literally
My point is not that his wit is too subtle for U.S. students. In fact, the only halfway effective strategy I've come up with for exploring Kafka's funniness in class involves suggesting to students that much of his humor is actually sort of unsubtle, or rather anti-subtle. The claim is that Kafka's funniness depends on some kind of radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical. I opine to them that some of our deepest and most profound collective intuitions seem to be expressible only as figures of speech, that that's why we call these figures of speech "expressions." With respect to The Metamorphosis, then, I might invite students to consider what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as "creepy" or "gross" or say that somebody was forced to "eat shit" in his job. Or to reread "In the Penal Colony" in light of expressions like "tonguelashing" or "She sure tore me a new asshole" or the gnomic "By a certain age, everybody has the face he deserves." Or to approach "A Hunger Artist" in terms of tropes like "starved for attention" or "love-starved" or the double entendre in the term "self-denial," or even as innocent a factoid as that the etymological root of "anorexia" happens to be the Greek word for longing.
— David Foster Wallace, Laughing With Kafka
Stemless does not relate to “literal” vs “metaphorical” the way our self-domestication with language demands.
“Words equal reality” is a kind of literalism that does service to the joy of neither language nor experience. This slogan is reified by a shared language that creates a flinch-to-be-resolved the moment you deviate from the official model of correspondence. Crowded with more nodding than meaning.
To not take something literally is to loosen the connection between words and worlds, and thereby also loosen the grip of the dull bureaucracy that mediates contact.
When you, in your speech, break free from literalism and use your own language and logic and rhythm and snarl in unmediated expression, I, the listener, become free to allow everything that comes out of you to be a symbol so intimate, that I can follow it all the way to you. Land in you, confident. Free, to take you — ironically — literally.
Out there [points at word-plane], they can be the flow of reality-making in here [points at heart]. Words can meet reality, your reality. They can be more literal when they give up trying to be literal.
Just like you may do better when you give up trying to do better. In Stemless, and in life.