What use does Franz Kafka make of grotesque humour in his shorter fiction?
In reading Kafka’s fiction, humour is not necessarily the first feeling aroused. Although he is not a comic author, Kafka certainly had a sense of humour. That humour is nourished by a deep psychological searching for the answers to manifold metaphysical questions, and an insatiable curiosity for humanity’s idiosyncrasies.
Kafka constantly probes our understanding of the world and of ourselves; in his shorter fiction the discomforting and intriguing atmosphere created is further concentrated. Although his humour is often overlooked (if noticed at all), it is in stories such as The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony and The Burrow that his ability to wield tragicomedy is most evident. The terms ‘humour’ and ‘grotesque’ are misleading here, especially in translation Kafka was, after all, ‘a Czech Jew who wrote in German’.
His use of simple language denotes his awareness that language is an inadequate tool with which to communicate truly accurate renderings of our thoughts and feelings; it is therefore very apt that his humour be named grotesque in that ‘grotesque’ often describes that which cannot be described. The challenge of explaining the human condition is what motivated Kafka; the wry kind of amusement his fiction rouses is so disturbing and exhilarating because it plumbs the depths of our psyches and causes us to look at an enlarged world and our own laughable position within it. As Kayser noted in his renowned observances about the grotesque, it is the ‘annihilating idea’ of grotesque that makes it an essential part of humour.
In this sense, Kafka is not the kind of author who cracks jokes, at least, not obvious ones. The Kafkaesque experience is one in which ‘the every day becomes uncanny, weird and anxiety-ridden’, and this explanation can also be used to define our reaction to all things grotesque. The humour in The Metamorphosis is intangible; the joke of a man turning into a huge beetle extreme; but this absurdity is amusing precisely because it is difficult to comprehend. Kafka asks us to suspend our disbelief, as is required of us when we come face-to-face with grotesque images, when Gregor Samsa maintains his human mind even as he scuttles about in his transformed body.
Precisely why this is funny is another question altogether. In determining Kafka’s use of grotesque humour it is necessary to note that the darkly comic element of his short stories, for instance with the story In The Penal Colony where the Officer’s own perverted notion of justice is turned upon him, invades our taboos. Secular societies are conditioned to exist within a set frame, which doesn’t allow much acceptance of ‘the other’; this then becomes taboo and subsequently ‘a source of anxiety, horror, astonishment, laughter or revulsion’. So Gregor Samsa’s seeping, creeping dirty insect invades our sense of propriety and, breaking the frame, both repels and attracts us. Grotesque humour relies on our sense of fascination with what is outside our understanding or approval; and laughter is often a reaction to the consequent disbelief.
Kafka’s humour is, of course, also ironic. Again, the levels of irony are extreme and the multitude of symbols so poetically employed in the short stories amplifies our emotional reaction. The painful truth keeps us grimacing in humoured angst when, for example, Gregor ‘turns into an enormous vermin in order to avoid having to face the unpleasantness of going to his job’. The story twists our sense of humour to the extreme in the grim irony that only in death does Gregor gain the respect and honour he has always sought from his family. This is just to touch on the way in which Kafka prompts his readers to look at the most fundamental questions and ironies of human life as will be discussed later.
Grotesqueness, like Kafka’s literature as a whole, does not at first seem inherently funny. The very notion depends on its ability to cross boundaries such as those we create with taboos but grotesqueness remains so fascinating because of its scarcity. ‘The mind does not long tolerate such affronts to its classificatory systems’, so what seems ambiguous and unusual must ‘break down the strange into the usual’. Too many strange bodies and immoral torture implements would cause us to realign our boundaries and eventually accept such things as categorised and part of life, but just enough of them in our familiar environment will keep us questioning them and their reasons for existence, and ours in turn. That Gregor Samsa turns into a beetle in his bed, at home, surrounded by the everyday is an example of Kafka’s use of grotesque humour. Because we recognise the situation, its disruption by something outside our normal experience is essentially a comic act. Kafka offers a changed view of a world we already know, and his short stories therefore take a somewhat parodic form. The situation is so close to what we know that, even with a man sized beetle in the bedroom, we feel comfortable enough to laugh.
This notion that we are able to laugh at Kafka’s fiction because it is strange but recognisable is supported by various stalwart experts of grotesque and gothic fiction, namely Kayser, who suggested that ‘the grotesque is always a civil war of attraction and repulsion’. In comparing the use of grotesque humour in both Dickens and Kafka, Spilka identifies the traits of the grotesque as ‘distortion of the external scene, fusion of human and animal shapes, and mingling of reality and dream. These strange effects rouse laughter, horror and perplexity, with laughter serving to diminish horror and perplexity and so make the nightmare scene more bearable’. In this case, laughter seems to be an emotional reaction to a disturbance of the understanding, and it is true to say that we are attracted to Kafka’s perverse images because of their challenge to our notions of correctness.
Freud often described this attraction to comedy (especially comedy containing sexual or excretory jokes) as a regression to childhood; this is true of Kafka in that, as discussed, his grotesque humour breaks adult taboos that children would not have yet formed. But precisely because it is grotesque, because it is strange yet familiar, Kafka’s humour ‘attempts to reveal the human spirit, alive and responsive in the cage of its own making’. Freud’s notion of humour as regressive is belittled by the depth of Kafka’s portrayal of humanity; and in defence of this position, Bergson theorised that the grotesque ‘affirms the assertive spirit in the very process of reduction’. Therefore, we can laugh reassured in the knowledge that ultimately we will transcend our restricted environment, just as the creature hopes in The Burrow. The invasion of the grotesque, the very thing that repulses and frightens us, can actually free us of our own limiting experience even if, like Gregor Samsa, that freedom comes only in death.
In presenting ‘the exceptional or marginal, rather than the merely conventional’ in his short stories, Kafka asks us to enlarge our thinking and face the difficult challenge of understanding the world better. This doesn’t seem inherently funny or comic either, but is actually what humour is all about. The ability to laugh at oneself is crucial when dealing with the ‘unrelenting strangeness of our culture’. Kafka’s grotesqueries help us look at ourselves in an enlarged environment that is deadly if taken too seriously. There is light-hearted humour within the growing friendship between convict and soldier in In The Penal Colony, despite the grim goings-on and the threat to the convict’s life; wry laughter is roused by the knowledge that, even as The Burrow’s creature says ‘I live peacefully in the innermost recess of my house and meanwhile, slowly and silently, the enemy is burrowing towards me from somewhere or other’ we know that enemy is inside the protective home he makes; Kafka invites us to share his view that we must gather all the enjoyment we can out of life or risk wasting the time we have in worrying about being pointless beings.
Although it is far easier to feel the despair in Kafka’s short fiction than it is to laugh at it, there is much scope for us to look at and laugh at ourselves; humans as a whole. That Kafka turns to animal grotesqueries is a sign of his intentions to remind us of how humanity is trapped in its animal past. Grotesque humour often employs animal imagery, and applied to Kafka, this kind of humour could be seen as ‘an attempt to visualise a world in which the spirit operates in fleshly prisons’. We see ourselves as so advanced and civilized that a grotesque subversion of this into animalism shows us in an essentially tragic light; man as ‘the fumbling, half-baked hybrid stuck fast between the animal and the spiritual’. This aspect of Kafka’s humour is, of course, not an uproariously funny trait but, as Neider himself stated, ‘Kafka’s humour is the humour of pain, with empathy for the tragic object’ Kafka is occupied with the fine art of tragicomedy, which shows humankind to be embroiled in both a tragic and pointless life that can be resurrected by the ability to see humour therein.
Kafka’s humour is not generous; it is that of ‘the awful, of disease’, more a painful and knowing humour. Brod described the kind of reluctant laughter that Kafka’s fiction extorts as the laughter of angels. This innocent, deeply knowledgeable humour does not deny tragedy, it seeks to free the reader from being dominated by the depressive thoughts which so hounded Kafka himself as he struggled to answer metaphysical questions.
Of course, the humour aroused by Kafka is uncomfortable for these very reasons, because it knows tragedy, and compared to the dark but warming sense of humour found in Dickens Kafka’s short stories do not leave us completely without nightmares. But Kafka’s searching personality infuses his fiction with a humanity that cannot be felt, for example, in Dickens. Because the metaphysical questions are asked so urgently throughout his short fiction, the ‘spiritual void more keenly felt, and the conscious self more isolated’, Kafka shows an acute understanding of human psychology so can tap into our fundamental interpretation of the world. Whilst his shorter fiction does demonstrate a whole appreciation of humanity, it is the necessity of finding humour within the tragic plight of humanity that shines through the darkness of his subject matter.
References
Anders, G. Frank Kafka. London: Bowes and Bowes: 1960
Brod, M. The Biography of Franz Kafka. Bloomsbury, W.C: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd.: 1947
Collignon, J. ‘Kafka’s Humour’ in Yale French Studies journal. No. 19: 1955. p.53 - 62
Harpham, G. ‘The Grotesque: First Principles’ in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 4, No. 34: 1976. p. 461 - 468
Kafka, F. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. London: Penguin: 2000.
Kayser, W. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. New York, Guildford: Columbia University Press: 1981
Kort, P (ed.). Comic grotesque: wit and mockery in German art, 1870-1940. Munich, London: Prestel: 2004
MacAndrew, E. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York, Columbia University Press: 1979.
Neider, C. The Frozen Sea. New York: Oxford University Press: 1948
Pascal, R. The German Novel: Studies. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1956
Preece, J (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2000
Spilka, M. Dickens and Kafka: a mutual interpretation. London: Dennis Dobson: 1963
Tags: animalism, culture, fiction, Franz Kafka, grotesque, humour, metamorphosis, strangeness
