Lit Geek Update #14: Kafka, Funny?

I mean, the thought of Kafka as funny never, ever occurred to me, in all my readings of him. I pored through his stories with unabashed earnestness, approaching them with utmost thoughtfulness. Man's essential solitude and loneliness have been his central themes, all throughout, have they not?

I--and most of us, I'd presume--would turn out to be mistaken, apparently. In the initial paragraphs of "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness," the third essay from David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster And Other Essays:, he writes:

"...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 power of his stories." -p. 61-

And I spent more than half an hour mulling over these lines:

"No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." -p. 64-

I rearranged the ideas in several different ways, tried to twist the logic to see if it would give, caught a headache in the process, finally decided I'd had enough, then went back to it with a firm resolve not to give up until I could roll the words of the simplest paraphrase in my tongue as comfortably as I can. Eventually, and thankfully, I succeeded.

What a feat!

And then I read the passage to a friend, asked him to turn the lines around his head, then tell me what he thought about it.

I'm guessing he went through the same thing I did.
=)

Wallace ends the essay with these superb lines:

"You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward--we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch." -p.65-