The Undiscover'd Country: The Death Motif in Kafka's Castle

The Sovereign’s Beatitude

“…The motive of sleep and sleeping is strikingly strong, and not only in this scene. Walter Sebald (1972) has assembled the many mentions of sleep and sleeping in the novel and interpreted them as metaphors of death. Further, references to beds are also ubiquitous in The Castle , and Sebald considers them mostly as deathbeds.…”

The Roar of the Minotaur

“…The indistinguishability of voice and person in Sebald extends to the time in which the stories he recounts take place. In a novel such as Kafka's The Castle-the subject of one of Sebald's most important critical essays-the time it takes people to tell K. their story is crucial in determining what happens to him: the longer he listens, the more inescapable his situation becomes (Sebald 1972). In Sebald, conversely, time seems not to pass while the speaker is telling his story.…”

Dexter – sinister

“…Gefühle -that were still interconnected in some secret way, as Leone suggests in the volume under discussion (98). In various combinatoires, Max's narrators are flâneurs, latter-day promeneurs solitaires hoping against hope for enlightenment, lost souls in limbo like Kafka's Jäger Gracchus, would-be angels who are swept along by the wind that heaps up piles of rubble, explorers into the darkness of personal and collective memory, and avatars of Ahasverus, 'the Eternal Jew' who features at the end of Max's first essay on Kafka (Sebald, 1972d;cf. 123 and 213-14 of the volume under discussion), who are condemned to wander the world for ever because of a sin that cannot be forgiven because, probably, no God is available to do so. Given which, it is entirely understandable why Max should have put a line in biro against the following citation from his copy of Illuminationen: 'Mit dem Schwinden des übernaturlichen Lebens im Menschen wird sein natürliches schuld .…”

“…Some of this annotation almost certainly fed into an article on messianism in the work of Döblin that Max published in July 1975, for its first page is highly redolent of Lukács's remarks on the topic, and in Max's second Kafka article (1976), he described the 'messianic figure' as 'the agent of the unceasing endeavour of man to revolutionize his situation'. 43 But in his first Kafka article (Sebald, 1972d) Max had viewed the topic in less political terms when he wrote of K.: 'The latent messianic mission to invade the realm of the dead as a living saviour can be interpreted in another way, if one equates the realm of the dead with the place where one's forefathers are assembled' (31). In his Kafka article of 1976 (also mainly on Das Schloß), Max, continuing further down the same non-political road, generalized even more revealingly: 'In hassidic tales which gave the messianic figure perhaps its most vivid expression [,] one encounters the unknown wanderer -his insignia the knapsack and the walking sticktraversing the country or sitting in wayside inns uttering truth upon truth.'…”

“…Many critics write about Max's literary work as though it were all of a piece, and the reason why is obvious: Max's uniquely recognizable voice that speaks in a slightly old-fashioned, slightly regionalized, but finely wrought and eminently readable prose. But that voice is merely the surface, something that is analogous to Schopenhauer's veil of Maya that masks the all-consuming Will, to Nietzsche's Apollonian form that conceals and makes bearable the Dionysian abyss, 46 to Benjamin's 'Totenmaske' ('death mask') that covers those elements which brought the work into being (Doerry and Hage, 2001: 234), to 'the smooth surface of Kafka's work' that hides 'the yearning, fearful images of death' (Sebald, 1972d), even to the nostalgic, funny, engaging surface of Amarcord that possibly veils the darker elements that are implicit in the film's title -the word 'amarcord' also connotes 'bitter heart'. Martin Swales notes that Max wrote of Jan Peter Tripp: 'behind the illusionism [of Tripp's work] there is "a terrifying depth".…”