In David Foster Wallace’s 1999 essay “Some Remarks
on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” Wallace
asserts:
[…]great short stories and great jokes have a lot
in common. Both depend on what
communications 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 orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it
becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released (61).
With this in mind, analyze the role humor plays in
“In the Penal Colony” and “A Report From an Academy.”
Granted, this is a difficult task I’ve set in front of you, but it should
be rewarding. As Wallace reminds us
further, the difficulty of understanding comedy and Kafka might just be
that:
[…] the particular kind of funniness Kafka deploys
is deeply alien to students whose neural resonances are American. The fact is that Kafka’s humor has almost
none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary US amusement. There’s no recursive wordplay or verbal
stunt-pilotry, little in the way of wisecracks or mordant lampoon. There is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor
sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention […]
There are none of the ba-bing-ba-bang reversals of modern sitcoms; nor are there
precocious children or profane grandparents or cynically insurgent
coworkers. Perhaps most alien of all,
Kafka’s authority figures are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but
are always absurd and scary and sad all at once (62-3).
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to
comment quite intelligently on the relation between jokes and short stories on a
larger scale, but let’s keep these posts to Kafka. Oh, and for those of you thinking, “These
stories were funny?!” humor is but
one aspect of Kafka’s writing, and one that doesn’t get enough attention if you
ask me. We’ll discuss many other aspects
of these stories in class.
While the vast majority of Franz Kafka’s work is ostensibly gloomy, one could validly argue many of his stories are quite humorous. For example, Kafka’s use of sarcasm shines brilliantly in “A Report for an Academy”. When the ape-turned-man narrator of the story “reminisces” of his days on the steamship, he seems to do so with fondness; as the story progresses however, it becomes increasingly more obvious he was not too happy with the way he was treated. In my opinion, it’s the nonchalant manner in which he recounts the horrific events brought on by these humans that makes the story funny. I mean, it would be absurd to think the narrator actually believes those men to be “good people” after they shot him twice, spit on him, burned him with pipes, repeatedly mocked him, and forced him into consciousness! The story is just awash with blatant sarcasm.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” bears a comical undertone. The Officer, a seemingly respected, albeit deranged, character gushes on and on about a torture/killing machine in use during the former Commandant’s reign and the “transfiguration” the prisoners go through while in the machine (because of the lengthy period it takes to kill them). It is the last time the apparatus is to be used, and the officer is explicit in his distaste for that fact. He believes the machine brings justice to the prisoners on which it is used and can’t imagine why the new Commandant would want to use any other method of punishment. The story takes an ironic turn when the officer decides to end his life in his beloved machine in order to go through the same sort of spiritual transformation as its previous victims. The machine works by inscribing the prisoner’s wrongdoings into his chest, then instantly killing him. The officer chose the phrase “be just” as his inscription. Instead of inscribing the officer and quickly killing him, the machine repeatedly stabs him and turns his body into a bloody pulp. While that is extremely graphic and just…appalling, it is possible to pull some humor from it. So he wants his inscription to be “be just”; well, in my opinion, the machine is just obeying his orders. The officer was a despicable man, one who reveled in torture and the pain of others. I feel the machine gave him exactly the sort of end he deserved. It's also sort of funny how the only reason he went in there to die was for the spiritual transformation, but he was brutally murdered before he even came close to that.
I'm going to give this one a "Booyakasha" bordering on "Word to your mother." Other things to think about: 1) What's the relationship between sarcasm and irony in "A Report...?" 2) Consider the ape's doubly ironic stance on human freedom and desire for "a way out." Does this play into your reading of his sarcastic stance on his human captors in any way? Think about it. Regardless... "Even to you, esteemed [students...], I have only made a report."
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