temporal vacuum

is descriptive of the fact that in kafka's novels, there is no lapse of time. They are without seasonal changes... most scenes take place at night indoors. Days or weeks pass, but there is no development... time does not clarify or even intensify the confusion.

In Kafka there is no lapse of time. His world is entirely a city-world (the village of The Castle might equally well be a tenement, there is no nature here) without seasonal changes... most scenes take place at night indoors. We hear of days or weeks passing, but there is no development... time does not clarify or even intensify the confusion, though it shows that the labyrinth is more extensive than the hero earlier thought. Anders uses the term 'paralysed time', Mendilow speaks of 'a temporal vacuum'. Kafka's time is the timelessness of a dream. His heroes set out again and again, but there new activity does not grow organically out of their earlier, it is not a true succession, it is a perpetual starting again. His heroes might say, with the narrator of Investigations of a Dog: 'how my life has changed, and how at bottom it has not changed.

temporal vacuum, n.All

temporal vacuum