First time through a work: Knife in the gut. Then twist. More than once.
Second time reading through: You start to think that you're figuring out and begin to gain appreciation for his handiwork.
Third time through: Angst and annoyance at Kafka for writing something so ambiguous. There is no fourth time through, because you are too disgusted by now
(note: Reading Kafka for more than the first time through tends to have a dehumanizing effect on the reader, for he must stop empathizing with the characters and think straight to Kafka. This is too bad, but I think it's enevitable, unless you want to wallow in #1, in which case you will have no more gut in a few short minutes)
Joking aside, I am really enjoying my study of Kafka. He makes some interesting points (which those less than sure in their Faith in God might find to be heretical to the point of avoidance), but I think his two great strengths are the fluidity of his work and the whimsical machinery of his logic. Sometimes, he just sat down and wrote whatever came. This is very much alike to my own writing style (note from 2003- I have learned about The importance of editing from Kafka as well). At the end, for those who can pull it off, it just happens turns out to look organized and thoughtful. The only way it can do so is because the themes are things that Kafka had thought about, and because he had a very logical (lawyerly) mind. He was able to point his mind in a direction and say, "go!", knowing that he would actually get somewhere. In doing this, he had the opportunity of observing where his mind was going and get a few chuckles by throwing some whimsy in. Logical whimsy though. We see him running down fun little rabbit trails just to show us, with a chuckle, that they really are dead ends or endless circles.
The writing I have done that I like the most is like Kafka's in these senses. It just happens to be that nobody sees them, since it's always a horrible thing to go back, "fix" them (i.e. destroy that fluidity in order to make it publishable), and then serve them to the public. That is probably why he wanted his best stuff burned.
The only thing close to that I have on the site is Life Progress, Escher Style, which I did write in one sitting in a fit of angst and disgust at my own condition. It took me all of 25 minutues to write, and I made no changes beside a bit of spelling or grammar correction here and there. The only other thing close to it that I have shown other people (i.e., I consider it worth showing other people) would be the paper I just wrote for Medieval British Literature class, a radio drama on the life of King Alfred. But even that was not really the best reflector of this freely flowing, experimental, whimsical style I so dearly love to enjoy, for it took me several days and did not have any whimsy in it. It's hard to explain what I'm talking about (probably because I'm spending all of my time talking about it and none of my time explaning it, in which case my explanation becomes what I'm talking about) (ha! there's an example! Ik! Not any more!) Kafka did a good job with the style, but he was rather too depressed to make use of it for anything. Perhaps my study of Kafka will help me in that particular. Or perhaps one has to become depressed and angstfull to do it right, in which case I think I'll become depressed, since I won't let myself become depressed and therefore will be cut off from the joy of writing in that manner.
(note from September 2003. I was somewhat entranced with the idea of epiphany as a writing method. This, of course was silly. I realized this after reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
(note from October, 2003. I have put online a paper I wrote about a work of Kafka, On_Parables. The paper is entitled, On_on_parables.)
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