Ghostwriting

W. G. Sebald's Poetics of History

Richard T. Gray

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501330001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Deutsche Literaturkritik

Ghostwriting provides the first comprehensive analysis of the fictional prose narratives of one of contemporary Germany's most recognized authors, the émigré writer W. G. Sebald. Examining Sebald's well-known published texts in the context of largely unknown unpublished works, and informed by documents and information from Sebald's literary estate, this book offers a detailed portrait of his characteristic literary techniques and how they emerged and matured out of the practices and attitudes he represented in his profession as a literary scholar. The title "Ghostwriting" signals the convergence in Sebald's works of a set of diverse historical questions, philosophical views, and literary practices. Many historical ghosts haunt Sebald's narratives on the level of story. Moreover, Sebald's narrator plays the role of a ghostwriter in the profound sense that his stories fictionally re-enact the histories of obscure, but once-living individuals whose lives they revitalize, and whose fates are tied up with the most virulent historical conjunctures of the modern world. This study thus seeks to comprehend the constitutive elements of Sebald's "poetics of history, " his implementation of literary tools for effective historical memorializing.

OneWittgenstein’s Ghost: Toward Understanding Sebald’s Literary Turn

“Man bezeichnet die Erinnerung als ein Bild. Das Bild kann ich mit dem Original vergleichen, aber nicht die Erinnerung. Die Erlebnisse der Vergangenheit sind ja nicht wie die Gegenstände im Zimmer nebenan: Jetzt sehe ich sie zwar nicht, aber ich kann hinübergehen. Aber kann ich in die Vergangenheit gehen?”

[“Memory is called a picture. I can compare a picture with the original, but this is not true for memory. The experiences of the past are not like the objects in the room next door: I do not see them at the moment, to be sure, but I can go over there. But can I go back into the past?”]

Ludwig Wittgenstein1

More than almost any other contemporary prose fictionalist of international repute, W. G. Sebald is a critic’s author. Long before he emerged in the early 1990s as an acclaimed writer of prose fictions, Sebald had enjoyed a nearly twenty-year career as teacher, researcher, and widely published scholar engaged primarily with German and Austrian literature. Not surprisingly, Sebald’s fictions are haunted by the presence of intellectual sages whose guiding spirits—whose ghosts—lend shape and thematic unity to his fictional endeavors. Intertextuality is the name now commonly associated with this heteroglossic aspect of Sebald’s fictions, in which the voices of older authors and intellectual mentors rise up to speak through the diction of Sebald’s first-person, pseudo-autobiographical narrator. This gesture of speaking through or speaking with named or unnamed intellectual companions is also one of the defining features of critical writing on literature, and this is what often relegates criticism to the potentially demeaning status of “secondary” literature. This term implies that “critical” elaboration is derivative of another form of writing, relying on the so-called “primary” works whose sense, meaning, and structure the critical work investigates and purports to explain. However, Sebald’s “primary” works of fiction are consciously and deliberatively “secondary” and derivative in a manner very similar to critical explorations. The major difference is that once one abandons the pretense to reasoned interpretive analysis, one can also jettison the rhetoric of persuasion, including the detritus of the scholarly apparatus, such as references, footnotes, and quotation marks.

Sebald spoke eloquently about this turn from the objectivity of scholarly investigation to the subjective, emotional engagement with the thought and words of others in an interview with Uwe Pralle, given just prior to the life-ending heart attack at the wheel of his car in December 2001. He remarks that the scholarly ideal with which he and his generation of students in Germany had been imbued demanded that the critic never use the pronoun “I,” that all subjective moments be banished, and scholarship reduced to the abstract gathering of factual information. While admitting that such a collection of objective materials has its significance, Sebald insists that this accumulation of prima facie information only becomes productive when it is infused with subjective experience: “To be sure, this type of material-gathering is not entirely useless, but I believe it only becomes productive for us in that moment when we project our own subjective experience into the area we are researching” (“Nun ist diese Form der Materialsammlung natürlich nicht vollkommen unnütz, aber ich glaube, sie wird für uns produktiv erst in dem Augenblick, in dem wir unsere subjektive Erfahrung hineindenken in das von uns erforschte Umfeld”). He goes on to specify that we must “interpolate” into the discourse of evidence the radically subjective color provided by our personal psychology, our own melancholy, hopes, and desires (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 255). This is precisely what Sebald’s shift from a biographically-inflected form of literary criticism to a mode of fictional discourse, haunted by the voices of his intellectual and literary mentors, allowed him to accomplish.2

Among the myriad forebears on whose life, works, and insights Sebald drew, three figures assume peculiar significance and prominence. At the top of the list stands, without question, the Prague German-Jewish writer Franz Kafka, with whom Sebald engaged throughout his career as a literary scholar,3 and whose shadow falls in some way on every fictional work he created. Another guiding figure for Sebald’s creative texts is Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born émigré writer whose life and works held special fascination for Sebald.4 If Kafka and his works, especially the figure of his revenant Jäger Gracchus (Hunter Gracchus), supply the stitching that weaves the disparate texts of Schwindel. Gefühle into a coherent whole, then Nabokov, about whom Sebald also wrote a critical study,5 plays a similar role in Die Ausgewanderten, where he appears as the recurrent figure of the Butterfly Man. Cast as the prototypical ever-wandering emigrant, Nabokov binds together on a motivic level the stories of the four emigrants retold in this work.6 The third primary predecessor does not appear on the surface to have the same prominence and formative influence on Sebald’s fictional works; and yet his life, thought, and language haunt Sebald’s prose fictions on a more subliminal, if equally pervasive level. This is the early-twentieth century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose life and work course through Sebald’s fictions like a rhythmic thorough-bass.7

Wittgenstein stands out in this group for several reasons. First, he is a philosopher rather than an author of literary texts, although, as David Edmonds and John Eidinow point out, in his popular reception he has gained the quasi-mythical status of such Modernist authors as Kafka, Proust, Eliot, or Beckett.8 Second, unlike Kafka and Nabokov, he was never the subject of a critical study by the scholar Sebald. Third and finally, Wittgenstein figures in Sebald’s fictions less on the level of intertextual resonance—although this dimension is not completely absent—than as an iconic figure whose life and lifestyle serve a paradigmatic function for the types of biographies that especially fascinated Sebald. Wittgenstein represents the classical voluntary émigré, someone who leaves his native Austria by choice, but who nevertheless remains emotionally attached to this homeland not as a political entity, nor for reasons of national or ethnic identity, but instead because of an intimacy with its landscapes and its natural environment. Wittgenstein thus reflects the ambivalent love–hate relationship Sebald himself harbored toward his native post-war Germany, reviling its cultural-political backwardness while relishing the magnificent alpine panoramas of the Allgäu region in which he grew up. Wittgenstein the émigré thereby models the same liberation from the habituation and constraint of one’s native circumstances that motivated Sebald’s own life of voluntary exile. According to his friend David Pinsent, Wittgenstein cultivated the state of exile as the condition of possibility for his intellectual productivity,9 and this also captures Sebald’s motivation to emigrate. Wittgenstein’s biography further parallels Sebald’s in remarkable ways: both spent their self-willed emigrations in England, and they shared the city of Manchester as their introduction to Britain and the British lifestyle. Wittgenstein lived in Manchester from 1908 through 1911, where he was enrolled as an engineering student at the College of Technology. Only later would he take up permanent residence in Cambridge, where he earned academic degrees and eventually assumed the post of professor of philosophy. Sebald, similarly, lived from summer 1966 through autumn 1968, and autumn 1969 through summer 1970, as a lecturer at the University of Manchester, before eventually moving to Norwich and the University of East Anglia, first as a Ph.D. student and then as a member of the teaching staff.

In an interview for Austrian television broadcast just before his death, Sebald addressed the close affinity he felt throughout his life for Wittgenstein, grounded, as he admits, more in his fascination with the person than with any inherent sympathy for or profound understanding of his philosophy. Sebald emphasizes that what intrigues him about Wittgenstein is “the history of his personality, how it developed … with all the pathological facets that were part of it” (“die Geschichte seiner Persönlichkeit, wie sie sich entwickelt hat … mit all den pathologischen Facetten, die dazu gehörten”; “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 229). What drew him to this figure was the peculiar combination of analytical genius and critical insight, coupled with a penchant for pathological brooding, insecurity, and morose isolation. These are personality traits Wittgenstein shared with Kafka, that towering presence in Sebald’s intellectual biography. In the cited interview, Sebald continues by specifying how he felt peculiarly mesmerized by photographs of Wittgenstein and his social milieu, coming to identify him as a life companion: “I just simply cannot get enough of looking at … the existing photographs of him [Wittgenstein]; not only pictures of the person, but also those of his entire social milieu. This somehow meshes in such a manifold way with my own interests that he has become, so to speak, a companion for me, a secret companion” (“Ich kann mich einfach nicht satt sehen … an den Bildern, die es von ihm [Wittgenstein] gibt; nicht nur den Bildern seiner Person, sondern dem ganzen sozialen Umfeld. Das verzahnt sich irgendwie auf so eine vielfältige Weise mit meinen Interessen, daß er sozusagen zu einem Kompagnon, einem insgeheimen Kompagnon geworden ist für mich”; “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 229). Sebald tellingly emphasizes the visual engagement he entertains with Wittgenstein the person and his life surroundings. This is consistent with Sebald’s special fondness for illustrated biographies, concretized most poignantly in his propensity for the Rowohlt collection of biographical monographs that formed one anchor of his own personal library.10 Not surprisingly, the volume in this series treating Wittgenstein’s life and works is among Sebald’s extensive collection of books by and about the Viennese philosopher.11 But most indicative of Wittgenstein’s significance for Sebald’s intellectual trajectory is that in the mid-1980s, around the time of his life-changing transition from a literary critic to an author of creative fictions, Sebald developed an inchoate project centered on this philosopher, conceived as a film that would recreate his life in a series of images and dramatic scenes. He referred to this endeavor as his “Projekt Wittgenstein,” and the work on this cinematic documentary, which bore the title “Leben Ws” (W’s life), served as an incubator for many of the ideas, aesthetic strategies, and narrative innovations that inform his prose fictions.

Among Sebald’s literary remains and posthumous papers is a folder containing application materials to the Filmförderungsanstalt in Berlin, the German institution charged with promoting the development and production of independent cinema. In this application, Sebald requests financial support for the creation of the Wittgenstein film script. This file contains a completed application form, a narrative description and justification of the project, and an outline of sixty-four scenes that constitute the bulk of the film.12 The signed application form is dated August 25, 1986, and these materials represent photocopies of the original application Sebald submitted to the Filmförderungsanstalt on or around that date. Although the file contains no letter of response, we must assume that Sebald’s application was rejected. The application cover letter requests salary replacement for four months, allowing Sebald to devote himself to fleshing out the film script, a small sum to fund research and materials, and costs for producing the final screenplay in the thirteen copies required by the foundation. In addition to the completed project description, this file contains twelve pages of handwritten notes that record Sebald’s ideas for elaborating individual scenes. The sketchiness of these amplifications suggests that Sebald broke off detailed work on this project at an early stage.

“Leben Ws” is not entirely unknown to Sebald scholars. Sebald himself published this proposal on April 22, 1989, under the title “Leben Ws: Skizze einer möglichen Szenenreihe für einen nichtrealisierten Film” (W’s life: Sketch of a possible ser...