ABSTRACT
Where does Sebaldian wayward, queer masculinity interact with the Oedipal structures of the German patriarchal family and of orthodox German studies? Or, to couch the question in more scholarly terms, how can a reading of W. G. Sebald’s academic apprenticeship help us to understand the theoretical underpinnings of the Sebaldian queer? Sebald’s very earliest critical work deals with the discontents attending on the system of patriarchal sexuality. Indeed, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks is riddled with discourses of perverse sexuality, unambiguously linking sex to calamity. If, as many critics have shown, the discourses that preoccupy all of Sebald’s fiction — messianism, the unnaturalness of Heimat and the repression of memories of the Holocaust, among others — can be read from his earliest academic essays, so too can his critique of German discourses of sex, bourgeois masculinity, and modernity. This chapter reads a selection of his critical works on Sternheim, Roth, Franzos, Handke, and Schnitzler, to form a picture of Sebald as an unruly son, who in his early work demolishes the theoretical underpinnings of the patriarchal male in modernist bourgeois literature. From his earliest critical writings, through to his last published critical collection Logis in einem Landhaus [A Place in the Country], Sebald was certainly an anatomist of melancholy, but at the same time a merciless anatomist of the psychopathology of bourgeois masculinity. His academic criticism was initially informed by the language of the Frankfurt School, in particular the work of Adorno, in analysing the authoritarian structures that underlay Wilhelminian patriarchy, but also developed its own methodology that linked crises in masculinity to crises in poetics. Further, Sebald links a scornful demolition of masculinities in modernist literature to an analysis of the deforming effects of Jewish attempts to assimilate to German culture. The works analysed in this chapter trace Sebald’s critical moves towards a Deleuzian ‘line of flight’ that tries to cross over the boundaries of German masculinity. Sebald’s developing critical commitment to an ethics of brotherhood instead of an allegiance to the patriarchy draws him close to a queer and often Jewish construct of masculinity.
