For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with
college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to
see that Kafka is funny ... Nor to appreciate the way
funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his
stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes
have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists
sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of
vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in
such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative
connections within the recipient.
This is probably why the
effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and
percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for
nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a hatchet with which
we chop at the frozen seas inside us." Nor is it an accident
that the technical achievement of great short stories is often
called "compression"-for both the pressure and the release are
already inside the reader.
What Kafka seems able to do better
than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure's
increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise
instant it is released.
Good article. I've only read The Metamorphosis but I think this makes sense. Looking back on it, the 'three lodgers' in that book present a funny, absurd scenario.
I prefer reading relatively short and simple classics like The Metamorphosis - if anyone has some recommendations I'd be interested.
For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny ... Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.
This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us." Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called "compression"-for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader.
What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure's increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.