How to read Kafka: part I

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/10/how-to-read-kafka-part-i

by agronaut • 8 years ago

141 37 8 years ago

David Foster Wallace's talk "Laughing with Kafka" is very insightful as well. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-...

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.

newman8r2• 8 years ago

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.

hprotagonist4• 8 years ago

penal colony, a hunger artist.

galaxyLogic2• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel)

mturmon• 8 years ago

My very favorite extremely short piece of Kafka's writing - just one magical sentence: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka...

The other short anecdotal pieces linked in that page are also wonderful. Here's one: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka...

And another, which (to me) is one of many counter-examples to the "Laughing With Kafka" notion: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka...

That is, the final piece above is truly despairing in a way that DFW, perhaps, could identify with.

nyolfen• 8 years ago

this reminds me of an onion video, from back when they had a video team that was much funnier:

Prague's Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ

jessup• 8 years ago

"Before the Law" is an example of a Kafka story that reads like a joke / one of the jokes that Kafka wrote:

http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html

aportnoy2• 8 years ago

I've read The Trial and couldn't help but think that Kafka is overrated.

dpwm• 8 years ago

I didn't "get" Kafka until I read some of the short stories he had written. In particular, the Stoker stood out to me.

vidarh• 8 years ago

If Kafka may feel overrated to some today, it is almost entirely because he was genre-defining. I mean, The Trial is full of clichés of Kafkaesque dystopias, for example. For good reason.

wjnc• 8 years ago

Honest questions: are you an avid reader? What kind of writers do you prefer that usually fall in the Kafka-catergory. The Trial was my first Kafka and it bound me from the beginning. The scenes where he is picked up they were gripping and intense and tragi-comic at the same time. Interesting that it doesn't work for everyone. That was my first thought at the OP top: who wouldn't get Kafka? Perhaps this is a subtle cultural effect at work.

aportnoy2• 8 years ago

It's a toy novel that sure does put you through a cool psychological experience.

But there's no additional depth to it, I see it as a horrors-of-bureacracy/system-vs-individual-themed amusement park attraction.

stepvhen• 8 years ago

I read The Trial, and I am an avid reader of literary fiction. I understand that the trial was published posthumously, and against Kafka's wishes. These facts track, for me, because I feel The Trial was unfinished, unpolished, and most of the time, not very good.

The whole time Joseph K. expounds his innocence, but still acts a total jerk to everybody he can, and at every opportunity. Being a jerk isn't exactly a crime, but its never clear what level of law the novel is operating on, and so its wholly reasonable to suspect K. is completely guilty, which changes the whole narrative (and for the worse)

The first chapter is wonderful and all that good "Kafkaesque" material people harp on about. Then the meeting with the priest where Kafka essentially provides a dialogue and commentary on one of his own short stories; enlightening, and entertaining. But past that nothing jives right.

The knowledge of his hecka abusive father doesnt serve the novel either. From the real world information, it only takes a few small adjustments to make The Trial as an allegory for child abuse, and the rationalizations and bitter remorse associated with it into adulthood. Kafka, as a person, was treated terribly for little to no reason, by an authority he was subject to. Kafka assumes his innocence, and presumes the authority was wrong, until eventually his mind is beaten down enough and the abused believes that the abuse is deserved. Not to mention the natual tendancy to assume parents, even abusive ones, arent actually as bad as they seem (to a child, at least). Goven tvat reading, the mystery of interpreting The Trial dissapates, and a grim and more common than desired account remains.

I guess my frustration with The Trial is not the novel itself, or Kafka himself, but the circumstances of its publication (which, again, in its shambolic presentation, show), and of the "prediction of future bueraucracy" ascribed to it, both factors external to the author.

But on subject, kafka is sorta funny. In a dark and/or cynical way. But I find him more sad and pitiful, both his work anf the author himself.

keiferski• 8 years ago

Try his short stories, especially A Hunger Artist, A Message from the Emperor, and In the Penal Colony.

leephillips• 8 years ago

And one of my favorite stories by any author, the 86-word "A Little Fable":

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/cgi-bin/version_printable.pl?sto...

cgag• 8 years ago

It was a long time ago but I think I just of felt like ok, I get it.

mtts• 8 years ago

I love Kafka and I think The Trial could have done with quite a bit of editing.

Try the stories instead. Many of those are very good. "The Metamorphosis" is an obvious starter candidate, as is "The Hunger Artist".

lurquer• 8 years ago

Probably my favorite author. The article and comments are dead-on: Kafka is humour. It's absurdist dead-pan humour. To 'get' Kafka, imagine it being read by a very stern and serious John Cleese.

dang2• 8 years ago

Max Brod: When Kafka read aloud himself, this humor became perfectly clear. Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness...

http://web2.law.buffalo.edu/faculty/westbrook/KafkaLaughter....

namirez• 8 years ago

I read The Trial a few years ago and found it a true masterpiece. I can understand that everyone doesn't share my opinion, but for me Kafka's stories hit too close to home. Many of us have been socially conditioned to have a false sense of autonomy and control, but this is not a universal and timeless phenomenon. If I were to chose my all time favorite authors, they would be Kafka and Camus.

hprotagonist4• 8 years ago

Kierkegaard is pretty great too. And much in the same vein.

AmericanChopper• 8 years ago

I’m not sure Kierkegaard would appreciate being compared to Camus in that way. They both worked on the same issues, but Kierkegaard was at the radical opposite end of the spectrum from Camus when it came to beliefs.

platz• 8 years ago

For me, The Metamorphosis was not very illuminating.

However, I very much liked Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_the_Singer,_or_the_M...

which I thought had very rich and subtle layers of complexity.

I also enjoyed "The Great Wall of China" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_of_China_(short... ) , even if I didn't quite understand it completely at the time that I read it, because it felt and reminded me very much like a Borges short story with it's detail and speculation.

m00dy• 8 years ago

Is it only me expecting Kafka streams instead of Franz Kafka ?

dang2• 8 years ago

Doubtless not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

anotherevan• 8 years ago

If I were wanting to start reading some of Kafka's works, what would you recommend I start with to ease into it?

xamuel2• 8 years ago

"The Metamorphosis" is the usual short story appetizer (often assigned in high school). "The Trial" is typically the introductory novel, though if you want to be a rebel you could start with "Amerika" instead. "The Castle" is the best novel but probably too difficult to start with unless you're already well-read.

ismail• 8 years ago

Wow shows how my thinking has changed. I own a few Kafka books that are probably in a box somewhere. Was an avid reader in my teens.

Yet when i read the title I expected a technical article on Kafka the software system. I last read Kafka so long ago I had completely forgotten about him.

Thanks for the reminder :)

galaxyLogic2• 8 years ago

The analysis of "Castle" in this article brings to my mind most religion. Religion offers us an absolute truth what you have to do to get saved and there is no room for doubt because then it could not be the absolute truth. If you start asking religious people what we should believe their religion truly claims to be the truth you will discover that they are just individual people who base their beliefs on their shared mirage of there being a single doctrine that is the truth. That is just make-believe but many people believe it and it takes on a life of its own and their beliefs govern their lives because they believe that other people above them in the hierarchy KNOW the truth.

It is not only that religion is a set of falsehoods, the belief that religious people have that there is a single true doctrine of the religion, and that there actually are people who truly believe and "KNOW" what that truth is, is also a falsehood which they willingly want to believe in order to gain some peace of mind in this universe.

So I wouldn't say that Kafka is anti-enlightenment, rather he is part of it, just version 2.0 of it.

lubujackson• 8 years ago

I always think of Kafka's writing as human logic vs. inscrutable systems, usually some bureaucratic organization. When people want an answer for how to read Kafka, the lack of a simple meaning seems to be the entire point, almost like the challenge of a koan.

econnor• 8 years ago

Great article. The entanglement of The Enlightenment in everyday thinking is the source of much confusion and irony. I imagine we'll grow out of it.

I'm reminded of a 1980s BBC film of Alan Bennett's "The Insurance Man" in which a Dr Kafka struggles with a claim and eventually end up helping his client by getting him a job at his uncle's factory. The ending is stunning: we linger on the beautifully photographed dust-filled air of the factory. Feel happy for the man. And learn that the uncle is in the asbestos business.

chenggiant• 8 years ago

Not the Kafka I thought...

How to read Kafka: part I

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