Ruminant Curiosity

The two subjects of this chapter are writers of German who did not live in Germany: Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald (a self-proclaimed devotee of Kafka). Kafka’s fiction has achieved the distinction of having generated a category that far exceeds its literary basis: the “Kafkaesque.” Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical investigations of literature in its ontological foundation is consistently worked out with reference to Kafka, under the telling phrase “literature and the right to death.” Perspectives by other theorists (Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Calasso) help refine Blanchot’s case, revealing that the “seasickness on dry land” of Kafka’s work takes on a life of its own apart from any particular work—precisely enabling the Kafkaesque to escape or exceed the thematic parameters articulated by the writer Kafka. Sebald then become the carrier of this viral affliction, portraying himself in peregrinations that hover indeterminately amidst various genres, from the premodern anatomy to the postmodern essayism evident in his Rings of Saturn. Sebald, like so many before him, finds that the engagement with history (World War Two and the Holocaust in his case) can only be truly undertaken by fictive means.