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Comment by andrewclunn | Hacker News Reader

I find that Kafka loses his zeal when the uncertainty of an unformed epistemology is removed. It's in the circular questioning of subjectivity and post modernism that his work takes hold. Move beyond that and what was once existential horror in his writing becomes trivial nuisance.

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My problem with shunting Kafka into post-modernism is it becomes too much a grab bag. Just like they try to vacuum up Cervantes and Sterne, aswell. Kakfa died 40 years before post-modernism; (and Cervantes 343 and Sterne 191).

But it brings to my mind a broader point: McHale's notion:

   intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain 
   point ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological 
   questions far enough and they "tip over" into ontological questions.

(I personally prefer the epistemological/ontological definition of modernism/post-modernism, especially here where we have Kakfa who could best be define (if anything) as a modernist writer being shoved into post-modern space.)

So is the shunting of a collective and ancient epistemological and ontological uncertainty an attempt to neutralize its implications? A question I think partly arises from something about your use of 'uncertainty' and 'unformed' here, which keeps occurring to me in terms of the excess of its vital substance and becoming: too much certainty/too much form tipping over into no certainty at all/formlessness. Just as defining the question (and no matter what anyone else argues Hitchhiker's Guide is my favorite example of this in fiction) for the answer of '42' as 'How many roads must a man walk down?' provides a solution, is it any more than a placebo affect? that at its core highlights the instability of our epistemological and ontological positions more intensely than a blank answer would have (and thereby beats us all over the head with a teleological hammer).

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