David Foster Wallace has a new book out: “Consider the Lobster and Other Essays.”
The title essay was originally commissioned by Gourmet, which sent Wallace to cover the Maine Lobster Festival, where he wrote an article that eventually ended up in The Best American Essays 2005. The initial essay in the book is a classic of deadpan humor — Wallace’s 48-page coverage of the annual Adult Video News Awards for best accomplishments in pornography.
Both of the essays are tour de forces of literary pyrotechnics, social commentary and moral perspective, filled with innumerable small gems (such as Wallace’s observation that “the relation between a Calvin Klein ad and a hard-core adult film is essentially the same as the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what is funny about that joke”).
But what gets Wallace mentioned in Jewish Current Issues is his remarkable essay on Kafka, entitled “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed” — a reflection on the difficulty of teaching students the humor in the following Kafka story (“A Little Fable”):
“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw the walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into. “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
Here is Wallace’s explication of the difficulty of teaching Kafka’s story, in which he manages to capture the essence of Kafka’s humor:
The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it — to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name Who for the interrogative pronoun who, and so on. And we all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling of not so much boredom as offense, as if something had been blasphemed. . . .
It is 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 that 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 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, and 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. Dast ist komisch.