Bugger Kafka

David Foster Wallace: Remarks on Kafka

“And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.

It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s Humour but that we’ve taught them to see humour as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. 

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 that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward Home is in fact our home.

It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. 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.”

1999

"There is nothing up there."

STANTZ :

Hey, where do these stairs go....?

[ Venkman strides purposefully the ruins  of the obliterated corner-penthouse apartment, conducts a visual inspection of the newly-manifested architectural feature and pronounces his finding on the structure. ]

VENKMAN :

They Go Up.

[ And so they do. ]