Download Uncanny Aesthetics in Kafka*s Amerika or The

Uncanny Aesthetics in Kafka’s
Amerika or The Man who
Dissapeared
Ship
• ‘Dreadfully large ship’
• ‘Innumerable
small
rooms,
corridors
constantly branching off, short flights of stairs
always followed by others.
• Lost in a labyrinth
Uncle’s House
• Six floors; three underground levels; two
elevators; ten offices.
• Process of ‘defamiliarization’.
• ‘(…) and from morning to evening and amid the
dreams of the night there passed along this street
an incessant bustle of traffic, which looked from
above like a confused, constantly self-renewing
medley of distorted human shapes (…) as though
a glass pane covering the street’
Mr Pollunder’s House
• ‘As only the lower part of the house was
illuminated, one could not tell quite how high
it was’
• ‘They suddenly heard Mr Green calling down
from the top step’; ‘beginning to mount the
steps’; ‘as they mounted the steps’
Mr Pollunder’s House
• ‘Made the inconvenient presence of Mr Green
doubly regrettable’
• ‘The smoke from Mr Green’s cigar (…) spread
through the room, carrying Green’s influence
even into the corners and crannies that he
himself would never enter’
Mr Pollunder’s House
• ‘The door of my room is the fourth, counting
from this door, on this side of the corridor. So
you go past three more doors and the one you
get to then is the right one’
• ‘Lying down had already become unbearable’
• ‘Slow progress, which made the way seem
twice as long’
Mr Pollunder’s House
• ‘As the corridor seemed never-ending, and no
window anywhere afforded a view, Karl was
already thinking that he might be going in a
circle round the whole house’
Freud
• ‘One may, for instance, have lost one’s way in
the woods, perhaps after being overtaken by
gof, and, despite all one’s efforts to find a
marked or familiar path, one comes back
again and again to the same spot (…) Or one
may be groping around the dark in an
unfamiliar room, searching for the door or the
light-switch and repeatedly colliding with the
same piece of furniture’ (“The Uncanny”)
Hotel Occidental
• Thirty elevators; many rooms, dining-rooms,
gaming-rooms; seven floors.
• ‘all the entrances to the hotel, that is, this
main entrance, the three middle entrances,
and the ten side entrances, to say nothing of
the innumerable small doors and exits without
doors’
Hotel Occidental
• ‘Don’t you know that even the slightest
absence from duty has to be reported in the
Head Waiter’s office?’
Conclusion: Freud and Kafka
• ‘Unintentional return’ (“The Uncanny”)
• ‘The impulsion to repeat’
• ‘Anything that can remind us of this inner
compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny’