8 ms·

How to read Kafka: part I

141 points by agronaut 8y ago

hprotagonist 8y ago
David Foster Wallace's talk "Laughing with Kafka" is very insightful as well. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf 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.
- newman8r 8y 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.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    penal colony, a hunger artist.
    - newman8r 8y ago
      Those sound good here's a link I found to 'In the Penal Colony' for anyone interested http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf
  - galaxyLogic 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel)
  - mturmon 8y ago
    My very favorite extremely short piece of Kafka's writing - just one magical sentence: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka_the_wish_to_be_a_red_indian 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_the_street_window 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_resolutions 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.
    - david927 8y ago
      Wow! I've never seen these works and they're brilliant. You've made my day! And, yes, the final piece is perfectly what DFW was talking about.
- nyolfen 8y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ
- jessup 8y 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 http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html
aportnoy 8y ago
I've read The Trial and couldn't help but think that Kafka is overrated.
- dpwm 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
  - aportnoy 8y 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.
    - westoncb 8y ago
      Are you more of a Philip Roth fan? ;)
    - xamuel 8y ago
      >no additonal depth I disagree. It has many different layers of meaning. Besides the plain reading on the face of it, you can also read it in the context of Kafka's own relationship with his father. Or you can read it through the Christian lens, where suddenly instead of an innocent good guy in a dystopic nightmare, the protagonist is a stubborn sinner who refuses to admit his guilt and submit for redemption. And so on and so forth. You can even read the chapters out of order, with the exception of the first and last. It's really a remarkable novel!
lurquer 8y 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.
- dang 8y 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.htm http://web2.law.buffalo.edu/faculty/westbrook/KafkaLaughter....
namirez 8y 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.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  Kierkegaard is pretty great too. And much in the same vein.
  - AmericanChopper 8y 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.
    - hprotagonist 8y ago
      yes. they serve as nice counterweights for existentialism.
platz 8y 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_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_story) 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 8y ago
Is it only me expecting Kafka streams instead of Franz Kafka ?
- dang 8y ago
  Doubtless not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
anotherevan 8y ago
If I were wanting to start reading some of Kafka's works, what would you recommend I start with to ease into it?
- xamuel 8y 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 8y 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 :)
galaxyLogic 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
Not the Kafka I thought...

141 points by agronaut 8y ago

David Foster Wallace's talk "Laughing with Kafka" is very insightful as well. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf 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.

newman8r 8y 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.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  penal colony, a hunger artist.
  - newman8r 8y ago
    Those sound good here's a link I found to 'In the Penal Colony' for anyone interested http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf
- galaxyLogic 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel)
- mturmon 8y ago
  My very favorite extremely short piece of Kafka's writing - just one magical sentence: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka_the_wish_to_be_a_red_indian 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_the_street_window 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_resolutions 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.
  - david927 8y ago
    Wow! I've never seen these works and they're brilliant. You've made my day! And, yes, the final piece is perfectly what DFW was talking about.
nyolfen 8y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ
jessup 8y 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 http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html

aportnoy 8y ago

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

dpwm 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
- aportnoy 8y 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.
  - westoncb 8y ago
    Are you more of a Philip Roth fan? ;)
  - xamuel 8y ago
    >no additonal depth I disagree. It has many different layers of meaning. Besides the plain reading on the face of it, you can also read it in the context of Kafka's own relationship with his father. Or you can read it through the Christian lens, where suddenly instead of an innocent good guy in a dystopic nightmare, the protagonist is a stubborn sinner who refuses to admit his guilt and submit for redemption. And so on and so forth. You can even read the chapters out of order, with the exception of the first and last. It's really a remarkable novel!

lurquer 8y 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.

dang 8y 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.htm http://web2.law.buffalo.edu/faculty/westbrook/KafkaLaughter....

namirez 8y 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.

hprotagonist 8y ago
Kierkegaard is pretty great too. And much in the same vein.
- AmericanChopper 8y 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.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    yes. they serve as nice counterweights for existentialism.

platz 8y 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_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_story) 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 8y ago

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

dang 8y ago
Doubtless not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

anotherevan 8y ago

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

xamuel 8y 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 8y 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 :)

galaxyLogic 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago

Not the Kafka I thought...