Dialogue with the Dead: Sebald, Creatureliness, and the Philosophy of Mere Life

Abstract

The idea of a “dialogue with the dead” strikes us by turns as both impossible and intriguing. Yet, what can be really meant by it is far from clear. This essay attempts to explore this idea in the work of novelist W. G. Sebald. It examines the scope and the meaning of such an interchange in his works and connects this theme to his wider explorations of “creaturely life.” It also links this particular dimension of Sebald's notion of “creaturely” or “bare” life with some of the other major treatments of the same theme in recent literature and philosophy.

Notes

1. Joseph Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, ed. L. S. Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 96.

2. Andrea Köhler, “Penetrating the Darkness,” in W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecountered (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004), 102. This essay accompanies this posthumous joint work of photographs and text of Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp.

3. This excerpt from the review is reprinted in the back cover of the U.S. edition of The Rings of Saturn (New York: New Directions Press, 1998).

4. Christopher Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 64.

5. Ruth Franklin, “Rings of Smoke,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 119.

6. Susan Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,” in Where the Stress Falls (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 46.

7. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (London: Allen Lane, 1967), 46.

8. Phillip Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 7.

9. Eleanor Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 39.

10. Arthur Lubow, “Crossing Boundaries,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 171.

11. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (New York: New Directions Press, 1996), 131.

12. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001), 74–75.

13. Susan Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,” 45.

14. Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 56.

15. W. G. Sebald, After Nature (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), 56.

16. Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 103.

17. W. G. Sebald, After Nature, 28.

18. W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn (New York: New Direction Press, 1998), 19.

19. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 185–87.

20. In fact the coincidences are more profound than this because the collection is initiated when Austerlitz views Turner's Funeral at Lausanne in Switzerland that causes him to recollect the scene from Mawddach that he himself had experienced when attending the funeral of his aunt and uncle soon after he had left their home for his education.

21. Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 117.

22. Tim Parks, “The Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 31.

23. Mark Anderson, “The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald,” October 106 (Autumn 2003): 116.

24. Peter Fritzsche, “W. G. Sebald's Twentieth-Century Histories,” in W. G. Sebald: History—Memory—Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2006), 291.

25. Mark R. McCulloch, Understanding Sebald (CA: University of Southern California Press, 2003), 150.

26. Sebald, The Emigrants, 23.

27. Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 54.

28. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 255.

29. Stefan Gunther, “The Holocaust as the Still Point in the World of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald: History—Memory—Trauma, 288.

30. This point is made by Bigsby in Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust, 60.

31. Karin Bauer, “The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald: History—Memory—Trauma, 245.

32. Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 41.

33. Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust, 81.

34. Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 42.

35. Anderson, “The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald,” 110–11.

36. Franklin, “Rings of Smoke,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 131.

37. Sebald, Austerlitz, 183, 281.

38. Sebald, The Emigrants, 150.

39. Michael Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 85.

40. Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 55.

41. Eric J. Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 12.

42. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 16. At the core of this idea is Adorno's notion of constellation: its intent is neither to clarify concepts like history or nature in relation to one another nor to define them as “invariants”; rather, it aims to gather a configuration of ideas in tension like transience, nature and history around a concrete historical facticity in such a way that it reveals itself in its uniqueness. For Adorno, the key is to understand the irreducible discontinuity of historical life and even the ambiguity of its constitutive moments: the mythical archaic and the dialectically novel. What is important is Adorno's anti-Platonism and its undialectical static world of ideas and myths is nominated as the major culprit. Against this, both Lukacs and Benjamin act as antidotes, revealing, respectively, nature as history and history as nature.

43. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 26.

44. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003).

45. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 9.

46. Carole Angier, “Who Is W. G. Sebald?” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 67. At this point, I’m not especially interested in the soundness of Sebald's general argument on the “internal émigrés.” His judgements seem to lack discrimination and therefore are not completely fair to those who were genuine passive resisters to the Nazis and by no means collaborators.

47. Angier, “Who Is W. G. Sebald?” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 65.

48. W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 90.

49. Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 50.

50. Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 84.

51. Lubow, “Crossing Boundaries,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 165.

52. Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 97.

53. Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust, 111.

54. Lubow, “Crossing Boundaries,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 172.

55. J. M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983).

56. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4.

57. Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cezare Casarino, in Theory out of Bounds (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), vol. 20, 22.

58. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 69.