“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… We all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling not so much of boredom as offense, like something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher’s feeling at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode, 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.”
— David Foster Wallace, from a speech he gave in 1998.
A Mind, Lively and at Ease
Month
