Do You Find Kafka Funny?

            There are writers who can only be taken seriously by being taken a little less seriously. David Foster Wallace brilliantly recognized this about Kafka. He suggests that the most familiar stories are “radical literalizations” of truths we tend to think of as metaphorical (“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness”): ”The Metamorphosis” (“what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as creepy or gross, or say that he is forced to take shit as part of his job”), “In the Penal Colony” (“expressions like tongue-lashing or tore him a new asshole”), and “A Hunger Artist” (“tropes like starved for attention or love-starved or the double entendre in the term self-denial, or…the etymological root of anorexia …the Greek word for longing”). And John Updike reminds us in his foreword to The Complete Stories that Kafka, reading his stories aloud to his friends, sometimes laughed so hard he could not continue.

            Philip Rahv introduces the Modern Library edition of Selected Short Stories; he makes a lot of the autobiographical elements of father-son conflict in “The Judgment” (an invalid father pronounces a death sentence on his son, which the son then executes on himself) and “The Metamorphosis” and says Kafka’s achievement was his combination of “the recognizable and mysterious, extreme subjectivity of content with forms rigorously objective, a lovingly exact portrayal of the factual world with a dreamlike and magical dissolution of it.” He writes in 1952, before a name was given to magical realism.

            Updike says Kafka’s work is drenched in some features of modern anomie: a sense of anxiety and shame without a specific cause, a feeling that everything is immensely difficult, and an abnormal sensitivity as of exposed nerve endings.

            The Modern Library edition, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, has fifteen stories, including, besides the ones already mentioned, the very short pieces “A Common Confusion” (a nightmarish inability to connect with someone with whom we are trying to meet), “The New Advocate” (Alexander’s Bucephalus is now working in the law courts), “An Old Manuscript” (“the nomads from the North have taken over the narrator’s town) and “A Fratricide.” Aside from “The Metamorphosis” and “The New Advocate,” animals figure in and narrate a number of stories. “The Burrow” is described from the point of view of the burrowing, unnamed animal;  in “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” the mouse narrator is ambivalent about the value of Josephine, the only mouse who has ever been able to sing, to their community; an ape records his progress from apishness to humanness in “A Report to an Academy”; and “Investigations of a Dog” is an epistemological romp in which the dog in question tries to find out about his world, apparently unaware that his food, for instance, comes from humans…unaware, in fact, that there are such things as humans. “The Great Wall of China” was apparently designed by those almost incredibly remote in distance, authority, and time, to have gaps, even though these obviously give entry to those nomads from the North. “A Country Doctor” doesn’t seem able to control much of what happens to his servant girl or his patient. Finally, “The Hunter Gracchus,” though dead, has conversations about his life and death with the Burgomaster of Riva, who has come to visit his bier on board a boat in the harbor.

            In “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” (1934) Walter Benjamin makes an observation similar to David Foster Wallace’s about Kafka literalizing metaphors and sayings: “Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that we could almost regard them as enormous parasites.” Benjamin thought that we tend to overinterpret Kafka and thus miss the point, but I am not convinced that he found Kafka funny, as Wallace and Updike do.