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> In his introduction to an edition of Metamorphosis, the novelist Adam Thirlwell suggests that we have misunderstood Kafka much as Magarshack said we had misunderstood Chekhov, and that Kafka is much more playful than we have hitherto given him credit for.

When I was 17, I read Kafka for the first time and was put off by what I saw as the dour and oppressive atmosphere. I had the same insight as Thirlwell when I reread him ~10 years later: Kafka's works have a sort of deadpan and absurdist humor to them and shouldn't be treated as seriously as they often are. I wonder how much of that humor is lost in translation.

There's something to this. When I read The Trial, I was struck by the sheer absurdity of it all. Josef is never charged with a crime, is never coerced into any action, yet at every step remains a willing participant in his own punishment. Up to his own death. It's as if his real crime was not refusing to go along with the farce.
Kafka's friend, Max Brod, talked of how Kafka found humour in his dark works - especially the chilling "The Trial", which he thought a hoot, laughing so hard while reading the first chapter aloud, that he repeatedly had to stop to collect himself.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jul/03/post...

maybe he was rationalizing his own fate, like Rubashov in Koestlers "Darkness at noon".

A common response by those arrested during Stalin's purges is said to have been "this is a all a mistake, it will be sorted out soon"...

"Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n23/rivka-galchen/what-k...

> Kafka's works have a sort of deadpan and absurdist humor to them and shouldn't be treated as seriously as they often are.

Kafka worked as some kind of minor bureaucrat in the Hapsburg government, and he is making fun of big bureaucracy. I always like to point out when people say something is Kafkaesque, as in "nightmarishly complicated", he himself was inspired by how absurd government bureaucracy is.

While "In the Penal Colony" actually is really funny and readable, I don't think much humor could have been lost.
I always imagined Kafka thinking '...hmmm, this Samsa guy is a real pest... Let's turn him into a bug!'
I read an article a few years ago that convinced me that Kafka's peculiar quality--the famous "Kafkaesque"--isn't due to his experience with Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, or his being a German-speaking Jew surrounded by Czech-speaking Catholics, or any of the other reasons commonly suggested--it was mostly his autism. (The author was an obscure, independent scholar named Jerry Stuger, although I don't remember the title.)
Bit weird to posthumously diagnose someone with autism. At best it would be an interesting hypothesis.
Yes, he's dead. So, for that matter, are Newton and Einstein, whose autistic traits have been discerned by none other than the world's leading expert in the field: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3676-einstein-and-new... .
A person can have autistic traits without being autistic. The diagnosis is how the symptoms affect the person as a whole, and if “Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning” (which is why it's so hard to diagnose adults, because many undiagnosed autistics learned to mask their difficulties).

That's why you don't diagnose based on rumors or historical records. It's unscientific and unethical. And as Glenn Elliott is quoted in the link you shared: “One can imagine geniuses who are socially inept and yet not remotely autistic, impatience with the intellectual slowness of others, narcissism and passion for one’s mission in life might combine to make such an individuals isolative and difficult.”

Baron-Cohen himself is very much proponent of Asperger abelist view of autism: an ouccrance of some super-intelligent boys with social deficiencies. That definition isn't much accepted nowdays, when we know autism doesn't necessarily cohabitates with better cofnitive abilities, or being AMAB.

I'll bite. Why is it unethical? As for its being unscientific, I'm also curious as to what standards of evidence people think are appropriate to biographical and literary-historical matters.
I'll bite back: no informed consent. It's the most basic requirement from every research on human subjects.
So, to take another example, if I were to say that Jonathan Swift appears to have suffered from depression, that would be a breach of ethics as you understand it?
If I speculate that Donald Trump is a narcissist based on publicly available information, would that be unethical? If not, how is it different?
The translation must have been a labor both of love and of Hercules. There are 1,403 endnotes for 564 ­pages of text—that is to say, 2.4836252 endnotes per page—to inform us of every literary allusion, and every geographical location mentioned, down to the number of a street: an admirable thoroughness that I should be tempted to call Teutonic if stereotyping were not so frowned upon these days.
> "an admirable thoroughness that I should be tempted to call Teutonic if stereotyping were not so frowned upon these days."

weaponized teutism

Another First Things reader on HN. Nice!
Not Apache Kafka RTFM