Free Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace Page A

we tend to treat as metaphorical. I opine to them that some of our most profound collective intuitions seem to be expressible only as figures of speech, that that’s why we call these figures of speech
expressions
. With respect to “The Metamorphosis,” then, I might invite students to consider 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. Or to reread “In the Penal Colony” in light of expressions like
tongue-lashing
or
tore him a new asshole
or the gnomic “By middle age, everyone’s got the face they deserve.” Or to approach “A Hunger Artist” in terms of tropes like
starved for attention
or
love-starved
or the double entendre in the term
self-denial,
or even as innocent a factoid as that the etymological root of
anorexia
happens to be the Greek word for longing.
    The students usually end up engaged here, which is great; but the teacher still sort of writhes with guilt, because the comedy-as-literalization-of-metaphor tactic doesn’t begin to countenance the deeper alchemy by which Kafka’s comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an immense and reverent joy. This usually leads to an excruciating hour during which I backpedal and hedge and warn students that, for all their wit and exformative voltage, Kafka’s stories are
not
fundamentally jokes, and that the rather simple and lugubrious gallows humor that marks so many of Kafka’s personal statements—stuff like “There is hope, but not for us”—is not what his stories have got going on.
    What Kafka’s stories have, rather, is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, “unconscious,” which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul. Kafka’s humor—not only not neurotic but
anti
-neurotic, heroically sane—is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
    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. 3 It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor 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

“Save up to 50%, and More!” Between you and I. On accident. Somewhat of a. Kustom Kar Kare Autowash. “The cause was due to numerous factors.” “Orange Crush—A Taste That’s All It’s Own.” “Vigorex: Helping men conquer sexual issues.” “Equal numbers of both men and women opposed the amendment.” Feedback. “As drinking water becomes more and more in short supply.” “IMATION—Borne of 3M Innovation.” Point in time. Time frame. “At this point in time, the individual in question was observed, and subsequently apprehended by authorities.” Here for you, there for you.
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