Laughing with Kafka

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TL;DR

Wallace's Harper's essay (July 1998), drawn from a March 1998 PEN American Center symposium speech on a new translation of Kafka's The Castle (later revised as "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed" in Consider the Lobster). It is Wallace criticism, not writing about Infinite Jest, but it is one of his most concentrated statements of the thesis the novel dramatizes: that a culture which trains people "to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance" also teaches them "that a self is something you just have" — and so cannot bear Kafka's central joke, that a human self is not given but is the terrible struggle to make one. Wallace grounds the failure in an American adolescence lived in terror of adulthood's "narrowing system of responsibilities," which it flees through drink, drugs, and reckless pleasure. The essay is thus a compact prose double of the entertainment-and-selfhood machinery of Infinite Jest.

Key claims

Kafka is funny, and students can't see it. For Wallace, "a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny". He grounds the difficulty in the fact that "great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common": both work by "exformation", a quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication, producing an explosion of associative connections within the recipient.
Explaining a joke empties it. Running a Kafka story "through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis" is "the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty".
Kafka's humor is culturally alien to American kids. "Kafka's humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary U.S. amusement": no recursive wordplay, body-function humor, sexual entendre, sitcom reversals; and his authority figures "are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once".
The only workable classroom tactic is to show that Kafka's funniness "depends on some kind of radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical" — "eat shit", "starved for attention", "tore me a new asshole" — and "that's why we call these figures of speech" the word "expressions".
The central Kafka joke. Students can't 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". The essay closes on the image of Kafka's art as a door we pound on desperate to enter, which finally opens — "and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along".
Diagnosis: entertainment as reassurance, self as a possession. The problem, Wallace argues, is not that students fail to "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". What "makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance" is exactly that training.
The adolescence footnote. Wallace argues "our present culture is, both developmentally and historically" adolescent; adolescence is "the single most stressful and frightening period of human development", when "the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations". Because "most of us Americans come to art essentially to forget ourselves", we want art that lets us escape — hence the "falling-down drinking and drugging and reckless driving and rampant fucking" of the terrified college student.

Theories & evidence

CONNECTION: "entertainment as reassurance" and art as self-forgetting — the discursive twin of the Entertainment's fatal escape

Crux: entertainment-lethality
Early text: Kafka's wit is inaccessible to "children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance", and "most of us Americans come to art essentially to forget ourselves". [sec. 9, fn 2] The claim is that entertainment's cultural function is anaesthetic escape.
IJ echo: The Entertainment / samizdat as escape-to-death — the medical attaché's fatal viewing and the cartridge's anatomy (scene 007, 029); the novel's whole thesis that fun engineered to let us forget ourselves is continuous with, not different in kind from, real television.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Postdates the novel (1998) but is the same argument as E Unibus Pluram, in Wallace's own voice at essay length: entertainment carried to its anaesthetic function. The essay raises no counter to it.

CONNECTION: "a self is something you just have" vs. the self as a struggle to be built — Hal's hollowness and AA's effortful selfhood

Crux: none
Early text: "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", which blinds them to the Kafka joke "that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle". [sec. 9]
IJ echo: The given-but-empty self of Hal, whose interior "I am in here" no longer reaches his surface (scene 001) and whose figurant meditation is a study in performed presence over absent self (scene 162); against it, the AA/White Flag discipline of building a self through effortful, un-ironic surrender (scene 074).
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: A selfhood continuity, not a plot crux. The self-as-possession vs. self-as-struggle axis maps the novel's Hal-vs-Gately poles.

CONNECTION: adolescent terror of "a narrowing system of responsibilities" fled through drink, drugs, and reckless pleasure — the addiction logic and E.T.A.'s frightened kids

Crux: none
Early text: Adolescence is "the single most stressful and frightening period of human development", when "the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations"; the American response is escape into "falling-down drinking and drugging and reckless driving and rampant fucking". [fn 2, 2a]
IJ echo: The addiction substrate entire — substances as flight from an unbearable interior (Kate Gompert's marijuana and the psychic pain she knows simply as "It", scene 135); the terrified adolescent athletes of Enfield Tennis Academy; the continuity the novel insists on between the pleasures that entertain and the pleasures that addict.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Diffuse across the novel rather than one scene; the addiction-as-escape continuity runs oeuvre-wide.

Themes

Entertainment and escape (the anaesthetic function of amusement); selfhood (given possession vs. effortful struggle); addiction and the terror it medicates; irony vs. sincerity (Kafka's reverent, "heroically sane" humor against ironic amusement); the pedagogy of reading (analysis as the machine that kills the rose).

Cross-references

dfw-borges-on-the-couch — the 2004 review that name-checks Kafka as the writer whose fiction makes artistic sense only as a manifestation of his psyche (the expressionist pole against Borges's impersonal metaphysics); the two essays bracket Wallace's theory of how fiction relates to a self.
dfw-my-appearance — the early fiction whose television people declare sincerity itself obsolete; the same irony-as-cultural-default that Kafka's reverent, "heroically sane" humor is set against here.

Notable passages

"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."
"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."
"Kafka's humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary U.S. amusement."
"the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations".