ABSTRACT
The line separating the contemporary perspective of the narrators and characters populating the work of W.G. Sebald from the past they are mnemonically contemplating is sufficiently thin to have raised suspicions of simple historicist nostalgia—especially for the post-Hegelian century—among critics of Sebald’s work. The line in question, however, is also ruptured in a way that precludes any easy identification of the ruminations on history in which Sebald’s narrators engage with that of more systematic—or more regressive—historicist projects. Allusions to the biography and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose own reflections on the limitations of strictly historical explanation was discussed above in Chapter One, occupy a prominent place in the dense web of intertextual references that constitutes Sebald’s texts. Both in his earlier critical work and the later literary texts, the frequency and character of the Wittgensteinian references are closely intertwined with the sustained investigation of mnemonic phenomena that structures Sebald’s literary work as a whole. Wittgensteinian thought here frequently functions as a third element between the critical or narrative voice on the one hand, and the critically evaluated or narrated subject-object on the other. That third voice is not committed to dialectical mediation: Wittgenstein’s work, Sebald will find, is hardly fit to legitimize particular critical judgments, or to provide explicit philosophical grounding for certain narrative operations. Rather, Sebald invokes Wittgenstein to eventually unsettle the very idea that there could be such mediation between narrator and narrated. In the case of the early critical work that calls upon the Tractatus as a critical instrument to delineate that which may be said in a novel, this unsettling process is only beginning. Not altogether unlike Wittgenstein himself, Sebald will in his later work undermine some of his own earlier methodological precepts. As he begins his own literary project, the context of the Wittgensteinian references suggests that it is the structure of Wittgenstein’s work and the doubts it casts on the possibility of the clarity which the Tractatus strove to embody that will inform the Sebaldian text. The diagnosis of clear, “pathological” signs in various authors gives way to a prose that is characterized first and foremost by the complexity of the relations it establishes between phenomena. Like Wittgenstein, who retained the ideal of a “perspicuous representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) as he moved from the isomorphic relationships between propositions and facts to grammatical relationships, Sebald’s narrators are also in search of an order that would bind the connections between the phenomena they observe. In both cases, that order is found on the surface, not within a deep structure. The textual and visual surface of Sebald’s books challenges the view that personal and collective histories are a matter of chronological order; it presents a rearranged world of facts and fictions that reproduces Wittgenstein’s finding—attested to by the preface to the Investigations—that the assumption of an internal, organic order is beyond verification, but also that, on the other hand, the viewing (Ansicht) of a sufficiently large number of phenomena will not necessarily make for a work that is perspicuous in any conventional sense. Hence the dizzying effect of the interplay between words and images in Sebald, always establishing relations across time and space, but withholding the substance, “life,” an internal realm where the meaning of these relations would be constituted and could be grasped, simply by looking inside, or proceeding to yet deeper layers of historical sediment.
