Literature as a Record of Resistance

Between travel and other commitments, I’m very slow at making my way through the December 2011 issue of the Journal of European Studies, edited by Dr. Richard Sheppard and devoted to W.G. Sebald.  My first post included the full Table of Contents and focused largely on a short travelogue intended for German visitors to East Anglia that Sebald wrote for a German publication in 1974.   Even though I am only about halfway through the Journal, it’s clear that this is an important anthology of essays that delve into some of the core issues surrounding Sebald’s work and legacy.  Needless to say, these are densely argued essays that can only be butchered by my minor remarks.  I won’t even pretend to offer a full synopsis of any of the essays, I’ll try to just give the flavor of several of the papers that I’ve read so far.

Ben Hutchinson’s The Shadow of Resistance: W.G. Sebald and the Frankfurt School examines Sebald’s sizable debt to the Frankfurt School, especially in relation to his books on Carl Sternheim and Alfred Döblin and on Sebald’s four works of prose fiction.  Hutchinson argues that a primary tenet that Sebald took from the Frankfurt School was their insistence on “literature’s relationship to a contingent historical context.”  “Sebald consistently insisted that aesthetic problems were also ethical ones.”  Hutchinson points out that Sebald’s praise for Thomas Bernhard (quoted from his 2001 radio interview with Michael Silverblatt) corresponds to the aesthetic values Sebald derived from the Frankfurt School. Bernhard’s fiction, Sebald said “wasn’t compromised in any sense…He only tells you in his books what he has heard from others.  So he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative.”

In his essay W.G. Sebald as Critic of Austrian Literature, Ritchie Robertson proposes that Sebald related so well to Austrian literature because it is a “literature of displacement.  Its writers and its literary figures are alienated from their childhood, their places of origin, and their native cultures.”  He relates this, in part, to Sebald’s sympathy for schizophrenics and the literature that they have produced – most notably Ernst Herbeck, who he visits and describes in the opening pages of the “All’estero” section of Vertigo.

Lynn L. Wolff’s essay The ‘Solitary Mallard’: On Sebald and Translation, reminds us the extent to which Sebald’s fictions themselves are “translations.”  Wolff points out, for example, how, in Austerlitz, the conversations between the narrator and Austerlitz were “originally” in English and French, and that Austerlitz often related prior conversations that presumably took place in Czech.  But Sebald has “translated”, as it were, all of these conversations into German.  Wolff discusses at length the many challenges that face Sebald’s translators and she notes some of the issues relating to the placement of images in various editions.

In The Calamitous Perspective of Modernity: Sebald’s Negative Ontology, Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will argue that “for Sebald, the world is rotten to the core.”  They believe that he saw no hope for mankind, that our history is a history of destruction, and that modernity’s promise of progress was hollow.  So why did Sebald write? They argue that “Sebald was able to sustain his practice of writing partly because of his increasingly embattled belief that he was called to fashion literature as a record of resistance.”

Sebald’s negative ontology produced in him neither a state of complete apathy nor, by any manner of means, one of abject nihilism.  On the contrary, his dominant mood of melancholic irony inspired a mode of writing where his inconsolability over history, nature, and, ultimately, the whole of Being provided constant motivation for further creativity, both fictional and essayistic….Sebald remarked that melancholia, “the contemplation of our continuing misfortune, has nothing in common with the craving for death,” being “a form of resistance…”

[I’ll be traveling until early April.]