By Victor Brombert
“All paintings and the affection of art,” Victor Brombert writes initially of the deeply own Musings on Mortality, “allow us to negate our nothingness.” As a tender guy getting back from international warfare II, Brombert got here to appreciate this fact as he immersed himself in literature. dying are available all over in literature, he observed, yet literature itself is at the aspect of lifestyles. With delicacy and penetrating perception, Brombert strains the subject matter of mortality within the paintings of a gaggle of authors who wrote in past times century and a part, teasing out and evaluating their perspectives of demise as they emerged from drastically diversified cultural contexts.
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Extra resources for Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi
Sample text
15 Is this to signify the impotence of rationalism? One might rather suggest that, like the Land Surveyor in The Castle, the explorer of “In the Penal Colony” is a perennial traveler, the eternally wandering Jew, a homeless outsider in a hostile world. Kafka deliberately provokes abstract, even metaphysical interpretations, only to undermine them in a subsequent [48] Kafka: The Death Journey in the Everlasting Present move. The precise hours it takes to complete the ritualistic suffering of the execution is an obvious allusion to the Crucifixion.
A Hunger Artist” relates the dying and the death of a performing artist. This “artist,” a professional faster, Kafka: The Death Journey in the Everlasting Present [43] exhibits his fasting skills in various public places behind the bars of a small cage. Admiring crowds, including openmouthed children, come to view him and even touch his emaciated body. During those festive periods, spectators appear at least once a day, sometimes even at night, for the hunger artist hardly ever sleeps. ) Special observers check to make sure that he does not cheat by feeding himself surreptitiously.
He conjures up images of lush, tropical marshlands, of hairy palm trees standing erect like phallic symbols in the midst of luxuriant vegetation swollen thick with primeval sap. Huge milk-white blossoms float on the dark stagnant waters, and the eyes of crouching tigers gleam behind bamboo thickets. [28] Thomas Mann and the Lure of the Abyss The Death Wish These images of elemental mud and teeming life in a distant Eastern setting are clearly transgressive. They are associated with the deadly cholera come all the way from the swamps of the Bengali Gulf, just as Dionysus, the god of wine and revels, who plays such an important symbolic role in the story, also migrated, according to a Nietzsche-inspired notion, from India to Greece.