May 16, 2011
Laughing with Kafka
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.
From a speech given by David Foster Wallace in 1998 at a symposium to celebrate the publication of a translation of The Castle by Schocken Books.
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“You are born; you live; everyone does it,with an animal force of blindness. Woe unto you if you want the human gaze, if you want to know what’s happening to you.” Hélène Cixous