“HOW STRANGE to return to Kafka. It takes just a few pages for all our preconceptions about literature to become unmoored. The old tools — character, plot, style — are useless to us; those solemn tomes of theory might as well be returned to their exile on the lower shelves; the recourse to undergraduate Freudianism had better be checked. None of it will guide us here. Erich Heller once wrote of the “pathetic plight of critics in the face of Kafka’s novels.” How one sympathizes! Kafka’s entire oeuvre is an assault on interpretation, on meaning; it is the most formidable rebuttal in the history of literature to the undying but misguided question: “What does this text mean?””
“And yet, ironically, few authors are so burdened with the cargo of meaning as Kafka.”
“He either founded a new genre or dissolved all of them. Kafka himself seemed to intuit this: “I am the end or the beginning,” he wrote.”
“Erich Heller, who, like Kafka, became a doctor of law at the German University in Prague, makes a strong case for the central paradox of Kafka’s writing in his canonical essay on The Castle (collected in 1952’s The Disinherited Mind).”
“The remote and absent figure of authority, the endless bureaucratic encumbrances, the futility of hope — “A Message from the Emperor,” like its sister-parable “Before the Law,” compresses into a few pages the most familiar hallmarks of that dreaded and diluted term, the Kafkaesque — promiscuously used these days to describe even the most trivial inconveniences, like dealing with Verizon. Happily, the term has recently been given a new lease on life by Reiner Stach (whose third and final volume of Kafka’s biography was just released by Princeton University Press); he usefully identifies it as a “peculiar form of rhetoric, which obscures the situation with analytical precision.””
“One is also reminded here that Kafka is anything but an obscure and impenetrable writer. He is a modernist, I suppose, but you could know nothing of Joyce and Pound and Eliot and still revel in the perfectly formed and invitingly strange world of his fiction.”
“When I first read “The Metamorphosis” at 15, not knowing anything about Kafka or modernism or literature in general (you couldn’t pay me, then, to read a book), I felt that I had either just read the most unsettling story ever written, or had been the butt of a massive joke. Probably that is exactly the reaction a Kafka story should induce in its reader.”
“His fiction is a comedy of proportions and incongruities.”
“Kafka makes the inexplicable and the absurd darkly funny. Sudden transformations, arbitrary arrests, messages stuck forever in transit — we laugh at them, but our laughter is hardly frivolous; it is the laughter of exhaustion, of incredulity, a last-ditch attempt to wrest something from a silent and inscrutable cosmos.”
“Because tragedy is always withheld or even denied in Kafka’s writing (it is always too late, as Michael Hofmann said about “Kafka-time,” but the worst has not yet happened), there is something perpetual about Kafka’s comedy. We seem to oscillate between laughter and despair — and even, on occasion, to confuse them.”
“This is a comedy that, as David Foster Wallace once pointed out, has little in common with the contemporary idea of laughter as entertainment and reassurance, precisely because it resists closure and comfort. Kafka here occasionally sounds like Kierkegaard, of whom he spoke in his diaries as being “on the same side of the world” as he was — in particular the Kierkegaard who asked: “What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?””
““My laughter is a concrete wall,” Kafka told his young admirer Gustav Janouch. “Against whom?” Janouch inquired. “Naturally, against myself,” Kafka responded:
A blow at the world is always a blow at oneself. For that reason, every concrete wall is only an illusion, which sooner or later crumbles away. For Inner and Outer belong to each other. Divided, they become two bewildering aspects of a mystery we endure but can never solve.”