Another handicap, even for gifted students, is that—unlike, say, those of Joyce or Pound—the exformative associations that Kafka’s work creates are not intertextual or even historical. Kafka’s evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sort of sub-archetypal, the primordial little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal. The exformative associations in Kafka are also both simple and extremely rich, often just about impossible to be discursive about: imagine, for instance, asking a student to unpack and
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