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Words, Not Bombs: W. G. Sebald and the Global Valences of the Critical Sina Rahmani Nearly twenty years after his death, W. G. Sebald’s literary star con- tinues its impressive climb. While he certainly cannot be classified as a household name, his exalted status among the professional arbiters of lit- erary taste has, at least for the time being, secured him a coveted spot on world literature’s elite roster. His canonization was, in fact, well underway before his passing. The glowing encomium heaped upon him by luminaries like Susan Sontag, A. S. Byatt, and Tariq Ali earned him that vaunted desig- nation of “writer’s writer.” Michael Ondaatje went so far as to name him “the most interesting and ambitious writer working in Britain today” (quoted in Jaggi 2001). Since his death in December 2001, Sebald’s reputation among the reputation makers has only grown. The title of a 2011 article in the New Yorker, which played a pivotal role in his ascendance, illustrates the evan- gelical zeal with which the literary establishment champions his texts: “Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald” (O’Connell 2011). This edict was certainly not nailed to the gates of the anglophone academic humanities. In remarkably short order, scholars across the dis- ciplinary spectrum based in English-speaking universities have produced boundary 2 47:3 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659-8524384 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/1/813782/0470001.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 2 boundary 2 / August 2020 dozens of monographs and thousands of articles, reviews, and book chap- ters that explore different areas of Sebald’s variegated oeuvre.1 The result is a daunting juggernaut of critical exegesis, augmented by the consider- able body of scholarship penned in German, French, Spanish, and Ital- ian. So much has been written about Sebald so quickly, and by so many, that statements about general trends in the criticism are by now simply impossible. But even though the critical terrain is far too vast to discern any landmarks, Sebald’s transformation from controversial yet obscure Ger- manist to seemingly permanent fixture of scholarly monographs, articles, reviews, syllabi, and conference proceedings furnishes us with an instruc- tive glimpse behind the velvet rope of global literary eminence. More spe- cifically, Sebald’s meteoric rise shines a light on the hegemonic role the anglophone literary market plays in the processes that authors and their texts undergo when they migrate from a national literary market to a plane- tary readership. Indeed, migration offers a key to Sebald’s oddball career and its place in literary history. Like many of the literati holy orders into whose ranks he has been admitted, Sebald’s biography is marked by a permanent departure from the land of his birth. But his emigration from the Federal Republic of Germany in his early twenties was no banishment from Ger- manic languages and literatures. To the contrary, his three decades teach- ing and researching European literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) focused primarily on Austrian literature, and he composed and pub- lished his research mostly in his native tongue. With the release of his first book of poetry in the late- 1980s, Sebald made yet another life- changing move. Although not nearly as seamless as many assume, as my essay in this collection argues, his transition from criticism to more “literary” writing granted him his first real opportunity at a broader readership not only in German but also, beginning with the Dutch edition of Vertigo, in translation. Sebald was neither the first nor the last critic to defect to the undis- covered country of “creative” writing; what sets his case apart is the combi- nation of the aforementioned moves with the final migration his life under- took. Eight months after the initial publication of Austerlitz in February 2001 and three after the release of Anthea Bell’s prizewinning English transla- tion, Sebald took leave for that nebulous universe of the posthumous. While it is impossible to divine what could have been—many have speculated that he was a shoo- in for an upcoming Nobel Prize—the global outpouring of 1. For an in- depth overview of some of this literature, see Sheppard 2009, Sheppard 2011, and Wolff 2007. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/1/813782/0470001.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Rahmani / Words, Not Bombs 3 grief and the countless retrospectives and memorials were an undeniable boon to sales. The interest in Sebald in the anglophone world in particu- lar paid handsome dividends in another important way. His sudden celeb- rity inspired publishers in smaller linguistic markets to commission transla- tions of his writings, expanding the geographic range of his readership far beyond Europe and the English- speaking world. But his surprise passing did more than pad bottom lines. Putting a new spin on the “death of the author,” Sebald’s death set in motion a process that claimed a seat (again, for now) for him at a very elite table. The same man whose first book drove one reviewer in Die Zeit to declare that “everything Sebald writes . is sheer nonsense” ended up in that restricted club of authors whose papers and personal library are enshrined in the German Literature Archives in Marbach. More than just a symbolic victory for an author who, as Uwe Schütte discusses in his contribution in this issue, was largely overlooked by the literary establishment during his lifetime, his admission to the sanctum sanctorum of German letters fur- nished the Sebald Industry’s global workforce with an international corpo- rate headquarters. Shattered in Translation Like the tragicomic tale of Gregor Samsa, Sebald’s metamorphosis says far more about the people and the world around him than it says about the central character. So instead of simply focusing on “Winfried Georg Sebald,” this special issue of boundary 2 refracts him through a constella- tion of questions and issues shorthanded here as the global valences of the critical. Above all, his place in literary history rests not merely in the textual legacy he left behind—a considerable portion of which remains untrans- lated—but in the many troubling and irresolvable questions raised by his rapid institutionalization as a writer of global importance. More than sud- den literary fame itself (read: Kaavya Viswanathan), it was the timing of his arrival to international notability that makes his case a unique and instruc- tive bellwether for writers, critics, and the enterprise of world literature. Austerlitz was released at a time when the culture industry was about to undergo seismic shifts that would rock the book industry particu- larly hard. When the dust settled, virtually every facet of the literary world that incubated Sebald had either withered away or diminished considerably. Indeed, by the time the New Yorker article announced the urgent need to “read W. G. Sebald,” the verb itself had taken on entirely new significations. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/1/813782/0470001.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 4 boundary 2 / August 2020 Seeing his books on tablets, smartphones, and laptops would have been unimaginable for Sebald, who toiled meticulously to arrange the images and text of his prose books. It was not just the books that changed with the coming of the new millennium but the institutions that published and sold them as well. Aside from the publishing wings of research universities— Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/1/813782/0470001.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Rahmani / Words, Not Bombs 5 alms for the needy—only a handful of conglomerates remain. The birth of the new millennium saw the much-lamented demise of the neighborhood bookstore like Norwich’s Hive Mind, which cashed in on the posthumous celebrity of its former patron (Comber 2014). The dispossessed Davids who manned these shops for centuries had front row seats for the spectacular demise of the usurping Goliaths when the law of diminishing returns caught up to the book trade. Suffering from the same pathological monumentalism Austerlitz derides, booksellers erected massive brick- and- mortar shrines only to shutter them a few years later. By 2011, there was a one-in- five chance that the titillated New Yorker reader in search of a Sebald text would turn to a single company: Amazon. But Sebald’s story is also proof positive that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite all the rhetoric surrounding the “global turn” in literary studies (Jay 2010), the preponderance of degree programs in “global studies,” and the emergence of the “Global Anglophone” canon, the vice-like grip of national hermeneutics still very much holds firm over scholars, university administrators, booksellers, and the culture industry in general. Sebald’s fraught relationship to national categorization—both in his biographical makeup and the admixture of cultural terrains he ambi- tiously covers in his writings—evokes the seeming paradox that has struc- tured the study of literature for more than two centuries, namely, that “the nationalization of languages over the past two centuries all over the world has been accompanied by the globalization of English” (Mufti 2016: 146). But as Aamir Mufti argues, there is nothing paradoxical at all about this power dynamic, since the hegemonic imperial power of two global empires has anointed “English” as “the preeminent cultural system for the assimila- tion of the world’s languages” (144). A closer look at Sebald’s migratory path to global fame offers a unique view of the potentially violent force of the assimilation of others into the anglophone cultural system.

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