Kafka Must Be Laughing From the Grave

I mentioned the other day that it was the 125th anniversary of Franz Kafka's birthday and that he had a much more humorous view of his work than do most of the high school and college teachers and professors who regularly hold forth on the literary enigma.

The Guardian is running a story about the secretary of Kafka's literary executor had horded parts of the writer's literary estate that the executor, Max Brod, had smuggled out of Prague before the Nazis could grab it. But she hadn't been forthcoming and had pretty much refused to let anyone see the material, including a publisher that had given her a five-figure sum in the 1980s to publish Brod's own diaries. The Israeli government has been after the documents as an important part of Jewish heritage, but even if they are made available, there may be some disappointments:

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulphuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe's damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until two years ago when health inspectors intervened after neighbours complained about the stench.

It's not a man turning into a giant bug, but it's pretty funny, if your humor turns toward the charred.

Happy Birthday, Franz Kafka - You Old Joker

Kafka would have been 125 today, and in all the years since the end of his short life, he's gotten a bum rap as dark and humorless. Yet, when I read the Metamorphosis some years ago, I found it hilarious ... in a black comic way, of course. Here's a guy who's spent his whole life trying to be and do what everyone else would not, eating the emotional refuse of the world, and he turns into a giant bug. A friend of mine at the time told me that Kafka actually saw a lot of his work as humor.

It seems that others think so as well. An entry in the Guardian's book blog goes into this very issue:

Kafka's friend, Max Brod, talked of how Kafka found humour in his dark works - especially the chilling "The Trial", which he thought a hoot, laughing so hard while reading the first chapter aloud, that he repeatedly had to stop to collect himself.

He revelled in the comic absurdity of his characters, whether the trapeze artist who never descends, the hunger artist who starves himself to death or the boy who wakes up to discover he has turned into a beetle. "It's terribly funny in a very direct way," says Hans-Gerd Koch, another Kafka specialist. "Gregor Samsa [in The Metamorphosis] turns into a beetle who crawls along the wall and tries to work out how he should pack his suitcase."

See? How could anyone take that overly seriously?