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.
