ABSTRACT
The chastity of the bachelor, as we saw in the last chapter, is a mode of minor resistance to bourgeois masculinity and its relentless drive for oppression and self-reproduction. In this chapter, I show how these fantasies of oppositional queer masculinity are connected to utopian fantasies of queer resistance to racist and colonial structures. In these fantasies, queer desire and queer love become sites of reconciliation between Germans and their racial others, become ways to undermine racist and colonial structures, and enable a transgression of bourgeois categories of gender, race, and nation. Sebald’s queer oriental fantasies thus provide access to the Sebaldian utopias of transgression, reconciliation, and the suspension of time. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Edward FitzGerald’s verse is, for Sebald, a place where the mediaeval Orient and the dwindling Occident can meet and reconcile in a way never allowed by the calamitous course of history (RS, 238; RSe, 200). FitzGerald’s homosexuality facilitates a break with the repressive reproductive tradition of his aristocratic family and allows for a tender, poetic transgression of the border between his colonial and oppressive West and the oriental other. As so much of the rest of Die Ringe des Saturn chronicles the cataclysm of Western colonial expansion, including the misery that ensued when imperial Britain attempted to gain hegemony over nineteenth-century China, and the horrors of Belgian colonialism in the Congo, FitzGerald’s poetic reconciliation achieves the rare status of a moment of redemption, underlined by its heterotopic presentation. In this chapter, I show that the orientation of Sebald’s queer characters is frequently expressed by travel to, engagement with, or mimicry of the Orient. This is most clearly shown in Sebald’s hagiography of Roger Casement in Die Ringe des Saturn, whom he canonizes for his political resistance to empire. 1 In Nach der Natur, Grünewald is caught between a Jewish wife and a male lover. In Die Ausgewanderten, Sebald also devotes the only narrative about a non-Jewish figure to his homosexual uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, who serves as a reconciliatory figure by having a love relationship with his Jewish employer, Cosmo. In these three narratives, Sebald can be viewed in a rich tradition of German queer Orientalist fantasy. The term ‘Orientalism’ was defined by Edward Said as a Western academic practice that dominated, restructured, and had authority over the Orient. 2 It has since been more 67broadly used as a term to describe a set of Western practices and fantasies about geographical locations and populations who are imagined as the other of the West. While Said excluded Germany from his initial study of Orientalism, subsequent research has demonstrated that not only did Germany have its own tradition of academic Orientalism, but that it has a long history of peculiarly German Orientalist fantasies, which, as Todd Kontje has shown, stretch back at least to the Middle Ages. These contain racist and violent elements, the most toxic and murderous of which were codified in National Socialist ideology.
