The Thomas Browne of WG Sebald

The World After Progress: The Thomas Browne of W. G. Sebald Dawn Morgan St Thomas University he late twentieth-century prose fiction of the German writer TW. G. Sebald is noted for its novelty and strangeness, even, and perhaps especially, by readers of the English translations (Long 3–4). The work translated into English as The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage (1998) is doubly strange for the English reader because it is generated in part by reviving and recasting English genres of the seventeenth century, par- ticularly those of natural history and anatomy, as formulated in English works by Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. To an interviewer from the Observer, Sebald described his astonishment at what he found in such works: It so happens that a friend of mine was in the process of translating into German—which is quite an impossible task— Aubrey’s Brief Lives [1693], and he did it in the most brilliant way by inventing an artificial seventeenth-century German, and so I got more and more into reading seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English authors, and the density of the miraculous achievements is staggering. (McCrum 17) ESC 39.2–3 (June/September 2013): 217–249 Sebald’s reliance on and, in some instances, verbatim re-voicing of Browne’s prose in The Rings of Saturn seems to exploit generic potentials not suspected or detected by recent writers of English, or at least not with Dawn Morgan is the same breadth of cross-linguistic appeal. As well as a poet and fiction Associate Professor of writer, Sebald was a literary scholar with the linguistic means and critical English at St Thomas inclinations to take seriously and envision new relevance for what are University in Fredericton otherwise considered to be historically exhausted forms of writing. An where she teaches the examination here of the generic potentials that Sebald liberates from the history of the novel, English and develops for his own German works leads to an important comedy in the novel, reassessment of these old genres and texts and of those by Sir Thomas and eighteenth-century Browne in particular. Consideration of Browne’s genres and the uses to literature. She has which they are put in Sebald helps also to account for a difficult aspect of published on Laurence Sebald’s work—its laughter—and the ways in which that laughter is pro- Sterne’s Tristram Shandy duced in yoking seventeenth-century English to a sustained and entirely and on questions of genre earnest critique of progress. By progress, I mean the Whig view of the in the early modern past as inevitably leading to, and therefore legitimizing, present prevailing natural philosophy of conditions, which are by this means projected into the future (Butterfield Walter Charleton (1619 to v). But whereas Butterfield was addressing historians and what he takes 1707) and Joseph Glanvill to be volitional ideological practices of historiography, his definition is (1636 to 1680). augmented through the present reading with the assertion that the idea of progress is more or less seamlessly bound up with the historical process of secularization. I understand secularization as a displacement of the seventeenth-century Christian trajectory of history. Sebald’s critique of progress is a productive effect of his recuperation of texts and genres that are not themselves scientifically modern but that helped to make available the identity and displacement of redemption with progress as the justify- ing telos of scientific modernity. The Rings of Saturn instructs us in how Thomas Browne locates and refuses the trope of progress, providing Sebald with a model of the generic process by which to locate his own critique. Genres, History, Laughter That a writer from outside the English language should recognize and activate Browne’s genres for new uses in the twentieth- and twenty-first century is as it should be, according to M. M. Bakhtin’s socio-historical theory of genre, which stresses the value of “outsideness,” of perspectives from outside a culture, and, in this case, outside the language, for recogniz- ing generic potentials. Like all meanings, the fullest capacities of a genre only become apparent “once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning” and “they engage in a kind of dialogue…. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself 218 | Morgan … and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths” (Speech Genres 7). “Outsideness” in Bakhtin’s formulation designates his embrace of otherness as constitutive of identi- ties and texts. It refers also to temporal positioning, which explains how novelty can be the effect produced when twentieth-century authors adopt perspectives afforded by such apparently outmoded, obsolete genres, for every “author is captive of his epoch…. Subsequent times liberate him from this captivity, and literary scholarship is called upon to assist in this liberation” through investigating and disclosing generic potential (5). Existing scholarship on Sebald is primarily by twentieth-century com- paratists who often can read his works in the original German as well as in English translation but who are not necessarily equipped to investi- gate in detail Sebald’s English sources, such as Thomas Browne or the seventeenth-century crisis of genres in which Browne’s works intervene.1 English literary historians, therefore, are uniquely positioned, and perhaps uniquely responsible, for helping to elucidate the formal innovations and narrative implications of both Sebald’s work and the now somewhat changed Thomas Browne, whom we meet through Sebald’s transcultural, transhistorical renewal.2 When Browne and his contemporaries adapted the ancient genre of natural history from the purposes it had served for Aristotle, Pliny, Lucretius, and others, and when they engaged the genre of anatomy from Lucian, Apuleius, and Petronius, they intuited potential uses, “both past and possible,” to which these crystallized perspectives 1 Deane Blackler, in her recent monograph, Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience, argues that Sebald authorizes a disobedient reader. While her analysis is fascinating and productive, it shows no more than passing acquain- tance with seventeenth-century English literature. Similarly, Browne’s writing is mentioned or discussed in just three of the fourteen essays in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (2004), edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Two of those articles are referenced below. Long’s more recent monograph, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, addresses the epistemic implications of Sebald’s use of Browne without specifically addressing its formulation in language, not even examining Browne’s writing in his section on Sebald’s “poetics of digression,” for example (32–35, 137–42). 2 Among the Browne scholars who have discussed Sebald’s appropriations of Browne are Peter N. Miller, who locates Browne in relation to seventeenth- century antiquarianism and interestingly places Sebald at “the end of this trad- ition” (313–15). Reid Barbour, Achsah Guibbory, and Claire Preston have, with distinct emphases, carried out the most recent and comprehensive historical contextualizations and analyses of Browne’s writing, to which my own analysis is indebted and from which it departs. Preston cites The Rings of Saturn in a brief survey of works in which Browne’s “literary remains have survived with extraordinary vigour in the imaginative universe of English letters” (4). The World After Progress | 219 and ways of thinking could be put. Like his English precursors, Sebald may have now “planted more potentials for unexpected development in the future,” as Bakhtin scholars Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson describe this effect (297). In addition to his emphasis on the perspective of “outsideness,” Bakhtin conceives of genres as the “drive belts” that move between historical reality and the languages and literatures of its representation (Speech Genres 65). For Bakhtin, genres are forms for seeing and thinking about kinds of experience; they “enrich our repertoire of visions of the world” (281) by making aspects of reality visible and interpretable. For we see reality only with “the eyes of genres” (Medvedev 134; Morson and Emerson 276). To an extent, of course, all authors have outsideness with respect to genres. Novelty or newness is produced because in selecting a genre authors impose on themselves a partially alien vision of the world (Morson and Emerson 283). Genres are profoundly historical, however, because they are accumulations or accretions of forms of seeing and interpreting aspects of the world that both guide and constrain future utterances, behaviours, and literatures. Finally, genres are sites of contest and struggle. Authors may hold views at odds with the genre selected, in which case both must adapt or be adapted. There exists conflict between genres for adequacy or supremacy in representing reality. Contesting genres lose their naїveté and self-assurance; they become polemical, conjectural, and double-voiced (Bakhtin Problems 171; Morson 304). Such polemics are evident in Sebald, the grave tone of whose works could not be more pronounced. Yet the gravity often gives way, surprisingly, and coexists with a bizarre humour. Laughter is frequently precipitated for the reader, despite the text’s dogged pursuit and indulgence of melancholy, and such eruptions of laughter have been described in just these terms: bizarre, strange, and even as an undermining flaw. In the context of narrated events, which are preoccu- pied with the widespread destruction and loss wrought by the engines of progress, laughter is viewed by some scholars as involuntarily produced and therefore as unfortunate, inappropriate, and exposing a lack of narrative skill. Greg Bond, for example, points to a linkage between Sebald’s discovery of Browne’s writings and the preponderance, in Sebald, of “ideas on anatomy, dissection and decay.” He then attributes Sebald’s “involuntary comedy” to an inability to sustain that melancholy connection: The few negative critical opinions on Sebald have noted his use of obscure language … or his involuntary comedy.

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