Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative Prose Writing

1
Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative Prose Writing
2
Intertexuality

• Literary texts often build up their worlds
  through reference to other texts, not just an
  external reality.
• Lends them authority, illustrates that their work
  belongs in a literary tradition. Also subvert
  that tradition?
• Odysseus in Tauben im Gras
• Ithaca

3
Ithaca, NY
4
p.190 Von Keryka aus über Ithaka und Patras in
den Golf von Korinth
5
Vladimir Nabokov (p. 26)

• http//www.randomhouse.com/features/nabokov/timeli
  ne.html
• http//www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807085405/
  ref3Dnosim/completereview/103-0650152-6226220
• The role of aesthetic patterning in narrative
  prose?
• An artistic device to signal that it is fiction,
  or that reality is more mysterious than we assume?

6
Sebalds critique of fictional representations of
traumatic experience

• For Sebald, the production of aesthetic or
  pseudo-aesthetic effects out of the rubble of a
  destroyed world is a process through which
  literature revokes its right to exist (Sebald
  1982 359).
• Compare with the eternal pattern of the cat and
  mouse, or the aesthetic patterning of reality in
  the use of colours in that book.
• If not fiction, then documentary?
• W.G. Sebald, Zwischen Geschichte und
  Naturgeschichte Versuch über die literarische
  Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung mit Anmerkungen
  zu Kasack, Nossack und Kluge, in Orbis
  Litterarum 37 (1982), S. 345-366.

7
Documentary Fiction?

• Surely a contradiction in terms?
• The act of ordering and creating artistic
  patterns and meaning out of the documents means
  that they are no longer in their original form.

8

• What is the formal effect and what are the
  thematic reasons why the narrator reproduces the
  memories of Luisa Lanzberg?
• What is the image of contemporary Germans and
  Germany in this story?
• Find examples of the self-reflexive use of
  photographs in this story. What does this suggest
  about the use of photographs in the book?

9
Formal effect

• Variations in narration and focalisation do much
  to determine the overall effect of novels (J.
  Culler).
• Get away from the limitations of a first-person
  narrator

10
Use of documentary memoirs

• Authenticity
• Give a voice to the victims of history?
• The cultural importance of transmitting memories
  the continuity of family history, social history
• Whose story? Max Aurach or his mother? (cf. 111)
  Or are their stories one and the same?

11
The power of authentic memoirs and their ethical
impulsion

• For Max Aurach (on second reading!) eines jener
  bösen deutschen Märchen, in denen man, einmal in
  den Bann geschlagen, mit einer angefangenen
  Arbeit, in diesem Fall also mit dem Erinnern, dem
  Schreiben und dem Lesen, fortfahren muß, bis
  einem das Herz bricht. (289)
• Die von mir im Vorstehenden teilweise
  wiedergegebenen Aufzeichnungen haben mich auf
  das nachhaltigste beschäftigt und sind zuletzt
  der Anlaß gewesen, daß ich nach Kissingen und
  Steinach gefahren bin. (p. 327)

12
Jews in Germany pre-1933

• das untere Dorf, das Luisa als ihre engere
  Heimat bezeichnet (290)
• ein Bild der Schwester von Papa, die das
  schönste Mädchen weit und breit gewesen sein
  soll, eine wahre Germania (292)
• Die Werke ihres Lieblingsdichters Heine, der auch
  der Lieblingsdichter der Kaiserin Elisabeth ist.
  (292)
• Schooling christliche Kinderbewahranstalt
  einklassige Schule, aber nicht das, was man
  unter einer Judenschule versteht (303)
• Der Lehrer Salomon Bein fühlt sich in erster
  Linie als treuer Diener des Staates (304)

13
German -Jewish culture?

• es werden Geschichten vorgelesen und Sagen aus
  der deutschen Vergangenheit (306)
• Fathers Heereslieferantenkontrakt (311)
• den endgültigen Übertritt in das bürgerliche
  Leben (312) cf. Fritz Aurach, p.325 individual
  history and social history?
• Anti-Semitism as European problem weil in
  Rußland die Juden zu Kurbädern keinen Zulaß
  haben (315)
• Assimiliation so gut wie bereits vollzogenen
  Austritt aus dem Judentum (321)

14
Intertexuality even in the memoirs?

• Dem Bratschisten Hansen aus Hamburg(319)
• Der Knabe auf Schmetterlingsjagd (319)
• beschlossen die Eltern, daß man jetzt einen
  Ehemann für mich finden müsse. (324)

15
Contemporary Germany

• Disfigured, ugly, grandiose, neo-imperialist
  unfriendly (328/9)
• Bureaucratic.
• verschrobenes Geschichtsbewußtsein (331). The
  brief biographies of master butchers (cf. 42,
  PBs obituary)
• von seinem einstmaligen Charakter nicht das
  geringste verratenden Steinach (p. 337)
• die rings mich umgebende Geistesverarmung und
  Erinnerungslosigkeit der Deutschen, das Geschick,
  mit dem man alles bereinigt hatte, mir Kopf und
  Nerven anzugreifen begann. (p. 338)

16
The Ethical Demands of Remembering

• Unverzeihlich erschien es mir nun im Nachdenken,
  daß ich es damals in Manchester verabsäumt oder
  nicht fertiggebracht hatte, Aurach jene Fragen zu
  stellen, die er erwartet haben mußte von mir und
  also fuhr ich zum ersten Mal seit sehr langer
  Zeit wieder nach Manchester ., p. 266

17
Photographs, reproduced in image and text

• Photographs of the ghettos, not shown why? Does
  an image reduce complexity compared to text?
• Like the one of the Bücherverbrennung but also
  not the original photographs they are
  reproductions
• Artificially produced to give the appearance of
  (documentary) truth
• How can Sebalds work evade this criticism? Can
  it? Should it? Is it ethically sufficient to
  foreground the problem and make us aware as
  readers of the problem Sebalds project is one
  of passing memories on not allowing them to be
  forgotten, keeping them in the public sphere.

18
How does one see the past?

• Aber ich spüre, daß sie alle drei herzschauen zu
  mir, denn ich stehe ja an der Stelle, an der
  Genewein mit seinem Fotoapparat gestanden
  hat. (p. 355)
• Ich überlege, wie die drei wohl geheißen haben
• Roza / Rosa a thread running through the book
  Luisa
• The three fates Nona, Decuma and Morta. Nona
  spun the thread of life, Decuma assigned it to a
  person, Morta cut it, ending that persons life.
• But here they are at the mercy of someone elses
  decree, someones elses aesthetic patterning of
  reality

19
Gesinnungsästhetik?

• Is there a political message to Die
  Ausgewanderten?
• The production of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic
  effects out of the rubble of a destroyed world
  is a process through which literature revokes
  its right to exist
• Uses literary-aesthetic strategies to raise
  ethical questions about the representation of
  others lives.
• The act of remembering and the memories
  themselves are being transmitted despite the
  formal complexities. The thread is still present.

20
Revision Seminars

• 3034 1-2 next week
• 4034 2-3 next week
• Additional 1-hour seminars in January in week
  beginning Monday 10th, Check noticeboard for
  details at start of year.
• Exam, Monday 17th, 12-2, KCG5

21
Gm3034 seminar questions

• 1. Discuss the significance of narrative
  perspective in at least TWO of the works you have
  read for this course.
• 2. In their attempts to write about an
  increasingly complex reality, writers in the
  twentieth century have consistently gone beyond
  realism. (S. Craven). Discuss
  with reference to at least TWO of the works you
  have read for this course.
• 3. In twentieth-century German literature, art
  is not about art for art's sake, but is
  increasingly concerned with the social, indeed
  the political (G. Schirr).
  Discuss with reference to at least TWO of the
  works you have read for this course.
• 4. Discuss the presentation of EITHER the
  outsider OR the artist in at least TWO of the
  works of narrative prose you have read for this
  course.

22
GM4034

• Literature is a paradoxical institution because
  to create literature is to write according to
  existing formulas to produce something that
  looks like a sonnet or that follows the
  conventions of the novel but it is also to
  flout those conventions, to go beyond them. J.
  Culler, Literary Theory A very short
  introduction, p. 41.
• If stories accept class divisions as natural
  and explore how the virtuous serving-girl may
  marry a lord, they work to legitimate contingent
  historical arrangements. Or is literature the
  place where ideology is exposed, revealed as
  something that can be questioned? J. Culler, p.
  39.
• By identifying what happens we are able to
  think of the rest of the verbal material as the
  way of portraying what takes place. Then we can
  ask what type of presentation has been chosen,
  and what difference that makes. J. Culler, p.
  87.
• Literary works offer a range of implicit models
  of how identity is formed. J. Culler, p.112.