Jacobs Carol - Sebalds vision

SEBALDS VISION

LITERATURE NOW

LITERATURE NOW

MATTHEW HART, DAVID JAMES, AND REBECCA L. WALKOWITZ, SERIES EDITORS

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.

Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Hctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolao: The Global Latin American Novel

Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

CAROL JACOBS

SEBALDS VISION

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright 2015 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jacobs, Carol, author.

Sebalds vision / Carol Jacobs.

pages cm. (Literature now)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17182-3 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-54010-0 (e-book)

1. Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg), 19442001Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PT2681.E18Z644 2015

833'.914dc23

2015004582

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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For Arnie and Ellen and their glorious clan:

Beryl, Willy, Isabella, Micaela;

A.J., Julie, Jasper, Lucas, and Zane;

and

for Henry,

who found the title for these musings

and has so lovingly stayed by my side all these years.

Contents

As a reader I therefore pay my tribute in what follows... in the form of several extended marginalia which otherwise make no particular claim. (Logis in einem Landhaus 7G)

A title, no doubt, should take the long view, describe, and circumscribe the textual matter to follow.

Three aspects of Sebalds writing must inevitably strike every reader.epistemological crises that he shows us arising out of the juxtaposition of all these.

That his writings are about vision as the ability to see can escape no reader. Alongside the unusual, interspersed visual materials that rightfully engage so many Sebald scholars a theme of sight is often woven into the text. In Air War and Literature Sebald reproves those writers who directly witnessed the Allied bombings. What was called for was a steady gaze at what was before them (Air War 51E, 57G) rendered in a concrete prose that might make the reader see.

The degree to which written texts are called upon to see and report a factual or historical world of the artists experience fluctuates wildly in Sebalds works and, more crucially, also within each individual work. In the texts we are about to read, neat conclusions about vision-of-the-eye are impossible. And then we encounter the prolific acts of citation, both visual and verbal, that are bound to seem twenty-twenty from a certain point of view. As we all know, howeverand no one better than Sebaldthe play of montage alters the incorporated material and puts it into new relations that cause us to see and read otherwise.

Vision, of course, also implies not only acts of the eye but also those of the mind, or, as we like to imagine it, spirit, as when we say that someone has vision, a vision, or is a visionary.The Emigrants, Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn) but also to other historical and natural scenes of violence: the 1525 massacre at Frankenhausen during the German Peasants War (After Nature), the 1800 Battle of Marengo (Vertigo), the bombing of German cities in the Second World War (Air War and Literature), slave laborers worked to death in the Belgian Congo, the nineteenth-century Taiping rebellion that took tens of millions of lives in China, the devastation of the herring population and then of trees in the hurricane of 1987 (Rings of Saturn).

Still, one takes away the rules of Sebalds engagement with difficulty and uncertainty. The puzzle in all this is due not only to Sebalds inconsistencies and contradictions. What if such entanglements are Sebalds game plan, which may be no plan at all? Sebalds writings are a continuously changing meditation on these issues and a dizzying practice of thinking and representing them: Schwindel. Gefhle., one is tempted to say. What if to read Sebald (and perhaps this does not distinguish him all that much from other writers) lies in the specificities of individual texts? Despite Sebalds frequent invocation of the birds-eye view (a vantage point shared by God and the dreamer), any naive attempt to assume that perspective as reader, to arrive at an overarching thesis in relation to these particular issues in Sebalds writings, is bound to fail. Even Air War and Literature, which claims for itself an extraliterary status while initially calling for documentary concreteness, eventually gives way to the suspicion that we may not be able to learn anything at all, even when we step back or look from above.

It is true: one ruins ones eyes with too much close reading. Still, what I offer in the pages to come includes the practice of a stubborn attention to detail. Sebald talks less openly of this than of the eye / of the crane that allows one to overlook a wide terrain,and spelling out the stories in his Welsh childrens Bible yet certain something else lies there, completely different from the sense of the words produced as he runs his index fingers over the lines of writing (Austerlitz 55E, 80G), and Austerlitz repeatedly in that same Bible examining every inch of a bewildering, hatch-marked illustration of the camp of the children of Israel (Austerlitz 5558E, 8184G).

These are puzzling models, I know, for literary criticism, and they presage only modest accomplishments in the chapters to follow. Still, if there are any insights to come, it will have something to do with a self-imposed myopia as I trace Sebalds running, elusive, understated, meditations on the intersection of vision, our capacity to know, and of what Sebald called our moral capacity: all these and his own narrative performances.

Thus in After Nature (1988, ), the earliest published of Sebalds major literary works, it is at the title of the first of its three poems that one must pause: Like the snow on the Alps. That title calls for particular attention, borrowed, as it is, from the poems concluding line and not according to the usual convention of citing the first phrase. Like the snow on the Alps is devoted to the German painter Matthaeus Grnewald. In the opening lines of the poem the figures from the altar at Lindenhardt cross the border from the sixteenth-century artwork into our twentieth-century world. By the end of the poem it is we as readers who are openly called upon to cross the border into the linguistic demands of the text.

Along the way Sebald experiments with what it might be to take in what is outside the text. We think as we begin to read that we understand its obvious project. Like the snow on the Alps sets about describing the painters work while sketching out a biography of the man: each of these tasks is embroiled in a sociopolitical critique. Such a project implies major presumptions about literary language and its practice of representation. Yet, as the poem progresses, ekphra sis gives way to a failure to capture the visual in language; and the biography describes the uncertainty of Grnewalds identity in the multiplicity of names attached to his works. Section 4 questions the identity of Grnewald because a jumble of different initials sign and claim authorship of his canvases. But, before and after this in Sebalds poem, that name appears in stranger form yet. Grnewalds They are the linguistic accompaniment to the coming blindness with which the poem closes, violent and ultimate blindness, it seems. We, the readers, who have been commanded to look sharply ahead, come upon those now famous phrases of Sebald, which announce: So it becomes, when the optic nerve / tears... / white like the snow / on the Alps (