Inside the underground piece

 During a long while, the adjective "Kafkian" brought to mind absurd, nightmare, daily and administrative horror...But some presently tell us that the correct interpretation would be comic, humor, and even laughter… Deleuze and Guattari (*) are some of those who won't budge. According to them, Kafka would be full of the joy of life ; a true clown who, at the core, would be amused at his trick-circus…The two philosophers state : "There has never been an author more comic and joyous…

Everything is laughter". They go as far as declaring (staring at the divan) : We call interpretation low or neurotic all reading that turns genius into anxiety, into tragedy…" "Does one enter into a work by Kafka? It's a rhizome, a burrow" Deleuze and Guattari ask themselves. The Burrow, a short story rather long with around forty pages, constitutes without a doubt one of the last narratives by Kafka (written around the 1920s). The uncompleted fragment was rediscovered by Max Brod, who was not able to find the rest. This text could be raised up to the "animal series" like Metamorphoses or Arabs and jackals or Josephine the opera singer or even Reports for an academy. It can also be attached to the three great novels on solitude. The intrigue hangs on only a few words : an animal constructs its burrow. If sometimes he finds a certain well being (especially when he is between a sleepy dream and conscious sleep), most of the time he is on the lookout and thinks his territory is not well enough protected. So, he gets busy, he gets busy… However there are already many roundabouts, galleries, passageways, corridors, rooms : a veritable labyrinth, within its centre, a fortified space. He continues building nevertheless. He perfects it. We can find in this passage a metaphor for literary creation. The animal and the short

Chloé Hunziger