As contemporary psychoanalysts speculated, trains had already pervaded the collective fin de siècle unconscious as a symbol of sexuality. This journey, which would achieve physical presence and thus temporarily halt the correspondence, is, significantly, a train journey. Kafka wrote ‘Frau Milena’ at least 126 letters between April and December 1920, and throughout these letters, he postpones an ever-promised journey to visit her. This oft-cited opposition between presence and absence structured Kafka’s epistolary relations with Felice and, at the beginning, with Milena. He is ‘made of literature,’ he once wrote to Felice and thus would rather read his lovers’ letters than touch their bodies. For most of the correspondence, Kafka chooses the latter. On the one hand Kafka desires the ‘natural’ intercourse sponsored by trains on the other hand, he passionately wants to continue writing letters. The technologies of presence, Kafka suggests, promote ‘natürlichen’-that is, physical- ‘Verkehr’ (traffic, intercourse, circulation) between humans, while the technologies of absence sponsor a disembodied ‘Verkehr mit Gespenstern’ (intercourse with ghosts). According to Kafka, the world was divided technologically into two groups: the technologies encouraging human presence (train, automobile, aeroplane, etc.) and the technologies encouraging absence (postal system, telegraph, wireless, etc.). Such technological and bureaucratic changes led to new ways of thinking about the body’s relation-or non-relation-to transported information.
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