Conclusion

Has Sebald’s queer Eros, then, triumphed over Oedipal Thanatos? As we see in Dr Selwyn’s suicide, homosexual love and queer desire are subject to the same negative forces of destruction that sweep through all of Sebald’s work. Even though ‘All’estero’ is structured as a Deleuzian ‘series’, and resists narrative coherence, the entire text of Schwindel. Gefühle. is not a fully realized revolutionary literary machine in the sense that it could become ‘the relay for a revolutionary machine to come’, nor does it complete the project of collective, minor enunciation that Deleuze and Guattari claim for Kafka. ¹ Instead, the queer lines of flight here become baffled, both by Oedipal structures — the narrator ends up, in ‘Il ritorno in patria’, returning to his fatherland of W. — and by the Thanatic logic of history. ‘Il ritorno in patria’ serves as a model for the dismal returns to repetitive history, and to German history in particular, throughout Sebald’s texts. Twice, the narrator of Schwindel. Gefühle. is driven back across the Alps into the land of his fathers, his patria of W. This is a most uncanny homeland, governed by the twin laws of patriarchy and history. The return to W. is loaded with ominous signs that the line of escape is being closed off: the narrator is repulsed by the Tyrolean newspaper he reads on the way, he visits the Krummenbach chapel where he is terrified both by pictures depicting the cruelty of the Stations of the Cross and by his memories of the terror as a child, and, crucially, the last stretch of the journey takes the narrator past a memorial commemorating a ‘last skirmish’ of the war in April 1945. The return to the homeland is a return to the German language, more specifically, to the narrator’s hated home dialect, to the Christian via dolorosa and to the historical legacy of Nazi perpetration. The unfriendliness of W. and its coldness to outsiders is confirmed, in some accounts, by Sebald’s own experience of Wertach im Allgäu. ² The Sebaldian narrator’s illomened journey passes through a bleak rain-swept landscape, whose miserable spell is finally broken when the sun comes out and shows him the valley like a revelation (SG, 192; V, 175).