The Phenomenology of Jetlag

A common experience, resulting in a common confusion. A. has to transact important business with B. in H. He goes to H. for a preliminary interview, accomplishes the journey there in ten minutes and the journey back in the same time, and on returning boasts to his family of his expedition. Next day he goes again to H., this time to settle his business finally. As that by all appearances will require several hours, A. leaves very early in the morning. But although all the surrounding circumstances, at least in A.'s estimation, are exactly the same as the day before, this time it takes him ten hours to reach H. When he arrives there quite exhausted in the evening he is informed that B., annoyed at his absence, had left an hour before to go to A.'s village and that they must have passed each other on the road.

Franz Kafka, "An Everyday Confusion" ("Eine alltägliche Verwirrung")¹

Just as the now continuously grades off into the ever more distant past, so the intuitive consciousness of time also continuously grades off. On the other hand, we are not speaking here of a continuous transition of perception to phantasy, of impression to reproduction. The latter distinction is a separate one. We must say therefore that what we term originary consciousness, impression, or perception is an act which is continuously gradated. Every concrete perception implies a whole continuum of such gradations. Reproduction, phantasy-consciousness, also requires exactly the same gradations, although only reproductively modified. On both sides, it belongs to the essence of lived experiences that they must be extended in this fashion.

Edmund Husserl, The Phenomeonology of Internal Time-Consciousness²

1.

It may well be that Franz Kafka, in naming one of K.'s bumbling, slapstick assistants of Das Schloß Jeremiah, obliquely assumes responsibility for his own role as an uncanny prophet of post-modern, virtual, teletechnic, and terrestrial eventualities. Among Kafka's most jaw-dropping guesses regarding the waves of the future are the telephonic networks installed into Amerika's Hotel Occidental and the Castle bureaucracy; the programmable and therefore partly cybernetic execution-machine "In the Penal Colony," a grim counterpart to the hilarious feeding-machine tested at the outset of Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times"; the superhighway equipped with prison watchtowers on the way to Ramses, also in Amerika; and in no way last, the "good" concentration camp in Oklahoma at the end of the same novel.

The K. of The Castle, a scofflaw to the delicate social convention prevailing throughout the novel's absurdly rustic global village of the modern world, brutalizes and eventually brusquely dismisses the assistants who have been assigned to him. Jeremiah, the prophetic or forward-looking one, eventually takes possession of K.'s former fiancée Frieda, whom he has dumped just as unceremoniously after liberating her from the clutches of Castle super-bureaucrat Klamm.

A vaguely emancipatory lawsuit, one loosely translatable into a discourse of civil rights, a claim to assume his rightful position of village Land-Surveyor, motivates K.'s often aimless meanderings and interactions through this global village. In addition to retracing the absurd errors in communication resulting in his initial appointment and summons to the village and pressing his claim with such public figures as the Mayor and Schoolmaster, K. becomes party to the woeful tale of exclusionary small-town bigotries as they have been experienced by the Barnabas family.

K. travels in circles and feedback loops of revision and consolidation rather than in any linear or evolutionary path of progression. What would be the culmination of any conventional or respectable novel is at the end of Das Schloß a guided tour of its misguided communications, an extended scene of writing as the only home-base the novel can claim. It is as part of these concluding deliberations that we find K., who has become increasingly sleep-deprived as his interactions have become more random and as the novelistic chapters become more rambling and less conclusive, finally in the presence of Bürgel, of whom he was not previously aware, the single Castle functionary...