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David Foster Wallace across the state of Illinois sat at their desks, depend on what communication-theorists curled over their pencils, stuck their tongues sometimes call "exformation," which is a cer- .between their teeth, and wrote five-paragraph tain quantity of vital information removed from essays about wearing uniforms to school. All but evoked by a communication in such a way except one. His essay began, "I never thought as to cause a kind of explosion of associative much about dancin' circles before today, but if connections within the recipient. This is prob- that's what you want to know about, well, here ably why the effect of both short stories and goes ... " And somewhere in North Carolina, jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like some poor soul will reach into the stack of 500 the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for essays she will have to read that day. Four hun- nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a dred and ninety-nine will be about wearing hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas uniforms, and one won't. It will be "off topic." inside us." Nor is it an accident that the tech- The IGAP rules say that it must receive the nical achievement of great short stories is often lowest possible score. But I wish I could watch called "compression"-for both the pressure her face when she reads that first line. If she and the release are already inside the reader. keeps reading and smiles, I know there might What Kafka seems able to do better than just be hope for us. about anyone else is to orchestrate the pres- sure's increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released. The psychology of jokes helps account for [Remarks] part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a LAUGHING WITH joke of its peculiar magic than to try to ex- plain it-to point out, for example, that Lou KAFKA Costello is mistaking the proper name "Who" for the interrogative pronoun "who," etc. We From a speech given by David Foster Wallace in all know the weird antipathy such explana- March at "Metamorphosis: A New Kafka," a tions arouse in us, a feeling not so much of symposium sponsored by the PEN American Cen- boredom as offense, like something has been ter in New York City to celebrate the publication of blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher's a new translation of The Castle by Schocken feeling at running a Kafka story through the Books. Wallace is a contributing editor of Harper's gears of your standard undergrad-course liter- Magazine; his short story "The Depressed Person" ary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode, appeared in the January issue. etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique po- sition to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency One reason for my willingness to speak critical machine, the literary equivalent of publicly on a subject for which I am sort of un- tearing the petals off and grinding them up derqualified is that it affords me a chance to de- and running the goo through a spectrometer to claim for you a short story of Kafka's that I explain why a rose smells so pretty.! Franz Kaf- have given up teaching in literature classes and ka, after all, is the writer whose story "Posei- miss getting to read aloud. Its English title is don" imagines a sea-god so overwhelmed with "A Little Fable"; administrative paperwork that he never gets to sailor swim, and whose "In the Penal Colony" "Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growing conceives description as punishment and tor- smallereveryday. At the beginning it wasso big ture as edification and the ultimate critic as a that Iwasafraid,Ikept running and running, and needled harrow whose coup de grftce is a spike Iwasgladwhen at last Isawwallsfar awayto the through the forehead. right and left, but these longwallshave narrowed so quicklythat I am in the last chamber already, Another handicap, even for gifted students, and there in the corner stands the trap that I is that-unlike, say, Joyce's or Pound's-the must run into." "Youonly need to changeyourdi- exformative associations Kafka's work creates rection," saidthe cat, and ate it up. are not intertextual or even historical. Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost For me, a signal frustration in trying to read sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which Kafka with college students is that it is next to myths derive; this is why we tend to call even impossible to get them to see that Kafka is fun- his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than sur- ny ... Nor to appreciate the way funniness is real. Not to mention that the particular sort of bound up with the extraordinary power of his funniness Kafka deploys is deeply alien to kids stories. Because, of course, great short stories whose neural resonances are American. The and great jokes have a lot in common. Both fact is that Kafka's humor has almost none of READINGS 23 the particular forms and codes of contemporary spect to The Metamorphosis, then, I might in- U.S. amusement. There's no recursive word- vite students to consider what is really being play or verbal stunt-pilotrv, little in the way of expressed when we refer to someone as wisecracks or mordant lampoon. There is no "creepy" or "gross" or say that somebody was body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual en- forced to "eat shit" in his job. Or to reread "In tendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offend- the Penal Colony" in light of expressions like ing convention. No Pynchonian slapstick with "tonguelashing" or "She sure tore me a new banana peels or rapacious adenoids. No Roth- asshole" or the gnomic "By a certain age, ish satyriasis or Barthish meta parody or arch everybody has the face he deserves." Or to ap- Woody-Allen ish kvetching. There are none of proach "A Hunger Artist" in terms of tropes the ba-bing ba-bang reversals of modern sit- like "starved for attention" or "love-starved" or coms; nor are there precocious children or pro- the double entendre in the term "self-denial," fane grandparents or cynically insurgent co- or even as innocent a factoid as that the ety- workers. Perhaps most alien of all, Kafka's mological root of "anorexia" happens to be the authority figures are never just hollow buffoons Greek word for longing. to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary The students usually end up engaged here, and sad all at once, like "In the Penal which is great, but the teacher still sort of Colony'''s Lieutenant. writhes with guilt, because the comedy-as-liter- My point is not that his wit is too subtle for alization-of-metaphor tactic doesn't begin to U.S. students. In fact, the only halfway effec- countenance the deeper alchemy by which tive strategy I've come up with for exploring Kafka's comedy is always also tragedy, and this Kafka's funniness in class involves suggesting tragedy always also an immense and reverent to students that much of his humor is actually joy. This usually leads to an excruciating hour sort of unsubtle, or rather anti-subtle. The during which I backpedal and hedge and warn claim is that Kafka's funniness depends on students that, for all their wit and exformative some kind of radical literalization of truths we voltage, Kafka's stories are not fundamentally tend to treat as metaphorical. I opine to them jokes, and that the rather simple and lugubri- that some of our deepest and most profound ous gallows humor which marks so many of collective intuitions seem to be expressible on- Kafka's personal statements-stuff like his ly as figures of speech, that that's why we call "There is hope, but not for us"-is not what his these figures of speech "expressions." With re- stories have got going on. What Kafka's stories have, rather, is a grotesque and gorgeous and thoroughly modem complexity. Kafka's humor-not only not neu- rotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane-is, fi- nally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O'Connor's bloody grace seems a lit- tle bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made. And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance) It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get-the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kaf- ka joke-that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pound- From Funny Times.
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