David Foster Wallace. Consider the Lobster

The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism "prepared," which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they come in ... whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle's rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster's fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature's claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over ("Consider the Lobster," pp. 247-48).

The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that 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 has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher's feelings at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad critical analysis -- plot to chart, symbols to decode, themes to exfoliate, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, 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. Franz Kafka, after all, is the story writer whose "Poseidon" imagines a sea god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sail or swim, and whose "In the Penal Colony" conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grace is a spike through the forehead (David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster [Back Bay Books, 2006], "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness," pp. 61-62.)

(I'm really sorry that it was only upon news of his untimely death that I picked up David Foster Wallace's brilliant, eclectic, and subversive collection of essays -- partly because it's ghoulish, but more partly because I've not had the past decade to get to know him better. At any rate, I think these essays are terrific: typically, "Consider the Lobster," which was supposed to be a review of the Maine Lobsterfest for Gourmet magazine, turns into an inquiry into animal cruelty, just as "Up, Simba," a remarkably prescient essay on the 2000 Presidential campaign of John McCain, turns into a manic meditation on the ways in which such campaigns strip human beings of their humanity. Among other things, the remaining essays hang out in Las Vegas at an annual porn awards event (same theme) and review Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage in order to distinguish levels of usage from Standard English. There's also a review of Tracy Austin's memoir, in order to ask how and why a tennis star can play so smart and sound so dumb. But he's terrifically disturbing too: it's like watching an extremely intelligent version of an 18th century scientist dissecting the nerves, ganglia, vessels, and innards of our post-modern society in search of the soul / truth, only to find it exasperatingly elusive and, inevitably, out of reach. His other collection of essays is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and yes, I know, he's most famous for his 1000-page + novel Infinite Jest, which I'm still working up the courage [and looking for the time] to read. Maybe next summer.)