across the state of Illinois sat at their desks,curled over their pencils, stuck their tongues

.between their teeth, and wrote five-paragraphessays about wearing uniforms to school. Allexcept one. His essay began, "I never thoughtmuch about dancin' circles before today, but ifthat's what you want to know about, well, heregoes ... " And somewhere in North Carolina,some poor soul will reach into the stack of 500essays she will have to read that day. Four hun-dred and ninety-nine will be about wearinguniforms, and one won't. It will be "off topic."The IGAP rules say that it must receive thelowest possible score. But I wish I could watchher face when she reads that first line. If shekeeps reading and smiles, I know there mightbe hope for us.

[Remarks]

LAUGHING WITHKAFKA

From a speech given by David Foster Wallace inMarch at "Metamorphosis: A New Kafka," asymposium sponsored by the PEN American Cen-ter in New York City to celebrate the publication ofa new translation of The Castle by SchockenBooks. Wallace is a contributing editor of Harper'sMagazine; his short story "The Depressed Person"appeared in the January issue.

One reason for my willingness to speakpublicly on a subject for which I am sort of un-derqualified is that it affords me a chance to de-claim for you a short story of Kafka's that Ihave given up teaching in literature classes andmiss getting to read aloud. Its English title is"A Little Fable";

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growingsmallereveryday. At the beginning it was so bigthat Iwasafraid,Ikept running and running, andIwasgladwhen at last Isawwallsfar awayto theright and left, but these longwallshave narrowedso quickly that I am in the last chamber already,and there in the corner stands the trap that Imust run into." "Youonly need to changeyourdi-rection," said the cat, and ate it up.

For me, a signal frustration in trying to readKafka with college students is that it is next toimpossible to get them to see that Kafka is fun-ny ... Nor to appreciate the way funniness isbound up with the extraordinary power of hisstories. Because, of course, great short storiesand great jokes have a lot in common. Both

depend on what communication-theoristssometimes call "exformation," which is a cer-tain quantity of vital information removed frombut evoked by a communication in such a wayas to cause a kind of explosion of associativeconnections within the recipient. This is prob-ably why the effect of both short stories andjokes often feels sudden and percussive, likethe venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not fornothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "ahatchet with which we chop at the frozen seasinside us." Nor is it an accident that the tech-nical achievement of great short stories is oftencalled "compression"-for both the pressureand the release are already inside the reader.What Kafka seems able to do better than justabout anyone else is to orchestrate the pres-sure's increase in such a way that it becomesintolerable at the precise instant it is released.

The psychology of jokes helps account forpart of the problem in teaching Kafka. We allknow that there is no quicker way to empty ajoke of its peculiar magic than to try to ex-plain it-to point out, for example, that LouCostello is mistaking the proper name "Who"for the interrogative pronoun "who," etc. Weall know the weird antipathy such explana-tions arouse in us, a feeling not so much ofboredom as offense, like something has beenblasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher'sfeeling at running a Kafka story through thegears of your standard undergrad-course liter-ary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode,etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique po-sition to appreciate the irony of submitting hisshort stories to this kind of high-efficiencycritical machine, the literary equivalent oftearing the petals off and grinding them upand running the goo through a spectrometer toexplain why a rose smells so pretty.! Franz Kaf-ka, after all, is the writer whose story "Posei-don" imagines a sea-god so overwhelmed withadministrative paperwork that he never gets tosailor swim, and whose "In the Penal Colony"conceives description as punishment and tor-ture as edification and the ultimate critic as aneedled harrow whose coup de grftce is a spikethrough the forehead.

Another handicap, even for gifted students,is that-unlike, say, Joyce's or Pound's-theexformative associations Kafka's work createsare not intertextual or even historical. Kafka'sevocations are, rather, unconscious and almostsub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from whichmyths derive; this is why we tend to call evenhis weirdest stories nightmarish rather than sur-real. Not to mention that the particular sort offunniness Kafka deploys is deeply alien to kidswhose neural resonances are American. Thefact is that Kafka's humor has almost none of

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the particular forms and codes of contemporaryU.S. amusement. There's no recursive word-play or verbal stunt-pilotrv, little in the way ofwisecracks or mordant lampoon. There is nobody-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual en-tendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offend-ing convention. No Pynchonian slapstick withbanana peels or rapacious adenoids. No Roth-ish satyriasis or Barthish meta parody or archWoody-Allen ish kvetching. There are none ofthe ba-bing ba-bang reversals of modern sit-coms; nor are there precocious children or pro-fane grandparents or cynically insurgent co-workers. Perhaps most alien of all, Kafka'sauthority figures are never just hollow buffoonsto be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scaryand sad all at once, like "In the PenalColony'''s Lieutenant.

My point is not that his wit is too subtle forU.S. students. In fact, the only halfway effec-tive strategy I've come up with for exploringKafka's funniness in class involves suggestingto students that much of his humor is actuallysort of unsubtle, or rather anti-subtle. Theclaim is that Kafka's funniness depends onsome kind of radical literalization of truths wetend to treat as metaphorical. I opine to themthat some of our deepest and most profoundcollective intuitions seem to be expressible on-ly as figures of speech, that that's why we callthese figures of speech "expressions." With re-

From Funny Times.

26 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / JULY 1998

spect to The Metamorphosis, then, I might in-vite students to consider what is really beingexpressed when we refer to someone as"creepy" or "gross" or say that somebody wasforced to "eat shit" in his job. Or to reread "Inthe Penal Colony" in light of expressions like"tonguelashing" or "She sure tore me a newasshole" or the gnomic "By a certain age,everybody has the face he deserves." Or to ap-proach "A Hunger Artist" in terms of tropeslike "starved for attention" or "love-starved" orthe double entendre in the term "self-denial,"or even as innocent a factoid as that the ety-mological root of "anorexia" happens to be theGreek word for longing.

The students usually end up engaged here,which is great, but the teacher still sort ofwrithes with guilt, because the comedy-as-liter-alization-of-metaphor tactic doesn't begin tocountenance the deeper alchemy by whichKafka's comedy is always also tragedy, and thistragedy always also an immense and reverentjoy. This usually leads to an excruciating hourduring which I backpedal and hedge and warnstudents that, for all their wit and exformativevoltage, Kafka's stories are not fundamentallyjokes, and that the rather simple and lugubri-ous gallows humor which marks so many ofKafka's personal statements-stuff like his"There is hope, but not for us"-is not what hisstories have got going on.

What Kafka's stories have, rather, is agrotesque and gorgeous and thoroughly modemcomplexity. Kafka's humor-not only not neu-rotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane-is, fi-nally, a religious humor, but religious in themanner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and thePsalms, a harrowing spirituality against whicheven Ms. O'Connor's bloody grace seems a lit-tle bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.

And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka'swit inaccessible to children whom our culturehas trained to see jokes as entertainment andentertainment as reassurance) It's not thatstudents don't "get" Kafka's humor but thatwe've taught them to see humor as somethingyou get-the same way we've taught them thata self is something you just have. No wonderthey cannot appreciate the really central Kaf-ka joke-that the horrific struggle to establisha human self results in a self whose humanityis inseparable from that horrific struggle. Thatour endless and impossible journey towardhome is in fact our home. It's hard to put intowords up at the blackboard, believe me. Youcan tell them that maybe it's good they don't"get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine hisart as a kind of door. To envision us readerscoming up and pounding on this door, pound-ing and pounding, not just wanting admission

This photogmph of a drama class at Volterra Prison in Siena, Italy, was taken by Italian artist Alex Majoli. His series of prison photographs ap-peared in Dazed & Confused, a monthly magazine published in London.

but needing it, we don't know what it is but wecan feel it, this total desperation to enter,pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That,finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward:we've been inside what we wanted all along.Das ist komisch.1 A more grad-schoolish literary-theory-type machine, onthe other hand, is designed to yield the conclusion that onehas been deluded into imagining there was any scent in thefirst place.

2 There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press booksto be written on the particular kzllating function humorserves at this point in the U.S. psyche. Nonetheless, acrude but concise way to put the whole thing is that ourpresent culture is, both developmentally and historically,"adolescent."Since adolescenceis pretty much acknowledgedto be the single most stressful and frightening period of hu-man development-the stage when the adulthood we claimto crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing sys-tem of responsibilities and limitations2a-it's not difficultto see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and en-tertainment whose primary function is to "escape." Jokesare a kind of art, and since most of us Americans come toart essentiallyto forget ourselves-to pretend for a while thatwe're not mice and all walls are parallel and the cat can beoutrun--it's no accident that we're going to see "A UttleFable" as not all that funny, in fact as maybe being the ex-act sort of downer-type death-and-taxes thing for which"real" humor serves as a respite.

2a You think it's a coincidence that it's in college that mostAmericans do their most serious falling-down drinking anddrugging and reckless driving and rampant fucking andmindless general Dionysian-type reveling?It's not. They'readolescents, and they're terrified, and they're dealing withtheir terror in a distinctively American way. Those naked/xryshangingupside down out of theirfrat-house' s windowson Friday night are simply trying to get a few hours' escapefrom the stuff that any decent collegehasforced them to thinkabout all week.

[Account]

CHRONIC PUBLICITYSYNDROMEFrom a "Diary" by Elaine Showalter in the April 2London Review of Books. Showalter is a fn'ofes-SOT of EngUsh at Princeton University.

Last spring, I began receiving deaththreats-all of them from people with chronicfatigue syndrome. The threats came as I em-barked upon a cross-country tour to promotemy book Hystories, which had just been pub-lished by Columbia University Press. In thebook, I argue that several contemporary phe-nomena---chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf Warsyndrome, recovered memory, multiple person-ality disorder, satanic ritual abuse, and alienabduction-are hysterical epidemics, real disor-ders but caused by psychological conflictsrather than viruses, nerve gas, devil worshipers,or extraterrestrials.

A CFIDS (chronic fatigue immune dysfunc-tion syndrome) action site on the Web called"Handling Showalter" provided a long list ofinstructions for activists wishing to confrontme in public and a regularly updated list of ad-dresses for bookstores where I would be speak-ing. "Yesterday I phoned CFIDS leaders inevery city along Showalter's book tour for thisweek," wrote Roger Burns, the site coordinator,"so hopefully she will be challenged every-

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