Research Report: Understanding Peregrination

By Britta Gustafson, Emigrants Project Team

Abstract

“Blending Fact, Fiction, Allusion, and Recall: Sebald’s ‘Literary Monism’” explores and establishes the genre and style of W.G. Sebald's work, drawing on all four of his novels. McCulloh identifies Sebald’s central concerns as memory and forgetting and carefully describes his unique blend of autobiography and fiction presented in a mature and slightly mysterious voice. McCulloh then presents the themes running through these novels: uncanniness, travel as both plot and metaphor, accesing reality through fiction, the significance of photographs, “grim humor”, the self-referentiality of writing, indirection, and understatedness. This is a close reading of some deceptively simple writing with an evident appreciation for the craft and talent that went into it.

Description

Published in 2003, McCulloh’s book is a general introduction and companion to W.G. Sebald’s novels, including details about their themes, allusions, and critical responses. This is a significant work because most other books about Sebald are specialized critical works rather than foundational studies. The book won a 2003 Choice Outstanding Academic Book award and received positive reviews from German Quarterly and Modern Language Review. McCulloh is a professor of German at Davidson College with interests in W.G. Sebald, literary relations between Germany and Britain, vexillology, and artistic and cultural innovations of the sixties. He has also co-edited a collection of essays about Sebald.

This first chapter considers his work as a whole, the following four chapters treat each novel individually, and the last chapter is synthetic like the first. The book-specific chapters are also useful, going into further detail about features and allusions special to each book – necessarily, most details and differences between the novels are left out of the general first chapter. McCulloh begins with the Emigrants narrator’s concerns about Germans forgetting their history – a definitive example of how Sebald “recalls the past, recovers the past, and seeks to depict how the present fades imperceptibly into the past” (2). This introductory section also notes Sebald’s blend of autobiography and fiction and explains how his “autumnal” voice may be partly due to his older age when he began to write poetry and fiction. McCulloh also noted in the introduction to his book another significant fact about Sebald: that he died in a car accident at age 57 and so his work takes on an additional tragic tone of unfulfilled potential.

After the chapter’s introduction, its first section is “The Uncanniness of Everything,” which explains Sebald’s affinities for everyday strangeness and Freudian free association. The next one is “The Narrator as Peregrinator,” which discusses Sebald’s theme of travel: his books are concerned with the relationships between movement and mourning, forgetting, remembering. It also discusses the narrators’ physical journeys as especially significant and metaphorical: travel as living, as writing, as plot device, as forward motion through time, as a type of movement engaging with the past, and as encountering the uncanny (sometimes even doppelgängers). Then, in “The Heightened ‘Reality’ of Fictional Reconstruction,” McCulloh tackles Sebald’s use of photographs as part of the careful verisimilitude in his fiction, “provoking involuntarily questions about the significance and meaning of the past” (8). McCulloh also notes that these pictures do not have captions, so the relationship between the pictures and the text is left ambiguous and sometimes humorous (a theme also picked up in the “Grim Humor” section). Next, “Work in Progress” covers Sebald’s narrators’ self-referentiality as they live, write, and come to terms with their stories: “the creative act of writing constitutes a form of active coming-to-terms with experiences such as these, of confronting the dark side of reality, but also moving forward” (12). Last, “Staid Hyperbole” and “Ambient Oneness” attempt to analyze his narrative voice, and “The Final Word is Never Final” acknowledges criticisms of Sebald’s indirectness and mysteriousness.

Commentary

This chapter is essential for understanding the literary implications of mapping one of Sebald’s novels. It covers his theme of travel in depth, including as applied to The Emigrants in particular – a preliminary validation of the effort of mapping the book by promising complexities to explore both while modelling the book and after the map is complete. The chapter also begins to explain why Sebald’s work evokes feelings of “dislocation” while being very specifically located: “Sebald's constructs often have the effect of a double-edged sword, and the phenomenon of movement is no exception; it brings life but also annihilation” (15).

McCulloh also hints that a map may not be the true key to understanding The Emigrants because in Sebald’s work, “everything belongs together somehow, everything is interrelated by some secret orderliness, but even the author isn't certain precisely how” (22), so reducing the novel down to one simple answer or model can never be truly correct. However, there is much promise in a map that represents time and character as well as space, because “The notion is implicit in Sebald’s work that life itself is a form of travel – a journey through time…Sebald's texts contain frequent similes in which buildings are compared with ships” (14). This also relates to an essay by Michael Niehaus titled “No Foothold: Institutions and Buildings in W. G. Sebald's Prose,” which elaborates why buildings are not stable places for the characters of The Emigrants.

Near the end of this chapter, McCulloh says, “The point is in the final result – the completed yet paradoxically open-ended experience Sebald relates in his enigmatic books, with their haunting pictorial homage to the past” (24), which means that a digital, hypertextual map is an appropriate form of modeling for this text. A Google Earth map is completed but open-ended; a reader-user can navigate from place to place using the book’s narrative sequence or any other kind of sequence that he or she chooses, viewing the images at each marker and imagining the travels of the characters overlaid on the visual map.

Resources for Further Study

Fuchs, Anne. “Understanding W. G. Sebald. (Book Review).” The Modern Language Review. 1 Jan 2005. Comp. HighBeam Research. 21 Feb. 2008 <http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-138705575.html>.

McCulloh, Mark R. “Blending Fact, Fiction, Allusion, and Recall: Sebald’s ‘Literary Monism.’” Understanding W. G. Sebald. University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 1-25.

McCulloh, Mark R. “McCulloh Homepage.” Department of German & Russian. Davidson College. 21 Feb. 2008 <http://www.davidson.edu/academic/german/mcculloh/mcculloh.html>.

Niehaus, Michael. “No Foothold: Institutions and Buildings in W. G. Sebald’s Prose.” W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh. Walter de Gruyter, 2006. 315-333.