Deane Blackler. Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture Series. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. xiv + 255 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57113-351-9.

Reviewed by Brad Prager (Department of German and Russian Studies, The University of Missouri)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Eve M. Duffy (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)

What Does Sebald Want?

To be disobedient in relation to a text, a reader must have some knowledge of an author's intentions. What are readers to make of W. G. Sebald's aims? How did he want his works to be read, and to what degree should those desires inflect our readings? At times Sebald appears to lead readers through the stacks of the library, setting out a thousand red threads to follow. Is an astute reader defined by his or her fortitude in pursuing each and every one, and in so doing disentangling the author's careful weave? Deane Blackler's thoughtful and well-written study of Sebald suggests that certain acts on the author's part are intentionally meant to encourage readers' "disobedience" and that a moral charge goes hand-in-hand with his encouragement. She asserts that Sebald's poetics "foreground the disobedient, adventurous reader," and that they promote the notion that reading itself is "the educative means by which we might become more civilized, less predisposed to our natural tendency to destruction, [and] able to resist unthinking obedience to institutional imperative" (p. x). This moral reader appears elsewhere in Blackler's study under the names "vigilant" and "inquisitive."

The numerous references to art and literature that fill the pages of Sebald's best-known writings--Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1993), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001)--set in motion endless chains of association. Blackler focuses on these four works, analyzing examples from them such as Sebald's reference in Austerlitz to J. M. W. Turner's Funeral at Lausanne (1841). The title character sees a funeral procession and recalls Turner's watercolor, which then reminds him of his discovery that Turner had visited the Mawddach Estuary on a visit to Wales. One could stop here and concern oneself with only the rationale behind this association (despite the fact that Austerlitz describes the connection as "entirely insignificant"[1]), but a reader could also go further. Turner painted The Great Western Railway (1844), and that work recalls motifs found in the Paul Bereyter section of The Emigrants. Likewise, Turner's The Eruption of Vesuvius (1817) can be tied to the apocalyptic imagery in Sebald's lengthy poem After Nature (1988). Close readers can weave their own intra- and extra-textual tapestries of connections, some intended by the author and some merely associative. To what extent can either path be referred to as disobedient?

Blackler works outward from the idea of liturgical disobedience, or the concept that one is meant to understand more in the biblical Book of Luke than its literal meanings. This exegetical tradition owes itself to the extent to which Luke the Evangelist implicates the reader in the process of reading. We become collaborators in the creation of a textual world; the narrating of reality, after all, takes place in our heads and inspired authors capably remind us of this fact. Blackler draws an additional connection between the terms that define her approach to Sebald and those put forward by the filmmaker Alexander Kluge. The director aimed to encourage audiences to "re-edit" his work in their heads. Where such categories are concerned Blackler might have been more incisive. Most authors want their readers to think, so to whom are we being disobedient when we make associations beyond the intended ones?

Literary readings of Sebald can follow a variety of paths. Does one pursue a solitary reference in Vertigo from Pisanello through Gentile da Fabriano all the way to Franz Grillparzer?[2] Or, should a reader, on the other hand, follow connections inspired by knowledge of the author's biography, noting for example that the name "Naegeli," which we find in The Emigrants, resembles Sebald's family name "Egelhofer," and that the character who goes by that name bears similarities to Sebald's maternal grandfather?[3] Where Sebald's work is concerned such processes of detection always reward, but free association is also an essential part of the game. As interpreters, Sebald's narrators specialize in it--and here he may have provided us with the clearest allegory for how he hoped to be read. In The Emigrants, sash windows made of dark glass suddenly make the narrator recall a chateau in the Charente with star-shaped fortifications, and in Austerlitz, traces of talcum powder are said to recall an ectoplasm that clairvoyants produce from their mouths. Sebald's figures are consistently in positions where one thing reminds them of another, and in this way he plays with the scholarly rules. In order to acknowledge this, however, one must acknowledge that the rules exist and that Sebald enjoys them as often as he abandons them.

One rub in all of this concerns the photographs ubiquitous in Sebald's work, and Blackler devotes a major part of her third chapter to them. With respect to the photographs in Vertigo, she notes that, "complete meanings are unavailable" (p. 160), and likewise observes that Sebald's photographs "invite disobedience by withholding information" (p. 94). Blackler writes astutely about The Emigrants, drawing on examples such as the inclusion of a photograph of Vladimir Nabokov, noting that Sebald's substitution--the fact that this picture is not the one to which the character Henry Selwyn refers--thrusts us back onto our understanding of the interplay between the character, the narrator, and ourselves. This employment of images raises a bounty of questions, and the dialogue between reader and image goes on and on, but these problems are knotty. Do Sebald's photographs really differ from the texts in their referentiality? And if they are different, to what extent should they be treated as "portals for escape from the labyrinthine topography of his textual landscapes"?[4] Moreover, Sebald scholarship, of which there is a surfeit, shows that it may be fruitful to reflect on the many differences between the German versions and the English-language translations. Some images take full pages in one version but are presented side by side with the text in another. These alterations might also productively inform one's readings.

Sebald's implied ellipses and captionless images certainly enjoin readers to look beyond the text, but how precisely should this be done? While Sebald makes moves and counter-moves, and he demonstrates masterful knowledge of the rules, his writings frequently return to the concept that history takes the shape of a continuum. In this regard he was influenced by Walter Benjamin, and his interest was in reading the world dialectically, setting contemporary Europe side by side with images from its violent past so that we may become, as Blackler writes, "less predisposed to our natural tendency to destruction (p. x)." This latter principle is consistently in evidence, as is the writer's dedication to studying the details of works of art, themselves endless chains of associations insofar as they are each in dialogue with art's own history. Art is at once a self-referential system and a reflection of the world. The discovery of this duality is part of the pleasure in reading Sebald, a pleasure that may or may not come to consciousness through acts of interpretive disobedience.

Blackler takes note of the out-of-focus atrocity photograph included in The Rings of Saturn, although she inclines away from the assertion that Sebald is a "second-generation" author, or one who is defined in relation to the Holocaust and the Second World War. While Sebald may be clearly linked to European modernists such as Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Nabokov, he is hardly diminished by interpretations that center on his view of mid-century violence and its consequences. Some passages in his work benefit from being read across historical lines, yet in order to read him as "a writer of imaginative fiction" a reader does not have to foreclose the possibility that he was simultaneously "a German writer voicing the silence of the postwar era" (Lilian Furst paraphrased in Blackler, p. 90). Sebald can be both, and the binarism can be misleading. Although his works are not reducible to singular meanings, the price of admitting that Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and Bergen-Belsen do not always loom large in Sebald's writing is admitting that they sometimes do loom large in Sebald's writing.

Blackler's study joins J. J. Long's excellent W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (2008) and Anne Fuchs's Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (2004) among the recent single-author studies of Sebald.[5] It represents an important attempt at a synthesis. Blackler has a good ear for the more existential observations in Sebald's writings, and opens with an apt epigraph from Edith Wharton: "We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region" (p. v). Blackler highlights how readers are positioned as Sebald's traveling companions (Fahrgäste) and how he appears to engage with the reader as would a good listener. How we relate to the signs in his texts--as a companion in dialogue or as a "disobedient" interpreter--goes toward the heart of the hermeneutic question where Sebald's work is concerned.

Notes

[1]. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (New York: Random House, 2001), 110. 

[2]. Here I am referring to Bianca Theisen, "Prose of the World: W. G. Sebald's Literary Travels," The Germanic Review 79, no. 3 (2004): 163-79; here 170.

[3]. On this, see Mark M. Anderson, "Fathers and Son: W. G. Sebald," Bookforum, (Dec.-Jan. 2007): 28-31.

[4]. As argued by Carsten Strathausen in "Going Nowhere: Sebald's Rhizomatic Travels," Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald (Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007), 472-491; here 488.

[5]. J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Anne Fuchs, Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). Mark Richard McCulloh's refined Understanding W.G. Sebald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) was the first such study.

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Citation: Brad Prager. Review of Blackler, Deane, Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23930

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