Franz Kafka Museum in Prague

  
 Crop of Charles Bridge (2009), by Paul Cook.  Charles Bridge (Karlův most) lies over the Vitava River in Kafka's hometown of Prague.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

The museum was an interesting and very revealing experience to me. Kafka Museum is  postmodern and interactive. It is different and unsettling. Through its labirynthine structure (dark narrow corridors, spiraling staircases) and the use of interesting visual and sound effects the museum creates truly Kafkaesque atmosphere: eerie, tense, complex, surreal. It perfectly recreates the sense of entrapment and enclosure so prevalent in Kafka's writing. The museum gives one a very good insight into Franz Kafka - the man and the writer, the things that influenced him: his childhood, his historical and cultural background, his friends, his relationships, his family. As the story of Kafka slowly unravels to us in the form of his letters, photographs, manuscripst we get to know him as an aliented writer, aspiring and ambitious artist (yes, I was surprised to discover that Kafka took up drawing as well, and produced many touching works) a sensitive loner and a genius. Selected museum exhibitions draw attention to Kafka's uneasy and complex relationship with the city of his birth: "Prague won't let you go, the little mother has claws," Franz Kafka once wrote. 


Kafka Museum is situated a stone's throw away from Charles Bridge, alongside Vlatva River in the Lesser Quarter. It was open in 2005 and boasts a vast collection of historical photographs and film recordings, manuscripts, diaries, drawings, sketches, newspaper cuttings, original letters, documents and publications relating to Franz Kafka's literary works, life, and cultural surroundings. 

The exhibition comprises of two sections: Existential Space and Imaginary Topography. The first part examines the impact Prague had on Kafka's literary imagination and writing. "Prague contributes myth, obscure magic and provides a magnificent backdrop" as the exhibition informs us. The second part of the exhibition, seeks to establish connections between Prague and its literary represantions in writer's novels. For example, there is a possibility that the anonymous cathedral which appears in the key chapter of The Trial, could have its origin in St Vitus Cathedral or that the mysterious river which flows in The Judgement narrative could have corresponded to Vlatva River. Kafka was rather enigmatic about the locations he incorporated in his creative discourse. He was not interested in producing an accurate portrayal of Prague. As the museum suggests, he sought to transform Prague into an "Imaginary Topography". He wanted to transform it beyond its physical self. Enigmatic descriptions of the urban architecture in Kafka's novels render the locations anonymous. His characters are not encircled or confined to a particular region, location or a city. They are confined to stifling emotional states, oppressive processes and inescapable situations. They are the states and processes everyone experiences and can identify with at a certain stage of one's life.

    
 
As mentioned before, the museum is arranged around Kafka's literary themes. Diverse items as photographs, audiovisual installations, letters, and music allow the exhibition space to simulate Kafka's or K.'s existential space. "Key passages from Kafka's diaries, novels, and short stories written in white block letters on dark, "muddy" walls, wooden pallets, or an ascending staircase leading nowhere interrupt the eye as one passes from exhibit to the next"(source: a review of "The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague," The Jewish Museum, New York, August 11, 2002 to January 5, 2003,Victor E. Taylor, York College of Pennsylvania, click on here to read the whole article). 

Writer's Biography

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century. Kafka's work is characterized by nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority. Thus, the word Kafkaesque is often applied to bizarre and impersonal administrative situations where the individual feels powerless to understand or control what is happening. The first recorded appearance of "Kafkaesque" in English was in 1946 (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

The development of vision in Emily Brontë’s selected poems

After the portrait by Branwell Brontë, ca. 1833, in the National Portrait Gallery

Emily Brontë has often been described a “mystic” and many critics have touched upon this aspect of her works. Most of the claims reffering to her alleged mysticism are based primarily on her poems. It is undeniable that at certain times a kind of subconscious pressure seems to have invaded certain poems (both Gondal and non – Gondal) powerfully. Sections of the poems valued for for their transcendental qualties have often been taken as a description of the poet’s own feeling  when confronted with an experience thought to be “mystical”. In this sub – chapter I shall examine some of the poems which feature nocturnal visions or visitations by spirits, and I shall take into account those poems a major function of which seems to be to explore such visionary and imaginary gifts. The sense of visitation by visions which is powerfully and prevalently present in some of Emily’s poems, according to Derek Stanford can be associated with mysticism. He explains that he applied the term “mysticism” to certain poems, in order to “focus attention on the relationship which Emily’s mind established with something beyond it.”[10]

             

In Stanford’s eyes the notion of visitation and visions which permeate considerable number of Brontë’s poems, deals with her “interior”, personal religion, and is much connected with a gnostic cult of night, since the vast majority of such poems are known to be composed at night. As day illuminates the world with all its multiplicity so that the distinction of its objects become apparent, it is night that darkens the world and so that all disparity and difference seems to be blurred and cancelled out. He goes on further stating that the removal of distinctions appears to produce a new unity, which only “the mystical mind can recognize”[11].

The  aspect of vision and visitation in Emily Brontë’s poems

 

Many poems by Emily Brontë appear to chronicle moments when she achieves her visionary or dreamy states and when her vision seems to overwhelm her and surpass her art, the example of such experience is recorded in the poem Alone I sat on the summer day:

        Dreams have encircled me, I said

            From careless childhood’s sunny time(…)

            But now when I had hoped to sing

            My fingers strike a tuneless string.[12]

Poems preoccupied with dreams and visions put forward an argument that Emily’s visionary states might be treated as “mystic” to some extent. Many of them record the experience of feverish dreaming, very often nighmtmares, resulting in a sudden waking accompanied by an unearthy sound, or the experience of encountering a dead associate[13]. One of the poems which evoke the vision conceived while dreaming is in The night of storms has passed. The speaker awakens from a nightmare about the “gulp o’er which mortality has never been” and then she notices “a shadowy thing”, which she mortally fears. The “thing “evokes a supernatural phenomenon, its terrifying appearance so much penetrates the speaker that when awake she is unable to move, to breathe freely, is immbilized completely by the basilisk gaze of the “thing”. One of the most striking characteristics of the poems is both the earthly closensess and cosmic distance of the “shadowy thing” to the speaker[14]: “And truly at my side/I saw a shadowy thing  whose “fearful face and eyes were fixed on me”.

            It seemed close, but, and yet more far

            Than this world from the farthest star

            That tracks the boundless blue.[15]

The poem Laid Alone in the Darkened Room describes a visionary moment experienced by the speaker again. It tells about “stern power” which is ready do descend on the speaker, and which produces “strange sensation”. Then it says that the visitant, whatever it is, arrives. Precisely how the visitant is conceptualised is not clear, from the poem, it can be only concluded that Emily Brontë recoils from the difficulty of putting the experience into precise words. It is clear that the vision enodowed with “stern power” is monitoring and controlling the speaker in an inexplicable way.

In Silent is the House,  the poet seems to be talking about an experience which will not return, however she insists that that memory can bring back the vision: “Memory has power as real as thine”. The poem breaks off suddenly as if she finds she cannot make rational sense of her experience. Poems dealing with nocturnal visions are very frequent and considerable in number. According to Edward Chitham “ For Emily’s purpose, night provided an ideal theatre for the visitattion of that spirit which confessed to her alone; a solitary, private, and gnostic communicat.” He continues stating  that Emily’s mystic – quietist poems, provide with a sense of “communion within communion”. He believes that poems dealing with some nocturnal visions are the outcome of a communion with night, which “serves to usher in a deeper phase of a sacramental knowing.”[16]

 

Whether the recurrent dream and vision, “phantom bliss” as Emily prefers to call it, can be described as the proof of mysticism is an open question. However, it should be said that the sense of communion with something outside the poet is very strong, although the precise nature of the power inherent in this “something” is fairly nebulous. 

Author: Dora Lorenc 



Bibliography:


[10] E. Chitham, T. Winnifrith, The Brontë Facts and Brontë Problems, p. 194
[11] M. Spark, D. Stanford, Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, p. 178
[12] Alone I Sat on the Summer Day, ed. B. Lloyd – Evans, The Poems of Emily Brontë
[13] E. Chitham, T. Winnifrith, Brontë Facts and Brontë Problems, p. 111
[14] J. D. Ghnassia, The Metaphysical Rebellion in the Works of Emily Brontë, p. 57
[15] The Night of Storms Has Passed, ed B. Lloyd – Evans, The Poems of Emily Brontë p.  67
[16] E. Chitham, T. Winnifrith, Brontë Facts and Brontë Problems, p. 201