Illness and Sebald’s Dialectics of Literary Historiography

ABSTRACT

This essay examines how Sebald exploits the time-honored literary theme of illness to maintain his dialectics of literary historiography. On the one hand, Sebald exhorts writers and readers to involve creative imagination when trying to approach a traumatic past. On the other hand, he warns about the peril of mistaking imagination for historical truths. Readers should understand that what literature offers are aesthetic truths, not historical ones. Sebald demonstrates a balanced attitude toward the power of literature in understanding history through his literary representation of illness. On the one hand, Sebald uses Austerlitz’s speech loss to illustrate the danger of abstention from imaginative investment and overreliance on the archive. On the other hand, Sebald employs mental breakdowns as a strategy to create an impasse whereby he refrains from offering overarching meaning to the past he is reconstructing. The impasse indicates the impossibility of attaining historical truths through literary imagination.

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Notes

1. I use the term “illness” loosely to include all types of unfitness. It is not exclusively or strictly clinical or medical.

2. For more on Sebald’s practice of shifting the interpretive burden to the reader, see Baumgarten 267–75; Pages 75; Schütte 76; and Baxter et al. 11.

3. Sebald believes that it is morally dubious to erase traces of the past. He bitterly criticizes “the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up” (The Emigrants 225). Instead, he invites the reader to be repeatedly haunted by history. Being haunted means “acknowledging our own position in relation to […] the past of countless, unnamed others, who are dead and buried in and by history” (Diedrich 274). It is the leap to revive the ghost’s voice. Moreover, being haunted cannot be done once for all: “one must keep making the leap” (275). For more, see Diedrich.

4. For more on Sebald’s pursuit of the synoptic view, see Presner and Diedrich.

5. Sebald’s wildly associative literary approach, like Ernst Herbeck’s ability to connect irrelevant objects, is a manifestation of poetic vision. For more on Sebald’s wildly associative literary approach, see Pages 74–82; Schütte 21–22, 52, & 80; Zisselsberger, “Stories of Heimat” 12; Fuchs 111.

6. I believe two reasons, one ontological and one epistemological (methodological), contribute to Austerlitz’s speech loss and later mental breakdowns. The ontological reason refers to the fundamental incommunicability of traumatic experiences while the epistemological reason lies in Austerlitz’s dangerously problematic approach to his past. Scholars who stress the ontological side of Austerlitz’s speech loss argue that Austerlitz’s mental unfitness (aphasia, melancholia, and repeated nervous breakdowns, for instance) cannot be cured by reconnecting with his past. Austerlitz’s close communion with his childhood nanny and recovery of his mother tongue Czech does not “release him from the trauma of loss” (Dubow and Steadman-Jones 20). To Sebald, the danger of Austerlitz’s revived linguistic competence of Czech is not “that it provokes anxieties about the past but precisely that it gives the illusion of having settled them” (Dubow and Steadman-Jones 20). And Sebald takes care not to present Austerlitz’s recovery of mother tongue as a guarantee of identity. These scholars view Austerlitz’s speech loss as merely a symptom of an ontologically incommunicable trauma, which renders Austerlitz “incapable of expression, and […] fundamentally impairs [his] ability to meaningfully convey [his] existential experience” (Sutcliffe 140). While these scholars surely have a point here, Austerlitz’s problematic approach to his past is an equally significant factor in his speech loss. Austerlitz’s ruthless suppression of personal memory and imagination is an approach doomed to fail. And the failure can be explained psychoanalytically, as is one of the major aims of the current essay.

7. Behrendt believes familial ties to catastrophe survivors can be a potential safeguard against misappropriation (56). Wolff argues the exact opposite. She finds Hirsch’s emphasis on familial ties a severe limitation because “literary discourse has an inherent ability and possibility to ‘reactivate’ and ‘reembody’ the past in ways that engage those who are not directly affected by what is represented” (188).

8. Presner notes that when presenting the narrator’s visit to the Breendonk fortress in Austerlitz, Sebald, mixes “past and present, fact and fiction, autobiography and literature, and photography and narrative to create a space of terra infirma, which destabilizes both the reliability of memory and spectatorship” (349). The representation of the Breendonk visit consists of multiple layers: the narrator’s memory of his 1967 visit to the fortress; his memory of later reading Améry’s memoir about the brutal torture at the fortress; the narrator’s memory of his childhood life; and Améry’s actual torture in 1943. Moreover, all the above temporal points are filtered and further complicated through the narrator’s perspective in late 1990s when he “wrote” Austerlitz. There is an unbridgeable gap between what the narrator experienced in his 1967 visit and what Améry actually experienced in 1943 and Sebald never attempts to “overcome[] or sublate[] this experiential and historical gap” (350). What concerns Sebald is the present – how people born after the catastrophe approaches the catastrophe, and “how they encounter, recall, and narrate the remains of the catastrophic past in the present” (350).

9. In an interview with James Wood, Sebald remarks that the “whole process of narrating something which has a kind of reassuring quality to it is called into question. That uncertainty which the narrator has about his own trade is then, as I hope, imparted to the reader who will, or ought to, feel a similar sense of irritation about these matters. I think that fiction writing, which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself, is a form of imposture and which I find very, very difficult to take. Any form of authorial writing, where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable. I cannot bear to read books of this kind..”

10. Sebald calls literature “einer Disziplin, die von Haus aus auf einen Grad der Empathie angewiesen ist” (Beschreibung 115). Writers as practitioners of literature should by nature have greater empathic power. Besides, Sebald contends that “Einem Dichter, der die für einen derartigen poetischen Lernprozeß erforderliche Empathie aufbringen kann, müssen die Veranstaltungen der Kunst wie ein ziemlich lächerliches Unterfangen vorkommen” (Beschreibung 136). We see that for Sebald empathy is more important than artistic skills to a great poet. In Interventionen, Uwe Schütte writes: “Es ist nicht zuletzt solche Empathie, die Walser in den Augen von Sebald zu einem literarischen Heiligen macht” (qtd. in Sutcliffe 81).

11. Schütte makes a similar argument, see W. G. Sebald 92.

12. The nauseating smell of soft soap in the Breendonk fortress rekindles the narrator’s childhood memory of being scrubbed with a brush, “along with the feelings of powerlessness, disgust and patriarchal supremacy” (Schütte, W. G. Sebald 93). Schütte believes the narrator thus creates a “psychological hyperlink” between his childhood memory and Améry’s humiliation and torture in the fortress. The involvement of personal memory and imagination may to a certain degree help understand historical victims’ experiences, yet “the narrator’s assumption of the identity of a victim of Nazi persecution [i.e., Jean Améry] treads on morally precarious terrain. Though Sebald doubtlessly aims to demonstrate his solidarity with Améry, the obvious charge of misappropriating Jewish suffering raises its head” (W. G. Sebald 93–94).

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Derong Cao

Derong Cao is an assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His work has been published in journals such as Critique, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and Comparative Literature: East & West.