Another handicap, even for gifted students,
is that-unlike, say, Joyce's or Pound's-the
exformative associations Kafka's work creates
are not intertextual or even historical. Kafka's
evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost
sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which
myths derive; this is why we tend to call even
his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.