Kafka: Amerika – Analysis, Part 2

Unlike those of the average, less cerebral Gothic novel, Kafka’s protagonists seek not physical freedom, but freedom from guilt, from oppressive self-awareness. Karl’s box (an object pregnant with meaning in folklore) is much more than a symbol of the self violated by Johanna Brummer. The Stoker criticizes Karl for leaving his box ‘in a stranger’s hands’, which clearly refers back to the seduction scene. Given the reverse-gender nature of that seduction, it is appropriate that the box, normally a female symbol, stands for Karl, while at the same time also representing both Johanna and the ship, which, like the castle in Gothic, is in many ways the ‘hero’ of the opening chapter of the novel, a mobile Gothic locus. In Freudian terms the ship stands for the woman in the case, Johanna Brummer, but also for Karl; symbolically it represents not only transgression, of which it is a literal symbol, but punishment as well. Kasten, like Bau, means (time in) prison. Ship and burrow are linked images, both of them associated with feelings of anxiety and entrapment.

What happens after the first chapter is a series of recapitulations, disguised by varying degrees of censorship and wishful thinking, of what was related there, the most egregious wishful thinking being that informing the last chapter. In Amerika, then, ‘an erotic mise-en-scène repeats itself as a series of visual tableaux’.¹ In these repeated tableaux Karl remains himself, but the other main figures are versions or variants of the ones in the master-tale². Most of the names are dream-variations on other names, the echoes indicating not so much the symbolical identity of those thus named, as Kafka’s obsession with a few basic figures³. These inter-relationships based on the patterning or replication of certain vowels and consonants which Kafka also uses elsewhere (e.g. Samsa ↔ Kafka) amount to an exemplary illustration of the stylistic impulse that, in the folk fairytale, keeps on forming the same figures, and of the obsessive circularity of dreams. Each successive episode in Amerika goes back to the initial seduction and expulsion, which it recapitulates in a brilliantly controlled and censored form. Kafka became a past master of consistent simultaneous symbolisms; after Amerika his method, while remaining strongly visual, is not associated with symbolical reduplication of such a relatively obvious kind.

1 – Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820 (London & New York: Routledge, 1993) 96

2 – Karl’s father → Onkel Jakob → Head Porter → Feodor; Johanna → Klara → Brunelda.

3 – Rossmann → Robinson; Karl → Klara → Kalla → Fanny ← Johanna; Karl → Mak; Green → Grete → Negro; Butterbaum → Pollunder; Bendelmayer → Mendel; Delamarche → Mitzelbach; Isbary, Feodor→ Isidor; Brummer → Brunelda; Jakob → Giacomo.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

The other notably Gothic and densely symbolical locus of the novel is Pollunder’s strangely old mansion, which is larger and taller than a country house designed for one family has any need to be, with no lights except in the lower part of the house. The height and extent of the edifice are unclear. What is clear is that this chapter, to which Karl comes ‘as in a dream’, is heavily overdetermined. On one level the ‘altes Haus’ from which Karl is ritually banished in a re-enactment of his initial expulsion represents the domain of the patriarchal (in colloquial German ‘altes Haus’ means ‘old man’), but this dark, labyrinthine house through which Karl tries to find his way is also a symbol of his own id or shadow, and therefore a reduplication of the symbolism of the belly of the ship. The dark attics of the court environment in The Trial are prefigured in this Gothic edifice.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

No wonder there is no sign of light in the upper, in symbolical terms once spiritual part of the house, the internal geography of which is confusingly inconsistent, surreal, reminiscent of Piranesi’s architectural drawings in the Carceri d’Invenzione of c. 1745, although the strangely unfinished house is arguably the work not of some neo-Gothic architect, but of the Devil. This is suggested both by the symbolism of Mak’s and Klara’s bedroom and by the arbitrariness of Onkel Jakob’s letter. The house is described as high, yet seems above all low and rambling, like the Castle of Kafka’s third and last novel. The crux of the matter is, of course, that this fortress- or castle-like country house, in which the candlelight sends long eerie shadows toward the countless closed doors, is ‘an American country house only in name, for it is another of Kafka’s castles with a total effect reminiscent of Ann Radcliffe’.¹ Karl trying to find his way through ‘his huge house, the endless corridors full of doors,² the chapel, the empty rooms, the darkness everywhere, with his candle guttering and finally going out, is pure Gothic as well as pure theatre. The stairway immediately beyond a door, by which Karl leaves, is a Gothic motif as well as a pantomime one.

1 – R. E. Ruland, ‘A View from Back Home: Kafka’s Amerika’, American Quarterly, 13 (1961), 33-42

2 – Like those in the ship, they are reminders, via the then current word Leibespforte (bodily opening or orifice), cited by Freud, of the reason for Karl’s banishment, Johanna Brummer.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Karl can scarcely credit his eyes when in the first corridor they come to on their way to Klara’s apartment he sees, at every twenty paces, ‘a servant in rich livery holding a huge candelabrum with a shaft so thick that both the man’s hands were required to grasp it’, a spectacle that would have been more at home in early exotic Gothic than in this supposed American country house. Dreams are not normally as exact as that either (every twenty paces—how big is this mansion?). Nor can all this be adequately explained in terms of phallic symbolism exaggerated for comic effect, although no more is heard of the luciferous¹ servants after Karl’s tussle with Klara, which leaves him so disenchanted that he calls her a ‘cat, a wild cat’, the symbolism being sustained when she bounds out of Karl’s room and we find him thinking that her room is likely to be ‘a dangerous lair, as Johanna Brummer’s room proved to be, and as the Burrow was to be. The cat simile reflects the fact that Karl is said to have been slung out by his father like a cat being put out (presumably for some feline transgression).

1 – Literal, for figurative ‘luciferian’.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

While Karl appears to resist Klara’s blandishments, he succumbs to her in the censored form of being overcome by her in a romp which stands for the original rape.¹ Karl’s first thought on seeing her makes her symbolical identity clear: ‘What red lips she has.’ While the wording here is somewhat reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood’s words to the wolf who is about to devour her, a closer correspondence is with Jonathan Harker’s thought on first seeing the three young vampires in Castle Dracula: ‘I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.’ The fact that in each case the first sight of the lips leads to a similar thought, one explicit and the other censored, makes one wonder whether Kafka could have had the passage from Dracula in mind: this is the first of a number of references to vampirism in these novels.

1 – Rauferei → Raub

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Karl is left to find his way through the darkness by the light of a single guttering candle, so that he arrives outside Klara’s and Mak’s room with his suit all covered in wax,¹ for Karl has no business to be heading for Clara’s bedroom at this time. The candle symbolism comes to a climax when he opens the door: on the bedside table a single candle is burning, but the sheets and Mak’s night-shirt are so white that the candle-light reflected off them is ‘almost blinding’. It is a will-o’-the-wisp, the visual equivalent of the ‘false ring of the night bell’. Shorn of its spiritual connotation, light proves all too often to be an ignis fatui. It is appropriate that the Czech word for ignis fatuus, bludička, also means street girl or prostitute and thus acts (in Czech only, not in German; but Latin ignis meant flame or beloved object as well as fire) as an open sesame to associations between, on the one hand, the idea of woman as snare and, on the other hand, ideas (being lost, error, heresy, the labyrinth, the vicious circle) that are central to Kafka’s work. One should not underestimate the significance for someone with his awareness of language of associations which, being inbuilt in the language, seem to be hallowed by it. His linguistic awareness and use of verbal association extend across several languages (German, Czech, Italian).

1 – The fairytale motif of trespass betrayed by dripping wax.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Patriarchal interdiction and expulsion are repeated in successive chapters, notably by Onkel Jakob, whose words ‘after today’s incident I have no choice but to send you forth from me’¹ echo Adam being ‘sent forth’ from Eden after the Fall. When Karl is locked out by Onkel Jakob for failing to return by midnight, this is both a reminder of the interconnectedness of Gothic and fairytale and an ignis fatuus inviting the unwary reader to indulge in wishful thinking on Karl’s behalf. There is, however, no Princess Charming to liberate this reverse-gender Cinderella; on the contrary, the woman in the case detains him. There are no fairytales here, just what in the next novel are dubbed echoes of earlier legends. Echoes is a peculiarly appropriate word, given the way in which Karl’s name is echoed in the names of Klara and (less obviously) Mak. Mak is not only the Prince Charming demanded by the allusion to ‘Cinderella’, and as such, in one definition, Karl’s super-ego; he is also, necessarily, a flawed or subverted prince², and therefore a figure of fun, as well as being a figure whose name, like Klamm’s name in The Castle, involves deliberate mystification of the reader.³

1 – Hence Onkel Jakob’s symbolical ‘transport business’.

2 – Cf. Czech macek, tom-cat, one of the Devil’s disguises.

3 – In Czech the word mak, literally ‘poppy’, also has the connotation of ‘poppycock’.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Rossmann’s position at the beginning of Chapter 4 is remarkably similar to that of Shelley’s Wolfstein in his St Irvyne: Driven from his native country by an event which imposed upon him an insuperable barrier to ever again returning thither, possessing no friends, not having one single resource from which he might obtain support, where could the wretch, the exile, seek for an asylum but with those whose fortunes, expectations, and characters were desperate, and marked as darkly, by fate, as his own.¹ Wolfstein fell in with a band of robbers inspired by Schiller. Allowing for subversion (ironization, change of register), Chapter 4 of Amerika corresponds to the banditti-element in the Gothic novel (e.g. Udolpho, IV, ch. 2). Rossmann falls in with their latter-day counterparts, Robinson and Delamarche. The more important figure is Robinson, whose name not only mimics Rossmann’s, but, like Pollunder’s, identifies him (English rob, rape; German rauben; Czech rabovat) as a ‘robber’, a reminder of Karl’s feeling of having been robbed/raped, although he will eventually accept that he is himself the robber. It is because Robinson’s name is symbolical that Kafka goes to the trouble of remarking that it is non-Irish. Robinson is ‘Irish’ only in the symbolical sense of being, or, better, representing one (Karl) who has erred in allowing himself to be tempted by the Devil into behaving like a madman. The reference is to Karl allowing himself to be seduced. Kafka puns on Irer (Irishman), Irrer (madman) and irren (to err).

1 – P. B. Shelley, in the first chapter of his St Irvyne; see Shelley, Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, ed. Stephen Behrendt (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) 113

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Chapter 5, which re-enacts the first three chapters, is initially close to ‘fairytale’ in being a matter of wish-fulfilment. The hotel which receives the weary traveller is by definition a kind of haven or harbour, and therefore retains the positive, seductive association of the harbour-image, although the, for Karl, negative (Freudian) associations of ‘docking’ are present in the background. This ‘hotel’ is a regressive haven, an apparent oasis in the wilderness of Karl’s life. It continues and combines the symbolism of the ship, Onkel Jakob’s business establishment, and Pollunder’s country house; like them, and like the court in The Trial and the castle authority in The Castle, it is a hierarchical, heavily defended organization. In symbolical terms it represents the lost paradise Karl is still hoping to regain, a false paradise, a regressive fool’s paradise in the sense of a childhood paradise implausibly regained. That is why the head cook is not only (like Therese, who ‘used to be’ a kitchen-maid) a sublimated version of Johanna Brummer, but a mother figure who ‘stood out as an exception to the general hubbub’ like Kafka’s mother, whom he described as a model of reason amid the hubbub of childhood. Karl’s job as liftboy shows him rehearsing the gallantry necessary to the would-be rake.¹ His action shows that Karl, far from regretting his part in the seduction, regrets only its unheroic nature; he has a long way to go before accepting his guilt.

1 – His action when he ‘shot into the lift after them’ represents a taking literally of the very metaphor that Freud uses in relation to the word Steiger in the sense of ‘rake’ or ‘roué’: den Frauen nachsteigen, ‘to run after women’; literally, ‘to get in after them’.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

In the meantime, his expulsion from paradise by patriarchal fiat, already repeated in Onkel Jakob’s interdiction, is re-enacted again, in a disguised (reverse) form, when he transgresses by breaking the first commandment for lift-boys in deserting his lift, with the result that he is expelled by the patriarchal, quasi-divine Head Porter, whose name (Feodor = Theodor) indicates the ‘God-given’ authority that he (like Kafka’s father) claims. Head Porter Feodor elaborates the Gothic and folktale motif of the forbidden door, and of the doorkeeper/gatekeeper, blowing his own trumpet (as Karl will presently do) in saying that he is in charge of all the (outside) doors in the hotel, the main door, the three central and ten side doors, not to mention innumerable little doors and doorless exits. In the first instance this mightily contrived emphasis on the door(way) shows how very large the Johanna Brummer episode is looming in Karl’s mind, but there is another point. Although Kafka’s main contribution to what Martin Buber called the ‘theology of the door’ is made in The Trial and The Castle, it seems possible that here already he had in mind the Gnostic tradition according to which hosts of ‘gate-keepers’ are posted to the right and left of the entrance to the heavenly hall through which the soul must pass in its ascent to the ‘Merkabah’, since it is from an earthly version of the ‘heavenly hall’ that Karl is expelled by the chief ‘gate-keeper’ whose authority is ‘God-given’.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Later in the novel there is another passage which links with the myth of the door; and more especially with the Parable of the Doorkeeper: originally Robinson had only to ask, and he was either admitted or not admitted to the holy of holies ‘according to circumstances’; but having once abused this privilege, having once obeyed the ‘false ring of the night bell’, he is forced to obey it whenever it tolls for him. And Robinson represents Karl Rossmann’s id or shadow-self. It should also be remembered that, as Andrew Webber has written, ‘Gatekeeping is one of Freud’s favoured metapsychological allegories. When the night-watchman sleeps, dreams play out unconscious fantasies on another, imaginary stage’.¹ Webber makes his point with reference to Hoffmann, but it is no less relevant to Kafka, whose work, as we have seen, comprises ‘night pieces’ in which the ‘stage’ metaphor is inherent, as it is in the lift symbol.

1 – Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelgänger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 193

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Brunelda’s flat, to which Karl is taken, is the very symbol of his fallen condition. The image of Brunelda lying on the sofa in her red dress is a mirror-image of Mak’s four-poster bed and a reflection of the day-bed on which Karl was laid by Klara. In the image of the great bed with its blue silk baldachin we saw sex enthroned in all its glory; here, by contrast, we see the flesh in all its squalor and contingency. Brunelda is a grotesque Eve, an extreme version of Johanna Brummer (Brummer [woman] → Brunelda), with whom she is explicitly identified both as a ‘bad singer’ and in being large, fat and ponderous. As a nightmarish version of Johanna Brummer, whom Karl is still blaming for his downfall, her function is to fill him with nausea. Through her appearance and dress she corresponds to the ‘giantess in a red dress’ of Icelandic folktale and the woman arrayed in scarlet of St. John’s vision. It is because Karl let himself be misled and seduced by Johanna that Brunelda’s ‘former husband’¹ is described as a Kakaofabrikant, literally, ‘cocoa-merchant’, but the word is simply a taking-literally of the phrase jemanden durch den Kakao ziehen, ‘to lead someone up the garden path’, the type ultimately identifiable with the Devil. German, it should be said, uses the same word for ‘mislead’ and ‘seduce’. Karl has been ‘whoring after a false idol’ in the biblical sense, this being shown literally, as in the Bible, which in turn accounts for an apparent echo of the story of Aholah and Aholibah (Ezekiel XXIII) which precedes the Fall of Tyre, to which allusion is duly made in the ‘Nature Theater of Oklahoma’ scene.

1 – Dreams and fairytales tend to describe lovers as husband and wife or brother and sister.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

It is when Brunelda in her role as Eve and avatar of Johanna Brummer is ordering Karl to make preparations for yet another re-enactment of his seduction in the form of a punitive fantasy that he makes an attempt to escape which is unsuccessful because the door of the flat is locked, as it was at the time of the original rape. This time, the re-enactment being part of a punitive fantasy, the key is missing. The missing key, charged with symbolical meaning, is nothing less than the key to his life, the emblem of his lost innocence and a sign that he is soon to go missing himself. The Gothic and fairytale forbidden door motif, which looms larger in each successive novel, reaches a climax in The Castle. In the present novel, Kafka merely toys with the ‘chamber of horrors’ motif, which he subverts: Karl’s escape from Brunelda’s flat amounts to a comic pastiche of the escape from incarceration that is so common in the Gothic novel, while the dumping of Brunelda in Unternehmen 25 is a reversal of Musäus’s Abduction from the Seraglio and at the same time the final unsuccessful attempt by Karl to get rid of the devil within himself (Brunelda ↔ Brendly).

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

Another extraordinary scene greets Karl in what used to be printed as the final chapter, and now appears as the penultimate fragment, when he finds hundreds of women, mounted on separate pedestals,¹ dressed as angels in white robes and with great wings, blowing long trumpets that glitter like gold. Clearly all that glitters is not gold: the women are neither as exalted nor as angelic as they seem. Fanny explains that they blow their trumpets for two hours at a time, after which they are relieved by men dressed as devils, half of them blowing on their instruments and the other half beating drums. There is no reason to suppose that the men, for their part, are not as devilish as they seem. There is a conclusion waiting to be drawn, which Karl duly draws by identifying with the Devil shortly afterwards. Heavily disguised by wish-fulfilment, this scene appears to represent some kind of paradise regained, but what it really represents is the Fall of Tyre (Ezekiel XXVIII, 13) with its tabrets and pipes, the Fall of Babylon (Rev. XIV-XVII), the ‘mother of harlots’ (cf. Brunelda), and the seven angels of the apocalypse, dressed in ‘pure and white linen’ and sounding the seven trumps of doom. The fact that Tyre was condemned for its sacrilegious pride, while Babylon was ‘drunk with the wine of her fornication’, makes the allusions appropriate, given Karl’s pride and ‘Robinson’s’ drunkenness. As variants of the Paradise myth, both the Fall of Tyre and the Fall of Babylon incorporate what has been called the central Gothic event. The novel thus ends as it began, with the Fall of Man. The last chapter is simply the most heavily disguised replication of the Fall. It holds no hope at all for Karl, who identifies with the men dressed as devils, thereby acknowledging his guilt, when he chooses one of the Devil’s appellations as his pseudonym.

1 – Some so high that—normal logic is reversed—they make the women look gigantic.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

This whole last chapter is therefore a dream, based on wish-fulfilment, with the latent meaning of the dream revealed to the reader, but withheld from the dreamer. The simple truth is that for Karl, who lost his way when he failed to defend his virginity against Johanna Brummer, there is no way back to innocence. As the German proverb says, hin ist hin, ‘lost is lost’. Once Karl has fallen, he can only go on falling; there is no question of being saved by some kind of miracle, not just because the age of miracles is long past, but because Karl, who has by now, in an act of self-denigration, identified with the Devil by adopting one of his appellations (Negro, the ‘Black One’, in German Schwarzer) is, as the meanings of the German word schwarz (shady, illicit) imply, specifically unentitled to enter any notional paradise. The misleadingly optimistic-seeming final chapter is accordingly to be read as the most heavily disguised version of his fall, the novel ending, as it must in Freudian terms, with Karl embarking on the journey to death. The immediate fate that Kafka had in mind for Karl was for him to go missing and be declared legally dead, the figurative equivalent of the live burial of Gothic. It was presumably because he could not bear to give it the negative ending he knew it would have to have, that Kafka left the novel unfinished, just as it was because he was too honest to do otherwise, that he broke off the ending on an unambiguous note.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

The enigmatic last fragment of the novel, entitled ‘They travelled for two days’, ends with a reference to great mountains and mountain torrents, the chill from which numbed their faces. This is a clear echo of the sublime, on which Gothic fiction is based. A comparison with a passage from The Mysteries of Udolpho (II, ch. 5) is revealing. Ann Radcliffe wrote: From this sublime scene the travellers continued to ascend among the pines, till they entered a narrow pass of the mountains, which shut out every feature of the distant country, and, in its stead, exhibited only tremendous crags, impending over the road. Though the deep valleys between these mountains were, for the most part, clothed with pines, sometimes an abrupt opening presented a perspective of only barren rocks, with a cataract flashing from their summit among broken cliffs, till its waters, reaching the bottom, foamed along with unceasing fury; and sometimes pastoral scenes exhibited their ‘green delights’ in the narrow vales, smiles amid surrounding horror. This mountainscape, the reader is told, is as wild as any the travellers had yet passed. There is an immediate connexion with Kafka in that this mountainscape, like his, is purely imaginary, neither writer having travelled through the country they purport to be describing. Radcliffe’s is a standard description of sublimity, the awe inspired by the Apennines tempered by the ‘green delights’ down on the human level. The broken crags foreshadow the broken battlements of Montoni’s castle.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

The ending of Amerika is comparable: On the first day they traversed a high mountain range. Masses of blue-black rock rose in sheer wedges to the railway line; even by craning their necks out of the window they could not see the summits; narrow, gloomy, jagged valleys opened out and they tried to follow with pointing fingers the direction in which these were lost to sight; broad mountain streams appeared, turning into raging torrents as they cascaded downhill in a thousand foaming wavelets, plunging under the bridges over which the train sped; they were so near that the breath of coldness rising from them numbed their faces. What is striking about this imaginary mountainscape is, first, that it is so similar to Ann Radcliffe’s, and, second, that Kafka, who normally eschews natural description, here apparently revels in it. It is not his style to be as emotional, or as obvious, as Radcliffe, so that his description is cooler and more laconic, but, although the two passages serve a different purpose, there is no mistaking the common symbolism. Radcliffe’s description serves to evoke the sublime of terror, pointing ominously forward to the terrors which Montoni’s castle is to hold for Emily before the eventual happy ending. Faced with the sublime in nature, Blanche’s thoughts turn involuntarily to the ‘Great Author’ of the sublime objects she is contemplating.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

At the end of Amerika there is no such consoling vision. On the contrary, what was once sublime is there associated with death and the Devil. Katka’s passage, which describes an alpine landscape (and although the word Alp is not used, it should not be forgotten that its secondary meaning is ‘nightmare’) ends with a reference to the Devil (whose domain nightmare is, and from whom that chill surely emanates) who is leading Karl to damnation, for when the reader leaves him Karl is clearly going ‘to the Devil’. In evoking the sublime, or once-sublime, Kafka is in effect drawing attention to the proximity of Gothic.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

In his first novel, then, Kafka combines Biblical and Freudian symbolism with fairytale and Gothic motifs, and with Gothic iconography, within an overall fairytale structure, although the initial adverse situation is, of course, also a characteristic of comedy. Its central theme is Gothic enough, as is much of the detail of Chapters 1, 3 and 5 in particular, but so much displacement or disguise is involved, and so much humour is present in the detail, that, despite its ending, the novel as a whole seems rather less Gothic than its successors. The combination of Gothic and humour is as characteristic as it is original.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Amerika, Franz Kafka

RICHARD JONATHAN, ‘MARA, MARIETTA: A LOVE STORY IN 77 BEDROOMS’  —  READ THE FIRST CHAPTER

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KAFKA – AMERIKA – PART 1

THE STRUCTURE OF FRANZ KAFKA’S FICTION – THE LIFE CYCLE OF A KAFKA CHARACTER – PART 1

KAFKA: NOVEL AND DREAM – PART 1

FRANZ KAFKA – THE UNCANNY & THE GOTHIC

FRANZ KAFKA – LETTERS TO MILENA – WRITING/INTERCOURSE

GYÖRGY KURTÁG – KAFKA FRAGMENTS – SOPRANO & VIOLIN

DJUNA BARNES

ISAK DINESEN

JAMES JOYCE