Kafka and The Missing Photograph

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Notes

1 The complex temporality that attends the peculiar modality of photography is described by Benjamin as an optical unconscious: “the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such pictures for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak so seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it” (Benjamin 243).

2 Although from Karl's recollection of the event, what was an accident for him had been a seduction carefully planned by the cook.

3 We encounter Kafka writing the novel, up in his room at one o'clock in the morning in his correspondence with Felice.

4 Interestingly, Barthes describes the punctum as an accident “A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me” (Barthes 27).

5 The overhang (Abhang) created during the excavation of a quarry was recognised by the insurance official Dr Kafka as one of the main risks of accident in this branch of industry. He also uses it as a figure for threat, as here from the letter to Felice of 26 November 1912: “Farewell, dearest. The threat that hangs over us and which I mentioned earlier on, should be left undisturbed until such time as we can exchange the first real words, not written ones” (Kafka, Letters to Felice 175).

6 See Duttinger's careful description of this context (99).

7 All illustrations are from Carolin Duttlinger's book, Kafka and Photography. Oxford University Press: Illustration 11, p. 97 from the Library of Congress Washington DC. Illustration 12, p. 98 & 19, p. 202 from Fischer Verlag, Hamburg.