georg runs from the room and throws himself from a bridge over a stretch of water, to his death. There has been much speculation about the Oedipal themes of the story and the connections it suggests between its narrative and characters, and Kafka’s own life.

The short story The Metamorphosis (1915), Kafka’s best known work and one which is often cited as a seminal work of short fiction of the twentieth century, begins with Gregor Samsa being awoken in his bedroom to find he has been transformed into a monstrous insect-like creature. Working as a travelling salesman, he is now unable to support his parents and sister. The story

208 Significantly, this realisation resonates with the death drive aspect of the uncanny. 209 Franz Kafka diary as quoted by Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 1.

32 progresses from the family reaction and adjustments to Gregor’s new form, and Gregor’s consequential isolation and entrapment within his room. Towards the end of the story, in an angry outburst, Gregor’s father throws an apple at his back, causing an injury from which Gregor eventually dies.

While Metamorphosis, and the Judgement are both focused on a specific interior (the bedroom), the novel The Trial (1925), is an extended example of the Kafkaesque labyrinth. Like the previous two short stories, it begins with its protagonist, the banker Joseph K., waking in his bedroom, where he is under arrest by two wardens. The wardens fail to explain the authority they represent, or the nature of the crime K. is charged with. The story that follows describes K.’s search for the remote and inaccessible authority that has prosecuted him. The nature of his crime is never revealed (to K. or the reader) and the novel ends with his being sentenced to death, and his subsequent execution in a quarry.

Each of these stories begins with the main protagonist in the comfort of a familiar interior; the tragic narratives that subsequently extend from this space are those which Vidler describes as part of the contrasting motif of the uncanny: the secure and comfortable homely interior and its unanticipated and extraordinary invasion. This ‘doubling’ of the interior, as both homely and unhomely, satisfies Freudian criteria. Furthering the unease and uncanny quality of each case is the actual death of the protagonist. Yet Vidler, for the most part, steers clear of assessing the spatial elements of Kafka’s fiction in The Modern Unhomely, despite its apparent relationship with Freudian theory and psychoanalytical modes of the uncanny. This lost opportunity is the trigger for the present work.

In terms of the significance of Kafka to architecture at a wider and more pervasive level, it is initially found in Vidler’s description of the work of Daniel Libeskind. Vidler states that Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish museum (Fig. 1.1) is ‘especially redolent of the “Kafkaesque labyrinths” of Caligari.’210 Here Vidler links

210 Hans Dieter Schaals, ‘Spaces of the Psyche in German Expressionist Film,’ AD Architecture and Film II Vol. 70 (2000).

33 a late twentieth-century building’s aesthetic expression directly to the crisis of modernity that was experienced by the Modernist and Expressionist artists, designers and architects of the early twentieth century in Europe. In Vidler’s terms,

[t]he virtual fears of late modernity, expressed in the eloquent silence of Daniel Liebskind’s bunker-like interiors in the Jewish Museum [...] bear at least a family resemblance to the old phobias of modernity as imagined in the shattered perspectives of expressionism, the rigorous abstraction of purism, the unsettling dreams of surrealism, the Merzbau of Dada. In both, a sense of loss and mourning informed by psychological and psychoanalytical theory has led to an effort to construe an aesthetic equivalent: in both, the generation of this equivalent has forced the aesthetic into new and sometimes excessive modes of expression.211

Granted, there is an aesthetic resonance between the warped Expressionist tropes of Caligari (Fig. 1.2) and Libeskind’s similarly violent work, however, the term ‘Kafkaesque’, in itself, is a complex adjective and requires careful thought before its application in architecture might fully be appreciated.212 How exactly is the work of Daniel Libeskind Kafkaesque (Fig 1.3)? What exactly is a Kafkaesque mode of spatiality? Kafka and his connections to both Freud and the wider Expressionist circles of the 1900s suggest that a Kafkaesque mode of spatiality might assume the artistic tropes of that period; however, this would be a surface aesthetic that belies the existence of a deep-seated issue. On a more intrinsic and personal level, the architect Daniel Libeskind was, like Kafka, of Jewish ethnic origin. Born in post-war Poland in 1946 213, his family emigrated to America. Libeskind does much work in Germany, including The Jewish Museum

211 Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 1-2. 212 For example, Kafka academic Jack Greenberg traces the use of the word ‘Kafkaesque’ from legal circles to, strangely, the description of a baseball player’s stream of consciousness musings before hitting a home run. Outside the legal context, Greenberg writes that the term Kafkaesque is a synonym for ‘weird’, ‘bizarre’, ‘phantasmagoric’, ‘strange’, ‘mad’, ‘confusing’, ‘bewildering’, ‘nightmarish’, ‘absurd’ and ‘bureaucratic.’ Greenberg claims that there is a connection between Kafka’s work and his writing, and therefore the Kafkaesque arose out of frustrations with bureaucratic management, which translated into his fiction. See: Jack Greenberg, ‘From Kafka to Kafkaesque,’ in The Office Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 355-357. 213 Daniel LIbeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin (University of Michigan: G+B Arts International, 1999), 118

34 in Berlin, and his portfolio of work includes a set design for a stage production of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.214 Libeskind has also spoken about the significance of E.T.A Hoffman’s stories — an important and integral author to Freud in his theorisation of the uncanny (see Chapter 3) — and the influence they play in his architectural conception.215

Methods and limitations

The research method employed for the present work involves critical textual analysis and exposition. This method is supplemented with a system of diagramming to illuminate key spatial relations. The critical theory is drawn from architectural, literary and psychoanalytical sources. Art theorist Hal Foster notes that ‘in the backlash against’ such theory that occurred in the ‘1990s, psychoanalysis was attacked with particular rancour and, in the eyes of most commentators, routed on the question of its truth value.’216 Sylvia Lavin adds that the appealing ‘sense of resistance and avant-garde’ of literary criticism, applied in architectural terms, resulted in the loss of ideas about function and form, and consequently critical theory was supposedly redundant in making a serious contribution to the world of architectural ideas.217 Foster suggests that to use critical theory as a mode of interpretation has the aim of generating a new understanding, which he acknowledges may be both critically insightful and ideologically blinded. Thus, Freudian psychoanalysis is viewed in the context of

214 Maggie Toy, ‘Architecture and Film’, Architectural Design 64 (Nov 1994): 44-45 215 LIbeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin, 21. 216 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, xviii. 217 Sylvia Lavin, "The Uses and Abuses of Theory," Progressive Architecture 71, no. 8 (1990)

35

Fig. 1.1 Daniel Libeskind, Berlin Jewish Museum. Source: "Daniel Libeskind: Danish Jewish Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark 2001-2004." A+U: Architecture + Urbanism September 2009, Vol. 9 (No. 432): 68-73.

Fig 1.2 Film still, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 1920. Directed by Robert Wiene. Source: Image Entertainment, Blackhawk Films and Decla-Film-Gesellschaft, 1997.

36

Fig. 1.3 Daniel Libeskind, set design for Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Source: Toy, M. (1994). Architecture and Film. (London, Academy Editions): 44-45.

37 the present research as an historically and contextually valid theory that might be critically applied to generate a reading of spatial dimensions, properties or qualities in Kafka’s work. However, the reading is not one that will prescribe any answers or offer a clear or simple solution. Thus, as Linda Groat and David Wang note, psychoanalytical critical theory forms an ‘emancipatory’ system of research enquiry, recognising that this reality is one of many. 218

A number of limitations arise in addition to the issues of repeatability and universality (and in the case of graphics, artistic license) that post-structuralist methods entail. The most significant of these is the issue of language or of translation. Both Freud and Kafka wrote primarily in German, and Kafka sometimes in Czech, languages of which the author is not fluent in, thus English translations of the work have been referred to. However, due to the popularity and significance of both Freud and Kafka, a good abundance of ‘Standard Editions’ and other comprehensive translations of their texts are widely available. Given that there are a number of English editions of the key works of Freud and Kafka, these different translations may be compared and contrasted for linguistic nuance and thus offer accurate insight as into the meaning of the original German text. For Freud, the ‘Standard Edition’ translation collection edited by James Strachey has been referred to primarily. These works were produced in consultation with Freud’s daughter, psychoanalyst Anna Freud, and so are widely considered the benchmark of English translations. For Kafka, the translations published by Penguin Classics have been referred to, being one of the most popular and thus widely available versions of his work. The Penguin translations have been produced by noted German literature scholar, Idris Parry. Given the authority of each of these figures, these English editions can be assured to be of considerable accuracy and even contextual insight. Although in terms of literature theory, it is unusual that a thesis would place such value on secondary resources, in comparison to archival and primary resources such as those original documents by Kafka held in the Bodelian Library, UK. However,

218 Linda Groat and David Wang, Architectural Research Methods (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002), 33.

38 this thesis is one that is ultimately structured by themes and concerns of architectural theory, rather those of literature and the pursuit of the historically empirical.

Further to this, Czech translator Eric Dluhosch points out that whilst ‘most Western scholars are proficient in the major languages of historical discourse — usually French, English and German, and occasionally even Russian’. However, ‘few are even faintly familiar with Czech, Hungarian, or Polish, not to mention other “exotic” languages such as Romanian, Bulgarian, and Slovak.’219 The lack of availability of Czech resources is further hindered by the political censorship of the previous Eastern Bloc, which has opened up only in the last decade Thus, while critical historical documents are now becoming available, some documents will not have been translated or be in an available or reproducible form due to historical and political reasons that are beyond the language abilities of a translator or researcher. Further to this, Kafka himself was notorious for burning his own notebooks, or instructing others to do so, most significantly his last domestic partner Dora Diamant and his executor Max Brod. Although Brod reneged on Kafka’s request after his death, much of his work has been destroyed and lost.

In addition to reviewing key spatial theories about Kafka, the chapters develop a series of diagrams, identifying topological, spatial or architectural properties, to support the text. These diagrams visually explain the theory and highlight theoretical connections between psychoanalysis, architecture and literature. They are neither definitive interpretations of the ideas being discussed, nor are they intended to replace the theory they are illustrating. In some cases, the diagrams are an oversimplification of a concept that has many important and complex connective strands. However, while they simplify or distil complex ideas, the diagrams are a valuable way of conceptualising and visualising key

219 Eric Dluhosch, ‘Translator's Introduction’ in The Minimum Dwelling. (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 2002), xiii.

39 relationships and points of resonance between architectural, literary and psychoanalytical constructs.

Structure of the dissertation

The broad arrangement of this dissertation is in three parts. The first part, entitled ‘Critical Theory’, contains a review of key literature across three chapters. The first of these chapters, Chapter 2, investigates previous models for spatial structures that have been identified in Kafka’s fiction. In particular, it reviews two theoretical and abstract spatial models, the first proposed by Benjamin and the second by Deleuze and Guattari. Both models depict a binary structure, which can be correlated to the binary structure theorised as underpinning much of Freudian theory, including the uncanny. The second part of the chapter examines two examples of spatial constructs, one in the work of Kafka and the other, Freud. The similarities between the two spatial constructs are used to suggest that Kafkan spatiality has inherent Freudian value, and that the two remarkably similar spatial structures may also belie the influence of standard domestic architectural tropes of the period.

Chapter 3 in Part I reviews the theory of the psychoanalytical uncanny as it appears in Freud’s writings, and its relationship to literary and architectural theory. It develops the themes introduced previously in Chapter 2, by first conceptualising Freud’s theory of the uncanny as a binary model, and then examining its relationship to architectural theory. Freud’s essay, On The Uncanny, was a departure from his more clinical studies of psychoanalysis, suggesting a link between psychoanalytical theory and creative practices, including architecture, as Vidler’s writing on the subject reveals. Four conditions of the uncanny are outlined in this chapter: the context of early twentieth century post-war Europe; clinical types of spatial anxiety that were prevalent at the time; the use of the uncanny as a purposeful literary device; and the unconscious impression of surrounding space that implicitly affects literary output. Both Freud and Kafka, at some point, experienced the uncanny in a number of these modes.

40 Thus, a theoretical nexus arises that offers particular connections between Kafka and Freud, and their respective literary and psychoanalytical theories.

Chapter 3 examines the way in which the spatial properties and functions of domestic architecture are integral to the construction of literary narrative. It extends the previous argument to identify the way domestic architecture inherently informs and shapes literary practice, historically and contextually. In this chapter, the notion that there are universal types of structures that inform both narrative and character constructs are examined by reviewing the theories of Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and Joseph Campbell and his parallel idea of the ‘monomyth’. These theories of universal narratives are then correlated to Freud’s theory about the universal value of dream symbols, thereby suggesting a connection between literary theory and psychoanalysis. According to both theories, there are universal character and narrative motifs. The chapter expands these ideas to argue that there must be an equivalent universal architectural language in literature and psychoanalysis. Noting that this is essentially a structuralist viewpoint — the idea of a universal and unconscious architectural language, or langue — the chapter then considers the existence of an architectural parole: that is, the unconscious universal understanding of architecture shaped and affected by idiosyncratic experiences. This idea of a universal system of langue, and an idiosyncratic parole, is reflected in Freud’s developing theories of the time, that there are universal dream ‘symbols’, and then idiosyncratic dream ‘elements’. The idea of a universal langue and an individually fashioned parole is the fundamental dialectic that informed Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of language220, which has since been imported into many other disciplines and forms the basis of structuralism and a point of departure for post-structuralism.

Part II of the dissertation, entitled ‘Spatial Biography’, has one lengthy chapter which reconstructs a spatial biography of Kafka’s life. Its aim is to trace Kafka’s domestic lodgings around Prague, and other architectural experiences

220 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)

41 by the way of vacation visits and unconscious dreaming. The spatial biography then situates these spaces and experiences within the larger architectural and urban context of Prague, and the artistic paradigms of the period. The experience of these spaces is also evaluated in relation to the waking events of Kafka’s life. Through this process it is demonstrated that Kafka’s real life spatial experiences were synthesized into his dreams, by way of replication but also as metaphor for his waking experiences, offering spatial clues as to his emotional state regarding these experiences and thus serving as a type of architectural parole. The chapter concludes that if architecture and domestic space from real life infiltrated Kafka’s dreams, and his dreams informed his fiction, then it could be argued that a spatial parole exists in Kafka’s fiction.

Part III has a single chapter entitled ‘Islands of Control’, which examines spatial structures and forms in Kafka’s fiction and how these relate to both his waking life experiences (spatial parole) and universal architectural thematic histories and symbolism (spatial langue). This chapter examines Kafka’s texts through the critical theory that has been developed in Part I, and identifying points of overlap, connections, and moments of synthesis and doubling between Kafka’s lived spaces and his fictional constructs. The chapter identifies the presence of a recurring, nested spatial and architectural structure in Kafka’s fiction, which is entitled an ‘island of control’. The spatial structure is made up of a series of elements, including interiors, furniture and objects, all of which play a similar role in The Trial and The Metamorphosis. The spatial structure resonates with elements of Kafka’s waking life and Freudian theory, as well as more universal architectural histories, and suggests a different way of looking at the function and meaning of architecture in Kafka’s fiction. The dissertation concludes, in Chapter 7, with a summary of the key elements uncovered, and an extrapolation of its central notion of an island of control, to consider the body itself as the final island, albeit not a solely architectural one.

42 Chapter 2. Models of Kafkan spatiality

Introduction

In Haruki Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore, the central protagonist Kafka Tamura remarks that ‘I think what [Franz] Kafka does’ In the Penal Colony is provide ‘a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machine […], as a sort of substitute for explaining the situation we’re in.’ 1 The formal and spatial properties of Kafka’s mechanism, a machine for torturing the body, is presented as a structural metaphor for the way in which the world at large can distress and impress on the body and psyche. ‘What I mean’ continues Tamura, ‘is that the machine is Franz Kafka’s device ‘for explaining the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of the machine.’ 2 This exchange identifies the presence of a mechanism within Kafka’s fiction which is both explicitly part of the narrative, and yet also encapsulates the essence of his entire worldview, that is, the rather nebulously defined concept known as ‘the Law’ (Chapter 1). Moreover, as in the example of the elaborate torture machine described In the Penal Colony, and other examples to be discussed later in the dissertation, these devices are often tied to particular spatial, formal or structural patterns and properties.

In the case of the Penal Colony machine, the connection between the working device and Kafka’s bleak conception of the ‘Law’ is a particularly immediate and violent one. In the story, the unnamed commander of the apparatus describes its features: ‘the shape of the harrow corresponds to the human form’ with a ‘harrow for the trunk’, and additional ‘harrows for the legs’3. For the head is reserved ‘one small engraver’ with ‘two

1 Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (New York: Vintage Books, Random House Inc., 2005), 61. 2 Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (New York: Vintage Books, Random House Inc., 2005), 62. 3 Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, in Metamorphosis, translated and edited by Malcom Pasley (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin Books, 1992), 133.

43 kinds of needles in a variety of patterns.’4 The ‘condemned man’ is ‘laid under the harrow’5, and the system of needles vibrate to inscribe ‘the sentence passed’6 into his flesh. Such violence acts as a real punishment as well as a rhetorical measure of justice. Architectural theorists Michael Ostwald and R. John Moore point out other historical examples of bodily rhetorical justice: ‘the cutting out of the tongue as a punishment for blasphemy was seen as erasing the right to speak; the amputation of a person’s hand was seen as erasing that person’s ability to steal’ 7 To this degree, Ostwald and Moore suggest that ‘Kafka’s machine is intriguing because it inscribes the power of the state both physically and symbolically into the criminal’s flesh.’ 8 As an imaginative and surrealistic device of fiction, the Penal Colony machine presents as a dark investigative extended metaphor for the way in which the world and its modus operandi inflicts consequence onto the individual and shapes them (see Chapter 7).

Other spatial structures exist in Kafka’s fiction that support the investigation of such laws and systems, but present themselves in much more abstracted, thematic or nuanced ways. This chapter examines several spatial structures associated with Kafka’s fiction, its productive climate, political context and psychological parallels. The chapter is not yet concerned with specific representations of buildings or interiors in Kafka’s fiction; instead its focus is on larger relations which are conceptualised spatially. These relations include those associated with tradition and modernity, power and control, the conscious and subconscious. Specifically, the chapter commences with a discussion of two models of Kafkan spatiality, the first derived by Walter Benjamin and the second by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The chapter then examines and maps these two models alongside Freud’s recurring theoretical trope, his dualistic spatial explanation for a wide range of perversions and conditions. Through this process the chapter sets up

4 Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, 133. 5 Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, 137. 6 Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, 135. 7 Michael J Ostwald, and R. John Moore, Disjecta Membra: Architecture and the Loss of the Body (Sydney: Archadia Press, 1998), 30. 8 Ostwald and Moore, Disjecta Membra, 30.

44 an initial working framework that identifies how a series of dualisms operate spatially in Kafka’s literature and in Freudian theory.

To confirm the viability of this general framework at a finer scale, the second part of the chapter examines a spatial structure in one of Kafka’s short stories (Before the Law) and a parallel structure in Freud’s description of the unconscious and repression. In both cases the chapter reveals the presence of a system of repulsion and control which, while serving different purposes, has a similar spatial representation. Through this two-part process — the first focusing on large scale examples and the second more specific and precise cases — the chapter begins to identify a possible structure for Kafkan spatiality and, moreover, its inherent Freudian value and application.

The structure of Kafkan spatiality

The idea that spatial structures both pervade and sustain Kafka’s fiction is not a new one. Philosopher Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of Kafka, was the first to suggest this idea, conceptualising the construction of Kafka’s written oeuvre as ‘an ellipse’9 (Fig. 2.1). Benjamin’s ellipse has two foci, positioned ‘far apart’ from each other, which represent Kafka’s inner and outer worlds. The foci are both balanced in their influence and oppositional in the positioning. Collectively and geometrically, these points shape and define the limits of the ellipse, which represents the idiosyncratic locus of Kafka’s literary production. For Benjamin, one focus was ‘determined by mystical experience (which is above all the experience of tradition)’, and the other ‘by the experience of the modern city dweller.’10 Anthony Vidler elaborates on the properties of these two points, which define Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s fiction and its spatiality, describing them collectively as creating a type of ‘vertigo machine’:

9 Walter Benjamin, ‘Letter to Gershom Scholem on Franz Kafka’ in Selected Writings: 1935-1938. Eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006), 325. 10 Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 210.

45 On one side Benjamin poses Kafka’s ‘modern citizen, who knows he is at the mercy of vast bureaucratic machinery, whose functioning is steered by authorities who remain nebulous even to the executive organs themselves, let alone the people they deal with,’ a figure well exemplified in The Trial, and on the other, Kafka’s equally powerful inner world ‘frequently so serene and so dense with angels,’ through the frame of which he looked out as modernity. Kafka’s ‘ellipse,’ then, was for Benjamin a kind of vertigo machine, drawing together worlds that could in no way be commensurate either on the level of reality or of dream.11

Benjamin’s spatial model of the origins of Kafka’s fiction proposes that it arises from the balanced polarity that exists between an outwardly lived phenomena and an inner psychological construct. The twin poles of the ellipse each exert a level of force or tension in the structure, which can only find stability or safety when perfectly balanced.

In 1975, French philosophers and psychoanalysts, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, revisited Benjamin’s idea, producing their own spatial translation of Kafka’s work (Fig. 2.2). However, whereas Benjamin’s spatial structure was largely abstract and geometric, Deleuze and Guattari’s took on several additional architectural dimensions. As the first step in their model, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two spatial and topological states; the first being ‘infinite-limited-discontinuous-close and distant’ and the second ‘unlimited-continuous-finite-faraway and contiguous.’12 They propose that these states are reflective of the newly emergent political structures of Kafka’s era, arguing that ‘they are distinct because they correspond to two different bureaucracies — the old and the new; the old, imperial despotic, Chinese bureaucracy, the new capitalist or socialist bureaucracy.’13 Vidler explains that the old, imperial and despotic model can be conceptualised in terms of the Great Wall of China which was, ‘itself, imagined by Kafka as a structure of discontinuous blocks, a “system of piecemeal construction,’” as Kafka terms it, that would, according to Kafka’s “scholar,” provide xxx

11 Vidler, Warped Space, 210. 12 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 75. 13 Deleuze and Guattari, Towards a Minor Literature, 75.

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Fig. 2.1 Benjamin’s ellipse. Source: author

Fig. 2.2 Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘states’. Source: Deleuze and Guatarri, Towards a Minor Literature, 75

47 the most secure foundations for a new Tower of Babel.’14 In Deleuze and Guattari’s model, this imperial and despotic model is depicted both spatially and architecturally as ‘a sequence of broken arcs in a circle surrounding a spiral tower at the center.’15 In contrast, the second state, the new capitalist or socialist model, is inspired by the ‘spatial complexities of the bureaucratic legal offices in The Trial’ which locate spaces ‘that are furthest away from each other — in close contiguity.’16 Thus, Vidler observes, in The Trial, ‘K. will drive to see the painter Tintorelli, “in a suburb which was almost diametrically opposite the end of town from the offices of the Court,” only to find that a second door leads from the studio into the Judge’s quarters.’17

However, while Deleuze and Guattari’s two architectural states are described in largely oppositional terms, they are also complementary and coexistent. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that in their spatialisation of Kafka’s fiction, they ‘want to emphasize that there is simultaneously a real distinction between the two states of architecture and the possibility of their interpenetration.’18 Vidler goes on to note that this manner of operation and the relationship between the two states is the same as that found in Benjamin’s previous schema, whereby the two spatial states are, in a way ‘parallel to the “two foci” of Benjamin’s elliptical model.’19 In this way, Deleuze and Guattari’s model can be seen as an extended architectural elaboration of Benjamin’s ellipse, which points to a greater structural fabric underpinning Kafka’s work, in the form of synergetic ‘pairs of opposites’ (Fig. 2.3). There are certainly differences between the content and intent of the two similar spatial structures. For example, the former is concerned with the mental conditions and contexts out of which a fictional production arises and the latter with the spatio-political mechanisms of the state within which this production occurs. However, as Vidler observes, they both use these polarising, yet still balanced, spatial

14 Vidler, Warped Space, 212. 15 Vidler, Warped Space, 212. 16 Vidler, Warped Space, 212. 17 Vidler, Warped Space, 212. 18 Deleuze and Guattari, Towards a Minor Literature, 75. 19 Vidler, Warped Space, 212.

48 structures to explain the conditions under which Kafka lived and wrote. Furthermore, they suggest that as Kafka’s fiction is necessarily shaped by this context, these structures also explain the various tensions inherent in his work. Thus, both Benjamin’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial models of the power of Kafka’s fiction rely on the presence of two poles or states that are at once both oppositional and interrelated, working together to generate the force that impels Kafka’s literature. Although the poles present in Benjamin’s ellipse represent a different set of concerns (tradition versus modernity) to those of Deleuze and Guattari’s (old versus new political systems), they share a similar conceptual foundation. In particular, they each propose that Kafka’s work arises from the existence of a ‘pair of opposites’ that conflict with each other, but also intersect synergistically. It is through this way of understanding the space of Kafka’s fiction that a connection with psychoanalysis can be identified.

For Freud, such ‘sets of antitheses’ or ‘pairs of opposites’ are sources of psychical conflict. Freud first identified the conflicting presence and influence of such polarities in his 1905 essay Three Theories of Sexuality, where he identified them as a cause of perversion. In that essay, Freud noted that ‘we find, then, that certain among the impulses to perversion occur regularly as pairs of opposites; and this […] has a high theoretical significance.’20 For Freud, the study of sadism, for instance, showed the simultaneous and underlying presence of masochistic pleasure. Thus, two conflicting yet still connected impulses worked in concert to sustain the perversion.

Psychoanalytical theorists Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis assert that this dualistic explanation of the construction of perversion is a recurring theme in Freud’s work. They argue that ‘the idea of the pair of opposites is part of a permanent and essential element in Freud’s thinking — namely, the basic dualism which provides the ultimate explanation of psychical conflict.’21 They further explain the importance of dualism in Freud’s theory, noting that,

20 Sigmund Freud quoted in J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, ‘Pairs of Opposites’ in The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1973), 295. 21 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Pairs of Opposites’, 295.

49 [w]hatever the form taken by this dualistic conception at the various stages in Freud’s doctrine, one is constantly coming across such terms as ‘pair of opposites’, ‘opposition’, ‘polarity’, etc. the idea is not only used descriptively — it also appears at various levels of conceptualisation: in the three antitheses which define the successive libidinal positions of the subject, namely active/passive, phallic/castrated and masculine/feminine; in the pleasure-unpleasure opposition; and, at a more radical level, in the instinctual dualism (love/hunger, life instincts/death instincts). 22

Thus, these dualities are not restricted to psychical conflict or the origins of perversion, similarly structured pairs of opposites are recurring tropes in Freud’s ‘psychoanalysis of neuroses.’ 23 Furthermore, Laplanche and Pontalis’s observations on the dualistic structure of Freudian theory has several parallels to Benjamin’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s readings of Kafka’s work (Fig. 2.4). For example, Laplanche and Pontalis describe the way in which ‘pairs of opposites’ work to produce psychical conflict, noting that, ‘the terms paired off in this way invariably belong on the same plane but that neither can be reduced to the other.’24 Thus, neither element of the pair can ‘engender the other in dialectical fashion — rather, the pair is the root of all conflict, the motor of any dialectic.’25

Viewed in this way, the spatial structure of Kafka’s literature is reliant on a ‘pair of opposites’, two ideas with contrasting content but which are located within a proximity sufficient for their forces to settle into a state of equilibrium, and thereby ‘belong on the same plane’, working together. Indeed, by extension this might suggest that the dualisms identified by Benjamin and Deleuze and Guattari collectively function as a ‘motor’ or mechanism that works to transmute psychical trauma into literature. In the case of Kafka, the tensions in the productive climate (Benjamin) and political context (Deleuze and Guattari) enable the dialectical position found in his writings.

22 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Pairs of Opposites’, 295. 23 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Pairs of Opposites’, 295. 24 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Pairs of Opposites’, 295. 25 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Pairs of Opposites’, 295.

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Fig. 2.3 Deleuze and Guattari’s states. Source: author

Fig. 2.4 Laplanche and Pontalis’ dualisms in Freudian theory. Source: author

51 While psycho-spatial and politico-spatial models proposed by Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari may provide insight into particular facets of Kafka’s fiction, both models lack contextual nuance (how they relate to the spaces of Kafka’s life) and chronological consideration (how they relate to the events of Kafka’s life). While Benjamin’s model makes reference to these two factors, they are not developed further. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari offer a valuable alternative approach for reading Kafka and critiquing Freud, along with a general precedent for constructing a psycho-architectural model. However, their work draws from Lacan and the other psychoanalysts who re-read Freud in the 1970s, rather than situating Kafka as a contemporary of Freud. Their model also sought to articulate the relationships that psychoanalysis maintains with political and capitalist modes of thought; relationships that are beyond the scope of the present study. However, the models of Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, with their similar underlying spatial structures, do lay the theoretical foundations for a new framework for analysing the spaces of Kafka’s life and fiction. Furthermore, the writings of Freud, Vidler, and Viktor Shklovsky in later chapters, all provide valuable tools with which to produce and support such a framework.

The next part of the chapter moves from the scale of these bigger abstracted spatial patterns to the scale of a precise and specifically described spatial example shared between Kafka and Freud. The abstract spatial structures identified by Benjamin and Deleuze and Guattari for Kafka’s fiction, and the similar binary abstraction that Laplanche and Pontalis note in Freud’s literature, demonstrate greater schematic ties that can be drawn between the two. However, these concepts are of a general application only, and such abstractions are not sullied by contextual effects.

The following section examines the spatial qualities of Freud’s analogy describing the mechanism of psychological repression, and the similar spatial case of Kafka’s short parable Before the Law. This next echelon of detail requires a case study approach, whereby considerations of contextual factors are to be included and considered in the analysis and comparison. Factors such as chronology, geography, the individuality of Freud and Kafka and their respective writing fields (psychology and fiction), theoretical modes, sociality, contacts and even personal lives become necessary to reason or

52 account for the similarities and differences present in the two specific examples. Yet despite differing contextual backgrounds, a fundamental architectural diagram is shared between the two examples. This implies that the wider theoretical connections are applicable in the next level of detail and can be found in specific architectural examples. The resonating binary idea of the universal and the idiosyncratic, as it also similarly underpins linguistic constructions (that is, Ferdinand de Saussure’s langue and parole) and literary theory, is discussed in Chapter 4.

Kafka’s parable and Freud’s analogy

A simple spatial correlation between the structure of Freudian repression and of Kafka’s political world-view is found in Kafka’s 1915 parable Before the Law. 26 In this story, a man from the country arrives at an undisclosed location in order to learn about ‘the law’, but is denied entry to the law’s location by a doorman. The short tale, begins as follows.

Before the law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and asks to be admitted to the law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot at present grant him admittance. The man considers, and then asks whether that means he may be admitted later on. ‘It is possible,’ says the doorkeeper, ‘but not at present.’ 27

Initially undeterred by the doorkeeper, the man from the country notes that the gateway to the law is ajar, and that it is possible to see the interior beyond.

When the doorkeeper sees this he laughs and says: ‘If it tempts you so, then try entering despite my prohibition. But mark: I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. In hall after hall stand other doorkeepers, each more powerful than the last. The mere sight of the third is even more than I can bear.’ The man from the country has not expected such difficulties; the law, he thinks, should be accessible to everyone and at all times; but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose, his long,

26 Freud’s Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis spatial analogy was published in 1915-17. Kafka’s parable ’Before the Law’ was written in December 1914, and first published in 1915. 27 Franz Kafka, ‘Before the Law’ in Metamorphosis (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin Group, 2010), 165.

53 sparse, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better, after all, to wait until he receives permission to enter.28

As the story unfolds, the man from the country makes many attempts to gain access through the door by ingratiating himself to the doorman. In return, the doorkeeper indulges the man with small talk and impersonal questions, but always concludes the conversation by confirming that he cannot yet admit him.29 By the end of the story, the man from the country has failed to gain access and realises it is because he has apparently displeased the doorman in some way.

What is striking about the spatial properties of Kafka’s parable (Fig. 2.5) is its similarity to Freud’s spatial analogy for explaining the mechanism of psychological repression (Fig. 2.6). Just two years after Kafka’s Before the Law was published, Freud’s introductory lecture on the subject of repression describes its nature using the ‘crudest’ and ‘most convenient’ analogy, ‘a spatial one’.30 Like Kafka’s parable, Freud’s analogy is worth quoting in detail:

The unconscious system may […] be compared to a large ante-room, in which the various mental excitations are crowding upon one another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment, a sort of reception-room, in which consciousness resides. But on the threshold between the two there stands a personage with the office of a door-keeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the reception-room when he disapproves of them. You will see at once that it does not make much difference whether the door-keeper turns any one impulse back at the threshold, or drives it out again once it has entered the reception room; that is merely a matter of the degree of his vigilance and promptness in recognition. 31

Freud then develops his spatial metaphor for repression to explain that the excitations in the ante-chamber of the unconscious are invisible to the consciousness in the second room. Thus the conscious and unconscious are kept apart, and unaware of each other.

28 Kafka, ‘Before the Law’, 165. 29 Kafka, ‘Before the Law’, 165. 30 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture XIX: Resistance and Repression’ in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970 ), 240 31 Freud, ‘Resistance and Repression’, 240.

54 When they have pressed forward to the threshold and been turned back by the door-keeper, they are “incapable of becoming conscious”; we call them then repressed. But even those excitations which are allowed over the threshold do not necessarily become conscious; they can only become so if they succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness. This second chamber may be suitably called the preconscious system. In this way the process of becoming conscious retains its purely descriptive sense. Being repressed, when applied to any single impulse, means being unable to pass out of the unconscious system because of the door-keeper’s refusal of admittance into the pre-conscious. The door-keeper is what we have learnt to know as resistance in our attempts in analytic treatment to loosen the repressions. 32

While Freud was generally uneasy about attributing modern neuroses to architectural or urban factors, preferring instead to attribute these problems to sexual aetiologies, the concepts and analogies he used to explain them, like his explanation of repression, were nonetheless constructed in an explicitly architectural manner. 33 Noting this psycho-spatial tendency, Vidler argues that ‘Freud’s own models of the mind, of the unconscious, were famously spatial, if not architectural,’ and that ‘certainly his dreams, if not interpreted through spatial psychology, were set in spatial scenes before being translated into symbols.’34

Freud’s spatio-cognitive practice was effectively reinforced by the social and cultural context in which he was generating his theories. The fin-de-siecle period in Europe promulgated and maintained ‘a dominant psychology that founded itself on spatial apprehension and experience’,35 a context Vidler explicitly describes as ‘an era obsessed with space’36. Through the power of the zeitgeist, and even by virtue of his very own laws and theoretical proclivities, spatial themes would haunt Freud’s work, even as they were deployed primarily in the service of his psycho-sexual agenda.

32 Freud, ‘Resistance and Repression’, 240. 33 Anthony Vidler, ‘Staging Lived Space: James Casebere's Photographic Unconscious’ in James Casebere: the Spatial Uncanny (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2001), 19. 34 Vidler, ‘Staging Lived Space: James Casebere's Photographic Unconscious’, 19. 35 Vidler, ‘Staging Lived Space: James Casebere's Photographic Unconscious’, 19. 36 Vidler, ‘Staging Lived Space: James Casebere's Photographic Unconscious’, 19.

55 Charles Rice, when examining Freud’s spatial analogy for explaining repression, observes that it is striking for ‘the way in which it doubles the domestic situation experienced by Freud’s clientele, a situation which, in many cases, had driven them towards the therapeutics of psychoanalysis.’ 37 Rice further notes that Freud’s description of the analogical space of repression, which emphasises the controlled relationship between its entrance hall and drawing room, also acknowledges the presence of ‘jostling between individuals’ and associated ‘acts of guardianship that permit or deny access’.38 When the setting and narrative of Kafka’s story and Freud’s analogy are aligned in this way, it demonstrates the use of space for the repression of thought. Kafka’s man from the country has been, in Freud’s words, ‘turned back by the watchman’, being forever banished to the unconscious. To develop these parallels further, and in a way that prefigures the arguments of later chapters, the law, with its urban location, and the conscious are both protected by the layers of doors and watchmen. Both the jostling, disturbed unconscious and the countryside devoid of modern systems, are interlopers, who are repelled by Kafka’s and Freud’s fortifications. Both spatial systems can be read as constituting a structure of repulsion and control, one psychological and the other more overtly political or social, but with underlying psychological ramifications.

These two psycho-spatial accounts, with their narrative and topological similarities, not only reinforce the relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the Kafkaesque, but also point to the possibility that they are inspired by the same source: the interior. As Rice argues, the bourgeois domestic interior, and the subsequent behaviour it regulated, ‘offered a powerful explanatory tool in Freud’s understanding of x

37 Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 40. 38 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 40.

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Fig. 2.5 Plan diagram for the architectural structure presented in Kafka’s fable Before the Law. Source: author

Fig. 2.6 Plan diagram of Freud’s spatial analogy of repression and the preconscious. Source: author

57 the structure and workings of the psyche.’39 It was precisely this type of domesticity that provides ‘the context wherein psychoanalysis went to work.’40 In Before the Law such an interior offers a means by which to explain the ‘Law’ as a fundamental underpinning base structure or system. In one sense, Jack Greenberg defines Kafkan ‘Law’ as pertaining to vague bureaucratic or judicial processes that result in an outcome that is unclear, convoluted or futile. The concept stems from a series of similar fictional moments that occur in Kafka’s The Judgement, The Trial, In the Penal Colony and ‘Before the Law’. However, the more psychological impact of such systems, and their spatial analogues, is a sense that something is ‘weird,’ ‘bizarre,’ ‘phantasmagoric,’ ‘strange,’ ‘mad,’ ‘confusing,’ ‘bewildering,’ ‘nightmarish,’ and ‘absurd.’ 41 These secondary meanings, which are implicit in the concept of the ‘Kafkaesque’, stress that there is a psychological dimension to the spatial structure.

Conclusion

This chapter examines the spatial structure of Kafka’s literature through the models of Benjamin and Deleuze and Guattari, noting that Kafka’s novels arise from, and reflect, a social and political context wherein a balanced polarity exists, in which two seemingly opposing states are complementary and coexistent. Through a review of these models, along with Vidler’s observations about their implications, a spatial structure for Kafka’s literary context and content is suggested. This spatial structure is also revealed, through a series of diagrams and accounts, to have parallels with Freud’s spatial analogies, which he repeatedly used to explain the essence of perversion.

While these models work at a macro level to explain various properties which are implicit in Kafka’s fiction (including the tension between tradition and modernity implicit in Benjamin’s ellipse and between two opposing and equally restrictive modes of

39 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 40. 40 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 40. 41 Jack Greenberg, ‘From Kafka to Kafkaesque,’ in The Office Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 356.

58 bureaucracy in Deleuze and Guattari’s model) they have not been demonstrated at a micro-level. Thus, the second part of the chapter explores and diagrams the spatial properties of one of Kafka’s parables, and the analogous architectural structures in Freud’s description of psychological repression. In both cases, it is notable that spatial and architectural devices are used to enforce a controlled relationship between the individual (countryman/unconscious) and that which is to be attained (law/pre- conscious).

By identifying the presence of a series of parallel structures — in the theoretical models of Benjamin, and Deleuze and Guattari, in the first instance, and then in the examples of Kafka and Freud’s work thereafter — this chapter confirms the possibility of uncovering a Kafkan spatiality, which opens up the possibility of examining further spatial relationships between Kafka and Freud. Given that Benjamin’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s models of duality in Kafka resonate with the ‘pairs of opposites’ that underpin many of Freud’s theoretical constructions, it is possible that Kafka’s work may also additionally exist as a machination of Freud’s dualism of the familiar and the unfamiliar — that is, the Freudian uncanny.

The next chapter examines the Freudian concept of the uncanny in more detail, in order to elaborate on the spatial themes and models in the present chapter. Throughout the following chapters these themes are developed to demonstrate that, like Freud’s topographies of the mind, architectural and spatial analogies provide Kafka with a means to reconstruct his own lived space (‘espace vecu’) in his fiction, pairing the two (real life and fiction) like Benjamin’s twin foci, but in a Freudian elliptical construction of the uncanny.

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Chapter 3. Rethinking the Freudian architectural uncanny

Introduction

Ernest Jones notes that in the months after Freud finished the first draft of his major theoretical turning point, the text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he decided to fill his few spare hours before leaving for a treatment in the spa town of Bad Gastein by ‘rewriting an old paper of his which he found in his drawer. It was an interesting one, entitled “The Uncanny [Das Unheimlich]”’.1 Despite being a diversion from Freud’s more clinical considerations, the essay marked a major bridge between psychoanalytical theory and creative practices, and to have major and notable significance in art, literary and eventually architectural criticism. Given that the root of this construct is the primary notion of home [heim], the uncanny as a psychoanalytical notion is also pertinent to architectural theory, as evidenced by Vidler’s extensive writing on the subject.

This chapter develops the themes introduced in Chapter 2 by analysing Freud’s theory of the psychological uncanny as a binary model, and then considering Vidler’s architectural reading and extrapolation of this theory. The chapter demonstrates how the uncanny offers particular connections between Kafka, Freud and architecture. The content of Freud’s ‘old paper’ on the uncanny also provides, both in its content and the spatial analogies used to diagram or explain it, another important model of spatial thinking about Kafka’s work.

Four conditions of the uncanny are analysed in this chapter. The first condition is associated with the unhomely context of early twentieth century Europe. It has been argued that feelings of the uncanny — of unease,

1 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Great Britain: Penguin Books and Hogarth Press, 1961), 504.

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displacement, suspicion and confusion — permeated the continent in the post- world war period, as demonstrated by literary, scientific and psychological works, including those of Freud and Kafka. The second condition, which builds on the first, arises from the relationship between Freud’s concept of the uncanny and the wider spatial anxiety that was prevalent at the time. As a result, in 1919, Freud’s development of the uncanny saw the concept inaugurated as an important psychoanalytical construct. The third condition frames the uncanny as a literary device. It is associated with the use, in fiction, of quotidian architectural and spatial forms, and especially those of domestic settings, to evoke eerie emotional responses. The conscious use of this literary device in the construction of unsettling fiction of the era, is examined as part of this condition. The fourth and final incarnation of the uncanny involves the way spatial impressions unconsciously influence and thereby shape creative or scholarly literary production. The key example of this parallel tradition of the uncanny is, somewhat ironically, Freud’s own study. This space possessed several characteristics that were significant for both the treatment of patients and for the construction of Freud’s own theories. Through this analysis of Freud’s study, the final section of this chapter suggests one way in which spatiality might also impress or play such a role in the construction of Kafka’s fiction. The chapter concludes by offering an explanation of the nature of the spatial uncanny, both deliberate and accidental, in Kafka’s work. From the wider conceptual connections between Freudian theory and the Kafkaesque demonstrated in the last chapter, this chapter focuses in to examine one particular Freudian construct, the uncanny [unheimlich], and establish its connection to both architectural and literary theory. The subsequent chapter investigates the nature and importance of spatial motifs alongside those of character and narrative in literature.

The context of the uncanny and its influence

Beginning in the late years of the eighteenth century, steadily flourishing into the early years of the twentieth century, many European writers observed a

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strong sense of alienation and anxiety associated with the rise of modern cities. Rousseau2, Baudelaire3 and Benjamin4, all wrote accounts of the city from the perspective of a flâneur (an often socially displaced urban wanderer) while Simmel 5 and Marx 6 offered commentaries of the effects of space from, respectively, the perspectives of sociology and political theory. All of these writers noted the detrimental impact of the growth of urban space and the associated mechanisation on society. Vidler argues that the unease underpinning all of these accounts of modernist alienation, social estrangement and anxiety, could be explained in terms of the uncanny. For Vidler, the uncanny was part of the larger condition of modernity, being ‘born out of the rise of great cities, their disturbingly heterogeneous crowds and newly scaled spaces.’7 The emotional phenomena of the uncanny — the homelessness so ‘wistfully meditated on’ by ‘philosophers from Martin Heidegger to Gaston Bachelard’8 — was readily apparent in society. It arose, in part at least, from the changing architecture of homes and cities, as the as-yet unfamiliar consequences of industrialisation, new modes of capitalism and wartime production efforts, gained momentum throughout Europe. The unfamiliar architectures that resulted from these new regimes generated the sense of unease, an emotional and spatial anxiety that was especially apparent in the years surrounding the two World Wars, 1914 to 1945.9

2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1791], Reveries of the Solitary Walker (London: Penguin Books, 1980) 3 Charles Baudelaire [1857], Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1992) 4 Walter Benjamin [1927-1940], Passagenwork (The Arcades Project), trans. Howard Eiland, ed. Keving McLaughlin (World: Belknap Press, 2002) 5 Georg Simmel [1903], ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) 6 Karl Marx [1867-1894] Das Kapital (Boston: MobileReference.com, 2008); Karl Marx and Frederich Engels [1848], The Communist Manifesto, ed. Jeffrey C. Isaac (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) 7 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 4. 8 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 7. 9 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 9.

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Both Kafka’s fictional and autobiographical writings were produced at the time when ‘tensions and communal anxieties’10 were fuelling the rise of what would later be known as the First World War. Julian Preece writes that in Kafka’s time, Europe was ‘torn at the seams by the First World War and the Versailles settlement which concluded it and [was] then shredded by Hitler.’11 Biographer Sander L. Gilman adds that in Prague, where Kafka was living at the time, ‘the war furore was […] as intense as anywhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Especially for the Jews who could “prove” their patriotism: but to whom, the Germans or the Czechs?’12 The first half of the twentieth century saw Europe in a continual state of iniquitous cultural change. Correspondingly, Preece argues that Kafka’s fiction ‘partakes of a multitude of discourses simultaneously’,13 — including religious and cultural complexities, scientific advances (psychoanalysis) and economic change (industrialisation) — and is thus typified by ‘images of anxiety and cultural dislocation.’14

This underlying sense of societal apprehension also affected Freud and the developing science of psychoanalysis. For example, Jones writes that Freud maintained no great level of interest in political events ‘unless they impinged on the progress of his own work’, and that ‘1914 was the first time they did so.’15 In the following year, the essay Reflections on War and Death captured Freud’s growing disillusionment, Freud writing that his homeland was torn asunder by a war that was ‘more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days [… and] it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as that has preceded it.’16 As a consequence of this, he notes, ‘the flowering time of our science has

10 Julian Preece, ‘Introduction: Kafka's Europe’, from The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. 11 Preece, ‘Introduction: Kafka's Europe’, 1. 12 Sander L. Gilman, Frank Kafka (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 77. 13 Preece, ‘Introduction: Kafka's Europe’, 1. 14 Preece, ‘Introduction: Kafka's Europe’, 1. 15 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 424. 16 Sigmund Freud [1915], ‘Thoughts on War and Death’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV (1914-1916), ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 278.

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been violently disrupted’ and ‘there is [a] bad time ahead for us.’17 In his essay of 1919, On the Uncanny, the subject of which was likely ‘present in his mind as early as 1913’18, Freud again confessed to being distracted by the war and its impact, noting that his contribution was not thorough ‘for reasons which, as may be easily guessed, lie in the times in which we live.’19 At this time, Freud’s bleak vision of human events and society began to permeate both his psychoanalytical interests and theories.20

This change is reflected in Freud’s proposition that, in addition to the driving motivation of desire, there also existed a ‘death drive’. Freud’s growing preoccupation with death is visible in his 1920 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.21 According to Briony Fer, the essay is ‘notoriously the most difficult and most problematic of Freud's texts.’22 The concept of the death drive ‘makes the whole edifice of psychoanalysis appear to veer off its track, where death, as opposed to desire, suddenly emerges at the centre of the system.’23 While Beyond the Pleasure Principle may contain Freud’s most extended excursion into the realms of expiration and ruination, the concept of the death drive has its origins in Freud’s earlier essays, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death and The Uncanny.

The latter of these works, The Uncanny, is an important prelude to Freud’s developing understanding of some of the darker territories of psychoanalysis, namely the death drive, and the way these constructs are played out, not in clinical form, but mitigated through everyday life and art. Thus, Vidler observes,

17 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 430. 18 James Strachey, editor preface to Sigmund Freud, ‘On The Uncanny’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 218. 19 Freud, On the Uncanny, 219-20. 20 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 494-5; Franz Kafka, ‘A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German-Bohemia (1916)’ in The Office Writings, eds. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 336-345. 21 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 17. 22 Briony Fer, ‘Fault-Lines: Surrealism and the Death Drive’ Oxford Art Journal, 18(1), (Jan 1995): 158. 23 Fer, ‘Fault-Lines: Surrealism and the Death Drive’, 158.

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the uncanny ‘seems to incorporate, albeit in an unstated form, many observations on the nature of anxiety and shock that [Freud] was unable to include in [his] more clinical studies of shell shock.’24 Indeed, ostensibly The Uncanny evolves out of a literary genre and the emotional response it evokes. In particular, ‘Freud’s close reading of E. T. A Hoffman’s ghost story “The Sandman” has become celebrated and much commented upon in literary criticism.’25 For example, Falkenberg stresses the way it captures the ‘cognitive uncertainty’ of the era, evoking the ghastliness of both its content and the ‘absurdly meaningless universe’ it evokes. 26 However, Freud’s overarching interest in the fantastic or macabre fiction of the era was not literary, it was social and psychological. Indeed, Freud’s essay on the uncanny presents a middle ground between historic clinical psychology and artistic expression, accounting for the way different types of psychic trauma might be expressed creatively, rather than clinically. Thus, Freud’s uncanny has a dual operation at its core; it is part of a trauma mechanism of the mind and also a literary device. As such, Freud’s essay presents a key theoretical connection between psychoanalysis and the aesthetic arts, including literature and, as the next section reveals, architecture.

Returning to the context for The Uncanny, Freud’s controversial theories of war neuroses and their treatment suggest a connection to Kafka. Freud’s proposal, that the nature of war-trauma involves real physiological damage to the nerves, was divisive and controversial. ‘The great majority of physicians no longer believe that the so called “war-neurotics” are ill as a result of tangible organic injuries to the nervous system’ 27 Freud wrote. Such an opinion disregarded Freud’s own clinical observations:

24 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 7. 25 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 26 Marc Falkenberg, ‘Rethinking the Uncanny in Hoffmann and Tieck Peter Lang’, Studies in Modern German and Austrian Literature 10 (USA: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2005), 10. 27 Sigmund Freud [1919] ‘Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 212.

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the war neuroses manifested themselves for the most part as motor disturbances— tremors and paralyses—and although it was plausible to suppose that such a gross impact as that produced by the concussion due to the explosion of a shell near by or being buried by a fall of earth would lead to gross mechanical effects, observations were nevertheless made which left no doubt as to the psychical nature of the causation of these so-called war-neuroses.28

Other practitioners considered returning war-neurotics as malingerers, and thus compromised subjects of any treatment regime. As Freud’s biographer Ernst Jones recounts, ‘at the end of the war there were many bitter complaints about the harsh, or even cruel, way in which Austrian military doctors had treated the war neurotics.’ 29 Some of the most notorious ill-treatment of this type occurred in the Psychiatric Division of the Vienna General Hospital, where patients were subjected to ‘electrical treatment’30, the outcomes of which were controversial to the point that, in 1920, ‘the Austrian military authorities instituted a special Commission to investigate the matter.’31 Freud was invited to submit an opinion on the matter and appear at the Commission. His subsequent report, Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics, maintained that ‘a knowledge of psychoanalytical principles would have been more useful than electrical therapy.’32 Freud also identified the conflict of interest that existed ‘between [a] doctor’s duty to put his patients interests always first and the demand of the military authorities that the doctor should be chiefly concerned with restoring patients to military duty.’ 33 Freud’s highly political report was received very poorly at the Commission, with the Director of the Psychiatric Division, Professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg, maintaining that ‘all the patients with war neuroses were simply malingerers’34. As a result of this, the Commission violently rejected Freud’s argument. Jones writes that for Freud, the Commission

28 Freud, ‘Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics’, 212. 29 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 493. 30 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 494. 31 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 493. 32 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 495. 33 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 495. 34 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 495.

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‘confirmed his opinion of the insincerity and hatefulness of the Viennese psychiatrists.’35 It highlighted a deep scientific rift, involving potent ethical and political concerns about the treatment of war-neuroses. A similar rift, between the needs of the individual and of the state, or between the health of the mind and of the body, is evident in Kafka’s observations of the experience of returning soldiers.

In Prague, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute readily accepted the view that shell-shocked soldiers were suffering from genuine neurological damage, and therefore required serious medical care. This was demonstrated by their concerns over the burgeoning need for in-patient psychiatric facilities for men returning from the front. Kafkan scholars Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner write that ‘during the war, neurological disorders, such as traumatic neurosis (or shell shock), spread so quickly that they were soon to be considered a “psychic epidemic.”’ 36 In addition to this, Kafka, in his official capacity as first assistant to the Chief Inspector of the Institute, Eugen Pfohl, was already well acquainted with conditions of trauma as it particularly arose from workplace accidents.37 Thus the impending, en masse return of shell-shocked men from the front was anticipated as triggering a real medical crisis, which would require public funding and political will to solve. As such, in 1916 Kafka wrote an impassioned and polemical article for the Institute, entitled A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German Bohemia, with the purpose of commissioning sponsors for building the medical facility. His article begins with a highly evocative description of the potential for mass trauma to affect everyday city street life:

Soon after the outbreak of the war, a strange apparition, arousing fear and pity, appeared in the streets of our cities. He was a soldier returning from the front. He

35 Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 495. 36 Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, ‘Commentary on “A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia (1916)”’ in Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 343. 37 Richard T. Gray, Rith V. Gross, Rolf J. Goebel, Cayton Koelb, ‘Pfohl, Eugene’ in A Franz Kafka Encyclopaedia (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Publishing Group), 219.

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could move only on crutches or had to be pushed along in a wheelchair. His body shook without cease, as if he was overcome by a mighty chill, or he was standing stock-still in the middle of the tranquil street, in the thrall of his experiences at the front. We see others, too, men who could move ahead only by taking jerky steps; poor, pale, and gaunt, they leaped as though a merciless hand held them by the neck, tossing them back and forth in their tortured movements.

People gazed at them with compassion but more or less thoughtlessly, especially as the number of apparitions increased and became almost a part of life on the street. But there was no one to provide the necessary explanation and to say something like the following:

What we are seeing here is neuroses, most of them triggered by trauma but other forms as well.

Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner note that Kafka’s essay ‘explicitly refers to the problem of the public perception of neurotic disorders’, 38 and furthermore his essay ‘especially highlights the danger of the public gaze getting used to the phenomenon of a mass derangement as part of life on the street.’ 39 The evocative imagery of Kafka’s piece, designed to persuade by fear and bordering on propaganda, no doubt fuelled the psychoanalytical zeitgeist of uncertainty and fear of mental derangement.40

Despite some artistic licence, at its heart Kafka’s article expresses genuine concerns about public health and offers valid proposals or initiatives to address them. Kafka’s article asserts that ‘cures can only be achieved by the proper residential therapy and not through outpatient treatment.’ 41 He describes a facility in Prague, similar in purpose to that of the Viennese General Hospital but which, according to Kafka, performs far more satisfactorily. ‘The only other

38 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ’Commentary on “A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia” (1916)’, 344. 39 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ’Commentary on “A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia” (1916)’, 344. 40 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (London: Dobson, 1947) 41 Franz Kafka, ‘A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia (1916)’ in Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 336-345.

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existing facility’ of this type, Kafka writes, is ‘Professor Marguilies’ temporary psychiatric hospital, housed in barracks on the Belvedere in Prague. Granted that this outstanding scientist and physician is doing everything humanly possible, [but] in this instance the possible cannot meet the need.’42 Kafka observes that the hospital is ‘small, shoddily built, lacking in equipment and supplies [and] short of the most basic necessities.’ 43 He goes on to argue that much could be achieved to support mental trauma if a ‘large, fully equipped psychiatric hospital’ could be placed in the hands of ‘such an excellent director.’44 Thus, Kafka’s view aligns with a similar argument posed by Freud, which maintains that war-trauma was a serious neurological condition requiring medical care.

The development of neuroses specific to war saw both Freud and Kafka consider the complex and pervasive nature of trauma. Psychoanalysis and War Neuroses, from 1919, saw Freud struggle with the theory that neuroses arise from the desire drive. ‘Neuroses arise from a conflict between the ego and sexual instincts’45, Freud wrote, but then admits that ‘this portion of the theory has not yet been proved to apply to the war neuroses.’ 46 In this work Freud begins to distinguish between the ‘ordinary neuroses of peace-time’47 and that of war trauma. Freud maintained that the fundamental root cause of war-trauma, if not sexuality, remained at large; this was until his conception of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in 1920. Freud nonetheless defended his concept of neurotic development, stating that ‘if the investigation of the war neuroses (and a very superficial one at that) has not shown that the sexual theory of the neuroses is correct, that is something very different from its showing that the

42 Kafka, ‘A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia (1916), 337. 43 Kafka, ‘A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia (1916)’, 338. 44 Kafka, ‘A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia (1916)’, 338. 45 Sigmund Freud [1919] ‘Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol 17, 1917-1919, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 209 46 Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses’, 208. 47 Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses’, 208.

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theory is incorrect.’48 However, Freud’s conclusion on the matter conflicts with his effort to distinguish a difference between peace-time and war-time trauma in the first place: ‘the war neuroses are only traumatic neuroses, which, as we know, occur in peace-time too.’ 49

Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner write that Kafka ‘squarely contested’50 Freud’s differentiation between ‘war-time’ and ‘peace-time’ trauma. In his capacity at the Workers Insurance Institute, Kafka had witnessed various clinical forms of trauma which arose from workplace and railroad accidents, not just war, and as such duly observed neuroses that were not derived from sexual disorders. Kafka draws connections between the case of industrialisation and its accidents and the advent of war and its technologies. ‘Just as the intensive operation of machinery during the last few decades’ of peacetime jeopardized, far more than ever before, ‘the nervous systems of those so employed, giving rise to nervous disturbances and disorders, the enormous increase in the mechanical aspect of contemporary warfare has caused the most serious risks and suffering for the nerves of our fighting men.’’51 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner argue that in suggesting that trauma was not ‘the product of the opposition between “war” and “peace”’, but rather generated by the opposition between ‘“machine” and “human nerves,”’ Kafka highlights that dealing with the effects of trauma is ‘the continuity of a battle that began well before the war and that, more importantly, would continue after its end.’52

Contextually, it is important to note where Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses (1919) sits in the chronology of Freud’s theoretical development, and the scope and context of its purpose. A clinical and very political study, the essay was a precursor to Freud’s Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War

48 Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses’, 208. 49 Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses’, 208. 50 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ’Commentary on “A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia” (1916)’, 343. 51 Kafka, ‘A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia (1916)’, 340. 52 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ’Commentary on “A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia” (1916)’, 343.

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Neurotics (1920), a report written for a Commission set up by the Austrian War Ministry. In between these two forays, Freud refined and published his essay, The Uncanny, which, considering the larger scientific context of Freud’s extensive writings, demonstrates a genuine interest in, and active awareness of, the far-reaching implications of trauma, by way of non-clinical forms, such as fairy tales, fictional literature and artistic practice. As Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner observe, ‘the origin of trauma reaches further back in history’53; both Kafka and Freud demonstrate an implicit acknowledgement, and developing understanding, of the many causes and forms that trauma neuroses can take and then proliferate.

The uncanny in psychoanalysis and architecture

Whilst Freud’s concept of the unheimlich (introduced in Chapter 1) and his related theory of the death drive were largely shaped by both post-war European society and politics, along with the aggravated state of his own profession, The Uncanny essay was equally informed by Freud’s personal interests in linguistics, literature, art and aesthetics. In 1919 Freud wrote that it ‘is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics.’ 54 For Freud, aesthetics was ‘understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of that feeling.’55 One aspect of that aesthetic feeling, the unheimlich, was a subject that for the most part had been neglected by aestheticians, leading Freud to lament that, almost ‘nothing is to be found upon this subject in comprehensive treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime — that is, with feelings of a positive nature.’56

53 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ’Commentary on “A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia” (1916)’, 343. 54 Freud, On the Uncanny, 219. 55 Freud, On the Uncanny, 219. 56 Freud, On the Uncanny, 219.

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In order to identify which aesthetic conditions led to these unpleasant feelings, Freud commenced his investigation into the topic of the uncanny by examining the word itself. In his native language, Freud writes that the ‘German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’] — the opposite of what is familiar’. However, the frustration associated with understanding this concept tempts the reader to, ‘conclude that what is “unheimlich” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.’57 And yet, he also notes that ‘naturally not everything that is new and familiar is frightening.’58 The meaning of the word-pair is therefore not solely polar, binary or oppositional (Fig. 3.1). Freud writes ‘what interests us most […] is to find that amongst its different shades of meaning the word “heimlich” exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, “unheimlich”.’59 Thus Freud acknowledges that ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’;60 thereby tracing the slow unfolding of the homely into the unhomely.61

These complex graded meanings of the word unheimlich, as it is translated in a number of languages and texts, saw Freud determine that the definition of the uncanny ultimately resided in the mind as a psychoanalytical mechanism. ‘We can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das Unheimliche’, Freud writes, ‘for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.’ 62 Freud concludes that ‘these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny.’63 Thus the uncanny, established as the psychological return of ‘something familiar which has been

57 Freud, On the Uncanny, 219. 58 Freud, On the Uncanny, 219. 59 Freud, On the Uncanny, 224. 60 Freud, On the Uncanny, 226. 61 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 25. 62 Freud, On the Uncanny, 241. 63 Freud, On the Uncanny, 247.

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repressed.’64, accepted that something could simultaneously appear as both familiar and unfamiliar. Furthermore, it was a phenomenon that was not only founded in the present and in reality, but which operated to additionally engage with fragments of past trauma, rooted outside of the realm of consciousness (Fig. 3.2).65

Freud’s definition of the uncanny — something that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar — brings into question the nature and circumstance of its trigger, the ‘something’. Vidler and Rice have each explored Freud’s uncanny in the context of spatial experience and theory, arguing that the ‘something’ is an innately spatial concept. As Rice points out, the word unheimlich is derived from, and thus begins with, the architectural concept of heim, the home. It is thus ‘rooted by etymology and usage in the environment of the domestic.’66 Rice describes the unheimlich condition as ‘a phantom, an unsettling double that xxxx

64 Freud, On the Uncanny, 247. 65 The diagram in Fig. 3.2 presents an explorative visual model for the uncanny, and other modes of the balance between the conscious and unconscious. The diagram consists of a circle and ellipse, which represents the conscious self (circle) and the unconscious self (ellipse). Conceptually, and as shapes, they are independent. However, a common and necessary focus point binds the shapes overlaid. In this way, the geometric construction of the ellipse and circle are not independent. It is in this way, too, in which the dynamics between the conscious self and the unconscious self occur: the conscious state of the self is not independent from, and is affected by, the workings of the unconscious self. Conversely, the unconscious is not independent or without affect from conscious operation. It is this mechanism that leads to the event of the uncanny. 66 Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 49.

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Fig. 3.1 The uncanny as a black and white linguistic and phenomenological equation. Source: author

Fig. 3.2 The linguistic meaning of heimlich/unheimlich, as underpinned and generated by Freud’s psychological concept of repression and his description of the ‘return of the repressed.’ Source: author

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arises out of the cosiness and protection offered by the domestic interior.’67 Vidler previously developed this theme to examine a specifically architectural counterpart of the linguistic unheimlich, and define the architectural uncanny as an ill-defined sense of fear that arises out of spatial experience. This phenomenon is thought to have its roots in a dubious spatial image held within the mind, where the spatial uncanny arises out of a confused homology between previous and current experience. The resulting spatial image is ‘a representation of a mental state of projection,’68 reflecting an idiosyncratic identification with a surrounding space. Vidler also argues that the spatial essence of the uncanny involves a process of ‘doubling’. However, because the doubling is ‘experienced as a replica of the self’ it becomes ‘all the more fearsome because apparently it is the same.’69 Where the psychological uncanny is produced through the conflict of the self (familiar) in relation to an apparently similar (unfamiliar) self or phantom, for Vidler, the spatial uncanny lies in the properties of the between. Specifically, he describes it as a precise psychological zone that ‘elides the boundaries of the real and unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming’ 70 (Fig. 3.3). Such a description connects the fundamental psychological concept of the self to the spatial concept of home. It also stresses, in a way which will become more important in Chapter 5, the innately unsettling relationship between the spaces of waking life and its dreamt counterpart.

While the unheimlich condition was often seen as operating in the domestic realm, an awareness of its properties also emerged at the time when the entire experience of space was being reconceptualised through the lens of psychology. Vidler writes that ‘the uncanny emerged in the late nineteenth century as a special case of the many modern diseases, from phobias to neuroses’, and was ‘variously described by psychoanalysts, psychologists, and

67 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 11. 68 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 11. 69 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 1. 70 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 1.

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Fig. 3.3 ‘A slippage between waking and dreaming’: the mechanism of the architectural uncanny according to Vidler. Source: author

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philosophers’71 alike. For this reason, the condition of the uncanny had ‘escaped the overprotected domain of the short story’ and was ‘no longer easily confined to the bourgeois interior.’72 The uncanny, as both psychological condition and an aesthetic response, ignored social and cultural boundaries, affecting the rich and poor alike, until it became a condition that could exist at any social stratum. As Vidler observes, ‘from the 1870s on, the metropolitan uncanny was increasingly conflated with metropolitan illness, a pathological condition that potentially afflicted the inhabitants of all great cities.’73 In this era psychological anxieties were not only spatially described through notions of domesticity and its breakdown, but were enshrined in psychology through recognition of urban spatial phenomena and perception, as the uncanny ‘became identified with all the phobias associated with spatial fear, including “la peur des espaces” or agoraphobia, soon to be coupled with its obverse, claustrophobia.’74

Agoraphobia and claustrophobia were especially difficult to conceptualise at the time, because they posited that space could be frightening because it was, at the same time, too large for some and too small for others. Furthermore, Paul Carter notes that Freud himself mentioned suffering from agoraphobia in his youth. This fear is not only of the volume of a space, but also of the effort of crossing it, something which Theodore Reik argues is at the core of Freud’s construction of various concepts using spatial opposites. 75 Furthermore, regardless of whether it is a fear of the scale of a space, or of the act of crossing it, these anxieties were connected to, and generated by, idiosyncratic, neurotic or even schizophrenic perceptions.76 Thus, the uncanny is the product of an

71 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 72 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 73 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 74 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 75 Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia (London: Reaktion, 2002). 76 Vidler writes that the studies of French psychotherapist Pierre Janet and, later, the work of sociologist Roger Caillois ‘seemed to be relating spatial disorientation to the pathology of derealisation discussed by Freud, and beyond this to the host of spatial phobias, from agoraphobia to acrophobia and claustrophobia. See Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 174.

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individual psyche, and in that sense is, as Vidler argues, ‘still an interior, but now an interior of the mind, one that knew no bounds in projection or introversion.’77

Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s observations on the dichotomy of spatial production notes that, even from the point of view of capitalism, where space is conceived of as purely a commodity or political tool, there is an inherently indefinable experiential condition to space. In the first instance, there is the ‘abstract space of the experts (architects, urbanists, planners),’78 which is quantitative, measurable and ocular-centric in its representation, and is thereby a commodity. However, as Lefebvre points out, there is the additional co-existence of an elusive, experiential and qualitative aspect of spatial production that maintains origin ‘in childhood, with its hardships, its achievements and its lacks. Lived space bears the stamp of conflict between an inevitable, if long and difficult, maturation process.’79 Lefebvre argues that from the other side, that is the capitalist point of view, space is inherently a dichotomy that contains an emotive, instinctual and psychological dimension.

The psychological incarnation of the uncanny, as opposed to its more social and political form, is specifically an effect of the mind of the individual, as projected onto space, and not a quality that can be intrinsically built into architecture. It is therefore, the result of a representation or an image. Thus Vidler writes that,

[t]he uncanny is not a property of space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming. […] Certainly no one building, no special effects of design can be guaranteed to provoke an uncanny feeling. But in each moment of the history of representation of the uncanny, and at certain moments in psychological analysis,

77 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 6. 78 Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Production of Space’, in ed. Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 145. 79 Lefebvre, ‘The Production of Space’, 145.

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the buildings and spaces that have acted as sites for the uncanny have been invested with recognizable characteristics. 80

Rice proposes that Vidler’s reading of the psychological uncanny arises out of the interaction between subjects and space, and that these interactions are only analysable at the level of their representation.81 To construct an ‘objectively’ uncanny architectural work is regarded as impossible, as the phenomenon of the uncanny is in the mind of the observer and a matter of each individual’s perception. However, architecture as constructed in literature is also subject to embellishment and distortion of aspects that are likely to trigger the uncanny reaction. Hence, as Vidler notes, ‘in this sense, it is perhaps difficult to speak of an “architectural” uncanny, in the same terms as a literary or psychological uncanny.’82

Although the uncanny results from a reaction to a spatial image, this reaction nonetheless has roots firmly established in a ‘real’ architectural or spatial experience. For example, Rice identifies several unhomely effects resulting from ‘real space’, as opposed to its ‘image’, arguing that when Vidler

writes of ‘real space’ rather than its representation, Vidler refers to states of ‘real homelessness’ and the effects of social estrangement as opposed to an unhomeliness represented in architecture. While sound on its own terms, this argument remains locked within representation when specifying the workings of the uncanny.83

Nonetheless, the presence of these political and social events affecting any number of individuals within a class would have eventual psychological consequences.84 In the same way, psychological anxiety is traceable to a root cause and a corresponding architectural setting. Such an architectural setting is

80 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 11. 81 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 47. 82 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 11. 83 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 50. 84 Vidler notes that in this period, with the changing nature and structure of social classes, the resulting new types of domestic architecture were exemplary of the unhomeliness evoked by capitalism, in both real and psychological instances. See Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 11.

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therefore invested with uncanny qualities through this process. As such, Rice counters his own observation noting that there is ‘a double relation between image and space where the interior has significance for understanding the uncanny, and vice versa.’ 85 In other words, understanding the interaction between subjects and real space is crucial to understanding any resulting spatial image, especially as presented in literature.

The uncanny in fiction

The relationship between space and its image is of paramount importance for the artist or author seeking to evoke the uncanny. For the author, it is possible to re-construct a type of ‘objective’ and uncanny architecture through the purposeful representation of spatial imagery; that is, to construe a literary image of architecture according to a person’s previous spatial experiences, and thereby manipulate that image purposefully in anticipation of re-producing an anxious reaction. In his original essay, Freud commented on the circumstance wherein ‘the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality’,86 evoking an ordinary setting and thus exploiting a familiar spatial image. In this situation, Freud suggests that the author accepts that ‘all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life […] would have an uncanny effect in reality,’87 as it does in the author’s story. Freud also notes that it is possible to elevate the effect of the uncanny in fiction by way of narrative means. For example, by describing the occurrence of extraordinary events in everyday settings, the author is able to utilise an unbounded narrative trajectory and thereby call to mind ‘events which never or very rarely happen’, thus serving to ‘increase [the] effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality.’88

85 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 50. 86 Freud, On the Uncanny, 250. 87 Freud, On the Uncanny, 250. 88 Michael Ostwald and John Moore make the similar case for the operation of an urban uncanny, that arises out of ‘the convergence between a real city and its fictional counterpart’ (53). Ostwald and Moore write that ‘the overall effect is, in the words of Peter Ackroyd, that two worlds, one fictional and one real

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Rice also notes this idea, and emphasizes the role that spatiality plays in such a device. He writes that

an act such as reading a story (perhaps by Poe or Hoffman) about a domestic uncanny while seated in a cosy domestic interior might create an uncanny effect through the unsettling homology between the represented interior, and the interior in which a subject engages with this representation.89

The uncanny arises out of the sameness that exists between the setting of reality and that of the fictional tale, constituting a ‘slippage between the situation represented, and the situation in which this representation is encountered.’ 90 The home in the fictional tale is one and the same as the home in which the reader sits. In the case of detective novels (and in their own class of extraordinary narrative structures) the author draws on the familiarity of the domestic image. Consequently, the uncanny arises for the reader of such a work, from the ‘confusion between a two-dimensional reflection and the three-dimensionality of space’91, or in other words, a slippage between a fictional setting and a lived interior.92 (Fig. 3.4).

The similarity between the domestic setting of a detective novel and that of the reader blurs the distinction between reality and image, and thereby evokes the uncanny. For some authors, including Kafka, the space being construed on the page is homologous to the spatial setting of its author. Given this alternative way of looking at architecture and its image as a source of the uncanny, it is possible that the actual domestic interior of the author has a role in, and consequences for, the creation of such literature.

”should meet, should in a sense be superimposed upon one another to create a composite landscape of the imagination.” (52) That composite landscape of the imagination includes feelings of ‘”unbearable discomfort” experienced by Breton, [which] is analogous to Vidler’s “something uncanny”.’ (53) See Michael J Ostwald., and R. John Moore, ‘Opening the Investigation: Architectural and Urban Fictions’, in Hidden Newcastle: Urban Memories and Architectural Imaginaries, eds. R. John Moore and Michael J. Ostwald (Sydney: Tower Media, 1997), 51–62. 89 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 50. 90 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 51. 91 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 51. 92 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 51.

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An example of such an uncanny setting that is homologous to where the reader might encounter the tale, and is also reflective of the author’s experience, is found at the beginning of E. T. A Hoffman’s The Sandman. The beginning of the story sees the main protagonist, Nathaniel, fondly recount the regular family practice of coming together after supper in his father’s study:

After supper, which was served at seven in the old-fashioned way, we all went into father’s workroom and sat at a round table. Father smoked and drank a large glass of beer. He often told us marvellous stories, and he would get so carried away that his pipe would keep going out and I would relight it for him with a piece of burning paper, which I thought was great fun.93

Here, positive adjectives are used to describe the elements of the scene, such as the ‘marvellous stories’ and ‘great fun’ which set up a sense of light-hearted nostalgia. Such familial practice and a domestic space might be familiar to many readers, even Hoffman himself. As such, a setting is presented that is likely similar to where and how many a reader might encounter the tale, and plays on the reader’s fond childhood memory.

However, halfway through the paragraph the mood unexpectedly shifts into something more uncomfortable, dark and disturbing. This happens when Nathaniel describes the atmosphere of the family gathering at other times:

But there were occasions when he’d put picture books in our hands and sit silently in his armchair, blowing out billows of smoke till we all seemed to be swimming in clouds. Mother was very sad on such evenings.

The space is no longer filled with excitable light-hearted fun and the chatter of recounting exciting tales. By contrast, the children are left to their own devices with picture books, whilst the space is filled with claustrophobic heavy smoke and an inexplicable depressive silence. Breaking the silence is the chime of the clock, and the mother’s panic to rush the children away to bed: ‘and hardly had the clock struck nine when she would say: “Now, children, off to bed with you!

93 E. T. A. Hoffman [1816], ‘The Sandman’ in Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffman, Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 138.

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The Sandman is coming, and I can already hear him.”’ 94 In the following paragraph, an ill-defined, ominous banging noise indicates the arrival of the Sandman. Nathaniel says, ‘and at these times I always really did hear something clumping up the stairs with a heavy, slow step; it must have been the Sandman,’95 although it is not certain whether this sound actually occurs or if it is a figment of Nathaniel’s mind, which further adds to the perplexing change of mood.

Further to this, the space might also be homologous to one where a writer might create such a tale. It is pointed out that the space the family collects in is the fathers ‘work-room’. The change in mood is similar to the earlier example presented of Charles Baudelaire (Chapter 1), where the excitement of starting creative practice is soon outweighed by the pressure of resolving it, and the subsequent transformation of the mood of the room. As such, the room may also be a reflection of the study Hoffman constructed his own stories in, and the similar change of mood in the face of creative struggle.

Kafka’s narrative structures and settings also rely on such a homology. Like the stories of Poe and Hoffman, including the former’s famous detective novel The Murders of Rue Morgue and the latter’s The Sandman, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, The Judgement, and The Trial all share a common starting point within a domestic setting that is similar to the type of space were a reader might engage with the story. The stories then progress into their extraordinary tales of arrest or transformation, which reflect on Freud’s earlier observations on the use of a normal setting as a device to amplify the horror of absurd narrative trajectories. The use of such a literary device in Kafka’s own work suggests that Kafka maintained an integral appreciation of the quotidian domestic setting, and how such an image of architecture and interiority might be used to support the narrative. Yet conversely, and as previously noted, such settings are also similar to the spaces in which Kafka composed these stories; thus, they might also be

94 Hoffman, ‘The Sandman’, 138. 95 Hoffman, ‘The Sandman’, 138.

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Fig. 3.4 ‘A slippage between waking and dreaming’: the confused homology between reader and narrative space. Source: author

Fig. 3.5 ‘A slippage between waking and dreaming’: the confused homology between writer and narrative space. Source: author

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a reflection or repetition of the author’s own domestic experiences and expectations.96 Thus, there are two types of uncanny in play: the homology of the space where a reader might encounter a story, and the homology of a space where a reader might compose a story (Fig 3.5), further discussed in the next section.

The uncanny and the production of writing

Various scholars have observed that Sigmund Freud’s consulting room is an example of the spatial homology that occurs for a writer — that is, the space that simultaneously appears on the page and in their own surrounds — when the trace of a domestic interior is maintained through the process of literary production. From 1908, Freud’s consulting rooms were contained in the same building with his family apartment at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. These spaces, initially domestic in nature, were transformed into a study and a consulting room, and arranged to house Freud’s extensive collection of antique sculpture and imagery. The collection was contained in cabinets and arrayed on every available surface. Photographs of the rooms taken by Edmund Engelman in 1938 (Fig. 3.6, Fig. 3.7), just prior to its dissolution and Freud’s flight to England, capture the scene as it would have been experienced by one of Freud’s patients.

This study was also the location where Freud wrote his manuscripts and met with patients for their primary consultation. The space has been described by Diana Fuss as a type of ‘reverse Panopticon’, whereby the focus is on observing ‘the patient, sitting isolated and exposed at the centre of the room, occupy[ing] the point of maximum exposure’ 97 and forcing them to initially

96 It has been suggested by a number of scholars (including Fickert, Dodd and Hayman) that the main characters of Kafka’s novels are all reflections of himself. In both The Trial and The Castle the use of the letter K suggests a direct connection to the author and in the case of The Metamorphosis, the name ‘Samsa’ maintains the same number of syllables and is phonetically similar to ‘Kafka’. 97 Diana Fuss, ‘Freud's Ear’ in The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 35.

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Fig. 3.6 Freud at his study desk, 1938. Source: Photo by Edmund Engelman, published in Diana Fuss, Freud’s Ear, 45.

Fig. 3.7 Freud’s study and writing desk with antiquities, 1938. Source: Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 43

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‘confront the idea of the ‘other’ self that existed in the unconscious.’98 (Fig. 3.8) Yet, in addition to being the place where the confrontation of the unconscious occurs, the space itself shapes the confrontation. For example, Rice suggests the room is not a space, but a place as defined as a representation of Freud’s idiosyncrasies (Fig. 3.9), and that it maintains an imperative role in the development of psychoanalytic practise and theory, by way of a series of discursive psychical transferences that it promoted between Freud, his patient and the interior.99 This argument maintains that both the study and the consulting room serve as an external spatial projection of Freud’s own mental interior. The rooms, Fuss observes, contains a confronting and confusing assortment of furniture and objects including a couch, chair, books, bookcases, cabinets, paintings, photographs, lights and rugs, as well as Freud’s extensive collection of antiquities (numbering over two thousand items).100 Epitomized by its fevered collection of often grotesque archaeological antiquities, the collection is in itself symbolic of Freud’s own mental anguish and neurotic transferences.101 Fuss describes the study and its contents as ‘an over-determined space of loss and absence, grief and memory, elegy and mourning’ where ‘every object newly found memorialised a love object lost.’102 The interior that results from this assemblage can be regarded as an ‘exteriorized theatre of Freud’s own emotional history’. 103 In this way mental transference takes on a spatial dimension.

98 Fuss writes about the importance of the mirror mounted on the window wall in Freud’s study, as being a means of forcing the patient to visually confront the idea of a ‘double’. This interpretation of Freud’s interior resonates with an example of Deleuze and Guattari analyzing Kafka, where they write about the psychological importance of a framed image of a woman on the wall of Gregor Samsa’s bedroom in Metamorphosis. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 99 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 42 100 Fuss, ‘Freud's Ear’, 32. 101Diane Fuss writes that this is in particular related to the death of his father. See Fuss, ‘Freud’s Ear’, 79. 102 Fuss, ‘Freud’s Ear’, 34. 103 Fuss, ‘Freud’s Ear’, 34.

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Fig. 3.8 Diagram of the slippage between the patients’ interior mind and Freud’s own that occurs via the process of free association. Source: author

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Fig. 3.9 A diagram of the actual ‘impure’ transaction that occurs between patient and psychoanalyst. Source: author

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Reciprocally, then, this same interior is also a setting for patients undergoing analysis and the exteriorisation of their own psychological interiorities. Thus, the interior is not only ‘a passive context for analysis’104, as, in reality, the transaction between psychoanalyst and patient is mediated by the idiosyncrasies of Freud and his surrounds. Even Freud himself notes that the interior maintained a degree of influence on his patient analysis:

[a]t least once in the course of every analysis a moment comes when the patient obstinately maintains that just now positively nothing whatsoever occurs to his mind. His free associations come to a stop and the usual incentives for putting them in motion again fail in their effect. If the analyst insists, the patient is at last induced to admit that he is thinking of the view from the consulting room window, of the wallpaper that he sees before him, or of the gas-lamp hanging from the ceiling. Then one knows at once that he has gone off into the transference and that he is engaged upon what are still unconscious thoughts relating to the physician; and one sees the stoppage of the associations disappear, as soon as he has been given this explanation.105

Even the patient’s material production (the act of verbalising his or her dreams, thoughts and feelings) is affected by the domestic interior. The analytical space and its contents (Freud’s interior) are subjects of the patient’s own unconscious thoughts, and thus constitute a scene of transference. As such, there is both confusion and slippage in the relationship between the exteriorized interior and between the patient and Freud (Fig. 3.8). Through this dual process the interior actively participates in and influences the production of content derived from free association and thereby becomes implicated in the discourse of psychoanalysis.106

A further issue associated with the influence of the interior on a patient’s psychoanalytic production is the idea that spatial transference maintains some

104 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 43. 105 Sigmund Freud [1921] ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18., ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 126. 106 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 43.

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influence on Freud’s own literary production, including his clinical cases and theories. The common conceit wherein psychoanalysis is compared with archaeological digging, and the derivation of many psychological constructs from Greco-Roman mythology, appears inevitable given the contents of Freud’s collection of antiquities. As Rice notes, ‘Freud himself seems not to have made the connection between his psychoanalytical method and own collection of antiquities.’107 As the interior affects the course of analysis in terms of patient production of material, so too the interior maintains a level of interference in Freud’s production of material. Indeed, to return to Freud’s spatial analogy for repression, comparing the spatial relationship between his own study and consulting room shows that there are similarities to be found.

Adjoining Freud’s study was the consulting room (Fig.3.10) where, after the approved initial appointment was conducted in the study, the patient was admitted for further analysis and therapeutic treatment. In reflection of this dual architectural and narrative topology, the spatial relations in the consulting room were configured in a more intimate manner than those of the study. Moreover, - Fuss suggests that they were arranged in a way that inspired complete disclosure between patient and doctor in order to aid and abet free association.

In the consulting room, the patient finds herself securely situated outside a circuit of visual surveillance […] The arrangement of couch and chair, with their occupants facing outwards at perpendicular angles, ensures that, once the analysis formally begins, there will never be an unobstructed line of vision between patient and doctor. The most intimate space in the room is thus also the most highly mediated, as if such close physical proximity between patient and doctor can only be sustained by the structural elimination of any direct visual transaction.108

The purpose of creating this atmosphere for the consultation was to induce the patient’s uninhibited production and release of unconscious material. Once the patient had vacated the room, arguably Freud’s work would migrate back into the study, for the process of conscious editing and assessment by way of

107 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 45 108 Fuss, Freud’s Ear, 37.

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evaluation, reflection and scientific rumination. In this way, the layout of Freud’s practise is both figuratively and architecturally similar to the structure of his tale of the watchman guarding the hall in his own given spatial analogy for the mechanism of repression (see Chapter 2). In such a reading, Freud is the watchman, only admitting for analysis in his study selective fragments and elements from the greater miasma of unconscious material produced during the consultation (Fig. 3.10).

Conclusion

The chapter examines four different readings of the uncanny, as it relates to both Freud and Kafka. These include contextual readings derived from social zeitgeist and political events of interwar Europe; the psychoanalytical construct as developed from linguistic and literary investigation by Freud; the uncanny as a purposeful device in fiction to create unease for the reader by way of spatial homology (Fig.3.4); a similar spatial homology that sees the uncanny as an accidental and implicit factor that affects the production of literature by the writer (Fig.3.5), and which has affected Freud’s written works by way of the creative spatial analogies he employed in his writings. The chapter ends with the example of the spatial homology; the interior of Freud’s practice and his spatial analogy for explaining the mechanism of repression (Fig.3.10).

Given that Freud’s interior implicitly informs and shapes his literary output, perhaps the experience of domestic space has a similar influence upon Kafka’s creative output. As previously noted, a similar spatial homology is seen in three of Kafka’s most celebrated stories The Judgement, Metamorphosis, and The Trial, each of which commence in the comfort of a confined bedroom space, which corresponds to the types of spaces that Kafka inhabited while he wrote these works. Additionally, the basic narrative structure of each of the three stories thematically conforms to the underpinning death drive of the Freudian uncanny, given that in each story Kafka navigates the protagonist to his ultimate death. Such an initial investigation (Fig.3.11) supports the idea that the character and narrative tropes of Kafka’s fiction generally correlate to both his own real life

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circumstances and to standard Freudian constructs. While this point will ultimately play a larger role in Chapter 5, where it is developed in more detail, given these initial conformities of character and narrative, it might be assumed that the spatial similarities and structures in these stories are both fertile grounds for investigating Freudian connections as well as those to Kafka’s waking life. This idea builds on the argument of Chapter 2, where a Freudian model of Kafkan space is proposed. Further to this, these connections may be understood in the particular context of the uncanny, as they are repetitions or ‘doublings’ of standard Freudian constructs and Kafka’s idiosyncratic, waking life circumstances.

While the present chapter explores the way architecture may implicitly inform literary practice, as it occurs in historical and domestic contexts, the following chapter examines another way that architecture informs literary practice. It examines the idea that domestic spatiality is integral to the construction of fiction as a key component of a universal psychic symbology. The nature and meaning of spatial repetition, as it may range from the recurrence of a type of universal human construct — such as Freud was trying to account for with his psychoanalysis — to the repetition of an individual idiosyncratic trauma, is examined further in the next chapter.

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Fig. 3.10 Diagram showing the relationship between the spatial configuration of Freud’s practice, and his spatial analogy for the mechanism of repression. Axonometric and photographic image source: Diana Fuss, Freud’s Ear, 34 and 43.

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Fig. 3.11 Diagram illustrating the hypothesis. Given that narrative and character tropes in Kafka’s work have been shown to operate according to a Freudian paradigm, and have also been considered reflective of his own real life circumstances, then it may be considered that the spatiality of his novels is also inherently influenced by these factors. Source: author

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Chapter 4. Architecture, Langue and Parole

Introduction

This chapter examines the way in which the spatial properties and functions of domestic architecture are integral to the construction of literary narrative. It extends arguments developed previously (see Chapter 3) about the way architecture informs or shapes literary practice, in both historical and domestic contexts. Such arguments are important in the present context because they situate architecture as part of a larger system of psychic symbolism, a proposition that is developed in the present chapter through a review of literary theories which contend that there are universal structures which underlie both narrative and character tropes.

The chapter commences with an examination of the proposition that a primitive and instinctive set of conditions underlie the creation of character and narrative structures in literature. This idea, embodied in the universal narrative theory of literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, is examined in conjunction with Freud’s contemporaneous proposition of a similarly universal theory of dream symbolism. The chapter demonstrates that Shklovsky’s narrative laws have strong parallels to Freud’s psychoanalytical dream symbols, and thereby identifies connections between the role of plot and character in literature and in psychoanalytical constructs. Importantly, Freud was not only writing at the same time as Shklovsky, but the latter traced his theories at least partially to psychology, strengthening the link between the literary and psychoanalytical theory of that period (previously established in Chapter 2).

Thereafter, the chapter argues that, given such universal narrative structures and character tropes, there may be an equivalent form of universal spatiality in these literary and psychoanalytical constructs. Architecture is an important, yet often overlooked facet of both universal theories of literature and psychoanalysis. Architectural tropes, like those of character and narrative, play

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an important role in the construction of literature, and architectural spatial and formal elements are also revealed in this chapter as possessing psychoanalytical significance in Freudian theory. Hence, in addition to character and narrative constructs, reading the spatial tropes of a text may provide an opportunity for further psychoanalytical insight. Indeed, this could be regarded as a central goal of the present dissertation — to undertake a close analysis of the spatial structures in Kafka’s fiction to uncover their symbolic and psychoanalytical implications. However, to further develop the foundations for this argument, the present chapter considers Freud’s observation that the house is a crucial universal dream symbol. Freud’s reading of the house implies that domestic spatiality is of critical importance to this universal dream langue (the system of speech used in a society). Given the established links between narrative theory and psychoanalysis, the chapter argues that this domestic spatiality is potentially as critical to the construction of fictional narratives as are character and plot tropes. This second section in the chapter also includes a brief diversion into architectural theories which anthropomorphise or apply gender to a building or its components. Multiple theories, which also have psychological or psychoanalytical intent or value, are positioned in this section against the backdrop of Freud’s argument that the home is the third key element in universal dream theory.

Following this analysis of the architectural implications of the existence of a universal and persistent dream langue, the chapter then develops the argument that there must be a type of idiosyncratic or unconscious parole (language as it is used by an individual). Freud’s concept of ‘dream-elements’, as opposed to universal symbology, is then presented to establish this position.

The chapter concludes by suggesting that if the narratives and characters of everyday life are integral to the construction of these dream-elements, then architecture and domestic spatiality may also play such a role, thus affirming a connection between the architecture of lived space and the inner mental space of the inhabitant’s mind. The importance of this conclusion (which echoes arguments in the preceding two chapters) is that it implies that fiction may be

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interpreted not only through narrative and character tropes, but also, under certain conditions, in terms of the lived and imagined spaces of the author’s life. Kafka’s fiction conforms to the conditions needed to allow such an interpretation to be undertaken.

Primordial character and narrative motifs

A diverse range of authors, beginning with the classical Greek philosophers and extending well into twentieth-century literary criticism and theory, have proposed the idea that a fundamental and universal psychological condition motivates literary creation. The notion of a universal narrative structure can be seen in ancient Greek philosophy, with Plato’s treatise on artistic imitation asserting that ‘there is a single essential Form corresponding to each class of particular things to which we apply the same name’,1 and Aristotle’s examination of the necessary component parts of successful plot formulae. 2 Such observations provide a foundation for the more recent conjectures found in more contemporary narratology, from the Russian Formalists Viktor Shklovsky and Vladimir Propp, to the later twentieth-century narrative theories of Roland Barthes,3 Tzvetan Todorov,4 Joseph Campbell,5 and Northrop Frye.6 Whilst the precise theoretical positions held by these writers vary in their details, they all fundamentally accept that an innate order exists in a disparate body of texts. For example, in 1927 Vladimir Propp’s landmark essay Morphology of the Folk-tale,

1 Plato, The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1955), 371. 2 Aristotle, Poetics. trans. Malcom Heath (London, England: Penguin Books, 1996) 3 Roland Barthes, Lionel Duisit, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ in New Literary History, On Narrative and Narratives Vol.6, No.2, (Winter 1975) (John Hopkins University Press), 237-272. 4 Tzvetan Todorov [1969] ‘Structural Analysis of Narrative’ in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010), 2023-2030. 5 Joseph Campbell [1949], The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Novato, California: New World Library, 2008) 6 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957)

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examined the narrative structure of ‘hundreds of Russian folk-tales and oral stories’ to demonstrate that ‘they all followed the same pattern.’7

Propp gives four examples of the recurring narrative pattern in Russian folk- tales.

1. A tsar gives an eagle to a hero. The eagle carries the hero away to another kingdom.

2. An old man gives Sucenko a horse. The horse carries Sucenko away to another kingdom.

3. A sorcerer gives Ivan a little boat. The boat takes Ivan to another kingdom.

4. A princess gives Ivan a ring. Young men appearing from out of the ring carry Ivan away into another kingdom, and so forth.8

Despite the lead characters (the ‘hero’, Sucenko and Ivan) possessing different names and traits, in each tale ‘neither their actions or functions change’9. For Propp, this suggests that ‘a tale often attributes identical actions to various personages’ and as such ‘makes possible the study of the tale according to the functions of its dramatis personae.’10 Defining these functions as the ‘basic components of the tale’, Propp claims that his investigation reveals that ‘the recurrence of functions is astounding’ and ‘the number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited’.11 Propp went on to demonstrate that there were only 31 of these functions.12

As a refinement of Propp’s position, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), proposes that there is only one ultimate ‘monomyth.’13 Campbell presents the view that ‘all hero myths, if not all myths, are basically the

7 Vladimir Propp [1927], ‘Morphology of the Folk-tale’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 72. 8 Propp, ‘Morphology of the Folk-tale’, 72. 9 Propp, ‘Morphology of the Folk-tale’, 72. 10 Propp, ‘Morphology of the Folk-tale’, 72. 11 Propp, ‘Morphology of the Folk-tale’, 73. 12 Propp, ‘Morphology of the Folk-tale’, 75. 13 Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 23.

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same’,14 and that there is essentially one function, which is that the hero’s adventure ‘is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation–initiation–return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.’15 In a manner that mirrors Propp’s argument, Campbell gives three examples of separate myths which conform to this pattern.

Prometheus ascended to the heavens, stole fire from the gods, and descended.

Jason sailed through the Clashing Rocks into a sea of marvels, circumvented the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece, and returned with the fleece and the power to wrest his rightful throne from a usurper.

Aenas went down into the underworld, crossed the dreadful river of the dead, threw a sop to the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, and conversed, at last, with the shade of his dead father. All things were unfolded to him: the destiny of souls, the destiny of Rome, which he was about to found, “and in that wise he might avoid or endure every burden.” He returned through the ivory gate to his work in the world.

These three myths illustrate Campbell’s hypothesis of the monomyth. Yet, upon closer viewing, they also comprise very similar functions to those identified in Propp’s formula. At the heart of both Propp’s and Campbell’s theories, and also those of Barthes, Todorov and Frye, is the belief that all human narratives have certain universal and deep structural elements in common.

Viktor Shklovsky’s narrative theory, and his work Art as Device (1917), are of particular interest and relevance to this argument about the universal properties of literature. Shklovsky is also important in the present context because his chronological and geographic circumstances are similar to those of both Freud and Kafka, and particularly as he displays significant theoretical resonance with the work of Freud. For example, in Shklovsky’s discussion on plot construction and style, he assesses the potential causes for universal similarities in narrative and character motifs of folkloric tales. He begins with the work of his predecessor, literary theorist Alexander Veselovsky, who defines a basic component of the tale. Much like Propp’s conceptualised ‘functions’, Veselovsky

14 Robert A. Segal, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 1. 15 Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 23.

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identified the ‘literary motif’ as ‘the simplest narrative unit’.16 Veselovsky then offers several examples of such tropes, including that of the ‘the sun/eye simile’ or ‘the sun (brother or husband)/moon (sister or wife) comparison.’17 A variety of these literary motifs are then arranged by the author into a thematic plot to create a narrative.

The question of what informs the process of arranging motifs into a narrative construction then arises, when considering the case of two similar tales originating in two different tribes. Shklovsky writes that according to Veselovsky, narrative appropriations occur due to cultural similarity and geographic proximity and are probable occurrences that shape narrative construction. Additionally, two such tales could be similar because they arise ‘by process of psychological self-generation against a background of identical concepts and realities.’18 It is through this argument that Veselovsky proposes that it is possible to explain ‘borrowings in historical time of a plot structure by one nationality from another.’19 In his reflection on the reasons for narrative generation other than cultural appropriation, Veselovsky proposes that ‘the probability of its [a narrative] independent formation takes on the ratio of 1:479,001,599’. Thus the statistical likelihood for independent narrative generation occurring is very slim. Veselovsky therefore concludes that it is reasonable to talk of ‘borrowing something from another nationality’20 when it comes to narrative similarities across cultures.

However, Shklovsky disputes the idea that cultural similarities and appropriations are the sole explanation for similarities in folkloric tales, arguing that the ‘coincidence of plot structures may be encountered even where there is no presumption of borrowing.’21 As evidence, he refers to a number of examples of folk tales which have remarkably similar narrative structures, yet which have

16 A. N. Veselovsky as cited in Victor Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’ in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 16. 17 A. N. Veselovsky as cited in Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 16. 18 A. N. Veselovsky as cited in Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 16. 19 A. N. Veselovsky as cited in Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 16. 20 A. N. Veselovsky as cited in Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 16. 21 Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 17.

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clearly not been formulated in response to similar chronology or geography. Two of these examples are American Indian and European tales of ‘how the birds chose for themselves a king, with the smallest bird managing to win the honour through sheer cunning.’22 Another example is ‘the story of Bat and his wife Anupa (the Egyptian tale of two brothers) and the Turkic tale of Idiga (in Oriental Motifs)’; tales separated by ‘an interval of four thousand years’.23 In such cases the explanation of cultural appropriation or ‘borrowings in time’ cannot ‘explain the existence of identical stories separated by thousands of years and tens of thousands of miles.’ 24 For Shklovsky, the inadvertent arrangement of such literary motifs in a series or cluster is not possible. Rather, coincidences can only be explained by the existence of unspecified and unbeknownst ‘special laws of plot formation’25 that have a deeper psychological or psychosocial significance.

In a similar way, Laplanche and Pontalis reflect on the question of a universal symbolic language from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. They propose that while the subject of symbolic thought, creation and utilisation falls within the scope of many disciplines — psychology, linguistics, epistemology, history of religions, anthropology and philology, to name but a few — the notion of symbolism is intrinsically tied to psychoanalysis.26 Defining a psychoanalytical symbol as ‘a mode of representation distinguished chiefly by the constancy of the relationship between the symbol and what it symbolises in the unconscious’,27 Laplanche and Pontalis argue that this recurrence is found not only in one individual, but from one to the next, and also in the most widely varied cultural and geographic spheres. They note that this

constancy is found not only in dreams but also in very diverse forms of expression (symptoms and other products of the unconscious: myths, folklore, religion etc.) as

22 Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 17. 23 Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 17. 24 Shklovsky, Plot Construction and Style, 17 25 Shklovsky, ‘Plot Construction and Style’, 17-18. 26 Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’ in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc.,1973), 442. 27 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 442.

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well as in highly disparate cultural spheres. It is relatively impervious (just as a fixed vocabulary is) to individual initiative: an individual may choose among the senses of a symbol but he cannot create new ones. 28

The nature of psychoanalytical symbolism, transcending such barriers of culture and geography, raises the question of whether there is a type of universal human condition. Thus they ask, ‘how did humanity forge symbols in the first place? And how does the individual make them his [or her] own? It was questions of this kind, which led Jung to his theory of the collective unconscious’29 Laplanche and Pontalis conclude that, ‘regardless of diversity in culture or language individuals have access to a “basic language”’.30

Such a universal ‘basic language’ arises from a fundamental structure to human nature. This is the connection between psychoanalysis and literary theory. The drives of basic human nature is what Freud was considering in the development of the laws and constructs of psychoanalysis. As such, Freud drew from the cautionary mythological narratives and fairy tales, essentially the fables of human nature, as evidence for these constructions. For example, Freud’s construction of the Oedipal complex, that is the unconscious sexual desire of a child for the parent of the opposite sex and wish to exclude the parent of the same sex, is developed from and evidenced by the Greek myth of Oedipus. In that myth, the narrative sees Oedipus, the returning son, unwittingly kill his father and fall in love with his mother Jocasta. Another motif in that story is that of the eyes and blinding sight: on discovering what he had done and Jocasta’s subsequent suicide, Oedipus blinds himself. Another example of the eye and sight motif in Greek mythology is found in the myth of Medusa. It is also found in the geographically and chronologically disparate E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story The Sandman. Such recurring narrative motifs ultimately saw Freud connect the gaze with desire and sexuality in his own psychoanalytical theorisations. Thus,

28 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 444. 29 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 445. 30 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 445.

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such recurring literary motifs spanning geographically and chronology disparate examples formed the evidence for his universal psychoanalytical constructions.

The concept of an universal psyche

This idea of a universal psyche is normally attributed to Freud, following his initial insistence on the recognition of the existence of symbols, although he never developed the hypothesis fully and was in some ways ambivalent about it. Historian of psychology Agnes Petocz writes that Freud’s position on symbolism, developed largely in material published during the period 1914 to 1917 (most notably in The Interpretation of Dreams and the tenth lecture in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) and it ‘is characterised by tension, uncertainty and disorganisation.’ 31 Laplanche and Pontalis similarly note that ‘Freud never committed himself completely’32 to a concrete theory on symbolism, and that he ‘criticises the ancient methods of dream interpretation, which he describes as symbolic.’33 Moreover they suggest that Freud ‘takes pains to point out a kinship between such ancient forms of symbolic interpretation and his own approach.’34

Despite his ambivalence, two Freudian concepts — primal phantasies and universal dream symbols — possess clear similarities to Shklovsky’s contemporaneous theory of the universal plot and character themes in literature and mythology. Furthermore, Shklovsky’s theory also has parallels to Freud’s views on a universal psychic condition. Freud proposed that ‘[s]ymbolism is not peculiar to dreams, nor exclusively characteristic of them’, 35 and that the ‘province of symbolism is extraordinarily wide’ and ‘dream symbolism is only a small part of it.’36 In his tenth lecture on dreams Freud notes that, ‘it would not

31 Agnes Petocz, Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 98. 32 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 445. 33 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 445. 34 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 444. 35 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’ in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970), 132. 36 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118.

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[…] be expedient to attack the whole problem from the side of dreams’37 in order to fully understand the nature of the unconscious psyche. Types of symbols are found in more guises than just those recounted in dreams. Freud acknowledges that they exists in much the same way ‘we have discovered that the same symbolism is employed in myths and fairy tales, in popular sayings and songs, in colloquial speech and poetic phantasy.’38 Thus, Freud’s observations and his method for understanding the laws of the unconscious psyche share a complementary foundation to Shklovsky’s ‘special laws of plot formation’ and his view on symbols and motifs in in narrative. Thus, the two major connections between the theories of Freud and Shklovsky are the similarities in the conceptualisation of symbols and the shared idea of narrative structures that dictate the arrangement of symbols. These two conections are examined in more detail in the following section.

Universal motifs: Shklovsky’s literary ‘estrangement’ and Freud’s dream- elements

Viktor Shklovsky proposed the concept of estrangement as a literary device that aimed to extend and enhance the perception of words, to explore their meaning in totality. He first conceived of the device literary ‘enstrangement’39 and

37 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118. 38 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118. 39 The original Russian word is ‘ostraniene’ (note that David Macey spells the term ‘ostranenie’); the word has deliberately been translated into the unique word of ‘enstrangement’. Translator Benjamin Sher describes the problem of linguistic familiarity and over-use of other terms as affecting his decision to make a new word that demands scrutiny for what it is. His linguistic investigation into the meaning of words is similar to Freud’s process in unpacking the term unheimlich, presented in Chapter 3: ‘The translation “estrangement” is good but negative and limited. “Making it strange” is also good but too positive. Furthermore, both “estrangement” and “making it strange” are not new, that is, they require no special effort of the imagination. In fact, they exemplify the very defect they were supposed to discourage. Finally, there is “defamiliarisation,”[…] This semi-neologism is very seductive until you realize that it is quite wrongheaded. Shklovsky’s process is in fact the reverse of that implied by this term. It is not a transition from the “familiar” into the “unknown” (implicitly). On the contrary, it begins with the cognitively known (the language of science), the rules and formulas that arise from a search for an economy of mental effort, to the familiarly known, that is, to real knowledge that expands and “complicates” our perceptual process in the rich use of metaphors, similies and a host of other figures of speech. “Defamiliarisation” is dead wrong! And so, after

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described its operation in the work of Leo Tolstoy. Shklovsky begins with an anecdote, where in the early spring of 1897 Leo Tolstoy40 partook in some minor domestic duties, and went about dusting his simple room. While engaged in this task, Tolstoy was also deeply engaged in serious thought — so much so that, when he came around to dusting the sofa, he ‘felt that it was impossible to remember’41 whether he had dusted it already or not, noting that the action of cleaning his room was entirely ‘habitual and unconscious.’ 42 Of this event, he mused that if he had in fact dusted the sofa, but had forgotten and was unconscious to the fact, then this was tantamount to not having dusted the sofa at all. Perhaps, Tolstoy mused, ‘if someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to restore this in my mind.’43 On the other hand, perhaps no one had been observing, or like Tolstoy himself, had been ‘observing only unconsciously’44. If the latter was the case, as Tolstoy concludes, then it must be that ‘the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, and it is as if this life has never been.’45

Tolstoy’s casual diary musings about the sofa would be observed much more consciously three decades later by Shklovsky, and subsequently form the key provocation of his landmark 1917 thesis, Art as Device. Taking the example of Tolstoy’s mindless dusting, the action representing a potential for an unconscious life, Shklovsky drew a parallel with the similar unconscious use of

some reflection, I decided to coin the word “enstrange,” “enstrangement,” built on the same cognate root.’ See ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, xix. 40 Deleuze and Guattari note that Kafka was aware of Soviet art and theory, writing that ‘more generally, it is difficult to believe that Kafka, always attentive to the 1917 Revolution, would not have heard at the end of his life about the avant-garde and constructivists projects in Russia.’ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 75. 41 Tolstoy diary entry, as reiterated by Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 5. 42 Tolstoy in Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 5. 43 Tolstoy in Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 5. 44 Tolstoy in Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 5. 45 Tolstoy in Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 5. Viktor Shklovsky repeats and emphasizes this conclusion of Tolstoy, in his own passage.

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linguistic symbols and words in everyday speech and writing. Considering that with everyday words, ‘objects are represented by either one single characteristic (for example, by number) or else by a formula’46, Shklovsky suggested that the common and overly familiarised use of these words meant that the entirety of meaning that an object might sustain ‘never even rises to the level of consciousness.’47 Shklovsky rued this contemporary condition of the word, as it was with lack of comprehensive meaning: ‘[a]nd so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.’48 Words had essentially become a type of shorthand symbol, a mindless process representing an entirety of meaning that for the most part remained unknown and unexplored, perhaps even lost.

While instances of the use of automatized, overly-familiar words is common in Tolstoy’s writing, Shklovsky identified a literary means to counteract and overcome this situation, and worked to restore the depth and true gravity of words. ‘The purpose of art is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition’49 wrote Shklovsky, identifying that a literary device of ‘enstrangement’ worked to achieve this, by bringing attention to the habitual and familiar by purposefully making it appear strangely unfamiliar. Through the process of “enstranging” objects, Shklovsky argues that ‘the device of art makes perception long and laborious’50, and thus forces the reader to carefully consider, or reconsider, the words and concepts presented.

Shklovsky championed Tolstoy’s use of the enstrangement device, arguing that ‘the perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest.’ 51 This outcome was achieved through the use of

46 Tolstoy in Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 5. 47 Tolstoy in Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 5. 48 Tolstoy in Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 5. 49 Shklovsky, ’Art as Device’, 6. 50 Shklovsky, ’Art as Device’, 6. 51 Shklovsky, ’Art as Device’, 6.

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techniques such as ‘disrupted metrical patterns, long descriptive passages, metaphors and other figures of rhetoric’ 52 that, by working to ‘destroy the conventional logic of verbal associations’53, were able to achieve a semantic shift. This shift served to slow the act of perception and make it more difficult, thereby forcing words and concepts to the point where they were almost ‘being perceived for the very first time.’54 In this way, enstrangement promoted a new way of seeing, as the act of perceiving a word concept was now not just mere recognition, but required work on behalf of the reader. That work included analysis and reconstruction, leading to a new reinterpretation and identification of that word concept. Thus, these ‘newly discovered words’ restored the perception of everyday life, and even made ‘more perceptible’ the mindless and unconscious actions that were an inherent part thereof (Fig. 4.1).55

With similar intention to Shklovsky, Freud proposed the concept of ‘dream- thoughts’ to describe a type of full and extended meaning-explanation for the unusual and incongruent motifs that appeared in dreams. In his landmark text of 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud set out to ascertain the fundamental nature of dreams and their psychic structures. The question of dreams had long dominated human thought and reasoning from the beginnings of civilisation. For Freud, the prehistoric belief was ‘that dreams were connected with the world of

52 David Macey, ‘ostranenie’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 284. 53 Macey, ‘ostranenie’, 284. 54 Macey, ‘ostranenie’, 284. 55 Macey, ‘ostranenie’, 284.

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Fig. 4.1 Conceptual diagram for Shklovsky’s theory of meaning in a literary motif or word. Source: author

Fig. 4.2 A model for a Freudian dream element. Source: author

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superhuman beings in whom they believed and that were revelations from gods and daemons.’56 Contemporary scientific inquiry had reclassified the phenomena of dreams as a problem of psychology. According to Freud, these studies offered ‘many stimulating observations […] and a quantity of interesting material bearing upon our theme’, but still nonetheless gave ’little or nothing that touches upon the essential nature of dreams or that offers a final solution to any of their enigmas.’57 The field of dream research had reached a point whereby there was a two-fold view: dreams were either an independent escape from reality or attached to reality by way of simple daily rendition. Freud sided with the latter view, writing that ‘it may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognise as forming a part of our knowledge or experience. […] We are thus […] tempted to believe that dreams have a power of independent production.’58

Freud noted that this type of dreaming would often occur ‘after a long interval’ when ‘some fresh experience recalls the lost memory of the other event and at the same time reveals the source of the dream.’59 Through the course of this process, ‘we are thus driven to admit that in the dream we knew and remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking memory.’60 Thus, a dream was an unconscious recount of waking life. ‘All of the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived from experience, that is to say, has been reproduced or remembered in the dream—so much at least we may regard as an undisputed fact.’61 Further to this, Freud posited that ‘every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure’62 and that ‘it would be a mistake to

56 Sigmund Freud [1900], ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol 4, 1900. Ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 2. 57 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 1. 58 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 11. 59 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 11. 60 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 11. 61 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 11. 62 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 1.

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suppose that a connection of this kind between the content of a dream and reality is bound to come to light easily, as an immediate result of comparing them.’ 63 Thus, the connection of reality (a conscious state) to dreams (an unconscious state) was a far more inherent and complex model.

Freud proposed that there are two types of dream-elements: manifest and latent. The first type, manifest content, or ‘dream-content’64, was simply the dream as it was ‘recounted by the patient in the course of an analytic session.’65 This manifest-content presented an often bizarre but coherent narrative in itself, with no readily immediate relations to everyday life. Of the research and work that had been done to understand dreams so far, Freud wrote that

every attempt that has hitherto been made to solve the problem of dreams has dealt directly with their manifest content as it is presented in our memory. All such attempts have endeavoured to arrive at an interpretation of dreams from their manifest content or (if no interpretation was attempted) to form a judgement as to their nature on the basis of that same manifest content. 66

As Freud previously pointed out, such studies were somewhat arbitrary and inconclusive in their findings. Thus he proposed ‘a new class of psychical material between the manifest content of our dreams and the conclusions of our inquiry: namely, their latent content, or (as we say) the “dream-thoughts”’.67 This second type of content was, as Macey points out, concerned with understanding the extended meaning of a dream that was ‘not actually recounted’ in the course of talk therapy, but ‘uncovered through the analysis of manifest content and the interpretation of the patient’s free associations.’68 Macey continues that ‘Freud

63 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 11. 64 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 277. 65 David Macey, ‘dream-work’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 102. 66 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 277. 67 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 277. 68 David Macey, ‘manifest/latent content’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 239.

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often describes the manifest content as a fragmentary and impoverished translation of the latent content.’69

The manifest content presents as a type of conscious summary, a recallable recapitulation of the latent material. Freud states that ‘the process by which the latent dream is transformed into the manifest dream is called the dream-work’ 70. The dream-work sees the manifest content ‘shaped by the mechanisms of condensation and displacement and by the censorship of the Ego’ 71 , although the dream-work ‘does not create anything and merely transforms existing material.’72 Freud further describes the relationship between the manifest content and latent content:

The dream-thoughts [latent meaning] and the dream-content [manifest meaning] are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content [manifest meaning] seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts [latent meaning] into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. 73

Freud concludes that ‘It is from these dream-thoughts [latent meaning] and not from a dream’s manifest content that we disentangle its meaning.’ 74 Yet the latent meaning can only be accessed though the analysis of the manifest content. As Freud points out in his Introductory lecture on the subject of dream- work, the ‘reverse process which seeks to progress from the manifest to the latent process, is our work of interpretation.’ Thus, ‘the work of interpretation therefore aims at demolishing the dream-work.’75

69 Macey, ‘manifest/latent content’, 239. 70 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture XI: The Dream-Work’ in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970), 135. 71 Macey, ‘manifest/latent content’, 239. 72 Macey, ‘dream-work’, 102. 73 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 277. 74 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 277. 75 Freud, ‘Lecture XI: The Dream-Work’, 135.

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When viewed as parallel propositions, the connection between Shklovsky’s and Freud’s theories is evident in the conceptualisation of the former’s literary motifs and the latter’s dream elements. In a manner which is similar to Shklovsky’s theorisation of words which are subjected to estrangement, Freud sustains a similar position for the appearance of motifs in dreams. Indeed, direct parallels can be drawn between Shklovsky’s theory for ‘enstranged’ words, and Freud’s model for dream-elements. The immediate meaning for Freud of a dream symbol, or its ‘manifest content’, is akin to Shklovsky’s immediate and superficial meaning of a word; it was only an abridged version that presents an incomplete, perhaps even mendacious meaning.76 Through the process of decoding and interpretation, an analyst could expand upon the deeper ‘latent’ meaning of such symbols. In both cases of Freud and Shklovsky, a dream or word signifier sustains a superficial ‘manifest’ meaning, as a text or dream subjects the signifier to various devices of literary or psychological enstrangement. Yet at the same time, the symbol holds a deeper, more comprehensive ‘latent’ meaning, which is revealed by more extensive analysis. Both theories also require a level of literary or therapeutic perception to translate superficial material and draw out inherent and unconscious latent qualities.

Both literary enstrangement and dream work can be viewed as a system of metaphorical and metonymic replacement. For example, Tolstoy employs enstrangement, utilising various modes of allusion, metaphor and metonymy, to ‘foregoe[s] the conventional names of the various parts of a thing, replacing them instead with the names of corresponding parts in other things.’77 In a similar way Freud ascertained that the unconscious shifts and enstranges dream- elements in four ways, the first three of which are “substitution of the part for the whole, allusion, and imagery.” 78 Thus, a dream-element is something enstranged; consciously remembered, it “is not the real thing at all, but a

76 Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, ‘Latent Content’ in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc.,1973), 235-236. 77 Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, 6. 78 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’ in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970), 118.

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distorted substitute”,79 the product of everyday material, that through taking on new and unprecedented styles of “character and syntactic laws”80 has been transformed into an unfamiliar element.

In the same way that an enstranged word in a novel invites the scrutiny and extended perception of the reader, latent dream content invites the scrutiny of the therapist. Just as enstranged word-elements invite the consideration of a dualistic conscious and unconscious meaning (Fig.4.1), the dream-element also ‘provides us with a means of approaching the thought proper, of bringing into consciousness the unconscious thoughts underlying the dream,’81 or establishing the relationship between the latent and manifest material (Fig.4.2). ‘The two are presented to us like versions of the same subject matter in two different languages’ wrote Freud, and that ‘the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression.’ 82 Thus, given the similarities in conceptual structure between Shklovsky’s enstranged word- elements (Fig 4.1) and Freud’s dream-elements (Fig.4.2), Freud’s psychoanalytical unpacking process for dreams might be applied to enstranged words, in order to understand them in a psychoanalytical frame.

The important link that underlies the relationship between any latent and manifest dream material is that, despite the unfamiliarity and strangeness of manifest dream-elements, their sources could always be traced, by various degrees of association, to a latent cause that was familiar. ‘The latent content of a dream would be said to consist of the day’s residues,’ wrote Freud, including that of ‘childhood memories, bodily impressions, allusion to the transference situation, etc.’83. The repetition of such familiar life experiences in a condensed and metonymic form, in new symbolic guises out of context with other factors of

79 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture VII: Manifest Content and Latent Thoughts’ in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970), 87. 80 Freud in Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Latent Content’, 235-6. 81 Freud, ‘Lecture VII: Manifest Content and Latent Thoughts’, 87. 82 Freud in Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Latent Content’, 235-6. 83 Freud in Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Latent Content’, 235-6.

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the dreamscape, sees that such dream-elements are transferences (or, enstrangements) of everyday events and traumas: dream-elements in a manifest state where something familiar is made strange. Thus, the propensity for the everyday to repeat and abstract itself in dream states essentially constitutes a form of the uncanny.

Additional to this conceptual link, there is a methodological intersection between Freud’s investigation into the nature of the uncanny and Shklovsky’s theory of enstrangement. Freud’s investigation relies on close analysis and comparison of the word ‘uncanny’ in many linguistic contexts in order to draw out a comprehensive and total understanding of the concept. As noted earlier in the chapter, Freud understood that the problem of defining the word unheimlich was not a simple black and white linguistic equation, and thus it was necessary ‘to proceed beyond the equation “uncanny” equals “unfamiliar”’,84 noting that ‘it is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete.’85 Freud’s proposed method of investigation involves examining the word unheimlich (and its closest equivalents in languages other than German), as it appeared throughout a wide variety of contexts:86

Either we can find out what meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these experiences have in common.87

Consequently, Freud’s methodology is that of close linguistic analysis and textual analysis of myths and fairy tales; a large portion of Freud’s essay is dedicated to scanning an abundance of literary excerpts and definitions, in an abundance of languages, in order to obtain a comprehensive and whole sense of the word unheimlich: “my investigation was actually begun by collecting a number of

84 Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Uncanny’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 219. 85 Freud, ‘On the Uncanny’, 219. 86 Freud, ‘On the Uncanny’, 220. 87 Freud, ‘On the Uncanny’, 220.

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individual cases, and only later received confirmation after I had examined what language could tell us.” 88 The importance of language to psychoanalytical investigation is paramount. Freud’s methodology attempts to deconstruct and unpack a deeper comprehensive understanding of the word unheimlich by looking for a shared underlying thread of familiarity throughout its use in a wide variety of contexts and literary excerpts. In this way, Freud’s methodology and Shklovsky’s estrangement share the same methodological aim: that is, to move beyond an everyday perception and meaning of the adjective unheimlich, and demonstrate deeper meaning and inherent ties to a deeper psychological undercurrent. This connection, amongst others — that the art of poetry and literature was for Shklovsky ‘thinking in images’, and for Freud dream-content was ‘a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed into the language of dream-thoughts’89; or the unheimlich was ultimately a ‘subject of aesthetics’90— further emphasizes the intricate and intimate relationship that lies between psychology and language.91

Further to this is Freud’s working methodology. Freud’s theory about the unheimlich and the workings of the psyche sprang from literature that is itself incongruent in terms of chronology, culture and geography. In his dissection of the unheimlich, Freud references both contemporary German horror fiction (such as The Sandman), as well as tenets of ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman mythologies (such as the Oedipal myth, or that of the Egyptian afterlife). Binding these tales are narrative structures and character motifs that Freud reasoned were responses generated by base unconscious yearnings, and thus from such narratives Freud postulated the fundamental constructs of psychoanalysis. Freud’s methodology for psychoanalytical investigation is textual and linguistic analysis. This demonstrates that there is an inherently converse connection

88 Freud, ‘On the Uncanny’, 220. 89 Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, 277. 90 Freud, ‘On the Uncanny’, 219. 91 Architectural theorist Anthony Vidler also notes this link. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 23.

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between the literary technique of estrangement and psychoanalytical dissection: the former is embedding a term in a purposefully contrasting context to draw attention to its full meaning; the latter is the assessment of the same linguistic element in a number of contexts in order to distil a comprehensive understanding of that singular word concept. The work of Shklovsky and Freud both point to the existence of some inherent universal structures in literature (character and narrative elements) and in psychoanalysis.

Universal drives and narratives

The second major connection between the theories of Freud and Shklovsky is found in their separate proposals for fundamental universal structures, presumed to be driven by a primordial and universal human nature. This section describes relevant sections of both Freud’s and Shklovsky’s theories, before identifying parallels and connections between the two.

Freud’s universal primal phantasy holds that there are both idiosyncratic and universal components in the construction of neuroses. ‘At a very early stage in his work’ Laplanche and Pontalis write, Freud sought to discover real, primitive events ‘capable of providing the basis of neurotic symptoms.’92 A neurosis was the result of a ‘primal scene’, which were ‘actual traumatic events whose memory is sometimes elaborated and concealed by phantasies.’93 Freud’s theory of the primal scene would evolve into the closely aligned notion of primary phantasy. Laplanche and Pontalis write about the difficulty in understanding Freud’s conceptualisation here:

Considered in isolation, what Freud means by a primal phantasy is difficult to understand; the fact is that the notion is introduced at the end of an extended discussion of the ultimate factors that psycho-analysis can uncover at the origins of

92 Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’ in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc.,1973), 331. 93 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331.

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neurosis and, more generally speaking, beneath the phantasy life of every individual.94

David Macey similarly identifies the lack of clarity in Freud’s theory: ‘whether or not the primal scene is an actual memory of a real event or a fantasy elaborated on the basis of fragmentary observations and suppositions is a question that is not really resolved by Freud.’95 Yet the developing discussion concerning primal phantasies uncovers and considers the connection and effects of individual idiosyncratic traumas from childhood to a greater universal operating system that underlies the human mind and its nature.

Over the course of developing his theory of the primal phantasies, Freud increasingly adopted a view that the development of neuroses arose from a fundamental system that underpinned greater human nature (nature), along with the effect of individual, idiosyncratic childhood memories and trauma (nurture). Freud’s theory of the primal phantasies began with his initial theorisation of the primal scene. The definition of the primal scene was ‘namely the scene of parental coitus which the child is supposed to have witnessed.’96 According to Macey, the child ‘usually interprets it as an act of violent aggression on behalf of the father’,97 the subsequent trauma of which sees ‘the memory of the primal scene feed into most fantasies, and especially those of neurotics.’98 This initial theory of the primal scene and its implications was expounded most famously in Freud’s classic case study of the ‘Wolf Man’ patient (1918)’.99 In that analysis, Freud sought ‘to establish the reality of the scene of observation of parental intercourse by reconstituting it in its minutest detail.’100

94 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331. 95 David Macey, ‘primal scene’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 312. 96 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331. 97 Macey, ‘primal scene’, 312. 98 Macey, ‘primal scene’, 312. 99 Macey, ‘primal scene’, 312. 100 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331.

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Yet the ‘Wolf Man’ case ultimately undermined Freud’s initial theory. Given the remarkable detail of the childhood account, Freud’s case was ‘shattered by Jung’s thesis that such scenes are merely phantasies constructed retrospectively by the adult subject’ and are ‘not actual memories.’101 Freud’s theory also relied on the definite chance of the child witnessing parental coitus; if the child did not witness or could not recall this primal scene or a very similarly scenario, then there was no base source for the construction of a neurosis. Thus, Freud revised and expanded his theory to additionally incorporate the role of phantasy construction in the child construing their accounts of a primal scene. Freud ‘still persists in maintaining that perception has furnished the child with clues’ but then, additionally, ‘he introduces the notion of primal phantasy’ 102 that referred to ‘the phantasies that are constructed around the period of childhood, irrespective of how greatly or how little real experiences have contributed toward them.’103

Thus, Freud started to acknowledge the presence of a greater underlying structure that directs human nature and the formulation of neurotic constructs, in addition to idiosyncratic experience. Freud began ‘to assert that presubjective structures may dominate over individual experience’104, thus pointing at the existence of a universal schema or drive that underpins the primal phantasies. Laplanche and Pontalis conclude that for Freud, ‘structures exist in the phantasy dimension which are irreducible to the contingencies of the individual’s lived experience’105 and that ‘the universality of these structures should be related to the universality that Freud accords to the Oedipus complex as a nuclear complex whose structuring a priori role he has often stressed.’106

101 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331. 102 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331. 103 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 332. 104 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 332. 105 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 333. 106 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 333.

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Laplanche and Pontalis write that Freud attempted to ‘identify a limited number of […] archetypal scenarios.’107 that were ‘typical sequences, imaginary scenarios […] or theoretical constructions’ whereby ‘the neurotic — and perhaps ‘all human beings’ — seek an answer to the central enigmas of their existence.’ 108 The new definition pointed to the consideration of a wider universality to the scenes. Laplanche and Pontalis write that ‘if we can consider the themes which can be recognised in primal phantasies (primal scene, castration, seduction), the striking thing is that they have one trait in common: they are all related to the origins.’ Laplanche and Pontalis further describe the phantasies as ‘[l]ike collective myths’, as ‘they claim to provide a representation of and a ‘solution’ to whatever constitutes a major enigma.’109

Laplanche and Pontalis identify several other examples of universal primal phantasies including narratives of intra-uterine existence, the observation of sexual intercourse between parents, and of castration and seduction. Furthermore, these scenarios are envisaged by most patients, even though ‘it is not possible in every case to point to scenes really experienced by the individual in question.’110 As for why patients are able to recall scenes that have not occurred in their lifetime, Freud writes

[i]t seems to me quite possible that all the things that are told to us today in analysis as phantasy […] were once real occurrences in the primeval times of the human family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.111

Laplanche and Pontalis, using the example of castration, note that at some time in the history of humanity, such an event may have actually been carried out by a father figure. Consequently, what was once a ‘factual reality in prehistory is said

107 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331. 108 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 332. 109 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 332. 110 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331. 111 Freud, quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331.

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to have become psychical reality.’112 In this way, such primal scenarios are ingrained in the universal narratives that are reconstructed by the subject’s mind and repeated, regardless of the personal experiences of different individuals.113

Freud argues for the existence of universal dream symbols which have clear parallels to such primal phantasy structures. The recurring and pervasive nature of these dream elements, where a particular wish or conflict is expressed in a similar fashion regardless of the individual dreamer, further suggests that ‘there are elements of the language of dreams that are independent of the subject’s personal discourse.’114 Laplanche and Pontalis argue that, whereas ‘the symbols discovered by psychoanalysis are very numerous, the range of things they symbolise is very narrow,’115 and they go on to reiterate Freud’s list of things represented symbolically in dreams, including ‘the body, parents and blood- relations, birth, death, nudity and above all sexuality (sexual organs, the sexual act).’116

Freud’s notion of universal primal phantasies and archetypes can be seen as an extension of Shklovsky’s view that there are unconscious and omnipresent narrative structures, as outlined in the first section of this chapter. According to Macey, Shklovsky’s theory of archetypal narrative units and ways of combining them into plot lines anticipated ‘structuralism’s concern with universals’117 citing the examples of ‘the universality of the ‘abduction of wives’ motif, which appears in stories and legends from all over the world and from all periods.’118 Macey writes that the motif’s universality ‘derives, in Shklovsky’s view, from history and

112 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331. 113 In itself, this propensity for the primitive condition to recur in a modern subject could be considered a form of the uncanny. 114 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 444. 115 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 444. 116 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 445. 117 David Macey, ‘Shklovsky, Viktor Borosovich’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 349. 118 Macey, ‘Shklovsky, Viktor Borosovich’, 349.

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social customs rather than from structures of the mind.’119 This consideration resonates with Laplanche and Pontalis’ conclusion that the greater structures of the mind are ingrained by social and historical practice. It is in this way that the structures that drive the construction of primal phantasy in the absence of actual experience are formed.

Further to this, Shklovsky’s proposition that there are universal laws which dictate the construction of character and narrative tropes of folklore is comparable to Freud’s assertion that the process of looking at symbols in folklore can assist in establishing the universal laws of the human psyche. In turn, Freud’s primal scenarios and dream symbols resonate conceptually with several of Shklovsky’s observations of universal plot and character tropes. For example, Shklovsky recites and supports Veselovsky’s argument that literary motifs arose out of ‘material and psychological conditions existing at the early stages of human development.’ 120 Veselovsky’s examples of the ‘sun (brother or husband)/moon (sister or wife) 121 literary simile is synonymous with Freud’s proposition that ‘parents, children, brothers and sisters’122 are types of universal characters symbolised prolifically throughout modes of psychoanalytical recall. Further to this, the manner in which Shklovsky’s ‘special laws of plot construction’ organise literary narrative, regardless of cultural, chronological and geographical factors, is similar to Freud’s view of the way in which primal fantasies operate and ‘organise phantasy life, regardless of personal experiences of different subjects.’ 123 There are tropes of event and character that are universally intrinsic to both psychology and literary synthesis.

119 Macey, ‘Shklovsky, Viktor Borosovich’, 349. 120 A. N. Veselovsky as cited in Shklovsky, Plot Construction and Style, 16. 121 A. N. Veselovsky as cited in Shklovsky, Plot Construction and Style, 16. 122 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118. 123 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Primal Phantasies’, 331.

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The possibility of a universal primordial architectural language

In addition to events (birth, death, sexual acts) and characters (parents, brother, sister, blood-relations), Freud claims that there is ‘one thing more’124 that is integral to universal symbolism. Freud writes that ‘[t]he only typical, that is to say, regularly occurring, representation of the human form is that of a house.’125 Although Laplanche and Pontalis omit architectural considerations from their summary of Freud’s position, and domestic space is only intermittently addressed by Freud, it is a recurring theme in his examination of universal symbolism. Along themes pertaining to character and narrative, spatial themes are the third most important consideration in any universal and fundamental language of dream symbols or fictional tales.

Before considering Freud’s specific observations about the role of the house as a universal symbol of the human body, it is worth locating his ideas in the context of the longstanding tradition of discourse on architecture and sexuality. Architecture’s role as a symbolic, metaphoric or allegorical human body is well-established, both historically and theoretically, within and without the discourse of psychoanalysis, by authors such as Vitruvius, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Mark Wigley, Guiliana Bruno, Anthony Vidler, Michael Ostwald and John Moore.126 Architecture has also been selectively gendered in previous discourse, changing from its more conventional neutral or asexual depiction. Some of these theories and applications, which have psychoanalytical implications, include those by Guiliana Bruno, Beatriz Colomina, Diana Agrest, Elizabeth Grosz,

124 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118. 125 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 120. 126 See: Vitruvius, On Architecture: Books I-V (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1996); Mark Wigley, ‘Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture,’ Assemblage 15 (August 1991); Guliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London and New York: Verso, 2002); Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000); Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992; Michael J. Ostwald and R. John Moore, Disjecta Membra: Architecture and the Loss of the Body (Sydney: Archadia, 1998).

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Adrian Forty and Joel Sanders127. Historically, gender differences and the body have informed architectural representation, structure and planning from as early as the Ancient Greeks. Architectural historian Joseph Rykwert uncovered an alternative history of the Classical orders in The Dancing Column (1996). For Rykwert, the Greeks ‘compared the column to the human body’128, creating a ‘bold metaphor’129 that is vitally responsible for the varying aesthetics of the different Classical orders and, consequently, much of their civic built environments. At the domestic level, the Greek oikos (house) implicitly symbolized gender difference in its segregated spatial planning, which both controlled behaviour and established or reinforced gender roles. 130 The relationship between architecture and sexuality is also a diverse one, incorporating discourses on aesthetics as well as systems of power and control. For example, spatial planning informed implicitly by sexuality is a discursive concept that encompasses many examples of architecture across a wide chronological and cultural span. Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality identifies and extends this discursive history through to the twentieth century, arguing that spatial conditions, especially of the Victorian era, were contrived in order to ‘produce, regulate, separate and link multiple sexualities.’131 He writes that to distil the family to a ‘conjugal relationship’132 required architecture as a mechanism of sexual control.

127 See: Guiliana Bruno, ‘Bodily Architectures’, Assemblage (19) (MIT Press, 1992): 106-111; Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992); The Sex of Architecture, eds. Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, Leslie Kanes Weisman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996); Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Adrian Forty, ‘Masculine, Feminine or Neuter’, in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and Interdisciplinary, eds Katerina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth and Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996); Joel Sanders, Stud (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). 128 Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1996), 13. 129 Rykwert, The Dancing Column, 13. 130 See Carla M. Antonaccio, ‘Architecture and Behaviour: Building Gender into Greek Houses’, The Classical World (Vol 93 No 5) (2000): 517-533. 131 Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 38. 132 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (London, England: Penguin Books, 1978), 46.

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The separation of grown-ups and children, the polarity established between the parents’ bedroom and that of the children (it became routine in the course of the century when working-class housing construction was undertaken), the relative segregation of boys and girls. 133

Alongside this ordering of the family in the domestic interior, the spatial arrangements of most psychic, religious and educational institutions, from the eighteenth-century French boarding school to the medieval English convent134, with ‘their large populations, their hierarchies, [and] their surveillance systems, constituted […] another way of distributing the interplay of powers and pleasures.’135 Foucault argues that most, if not all, building typologies, from domestic to institutional, have evolved in response to universal concerns about sexuality and the control of desire.

Although not recognised by Foucault, at the centre of his observations on spatial arrangements for control of sexuality are several psychoanalytical constructs. For example, literary critic Alexander Welsh notes that ‘Foucault’s own reasoning is unmistakably indebted to Freud’, however Foucault ‘does not seem to have wanted to place Freud’s thinking in a nineteenth century context.’136 Foucault argues that architecture of this period was constructed in response to a conceived conceptual and pervasive framework of familial desire, the ‘conjugal family unit’; in a psychoanalytical turn of phrase, this is the Oedipal scenario. Rice affirms this point when he argues that the way nineteenth-century domestic architecture managed sexuality was indebted to psychoanalytical thinking: ‘the interior can be considered as a practical instrument or machine working as part of the technology that psychoanalysis enacted.137 In a sense, domestic architecture of the era serves as a device to constrain or control

133 Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, 46. 134 Carrie F. Klaus, ‘Architecture and Sexual Identity: Jeanne de Jussie's Narrative of the Reformation of Geneva’ Feminist Studies, 29(2) (2002): 278-297. 135 Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, 46 136 Alexander Welsh, Freud's Wishful Dream Book. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994), 128. 137 Rice, Emergence of the Interior, 37.

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sexuality, and also to partition and separate the body from the subject of its physical narratives, properties which jointly make the home rich in psychoanalytical potential.

This interplay between architecture and sexuality established itself as a key concern in architectural research in the 1990s, beginning with the ‘ground- breaking’138 publication Sexuality and Space139, a collection of articles edited by Beatriz Colomina on the relationship between gender, sexuality and architecture. The relationship depicted in that work is multi-faceted; ‘what Colomina called for […] was not simply the addition of sexuality to architectural debates but a reciprocal exchange between theories of architecture and theories of sexuality.’140 This role of architecture, as both progenitor and product of gender and sexual identity, has since been understood in two distinct ways. The first and most immediate aspect represents a new wave of feminist debate about architecture, focusing on the gender politics of practice, the debate over the role of women as practitioners and clients, and the way women are constrained to domestic situations by architectural strategies. 141 The second response has come from American schools and the work of, amongst others, Colomina, Agrest and Reed.142 This work has promoted a return to philosophy and theory as a

138 Louise Campbell, ‘Review: Gender and Architecture by Louise Durning, Richard Wrigley’, Journal of Design History, 14(2) (Oxford University Press, 2001): 159. 139 Beatriz Colomina, ed. Sexuality and Space, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) 140 Victoria Rosner, ‘Review’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 25, Issue 3 (Spring 2000): 981 141 See: Campbell, ‘Review: Gender and Architecture by Louise Durning, Richard Wrigley’, 159; Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary, eds. Duncan McCorquodale, Katerina Ruedi, Sarah Wigglesworth, (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996); Gender Space Architecture, Jane Rendell, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice Francesca Hughes, ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996); Alice T. Friedman, Woman and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York: Abrams, 1998). 142 See: Architecture and Feminism Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, Carol Henderson, eds. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); Joel Sanders, Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); The Sex of Architecture, Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, Leslie Kane Weisman, eds. (New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 1996); Not At Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, Christopher Reed, ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, New York, 1996)

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means of ‘reading space sexually, but also reading sexuality in spatial terms.’143 Thus, amongst this new critical theory there has been a strong interest in psychoanalysis and Freudian theory as an interpretive approach to the built environment.144 Specifically, Freud’s theories offer multiple sexual and gendered interpretations of architectural and spatial elements, providing fertile territory for analysis and critique.

Freud states that the house often appears in dreams as a metaphor for the human body, and describes some of the exterior and interior architectural features that symbolically or phenomenally correlate with gendered bodies or features. For example, ‘[w]indows, doors and gates stand for the entrances to cavities in the body, and the facades may either be smooth or may have balconies and ledges to hold on to.’145 The exterior appearance of the house may even denote the gender of the body that it represents or serves. For instance, ‘[w]hen the walls are quite smooth, the house means a man; when there are ledges and balconies which can be caught hold of, a woman.’146 Interior spaces, such as ‘cupboards, stoves and, above all, rooms’147 are all references to the uterus and intra-uterine space, as ‘the female genitalia are symbolically represented by all such objects as share with them the property of enclosing a space.’148 Additionally, properties of rooms, including ‘being open or closed’ reinforces this symbolic language, because ‘the key which opens them, is certainly a male symbol’, 149 just as ‘doors and gates represent the genital opening.’150

143 Rosner, ‘Review’, 981 144 Fetish Sarah Whiting, Edward Mitchell, Greg Lynn, eds. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1992) 145 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125, 146 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118. 147 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 148 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 149 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 150 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125.

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Freud also lists multiple additional architectural considerations of materiality, building type and site. These too, in their psychoanalytical context, are of a gendered nature. Thus, he argues that certain materials are symbolic in dreams of a female body; ‘wood, paper, and objects made of these, such as tables and books.’151 Certain types of buildings also refer to specific genders, with churches and chapels also being symbolically feminine. Moreover, for Freud, both the landscape and the architecture of machinery are also sexually connotative.

The complicated topography of the female sexual organs accounts for their often being represented by a landscape with rocks, woods and water, whilst the imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends it to symbolization by all kinds of complicated and indescribable machinery.152

In Freud’s universal dream language feminine properties are analogous with natural materials, formations and the landscape. Masculine features identify more with industrious forms such as machinery, processing, technology and the modern built environment. Implicitly, these wider architectural considerations are also gendered.

Freud concludes that this list of the symbolic relationship between the house and the body is not exhaustive, and that further examples should be expounded, providing ‘material for a study of dream-symbolism’ that, using similarly spatial and potentially gendered language, is ‘both extended and made deeper.’ 153 This argument will be investigated later in the dissertation (see Chapter 6). Furthermore, Freud asserts that the meaning of symbols may be sourced not only from dreams, but from widely diverse sources including ‘fairy tales and myths, jokes and witticisms, […] from what we know of the manners and customs, sayings and songs, of different peoples.’154 In this statement, Freud, once again reiterates the connection between recurring dream symbols

151 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 152 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 153 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 154 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125.

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and literary tropes, noting that ‘[i]f we consider these various sources individually, we shall find so many parallels to dream-symbolism that we are bound to be convinced of our interpretations.’155

Freud additionally observes that the example of domestic architecture not only appears symbolically in dreams but also implicitly marks colloquial speech and metaphor. He gives four examples of architectural colloquialisms in descriptive speech, such as ‘“a thatch of hair,” or a “tile hat”’, or speaking ‘of the openings of the body as its “portals.”’156 Of particular interest is his repetition of the derogatory remark wherein a person with a mental illness is described as ‘not right “in the upper storey”’;157 a description which is a clear spatialisation, not only of the body, but also of a psychological condition. Importantly, the upper storey is detached and isolated from public access, perhaps even controlled by a watchman; it is both the most private and the most controlled of spaces.

When Freud explains the universal symbolism of dreams and cultural values, he also uses an architectural language, suggesting that, in addition to the consideration of character and narrative tropes, architecture plays an integral role in the universal languages of narrative and dream symbolism. Freud’s insistence on the importance of architecture, not only as bodily substitute in the universal psyche, but also as emotionally responsive setting, is reinforced in his analysis of the home as it is represented in the unheimlich.

Etymologically, the word unheimlich, (discussed in Chapter 3) is rooted in the concept of heim, or home. Freud observes that ‘[p]eople have dreams of climbing down the front of a house, with feelings sometimes […] of dread.’158 Such dread is characteristic of the unheimlich, brought on by the return of the repressed psychological material. That material, in its conscious resurfacing, is consequently framed as both familiar and unfamiliar. This condition of the

155 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 156 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 157 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 158 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118.

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unheimlich is the same as that of universal character or narrative themes; the essential narrative and character structures are universally familiar, however, given cultural appropriations and idiosyncrasies, a tale may in ways also appear to be unfamiliar. The concept of heim, is therefore integrally connected to these other universal unconscious structures of characters and narrative motifs.

Thus, along with the similar literary and psychoanalytical currents that have been established thus far, there are typical universal character motifs (mother, father, sibling) and narrative arrangement of these motifs (birth, death, sexual acts, adultery, conjugality, the Oedipal). It is further plausible to consider that there may be an additional current of universal spatial motifs. This is supported by the broad amount of literature that documents architecture as a spatial representation the body, or as a means of controlling the body. In this tradition, architecture, particularly domestic in nature, stands as an expression of cultural and social constructs around bodies and the expected domestic relationships between them. Psychoanalysis has attempted to theorise these social constructs, suggesting that domestic architecture may be considered a spatial representation of psychoanalytical constructs and concerns. Given Freud’s own commentary on the subject of domestic architecture and the theme of heim (home), architectural motifs are inherently connected to psychoanalytical symbolism. This further points to a correlation and suggests a type of primordial system of spatial motifs that exists alongside those of psychoanalysis and literature.

The universal dream ‘langue’ and an idiosyncratic dream ‘parole’

The province of symbolism in psychoanalysis is large, varied and intricate. In general psychoanalytical terms, a ‘symbol’ may loosely refer to any substitution, be it behavioural or a part of dream metonymy.159 However, a Freudian symbol occurs for the most part in dreams. That is, it is a type of dream-element, which for the most part must maintain the same meaning, from

159 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 444-445.

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one individual to the next. It is thus generally accepted as being characterised by ‘constant meaning, “mute-ness”, and phylogenetic inheritance.’160 As Freudian scholar Virginia Barry writes, ‘there are universals in the ways we experience, represent, and ultimately come to symbolize reality.’161 Yet these symbols are subject to profound influence by the individual forming the images where

inner representations of reality are associated networks of information from all our senses, including sight, sounds, taste, olfaction, touch, inner senses, and so forth, the representation of reality is necessarily influenced by our particular body’s capacities for sensing sensations. The representation of reality must be a highly subjective, individual experience constrained by the mechanisms that our brains and bodies have to sense the world.162

As such, there are also dream-elements that are construed more from individual, idiosyncratic experiences and residues, which are not universal symbols.

Freud developed his position to hold that there are two types of dream symbols. The first ‘is based on the dreamer’s associations’ and the second is its independent ‘interpretation of the symbols.’ 163 Freud advocated a mixed approach to dream analysis, with the focus being more on idiosyncratic associations than universal symbols. He asserted that a system of interpretation based solely on a knowledge of symbolism is not one that can replace that of free association; ‘[i]t is complementary to this latter, and the results it yields are only useful when applied in connection with the latter.’164 This implies that while universal laws dictate the fundamental structures of the dream, and dream- elements fundamentally conform to these deep-seated constructs, they also superficially take on idiosyncratic forms and appearances. This two-layer conception of the meaning of dream-elements has the same problem that Freud

160 Petocz, Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism, 98. 161 Virginia C. Barry, ‘Freud and Symbolism: Or How a Cigar Became More Than Just a Cigar.’ Sigmund Freud and his Impact on the Modern World (Hillsdale, New Jersey and London: The Analytic Press, 2000), 55. 162 Barry, ‘Freud and Symbolism: Or How a Cigar Became More Than Just a Cigar’, 54-55. 163 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Symbolism’, 445. 164 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 118.

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faced in his theoretical conception of the primal phantasies, discussed earlier in this chapter. In that case again, a greater phylogenetic system, or collective unconsciousness, drives the construction of phantasy in the face of limited or non-existent actual experience.

A similar two-form construction is found in the linguistic concepts of langue and parole. First presented by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916 as part of his Course in General Linguistics, the concepts of langue and parole were not only seminal developments in that field, but key to the wider development of works in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literary criticism (including aforementioned narratologists Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky) and architecture. The pervasive power of the concept, and the modes of thinking and acting it encompassed, were widely referred to as Structuralism 165 . Saussure’s conceptual framework for analysing or understanding language distinguished between the greater ‘system of a language (la langue)’ and individual ‘speech acts (la parole)’.166 Thus he presents two levels of structure in the form and diction of a language. The greater system, langue, ‘is defined as the social aspect of the language’ which ‘has little to do with the individuals.’ The langue is ‘the product of a linguistic cont[r]act between all members of a community.’167 and ‘consists of signs organised into a system and expressive of ideas.’168 The second level to the structure, parole, refers to ‘the individual aspect of language, or the manifestations of langue in individual speech acts.’ 169 An individual speaker of a language adopts the greater system of langue (language), but inevitably fashions their own linguistic idiosyncrasies through the act of parole

165 Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, ‘The Implied Order: Structuralism’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 53. 166 Jonathan Culler, ‘The Linguistic Foundation’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1975), 57. 167 Macey, David. ‘langue/parole’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 224. 168 Macey, ‘langue/parole’, 224. 169 Macey, ‘langue/parole’, 224.

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(the act of speech). Parole will always be an idiosyncratic crafting of the wider cultural langue.

Importantly, while often framed as separate, langue and parole are inherently connected. Translator and linguist Johnathan Culler describes langue and parole and the relationship between them as that ‘the former is a system, an institution, a set of interpersonal rules and norms, while the latter comprises the actual manifestations of the system in speech and writing.’ 170 Culler points out that individual parole is ultimately the product and evidence of the langue:

It is, of course, easy to confuse the system with its manifestations, to think of English as the set of English utterances. But to learn English is not to memorise a set of utterances; it is to master a system of rules and norms which make it possible to produce and understand utterances. And the linguist’s task is not to study utterances for their own sake; they are of interest to him only in so far as they provide evidence about the nature of the underlying system, the English language.171

Moreover, individual acts of parole are ultimately guided by and subject to the greater langue, but parole rarely affects langue unless the act of speech becomes grounded by widespread common usage. Macey writes that ‘at the level of parole individuals are creative agents whose linguistic innovations can modify langue, but only by becoming impersonal elements of a system over which individuals have no control.’172 Thus, the widespread nature of an act of parole may eventually see it become grounded as part of the inherent law and structure of that language. Macey argues that ‘the relationship between langue and parole takes the form of a dialectic’ and that ‘the dialectic between the two aspects of language is the motor-force behind linguistic evolution’173 (Fig. 4.3). This evocative description suggests a similar construction to those found in Kafkan literature and Freudian theory (Chapter 2).

170 Culler, ’The Linguistic Foundation’, 57. 171 Culler, ’The Linguistic Foundation’, 57. 172 Macey, ‘langue/parole’, 224. 173 Macey, ‘langue/parole’, 224.

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Fig. 4.3 Binary model of Saussure’s langue and parole as described by Macey. Source: author

Fig. 4.4 Theoretical model for an architectural langue and parole. Source: author

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The langue and parole model has been further employed in other fields to understand their systems. For example, early Structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss ‘learned of Saussure’s ideas about language’ and ‘began to see that culture, like language, is a system characterised by an internal order of interconnected parts that obey certain rules of operation.’174 Levi-Strauss would then apply the system to literary analysis, going ‘on to conduct famous studies of myths that noticed, in the same manner as Russian critic Vladimir Propp’s path-breaking work on folk tales, that such myths, despite their heterogeneity and multiplicity, told the same kernel narratives.’ 175 Structuralist thinking has since traversed into architectural criticism, including the 1972 Learning from Las Vegas, which saw Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steve Izenour attempt to define architecture as a type of structuralist system of communication.176 Culler concludes that ‘within linguistics itself there are disagreements about what precisely belongs to langue and parole’, and that ‘such debates need not concern the structuralist, except in so far as they indicate that structure can be defined at various levels of abstraction.’177 The idea is that a greater underlying langue or implied order largely dictates an individual’s parole in many forms, be it speech, behaviour, dreams, or creative endeavours such as architecture and fictional literature.

The previous section concluded with the possibility of a primordial and universal system of spatial motifs in dreams and fiction; a system which may be thought of as an architectural langue. Indeed, spatial motifs, as they appear in narratives and in psychoanalysis, conform to a similar structuralist system of langue and parole. Spatial motifs take on idiosyncratic appearances that are derived from the individual’s everyday thoughts and experiences, but these associations have a deeper and more systemic universal meaning (Freud’s symbolic attributions). An architectural parole may be embodied in an

174 Rivkin and Ryan, ‘The Implied Order: Structuralism’, 53. 175 Rivkin and Ryan, ‘The Implied Order: Structuralism’, 53. 176 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1972) 177 Culler, ’The Linguistic Foundation’, 57.

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idiosyncratic fashioning, such as stylistic features, ornamental details, material composition and some aspects of form.178

This idea resonates with several themes in semiotician Umberto Eco’s reflections on architectural form and communication. Eco proposes that there are two levels to architectural signification: denotation and connotation. According to Eco, architectural denotation occurs ‘according to an immemorial architectural codification’179, and presents the object’s fundamental purpose. For example ‘a stair or a ramp denotes the possibility of going up’. However, Eco adds that

whether it is a simple set of steps in a garden or a grand staircase by Vanvitelli, the winding stairs of the Eiffel tower or the spiralling ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, one finds oneself before a form whose interpretation involves not only a codified connection between the form and the function. 180

Thus, Eco observes that ‘besides denoting its function’ the architectural object also ‘could connote a certain ideology of the function.’181 This is architectural connotation. Eco continues with another example of a chair: ‘a seat tells me first of all that I can sit down on it.’ However, ‘if the seat is a throne, it must do more than seat one: it serves to seat one with a certain dignity, to corroborate its user’s “sitting in dignity” — perhaps through various accessory signs connoting “regalness” (eagles on the arms, a high, crowned back, etc.)’182 In addition to its communicated fundamental function (the denotation), stylistic details and ornament communicate further, more symbolic functions (the connotation).

Spatial motifs in narrative can also be interpreted through the structuralist system of langue and parole (Fig. 4.4). For example, in Kafka’s fiction the importance of parole is found in the way he uses spatial motifs in his stories that

178 However, the functional and thematic histories of a chair, window or cabinet are qualities that are inherently more universal, and thus present a type of architectural langue. See Chapter 6. 179 Umberto Eco, ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’ in Signs, Symbols and Architecture, eds. Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt and Charles Jencks (New York: Wiley, 1980), 83-85. 180 Eco, ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’, 83-85 181 Eco, ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’, 83-85 182 Eco, ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’, 83-85

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respond to the greater architectural langue, that is, universal spatial histories and themes. However, there is also at play in his fiction an idiosyncratic translation of his own architectural and spatial experiences, thus constituting a type of parole. The investigation of this architectural langue and parole in Kafka’s fiction, as it relates to wider spatial histories and Kafka’s own life, is developed in Chapter 6.

Conclusion

This chapter develops two related arguments. The first is concerned with the critical place of architecture in universal theories of literature and dreams. In these theories, architecture is revealed as the third component, after characters and events, that shapes the overall meaning of a tale or a dream. Setting is crucial in the construction of fiction, as are character and narrative events. Moreover, there exists an established link between domestic architecture and psychoanalytic theory, as Freud treats the house and components of domestic architecture as key to psychoanalytical symbology. This is important because the concept of heim (home) is also central to the concept of the unheimlich. Freud’s meditation on the house as a universal symbol confirms that domestic architecture is an implicit and integral part of the universal primitive psychic law, or langue, that, according to both Shklovsky and Freud, dictates the thematic construction of various examples of myths, fairy tales and folklore.

This second argument developed in this chapter, suggests that if there is a pervasive langue of the unconscious — that is, a language viewed as a type of universal abstract system — which structures human narratives, behaviour and dreams, then a type of parole must exist, where an individual naturally fashions an idiosyncratic usage of the universal system. Both the universal langue and the idiosyncratic parole are relevant to interpreting literature and architecture’s role in it. This distinction between langue and parole is suggested in the chapter by the way in which universal narrative and character structures play out in myths, folk-tales and dreams. Cultural, geographic and chronological circumstances dictate an idiosyncratic variation of the universal literary motifs. The narrative and characters of everyday life are also crucial to the constitution of dream-elements.

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Furthermore, given that domestic spatiality also sustains an implicit and integral role in these universal structures — the architectural langue — then there must exist, by way of similar cultural, chronological and geographic circumstances, an idiosyncratic architectural parole. From this perspective, such domestic spatiality occupies an equally integral part of an individual psychic parole, and these everyday spatial residues necessarily inform literary practice.

Collectively the two arguments developed in this chapter affirm the importance of architectural and spatial forms in literary and psychoanalytical interpretation and reading. When combined with the arguments in the preceding two chapters, they confirm the importance of interpreting the spatial structures and devices present in a person’s life, thoughts and works. Or more specifically, in Kafka’s case, his lived experience, his subconscious or dreamed experience and in his fiction. The next chapter examines the first two of these, developing a spatial biography of Kafka’s lived (spatial) and imagined (psychological) realms as he moves homes and inhabits various rooms around Prague. The penultimate chapter then shifts the focus to the role of spatial structures and devices in Kafka’s fiction.

The issue then becomes how to interpret the architectural langue (universal) and parole (architectural) in literature or in dreams. To establish Kafka’s architectural parole, the next chapter will map a spatial biography that chronologises his idiosyncratic experiences of and attitudes towards architecture, in real life and in dreams. Then, the penultimate chapter looks at spatiality in Kafka’s fiction, and how the occurrences of five spatial motifs are recurrences of Kafka’s architectural parole. The chapter also looks at how these spatial motifs connect to an architectural langue, that is, the way spatial motifs can be demonstrated to satisfy a wider thematic history of that spatial construct.

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Chapter 5. Mapping Home: a spatial biography of Kafka

Introduction

This chapter presents a biography, not of Kafka’s life, but of selected spaces he inhabits, observes and imagines. The construction of this biography aims to, firstly, demonstrate the links between Kafka’s experience of domestic spaces, as presented in his diaries and autobiographies, and the bigger architectural developments and changes happening in the city. The second purpose is to identify the links between Kafka’s spatial experiences of home and the architectural constructions of his dreams.

The first part of the chapter examines the difficult and complex concept of ‘spatial experience’. Kafka’s spatial experiences range from fully ‘conscious’, ‘active’ and pursued interests in architecture, to ‘unconscious’ and ‘passive’ background events that are not explicitly registered in his diaries, but are also not without some psychological affect. The section presents three classifications of experience that are included and examined within the spatial biography, noting that the classifications are not straightforward and that there are ‘slippages’ between the three.

The spatial biography then commences at the urban scale, with a description of Prague in the period of Kafka’s lifetime. This part examines the wider context of Kafka’s home, and relevant aspects of the historical, social, architectural and artistic context in Prague during the period of Kafka’s primary literary production. Kafka’s experience of space, how he moved in and inhabited the changing environment of Prague in this time, explicitly affected his psychological state. The section documents how the city developed at that particular time in relation to wider European trends and factors that include the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of Modernism in architecture, and the need for mass housing after the First World War. These factors would also, in turn, affect the domestic environments that Kafka would come to inhabit.

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The following section of the spatial biography then considers domestic-scale spaces within Prague, constructing a chronology of key addresses at which Kafka dwelled in his lifetime, along with key dreams that Kafka documented, and that are significant in their spatial and architectural content. By discussing the spaces Kafka inhabited in a chronological order, the trajectory of the investigation is systematic; but, much like the slippages that occur in any comprehensive chronology of Kafka’s life, this present chapter also drifts between varying grades of ‘conscious’ sites around Prague, and ‘unconscious’ spaces such as those found in his dreams. This section begins by tracing the early domestic backgrounds that were fundamental to Kafka’s childhood and general waking life. These spaces may be described as being typically passive in their physical influence, but they have an effect upon Kafka’s psychological state and are replicated in various ways in Kafka’s dreams.

The spatial chronology in this chapter focuses on five key domestic sites of his waking life. These five were chosen from a much larger number of both historic and modern spaces Kafka inhabited. For this reason, the overview of his ‘real’ spaces is necessarily edited and controlled, although the five examples are the ones that play the largest role in his diaries, letters and dreams. These five are also significant because, by and large, Kafka lived only in the Old Town of Prague, and so the scope of his lived spaces is therefore constrained both culturally and geographically (Fig. 5.1). Further to this, the five examples encapsulate a substantial proportion (over half) of the prime of Kafka’s lifetime. Having been documented in his diary entries and letters, these five are particularly revealing in terms of his developing attitudes to domestic architecture, as the examples also coincide with the major shift in urban infrastructure that occurred in Prague at the time (Fig. 5.2).

In between discussing the spatial and architectural properties of the various real sites in Prague, the chapter also examines three examples of Kafka’s ‘unconscious’ architectures. These spatial experiences are constructs of Kafka’s mind, usually occurring in his dreams. Architecture, in this context, is an integral part of Kafka’s mental landscape. Furthermore, these examples confirm his phenomenological processing of real spatial conditions into various spaces (buildings and interiors) that

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Fig 5.1 Map of Prague showing Kafka's addresses over his lifetime. Fig. 5.2 Timeline of Kafka’s lived spaces and wider urban changes in Prague.

Source: author. Adapted from Klaus Wagenbach, Kafka's Prague: a Travel Reader and Emanuel Frynta, Kafka and Prague. Source: author

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appear in his dreams. Three dream environments are described in this chapter, which demonstrate varying levels of architectural synthesis, ranging from the straightforward replication of everyday civic elements and spatial memory, to more complex spatial metaphors that are symbolic of his waking life experiences and anxieties. Through this process of interweaving, it is demonstrated that the ‘real’ and seemingly ‘objective’ spaces of Kafka’s life are congruently residual in his dreams. The section concludes with the suggestion that real architectural experiences have been synthesized into his dreams on a number of levels, and given that Kafka’s dreams influenced his fiction, then the architectural experiences of his real life may be both consciously and subconsciously connected to the architectures of his fiction.

The final section in the chapter reflectively examines the congruency of conscious and unconscious architectures, and the way in which real life spatial experience is synthesized into the dreamscape. The section presents two types of spatial synthesis. The first is replicated space, where architectural units or landmarks from real life are repeated in the dreamscape, although not without unrealistic rearrangement or variances. The second type of spatial synthesis is where space may be considered as a replacement or substitution for something else; the architectural artefact presents as a metaphor for an emotional condition, character or event. In this case, architecture presents as a symbol. The symbolic importation of architecture into dreams is presumably informed by idiosyncratic associations, and thus may be considered an example of architectural parole, an idea presented in the previous chapter. The present chapter concludes that if architecture and domestic space from real life infiltrated Kafka’s dreams, and his dreams informed his fiction, then it can be said that a spatial parole exists in Kafka’s fiction. This idea is investigated in the penultimate chapter, which examines spatiality in Kafka’s fiction and the relations it has to both Kafka’s waking life experiences and universal architectural thematic histories and symbolism.

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Slippage from waking to dreaming

Much like the autobiographical accounts contained within Kafka’s diaries and notebooks (see Chapter 1), architecture, as it features in Kafka’s life and writings can also be generally differentiated into two main categories: that which is ‘real’ and that which is ‘imagined’, with various slippages between the two. The levels of slippage of architectural experience range from the real and objective (built domestic spaces that are an unacknowledged functional background support to everyday life) to the imagined and thus subjective (the unreal architectural constructions of dreams and fiction). However, despite being able to describe them broadly in this way the intricacies of such groupings are complex and equivocal when considering Kafka.

In the spectrum from ‘conscious’ to ‘unconscious’ architectural experience, there are two types of ‘conscious’ architectural experiences that are worthy of differentiating (Fig. 5.3). The first type of ‘conscious’ spatial experience is an ‘active‘ one. This category is minor, but includes cases where Kafka displayed an active interest in architecture and sought out particular spatial experiences or knowledge. Examples of this type include: Kafka’s attendance at a lecture by key Modernist proponent and theorist Adolf Loos1; his visits to the preserved domestic lodgings of notable authors who interested him2; his varied connections to practicing architects,3 including his close childhood friend Oskar Pollak.4 Such examples provide a level of evidence of Kafka’s interest in and considered experiences of architecture, and thus any consequential spatial opinion or attitude that develops from these encounters may be considered a conscious type of spatial synthesis. They are of interest in the present context because they mediate between the real and objective domestic spaces of his life and, at the other end of the spectrum, the unreal and subjective spaces of his unconscious

1 Architects Adolf Loos and Rudolf Steiner presented lectures in 1911 at the Berta Fanta salon. 2 Kafka visited Goethe’s house, Schiller’s house and the ‘Grillparzer room’ in Vienna. 3 Translator Julie Jesenka-Pollak to Prague architect Jaromir Gocar 4 Oskar Pollak was a close childhood friend of Kafka. He became a professor of architectural history and wrote a book entitled ‘Architect’s Fairy Tales’. The architectural history of Prague and Rome was one of his chief fields of interest. See Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 55.

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Fig. 5.3 Spectrum of architectural experiences for Kafka. Source: author

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dreaming. While these are examples of ‘conscious’ and ‘active‘ interests in architecture, there are also conscious and ‘passive’ experiences. This type includes the domestic backgrounds that are unacknowledged, mindlessly operational and seemingly taken for granted in the course of everyday life. Nevertheless, such spaces are strongly influential, and are discussed at length in the latter parts of this chapter.5 Nonetheless, as is the nature of Kafka’s diary entries, dreams and fiction, these three types of spatial experiences (the real, the conscious and the unconscious) do drift between one or other state in important ways. For example, the analysis of the ‘real’ space of Kafka’s life, especially in the moments before his impending marriage, concludes with a diary entry that demonstrates his conscious, albeit paradoxical, self-awareness regarding his relationship to, and preferences for, domesticity and its architecture. This example, as we will see, might be classified as ‘conscious’ and ‘imagined’, more so than objective and unconsidered.

Kafka’s home: the wider context of Prague

In the early years of the twentieth century, Prague was the third largest city in the Austro-Hungarian empire, with a population of almost one quarter of a million people, living across eight districts. On the right of the River Moldau (Vltava) was the Old Town (Prague I), including the former Ghetto, the Josefov, or Josefstadt (Prague V), whose medieval buildings were razed between 1895 and 1905, and replaced by “modern tenement palaces”’6 in the so-called New Town district. As a result of this, early twentieth-century Prague was a city undergoing unprecedented socio-political growth and transformation. At the same time Prague society constituted a complex system of racial, religious, class and hierarchical divisions, within which ‘lack of synchronization was all too tangible.’7 These cultural tensions were especially visible in bitter arguments

5 This is reminiscent of the earlier Tolstoy fable by Shklovsky. See Chapter 3. 6 Klaus Wagenbach, Kafka's Prague: A Travel Reader, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: The Overlook Press, 1996), 11. 7 Wagenbach, Kafka's Prague, 14.

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about the city’s historical and architectural values, particularly as an influx of creative and avant-garde ideas began to both pervade and shape the urban fabric. This change in the city prompted an increasingly passionate debate about its development and potential destruction. As an inhabitant of the city at this critical juncture, Kafka, according to historian and biographer Klaus Wagenbach, would have ‘experienced Prague as a deeply divided city,’ 8 with architectural rifts complicating the existing cultural and religious ones.

The most militant Czech architectural critic of that period, the Marxist Karel Teige, is credited as sparking the call for a Modernist architectural revolution in Prague.9 In his 1930 essay, The End of the Century, Teige traces the history of domestic housing in inner-city Prague, noting that for the better part of the nineteenth century, this ‘housing was in a deplorable state.’ 10 Teige expresses little enthusiasm for the bourgeois apartments of the fin de siècle, which were riddled with functional and sanitary problems. He describes such dwellings as comprising a trivial consistence; ‘merely of rooms and a kitchen’11. In his taxonomy of typical Czech housing, Teige observes that:

[o]ne example of the bourgeois and petit bourgeois dwelling was the ‘pansky byt’ [patrician apartment] in a palace or mansion made up of many rooms, with an endless enfilade of living rooms and other rooms that only later assumed a specialised function: to wit, gentlemen’s room, lady’s room, library, children’s room, reception room, music room, dining room, and boudoir.

The nineteenth century saw such planning incrementally improve to host, in addition, the vital utilities for cleanliness and health. For both Teige and architect Pavel Janák12, the major development in Czech building at the time was ‘the appearance of bathrooms

8 Wagenbach, Kafka's Prague, 14. 9 Rostislav Švácha, The Architecture of New Prague 1895-1945, trans. Alexandra Büchler (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 1995), 21. 10 Karel Teige. Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 67. 11 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 67 12 Pavel Janák published a number of articles in the review Styl describing the evolution of Prague apartment houses. Teige was in strong opposition and very critical of Janák’s architectural work.

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and toilets in ordinary apartments.’13 As Teige recounts, ‘only in the 1840s or 1850s did each apartment begin to have its own toilet’ and, ‘around 1900, bathrooms appeared in apartments of at least four rooms but only after 1920 in smaller apartments.’14

Yet, for the most part, bourgeois housing remained stylistically focused on emulating aristocratic palaces and courts and responded poorly to the site opportunities necessary for physical health and wellbeing. According to Czech architectural historian Rotislav Švácha, many Prague architects ‘began to acknowledge the necessity to make the urban areas more distinctive and scenic, to structure them and brighten them up by means of ending the city boulevards with conspicuous points-de-vue.’15 Reflecting the values of the period, in 1901 the architect Jan Koula praised the ‘exquisite sense’ with which the winning proposals ‘formulated and developed new areas creating a harmonious whole with the old parts of the city.’16 Despite these aspirations, Teige brutally condemned these efforts, arguing that they were at the expense of healthy living conditions, and ‘the entire nineteenth century had sacrificed practical functional requirements to powerful decorative lavishness and the monumental backdrop.’ 17 Teige describes the problems of this stylistic emulation as undermining fundamental design provisions that allow access to light and air and thereby health. For Teige,

[c]astles and palaces, much like the apartment buildings of the nineteenth century, lacked bathrooms. Their main façade was always orientated with respect to some point-de-vue: they faced north, while their staircase faced south — that is, without regards to the movement of the sun. Space was squandered to accommodate an enormous monumental staircase; useless spaces were designed purely for effect. 18

13 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 67. 14 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 67. 15 Švácha, The Architecture of New Prague 1895-1945, 21. 16 Švácha, The Architecture of New Prague 1895-1945, 21. 17 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 68. 18 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 68.

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Teige deplored the fact that ‘apartment buildings […] harboured pretensions of being a palace or castle.’19 Even the sanitary aristocratic home, built to a ‘château formula’, was ‘a hideous outcome of an art historical, “stylistic” and decorative understanding of architecture.’20

The health problems associated with housing in the Prague Ghetto were so extreme that, between 1895 and 1905, the district was razed and rebuilt. Yet, despite this radical intervention, and the new advances in architecture that were being made at this time, there remained major problems with the levels of amenity found in the housing. While Kafka biographer Sander Gilman proposes that the reason for the widespread urban pandemics that occurred in the historic districts was ‘the extraordinary severity of the winter and the poorer food available in the cities’, he also observes that ‘Kafka in his windy and clammy castle [the Schönbörn Palace] was certainly more at risk than most.’21 This observation also echoes that of Teige, who directly associates the health concerns of the city with the state of its housing, noting that ‘the dwellings of the proletariat and the poor are good indicators of the creeping illness of our cities.’22

Echoing the contemporaneous concerns of Le Corbusier who, along with other early modernists, criticised the lack of hygiene and its impact on health within the historical city, an exasperated Teige described this as a ‘period of greatest decline in planning and design’23. While Teige admits that ‘the abolition of the Prague ghetto and the razing of the entire fifth district were important urban developments’, 24 he otherwise finds the new housing just as offensive, concluding that the:

19 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 68. 20 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 68. 21 Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 99. 22 Karel Teige. The Minimum Dwelling, trans. Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1932), 54. 23 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 78. 24 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 80.

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[c]ontemporary architecture […] could do no better than raise new barrack-style apartment buildings, riddled with poor taste, upon the ruins of old and unsanitary houses. To erect unsightly new residential districts may be even worse than to force people into unsightly old residential districts.25

The demolition of Old Prague and the subsequent construction of new ‘modern tenement palaces’ was exceptionally controversial at the time. The period also saw conflicting architectural and stylistic motifs embodied in the new buildings, as they embraced both historic and vernacular motifs and ornamentation in an effort to retain a sense of Old Prague. According to Švácha, this new ‘Bohemian neo-Renaissance’ style, which was simultaneously derived from Bohemian buildings of the sixteenth century and the local architectural language of countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, ‘appeared to suggest the most promising direction.’26 Švácha writes that this style ‘found many supporters among other architects as well as among politicians of the nationalist Young Czech Party, which reigned supreme.’27 Yet, on the other hand, Teige claims that many of his contemporaries shared his reservations over the ambiguous cultural messages and values conveyed by the new architecture. For example, the creative writer Ivan Olbracht was horrified by the construction of such estates, which became elitist enclaves ‘where “creative individualities” clash with one another so mercilessly that one can only weep over what an abomination they have made out of one of the most beautiful places in Prague.’28 Teige quotes from Olbract’s description of the problems to emphasise that the architectural styles of the Rieger Embankment were often a whim of the nouveau riche merchant classes. Thus, the ‘butcher commissions a “very art nouveau” house” while the ‘industrialist sees some pseudo-Gothic thing in Vienna and wants the same.’29 The ‘wife of a successful stockbroker’ demands a Venetian palace, a pharmacist commissions a Baroque palace and the ‘daughter of a

25 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 80. 26 Švácha, The Architecture of New Prague 1895-1945, 28. 27 Švácha, The Architecture of New Prague 1895-1945, 21. 28 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 80. 29 Ivan Olbracht as quoted by Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 80.

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grain merchant is so inspired by a tale from the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights that she wants to live in Arabian style.’30

Tiege’s socially constructed narrative of Prague life and the emergence and influence of the new architecturally-conservative, financially prosperous and mobile bourgeoisie, has undeniable Marxist undertones. However, as Teige notes, other critics who disagreed with his views on the razing of Old Prague had similar reservations about the absurd importation of traditional motifs into the new stylistic trend.

Vilem Mrstik ‘witnessed the destruction of the Old Town and blamed it on contemporary architecture. His “Bestia trumphians” … sounded like a call to arms against the ruin of the old architecture, threatened by contemporary life. Such were the origins of the Club for Old Prague [Klub za Starou Prahu] 31 , a group devoted to the preservation of historical monuments and the ‘genius loci.’32

Despite such concerns about the loss of ‘genius loci’, the Baroque architecture and construction methods of Old Prague could not accommodate an escalating housing crisis. Prague was experiencing an unforeseen explosion in population, and time- consuming traditional construction methods were not sufficient to respond to this. An increasingly frustrated Teige argued that, the ‘nineteenth century, spurred on by the energetic development of industrialism and capitalism, as well as by the rapid growth of major cities as industrial and commercial centres, was the first to face grand but insoluble urban tasks.’33 Wagenbach notes that in about 1900 the ‘areas’ of Vyšehrad, Hološevice-Bubna, and Lieben were indiscriminately ‘added’ to the suburbs of Prague,

30 Ivan Olbracht as quoted by Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 80. 31 Historian Rotislav Švácha describes the Club as an association of Czech artists and intellectuals that was formed in 1900 to protest against the planned modernisation of Stâre Mésto and Josefov. 32 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 81. The term ‘genius loci’ became widespread in architecture in the 1970s, through the work of Christian Norberg Schulz, who had reacted to similar historical problems and challenges as those occurring in Prague several decades earlier. While Norberg Schulz’s use of the term is more closely related to the phenomenology of place in a larger philosophical and geographical sense, Teige’s use is largely about local details, motifs and elements in architecture. 33 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 81.

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a process Teige describes as akin to the spreading of ‘weeds.’ 34 Within this greater context of radical architectural progress and urban and cultural transformation, the city of Prague was at the forefront of the battle between medieval and modern life. It is against this backdrop that Kafka’s life and spatial experience was shaped.

Kafka’s home: domestic

Given the large number of scholarly works dedicated to identifying a connection between Kafka and Prague the author and his city might almost be considered in synonymous terms.35 This is particularly so because Kafka ‘hardly ever left his home city of Prague during his short life’, apart from ‘several business trips, a number of educational visits, many stays in sanatoria, six months in Berlin, and a few months in the Bohemian country side.’36 Kafka was aware of the close connection he maintained with the city. In a 1902 letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, he notes that ‘Prague doesn’t let go,’37 and that, characterising the city as both maternal and demanding, ‘this little mother has claws. … One has to give in or else.’38 Additionally, Kafka wistfully told his friend Gustav Janouch39 that ‘in us … the ghetto still lives — the dark corners, the secret alleys, shuttered windows, squalid courtyards.’40 For Kafka, his connection with Prague was a complex and frustrating one. The medieval urban fabric of Josefov clearly resonated favourably with him, and the transformations in its architectural and urban fabric that occurred at the turn of the century coincided with Kafka’s formative years as a young adult, leaving a definitive impression on him. Despite, for the most part,

34 Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 81. 35 Juan Insua, ‘The City of K: Franz Kafka and Prague’; in The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague (Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporania, 2002); Emanual Frynta and Jan Lukas, Kafka and Prague (London: Batchworth Press Limited, 1960). 36 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 7. 37 Ronald Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka (London: Phoenix Press, 1981), 37. 38 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 37. 39 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (New DIrections Publishing Corporation, 1971) 40 Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, 108.

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remaining within the boundary of a nine-kilometre radius for the majority of his life, Kafka made a number of moves around this district and consequently experienced a wide diversity of architectural experiences from medieval to modern.41 Nevertheless, a close review of his observations about five key examples of this experience of lived space indicates that for the most part Kafka generally embraced the familiar elements of the Old Town and felt ill at ease with the city’s emerging modernity.

Kafka’s early childhood was highly unsettled, being punctuated with regular domestic upheaval. In the first six years of his life he had to endure a total of five moves.42 Biographer Ronald Hayman describes the sequence of abrupt moves in detail, noting that at the time of Kafka’s birth the family was ‘living in the old city in a small flat in Maiselgasse,’ and that ‘Franz was not yet two when they moved to another small flat in Wenzelsplatz.’43 The family stayed in the Wenzelplatz flat ‘for only seven months before moving again, this time to Geistgasse, which was near the original in Maiselgasse.’44 Then, in 1887, they moved again to Niklasstrasse, a ‘pleasant’45 street that was closer to the original Maiselgasse flat. The next move was in 1888, to a flat at No 2 Zeltnergasse, and then the following year, the family moved ‘into their first large flat,’46 which was more like a ‘house,’ that ‘separates the Grosser Ring from the Kleiner Ring, which leads into the Maiselgasse.’47 These early childhood flats were all located within the poor Jewish ghetto of Prague and, as Wagenbach notes, the first three were torn down and redeveloped as part of the health raze that occurred at the turn of the

41 Robert Crumb and David Marowitz, Kafka for Beginners (Cambridge, England and St. Leonards, NSW Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1993) 42 Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, 11. 43 Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, 10. 44 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 11. 45 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 11. 46 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 11. 47 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 11.

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century. 48 This implication being that they were typically small, insalubrious and medieval in their architectural planning and detailing (Fig 5.4).

The process of constant relocation that occurred throughout this time was in response to a growing desire for social and economic status. Hayman attributes these ‘impatient’49 relocations around the Old City to Kafka’s father Hermann, and ‘his greed for prestige and respectability.’50 Hermann, who arrived in Prague from the country as a travelling salesman, soon set himself up as a seller of fancy goods and was enjoying ‘growing success’51 with a shop in the Aldstadter Ring. However, the Aldstadt ‘was a less fashionable area than the Stadtperkviertel where [Kafka’s school friends] Rilke, Werfel and Max Brod grew up’52; a fact which contributed to the constant change of address. Thus, each time the family moved in these early years, ‘they rose socially and economically’53 and as the standard of housing they inhabited incrementally improved and the flats grew progressively larger, the feverish pressure to relocate slowed.

At the Three Kings, 3 Zeltnergasse: spring 1896 – June 1907 (Map: 7)

In 1896 the Kafka family moved into a residence where they would remain for the next eleven years. That residence, At the Three Kings, was another medieval house, but also the most spacious for the family yet, as Kafka was, at 13 years of age and ‘much to the envy of his classmates’,54 for the first time granted a room of his own. Dwelling in this room until he was 24, the space provides the backdrop to a significant portion of Kafka’s life, corresponding with the beginning of his creative interest in literature and the

48 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 31. 49 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 12. 50 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 12. 51 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 21. 52 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 11. 53 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 21. 54 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 35.

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composition of his first texts. Inhabitation of this space also coincides with the beginning of Kafka’s close friendship with Max Brod.

Brod recounts that it was at At the Three Kings where he first went to see Kafka.55 The Kafka apartment was ‘next to the Thein church, in the Zeltnergasse’56 and it was, in Brod’s words, a ‘narrow’, ‘twisty’ and ‘ancient’ building with a ‘friendly’57 atmosphere. Wagenbach describes At the Three Kings as a ‘very old’ building with a ‘Gothic’58 sense about it. The Kafka family residence was located on the first floor of the building and while relatively extensive, Kafka’s own room was very small. The surrounding neighbourhood evoked a ‘dark, mystical’ feeling through its composition of ‘narrow streets, courtyards, dark hallways [and] windows’59 coupled with its ‘often confining atmosphere.’60 The complex urban fabric of this part of Old Prague led to the creation of curious civic junctions between buildings. In the case of At the Three Kings, a significant and distinguishing feature of the building was its intimate connection to the neighbouring Gothic Thein church.61

John Grandin describes the unusual relationship between the Kafka family’s apartment and the Thein church, noting that one entered the former by way of ‘the hallway of the house through the large wooden doors which reveal a very dark stairway and, in the background, the small courtyard where the church and house meet.’62 Grandin’s description emphasises that this small courtyard can be seen from the ‘rear windows of the apartment and from the small balcony, [where] the church wall and

55 Brod, Kafka, 8. 56 Brod, Kafka, 8. 57 Brod, Kafka, 8. 58 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 35. 59 John Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 11 Issue 3 (1978): 295. 60 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295. 61 Tyn church, Theinkircke: the name is spelled differently according to different accounts. The name is replicated verbatim as it appears in the account being referenced. 62 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295.

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spire rise far beyond the height of the house.’63 Further to this visual connection, the Kafka apartment was also connected to the church by way of a curiously located, large ‘clear glass window, built into the wall of the church and apartment enabling one to look directly from the apartment in which Kafka lived into the heart of the church.’64 Grandin records that ‘oral tradition’ in the community maintained ‘that a priest had lived in the apartment formerly and had had this rather unusual window built as a means of viewing the church’s impressive, dark, incense-filled, and mystical interior.’65

There is some disagreement as to whether this window within the apartment was specifically in Kafka’s room. Biographer Ronald Hayman suggests that it was within Kafka’s, room and that it ‘was so close to the Teyn Church that it was almost like living inside it’, with ‘prayers, hymns and organ music […] loudly audible’.66 Hayman further claims that ‘if he had pulled the curtain aside during a service Kafka could have been seen to the right of the picture above the altar.’67 Whilst this would be an accurate description of the properties of the room, the space was not necessarily Kafka’s. Wagenbach disputes Hayman’s claim, arguing that Kafka’s own room was ‘not, as many guides have it, with a window overlooking the Teyn Church’,68 but overlooking the Zeltnergasse street. Wagenbach states that such a location would correspond with both the notes in Kafka’s diary and with one of his earliest fictional compositions aptly titled ‘The Window on the Street’.69 Such a title also starts to indicate that aspects of domesticity had an impact on Kafka’s literary development along with his general psychological wellbeing. For example, in that fictional work, Kafka observes that ‘anyone who lives a solitary life and yet feels the need now and then for some kind of contact will

63 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295. 64 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295 65 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295. 66 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 24. 67 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 24. 68 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 35. 69 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 35.

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not get by for long without a window on the street.’70 This type of visual connection to the street could well have been facilitated by the ‘friendly’ scale of At the Three Kings and of the windows in its medieval façade.

During the time Kafka lived in At the Three Kings, the demolition and rebuilding of the old Prague ghetto commenced, and between 1895 and 1905 the oldest parts of the medieval Josefov district were demolished. Urban historian F. W. Carter writes that the demolition was extensive, and ‘only a few of its most valuable buildings were saved.’71 The old buildings were soon replaced by ‘high blocks of flats’72 that were ‘erected on land parcelled out schematically’73 and ‘without regard for the historic structure of the street pattern.’74 The old ghetto was swiftly replaced with larger, higher-density housing that adhered to the new and fashionable Modernist aesthetic palette and to the principle of the tabula rasa.

The Kafkas’ domestic staff (see Chapter 1 general biography) described the layout of Franz’s room in At the Three Kings as ‘simply decorated’75. Adjacent ‘to the door was a desk, and on it the Roman Law in two volumes. Opposite the window was a closet, in front of it a bicycle, then the bed, next to the bed a little bedside table, and by the door a bookshelf and a washbasin.’76 Brod also describes the features of the room, noting that ‘[o]ver Kafka’s desk there hung a copy of the picture by Hans Thoma, ‘The Ploughmen. On the wall at the side there was a yellowing plaster cast of a little antique relief, a

70 Franz Kafka, ‘The Window on the Street’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, ed. Malcom Pasley (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin Books, 1992), 30. 71 F. W. Carter, ‘Kafka's Prague’ in The World of Franz Kafka, ed. J. P. Stern (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 33. 72 Carter, ‘Kafka's Prague’, 33. 73 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 11. 74 Carter, ‘Kafka's Prague’, 33. 75 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 35. 76 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 35.

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maenad brandishing a piece of meat — a leg of beef, to be precise. The graceful folds of her dress danced around the figure, which had no head.’77

Brod notes that Kafka maintained a serious attachment to his furniture. Despite the fact that Kafka would go on to live in some of the most modern, wealthy and fashionable districts in Prague, ‘this modest furniture accompanied Franz to all his lodgings.’78 The ‘almost miserly furnishings’79, that ‘were almost of a provisory nature’80, included ‘a bed, a wardrobe, the little, old, dark brown, almost black, desk, with a few books and a lot of unarranged notebooks.’ 81 (Fig. 5.5) Brod summarises Kafka’s domestic interior as ‘the whole not uninhabitable, but not perhaps comfortable for people who want the conventional ornaments and luxury.’82 This utilitarian taste would later be reflected in Kafka’s disregard for bourgeois norms and his growing distaste for the luxury of modern tenement house living.

At the Ship, 36 Niklasstrasse: June 1907 – Nov 1913 (Map: 8)

In 1907 Kafka’s family relocated to a modern housing development, a newly-built apartment building at 36 Niklasstrasse called At the Ship. This relocation into new tenement housing was one that ‘definitively mark[ed] their social rise’.83 At the Ship had a notable new feature, an elevator, and ‘the family lived on floor’.84 In terms of its spatial structure, the residence was ‘a typical bourgeois apartment with an enfilade

77 Brod notes that ‘the above-mentioned picture by Thoma, a Kunstwart print, bears witness to the great influence that a friend from his secondary schooldays, Oskar Pollak, had on Kafka. See: Brod, Kafka, 54. 78 Brod, Kafka, 54. 79 Brod, Kafka, 54. 80 Brod, Kafka, 54. 81 Brod, Kafka, 54. 82 Brod in The Kingdom of Love, quoted in his own Brod, Kafka, 54. 83 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 42. 84 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 42.

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Fig. 5.4 Ignác Ullmann, 1866, Prague apartment building at the corner of Národni Avenue and Perlová Street. A typical residential floorplan in Prague, showing rooms situated in an enfilade and accessible sequentially. Source: Karel Tiege, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 69.

Fig 5.5 A possible layout of Kafka’s room according to Brod’s description. Source: author

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of rooms’85 (Fig. 5.4), and as such Kafka’s room was a diminutive space, ‘sandwiched between his parents’ bedroom and their living room, with access from both, so that it served as a passageway as well [as] living quarters.’86

Kafka’s room had a set of ‘large double windows’87 to the exterior, and the view from them encompassed ‘the quay, the Moldova, the baths, the [Cech] bridges, and the green slope of the Belvedere.’88 Wagenbach observes that at the time Kafka moved into At the Ship ‘ over the Moldau, the Cech Bridge, was still being built’89 and for five years ‘in front of the house [… there] was a big empty building site, the Johannesplatz.’90 Kafka’s room effectively offered him an uninterrupted, birds-eye view of the familiar Medieval ghetto as it was being systematically razed, and then replaced with a modern, alien architecture.

The time spent in At the Ship also encompassed one of Kafka’s more traumatic experiences of domesticity. His passageway room had no heating, and Kafka appeared aggravated by its cold, noise and lack of privacy. Hayman writes that Kafka was ‘disturbed each time [his parents] wanted to pass from one [room] to another’91 and consequently Kafka was ‘unable to leave exposed anything he did not want them to see. Even letters were liable to [be] read.’92 For example, in a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Kafka complains about the noise in his room, noting that ‘he could hear if his father turned over violently in bed’93 adding allusively that ‘the sight of his parents’ pyjamas and nightdress, laid out in readiness on their bed, filled him with disgust.’94

85 Karel Tiege, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, 71. 86 Idris Parry, ‘Introduction,’ in The Trial (London: Penguin Group, 1994), xii. 87 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 59. 88 Brod, Kafka, 9. 89 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 42. 90 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 42. 91 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 59. 92 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 59. 93 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 86. 94 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 86.

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In addition to the lack of general comfort and privacy, Kafka was disturbed by the visual composition of his room. The double windows allowed for ‘lights and shadows cast by the electric light on the street and the bridge’ to move across the walls and ceiling of his room, creating a disturbing and irregular composition.95 In a diary entry Kafka observes that ‘with the installation of the electric arc lamps down below, and the decoration of this room, no housewifely care was taken as to how my room, at this hour and without its own illumination, would look from the couch.’96

There are multiple parts of this statement which are potentially significant. First, the light from the street is effectively invading Kafka’s space and he implies that its impact is worsened by the fact that the space lacks a sufficient level of ‘housewifely care’ to render it acceptable. It is not clear what Kafka means by this. The term ‘housewifely’ may a reference to the Kafka’s domestic staff and his own bourgeois expectations, suggesting that their lack of attention to his space attenuates the problems of the lighting below. However, it also evokes a more domestic allusion associated with the lack of a wife or partner, and the lack of a bed to sleep in. The double windows were operable, and Kafka sustained an ‘austere’97 habit of sleeping with them open whilst ‘sitting in an armchair [the couch] with a blanket around his legs’98, a practice which left him with little privacy from the street. Thus, despite his previously stated desire for a visual connection to the street, living on the top floor denied an immediate link, yet left him exposed to the world.

It was in November of 1911, during the time he was living in At the Ship on the Aldstadter ring, Kafka recorded in his diary details about a dream. In the dream, Kafka found himself at the theatre, ‘up in the balcony’ looking down onto the stage.99 The stage set ‘represented the Aldstadter Ring, probably from the opening of the

95 Kafka diary entry as cited in Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 43. 96 Kafka diary entry as cited in Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 43. 97 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 86. 98 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 86. 99 Kafka as quoted in Calvin S. Hall and Richard E. Lind, Dreams, Life and Literature: A Study of Franz Kafka (Chapel Hill: The University of California Press, 1970), 102.

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Niklasstrasse.’100 The spatial relationship between the balcony and the stage in the dream theatre is immediately reminiscent of his real-life window in At the Ship looking down onto the street, suggesting a synthesis between that real view and his subconscious stage set. Kafka describes the theatre set as featuring the same city landmarks as his real-life neighbourhood view, with the Thein church, Rathaus and the Niklas church all present. However, while these major landmarks in the theatre set appear familiar, their position in the city has been rearranged. For example, Kafka notes that ‘[t]he Tein church was in its place, but in front of it was a small imperial castle in the courtyard’ and that ‘one should really not have been able to see the square in front of the Rathaus clock and the small Ring.’101 Kafka observes that in the theatre set other parts of the city are relatively static, appearing as they are in real life. He records that ‘all the monuments that ordinarily stood in the square were assembled in perfect order: the Pillar of St. Mary, the old fountain in front of the Rathaus that I myself have never seen, the fountain before the Niklas Church, and a board fence that has now been put up around the excavation for the Hus memorial.’102 The rearrangement of the dream city has parallels to the real-life rearrangement that Kafka could see from his window overlooking the city at the time. In Kafka’s dream, the view of the city ‘was the most beautiful set in all the world and all of time’103, a description which demonstrates a strong affection for the old city and its landmarks. This simple dream is primarily important in the present context because it confirms, that Kafka’s familiar architectural perceptions of real-life are actively reproduced in the medium of dreams.

100 Kafka as quoted in Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 102. 101 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 102. 102 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 102. 103 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 102.

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Oppelthaus, 6 Alstadter Ring: Nov 1913 – Aug 1914; Sept 1917 – 1924 (Map: 9)

Six years later the family made a final move into a ‘bigger and more luxurious’104 apartment located in the new modern housing block, Oppelthaus. As with all of the spaces Kafka inhabited, there is some disagreement about its layout and actual size, with Hayman describing it as a four-room flat,105 while Wagenbach maintains it had six- rooms.106 Despite this disagreement, it was the largest and most opulent interior that the family had occupied, and it remained their residence for the rest of Kafka’s lifetime. The apartment was in a four-storey building with an elevator and a mezzanine.107 Despite being of modern construction, Wagenbach observes that the building incorporated some traditional architectural forms and ornamentation including ‘oriel windows,[…] a tall roof with a corner tower’108 and ‘outside the front door were pillars with caryatids.’109 This modern appropriation of classic ornamentation is an example of the bastardized stylistic motifs described previously in this chapter and which Tiege deplored. Hayman adds a final observation about the Oppelthaus apartment, that stepping out of the lift, ‘the bars over the maid’s window’ were visible, this being because ‘the only window in her room looked out on the staircase.’110

Kafka appreciated the urban sights that the Oppelthaus had to offer more than he did those of At the Ship. On the top floor, his window on the Niklasstrasse again provided no social connection to the street, due to its height, but Kafka describes the view of the Old Town as ‘lovely111 and there was also, once again, a view to the Thein

104 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 48. 105 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 171. 106 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 48. 107 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 48. 108 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 48. 109 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 171. 110 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 171. 111 Franz Kafka in a letter to Grete Bloch dated November 1918 in Franz Kafka, , ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), 331.

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church.112 Kafka appreciated his unique vantage point of another Baroque Russian Church with two towers113, and ‘in the distance a tiny church on the Laurenziberg’.114 In particular, Kafka marvelled at his outlook over the medieval Town Hall, describing it as a ‘great mass’115 with ‘the tower rising sharply […] and reclining again in a perspective that no one else, perhaps, has seen properly before.’116 Kafka felt a strong affinity towards these archaic parts of the Old Town as viewed from afar, leading Grandin to observe that ‘it is significant that Kafka lived most of his life in the shadow of Prague’s most magnificent churches’117 suggesting that the architecture of these grand religious structures was somehow particularly gratifying for him. ‘It is not an exaggeration to say that Kafka lived in part of the Teinkirche from 1896-1907; and this same church could be seen from the Oppelthaus and from Kafka’s room on the Langengasse.’118

While of similar appearance to his room in At the Ship, the modern interior of the Oppelthaus was not to Kafka’s taste. Brod drily observes that the spatial arrangement of the flat was more suitable for Kafka and that the ‘study’119 Kafka dwelled in ‘at least’ had ‘a second entrance which Kafka generally used, through the kitchen and the bathroom.’120 But when ill-health forced Kafka to return to the Oppelthaus in late 1917 and reside in his younger sister Ottla’s room, Kafka complained in a letter to her that ‘your bedroom is not a bedroom’121, echoing a similar dissatisfaction to that of his room in At the Ship. Other tensions, in particular regarding noise, were also reminiscent of his time in At the Ship. For example, he records that the courtyard is a source of noise, as

112 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295. 113 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 171. 114 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 171. 115 Kafka diary entry as cited in Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 48. 116 Kafka diary entry as cited in Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 48. 117 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295. 118 Grandin, ‘Kafka’s Prague Today’, 295. 119 Brod, Kafka, 9. 120 Brod, Kafka, 54. 121 Franz Kafka, postcard to Ottla dated September 2, 1917. In Franz Kafka, Letters to Ottla and the Family (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 20.

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too is the bathroom. In regards to the latter he writes that last night, ‘[t]hree times by my count the light there was turned on and the water released for incomprehensible purposes.’122 Such examples suggest that in general Kafka did not have much regard for the noisy modern conveniences of the Oppelthaus. Indeed, Hayman writes that

once, outside the house, [Kafka] told [friend Gustav] Janouch that it only looked as if he were going home: “Really I’m going up into a prison specially constructed for me, all the more oppressive because it looks like a perfectly ordinary bourgeois home…. One can’t break one’s chains when no chains are to be seen.”123

This feeling of spatial oppression led Hayman to suggest that in becoming engaged to Felice, Kafka’s ‘main object was to escape from the imprisonment in his parents’ flat.’124

Before looking at the relationship between Kafka and Felice, it is worth noting that Kafka’s descriptions of his spaces in At the Three Kings, At the Ship and Oppelthaus all treat them as types of controlled enclosures, which are in turn invaded and disturbed before he is eventually forced to move on. Whether the boundaries of these spaces are breached by familial passage, internal and external sounds or lights from outside, there is a sense that the walls which he uses to construct his privacy, and protect his treasured belongings, are forever able to be breached. As such, these rooms are a special type of prison, not one which is sealed and controlled, but one which is forever in danger of being disturbed.

Returning to Janouch’s suggestion that Kafka may have briefly seen marriage as a means of bolstering the strength of his spatial fortifications, Kafka also had anxieties and fears about the impending marriage, perhaps not yet realised in his conscious mind but nevertheless surfacing in his dreams. In February 1914, Kafka recalled in his diary two dreams that he had about Felice. The first dream began with Kafka in the streets of Berlin, ‘calm and happy in the knowledge that, though I haven’t arrived at her house yet,

122 Franz Kafka, postcard to Ottla dated September 2, 1917 in Kafka, Letters to Ottla and the Family, 20. 123 Gustav Janouch quoted in Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 138. 124 Gustav Janouch quoted in Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 138.

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a slight possibility of doing so exists.’125 In undertaking his search for Felice, Kafka asks the advice of ‘an affable, red-nosed old policeman’ who gives him ‘excessively detailed directions’126. These directions include taking a trolley, then the subway, and then seeking a ‘railing of a small park in the distance’ of which Kafka ‘must keep hold of for safety’s sake’127 whilst passing. The onerous nature of the journey upsets Kafka, and he asks of the policeman, ‘knowing full well that I am underestimating the distance: “That’s about half an hour away?”’ The policeman answers that ‘I can make it in six minutes.’128 In the second short dream, Kafka is living in a ‘pension’ with some ‘very small rooms’ which are ‘filled with young Polish Jews’.129 He is again searching for a location in Berlin, and notes that in the dream it is ‘impossible to lay hands on a map’.130 Whenever Kafka thinks that he has found a map ‘it always proves to be something entirely different. A list of Berlin schools, tax statistics, or something of the sort.’ He concludes ambiguously that ‘I don’t want to believe it, but, smiling, they [the Polish Jews] prove it to me beyond doubt.’131

The anxious quality of these two dreams has parallels with Kafka’s waking life and to the nature of his relationship with Felice. Calvin Hall and Richard Lind confirm that the ‘her’ referred to in these dreams is Felice and that in the waking context of these two dreams, ‘Kafka and Felice Bauer were not getting along.’132 Despite their tensions, in May 1914, three months after waking from these dreams, Kafka proposed to Felice and they made their first official engagement. But by late 1914, Kafka had ‘realised he could never marry Felice’133 and their first engagement was broken. On December 2, Kafka

125 Kafka, as cited in Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 112. 126 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 112. 127 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 112. 128 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 113. 129 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 113. 130 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 113. 131 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 113. 132 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 112. 133 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 113.

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made a diary entry about a dream he had recently experienced. In the succinct account of this episode Kafka recalls that he was with Kaiser Wilhelm and they were in a castle. The room was ‘similar to that in the Tabakskollegium’ and it had ‘a beautiful view’134. The mood of the dream appears to be pleasant and relaxed, which may be emotionally congruent with Kafka’s secret relief from the broken engagement. Yet despite the broken engagement, Kafka remained in contact with Felice, writing letters that appeared to have a cathartic aim after the break-up, and in 1916 Kafka and Felice pursued a second engagement.

At the Golden Pike, 18 Langengasse: March 1915 – March 1917 (Map: 10)

In preparation for his marriage, Kafka moved from his parents’ house to a room in At the Golden Pike, another new building of the Josephstadt redevelopment.135 This move was part of a brief period of autonomy for Kafka before his anticipated nuptials. The view from Kafka’s balcony in At the Golden Pike also ‘look[ed] almost straight into the windows of the apartment’136 which he and Felice intended to inhabit after their marriage. Writing to Felice, Kafka notes that the new tenement housing opposite At the Golden Pike, ‘whose plans you and I once studied,’137 will receive ‘the morning sun through all three windows on the streetside.’ 138 In his ruminations of life in these buildings it is even apparent that Kafka had begun to resolve a clear opinion on modern bourgeois architecture and domesticity. For example, describing his own new residence in a letter to Felice, Kafka wrote ‘I have moved to a room about ten times noisier than

134 Kaiser Wilhelm, was the last German emperor and King of Prussia, so being in his presence implies a position of some importance or power. Tabakskollegium, translates to tobacco college. This was a type of room dedicated to regular tobacco smokers. While such rooms were found in pension hotels, more opulent versions were also found in palaces where they tended to fill a similar role to the grand drawing room. 135 Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 57 136 Kafka in a letter to his fiancée Felice dated March 3rd 1915. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), 448. 137 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 448. 138 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 448.

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the last, but incomparably more pleasant in every other respect.’139 Kafka observes that ‘in this room I even get the morning sun, and since the rooftops all around are much lower, it shines full and direct upon me. But I get more than the morning sun, for it is a corner room and two windows face southwest.’140 Yet his sanguine state was not to last, and in another letter the following month he complains about the noise, lamenting the ‘whole infernal concrete building’141 and observes that ‘in my own room […] all hell has broken loose.’ 142 Considering his impending marriage, and subsequent domestic lifestyle, Kafka reveals that he has had a major difference of opinion regarding Felice’s needs and wants concerning the nature of home.

In a letter dated March 3, 1915 (a few months before the second official engagement), Kafka consciously affirms his growing distaste for modern space and his expectations of middle class domesticity. He starts this letter by observing that he is aware Felice wants ‘a pleasant, pleasantly furnished, family apartment, such as inhabited by all families of both your and mine social standing.’143 This ‘well-furnished home [is] of the type that would be bought by a middle-class couple who could count on their business to go on expanding steadily.’ 144 However, Kafka writes that he is ‘dismayed by every detail of [Felice’s] scheme’ and that ‘for these others [the bourgeoisie] a home, quite legitimately, has an entirely different meaning to the one it would have had for me.’145 Kafka continues that

I don’t need a permanent home from whose bourgeois orderliness I propose to run this business — not only do I not need this kind of home, it actually frightens me. […] the conditions are antagonistic to my work, so if I set up house according to your wishes under these conditions, it would mean — if not in fact, at any rate symbolically — that I am

139 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 446. 140 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 446. 141 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 448. 142 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 448. 143 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 440. 144 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 176. 145 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 440.

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attempting to make these conditions permanent, which is the worst thing that can befall me.146

In regards to the type of home that would suit him, Kafka writes that he wants none of the familiar features of the bourgeois home and that ‘the most apposite and most obvious from the point of view of my work would have been to throw everything away, and to look for an apartment even higher up than the 4th floor, not in Prague, elsewhere.’147

Yet such was the nature of Kafka’s views that his claims here, about what type of home would suit him, contradict his earlier wistful desire for a window to the street, his familiar furniture and the Old Town. By this stage in his life Kafka had realised that his domestic surroundings had an effect on him, writing that ‘I thought both the location and the appearance of the room were irrelevant to me. But they are not.’148 Yet, despite this strong opinion, he could not define their most aggravating attributes. In regards to what type of space might comfort him, Kafka concedes that, ‘actually I can’t answer that question.’149 In a later letter he reveals that ‘without having a fairly open view, without the chance of seeing a large expanse of sky from my window with perhaps a steeple in the distance — that is, if it can’t be real open country — without these, I am a wretched, depressed creature.’150 He concludes that ‘I cannot give the exact proportion of misery that can be attributed to the room, it cannot be small.’151 Whether it is the size of the room or the amount of misery he is referring to is unclear, but ultimately this passage sees Kafka confirming a case of spatial anxiety.

146 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 440. 147 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 440. 148 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 440. 149 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 440. 150 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 448. 151 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 448.

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Schönbörn Palace, 15 Marktgasse: March 1917 – Sept 1917 (Map: 11)

If the nature of Kafka’s spatial anxiety was not clinical claustrophobia, then perhaps it surfaced from the unfamiliarity or alienation associated with modernity. In an agonising diary entry of 9 March 1914, Kafka rued the fact that he was ‘spoiled’, needing only ‘a room and vegetarian food, almost nothing else.’152 Despite having lived in some of the most modern and luxurious housing in Josefov, in the summer of 1916 Kafka turned away from the new architecture, and Prague, and set out to look for ‘a quiet hole in some attic-room in one of the old palaces, where I could finally stretch out in peace.’153 He eventually found ‘such an unhealthy’154, ‘cold, stale and ill-smelling’155 room in the ‘decaying’156 Schönbörn Palace. The ‘damp and mouldering’157 space had none of the conveniences of modernity, not even a kitchen or bathroom. Yet for Kafka it was ‘the fulfilment of a dream’,158 and perhaps in some way it signalled a return to the medieval and musty conditions of his earliest childhood homes. Once again, he furnished his room at the Schönbörn Palace with his miserly but familiar collection of a bed, a wardrobe, a desk and a chair.

Kafka biographer Sander L. Gilman describes the conditions of the Schönbörn Palace as a place of grandeur, although in decay; other authors similarly describe the grandiosity of its original Renaissance styling. According to former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright159, the palace was first constructed in 1643 – 1656 by an Austro-Hungarian general and originally consisted of ‘five medieval residences and a

152 Franz Kafka, ‘The Diaries 1910-23 (March 9, 1914)’ in Franz Kafka Complete and Unabridged (Great Britain: Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, 1976), 760 153 Kafka as cited by Wagenbach, Kafka’s Prague, 63. 154 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 281. 155 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97. 156 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97. 157 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97. 158 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 97. 159 The Schönbörn Palace is currently host to the United States embassy in Prague.

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malthouse.’160 However, ‘the dominant image of the place dates to 1718’ when it was extensively renovated according to ‘the design of the expatriate Italian architect Giovanni Santini.’161 This remodelling project, Albright claims, ‘unified the street façade with classical elements’ and ‘created airy apartment wings behind’162 (although Gilman alternatively observes that the palace ‘had been cut up into apartments’163, implying compromised spaces and design.) The US Department of State further describes the historical apartment development:

The palace is built in four wings around three courtyards. Altogether, it contains over one hundred rooms, many originally hung with damask and decorated with stucco. The ceilings of the rooms on the first floor are over 30 feet [9.144m] high. 164

Other stylistic features of the palace included ‘the decorative moldings around the windows [which] are adorned with ornamental heads and garlands in the baroque style.’165 Albright further writes that ‘the building’s Renaissance past is preserved in the courtyard stair tower, the geometric stucco ceilings, and the entrance portal with its rough stone set in a diamond bossage pattern.’166 Of the courtyard, a central arch ‘is supported by two gigantic caryatids (Atlantes), the work of Matthias Braun, one of the best sculptors of the age.’167 Further to these architectural features is the landscape design of the Palace. Behind the palace ‘stretches a terraced garden and orchard of seven acres which extends up a hillside topped by the Glorietta.’168 Albright adds that this ‘garden pavilion, called the Glorietta, was converted from a winepress into an open-

160 Madeleine Albright, ‘Schoenborn Palace’, The Secretary of State's Registry of Culturally Significant Properties, ed. J. F. Kerry. (U.S. Department of State: Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, 2001), 36. 161 Albright, ‘Schoenborn Palace’, 36. 162 Albright, ‘Schoenborn Palace’, 36. 163 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 96. 164 United States Department of State, 'Schoenborn Palace', Embassy of the United States, Prague, . Accessed 31 January 2017. 165 United States Department of State, 'Schoenborn Palace' 166 Albright, ‘Schoenborn Palace’, 36. 167 United States Department of State, 'Schoenborn Palace' 168 United States Department of State, 'Schoenborn Palace'

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air belvedere with majestic views of the city.’169 She states that ‘the elegant and romantic English garden is basically unchanged from the first decade of the eighteenth century.’170 In the time Kafka lived in the place, 200 years after its major renovation, the Schönbörn Palace presented as a place of 18th century grandeur in decay.

Nonetheless, Kafka was in awe of the Schönbörn palace and held it in high esteem. In a letter to Felice in January 1917, Kafka tells how a renting agent had offered him ‘an apartment in one of the most beautiful palaces.’171 The apartment comprised ‘two rooms, a hall, half of which had been converted into a bathroom. […] The rooms high and beautiful, red and gold, rather like Versailles. Four windows overlooking a quiet, dreamy courtyard, one window into the garden.’ 172 Kafka was particularly impressed by the landscaping and the Glorietta:

The garden! On entering the gateway to the palace, one can hardly believe one’s eyes. Through the tall arch of the second gate, flanked by caryatids, one catches the sight of a beautifully spaced double flight of stone steps leading to the large garden which rises gradually in a wide sweep up to a belvedere.

However, this was not the apartment Kafka would eventually take. He writes that the present tenant had ‘spent so much on the apartment’ adding modern conveniences and was looking for someone willing to ‘compensate him’ for the costs of ‘installing electricity, building the bathroom, putting in cupboards, installing a telephone, a large fitted carpet. […] I was not that someone.’173 Kafka continues that ‘What’s more, the exaggeratedly high, cold rooms were too sumptuous for me: after all, I had not furniture,

and there were other minor considerations.’ 174

However, there was another apartment available in the palace. Kafka writes that this alternative ‘was on the second floor, [with] somewhat lower ceilings, overlooking the

169 Albright, ‘Schoenborn Palace’, 36. 170 Albright, ‘Schoenborn Palace’, 36. 171 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 541. 172 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 541. 173 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 541. 174 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 541.

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street, with Hradčany directly outside the windows.’ Further to this, Kafka was fond of this apartment’s scale and conservative properties, describing the place as ‘friendlier, more human’ and ‘unpretentiously furnished; a visiting countess, probably more modest in her demands, had lived here; her old furniture with a girlish touch about it still remained.’175 This apartment was the one that Kafka eventually took, ‘but without the furniture, on which I had counted.’176 This was only for the reason of the apartment’s received emptiness due to his own lack of possessions: ‘I should have to borrow some furniture from my sister […] for one of the rooms, which is enormous, I should literally only have a bed.’177 Kafka further describes the apartment as simply consisting of ‘two rooms and a hall’. The apartment ‘has electric light but no bathroom, no tub, but this I don’t really need’. 178 Kafka was happy about the apartment’s simplicity, writing to Felice that in taking the apartment ‘this would mean that the two of us would have the most perfect apartment imaginable in Prague.’179 Although Kafka points out that for Felice it meant ‘you would have to do without a kitchen of your own, and even a bathroom.’ Despite this singular lack of domestic amenities, which would be central to a traditional expectation that a marriage leads to a family, Kafka writes to Felice that, ‘nevertheless, it [the apartment] would be very much to my liking.’180 Implicitly this confirms both Kafka’s aversion of standard bourgeois domestic expectations and his own need for solitude.

Kafka’s rejection of modernity, and concomitant return to the poverty-stricken interiors of his childhood, completes a cycle of shifting inhabitation patterns, driven by anxiety arising from his irreconcilable spatial and domestic needs. One such irreconcilable need is found in his requirement for a window that maintains a close human connection to the street, but which is higher than the fourth floor. Another is

175 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 541. 176 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 542. 177 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 542. 178 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 542. 179 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 542. 180 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 542.

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found in the suggestion that a level of housewifely attention is needed, whereas his greatest desire is solitude. A third is found in the example of the family home at the Oppelthaus where he feels claustrophobic, yet the Schönbörn palace offers him too much space. Such spatial enigmas, which challenged Kafka’s view of every space he inhabited, can perhaps only be resolved in his dreams and fiction.

‘Conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ architectures

In their study on Kafka, entitled Dreams, Life and Literature, Hall and Lind set out to ‘understand how dreams mesh with the dreamer’s personality and […] behaviour in waking life.’181 They observe that since the publication of Freud’s monumental work on the topic, dreams have been regarded as an important means of ‘providing information about a person’s psychic life that is not readily available from other sources.’ 182 Therefore, dreams may be considered a valuable socio-metric means of charting the dreamer’s conscious encounters, relationships with others and ‘with objects in the environment’183 Hall and Lind’s work examines Kafka’s dreams in relation to both his life and fiction. Through both a qualitative and quantitative comparison, Hall and Lind infer that ‘what occupied Kafka’s thoughts and how he behaved during the day were what he dreamed about during the night’, concluding that ‘a person’s dreams’ and their ‘waking behaviour are congruent.’184 One example of this congruence between anxieties in Kafka’s waking life and in his dreams is found in the year before writing the letter of March 1915 to Felice. The three dreams analysed in this chapter reveal Kafka’s increasing anxiety about the bourgeois married lifestyle. The three dreams presented in the letter of 1915 where he finally consciously confirmed these doubts and fears about Felice and their planned marital home.

181 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 112. 182 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 112. 183 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 112. 184 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 89.

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Hall and Lind argue that, ‘although dreams bear a direct relationship to waking life’ there are also ‘complexities in the nature of this relationship.’185 For example, one complexity associated with understanding dreams ‘results from the different idioms employed in dreams’, these idioms being symbolic or metaphoric ‘acting out of wishes and fears in the timeless unconscious.’ 186 Hall and Lind give the example of a dream Kafka had in the early 1920s about his last lover, Milena Jesenska, where their bodies merge together in flames.187 Hall and Lind see the fire as a metaphor where Kafka’s waking life ‘feelings for her [Milena] are accurately symbolized in the dream.’ 188 They conclude that ‘different symbols for the same referent may be used in dreams’; despite the ‘outward form’ of the dream symbol being ‘dissimilar’ or abstracted.189 As such, ‘symbols are dynamically equivalent’ and emotionally congruent to waking life relationships and occurrences.

While accepting Hall’s and Lind’s position, that Kafka’s anxieties about Felice and their future domestic life together have seemingly straightforward correlations with the characters and events of his dreams, there is also a spatial metaphor at play in these examples. For example, there are the two anxious disorientation dreams about Berlin (described previously in this chapter) Kafka had in February 1914 whilst preparing to leave his parents’ Oppelthaus home, in anticipation of his engagement to Felice and their future marital home on the Langengasse. Berlin was Felice’s home city and a place Kafka had visited only briefly in the months prior to their engagement, for the reason of pursuing their courtship. His spatial disorientation and associated futile attempts to navigate through that city might recall his waking experience of an unfamiliar place, but they are also symbolic of his struggle with the concept of marital life, and a conflicted definition of home that he had developed. In that dream, great attention is paid to describing the location of Felice’s house, but it simply cannot be found. There is a map

185 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 90. 186 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 90. 187 See Dream 37 in Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 124. 188 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 90. 189 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 92.

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that refuses to give directions, and the journey to find a home with Felice is first vague, then complex and finally dangerous. Further to this, the space of the journey cannot be logically comprehended, the home being paradoxically both over half an hour away and only six minutes away. All of these features reinforce the notion that life with Felice and a sense of homeliness simply cannot coexist. The spatial paradoxes in the dream are also reflective of Kafka’s conscious dilemmas regarding the type of domestic space that would suit him.

Of further interest in this context is the architectural juxtaposition found in the two dreams. For example, in anticipation of marriage to Felice, Kafka’s second dream about Berlin sees him in a small, crowded room of a poor pension, implying claustrophobia and a lack of comfort. This is in contrast to the grand architectural state of the dream that occurred soon after their broken engagement, in December 1914, where he is inhabiting a gentlemen’s smoking parlour in a castle and is associating with royalty. Hall and Lind write that their ‘analysis of Kafka’s dreams revealed complexes and conflicts that could not be readily identified from biographical or autobiographical material.’190 The architectural dichotomy found in these dreams suggests an alignment of Kafka’s unconscious anxieties and confusion about both the concept of home and the implications of marriage.

Conclusion

If we accept Hall and Lind’s arguments, which are actually founded in Freud’s theories, Kafka’s lived spaces naturally shaped the subconscious formulation of his architectural opinions and preferences. Albeit, like the rest of his oeuvre and life, these architectural sensitivities and opinions were at times paradoxical and convoluted. For instance, Kafka’s waking attitude includes a developing resistance towards Modern domestic architecture. This is evidenced in his irritation and general complaint about the modern buildings he inhabited, their noise and lack of privacy. It is also seen in his

190 Hall and Lind, Dreams, Life, and Literature, 89.

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resistance to the typical bourgeois family constructs that he was meant to adhere to. Kafka’s fondness for the Old Town is demonstrated by his nostalgia for his earlier medieval homes, further reinforced by his connection to the similarly aged Schönbörn Palace. These waking attitudes towards architecture are then synthesized in two ways into the dreams described in this chapter.

The first type of architectural synthesis is one of replication. The first dream presented in this chapter, that of the Old City as a theatre set, demonstrates a simple but active replication and rearrangement of Kafka’s waking cityscape in his unconscious mind. Despite the dream’s straightforward construction, it is not without an attitude towards architecture that is reflective of Kafka’s nostalgia for the city. Underlying the translation from reality to the dream state is a simple, almost adolescent fondness and yearning for the old town of Kafka’s childhood, a replication of his waking life attitude.

The second type of architectural synthesis is more complex and intricate. Spatiality and its qualities can be symbolic substitutions for a character, event or emotion. For example, the two later dreams about disorientation in Berlin, from when Kafka was older, revolve around his conflicted visions of Felice, marriage and concept of a satisfying home. The dangerous and irresolvable layouts of Berlin in these dreams, and the cramped pension interior inhabited by Polish Jews, are both anxious, disturbing dreams. These spatial qualities are in contrast to Kafka’s later dreams, after the engagement was broken: a calm, grand, airy and large scale castle and Tabakskollegium, associating with royalty and fine gentlemen. In addition to the dichotomy implicit in the characters Kafka is associating with (poor Polish Jews on the one hand, and King Wilhelm on the other), there is also a similar dichotomy in the spatial qualities and scale (a grand castle compared to a poor, cramped pension). In these examples, architecture takes on a symbolic role in the translation of more complex adult concerns, involving Kafka’s marriage, expectations of the bourgeois lifestyle, and his troubled relationship with Felice. Architecture here plays a metaphorical role, encapsulating the waking anxieties of real life, where an emotional or psycho-social state is embodied in a spatial metaphor. Furthermore, in both of these later life dreams, space and form are deployed in such a way as to suggest a congruence with both real

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urban constructions of the era and Kafka’s growing awareness of architecture. Given that the spaces found in Kafka’s dreams are often slippages from his waking experiences of, and opinions about, the domestic spaces in Prague, and that Kafka’s dreams then influenced his fictional compositions, it might follow that Kafka’s real life architectural experiences are intrinsically connected to his fiction.

This is an example of architectural symbolism, fashioned in an idiosyncratic type of expression, thus an example of an architectural symbolic parole, an idea that was presented in the previous chapter. In that chapter, it was demonstrated that an architectural symbolic parole operates in tandem with a bigger universal architectural symbolic langue (spatial motifs and constructions that appear universally in dreams, myths, narratives, fairy-tales and fiction). The following chapter analyses three of Kafka’s short stories to determine how the architectural symbolic langue and parole operate, by identifying examples of domestic architectural configurations as they appear in Kafka’s fiction, and by mapping the resonances and connections these spatial motifs (termed ‘islands of control’) have to his waking life, Freudian dream symbol theory, and architectural histories.

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Chapter 6. Islands of Control

Overview

This chapter identifies the presence of a recurring spatial structure in Kafka’s fiction. This structure not only resonates with elements of his waking life and Freudian theory, but it suggests a different way of looking at Kafka’s fiction in terms of an architectural parole.

The first part of the chapter describes this recurring spatial structure conceptually, drawing on the history of ancient fortifications and their use of layered or ringed bastions to protect a citadel or castle keep. This spatial structure, made up of layered fortifications, is conceptualised as a series of bastions or nested ‘islands of control’ which, in Kafka’s work, serves as a type of ‘psychological fortification’. It also has similarities to spatial structures, discussed previously in Chapter 2, in the work of Kafka and Freud. The second part of the chapter looks at how these ‘islands or control’ are transposed from Kafka’s real life to his fiction, and thus represent an uncanny repetition of the domestic interior, as previously considered in Chapter 3. These ‘islands’ include interior spaces and their relationships with adjacent and exterior areas, along with items of furniture. Starting with the larger-scale spatial structures, and gradually progressing to smaller ones, the chapter shows how each island, regardless of its precise form, is employed in a similar way. This recurring spatial structure also plays a role in Kafka’s fiction, with the purpose of personal control and power, in an attempt to repel invaders and thwart intruders in his personal space. Yet ultimately, in the course of these narratives, these fortifications inevitably fail, leading to the exposure of a final bastion.

In order to demonstrate the presence of this structure, along with its narrative and idiosyncratic personal functions, the next five parts of the chapter systemically examine a series of ‘islands of control’ in Kafka’s fiction, focusing on The Metamorphosis and The Trial, but also drawing on other works. Throughout these five sections Freudian

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interpretations of each island are presented alongside additional alternative readings, derived from the history of the domestic interior. Correlations between each island and the conditions and circumstances of Kafka’s waking life are also presented. Through this analysis of the islands, a series of recurring themes are identified in Kafka’s construction of space. In particular, two themes of ‘repel’ and ‘repulsion’ emerge from the study, being important precursors to the conclusion of the dissertation and wider implications of the research. The conclusion of the present chapter considers the possibility of a final bastion or island, the body itself.

Introduction: The ‘island’ spatial construct

In his book, A History of Fortresses, Sidney Toy describes a fortification found at the Mycenaean Citadel of Tiryns (Greece) from around 1500 B.C. (Fig. 6.1). This fortress was made up of a series of intricate layers of defence, each designed to both repel attackers and to prepare for the possibility that a wall may be breached, requiring a retreat into a new position from which to mount the next line of defence. As an example of this, the Citadel of Tiryns, ‘rises in two stages’, the first ringed by a ‘wall of Cyclopean masonry, 26 ft. thick and originally about 65 ft. high’, defining ‘a long and relatively narrow area’ between the stages. ‘A cross wall, built along the upper edge of the slope between the two platforms, divides the fortification into a citadel, on the highest point, and a lower ward. The palace and principal offices stand within the citadel.’ 1 In this example, Toy identifies a series of fortification walls, surrounding or isolating the most valuable part of the Citadel, the palace. Passage between the walls, from one isolated zone to the next, is by way of a ‘ramp, or inclined path, which rises against the hill on the east side and leads to a gateway at the top […] and is so placed that the right or unprotected side of an advancing force is exposed to attack from the defenders on the walls above.’2 Progress into the palace requires movement through a

1 Sidney Toy, ‘Ancient Fortresses’ in A History of Fortification from 3000 B.C to A.D 1700 (London: Heinemann, 1955), 11-12. 2 Toy, ‘Ancient Fortresses’, 11-12.

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series of long corridors, then a series of fortified gateways: ‘from this last gateway it is necessary to pass successively through another long passage, an open court, a second gateway, another court, and a third gateway, each gateway being built at right-angles to that preceding it.’3

The defensive strategies employed in the Citadel of Tiryns can be found in many examples of historic fortifications. As Toy notes, ‘the art of fortification had reached a high state of development” 4 in the architecture of Ancient Greece. The rise of the Romans saw the construction of fortifications which possessed a high level of ‘uniformity in fundamental principles of design.’5 In terms of the wider regional differences, whilst there were ‘naturally variations of form’ in response to climate and materials, in terms of core architectural strategy, ‘the progress was, in the main, general.’6 Toy writes that ‘since the design of fortifications, the details of structure and the methods of attack and defence, were, in essence, the same whether related to a town, a castle, or even a camp,’7 the art and technique of military fortification was fundamentally universal. For this reason, the Citadel at Tiryns is a typical example of a defensive type.

Toy observes that from ‘the earliest times cities and palaces were surrounded by walls, often of enormous thickness and of great height. Sometimes there were two, three, or more lines of such walls’, and the citadel lay ‘within the inner most line.’8 In addition to their size and strength, these defensive walls feature further resources for control, protection and surveillance, including ‘at their summits wide wall-walks with embattled parapets’, and their gateways ‘flanked by towers’.9 These nested layers of impervious walls and their strategic bastions of parapets and gateways were a means of controlling entry to, and protecting, the core citadel. For, as Toy writes, it was a crucial

3 Toy, ‘Ancient Fortresses’, 11-12. 4 Toy, A History of Fortification from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1700, xxi. 5 Toy, A History of Fortification from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1700, xxi. 6 Toy, A History of Fortification from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1700, xxii. 7 Toy, A History of Fortification from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1700, xxii. 8 Toy, ‘Ancient Fortresses’, 1. 9 Toy, ‘Ancient Fortresses’, 1.

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‘concern of every great leader to be familiar with the latest methods of attack and defence, since his safety […] depended on his ability to forestall any surprise line of assault.’10

The Prague Castle, Hradčany, itself features a similar series of fortified gates and spaces (Fig. 6.2). Architectural historian Jane Pavitt writes that ‘for 1,000 years, Prague Castle has been the centre of Czech nationhood,’11 and has housed the pinnacle groups of governance, from medieval religious figures to modern politics; ‘since 1918, it has been the political centre of the newly independent Czech state.’ 12 Hradčany presents as a progression of courtyard spaces that lead to the innermost sanctum of the compound. Pavitt describes the development of the fortifications, beginning in 890AD with the Přemyslid princes, who ‘encircled the castle with ramparts, and rebuilt it in stone.’ 13 Then, ‘further developments included the fortification of the castle by Soběslav I [c.1125-1140], parts of which still remain. These fortifications defined the castle area for another 500 years.’14 The castle now stands as a series of three courtyards, in addition to these prior fortification efforts. The First Castle Courtyard is the newest, an addition to the existing fortifications as part of ‘remodelling the castle in 1763-71’15. The Second Castle Courtyard was initially ‘built outside of the castle fortifications in the sixteenth century, then connected to the interior in the years 1642- 44.’16 Finally, the Third Castle Courtyard, the oldest of the three, ‘was the site of the original castle settlement, and the passage that leads to it once formed part of

10 Toy, A History of Fortification from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1700, xxii. 11 Jane Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 31, 12 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 31. 13 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 31. 14 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 31. 15 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 31. 16 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 32.

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Fig. 6.1 The Citadel of Tiryns, Argolis, Greece. Source: Sidney Toy, A History of Fortification from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1700, 12.

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Fig. 6.2 Prague Castle. Source: Jane Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 33.

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Soběslav’s fortifications.’ 17 Finally, ‘the entrance to the Palace is from the third courtyard, from which a number of small ante-rooms lead up.’18

Pavitt points out that Kafka lived for a short time in ‘Golden Lane (Zlatá Ulička)’, located within one of the castle’s layers of fortification. The street ‘runs along the inside of the castle walls, between the Daliborka Tower (1496) and the New White Tower (1584).’ 19 Pavitt notes that Golden Lane was ‘once a street of goldsmiths’, however since the seventeenth century ‘the street has had a rather bohemian reputation’ as ‘its cheap rents attracted artists and poets.’20 Kafka briefly lived at No.22 in 1917, and Pavitt claims that ‘the current appearance of the street is vastly different from the slum it would have been then.’21 The setting of Kafka’s unfinished tale, The Castle would no doubt be influenced by these experiences of the Prague castle. In that novel, a protagonist known only as K. arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities that govern it from a castle. Elizabeth Boa describes the setting of the novel as the ‘feudal atmosphere of a village located under the shadow of a castle.’22 Further to this direct replication of a setting, the spatiality of The Castle presents a ‘satirical mockery of bureaucracy.’23 Fortification, and K.’s inability to ever reach the castle and its officials, is a spatial metaphor for the layers of bureaucratic structure, by way of complex processes and convoluted paperwork. This structure of a never-ending enfilade that thwarts arrival at a final destination is similar to the spatial structure that drives Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’.

These examples reveal the spatial structure of the fortress and may be understood as common to all types of fortifications. This spatial model of repulsion and control is

17 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 32. 18 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 32. 19 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 37. 20 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 37. 21 Pavitt, The Building of Europe: Prague, 37. 22 Elizabeth Boa, ‘The Castle’, The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julian Preece (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press), 61. 23 Boa, ‘The Castle’, 62.

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also, in essence, similar to the spatial models described in Freud’s analogy of repression and in Kafka’s parable of ‘the Law’ (Fig. 6.3). Thus, one might begin to consider those analogical and literary structures also as types of fortification. In the first instance, the description of Tiryns, with its many doors and courts, is superficially reminiscent of Freud and Kafka and their spatial analogies for the mechanism of repression and ‘the Law’. But it has also previously been demonstrated that Freud saw the mechanism of repression as a type of protection for the conscious mind. In essence, it was a way of pushing a trauma into the secretive depths of the unconscious, thus protecting the ‘citadel’ of the conscious mind from its full force.

Freud’s spatial analogy is constructed of layers of protection and secrecy. Furthermore, just as there are gateways in an actual fortification which are protected with parapets and bastions around potential breach-points, in Freud’s parable the doorways are guarded by watchmen. The doorways and their guards serve to both contain and control, but they are also locations where thoughts can escape the unconscious and penetrate into the space of consciousness. Thus, Freud’s spatial analogy for repression could be viewed as a type of ‘psychological’ fortification.

As previously observed, Kafka’s spatial construction of the ‘Law’ has several similar features. Although Kafka’s definition of the ‘Law’ remains abstract and ill-defined, his spatial evocation of it has a similar structure to Freud’s fortification against psychic trauma. The concept of ‘the Law’ has previously been linked to Kafka’s minority religious beliefs along with his struggle against expectations of the conventions of marriage, sexuality and domesticity. Thus, Kafka’s parable, which describes a never-ending enfilade of doorkeepers, each one leading to a higher level of administration or appeal, might also be considered a fortification structure, which aims to prevent a person from achieving a sense of justice or equality, or even reaching a ‘citadel’ of acceptance, in relation to what the Law might be.

Importantly, nested spatial structures or devices that seek to control or repel are also found in Kafka’s fictional descriptions of domestic life. For example, many of his short stories, notably including The Metamorphosis and The Trial, begin within a

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Fig. 6.3 Fortification strata in the Citadel of Tiryns, Kafka’s parable Before The Law and Freud’s analogy for repression. Source: author

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domestic room, as a type of cabinet for protection. As these stories progress, smaller interior spaces, furniture, and items are introduced that play a role in the narrative. These include a wardrobe, desk, bedside table, hanging pictures and arm-chair sofa. Collectively, these spaces of the interior and its furnishings serve as layers of walls and bastions, defining a series of ‘islands of control’ in Kafka’s interior. Moreover, this sequence of spaces and objects, which gradually reduce in scale like the layered fortifications of a medieval castle, are present in Kafka’s fiction as moments where the main protagonist seemingly has complete control, although this is ultimately revealed to be a limited, if not futile, type of personal power. Indeed, this spatial structure actually serves to highlight the disempowerment that Kafka felt in his lifetime, particularly in regard to regular bourgeois domestic constructs. Although seemingly designed to repel invaders of his personal space, and uphold a level of personal control, Kafka’s ‘islands of control’ are ultimately flawed and prone to failure. For example, as this chapter reveals, the narrative events of Kafka’s fiction inevitably see the ‘islands’ invaded and any sense of sanctuary undermined or destroyed (Fig. 6.4). This pattern of control and repulsion is repeated over multiple scales in each tale, from the space of the room to its interior arrangement and the items within. The purpose of this chapter is to draw on architectural and psychoanalytical theories and constructs to unpack this idea of a domestic fortification system and to understand the way it presents in Kafka’s fiction, and how it relates to his waking life.

This chapter draws on both histories and theories associated with the interior, space and furnishings, alongside Freudian interpretations of these elements, because Freud’s theories alone are not sufficient to develop a useful understanding of these spaces and elements. The symbolic readings Freud developed for each of these elements are inherently superficial. In Freudian theory, most architectural features have symbolic values which primarily reference gender or bodily parts. For example, Freud writes that in ‘mythology and poetry […] towns, citadels, castles and fortresses’ are

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Fig. 6.4 Hand drawings by Kafka from his diary. Source: Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 269

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simply ‘symbols for women.’24 This superficial interpretation of the fortress spatial type, is in contrast to the way he previously used spatial metaphors to describe constructs of the mind (Chapter 2). Nevertheless, Freud does note that his work on dream symbolism is developing, incomplete and superficial. For example, on the symbolism of a room he muses that

[t]he fact that in dreams a room represents a woman you may be inclined to trace by which Frauenzimmer (lit. “woman’s room”) is used for Frau, that is to say, the human person is represented by the place assigned for her occupation. […] But I think this derivation is too superficial, and it strikes me as more probable that the room came to symbolise woman on account of its property of enclosing within it the human being. We have already met with the house in this sense.

Thus, part of the problem with using Freudian theory to interpret the symbolic meaning of an object lies in the words and language which are used to describe it. For example, whilst direct, if superficial correlations can be made between Frauenzimmer, ‘woman’ and ‘room’, there is also a deeper spatial metaphor at play, which starts to evoke a more historic and universal meaning. Such a consideration is part of the previous discussion in Chapter 4 on the notion of literary estrangement, and the deeper, invested meaning of words. Freud himself comments on the limitations of language, noting that symbolism extends beyond the boundaries of the German language. He notes that ‘of late years I have mainly treated foreign patients, and I think I recollect that in their dreams rooms stand in the same way for women, even though there is no word analogous to our Frauenzimmer in their language. There are other indications that symbolism may transcend the boundaries of language.’25

This suggestion of a universal symbolism that transcends language is an idea covered in Chapter 4. This universal language suggests that there is a type of unconscious meaning at play, although that language is limited in being able to define or describe. For these reasons, Freud’s theories about the symbolic meaning of

24 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’ in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970), 129. 25 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 129.

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fortifications, rooms, paintings and furniture are not sufficient in and of themselves, to provide a critical foundation for a review of Kafka’s islands of control. However, coupled with other architectural and historical readings of the meaning of these same elements, they can be used to develop insights into Kafka’s spatial constructs.

The following section of this chapter commences by defining a particular interior topographic construction that is present in three of Kafka’s most well-known fictional works, and has parallels to the spaces of his waking life. It looks at the overarching resonances that these interiors suggest in the context of the previous critical theory chapters, thus asserting their psychoanalytical value. The second section concludes by identifying the six elements or islands within the interior topography that are worthy of further exploration in terms of their psychoanalytical intimations, both universally and in ways which are idiosyncratic to Kafka.

These two levels of meaning — the universal and the idiosyncratic — as demonstrated in the six main interior elements of Kafka’s fiction, are the focus of the next four parts of this chapter. For the first three of these ‘islands of control’ — the room, furniture cabinet and the painting — the section begins with a wider historical account of each item, demonstrating how historically it grew out of the need for personal secrecy or security, controlling a public and private identity. Then, each section looks at the Freudian interpretation of the object and what it means in a psychoanalytical context. Whereas the first three islands are all examined in more detail, the next three are combined into a single section, where the evidence is less consistent, or a direct Freudian interpretation is either non-existent or extremely limited. However, through the connections these items have with the histories and interpretations offered for the previous three, they are part of the same thematic group.

Superficially the recurring spatial structure (which comprises both interior relations and furniture items) identified in this chapter appears straightforward, however, there are several complexities to note. One difficulty that arises in addressing the design history of each furniture item is the problem of repetitiveness, as the histories of these items are inextricably linked and overlapping. All of the histories are generated out of

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what might be described as the cabinet, noting that this term has a definition that can be applied to a whole subset of spatial types and furniture items. Thus, small private rooms, cupboards, dressers and storage vessels are all types of cabinets. A further difficulty is found in the way the themes of secrecy, control and sexuality, that underpin the history of the cabinet type, have then been transposed into literature, complete with psychoanalytical and symbolic contexts and intimations. The psychoanalytical meanings that Freud prescribed to a range of cabinet-related objects have at least partially informed the historic and recent readings of the meaning of cabinet spaces and furniture in literature. Because of this overlap, the ‘islands of control’ described in this chapter repeat the same structure (arguments and observations) over different scales, creating a type of nested spatial mechanism. For this reason, additional emphasis is placed on the first ‘island of control’, the room cabinet, as a means of introducing the overarching themes and links to literature and psychoanalysis. These themes and arguments then apply to the next item, the furniture cabinet, and so on. While this is a practical necessity, it might also be considered a reflection on the potential for a type of universal architectural meaning, as previously discussed in Chapter 4, that then plays out in the specific context of Kafka’s life and writing. Thus, finally, the section looks to an idiosyncratic and nuanced reading of a particular ‘island of control’, and specifically how the piece is involved with and operates in Kafka’s fiction. This reading is informed by Kafka’s waking-life circumstances, and how these idiosyncratic nuances fit into the wider historical context, framework of the universal meanings, and Freudian theory.

In the following four sections, resonances between these elements and their psychoanalytical meanings are developed both in terms of Kafka’s waking life, as well as his wider literary production. The chapter then systematically examines the six islands of control, developing a reading of each as relating to the underpinning themes of control and repulsion. These readings take into account the obvious Freudian interpretation, but also look to etymology and the history of space and furniture as a means of offering an alternative or parallel history to their thematic underpinnings. The chapter concludes with a summary of the pattern uncovered, noting variances and conflicts, and the potential for other examples to be found.

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Domestic fortifications

In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the room of its protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is described in substantial, if not painstaking, detail. The story begins with Samsa in bed, waking in his ‘ordinary human room’ that is ‘somewhat too small’26 The bed is located ‘peacefully between the four familiar walls’27 and, as the story progresses, the layout of the room is established. For example, at the beginning of the story Gregor has locked himself in the room, and his family with the company chief clerk, try to discover why he has not departed for work. In their attempt to communicate with Gregor, the family and the chief clerk locate themselves in adjacent spaces, surrounding the room. ‘[I]n the room on the left’, later described as the ‘living room’, ‘an embarrassed silence fell.’ Then ‘in the room on the right his sister began to sob.’28 Gregor’s father began ‘knocking at one of the side-doors’ and ‘from the other side-door came the soft, plaintive voice of his sister.’29 This description indicates that there are two doors on adjacent sides of the room that lead into other spaces. Later in the story they are described as white30 double doors.31 However, at one point in the narrative there is ‘a cautious knock at the door behind the head of his bed.’32 It is unclear whether this door is one of the side-doors previously mentioned. The additional comment, ‘why didn’t his sister go around to join the others?’,33 also indicates that there is a hallway that runs past one wall, and a third entry into the room, and without the need to use his room as a thoroughfare. While these three walls possess doors, and at least one is adjacent to a corridor, the fourth

26 Franz Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’ in Metamorphosis, ed. Malcom Pasley (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin, 1992), 76. At a point later in the story he contradicts this statement and describes the room as ‘high’ and ‘spacious’ (93). 27 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 76. 28 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 83. 29 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 78-79. 30 ‘The white door was stained with horrid blotches’. See Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 91. 31 ‘But when he had at last succeeded in getting his head opposite the doorway, he discovered that his body was too wide to pass through as it was. His father, in his present mood, did not even remotely consider opening the other wing of the door to provide an adequate passage for Gregor.’ See Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 91. 32 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 78. 33 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 83.

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wall of the room is external and contains a window with a view onto a ‘narrow street’34 overlooking the ‘peaceful but decidedly urban Charlottenstrasse’,35 and ‘a section of the endlessly long, dark-grey building opposite — it was a hospital — with its regular row of windows starkly pitting its façade.’36

With this general sense of the boundaries and geography of the room defined within the room itself, the interior elements and their positioning are also described. In the corner there is a table, and above it ‘there hung a picture which [Gregor] had recently cut out of a glossy magazine and put in a pretty gilt frame. It represented a lady complete with fur hat and stole, who was sitting upright and extending to view a thick fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished.’37 At one point Gregor looks across to an ‘alarm-clock which was ticking away on the bedside table’38, presumably next to the bed that he awoke in. Additional details about the interior are provided when, in the course of his new and unfamiliar struggles around the room as a large insect, Gregor ‘slid off the polished wardrobe’39 and ‘let himself fall against the back of a nearby chair, gripping it round the edge with his little legs.’40 The chair is described variously throughout the story as an ‘armchair’ or ‘sofa’. 41 Collectively, when all of the descriptions are combined, sufficient detail is presented to construct a general plan of the room, showing a possible internal configuration of the furniture and its position within the flat, and also the rooms in relation to their immediate urban context (Fig. 6.5).

34 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 80. 35 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99. Note that Charlottenstrasse is a main street in Berlin, the city where Kafka’s fiancée Felice Bauer lived. 36 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 87. 37 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 76. 38 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 85. 39 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 85. 40 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 85. 41 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99.

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In similar circumstances, the central protagonist of Kafka’s longer novel The Trial, Josef K., also wakes in his own room ‘with his head on the pillow’42. He finds himself looking through a window across the street ‘at the old lady living opposite’ who was ‘observing him with a curiosity quite unusual.’43 Then, there ‘was a knock at the door’44 and a man K. had never seen before entered his room and informed him that he was under arrest. K.’s fearful response to this warden, Franz, was met with ‘a short burst of laughter in the next room’.45 K. was then moved into the adjacent room, the landlady Frau Grubach’s ‘living room’, which was ‘packed with furniture, rugs, china and photographs’, where he found a second warden sitting by the window. In an attempt to thwart his impending arrest, K. returned to his own room and searched the ‘drawers of his desk’46 procuring identification in the form of a bicycle licence.47 In his frustration to escape the situation he contemplates opening ‘the door into the next room or even the door into the hall’48, indicating there are another two entry points to his room. Instead, seeing no way out and feeling surrounded, K. ‘threw himself on his bed and took from the bedside table a fine apple he had put aside the previous evening for his breakfast’49 and then ‘went to the cupboard’50 (later described as a ‘wardrobe’51) to fetch a glass of schnapps.

Thereafter, a call from one of the wardens in an adjacent room informs K. that the supervisor is now ready to see him, and he is taken through the living room into ‘the

42 Franz Kafka [1915], The Trial, trans. Idris Parry (London: Penguin Group, 1994), 18. 43 Kafka, The Trial, 1. 44 Kafka, The Trial, 1. 45 Kafka, The Trial, 1. 46 Kafka, The Trial, 4. 47 Kafka, The Trial, 4. Brod notes that Kafka had a bicycle in his description of At the Ship. 48 Kafka, The Trial, 6. Also indicated by the passage ‘after opening the door to the hall a little so that he could see from his position on the sofa anyone who came into the house.’ See Kafka, The Trial, 18. 49 Kafka, The Trial, 6. 50 Kafka, The Trial, 7. 51 Kafka, The Trial, 7.

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adjoining room whose double door was already open.’ 52 K. notes that this room had recently been rented by a young lady typist, Fräulein Bürstner. In this room, ‘the bedside table had been moved to the middle of the room to serve as the interrogator’s desk’53 and ‘in the corner of the room stood three young persons looking at Fräulein Bürstner’s photographs stuck on a board which hung on the wall.’54 Outside, across the street, the ‘two old people were again to be seen.’55 After the interview, K. was allowed to leave the room, and ‘[i]n the hall the front door was then opened for the whole company by Frau Grubach.’56 Once again, from the detailed description in The Trial, a plan of K.’s interior and its immediate urban context may be constructed (Fig. 6.6). Furthermore, this plan has many similarities to that described in The Metamorphosis.

Whilst the setting of The Trial is more detailed and seemingly more complex than that of The Metamorphosis, there are multiple shared features and commonalities between the two. The singular ‘unit’ of the first room — belonging to Samsa and K. — is fundamentally the same in its layout and interior topography in both cases. The ‘shell’ or outline of the rooms is identical in each case, with four walls featuring double doors on three sides, one opening up onto a hallway. The single external wall in each case has a window to an urban setting. Additionally, the same five items of furniture are referenced in both settings: chair, desk, photograph57, bed and bedside table (Fig 6.7).

Thus, the six recurring interior elements identified in Kafka’s fiction are: the room itself; hanging pictures; a cupboard or wardrobe; a writing desk; a bedside table; and

52 Kafka, The Trial, 7. 53 Kafka, The Trial, 8. 54 Kafka, The Trial, 8. 55 Kafka, The Trial, 8. 56 Kafka, The Trial, 12. 57 Although in The Trial, the photograph appears in the adjacent room of Fräulein Bürstner.

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Fig. 6.5 Plan of Metamorphosis interior. Source: author

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Fig. 6.6 Plan of The Trial interior. Source: author

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Fig. 6.7 Comparison of Metamorphosis and The Trial interiors and elements. Source: author

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an arm-chair or sofa. Certainly, these interior elements are not always described in precisely the same way; there are discrepancies, variations and omissions. Furthermore, some of these elements are the focus of greater attention than others. Thus, the desk, arm-chair or sofa are often described in more detail, whereas other objects, like the bed, are simply alluded to. Furthermore, in some of Kafka’s stories there is also evidence that a bicycle exists, (for example, a bicycle licence is mentioned in The Trial, suggesting ownership a of bicycle), but this is not consistent.

This room, which could be regarded as constituting Kafka’s archetypical interior, has parallels to Kafka’s real life bedroom. For example, Parry writes that Kafka ‘slept and worked in a small room sandwiched between his parents’ bedroom and their living room, with access from both, so that it served as a passageway as well as a living quarters.’1. Furthermore, the same interior elements appear in Max Brod’s description of Kafka’s room in At the Ship: ‘a bed’; ‘a wardrobe’; ‘the little, old, dark brown, almost black, desk’2; and over the desk hung ‘a copy of the picture by Hans Thoma, “The Ploughmen.”’3 Interestingly, Brod notes that Kafka maintained an attachment to these objects as a set and that they ‘accompanied Franz to all his lodgings.’ 4 In The Metamorphosis, a similar observation is made by Samsa’s mother when, weeks after Gregor’s transformation, she attempts to clear out Samsa’s room in order to make more space for him to scurry around the walls. Samsa’s mother states that:

it was not at all certain that they were doing Gregor a favour by removing the furniture. It seemed to her that the opposite was true; she found the sight of the bare wall positively heart-rending; and why shouldn’t Gregor react in the same way, since Gregor had been used to this furniture for so long and would feel abandoned […] “I think the best thing would be if we tried to keep the room exactly as it was before.”5

1 Idris Parry, ‘Introduction,’ in The Trial (London: Penguin Group, 1994), xii. 2 Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 54. 3 Brod, Kafka, 54. 4 Brod, Kafka, 54. 5 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 103.

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Samsa himself comments on his fondness for his interior, and the stress associated with its removal. For him, everything familiar, including the furniture, must remain in place and be the same. He asks himself, does

he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be transformed into a cave […?] Not a thing should be removed; everything must stay; the good effects of the furniture on his condition he could not do without; and if the furniture should hinder him in his senseless crawling expeditions that was no drawback, it was a great advantage.’6

It is clear in this statement that Samsa has an emotional investment in his furniture, which is congruent to that of Kafka and his own real life furnishings (Chapter 5).

Some of the differences between Kafka’s fictional and real spaces are also telling. For example, the books on Kafka’s own desk are replaced, in his fiction, with, for example, cloth samples in the case of The Metamorphosis. Interestingly, the washbasin that Brod mentions as being a central part of Kafka’s own interior, is not explicitly present in any of his fictional rooms. This may well be indicative of Kafka’s aversion to acknowledging bodily functions, thereby further reinforcing the notion that the presence (or absence) of specific furniture items may be associated with his personal psychoses or attitudes towards the body. This also implies that there may be a core psychological dimension implicit in the six elements, perhaps even associated with a universal meaning. Any differing descriptions of the furniture (for example, the adjective ‘arm- chair’ and ‘sofa’ appear interchangeably) might also indicate more personal connections and idiosyncratic meanings that relate to the immediate and particular circumstances or contexts of Kafka’s life.

Kafka’s attachment to his set of furniture, to the extent that it reappears in his fiction, might be regarded as a type of uncanny repetition akin to that discussed in Chapter 3, the transference of the author’s setting into his work. In the case of Kafka, both The Trial and The Metamorphosis begin in the central protagonist’s bedroom and with a startling invasion of privacy, which is also highly reminiscent of the interruptions

6 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 103.

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that occurred in Kafka’s real-life settings. It could be argued that the settings described in Kafka’s fiction are derived from the typical bourgeois interiors that he inhabited in his life, and the sensational narrative situations (inexplicable arrest or transformation) recreate the anxiety that he felt in waking life from a general lack of privacy and control of his own space.7 Viewed in this way, Kafka’s fictional rooms appear fundamentally biographical.

This realisation invites a further question about the biographical connection. Does this interior spatial and furnishing configuration, as it appears in his fiction, have inherent psychological worth and psychoanalytical value? The need to consider this question is supported, in the first instance, by the resemblances between the spatial constructions of The Metamorphosis, The Trial and Before the Law, along with Freud’s model of repression (Fig. 6.8). Freud’s model proposes that there are universal dream symbols (Chapter 4) and then there are idiosyncratic versions of these. Spatial structures, motifs and objects also have a universal psychological meaning and then an idiosyncratic reading that is more inherently tied to and shaped by the narrative, settings and circumstances of Kafka’s waking life.

The first island: the room cabinet

As previously described, both The Trial and The Metamorphosis commence in an almost identical interior, the personal bedroom of the main protagonist. Historically, this personal space would have been considered a type of cabinet, the design history of which has always been associated with gender politics and bourgeois domestic constructs, and is thus implicitly linked in Freudian literature and psychoanalysis. Given the cabinet’s strong association with such themes, any consideration of its function and meaning inevitably crosses over into literature, where it has served as a generic spatial trope, a setting for illicit sexual relations that explore and challenge such

7 The use of an ordinary setting overwhelmed with extraordinary events was cited by Freud as a typical literary device that instigates the uncanny (see Chapter 3).

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Fig. 6.8 Comparison of Metamorphosis and The Trial interiors, Kafka’s Before the Law parable and Freud’s spatial analogy for repression. Source: author

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constructs. Such readings have been identified in Kafka’s own fiction, where his works are considered to be a means of exorcizing fears about marriage and expected domestic practices in the context of his own life. Because of the interconnectedness of these ideas, the beginning of this section presents a ‘cabinet’ theory, where the historical considerations converge with the later psychoanalytical readings of the space, before demonstrating how these correlate to their presentation in literature. The interior topography of Kafka’s literature emerges through this reading as a product of cabinet theory on two levels. Firstly, as the elements of the interior topography themselves are generated from cabinet theory. Secondly, this interior topography serves to support the narrative and character elements of Kafka’s fiction.

The word ‘cabinet’ was first used in Europe during the sixteenth century. In its early incarnation, it referred to a ‘room meant for private use and often housing a collection of small works or art or other objects of interest.’1 Art historians Guiseppe Olmi, Meredith Chilton and Friederike Wappenschmidt trace the history of the cabinet type, noting that the first examples ‘were small rooms, usually adjoining a bedchamber, in the most private part of a castle, palace or apartment, meant for the private use of the master of the house.’ 2 The term soon grew in its application and over time it began to denote a type of furniture as well as a private chamber. Later seventeenth and eighteenth century definitions in ‘French and German dictionaries indicate that the term [cabinet] has also been used with a wide range of other meanings.’3 In addition to suggesting the function of a room, the word also denotes a number of related furniture types, a ‘family of forms’ which, while ‘yet to be fully disentangled’ are associated with a ‘fundamental idea of seclusion and privacy.’4 The role of the cabinet, regardless of whether the term is applied to a small room or item of furniture, is one of personal containment and control, but also secrecy and concealment.

1 Guiseppe Olmi, Meredith Chilton, Friederike Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’, Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 2 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 3 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 4 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’

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As a room, the cabinet was consistently framed as a private place, despite varying in its specific function. For example, in the eighteenth century it was either ‘the place where the master of the house attended to his most personal affairs, or […] it could be used as a room for conversation and audience.’ 5 According to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the word cabinet was also used to designate a room which people ‘dedicated to study’, or a place to conduct ‘private business’, or to ‘contain the finest examples of one’s collections of painting, sculptures, books [and] curios’6. From these usages, several different types of cabinets emerged that were specific to various applications. Diderot’s Encyclopédie goes on to emphasize that for a wealthy aristocrat, it was necessary

to have several cabinets in his residence, each with a specific function. First, there had to be a grand cabinet in which he could discuss private matters with those who called upon him because of his social position; and in this same room he might have kept his pictures and curiosities. There also had to be an arrière-cabinet for his books and writing-table; this was his place of work, but also the room where he received guests of higher rank towards whom he wanted to show special respect. In another cabinet documents, contracts and money could be kept safe, and lastly there was a cabinet de toilette containing dressing and sanitary facilities.’7

In a similar way, the eighteenth-century architect Jacques François-Blondel classified cabinet spaces into two categories. The first, ‘served basically the same function as the grand cabinet and arrière-cabinet’, a place of reception and a space to conduct personal affairs, relations and correspondence, and to store the associated papers and items. Second, ‘there were those used as oratories and boudoirs and containing dressing and sanitary facilities.’8 Architectural historian Edward Lilley writes that this divergence of definition and use occurred in response to the ‘increasing insistence on the autonomy of the individual and a consequently augmented demand for privacy.’ 9

5 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 6 Diderot Encyclopédie [1751] as cited in Edward Lilley, ‘The Name of the Boudoir’ in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 53, No. 2(1994): 194. 7 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 8 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 9 Lilley, ‘The Name of the Boudoir’, 193.

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Yet, although there are various different types of cabinet, two main functional variations emerged. First, the cabinet as a private space for contemplating and organising personal affairs, business, study, writing, papers and objects. Second, the cabinet as a space for intimate rituals associated with the body, such as dressing and sanitary functions.10

As the number of types of cabinet proliferated in response to an increasing array of private functions, gender specific cabinet-type spaces also developed. For instance, Diderot wrote that ‘one also calls cabinets those rooms in which ladies get dressed, attend to their devotions or take an afternoon nap, or those which they reserve for other occupations which demand solitude and privacy.’11 Eventually this type of specifically female cabinet space would emerge to become a ‘sub-species’ 12, known as the boudoir. Lilley writes that Diderot’s eighteenth-century definition stresses ‘that men and women have different needs for their private rooms. While a man might study, deal with his private business, or admire his collections, a woman might adorn herself, perform her religious duties, or rest.’13 Over time, the gendering of cabinet rooms served as a means of upholding middle-class notions of orderliness by way of segregating men from women, in order to supress sexual desire.14

Yet, rather than deterring sexual relations or ensuring they could not occur, Lilley notes that the space of the boudoir soon ‘became associated with illicit sexual liasons’ and was commonly ‘associated with light-hearted fictions of upper-class dalliance.’15 It is here that the actual and implied secrets and sexuality of the cabinet type cross into literature and psychoanalysis. When implicitly gendered, rooms and objects which may

10 For Kafka, his one room was used for all these functions. Privacy — or more accurately, the lack thereof — has always been a key aggravating factor in the discussion of any space he has been resident of. 11 Diderot Encyclopédie [1751] as cited in Lilley, ‘The Name of the Boudoir’, 194. 12 Lilley, ‘The Name of the Boudoir’, 194. 13 Lilley, ‘The Name of the Boudoir’, 194. 14 Foucault writes about the development of domestic planning as a tool in suppressing and controlling sexuality. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (London, England: Penguin Books, 1978) 15 Lilley, ‘The Name of the Boudoir’, 193.

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be classified as vessels for storage — including the wardrobe, armoire, chest, cabinet, closet, bureau and the like — have, in literature and psychoanalysis, been repeatedly employed as metaphors for sexual and domestic identity. For example, Henry Urbach argues that the closet ‘holds two distinct but related meanings.’16

On the one hand, a closet is a space where things are stored. In this regard, we might say, ‘Your clothes are in the closet.’ But when we observe that ‘Joe has been in the closet for years,’ we are concerned less with his efforts to match trousers and tie than with how he reveals his identity to others. In this sense, the closet refers to the way that identity, particularly gay identity, is concealed and disclosed.’17

The proverbial ‘closet’, as metaphor for gay identity, rose in prominence in America in the 1960s, yet Urbach notes that the metaphor ‘existed long before it was first called “the closet.”’18 For at least a century prior to this time, reference to ‘the closet was a social and literary convention that narrated homosexuality as a spectacle of veiled disclosure’19. Other authors, including Eve Kofosky Sedgewick20 and D. A. Miller,21 trace the complex and nuanced use of the closet and other related vessels of storage as a metaphor, to ‘the late nineteenth-century device by which “the love that dare not speak its name” could be spoken and vilified.’22 Emily Apter also constructs a similar history of the related storage vessel, the cabinet. Apter writes that the fin de siecle cabinet was also a space closely associated with private identity and sexuality. It was ‘a space in which assembled treasures nested and multiplied, habitually contained familial icons, objets d’art or private papers, themselves fetishized and invested with rarified [sic]

16 Henry Urbach, ‘Closets, Clothes, Disclosure.’ Assemblage 30 (MIT Press: 1996): 62. 17 Urbach, ‘Closets, Clothes, Disclosure.’, 62. 18 Urbach, ‘Closets, Clothes, Disclosure’, 67. 19 Urbach, ‘Closets, Clothes, Disclosure’, 67. 20 Eve Kofosky Sedgewick, The Epistemology of the Closet (London: Penguin, 1994) 21 D. A Miller, ‘Anal Rope’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991) 22 Urbach, ‘Closets, Clothes, Disclosure’, 67.

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forms of eroticism’23. Often used at this time as a spatial setting for acts of illicit or inconceivable sexual practice, such ‘cabinet fiction’, as Apter defines the genre, ‘was equally the result of nineteenth-century marriage between the “pathologies of modern life” contrived by Balzac and Baudelaire’ and the ‘medical literature of psychosexual mania’24 supplied by Freud at the turn of the century.

There are two further connections between the cabinet, Freudian theory and the uncanny. The first is associated with the collection which is contained within the cabinet, its relation to the Freudian notion of fetish, and the necessary condition of the gaze. Given that one of its fundamental functional purposes was housing a collection, the term cabinet also came to ‘denote not only a particular sort of room but also the collection of objects contained therein.’25 Such collections were broad in range and size, to the point where it was common to refer to ‘a whole suite of several rooms containing a collection’ 26 as a cabinet. Collections ranged from ‘the encyclopaedic to the specialized’27, of which the most fascinating was undoubtedly the type of the cabinet des curieux, the cabinet of curiosities, that ‘contain[ed] rare and bizarre objects, both natural and artificial.’28

The interest in, and collecting of, atypical and bizarre objects is another way the small private chamber became associated with perverse or illicit activities. Apter writes that although it was ‘often a simple room within the home’, the cabinet was a space ‘in which assembled treasures nested and multiplied, habitually contained familial icons, objets d’art or private papers’29 that were fetishized and imbued with unusual erotic values. This ‘mania of collecting and its increasingly refined, recherché developments’

23 Emily Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets: Fetishism, Prostitution, and the Fin de Siècle Interior’, Assemblage 9 (MIT Press: 1989): 8 24 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 7-8. 25 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 26 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’. This has been considered the origins of the museum typology. 27 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 28 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 29 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 8.

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were seen to verge into almost pathological conditions of ‘bric-a-bracomania, tableaumania, bibliophilia [and] vestignomia’ 30 which Apter presents as a broad spectrum of fetishism types.

According to Freud, such feverish collecting served as a displacement of sexual neuroses by means of the fetish object. Freud, ‘in his mapping of the libidinal economy, would refer to the uncanny volatility of the surrogate phallic object.’31 This sexual fixation upon an object, what Freud labelled a fetish, was a substitute for the shock of witnessing the ‘maternal phallus’.32 In such a moment ‘the fetishist, fearing the spectacle of maternal castration, would fix his gaze’33 and avert to looking at another object. The surrogate objects often became the subject of a feverish collection practice, which was also contained within a cabinet. Apter thus construes the fetish object as another type of ‘cabinet secret, or “hidden” agent.’34

The cabinet, regardless of whether it is a room or item of furniture, through its containment of such fetish objects and their associated sexual associations, became ‘a spatial metaphor criss-crossing the high associations of connoisseurial collecting with the low associations of the prostitute’s peep show.’35 Spatially, its symbolism in literature ‘merged with the newly minted sexual aberration of erotomania.’36

[T]he cabinet, […] received a literary pedigree from […] J.K. Huysmans, the Goncourt brothers, Zola, and Proust. Descriptions of the interior in the work of these authors demonstrate a disturbing set of slippages from object mania to erotomania, from household

30 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 8. 31 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 9. 32 See Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, ‘Castration Complex’ in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson (New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1973), 56. 33 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 9. 34 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 9. 35 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 8. 36 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 8.

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fetishism to brothel decadence, and from the medical genre of the doctor’s secret cabinet to the voyeuristic literary representation of the prostitutional curiosités.’37

The cabinet within the home was transformed into ‘a fetishistic space of perversion’.38 As a device in literature, it served to juxtapose the typical and homely with the atypical and unhomely. However, in order to function as a literary device of containment and discovery, the cabinet also requires a means of presenting or exposing itself.

The cabinet’s capacity to both resist intrusion and then revel in its exhibition are reliant on the presence of an aperture or opening through which the voyeur’s desire can be first denied, and then enabled. Thus, in her survey of cabinet literature, Apter identifies a number of furtive keyholes, windows and apertures that become a necessary universal condition of the fictional cabinet. Such apertures, known in German literature of the time as wasistas, were fundamentally a ‘strange piece of voyeuristic paraphernalia’ that ‘betrays a cabinet secret’39 through enabling the gaze onto the subject. Apter explains that the noun wasistas is ‘derived from the German phrase “Was ist das?” [what is that?]’, a question about the hidden object of desire. Consequently ‘this singular spy window breaks down into one of the major questions of psychoanalysis (and of the fetishist in particular), “What is it?” “What is the object of (perverse) desire?”’40 Such a question is complex and in the cabinet fiction of the era was necessarily ‘answered on an individual basis.’41 On one level, this aperture enables what Freud termed scopophilia, the pleasure that is derived from looking, which is also one of the primary purposes of frivolous cabinet fiction. Yet on another level, the aperture invites further psychological or pathological scrutiny of an individual subject. The wasistas is an architectural device, which in the space of cabinet fiction enables the invasion of the gaze and consequential discovery and examination. This idea of the gaze

37 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 8. 38 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 9. 39 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 12. 40 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 12. 41 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 12-13.

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breaching an enclosure becomes significant in Kafka’s fiction and is discussed in the following sections.

Given this background to the cabinet, including its origins as a private chamber and development to embody a range of additional meanings, the first ‘island of control’ is the room. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Judgement all begin with the central protagonist waking in his own bedroom. Previously, a correlation in the structure and content of this was identified between the descriptions in The Trial and The Metamorphosis, as well as Kafka’s waking life. Defined as a cabinet, the room operates in his fiction in two ways, as a collection and as a subject of wasistas (Fig 6.9).

In the first instance, the ‘collection’ of the cabinet room may be defined as Kafka’s miserly but precious set of furniture, a collection that is also seen in The Trial and The Metamorphosis. Given the transference of the collection from his waking life into his fiction, there is a clear sense of attachment to it, and possibly comfort derived from its familiarity. In his waking life, its homeliness may have counteracted the increasingly unfamiliar and unhomely nature of the Modern tenement housing that he moved through. Alternatively, as a deliberate literary device, the familiarity and comfort of the furniture collection may be used by Kafka as a contrast to the extraordinary developments of the plot. In the former case, the repetition of Kafka’s waking interior in his fiction may constitute a type of uncanny response (as previously discussed in Chapter 3) whereas as a purposeful device, the author repeats a familiar domestic scene in a fictional setting, to juxtapose the overtly homely against abhorrent narrative events.

The second way the fictional cabinet room functions is that it engages with the condition of the wasistas. However, rather than being a secret oculus for the voyeur to achieve visual pleasure, in both The Metamorphosis and The Trial, the wasistas serves as a mechanism that allows visual invasion and scrutiny of the central protagonist. In the case of the opening scene of The Trial, the cabinet wasistas is the window to the street, and the protagonist K. forms its spectacle. Specifically, K. wakes in his bed to

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Fig. 6.9 The first ‘island of control’: the room. Source: author

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find himself on display for ‘the old lady living opposite’.42 She continues to watch the scene as K. is arrested by wardens, repeatedly returning to the corresponding window that looks into his own apartment (Fig. 6.6). As K. observes, ‘[t]hrough the open window the old woman was again visible; with true senile inquisitiveness she had moved to the corresponding window opposite so that she could continue to see everything.’43 Later in the proceedings, the old woman ‘had dragged an even older man to the window and now held him tightly.’44 K., unnerved by her scrutiny, ‘had to make an end of this exhibition.’45 However, despite his attempts, the next time he looked out the window, the ‘two old people’ were still there, ‘but the group had increased in size, for behind and towering over them was a man with an open necked shirt who stroked and twirled his reddish goatee with his fingers.’46 This group is fascinated with the spectacle of K.’s arrest, viewing the event as voyeurs until confronted by K.

Across the way the group was still at the window and only now, because K. had come to the window, did their quiet contemplation seem a little disturbed. The old people tried to stand, but the man behind reassured them. ‘There are more spectators over there,’ shouted K. quite loudly to the supervisor and he pointed across with his finger. ‘Away from there,’ he then shouted at them. The three immediately fell back a few steps, the two old people even retreated behind the man, who shielded them with his broad body […] But they did not disappear completely, they seemed to be waiting for the moment when they could come to the window again without being observed.47

The window is the wasistas which enables the visual invasion of K.’s space, and the exposure of his predicament, turning his life into a cabinet spectacle. Later, when leaving the room, K. sees the man with the goatee appear in the house-door, leading K. to exclaim ‘[d]on’t look over there,’ then note that his statement had been made ‘without

42 Kafka, The Trial, 1. 43 Kafka, The Trial, 2. 44 Kafka, The Trial, 5. 45 Kafka, The Trial, 5. 46 Kafka, The Trial, 8. 47 Kafka, The Trial, 10.

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thinking’ and 'how extraordinary such a remark was when addressed to grown men.’48 This comment is suggestive of the primeval urge that transfixes the spectator. That urge, along with the fixation of the gaze as part of the desire drive has, as previously discussed, thematic connections to the history of the cabinet. It is also connected to Freud’s uncanny and the relationship of the gaze to that mechanism, as the instigation of desire, (see Chapter 3). The gaze, and its subject, are ultimately central to the construction of the cabinet room in Kafka’s literature.

The themes of invasion, scrutiny, fear and disgust are repeated in the framing of the cabinet room in The Metamorphosis. In this instance, the wasistas is a door. Its initial locked state, its closed-ness, and the process of unlocking it, are used to amplify the anticipation and horror of witnessing the cabinet spectacle. In The Metamorphosis, on waking up late and discovering himself in his new, insect-like form, Gregor finds himself locked alone in his room, with his family and work supervisor surrounding three sides. Wondering why he has not left for work, the family calls to him and asks him to open the door. Gregor’s urgent need for privacy and security from the family is emphasised by the multiple, locked doors, which ‘Gregor had no intention of opening up, and congratulated himself instead on the prudent habit he had acquired as a commercial traveller of locking all his doors , even when at home.’49 Even the window to the street is overlooked but rendered ‘closed’ by ‘the sight of the morning fog, which was thick enough to obscure even the other side of the narrow street.’50

In anticipation of revealing his changed form to his family and the chief clerk, the act of opening the door to his room occupies a significant part of Gregor’s thoughts. ‘He meant to actually open the door, actually to show himself and speak to the chief clerk; he was eager to find out what the others […] would say when they saw him. If they took fright, then Gregor would have no further responsibility and could rest in peace.’51

48 Kafka, The Trial, 13. 49 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 78. 50 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 80. 51 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 85.

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Speaking through the walls of the locked room, the confusion brought on by the sound of Gregor’s new voice and the lack of visual connection only served to amplify the mystery of Gregor’s condition to his family and their subsequent anxiety. His mother tells his sister Grete to ‘run for the doctor, quick. Did you hear how Gregor was speaking just then?’ The chief clerk then comments ‘“[t]hat sounded like an animal,” […] in a tone that was strikingly subdued compared to his mother’s shrieking.’ As Grete and the housekeeper run to find a doctor and a locksmith, Gregor hears the ‘tearing open [of] the front door’ but ‘no sound of its slamming; presumably they had left it open, as tends to happen in homes where some great disaster has occurred.’52 The open front door to the apartment, both inviting intrusion and signalling disaster, is in contrast to Gregor’s locked cabinet room. Anticipating the arrival of help, Gregor significantly hopes ‘for impressive and startling achievements from both the doctor and the locksmith, without making any precise distinction between them.’53 This conflation is significant, as both the door and the body are seemingly treated for similar ailments, the first being locked, the later changed. The merging of the locksmith and the doctor also evokes Apter’s description of the medical cabinet where ‘the doctor’s most disturbing professional secrets were divulged.’54 The doctor’s cabinet was a common trope in the ‘doctor’s memoir, nosological observation, and roman à tiroir’, where it ‘devolved dramatically around the fetishistic conceit of “showing and telling” what was in principle kept professionally sealed behind closed doors.’55

As The Metamorphosis progresses, the process of unlocking the door to Gregor’s room is the crucial cabinet moment; opening the wasistas to reveal Gregor’s new form. In working up to this moment of revelation, ordinary familiar domestic architecture and its operation — that is, the key in the lock and the opening of the door — are juxtaposed against Gregor’s new, unfamiliar form, highlighted by an extended description of the

52 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 85. 53 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 86. 54 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 8. 55 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 8.

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difficulty he has in performing this feat. Gregor starts by ‘using his mouth to turn the key in the lock. Unhappily it seemed that he had no proper teeth […] but to make up for that his jaws were certainly very powerful; with their help he did in fact succeed in getting the key moving.’56 Gregor ‘clenched his jaws desperately on the key with all the strength at his command. As the key proceeded to turn, so he danced round the lock; by now he was holding himself up by his mouth alone, and either hanging on to the key or pressing it down again with the full weight of his body as the situation required.’ 57 The strangeness of this process is further punctuated with disturbing details about his new form. For example, while turning the key Gregor ‘paid no attention’ to the ‘brown liquid [that] was emerging from his mouth, flowing over the key and dripping onto the floor.’58 With the door finally ‘open quite wide’ Gregor is revealed, prompting a moment of horrific recoil.

[T]he chief clerk utter a loud ‘Oh!’ — it sounded like a rushing of the wind — and now he could see him too, standing nearest to the door, as he clapped his hand to his open mouth and started slowly backing away, as if he were being driven by the steady pressure of some invisible force. His mother […] looked first with hands clasped at his father, then took two steps towards Gregor and sank to the floor, her skirts billowing out in circles all round her and her face buried on her breast, quite lost to view. His father clenched a fist with a menacing expression, as if he meant to beat Gregor back into his own room, then he looked uncertainly round the living-room, covered his eyes with his hands and fell into a sobbing that shook his mighty chest.

The image of this first locked and then unlocked door is such an important theme in The Metamorphosis, that it is depicted in the cover illustration for the 1916 first edition. The title page ‘shows a man turning away in horror from a partially opened door’, into which ‘nothing but darkness can be seen.’59 Kafka had ‘refused to allow the illustrator Ottmar Starke to create an image of Gregor Samsa’60 (Fig. 6.10). Kafkan scholar Sander L.

56 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 86. 57 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 86. 58 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 86. 59 Sander L. Gilman, Frank Kafka (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 90. 60 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 91.

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Gilman writes that ‘the transformation into a bug had been a theme in Kafka’s sense of his own body.’61 Perhaps due to Kafka’s aversion to his body, the door acts as a type of fetish replacement for his body or any representation of it; as an object, the door is preferable to the abhorrent body of the insect.

For Freud, the open and closed rooms are symbolically related to sexuality. In terms of universal dream symbolism, he writes that rooms are symbolic of the female uterus, and that ‘this representation may be extended, so that windows and doors (entrances and exits from rooms) come to mean the openings of the body; the fact of rooms being open or closed also accords with this symbolism: the key, which opens them, is certainly a male symbol.’62 In The Metamorphosis, both the locksmith and the doctor are agents of opening or exposure, being male in the Freudian sense, but also being the devices that enable the mechanics of wasistas. Thus, both the Freudian and the literary interpretation of the cabinet room, and its dual role as site of protection and exposure, come together.

Adding a further dimension to this reading, accounts of locked (and later unlocked) doors have been previously used in other cabinet fictions to emphasize a strange atmosphere. In one example Apter describes an erotic scene from Emile Zola’s Nana. In that scene, between a dominatrix and willing victim, Apter writes that its ‘eerie specularity’ is heightened by reference to locked doors. Zola’s repeated references ‘to the “shut door,” “shut-up bedroom,” and strange, unnatural atmosphere incubating within them, suggest that the room itself is as much an ‘accomplice in these antics as the couple.’63 Apter writes that the work ‘foreshadow[s] [Zola’s] theme of la bête humaine, or human beast’,64 in which Zola ‘transforms the reader, masculine and feminine alike, into a spy, who, much like the unlicensed lay reader of the sexological

61 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 90-91. 62 Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’ in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Allen and Unwin, c.1970 ), 125. 63 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 11. 64 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 11.

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Fig. 6.10 Ottomar Starke, cover illustration for the first edition of The Metamorphosis, 1916. Source: Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka (London: Reaktion books, 2005): 91.

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document, is implicitly troubled by the sight.’65 The cabinet occupies a similar role in The Metamorphosis, where the locked room amplifies the anticipation of the cabinet spectacle — the revelation of Gregor as the human beast.

Fundamentally, the cabinet room provides an initial sense of privacy and concealment, which is then breached by various forms of wasistas, allowing the gaze to intrude into the life of Kafka and his protagonists, transforming them into a type of crude cabinet spectacle. In addition to the replication of his own domestic interior, both Samsa and K are considered a doubling of Kafka into his own fiction, and become vehicles for ‘the way Kafka draws autobiographical material into his fictions.’66 The initial of The Trial’s central protagonist, K., presents an obvious foreshortening; similarly, it has been argued that Samsa ‘is phonetically the same as the word Kafka.’67. When considered a vehicle through which to examine his life, both The Trial and The Metamorphosis are thought to reflect Kafka’s real life fears and repulsions. Firstly, in The Trial the repulsion he had with his own self is represented in the reactions of the old people across the road, as well as those of the chief clerk and family in The Metamorphosis. Secondly, this response is allegedly a reflection of his fear of domesticity, sexuality and marriage. Multiple small clues in the stories allude to this second interpretation, including the fact that the initials of key female protagonists in Kafka’s stories, F.B. (Fräulein Bürstner in The Trial, Freide Breda in The Judgement), are the same as that of his real-life fiancée, Felice Bauer. Other spatial clues and features also allude to her, including the address of the room in The Metamorphosis, Charlottenstrasse, which was a main avenue in Felice’s home city of Berlin. The physical and social buffer between K.’s room and that of Fräulein Bürstner in The Trial, being the lounge room of Frau Grubach, might also be considered an arrangement that spatially emphasises a fear of intimacy and closeness.

65 Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets’, 11. 66 J. P. Stern. ‘Franz Kafka’s “Das Urtel”: An Interpretation’, in The German Quarterly, Vol.45, No. 1 (Jan. 1971). (Wiley): 114 67 Zahra Barfi, Fatemeh Azizmohammadi and Hamedreza Kohzadi, 2013. ‘A Study of Kafka’s the Metamorphosis in the Light of Freudian Psychological Theory’ in Research Journal of Recent Sciences Vol.2(10), October 2013 (International Science Congress Association): 107

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Viewed in this way, the importance of locking himself in a room appears as a means of protection against physical and emotional intimacy that would be a part of marriage, and to negate the loss of personal power, independence and privacy to a domestic partner.

The second island: the frame

Amongst the types of collections that the room cabinet historically contained, pictures and images were two of the most prevalent. Due to the small and private nature of the cabinet room, it ‘was often in danger of seeming too closed [,] dark and suffocating.’ In some cases, architects took the opportunity of ‘exploiting the smallness of the space’, through which it was ‘possible to accentuate the impression of seclusion and transform the room into a mysterious and magic recess, completely isolated from the world.’68 An alternative approach was to seek various means of brightening or enlivening the room. One way to resist the smallness of the space was to ‘site the room where it had a good view from its windows.’ But where this effect could not be achieved, or compromised the integrity of the space, another technique ‘was to simulate opening […] by painting real or imaginary landscapes on the walls.’69 The cabinet room soon became a space where ‘extravagant and bizarre’ 70 forms of ornament and representation dominated. Thus, one version of the cabinet room was dedicated to collecting pictures, and ‘in French these were called cabinets de tableaux.’71 Picture cabinets were arranged thematically according to the specialised interests of the owner ‘with the general aim of comprehensiveness’72 As such, a key virtue of the picture cabinet is its escapism, and the visual pleasure gained through viewing a large and varied collection of images of a personal interest.

68 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 69 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 70 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 71 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 72 Ursula Härting, ‘Cabinet picture’, Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

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Fig. 6.11 The second island of control: picture and window frames. Source: author

Fig. 6.12 Hand drawing by Kafka. Source: Kafka, published in Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 269

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At the time when cabinet pictures and collecting them became widespread, ‘a new type of painting, which depicted the private galleries […] themselves’ emerged. Such cabinet paintings depicted ‘a room in peep-show style, its walls hung decoratively with cabinet pictures.’73 Sometimes, these paintings were embellished representations of a particular collection, at other times they were ‘allegorical pictures of imagined galleries.’74 Such imaginary spaces become a projection of the desire that underpins collecting, so unique to the connoisseur that such pictures may be deemed ‘“portraits” of a collection that can be identified along with their owners.’75 Such an interest in collecting pictures of a specialised nature, and their relationship to personal identity, recalls Apter’s definition of collecting mania, and thus may be treated as a type of fetish.

The argument that the picture cabinet and its collection may be viewed as a fetish presents two interesting parallels in terms of Freudian theory. Firstly, the concept of an allegorical picture of a specialised collection as a portrait, presenting blurred connections or transferences between personality and specialised objects, is reminiscent of Freud’s own study, which was filled with his collection of Greco-Roman antiquities which had an influence on both his theoretical output and patient analysis (see Chapter 3). The second parallel arises from the confusion about what constitutes an actual fetish; in the case of collecting pictures, it is unclear if the fetish is the thematic subject of the pictures or the picture-object in itself. Regardless, fundamentally the importance of a collection is to be gazed upon for imaginative pleasure, evoking scopophilia, the function of a fetish.

Much like the wasistas in cabinet literature, picture or window frames act as apertures, allowing the human gaze to partake in the pleasurable viewing of a subject. However, whilst both the wasistas and framed pictures are apertures of this type, the direction and subject of the gaze differs. Wasistas windows and doors serve as breach- points in the cabinet fortification, allowing the gaze in, where it is directed onto the main

73 Härting, ‘Cabinet picture’ 74 Härting, ‘Cabinet picture’ 75 Härting, ‘Cabinet picture’

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protagonist himself. Conversely, framed pictures on the walls of the room, or views from a window onto another external subject, are instances where the gaze of the protagonist is directed onto something else (compare Fig. 6.9 to Fig. 6.11). In this second scenario, the gaze of the protagonist is projected onto a controlled subject that offers familiarity, relief and escapism. In essence, Kafka is in control of the subject of the gaze and the associated scrutiny and imaginative speculation, thus it forms the second island of control.

In Kafka’s literature, framed pictures have a dual purpose. On one hand, they represent places of refuge, operating through the agency of fantasy or nostalgic reflection. On the other, they represent a combined instance of loss and repulsion. For example, in The Metamorphosis two framed pictures are described in detail. The first is in Gregor’s room, where above the table a picture was hung, which Gregor ‘had recently cut out of a glossy magazine and put in a pretty gilt frame. It represented a lady complete with a fur hat and stole, who was sitting upright and extending to view a thick fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished.’76 It is later revealed that Gregor made the picture-frame himself. Furthermore, his father claims that for Gregor, fret-work is ‘the only relaxation he gets’, and continues that Gregor ‘spent two or three evenings making a little picture-frame; you’d be surprised how pretty it is. It’s hanging there in his room; you’ll see it just as soon as Gregor opens the door.’77 Gregor’s attachment to the picture is highlighted later in the narrative, when his mother and sister, in the attempt to give him uninhibited crawling space within the room, remove items of furniture. This act perplexes Gregor, and in the quest to salvage his familiar space, he ‘spotted the picture of the lady all swathed in furs hanging so conspicuously on what was otherwise a bare wall.’ Gregor ‘crawled rapidly up to it and pressed himself against the glass, which held him fast and soothed his hot belly. This picture at least, which Gregor now covered completely, was definitely not going to be removed by

76 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 76. 77 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 82.

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anybody.’78 When Grete re-enters the room to keep clearing, ‘her eyes met Gregor’s, looking down at her from the wall.’ In anticipation of her intentions to remove the picture Gregor exclaims, ‘Well, just let her try!’ Gregor then ‘clung to his picture and was not going to give it up. He would rather fly in Grete’s face.’79

The attachment that Gregor displays towards the picture of the lady with the fur- stole has generally been read as sexual. Freud offers a potential symbolic reading of the fur stole that the lady is cloaked in, suggesting that clothes generally ‘represent nakedness and the human form.’ 80 In terms of its material, an exotic fur may also represent a type of wild animal, which Freud suggests ‘denote[s] human beings whose senses are excited, and, hence, evil impulses or passions.’81 Alternatively, fur is often a fetish object, a replacement for the maternal phallus and indicator of Oedipal tendencies. In both dreams and typical fetish selections, a fur stole is a potential reference to the female pubic area, especially given the evocative nature of its material and even shape.82 Deleuze and Guattari support this observation about the sexuality of this particular image chosen by Kafka, with their own view that ‘Oedipal incest is connected to photos, to portraits’ and that this ‘clearly appears in “The Metamorphosis,” between the woman with the covered neck, as she appears in the photo as an object of Oedipal incest’83

The picture in The Metamorphosis has a dual interpretation. Firstly, the picture provides a form of psychological refuge, a safe and controlled source of fantasy. Gregor’s carefully constructed frame is a ‘portal’ in which he may place an object of desire, the fantasy of which is an escape from the drab reality and social confines of his

78 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 105. 79 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 105. 80 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 124. 81 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 82 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 125. 83 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 67.

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room.84 Secondly, the sexual and Oedipal connotations of the picture offer a type of repulsive cabinet secret involving abnormal sexual attraction, which is revealed along with Gregor’s new form after the failure of the first island of control, the room cabinet. Thus, the picture, in this sense, is an island of repulsion: it initially suggests a controlled, safe source of fantasy, but is later revealed as an unhealthy, indeed abhorrent source of Gregor’s passions.

The picture of the lady in the fur stole may also have a direct connection to Kafka’s waking life. The image, as described in The Metamorphosis, may potentially be a representation of the El Greco work, ‘Lady in a Fur Wrap’, c. 1580 (Fig. 6.13). El Greco’s paintings were considered a precursor to the twentieth-century movements of Expressionism and Cubism, which were central to the art and architectural scene in Prague at the turn of the century (see Chapters 1 and 5). It is noted that the print in The Metamorphosis was cut out of a magazine, and this picture by El Greco was published in Der Kunstwart, a German magazine for poetry, theatre and the fine arts and applied arts, in May 1912.85 Kafka, had a Kunstwart print in his room and Brod indicates that Kafka was familiar with the Kunstwart publication and its articles.86

The picture by El Greco depicts a young lady with a rosy face, dark eyes and hair swathed in a luxurious white fur stole. The fur is exotic, long and spotted and the young lady also wears two jewelled rings on the visible hand, suggesting considerable wealth and marital status. The background is plain and dark, suggesting that the painting is a formally commissioned portrait. On the whole, the painting is an alluring picture of a beautiful young woman. Art historian Eric Storm writes that at the opening of the Galerie Espagnole at the Louvre in 1838, at a time when ‘international appreciation of El

84 Additionally, the importance and joy of fret-work to Gregor and the sexual connotations of the picture connects to a later insight about the fret-saw contained in the wardrobe cabinet. 85 Georg Martin Richter, ‘Greco’, Der Kunstwart XXV (May 1912): 175-179. See footnote 38 to Chapter X in Eric Storm, Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalization of Culture versus the Rise of Modern Art (1860-1914) (England: Sussex Academic Press, 2016). 86 Brod, Kafka, 54.

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Fig. 6.13 El Greco, Lady in a Fur Wrap (ca. 1577–1580). Source: Eric Storm, The Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalisation of Culture Versus the Rise of Modern Art, 17.

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Greco […] was not exactly great,’87 the painting ‘Lady in a Fur Wrap drew particular attention.’88 The painting ‘was the only Greco in a room dedicated to Velázquez’; displayed amongst museum walls that ‘were almost entirely covered with paintings’, the ‘Lady in a Fur Wrap was considered to be one of the finest pieces in the collection and Gautier even compared her to the Mona Lisa.’ 89 The portrait is allegedly ‘of El Greco’s daughter’90, although ‘once additional details emerged from the archives it would be referred to as a portrait of Jerónima de las Cuevas, the woman with whom El Greco cohabited.’91 The painting caused a sensation, additionally, about El Greco’s family life as, Storm writes, ‘since almost nothing was known about the artist’s private life at the time, one could fantasize endlessly.’ Interestingly, one critic stated that the old El Greco, who had gone mad because of contempt from his contemporaries, found “solace” in his daughter.’ 92 This Oedipal (or, strictly speaking, Electra complex) undertone to the creation of the artwork correlates with Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that the portrait signals an incestuous dimension in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

The second framed picture in Gregor’s room is only revealed in the moments after his transformed state. In surveying the family’s shock, it is noted that ‘hanging on the wall just opposite was a photograph of Gregor from his army days, which showed him as a lieutenant, with his hand on his sword and a carefree smile, inviting respect for his bearing and his uniform.’93 This moment of the story presents a type of doubling, signalling an instance of the uncanny. The picture serves as a symbolic mirror where Gregor, in his new unhomely state and confronted with his father’s disdain and rage, looks back on himself in a past form and identity that commanded respect. The picture of a better self that is now unfamiliar and cannot be reclaimed presents another case of

87 Storm, Discovery of El Greco, 12. 88 Storm, Discovery of El Greco, 12. 89 Storm, Discovery of El Greco, 12. 90 Storm, Discovery of El Greco, 12. 91 Storm, Discovery of El Greco, 13. 92 Storm, Discovery of El Greco, 13. 93 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 87.

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loss. It also serves to highlight the new-found repulsion that his family and father have gained in regards to his transformation.

Finally, in The Metamorphosis, a third frame of control is the window to Gregor’s room as an aperture for recollection. In the days after Gregor’s transformation, he ‘would embark on the strenuous task of pushing an armchair over to the window and then crawling up to the sill, where propped on the chair he would lean against the window-panes’94 Looking out, Gregor is ‘inspired by some recollection of that sense of freedom that looking out of the window used to give him.’95 In this example, the window acts as a frame through which he can reimagine the freedom of being human. He embarks on this activity sufficiently often, that ‘his observant sister’ ensured that ‘every time she cleared up the room, she pushed the chair carefully back to the window and even began to leave the inner casement open.’96 For this simple act Gregor is indebted: ‘if only [he] had been able to speak and thank her for everything.’97 This is reflective of Kafka’s real life; biographer Ronald Hayman writes that in real life, ‘Kafka seems to have spent a lot of time gazing out of windows.’98

However, despite the initial sense of safety this island of control provides, it is not long before Gregor’s diminishing eyesight leaves him exposed once more. ‘For now, in fact, he found objects only a short distance away becoming daily more indistinct’ and, as a result of this, even the hospital across the road was lost from his sight. Indeed, ‘if he hadn’t known perfectly well that he lived in the peaceful, but decidedly urban Charlottenstrasse, he might of supposed that he was gazing out of his window into a wasteland in which the grey sky and grey earth ran indistinguishably together.’99 As the

94 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99. 95 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99. 96 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99. 97 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99. 98 Ronald Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka (London: Phoenix Press, 1981), 67. 99 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99.

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familiar sights of his urban home dissolved into increasing unfamiliarity, the sanctuary of the window diminished in parallel with his eyesight.

The fortifications of this island of control are finally breached by Gregor’s own body, when his walls are covered in a different type of trace. In The Metamorphosis, the repulsion of the insect body is almost gleefully explored with repeated graphic descriptions of the liquid coming out of his mouth and the stains that he leaves on the walls of his room. As he finds pleasure in the pastime of crawling around, he leaves behind smeared traces of ‘sticky stuff’100 and a ‘huge brown patch’ that is in stark contrast with ‘the flowered wallpaper.’101 Eventually, ‘streaks of dirt’102 line the walls; the collection of bodily fluids forming a new type of ‘cabinet picture’ that highlights Gregor’s new form, and further reinforces the loss of his past identity and the failure of the framed picture as an ‘island of control’.

The third island: the furniture cabinet

The two functional variations of the cabinet described previously in this chapter, for organising personal affairs and for modesty, saw its space change in both scale and character, making way for the proliferation of even more specialised cabinet forms. In one lineage, the cabinet became bigger and assumed a greater public dimension, becoming ‘one of the main reception rooms’ of a house or apartment.103 These rooms were more open, and served to invigorate social relations and reinforce social hierarchies. However, even though they were relatively public, they were still ‘conceived of as precious, hidden treasure chests, to which only the most privileged visitors could be admitted.’104 Yet ultimately, this new social role of the grand cabinet forced the introduction of a smaller variation, this time more akin to the scale of furniture. This new

100 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 102. 101 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 105. 102 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 112. 103 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 104 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’

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variation was ‘a small item of furniture with numerous little drawers and cupboards.’105 It reinstated a level of privacy within the grand cabinet, being a vessel that allowed for concealment and control within the bigger room.

Whilst varying widely in title, form and function, all the types of furniture that evolved from the cabinet are united in possessing two key qualities. The first is that of personality, secrecy and control. Olmi writes that ‘whatever specific use was made of it’, be it to store personal letters, papers, artworks, or apparel, ‘the cabinet reflected the personal tastes of the owner more than any other room.’106 As a mechanism to aid and control the concealment, revelation and presentation of these personal collections it was ‘an instrument of self-affirmation.’107 The second quality that emerges as part of this type is associated with gender and sexuality. The practices of dressing and maintaining personal hygiene are naturally able to be transposed into considerations of sexuality, particularly as related to women.

Freud himself wrote about closet-like, cabinet-like storage vessels, viewing such objects as connected to various properties of femaleness. He writes that ‘the female genitalia are symbolically represented by all such objects as share with them the property of enclosing a space or are capable of acting as receptacles.’108 Amongst other things, this includes ‘boxes, chests and coffers and so forth’, comprising indistinctly, containers of ‘all sorts and sizes’.109 Freud continues that ‘cupboards, stoves and, above all, rooms’110 are symbols that ‘refer to the uterus’ and thus again are allusions to the feminine. ‘Room symbolism here links up with that of houses’ where ‘doors and gates represent the genital opening.’111 Moreover, as previously discussed in Chapter 3, material of different kinds can also be symbolic of the feminine. Underlying

105 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 106 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 107 Olmi, Chilton, Wappenschmidt, ‘Cabinet (i)’ 108 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 109 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 110 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 111 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123.

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all of these literary metaphors and psychoanalytical meanings is the fact that the space of the storage vessel is potentially both gendered and sexually connotative, in such a way that it typically verges towards more effeminate readings and meanings.

An example of such a sexual reading can be found in the opening of The Trial where, after his arrest, K. gets dressed in front of the wardens. After being instructed to wear something smart, he ‘opened the wardrobe, looked for some time among the collection of clothes, [and] selected his best black suit’. The suit he chose was ‘a two- piece that had caused quite a sensation amongst his acquaintances because of its cut’112 and as such, he began ‘to dress with care.’113 This passage suggests that K. took great care in his physical appearance and was not afraid to emphasise this, even if his sexual personae is more allusive. Previously Deleuze and Guattari have remarked that a sign of Kafka’s homosexuality is found ‘in the famous tight clothes that Kafka so loved.’114 In addition to the way the wardrobe functioned as a house for clothes, the cabinet also serves as an architectural metaphor that further belies the purported neurotic struggles Kafka had in dealing with his own sexuality, related bourgeois notions of domesticity and the very idea of marriage. The wardrobe, it might be assumed from these past readings, serves as a means of concealing aspects of sexuality.

Notwithstanding this particular interpretation, in The Trial the wardrobe serves primarily as a general space of control. For example, during his arrest, the warders take K.’s breakfast from him and confine him to his room. Frustrated with his lack of autonomy, K. performs a small act of defiance by taking a drink from his cupboard. ‘If the intellectual limitations of the warders had not been so obvious‘115 K. wryly notes, ‘they could watch if they liked as he went to a cupboard where he kept a bottle of fine schnapps and see how first of all he drank off a glass in place of breakfast.’ However, this defiance is fleeting and his anxiety swiftly takes over, as K. finishes the first drink

112 Kafka, The Trial, 7-8. 113 Kafka, The Trial, 7-8. 114 Deleuze and Guattarri, Towards a Minor Literature, 68. 115 Kafka, The Trial, 7.

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and contemplates ‘a second to give himself courage, the second only as a precaution for the improbable event that it might be necessary.’116 However, when the supervisor is ready to interview K., the call ‘from the next room startled him so much that his teeth struck the glass.’ Thereafter he became submissive: ‘“[a]t last,” he shouted back and locked the wardrobe and hurried straight into the next room.’117

It is important here to note that the cabinet or closet should also be interpreted in accordance with what is collected or contained within it. What is contained within the cabinet has as much psychoanalytical value as the cabinet in which it is contained. Thus, a wardrobe constructed out of timber, containing some type of ‘objet d’art’ is an especially redolent and multi-layered example of sexual connotation. The wardrobe and its contents also appear in The Metamorphosis and with even greater effect (Fig. 6.14). In that story, Gregor’s sister and mother attempt to provide him ‘with the maximum crawling-space’ available ‘and to remove the pieces of furniture that stood in his way, which meant above all the wardrobe and the writing desk.’118 The sister and mother then proceed to clear the room, beginning with trying to shift the ‘old wardrobe, which was really quite a weight [and] took a very long time.’119 This caused Gregor to become increasingly upset, ‘affecting him like some great turmoil that was being fuelled from all sides’ 120 , as they were ‘depriving him of all his dearest possessions.’ 121 Gregor immediately follows this claim with details of the contents of the wardrobe, including ‘his fretsaw and other tools’.122 Interestingly, his sister and mother do not open or empty the wardrobe prior to attempting to shift it, which naturally would make the piece lighter and easier to move. What are we to construe from this? Perhaps the wardrobe

116 Kafka, The Trial, 7. 117 Kafka, The Trial, 7. 118 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 102. Earlier he wrote about Gregor being fastidious in locking his doors. 119 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 102. 120 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 104. 121 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 105. 122 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 105.

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Fig. 6.14 The third island of control: the wardrobe. Source: author

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is locked? The locked door appears as a theme earlier in the story, when Gregor notes his fastidious practice of locking all doors.123 Yet the locked door cannot prevent the wardrobe from being removed entirely from his control. Once again, this completes the cycle seen previously in the chapter, wherein spatial structures that support defiance and control are subverted to become sites of submission and loss.

The content of Gregor’s wardrobe, the fretsaw (a saw with a narrow blade stretched vertically on a frame and used for cutting thin wood in patterns) and other (presumably woodworking) tools, are also important. In 1910 Kafka wrote a report entitled Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines, an essay on the dangers of using tools. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner argue that this report is unique because it was the first from the Institute to include illustrations, including technical drawings of wood-planing machines and the injuries they could inflict on workers’ hands (Fig. 6.15). Additionally, ‘Kafka attended a special course at the Institute of Technology in Prague to acquire the requisite knowledge’124 to write this report and detail the dangers of tool use. This report has garnered particular scholarly attention because of the ‘fascinating relationship between the illustrations and the technical descriptions of the various types of planning machines and the wounds they inflict.’125 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner argue that ‘the imagery of this essay, as well as its genre — the technical protocol,’126 have clear parallels with events and machines in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (previously discussed in Chapter 2). They conclude that ‘it is more than a similarity of motifs that constitutes the nexus between Kafka’s office writings and his literature. Both contain a play of worldviews deeply informed by an analytic grasp of social organisation.’127 It is also worthwhile noting here

123 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 102. 124 Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner, ‘Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines (1910): Commentary 6’ in The Office Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 109. 125 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ‘Commentary 6’, 109. 126 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ‘Commentary 6’, 109. 127 Corngold, Greenberg and Wagner, ‘Commentary 6’, 118.

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Fig. 6.15 Kafka’s drafted images from his report ‘Measures for Preventing Accidents From Wood-Planing Machines’, 1910. Source: Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, edited by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, 111.

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that the imagery evoked In the Penal Colony is also inherently psychoanalytical and sexual. For example, Freud writes that ‘the imposing mechanism of male sexual apparatus lends it to symbolization by all kinds of complicated and indescribable machinery.’ 128 In addition to the waking influence of his work, in this example Kafka’s interest in psychoanalysis, conscious and unconscious, are also shaping his fictional constructions.

To return to the fretsaw within the wardrobe in The Metamorphosis, this too is related to woodworking and also to sexuality within the framework of meaning previously set out by Freud and various literary theorists. The images in Kafka’s report depict hands with missing fingers, at the mercy of woodworking instruments. Freud writes that ‘the representation of the male organ by some other member, such as the hand or foot, may be termed symbolic.’129 Lost fingers may be a metaphor of castration; thus, through its woodworking association, the fretsaw is naturally depicted as the tool for doing so. Interestingly, Freud notes in his analysis of the representation of the penis in dreams, that these objects ‘have the property of penetrating, and consequently injuring, the body, — that is to say, pointed weapons of all sorts: knives, daggers, lances, sabres.’130 The fretsaw may fit into this category, by being an object that is capable of injuring the body, although it is not so phallic as Freud’s examples. Also, alluding to Freud’s previous association of wood with the feminine, the fretsaw presents the idea of an instrument for ‘wood-working’, in this case a hidden or locked up tool, contained within a cabinet. The fretsaw itself implies castration on one level, and is perhaps also a fetish object on another, which is the result of castration anxiety. This interpretation complements the metaphorical reading of the wardrobe in which the fretsaw resides.

The fret-saw also suggests a connection to the previous island of control, the picture frame. The picture of the lady in a fur stole in The Metamorphosis and the

128 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 129 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123. 130 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 123.

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implications of the pictorial subject have previously been discussed. Here, the act of wood-working, its relation to the fret-saw within the wardrobe and the wider allegory of this process, becomes a point of discussion. For Freud, the symbolic connection of wood to femaleness springs from considerations of the house and material practice. To develop this argument Freud turns to the Greek concept of hylomorphism. In a process similar to estrangement (Chapter 3), Freud looks at the linguistic development of the word to unpack the relation of the signifier ‘wood’ to the female gender. Freud begins with pointing out that there is a well-known, popular contemporary German saying that refers to a woman with a markedly developed bust as having ‘plenty of wood in front of her house’. This phrase indicates the intrinsic association of women with wood, but the origin for the association is unclear. Freud continues that ‘a comparison of different languages may be useful to us’, and traces the historical development of the word. He writes that

the German word Holz (wood) is said to be derived from the same root as the Greek υλη (hyle), which means stuff, raw material. This would be an instance of a process which is by no means rare, in that the general name for material has come to finally be applied to a particular material only. Now, in the Atlantic Ocean, there is an island names Madeira, and this name was given to it by the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at the time it was covered by dense forests; for in Portuguese the word for wood is madeira. But you cannot fail to notice that this madeira is merely a modified form of the Latin material, which again signifies material in general.

Freud concludes that the Latin ‘material is derived from mater = mother, and the material out of which anything is made may be conceived of as giving birth to it. So, in the symbolic use of wood to present woman or mother, we have a survival of this old idea.’131 To fashion something out of material, by a process such as wood-work, is in essence a metaphorical ‘birth’ to a new form or object. Alternatively, wood-work, in the sense of indicating a task to be taken up with wood with the aim of shaping or altering it, could mean the construction of, or struggle against, femaleness, whether a reflection of his mother or fiancée. This reading corresponds with earlier ones in the present

131 Freud, ‘Lecture X: Symbolism in Dreams’, 126.

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chapter, and is supported by the arguments of Deleuze and Guattari. The wardrobe serves as an ‘island of control’ in order to keep hidden aspects of the self controlled and concealed, such as sexuality. While the items stored in the wardrobes — clothing in The Trial and a fret-saw in The Metamorphosis — evoke varying symbolic interpretations that revolve around acts of concealing or altering the body and thus having control over it.

Partial islands: the desk, the bedside table and the sofa

The three next ‘islands of control’ only partially conform to the domestic fortification concept and cabinet theory proposed in this chapter. These three — the writing desk, bedside table and sofa — possess some of the characteristics of the other islands through their divergent relations to the history of cabinet forms. The previously raised points about cabinet space also apply to the desk, the bedside table and, indirectly, the sofa chair. Thus, all the interior islands conform to the Freudian themes previously presented. However, the reason they are grouped here as only partially conforming spatial structures is that there is not enough evidence to demonstrate a direct or comprehensive Freudian symbolic interpretation. Nonetheless, in the way the three items support narrative events in Kafka’s literature, they demonstrate traits that are conducive to the wider themes of control and repulsion, and additionally possess connections to Kafka’s waking life.

The first of the three partially conforming islands, the writing desk (Fig 6.16), is significant in both Kafka’s life and fiction. Smaller variations of the cabinet were produced over time, which gradually evolved into the bureau and the secretaire. These items, which first appeared in Italy during the Renaissance and in Spain in the 1600s, began as small ‘cabinets with a drop-leaf writing surface […] concealing an elaborate arrangement of drawers’132. By the middle of the seventeenth century, various types of writing tables with drawers known as bureaux Mazarin were being produced in

132 J. W. Taylor ‘Bureau’, Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

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France133, and a similar English bureau-cabinet was also created at this time, both of which were ‘adopted widely throughout northern Europe.’134 Towards the middle of the eighteenth century in France the secrétaire emerged as a distinct type of cabinet. The secrétaire was usually ‘a shoulder height piece of case furniture […] with a vertical fall- front enclosing a fitted interior above a cupboard.’135 While secretaires varied in their outward expressions, they ‘often preserved an interior arrangement, including secret drawers, ultimately inherited from the sixteenth century cabinet.’136 Being a space for writing, organising and concealing personal affairs, the bureau and the secrétaire replicate the function of the arrière-cabinet, at a smaller scale, and in an item of furniture.

Once again, the practical functions of these cabinets were inherently gendered. Furniture historian Dena Goodman writes that ‘the bureau was always considered a masculine piece of furniture’ because ‘the political, economic, and administrative functions associated with the bureau were unequivocally seen as men’s work.’137 The secretaire was gender neutral, ‘designed for and owned by both women and men,’ as ‘the construction of the self through personal writing was not considered gender specific.’138 An alternative evolutionary path of the bureau saw the development of the dressing table. The construction and projection of self, through dressing and adornment, was considered a largely female act. Thus certain types of bureau Mazarin were distinctly feminine pieces of furniture.

An alternative reading to the history of the bureau and secretaire draws on their etymology. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bureau is used to

133 Taylor, ‘Bureau’ 134 Taylor, ‘Bureau’ 135 Taylor, ‘Bureau’ 136 Simon Jervis, ‘Cabinet (ii)’, Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 137 Dena Goodman, ‘The Secrétaire and the Integration of the Eighteenth-Century Self’ in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell us About the European and American Past, eds. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 186-187 138 Goodman, ‘The Secrétaire and the Integration of the Eighteenth-Century Self’, 186-187.

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Fig. 6.16 The fourth island of control: the writing desk. Source: author.

Fig. 6.17 Hand drawing by Kafka of himself at his writing desk. Source: Kafka, published in Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 269

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describe functions associated with ‘an office or organisation’.139 In addition to denoting a desk, the noun bureau alternatively refers to ‘an agency for the coordination of related activities, and the distribution of information.’140 Another dictionary definition of bureau suggests that the word means ‘an office for transacting a particular type of business’, of which synonyms include the words ‘department’, and the noun ‘organization’. For the noun secretaire, the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that origins of the French word are inherently tied to the word ‘secret’. The French noun (as well as the word in modern usage) also originally referred to an actual secretary, or ‘one who is entrusted with private or secret matters; a confidant; one privy to a secret.’141 Additionally, when considering the form and purpose of the secretaire, the inclusion of secret compartments reinforces this reading. Thus, in thematic relation to the writing desk space of the bureau, the secretaire highlights the act of ‘departmentalisation’ or ‘compartmentalisation’. Intrinsically, both of these furniture pieces are related to the acts of division, organisation, distribution and order.

The way in which these items organise and thereby serve as sites of control offers a momentary point of relief for K. When K. attempts to find identification papers ‘he immediately pulled out the drawers of his desk [and] everything was arranged in perfect order.’142 However, the sense of control was quickly diminished as ‘he could not find the identity papers he was looking for.’ It was only after further searching that ‘he found his bicycle licence and thought of taking this to the warders, but then the paper seemed too trivial and he looked further until he found his birth certificate.’143 In The Metamorphosis, the writing desk is also referred to by way of its importance to the main protagonist when he notes that he ‘could dispense with the wardrobe, at a pinch, but nothing more;

139 ‘bureau, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Accessed May 24, 2016: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/24904?redirectedFrom=bureau& 140 ‘bureau, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online 141 "secretary, n.1 and adj.". Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Accessed May 24, 2016: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/174549? 142 Kafka, The Trial, 4. 143 Kafka, The Trial, 4.

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the writing-desk must stay.’144 For this reason, the disruption to its position within the room causes him great distress. He states, ‘[n]ow they were working his writing desk loose, which was almost embedded in the floor, the desk at which he had always done his homework, as a student at the commercial academy, as a grammar-school boy, yes, even back in his primary school days.’145

Although there is no further information to interpret the writing desk as a major island of control or repulsion, it does conform to the general themes of projection of personal identity and storage and control of information and possessions, and thus fits into the wider themes of the cabinet. As noted previously in this chapter, scholars have suggested that the bicycle licence potentially relates to Kafka’s real life ownership of a bicycle, and the attachment to the desk and its organisation are also indicative of his own attachment to his furniture, his neuroticism and passion for writing (Fig. 6.17).

Much like the writing desk, the bedside table in Kafka’s fiction has only limited direct evidence of any significance as an island of control (Fig. 6.18). Certainly, due to its shared history with the bureau and the cabinet, it conforms to the wider themes of control, concealment and repulsion. In the later part of the eighteenth century the popularity of possessing a matching collection of furniture saw the bureau and the secrétaire become more widely adopted throughout Europe, as standard décor pieces made en suite.146 Such collections also often included a bedside table or commode. The name ‘commode’ comes from the French, which implies convenience, but also came to refer to a ‘chest-of-drawers.’147 In its early incarnations, the commode was closely related to, and emerged out of, the bureau type. For example, the ‘royal commodes of the 1690s and early 1700s were at first described as bureaux or tables en bureau’148 and ‘an intermediate form that had appeared in the 1670s was the so-

144 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 104. 145 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 105. 146 Taylor, ‘Bureau’ 147 Lucy Wood, ‘Commode’, Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 148 Lucy Wood, ‘Commode’

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Fig. 6.18 The fifth island of control: the bedside table. Source: author.

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called bureau Mazarin’149 However, the commode evolved into a table with drawers ‘for keeping such things as “shawls, coiffures… ribbons, stockings, everything that’s à la mode” (as Françoise-Marie, Duchesse of Orléans, described the contents of one presented to her daughter in 1718).’150 Such a provision was considered commodious or convenient ‘for a lady at her toilet.’151 Thus, the commode or dressing-table, is an item associated with the organisation of personal items related to hygiene and modesty, rather than being a table for writing. However, elsewhere in Europe, the commode was ‘not fitted with drawers at all but with shelves and cupboard doors’ 152 often to accommodate a chamber pot. This variation, the nightstand, and related bedside tables of convenience, worked alongside the wardrobe or armoire, which contained clothes. In this way the commode or the bedside table is more closely related to the function of the earlier cabinet toilette, a highly private space for performing ablutions and other rituals that are intricately association with the human body.

Within Kafka’s fiction, the bedside table is a space where small acts of defiance and control are attempted. For instance, upon his arrest in The Trial, K. finds that the warders have unscrupulously ‘intercepted his breakfast’ and devoured it153 In response to K.’s protestations, the warders state to K. that ‘you haven’t treated us in the way that our considerate attitude might have deserved’, and furthermore, ‘we are ready, if you have the money, to fetch you a light breakfast from the café opposite.’154 K. refuses to reply to this offer and instead, he

took from the bedside table a fine apple he had put aside the previous evening for his breakfast. Now it was all the breakfast that he had, and at any rate, as he ascertained from

149 Lucy Wood, ‘Commode’. Note that the term bureau Mazarin here conflicts with the earlier observation of the bureau Mazarin as a type of writing desk, not a dressing table. This further demonstrates the connection between furniture typologies and the loose definitions by which the furniture titles imply. 150 Lucy Wood, ‘Commode’ 151 Lucy Wood, ‘Commode’ 152 Lucy Wood, ‘Commode’ 153 Kafka, The Trial, 7. 154 Kafka, The Trial, 6.

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his first great bite, much better than the breakfast from the filthy night café which he might of got through the gracious favour of the warders. He felt well and confident.155

This small act of defiance occurs in parallel with the previously discussed, taking of schnapps from the locked wardrobe, whereupon triggering K. to sardonically muse upon the intellectual limitations of the warders.

However, in The Trial the bedside table is soon transformed from a small space of defiance into one of defeat. Soon after taking his apple and schnapps, K. is called into the next room for interrogation. K. moves from his room into that of Fraülein Bürstner, where ‘the bedside table had been moved from the bed to the middle of the room to serve as the interrogator’s desk, and the supervisor sat behind it.’156 Thereafter, the bedside table and its contents are invaded by the supervisors.

‘You must be very surprised by this morning’s events?’ the supervisor asked and at the same time used both hands to move the few objects on the bedside table, the candle with matches, a book and a pincushion, as if these objects were required for his interrogation. ‘Certainly,’ said K., and he was overcome with pleasure at meeting a reasonable man at last and being able to discuss the case with him, ‘certainly I am surprised, but I am by no means very surprised.’157

Over the course of the interview, the supervisor continues to rearrange with the objects and contents of the table: ‘“Not very surprised?” asked the supervisor and now placed the candle in the middle of the table and grouped the other objects around it.’158 From this moment K. lost confidence in the interview:

‘Perhaps you mis-understood me,’ K. hastened to remark. ‘I mean…’ Here K. broke off and looked round for a chair. ‘I can sit down?’ he asked. ‘It’s not customary,’ answered the supervisor.159

155 Kafka, The Trial, 6. 156 Kafka, The Trial, 8. 157 Kafka, The Trial, 8. 158 Kafka, The Trial, 8. 159 Kafka, The Trial, 8.

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In this example, the interrogation of K. occurs in parallel with the interrogation of his personal objects in the nightstand, to the point where the supervisor ‘looked to see how many matches were in the matchbox’ and then ‘slammed the matchbox down on the table.’160 At this moment the space of the bedside table shifts from being a space of defiance into a space of intrusion and invasion, and K. is eventually overcome by the power of the supervisor.161 Again, like the writing desk, there is no direct Freudian symbolic reading of the bedside table, it is linked thematically with, and supports the meaning of the other more prominent ‘islands of control’, including the wardrobe and framed pictures. However, in this example from The Trial, K. is also denied the right to be seated. In essence, the function of his chair is undermined in a similar way to the function of his bedside table. This observation leads to the final island, the armchair.

The final partial example of a potential island of control is the arm-chair (Fig. 6.19). Of all the ‘islands’, it is the only one that has not evolved from the cabinet type. As the historian Simon Jervis notes, that ‘[t]hree basic furniture archetypes, the bed, the table and the chair, answer physical needs — sleep, food and rest during the day. By contrast, the chest, a space enclosed by a lid, and the cupboard, a space enclosed by doors, are for the protection of possessions.’162 The dominant interpretations of the previous islands of control are broadly derived from cabinet theory, and relate to the desire to protect or control access to various possessions or collections, which are items with psychological or even psychoanalytical investment for their owners. The sofa differs slightly from the other islands as its functional agenda is to support the body for

160 Kafka, The Trial, 9. 161 At the same time, three figures are also in the room inspecting Fräluein Bürstners personal photographs. The preciousness of frames pictures and images has previously been commented on in the earlier section. Here it is being invaded. 162 Jervis, ‘Cabinet (ii)’.

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Fig. 6.19 The sixth island of control: the sofa arm-chair. Source: author.

Fig. 6.20 Freud’s chair for patients. Source: Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 44.

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the purpose of rest. Nevertheless, the sofa does play a role in several scenes in Kafka’s fiction.

In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s transformation negates the anthropometric function of the sofa and thus its fundamental human purpose. The sofa of The Metamorphosis starts as a place of repose, but then it becomes a space of refuge for Gregor, and a means of protection from the gaze of his family. For example, during the twice-daily act of clearing up Gregor’s room, his sister Grete ‘terrified Gregor with all this noise and bustle [and] the whole time he lay quaking under the sofa.’163 On another morning Grete arrives unexpectedly in the room and the sight of Gregor frightens her. She eventually returns later whereupon Gregor ‘immediately hid himself under the sofa’.164 The passage continues to describe in detail the repulsion of Gregor’s new sight.

[Gregor] had to wait until midday for she came back, and she seemed much more ill-at-ease than usual. This made him realise that the sight of him was still repugnant to her and was bound to go on being repugnant, and that it probably cost her a great effort not to take to her heels at the mere sight of that small portion of his anatomy which protruded from under the sofa.

In response to this realisation, Gregor attempts to modify the sofa, to spare Greta the appearance of his partial body, by ‘transport[ing] a sheet to the sofa on his back — the task took him four hours — and arranged it in such a way that he was now completely covered, and his sister would not be able to see him even if she stooped down.’165 In this example, the function of the sofa shifts from the simple place of rest, into an object for concealing and controlling. Whilst ‘the whole thing really did look simply like a sheet casually thrown over the sofa’,166 its new function was to conceal the cabinet spectacle of the room. The purpose of the sofa in this scenario is equivalent to that previously

163 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 100. 164 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 100. 165 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 100. 166 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 102.

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discussed in terms of the role and meaning of the historical furniture cabinet within a room.

The sofa in The Metamorphosis also serves to conceal Gregor’s condition. For example, weeks after his transformation, Gregor’s mother finally ventured into the room, cajoled with the promise that Gregor cannot be seen: ‘“Come on in, you can’t see him,” said his sister, evidently leading her mother by the hand.’167 Hiding under the sofa, Gregor ‘denied the sight of his mother on this first occasion and was just happy that she had come after all.’ 168 Eventually it became an unwritten contract that the sofa is the space where Gregor must reside, should his sister or mother enter the room. On another occasion where his mother ’subjected his room to a thorough clean-out’, Gregor again ‘lay stolidly, grumpy and motionless, on the sofa’.169 Notably, when his mother and sister propose to clear out Gregor’s room, the plan entails ‘the removal of every stick of furniture in the room apart from the indispensable sofa.’170 The sofa with its sheet cover is central to managing any transaction between Gregor and his family; it is thus a type of ‘island of control’, albeit for the family more so than for Gregor. For Gregor, it is the only place he can reside if he wants to sustain relations with his family members.

In a sense, the sofa is closely related to the second island of control, the window or picture frames, in the respite and refuge it offers. Firstly, the sofa serves to enable Gregor to gaze out of the window for respite and escapism, as he would push an ‘armchair over to the window’171 in order to be able to look out of it. In this case, the sofa serves the window frame in the escapism it offers. Secondly, the sofa offers respite to Gregor, in a manner which is similar to the picture frame, by way of its materiality. Like

167 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 102. 168 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 102. 169 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 112. 170 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 103. 171 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99.

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the framed picture of the lady in a fur stole, the glass of which ‘soothed his hot belly’,172 the sofa offers Gregor a similar antidote to the heat of an emotional state: ‘whenever the conversation turned to the necessity of earning money, Gregor always at once let go his hold on the door and threw himself down on the cool leather sofa beside it, for he felt hot all over with shame and grief.’173 The importance of the sofa as psychological refuge can be related to the nature of Freud’s own chair lounge (Fig. 6.21), the function of which also moves beyond that of simple daytime physical rest (see Chapter 3).

Themes of ‘repel’ and ‘repulsion’

A greater theme emerges that underpins each of Kafka’s ‘islands of control’. Starting with the function of the nested islands as they operate in Kafka’s fiction, each island has the fundamental purpose of repelling invaders and thwarting the intrusion of increasing levels of personal space. Yet a deeper theme and inherent attitude emerges when examining the meaning of the word ‘repel’ and its close linguistic associations ‘repulse’ and ‘repulsion’.

According to Apple dictionary, based on the Oxford Dictionary of English, the first and fundamental definition of ‘repel’ is to ‘drive or force (an attack or attacker) back or away’. Derived from the Latin ‘repellere, from re- ‘back’ + pellere ‘to drive’, the verb in its first instance denotes a simple directed force (Fig 6.21). An example of this word in context is given: ‘government units sought to repel the rebels’; and indeed, this act of repel is fundamentally at the heart of any fortification structure. Synonyms cited for this meaning include to ‘fight off’, ‘drive back/away’, ‘force back’ or to ‘repulse’. Thus the word ‘repulse’ emerges as a key synonym to the word repel. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘repulse’ at its heart sustains a very similar meaning. To repulse is essentially to repel, as to repulse is also ‘the act of forcing or driving back’

172 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 105. 173 Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, 99.

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and ‘the act of repelling an assailant or hostile force’174. However, repulse can also indicate ‘the fact of being forced back’ 175 and ‘the fact of being driven back in a military engagement.’176. Again, there are connotations to the word that can be connected to concepts of fortification. But in addition to being a driving force, to be repulsed also can indicate a level of defeat, or a successful breach of one’s boundaries.

Moreover, a second definition listed in Apple dictionary for the word ‘repel’ gives rise to an inherent underlying emotional dimension to the word. The second definition defines repel as to ‘be repulsive or distasteful to’: for example, ‘she was repelled by the permanent smell of drink on his breath’. Suggested synonyms for this usage again include ‘repulse’, of which Apple dictionary lists the meaning as ‘cause to feel intense distaste and aversion.’ In this instance, there is revealed an attitude of disgust that underpins the sense of the word. In this case of meaning, for both repel and repulse, the synonyms listed begin with ‘disgust’, ‘revolt’ and ‘horrify’; further synonyms allude to increasingly uncomfortable bodily reactions, such as to ‘sicken’, ‘nauseate’, ‘turn someone’s stomach’, to ‘make shudder ‘, ’make someone’s flesh creep’ or ‘skin crawl’, to ‘make someone’s gorge rise.’ In this instance, to be repelled or repulsed is to have a feeling of disgust and aversion that manifests in varying degrees of physical reaction (Fig 6.22).

Finally, a third layer to the definition of ‘repel’, ‘repulse’ and ‘repulsion’ emerges that revolves around protection of the body. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an instance of repulse to mean ‘an act or mode of repelling an injury.’177 It is also given that both ‘repel’ and ‘repulsion’178 operate as words in medical terminology, meaning ‘to drive (a morbid humour, fluid, etc.) back to its source or away or inwards from a

174 ‘repulse, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2016). Accessed February 11, 2017: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163201?rskey=2dKrve&result=1 175 ‘repulse, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online 176 ‘repulse, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online 177 ‘repulse, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online 178 repulsion, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2016). Accessed February 11, 2017: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163203?redirectedFrom=repulsion&

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Fig. 6.21 Hand drawing by Kafka. Source: Kafka, published in Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 269

Fig. 6.22 Hand drawing by Kafka. Source: Kafka, published in Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 269

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swollen or diseased part; to supress (an infection, swelling, eruption, etc.).’179 In this instance, repel and repulsion denote a fear of bodily injury and an act of medical intervention or invasion.

Thus, from ‘repel’ to ‘repulsion’ there are layers and grades of meaning presented. Beginning with a greater instance of military invasion and defence, ultimately the words draw down to the scale of the body and the potential for its damage or demise. Considering this in relation to all fortification structures, ultimately, any such structure is built to protect a final body. In the case of actual military and castle fortifications, such a structure is built to protect a King, Emperor, Czar, Pharaoh or great leader. In the case of Freud, the psychological fortification of repression (earlier mentioned in this chapter, and Chapter 2) is built in order to ultimately insulate and protect the Self. In the case of Kafka, the fortification structure that is ‘islands of control’ are about the protection of the body and self of Kafka.

Conclusion

When viewed through a lens focused on space and the interior, Kafka’s fiction reveals a surprisingly consistent sequence of fortification structures. These operate across multiple scales, in many cases nested inside each other, where they are employed to provide a mean of control and psychological relief for the main protagonist. This chapter identifies six interior elements that present, in Kafka’s fiction, as ‘islands of control’: the room cabinet, frames and pictures, the furniture cabinet, the writing desk, the bedside table and the sofa. Five of the six islands of control can also be interpreted in terms of the history of the cabinet, evoking a series of themes which have shaped a substantial body of literary and psychological theory and thus intersect with Freudian theory pertaining to these spaces and objects. The sofa is the only island that, by historical definition, is not derived from the cabinet family. It is not, explicitly at least,

179 ‘repel, v.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2016). Accessed February 11, 2017: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/162724?redirectedFrom=repel&

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intended to deal with the management and containment of possessions or psychological attachment. However, in the course of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the sofa is modified to perform similar functions to that of the cabinet.

Of importance, several items that relate to basic bodily functions and practices, such as the bed or washbasin, are avoided or omitted altogether. The bed in Kafka’s fiction is simply a site of awakening, and any narrative events surrounding it are not related to sleep or sexuality. The washbasin is omitted entirely from the room descriptions. Given that the functions of such furniture items are associated with the fundamental drives, and most intimate practices, of the human body (sleep, sexuality and hygiene) their omission suggests a possible aversion or sensitivity about bodily ablutions or the sexual connotations of the bed. This may be a reflection to the well- noted aversion that Kafka had to his own body, as indicated by his neurotic focus on fundamental bodily rituals of hygiene, cleaning, sleep or even his psychological complex about the expectations of bourgeois marriage and sexuality (Chapter 5).

Importantly, looking at the six islands of control as a collection (which is how Kafka viewed his own furniture), there is an assumption, manifest in the narrative, that each will eventually be breached. Kafka’s fiction could even be read as a narrative that charts the inevitable and deliberate failure of each island. The first island, the room cabinet, inevitably fails through both the visual invasion of the gaze and actual physical invasion of the space. The visual pleasures and refuge of the second island, pictures and frames, are lost through their removal and the failure of the body to be able to appreciate them. The order and organisation of the writing desk is disrupted and undermined by interrogation or removal. The futile acts of defiance provided by the islands of the wardrobe (the drink schnapps), and the bedside table (the breakfast apple) inevitably fail when confronted by the warders or supervisor. Finally, the last island, the sofa, fails as it inevitably offers more respite and power to the family than it does to Gregor himself. The warden’s denial of the function of the chair has parallels to Gregor’s condition, which denies him access to the comfort of his favourite chair.

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The failure of each layer of Kafka’s spatial and psychological fortification leads to a final question about the ultimate purpose of the fortification. If nested fortifications are traditionally designed to protect something, a castle keep, citadel or palace at its core, what is its equivalent in Kafka’s fiction? The answer, which is discussed in detail in the concluding chapter, is the body itself.

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Chapter 7. Conclusion

Introduction

The primary purpose of this chapter is to reiterate the manner in which the research aim (Chapter 1) has been addressed in the dissertation. To do this, the chapter revisits the core concept developed in this dissertation — islands of control — and reflects on its foundations in the critical theory and literature review chapters presented earlier. Thereafter, this chapter raises the idea of a ‘final bastion’ or island in Kafka’s fiction and life, and concludes with thoughts about the results of this research and future possibilities.

Results of research: uncovering the ‘islands of control’

The broad aim of the dissertation was to develop a deeper understanding of Kafka’s relationship to architectural space, form and structure. The initial path taken to developing this goal was to explore Kafka’s relationship to space in terms of diverse, but interconnected bodies of theory. First, the abstracted theoretical models present in his fiction were examined (Chapter 2). Thereafter, the literature review constructed a spatial biography that noted a number of accounts, primary and secondary, regarding Kafka’s thoughts about and connection to the city of Prague and various family residences located within (Chapter 5). Through this process the dissertation developed an understanding of how spatial elements within Kafka’s fictional interiors can be seen as connected to his everyday waking life, and how their repetition or reiteration may then be understood in psychoanalytical terms. The process of examining interior topographies within Kafka’s fiction (Chapter 6) uncovered a series of spatial elements operating as a protective, bastion-like mechanism: ‘islands of control’. The elements within this construct are connected in the dissertation to his previous spatial experiences and waking life (Chapter 5) as well as the psychoanalytical theory of spatial

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elements and their meaning in that context of dreams and unconscious desires (Chapter 4).

The key new finding of this thesis is the existence of a special type of spatial structure, ‘islands of control’. The ‘islands of control’ construct is reminiscent of a nested fortification structure — yet another connection and allusion to a spatial concept of city plans, urban forms and castles — but located within the domestic interior. The ‘islands of control’ consist of five interior elements (ranging from the room itself, to its furnishings and decorations) that repeatedly appear in Kafka’s fiction. These elements provide significant narrative frames, events or moments, which are used for the purposes of repelling the invasion of personal space. This new spatial structure is interpreted through, and reflects, the concepts and themes presented in the critical theory chapters (2, 3, and 4). Each of these are discussed briefly hereafter.

First, in the analysis in Chapter 6, a type of architectural langue is demonstrated. Through the identification of the five interior ‘islands of control’, the research demonstrates that there is a convergence of typological design histories with meanings of objects as psychoanalytical metaphors (discussed in Chapter 4). This convergence of design history with psychoanalytical symbolism confirms that there may be a type of inherent universal meaning to these architectural and interior objects. Thus, much like Freud’s universal dream elements, and the various universal narrative theories developed by Shklovlsy, Campbell, and others, there may also be a type of pervading architectural meaning in Kafka’s fiction. For example, if a universal system of character and narrative motifs exists, and a similar universal system of dream motifs has been postulated, then the present research demonstrates there is cause to think that a system of universal architectural motifs might also play a role in various literary and psychoanalytical systems, including those developed by Kafka (see Chapter 4).

Second, this research demonstrates that the nature of a universal architectural langue operates and is idiosyncratically shaped at an individual level. Thus, in addition to an architectural langue there is also an architectural parole in Kafka’s fiction (Chapter 4). This occurs because the elements which make up the islands of control are

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repeated in Kafka’s real life, dreams and fiction. Thus, this architectural parole also constitutes a mode of the uncanny (as previously discussed in Chapter 3).

Third, as the previous point reveals, the replication of spatial moments from Kafka’s real life into his fiction constitutes an instance of the uncanny. Previously (Chapter 4), four type of the uncanny were discussed: the uncomfortable feeling that pervaded the general context of Europe in the World War periods of the early twentieth century; the uncanny as a definitive Freudian construct, later transposed into architectural theory by Vidler and Rice; the uncanny as a conscious and deliberate device in fiction, used by authors such as E.T.A Hoffman in The Sandman; and the uncanny as an unconscious and undeliberate consequence in the act of literary production. Past research, reinforced by the findings of the present dissertation, argues that the domestic interiors of Kafka’s real life were imported into his fiction, as a purposeful literary device to evoke the uncanny. Similar to the way in which Hoffmann changed the warm homely interior into a frightening and strange setting (discussed in Chapter 3), the real-life domestic settings of Kafka are also replicated in his fiction (detailed in Chapter 6), and these familiar domestic settings are then invaded by an unexpected, authoritative presence or a strange bodily transformation. In the words of Charles Rice, the result is ‘precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence.’1

Whilst some spatial and narrative elements from Kafka’s life are deliberately replicated in his fiction — the islands in terms of their superficial narrative engagement — additional spatial nuances may also be the product of inadvertent and unconscious transference. Such instances include the convergence of design histories with psychoanalytical metaphors, neither of which Kafka would have been overtly or consciously aware of. This again points to the emergence of a type of universal architectural langue in literature. Other moments of spatial transference are less deliberate, but still have connections to Kafka’s life, such as the use or transformation of

1 Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 49

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saws and types of wood-working machinery in his stories, including the intricate machinery of torture found in the Penal Colony. These moments constitute a similar instance to the aforementioned cases of architectural transference in Freud’s psychoanalytical study (Chapter 3), where items of antiquity displayed in Freud’s consulting rooms would be inadvertently mentioned by patients in the course of a free association, confirming the influence of the surrounds. Additionally, Freud also referenced the myths and beliefs of antiquity in the construction of his psychoanalytical theories, which are referenced in his surrounds, his personal waking life and literary production. In all of these examples, the replication of spatial and narrative conditions from real life into fiction and or literary reproduction, be it conscious or unconscious, is a form of doubling and thus satisfies the first condition required for an instance of the uncanny to occur.

For the fifth theme, another instance of deliberate replication of domestic space into literary production, which further points to the connection between Freud and Kafka by way of architecture, is the use of standard domestic spatiality to describe abstract concepts. For instance, Freud used examples of domestic spatiality to inform his metaphors for structures of the mind. In particular, the domestic interior was again a conscious influence and device in Freud’s work: his considered analogy for the mechanism of repression was also a spatial one (Chapter 2). Similarly, Kafka used domestic architecture to describe his concept of ‘The Law’, in the parable Before The Law (Chapter 2). Kafka structures the Law in an infinite sequence of echelons, like unassailable ringed castle walls, whereas the islands of control are constructed of layers of echelons which inevitably fail, leading to the notion of a definitive end and even, a final bastion. Arguably, and appropriately, Kafka’s final bastion is the body itself, and the failure of this bastion leads to the death of the body (Fig 7.1). Ultimately, the inevitable failure of the bastions presented in Kafka’s fiction resonates with the death drive element of the uncanny in operation. The presence of the drive towards death satisfies the second condition required for the uncanny to occur.

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The final island: the body

Kafka was always preoccupied with the condition of his body. Biographer Sander L. Gilman imagines a typical morning for Kafka living at the Schönbörn Palace: ‘it is a frosty, damp early morning in 1917. Passers-by look up at an odd sight for central Prague. A young man, stripped to the waist, stands at the open window of his apartment [… doing] calisthenics for a full ten minutes. Exercise and repeat, exercise and repeat every evening at 7.30p.m.’2 According to Gilman, Kafka ‘did body-build compulsively and ‘fletcherized [measured mastication] at every meal.’ The scene, of ‘Franz Kafka exercising in a decaying castle in the middle of Prague, compulsively chewing his food’ was, according to Gilman, representative of his ardent desire to ‘control his body.’3 Control of one’s body, and the obsession with the body and its protection via health and potential for death, are recurring themes in many accounts of Kafka’s life, and they are also pivotal in the construction of the islands of control.

Kafka’s own body was small and weak (Fig 7.2). Gilman writes that he was ‘[i]nordinately thin’ and ‘compulsively hypochondriac’, although his ‘’preoccupation with his body was, however, not solely a narcissistic quirk.’ 4 At the time, ‘the ideal male body with whom all young men of the day identified’5 with was that of the Prussian body builder Jens Peter Müller. In 1902 Müller, who was aged 35, ‘was 5ft 9in (1.75m) tall, weighed 202lb (91.6kg) had a 48in (121cm) chest’6 (Fig.7.3). Kafka himself was ‘slightly under six feet tall (1.82m’ but only ‘weighing 133 pounds (61kg)’ 7. When commencing employment at the Assicurazioni Generali Insurance Company in 1907, Kafka was required to attend a physical examination, where Dr Wilhelm Pollack described Kafka’s body in detail:

2 Sander L. Gilman, Frank Kafka (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 13. 3 Gilman, Kafka, 13. 4 Gilman, Kafka, 14. 5 Gilman, Kafka, 14. 6 Gilman, Kafka, 14. 7 Gilman, Kafka, 14.

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Fig.7.1 Hand drawing by Kafka from his diary. Source: Kafka, published in Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 269

Fig.7.2 Hand drawing by Kafka from his diary. Source: Kafka, published in Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 269

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Fig.7.3 ‘Jens Peter Müller, “the most beautiful man of the new century”, according to the novelist Erich Kästner.’ Source: Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka, 12

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His body is thin but delicate [gracil]. He is relatively weak. His stride is secure, relaxed. The circumference of his neck is 37cm. He shows no signs of goiter. His voice is pure and strong. He looks younger than his age. The form and structure of his chest — his breast is raised, his clavicle is drumstickshaped and indented at its ends. He has weak chest muscles. With a deep breath his chest circumference at level of his nipples is 82cm and on expiration it is 78cm. Both halves of his chest are equally developed but weak. He takes 16 breaths a minute when resting; and 19 per minute with exercise. The percussion of the right upper lobe of his lung is dull as a result or an earlier rachitic deviation. No anomalies by auscultation; no anomalous sounds. 8

Gilman concludes that ‘Kafka was someone whose mother constantly encouraged him to “eat, eat, my son”.’9

In general, having a delicate body was an inherent part of the general Jewish male identity. According to Gilman, ‘the average Czech man of the time was five foot five to six inches tall’, but ‘the average Central European Jew was much shorter — five foot.’10 Gilman writes that ‘being intrinsically ‘sickly’ and in need of transformation meant, in Kafka’s world, being Jewish.’ 11 Gilman cites a 1912 article in the Prague Zionist newspaper, Selbstwehr (Self-defence), avidly read by Kafka, that called for Jewish men to focus on their health.

Jews must “shed our heavy stress on intellectual pre-eminence… and our excessive nervousness, a heritage of the ghetto… We spend all too much of our time debating, and not enough time in play and gymnastics… What makes a man is not his mouth, nor his mind, nor yet his morals, but discipline… What we need is manliness.”12

Gilman concludes that at the time the male Jewish body was conceptualised as ‘diseased, deformed, at risk, unmanly’, and that ultimately, ‘healthiness is manliness.’13

8 Gilman, Kafka, 14. 9 Gilman, Kafka, 14. 10 Gilman, Kafka, 14. 11 Gilman, Kafka, 14. 12 Gilman, Kafka, 15. 13 Gilman, Kafka, 15.

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Another phenomenon that fuelled this cultural preoccupation was ‘the craze for body-building’ 14 which, Gilman writes, ‘had an exponent in the civil servant Franz Kafka.’15 The modern figures of this time include the Dutch body builder Jens Peter Müller, described by one novelist as ‘the most beautiful man of the new century’16, whose litany of advocations included ‘exercise, row, swim, ride horses, build your body, transform yourself. Light clothing even in the midst of winter.’17 Another key figure at the time was strongman, Eugene Sandow, who alternatively purported good health through the use of ‘(Indian) clubs and spring dumbbells (all sold to eager young men through the post)’ 18 . Despite their differences, Sandow and Müller both ‘believed that bodily transformation was […] necessary in order to become a modern man.’ 19

The cultural preoccupation with the body and its appearance would continue throughout Kafka’s lifetime. Gilman writes that ‘Sandow’s tradition of body-building was carried into the 1920s by the Polish Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart.’20. Breitbart’s feats of unbelievable, almost comical bodily strength — such as biting ‘through iron chains “as though they were soft pretzels and [bending] a 7.5-millimetre-thick iron rod like straw”’ 21, according to one awestruck Berlin reporter — saw him quickly eclipse Sandow in popularity to become ‘known as the “Strongest Man in the World”.’22 Breitbart quickly became another modern, if not unrealistic Adonis figure for young men to aspire to in the Jewish world. Gilman describes the height of Breitbart’s popularity with Jewish audiences as follows.

14 Gilman, Kafka, 13. 15 Gilman, Kafka, 13. 16 Gilman, Kafka, 12. 17 Gilman, Kafka, 12. 18 Gilman, Kafka, 13. 19 Gilman, Kafka, 13. 20 Gilman, Kafka, 15. 21 Gilman, Kafka, 15. 22 Gilman, Kafka, 15.

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Breitbart appeared before a huge Jewish and non-Jewish audience across Central Europe, frequently in Berlin, Vienna and Prague, and his advertising stressed his Jewish identity including Jewish iconic images such as the Star of David. Among Jews he was referred to as ‘Shimshon hagibor’ (Samson strongman) when he appeared flanked by the Zionist flag. He even performed for his Jewish audiences as Bar Kochba, who led the Jewish revolt against Rome between 132 and 135CE.

According to Gilman, Kafka aspired to transform his body into that of Breitbart; ‘the transformed Jew as hero’23.

In addition to this intense cultural preoccupation, Kafka’s relationship to his body was, at the individual level, also intense, complex and obsessive. Hayman writes that due to Kafka’s ‘mother’s absences and his father’s efforts to encourage and discipline his son’s eating’ Kafka had developed ‘a neurotic fastidiousness about food.’24 Kafka’s anxieties around his own health were ironic, for although ‘he drank no alcohol, coffee or tea, seldom ate chocolate [and] never smoked’, he was undermining his health by ‘starving himself of sleep.’25 As much as a lack of sleep undermined Kafka’s health, it was a malaise that was essential to his creative production.

Kafka’s diary entries repeatedly describe an inexplicable and persistent malaise which he felt for much of his life. In January and February 1910, ‘feelings about his writing were inseparable from the malaise that was persistently sapping his energy’ leading him to write only a few letters, although he had a continual compulsion to exercise. ‘He was using a system devised by the Danish gymnastics instructor Jorgen Petersen Muller, who in 1903 had published a book prescribing exercises for daily home use. 26 At one point, Kafka lamented that ‘“I’ve felt bad all the time’”, and that ‘the same malaise’ saw him consider at one point ‘to have his stomach pumped’.27 Hayman writes

23 Gilman, Kafka, 16. 24 Ronald Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka (London: Phoenix Press, 1981), 79. 25 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 146. 26 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 79-80. 27 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 110.

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that Kafka ‘found it hard to distinguish between physical pain that was involuntary and mental pain that seemed partly self-inflicted.’28

Clearly Kafka struggled with the Jewish ideal of masculine physicality and masculinity. Gilman, echoing Hayman, writes that Kafka was unable to separate mental anguish from bodily concerns, writing that ‘the young Franz Kafka turned his “physical” deformation into his intellectual calling card. His ‘sickly’ body becomes the equivalent of his deformed psyche’. A diary entry from Kafka explains his own feelings on the issue.

It is certain that a major obstacle to my progress is my physical condition. Nothing can be accomplished with such a body… My body is too long for its weakness, it hasn’t the least bit of fat to engender a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire, no fat on which the spirit could occasionally nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage to the whole. How shall the weak heart that lately has troubled me so often be able to pound the blood through the length of these legs. It would be labor enough to the knees, and from there it can only spill with a senile strength into the cold lower parts of my legs. But now it is already needed up above again, it is being waited for, while it is wasting itself below. Everything is pulled apart throughout the length of my body. What could it accomplish then, when it perhaps wouldn’t have enough strength for what I want to achieve even if it were shorter and more compact.

For Kafka, his body, including his “weak heart” and “mental instability,”29 were one and the same. His anxieties and strict health regime ironically contributed to a constant sense of psychosomatic malaise. In this way, a psychological collapse is the same as a physical collapse.

These deep and pervasive concerns about bodily collapse are ultimately played out in Kafka’s literature. As each island of control fails, the protagonist’s body comes closer to being exposed to a loss of control, freedom or life. Indeed many of Kafka’s tales end with the loss of the body. For example, in The Trial, the protagonist dies and in The Metamorphosis, the body is transformed into something inhuman. Kafka’s story, the Penal Colony, is especially compelling in this regard as it ends in both bodily

28 Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, 1110. 29 Gilman, Kafka, 16.

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transformation and death. At the centre of the Penal Colony is an object or apparatus designed with the purpose of erasing the human body and the life it contains. As one of Kafka’s darker and more violent spatial inspirations and metaphors, the machine ultimately is about bodily demise, connecting to the uncanny by way of its purpose and inclination towards death.

Final thoughts

A central theme in this dissertation is that there is an inherent, subliminal, universal psychoanalytical meaning which can be applied to certain architectural typologies, objects and forms in Kafka’s life and fiction. While this idea is only developed in detail for three of Kafka’s tales, there would be fertile grounds to expand the basis for this argument to consider some of Kafka’s other major works such as The Castle.

This dissertation also identifies that there is a type of universality to the interpretation of architectural symbols. Given this message, a similar approach might be applied to interpret the role of architecture in the works and lives of other modernist authors. Specifically, such research could test if there is an architectural langue, as well as parole. Modernist authors of the World War 1 to World War 2 period would appear to offer opportunities for expanding the application of this method. For example, Virginia Woolf, who longed for A Room of One’s Own, along with TS Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and DH Lawrence, could also be analysed in terms of their application of architectural langue and parole.

Finally, the only previous major research into Kafka and architecture by Ayad B. Raymani suggests several connections between Kafka and major buildings: domestic commissions or commercial architectural practice by significant architects of the time, including Adolf Loos and Mies van der Rohe. Significantly, this thesis has presented a ‘reverse’ set of relations: by locating the inwardly hidden architectural relations that have been metaphorically drawn from instinctive architectural narratives and interior histories.

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