Ben Hutchinson

W. G. Sebald - die dialektische Imagination

This book uses the annotations in W.G. Sebald’s private library (held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach) to develop an interpretation of his prose style as fundamentally dialectical. Alongside his readings of writers as diverse as Benjamin, Bernhard, Bassani, and Levi-Strauss, it uses in particular Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to help develop a close reading of Sebald’s syntax and narrative structures. The key concern of Sebald’s prose emerges not as the Holocaust (as has often been contended), but rather the dialectical processes of ‘progress’ and ‘regression’ inherent in history.

The shadow of resistance: W. G. Sebald and the Frankfurt School:

Sebald’s views on history and art were determined early on by his engagement with the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School, namely Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. From his earliest postgraduate research in the 1960s to his latest prose fiction in 2001, Sebald’s work bears signs of their influence at every level. This article traces this influence in three main phases. Initially, it establishes the main tenets underpinning Sebald’s interest in their thought. This interest is then followed through his books on Sternheim and Döblin, in order to establish the extent of the impact of the Frankfurt School on his formative years. After this reconstruction of the methodology in his early critical work, the article then assesses the consequences of Sebald’s interest in the Frankfurt School for his later prose fiction, highlighting in particular his dialectical syntax, his critique of the Enlightenment idea of progress, and his taste for certain kinds of modernist artists.

Marinheiro ou camponês? Algumas reflexões sobre as leituras de Sebald do ensaio “O narrador” de Walter Benjamin

A biblioteca particular de W. G. Sebald, cuja parte e mantida no Deutsches Literaturarchiv, possui uma copia da obra Illuminationen , de Walter Benjamin. Este ensaio tem por objetivo estabelecer um esquema teorico sobre a tecnica narrativa de Sebald, investigando suas anotacoes no ensaio “O Narrador” que encerra a obra supracitada. Com a ajuda de suas marcacoes e anotacoes, a propria estrutura narrativa de Sebald pode ser interpretada como uma forma de representar a “historia natural” como uma resposta estetica a um conceito filosofico. Dois principios podem ser derivados a partir dessa perspectiva: a estrategia de entrelacamento de camadas ( Einschachteln ), e a estrategia da montagem. E a dialetica entre esses dois principios que impulsiona o estilo da prosa de Sebald. A tensao em seu trabalho entre fato e ficcao deriva, em ultima analise, de uma complexa relacao entre, de um lado, o seu estilo em prosa artisticamente construido, de outro, seu realismo quase documental.

Marinheiro ou camponês? Algumas reflexões sobre as leituras de Sebald do ensaio “O narrador” de Walter Benjamin "Seaman" or " Peasant"? Some reflections on Sebald's reading of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Narrator"

W.G. Sebald’s private library, which is held in part in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, contains a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminationen. This essay seeks to establish a theoretical framework for Sebald’s narrative technique by investigating his annotations in the closing essay of the book, “The Narrator”. With the help of his underlinings and marginalia, Sebald’s own narrative structures can be interpreted as a means of depicting “natural history”, as an aesthetic response to a philosophical concept. Two principles can be derived from this perspective: the strategy of “interlocking layers” (Einschachteln), and the strategy of montage. It is the dialectic between these two principles that drives Sebald’s prose style. The tension in his work between fact and fiction derives ultimately from an uneasy relationship between his artfully constructed prose-style on the one hand and its quasidocumentary realism on the other.

German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: crisis and creativity

which puts forward an argument for the necessity of a “critical sense of the remembering self as much as of those who are remembered” (40). A case in point, for instance, are the apparently unrelated narratives of Sebald’s works, The Rings of Saturn (London: New Directions Books, 1995) and Austerlitz (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001), since they reveal “an associative narrative consciousness unfolding peripatetically (articulating the proximity of two spatialised historical memories)” (55). Chapter three introduces the reader to a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s theses on history and historicism as applied to Sebald’s Zürick lectures, Luftkrieg und Literatur (1997), in order to indicate the limitations of any attempt at a realistic reproduction of the past. Sebald’s (often unexpected) juxtapositions of images in his narrative aim to reject historical truth as such and to opt instead for a photographic approach to reality. Narratives which actively seek to warp reality can, in fact, better convey the complex relations between the perpetrators’ and victims’ respective memories of the Holocaust. “Grey Zone,” chapter four, ventures again into contested territory, such as the porous boundaries existing between victim and perpetrator, as represented by the bystanders in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved and in Spielberg’s Hollywood blockbuster. The central thesis of the book is reiterated here and in the following chapter on Schlink’s The Reader (Zurich: Diogenes, 1995) and Homecoming (Zurich: Diogenes, 2006). The final chapter on architecture and the spaces of memory focuses on The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and is, perhaps, the most interesting of the whole study, since it tests the initial thesis on the Holocaust’s materiality. As with the other texts analysed, in this chapter the author shows again how these spaces allow for a dialogic representation of victims and perpetrators, by re-enacting the past and involving the visitors as interactive witnesses in the Holocaust “performance.” This is done to stress the need for a more nuanced, yet affective, participation of contemporary witnesses in the memory of the Holocaust, not only in terms of its repetitive traumatic effects but also of postmemory’s desire for further understanding. This is a stimulating book, which uses critical tools in a very detailed and reflective way and presents an interesting picture of a difficult topic. My only reservation is for the occasional over-use of theory at the expense of clarity. This study would have benefited from clearer, more incisive expression to communicate such meaningful and sound concepts. Sometimes key ideas could have been discussed more directly and some convoluted, distracting turns of phrase avoided.

Modernism and the Erotics of Style

If, as Roland Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), writing can be considered as ‘the science of the various blisses [jouissances] of language, its Kama Sutra’,1 the question remains open as to whether there is a specifically modernist Kama Sutra. In 1927, Robert Graves and Laura Riding wrote of the ‘general modernist tendency to overcome the distinction between subject-matter and form’2 — but does this suggest the possibility of an identifiably modernist ‘erotics of art’, in the sense in which Susan Sontag established this phrase as shorthand for an increased attention to questions of form?3 And how does this erotics relate to the concept of style, itself a highly charged term in modernist discourse? This chapter will explore a representative selection of modernist texts from the genres of prose and poetry in order to argue that modernist eroticism is contingent on its highly self-conscious relationship to its own stylistic expectations — and that it is precisely this stylistic tension that renders it both erotic and modernist.

The ‘Virus of Prose’: Decadent Style and the Modernist Novel

Twelve years after The Flowers of Evil, and two years after his death in 1867, a work of Baudelaire’s was published that in its own way would be just as important as its predecessor for the development of modernist notions of style. Le Spleen de Paris (1869) not only reinforced the idea, established in The Flowers of Evil, that the locus of modern life was the big city — of which Paris was the exemplar par excellence — it also sought to bring together the two competing forms of poetry and prose (as its alternative name, Petits poemes en prose, suggests). Through his brief, lyrical vignettes of modern life in the streets of Paris, Baudelaire took a decisive step towards the Flaubertian dream of giving ‘prose the rhythm of verse’.

1857: Literary Beginnings

The development of a stylistic self-consciousness in modernism can be traced in the first instance by comparing the 1850s — the period of the genesis of Madame Bovary and The Flowers of Evil — with their subsequent reception in the 1920s. After the failed revolutions of 1848, the literary landscape across Europe underwent something of an inward turn. Since politics, it seemed, did not have the answers, perhaps poetics did. Emblematic of this would become Baudelaire’s figure of the dandy or ‘flâneur’, dawdling defiantly at the margins of modern capitalism. The dandy’s sense of self-consciousness — the dandy ‘should live and sleep in front of the mirror’1 — cultivated the aesthetic to the exclusion of the political or moral; ‘the figure of the leisured dandy thus aligned style with the refusal to compromise’.2 The ‘ivory tower’ became a common metaphor to writers such as Gerard de Nerval and Flaubert, in retreat from what they saw as the philistinism of modern life. ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower,’ the latter memorably wrote, ‘but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’3

1922: Style and the Modernist Lyric

Having traced the development of modernist conceptions of prose style from the germ of decadence to the linguistic fever of late modernism, this chapter proposes to focus on poetic manifestations of style around the zenith of modernism in the year 1922. Works by three of the major lyric figures of the modernist age will be taken to represent three different linguistic traditions: Valery’s Charms, Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is not the aim of this chapter to pursue a point by point exposition of these poems, nor to claim common cause between them. The intention is rather to understand them as crystallizations of certain contemporary views of poetic style, where it is precisely the differences — both of conception and of execution — within a common context that render such a comparative approach worthwhile. Through examining three poets with distinct agendas, the chapter seeks to explore the implications of stylistic self-consciousness for lyric poetry in the modernist era. Does style manifest itself differently in the modernist lyric than in modernist prose?

The ‘Alibi’ of Style: Modernist Manifestos

After charting in the previous chapters conceptions of style in modernist prose and poetry, this final chapter proposes to consider style in relation to a characteristically modernist ‘genre’, namely the manifesto. One could argue that the two terms ‘style’ and ‘manifesto’ are related etymologically: where the former refers implicitly to instruments wielded by the hand (a ‘writing-implement’, but also ‘a weapon of offence’),1 the latter refers explicitly to the hand (‘manus’) and to offence (‘fendere’).2 Moreover, if manifestos are defined not just by what they advocate, but also by what they oppose (a quality Mary Ann Caws terms their ‘againstness’),3 then equally ‘most of the famous statements on style […] are protests’, as John Middleton Murry claimed in 1922.4 As well as tracing conceptions of style through a representative range of modernist manifestos, a particular emphasis will thus be placed in this chapter on the relationship between the manifesto and style, on what one could call the performative aspect of the manifesto: what is the relationship between the ideas propounded and the way in which they are propounded?