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Verschachtelte Räume: Writing and Reading Environments in W. G. Sebald The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Jones, Emily Erin. 2012. Verschachtelte Räume: Writing and Reading Environments in W. G. Sebald. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9406020 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2012 - Emily Erin Jones All Rights Reserved Professor Judith Ryan Emily Erin Jones Verschachtelte Räume: Writing and Reading Environments in W. G. Sebald This dissertation focuses on the construction of the narrated environment in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten, Die Ringe des Saturn, and Austerlitz. Drawing on a constellation of ecocritical theories, I examine the ways in which memory and history are embedded in images of the built environment and how, in turn, this spatialization of the past contributes to a criticism of traditional linear narration. Sebald’s texts create postmodern textual environments, urban, domestic, faux- pastoral, and heterotopian, that unite disparate times and spaces, demonstrating the need for innovative narrative in untangling and portraying complex, sometimes contradictory layers of history. An examination of the labyrinth and garden in Die Ringe des Saturn and of urban spaces in Austerlitz demonstrates the potential of the environment to seize agency and exert force on the human subject in the environment. The domestic environment also contains this potential, but in Austerlitz, the protagonist reclaims agency and uses the domestic environment as a medium for recovering memory. Finally, drawing on theories from Michel Foucault and Marc Augé, I examine the effect heterotopian spaces have on the characters experiencing them in all three of Sebald’s major prose works. More importantly, I demonstrate the way in which Sebald exploits the heterotopian potential of the text itself, creating a textual “environment” that pushes back against the reader, reinforcing the meaning of its content, but also drawing attention to the textual structures it deploys to create meaning. iii CONTENTS Introduction 1 Irrwege: The Labyrinth and The English Landscape Garden in Die Ringe des Saturn 13 “Ein[…] immer verwinkelter werdende[s] Gewirr fauliger Gassen und Häuser”: The Urban Environment and Layers of History 50 “Jeden-Tag-von-neuem-Begreifenmüssen, daß ich nicht mehr zu Hause war”: The Domestic Environment 99 “Extraterritoriale Orte”: Heterotopian Narratives and Spaces 140 Conclusion: “Eine lautlose Katastrophe” - Prospects for Further Research 205 Works Cited 215 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The dissertation that follows is certainly the product of years of effort, but it is also a tribute to the many people who have been so generous with their time and help. I would like to express my thanks first to the John A. Armstrong and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Fellowship Fund for providing financial support in my final year of writing. My mentors in the Harvard Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures have been an invaluable resource throughout my graduate school career and especially in these last months. Warmest thanks to my committee members Oliver Simons and Markus Wilczek for their support and help at all stages of the process. To my Doktormutter Judith Ryan I am deeply grateful for her collegiality, incisive editing, and unwavering support of my project. Her efforts on my behalf and advice about the research and writing process have been invaluable. In addition to the support we graduate students receive from our departments and colleagues at the university, the luckiest among us have a strong cheering section on the home front. I am grateful to my parents, Karen and Connell Jones, who have always believed in me, inspired me by their example, and, in darker moments, reminded me that “this too shall pass.” I also owe much to my grandparents, Ruby Jones and Bennett and Juanita Mullins, whose absence I have felt keenly in recent months – their love and support taught me to believe in myself and their grit has always inspired me never to give up. I have been especially blessed to spend my graduate school years with my sister at my side. To Jamie L. Jones (Harvard Ph. D., 2011) I am grateful for, among a litany of other things, lending an ear when I most needed one, an outside perspective on all things German, an insider’s perspective on all things academic, a fierce but friendly editing eye, and some of my happiest v memories of the last seven years. Having had Jamie as a colleague and friend throughout has made me wonder how others manage without a sibling in academe. I am also indebted to my brother-in- law Eric, who has made Jamie so happy, but who has also generously shared his time, his perspective on issues both academic and not, and gone above and beyond the call of duty by helping with some research in Spanish. Finally I would like to thank my husband, the love of my life, Daniel Le Ray. The love I daily receive from him is the foundation upon which my efforts have been built. Without his encouragement, intellect, fierce loyalty, and friendship, I would be at a loss. He is my touchstone, refuge, and companion in both laughter and tears. It isn’t a love song, but this dissertation is evidence of the strength and joy I find in our love. vi FOR MY FAMILY, whose accomplishments inspire we, whose love sustains me, and without whom this would not have been possible vii INTRODUCTION W. G. Sebald has become one of the most studied and most admired writers of German literature in recent history. His texts are notable not only for their moving thematic content, but also for Sebald’s innovative approach to genre and the dense richness of his tone. His complex network of historical and literary allusion, coupled with the fact that he was also a scholar of literature, continues to draw attention to the way in which his texts, both literary and critical, engage in a dialogue with literary theory, cultural criticism, and the topic of engagement with German history. Much of Sebald scholarship focuses on the texts’ portrayal of and engagement with German history. This emphasis on history relies heavily on analyses of the construction of temporality and memory in the text. While my dissertation also addresses, to a degree, Sebald’s engagement with history, I approach it from a new perspective. A unique characteristic of Sebald’s engagement with history and memory is his recognition of the importance of space in processing history. After all, when people think about history, engage in active memory, and memorialize the past, these things are very frequently encoded in places. Memorials to the tragedies of the past become sites of memory and, in turn, attain their own significance for people who visit them. Beyond this explicit platial engagement with history and memory, history is frequently constructed along spatial divides: wars crop up along borders, territory is a cause of conflict. This is especially true of twentieth-century German history and the literary forms through which it has been processed. My dissertation distinguishes itself from the body of Sebald scholarship that focuses on the temporality of history in that I focus on these environmental expressions of history and memory, undertaking an “ecocritical” study of environment – broadly 1 defined – in Sebald’s literary texts.1 In this sense, I position Sebald within the “spatial turn” that continues to play a significant role in literary theory and practice since the 1980s. Sebald’s attention to environment, I contend, represents an original approach to this topic. My analysis concentrates on three central works from Sebald’s literary oeuvre – Die Ausgewanderten,2 Die Ringe des Saturn,3 and Austerlitz4 – with the aim of examining the construction and role of concrete spaces in the texts. I will argue that the preponderance of spatial metaphors and the complexity with which the texts construct environment function as a critique of the primacy of temporality in many narratives that deal with (German) history. In his essay on the criticism of time implicit in Sebald’s works, Amir Eshel focuses on the “poetics of suspension,” which goes beyond the thematization of time and becomes, instead “a poetics that suspends notions of chronology, succession, comprehension, and closure – a poetics that rather than depicting and commenting on the historical event in time, constitutes an event, becomes the writing of a different, a literary time.”5 I will argue that beyond this focus on temporality, Sebald recognizes the ways in which the Nazi regime’s power and ideology were encoded in spatial terms (borders, conquest, architecture) and proposes a spatial paradigm for dealing with the ghosts of Germany’s past. My study is not primarily concerned, however, with questions of territorial power. Rather, it examines space in a broader sense that includes the relationship between human beings and their environments. For this reason, it will be 1 Ecocriticism, it should be noted is not a unified school of literary criticism. It encompasses criticism that focuses on ecological crisis, new forms of gender studies (for example, ecofeminism), environmental justice, urban studies, and so on. Buell refers to ecocriticism as “the omnibus term by which the new polyform literature and environment studies movement has come to be labeled,” (Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 3.) but tends to prefer, as do I, the broader term “environmental criticism,” which does not immediately imply environmentalism as much as the prefix eco- does.

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