A fellowship of writers, including David Foster Wallace, loyal to free expression and the movement of literature marked the publication by Schocken Books of a new translation of "The Castle" by Franz Kafka by sponsoring a night of homage and examination of Kafka on March 26th, 1998. DFW's speech can be found in Harper'sMagazine under the "Remarks" section in the July 1998 issue.

"Laughing with Kafka" ends with the German saying, "Das ist komisch" which holds a loose translation of, "That's really funny." DFW's concern is that most American students don't recognize the humor he finds abundant in Kafka's writing because they've been conditioned to recognize only limited types of humor. This makes teaching Kafka's special brand of humor nearly impossible. "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" (26). The undertone of this speech lies within the footnotes. (I'm curious to know if he interrupted himself to read them, 1, 2, and 2a.) In Wallace's opinion our culture, "...has trained (children) to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance" (26). It seems humor has a reassuring, calming effect. Humor has become an escape mechanism in contemporary society and art. Students don't see humor as a way to engage with and challenge society or oneself, but as an escape from the knowledge that comes with becoming an adult. Footnore 2 points to the fact that college is the first expereince many students have with life being hard. In college, because students are being challenged to think about things in ways they never have before, they may start to see for the first time the power mechanisms working in society as well as theinevitablelimitations anddisappointmentssociety offers. And so the "...naked boys hanging upside down out of their frat house's windows on Friday night" (27), is actually a type of self-revelation. Kafka's humor is woven and based in the tragic humor only real life can offfer. Kafka presents life's tragic irony as comedy, and students don't want to recognize this type of humor. It's more real than simple potty humor, or slapstick. Maybe it's too real.

Infinite Jest has two early Kafka references. I think of Kafka, I think of The Metamorphosis. Hal is, "having these-Kafkaesque interfaces with this man day after day, week after week" (254). He's being asked to look at himself in a new way. His defense mechanism is to beat the system, so to speak, by learning the ways of a therapist. I found this passage relevant to IJ:





work cited

Wallace, David Foster. "Laughing with Kafka." Harper's Magazine. July 1998. 23-27

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996.