The Sign of Saturn: Melancholy, Homelessness and Apocalypse in W.G. Sebald's Prose Narratives

Abstract

W.G. Sebald's prose narratives of the 1990s, Schwindel. Gefühle, Die Ausgewanderten and Die Ringe des Saturn, have been positively received as reflections on history and memory after Auschwitz. In the present article a more critical view of Sebald's narrative stance is suggested. Sebald shares his generation's problem of not being able to talk about postwar German identity, and hence about his own identity, other than in terms of Auschwitz. While this may lead to a sympathetic portrayal of individual lives in Die Ausgewanderten, it also involves a repression and a projection of important aspects of self‐identity. Auschwitz becomes the literary symbol of the over‐determination of Sebald's generation by the national past. In Die Ringe des Saturn Sebald's narrative melancholy escalates into an apocalyptic negativity as Auschwitz turns from a historical event into an all‐encompassing myth of destruction. The argument falls into two parts: firstly Sebald's narrative melancholy is shown to have its origins in a sense of over‐determination by the past and loss of a sense of group identity, generating a powerful counter‐movement of apocalyptic rejection; secondly his narrative perspective is contextualised in terms of the ‘left‐wing melancholy’ of postwar West German intellectuals, with reference to Lepenies's Melancholie und Gesellschaft, and Grass's Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke.

An uncanny journey: W. G. Sebald and the literature of protest

“…Given this absence in Sebald's writings and the fact that his major literary works appeared years after what Gerd Koenen (2001) has called West Germany's 'red decade', it is not surprising that relatively few critics have linked Sebald's work with the events of that time (but cf. Anderson, 2003;Atze and Loquai, 2005;Morgan, 2005;Long, 2007a;Wolff, 2007;Anderson, 2008;Long, 2009;Zisselsberger, 2009;Sheppard, 2009b;. This situation may, of course, also be due partly to such features of contemporary criticism as the traditional German view that Sebald's literary works, belonging as they seem to do to the realm of high art ('Dichtung'), are necessarily separated from the lower realms of history and politics, an impression that may have been fostered, too, by Sebald's extensive and unconcealed resonance with his literary forebears and his highly literary, archaizing style.…”

`Woods, trees and the spaces in between'

“…Mark Anderson's essays on Sebald are always rewarding and his piece in Poetics Today (2008) is no exception. Where Morgan described Sebald's work as 'resolutely non-political', even while diagnosing his malaise as 'Linke Melancholie' ('left-wing melancholy') (Morgan, 2005: 88-91), Anderson concedes that such an estimation is typical of Sebald's critics (2008: 139). He then situates Sebald's work within a tradition of politicized literature that goes back to the Weimar avant-gardes.…”

“…Sebald's work gets stuck in the empty space between coming apocalypse, transcendental yearning and nostalgia for an ideal past (Johannsen, 2008: 102, 107). Morgan (2005) identifi ed something similar when he said that Sebald's 'traumatised ethnicity' was marked by 'a deep sense of longing for something missing' which, uniquely, gets transformed in his texts 'into melancholy and apocalyptic fantasy ' (2005: 85). But unlike Morgan, who claimed to glimpse 'the beginning of a new order' beneath Sebald's melancholy (2005: 90), Johannsen maintains that his fi xation on the ruins which litter the present emptiness prevents him from learning from the past or envisaging new beginnings (Johannsen, 2008: 105, 107).…”

Carnival exhausted: Roguishness and resistance in W. G. Sebald

“…Yet Sebald tried to walk this tightrope in his prose fiction, exploring, across his body of work, three routes of escape from the trap of modernity. The first was to write from within a tradition of pessimistic, leftist melancholy (Morgan, 2005: 89). There is a glut of criticism that explores this side of Sebald’s writing and, as Anne Fuchs (2007: 121) notes, connecting ‘Sebaldian melancholy and the depictions of nature seems to be a common feature of almost every review’ of his work.…”

“… 1. For discussions of melancholy in Sebald’s work, see Barzilai (2007), Bruzelius (2010), Cosgrove (2007) and Morgan (2005). This focus on melancholia has also produced something of a feedback loop, to the extent that, in some cases, it seems to be the only lens through which critics examine his work, and as a result, much of the humour in Sebald has been entirely overlooked.…”