WG Sebald and the Global Valences of the Critical Sina Rahmani

Home , Austerlitz (novel), German literature, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo (Sebald novel)

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 literary 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 disciplinary spectrum based in English-speaking universities have produced

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dozens of monographs and thousands of articles, reviews, and book chapters that explore different areas of Sebald’s variegated oeuvre.1 The result is a daunting juggernaut of critical exegesis, augmented by the considerable 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 specifically, 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 published 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 translation, 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.

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grief and the countless retrospectives and memorials were an undeniable boon to sales. The interest in Sebald in the anglophone world in particular paid handsome dividends in another important way. His sudden celebrity inspired publishers in smaller linguistic markets to commission translations 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 sudden 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 particularly 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.

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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—

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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 assimilation 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. Both the titles of his “prose fictional” works and the order they appeared in English signal as much. Schwindel: Gefühle was released in English eight years later, in 1998, as Vertigo, a title that, understandably, erases the subtle wordplay of the original. Sebald’s next work, Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen (The Emigrated: Four Long Narratives), appeared in English in 1996, four years after its original publication, under the much simplified and noticeably different The Emi- grants. Both Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage), published in German in 1995, and his 1988 book of poetry, Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (After Nature: An

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Elementary Poem) also had their subtitles truncated in English translation. While it would take only three years for Michael Hulse’s tactful (if at times stiff) translation of the former to appear in English, fourteen would pass for the latter. These examples could be written off as collateral damage typical of the translation process regardless of the languages involved. Moreover, Sebald was alive for and approved most of these not insignificant changes. But the “Tenth Anniversary Edition” of Bell’s masterful rendering of Auster- litz is a particularly illuminating exemplar of the unnecessary roughness with which the anglophone world transplants foreign texts into its terrains. In line with standard marketing conventions, the book designers incor- porated selections from the critical fanfare that enveloped the text. One extract in particular, three words culled from James Wood’s introduction, hangs like a banner above them all: “[a] beautiful novel.” Putting aside the questions raised by the very existence of this “Tenth Anniversary Edition”— this is, after all, a book that rails against the fictitiousness of linear time— there would not be much worth noting about this paratextual accoutrement if not for the fact it directly contradicts Sebald’s own position on the generic classification of Austerlitz. Time and again in the dozens of interviews he gave after its publication, Sebald staunchly declared his opposition to label- ing Austerlitz. One prominent example is found in an interview with Der Spiegel: “Because in my view [Austerlitz] is not a novel. It is a prose book of an undetermined kind. A novel, for me, means a lot of dialogue and all the staffage you expect from proper novelists. I just can’t manage that. I can’t write dialogue either, something that could have to do with the fact that I have lived so long out of the country and so removed from everyday German” (2011: 196). Sebald felt the same way about his other “prose books,” using subtitles for two of them (“Four Long Narratives” and “An English Pilgrimage”) to explicitly disavow the term.2 Given the lengths to which Sebald went in articulating himself on this point, it is surprising that Wood, an early and loud Sebald booster in the anglophone world, does not seem particularly worried about contradicting not simply an author’s opinion but an opinion of an author who studied and researched novels for decades. Despite all the praise for Sebald permeating this edition, the professional stewards of his posthumous legacy clearly do not consider his own views all that relevant. Interestingly, this was not the first time that Sebald would be overruled by

2. I owe this insight to Uwe Schütte.

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the parties involved in publishing his books. The title page of the first Ger- man paperback bore the term “Roman,” although the publisher acknowl- edged this as a mistake and removed it in subsequent printings. This lack of consideration goes far beyond the three offending words, “a beautiful novel.” The addition of Wood’s introduction disregards Sebald’s lifelong rejection of authority in any and all forms. Although he fed a great deal of misinformation to interviewers, there is no reason to doubt the sin- cerity of Sebald’s description of the German university system in the early 1960s: “Nobody mentioned it, but there was a very deeply ingrained authori- tarianism, and as I have, I think, somewhere an anarchist streak in me, I couldn’t really put up with that” (Schwartz 2007: 106). He battled his pro- fessors, colleagues, university administrations, and the state itself (Schütte 2011) during the violent neoliberal restructuring of higher education under “Baroness Thatcher” (Sebald 1998: 41). In his choice to retain his native tongue as his primary medium of expression—unthinkable today for literary professionals in English-speaking countries—he effectively refused a foundational component of the anglophone cultural system. (Sebald’s mar- riage to a native German speaker and his close friendships with fellow emigrants marooned, as it were, on the island most certainly reinforced his partisan stance against the Queen’s tongue.) He rejected not just the language but also the logic of classification so pivotal to that system’s func- tioning as the idiom of global cultural commerce. “Don’t put me in a box,” in the words of the original publisher of the English translation of The Rings of Saturn. The result of all these transgressions, as I argue in my essay in this issue, are four stateless, “intermodal” novels—formal symptoms of the rise of container shipping and the total erasure of not only the boundaries between media forms but also the sacred bond between national language and national literature forged over the last two centuries. It is highly unlikely that Sebald would have allowed the addition of Wood’s introduction, nor would he have green-lighted the two recent films adapted from his works that Isa Murdock-Hinrichs examines in this collection. The introduction is indicative of, among other things, a desire to quell its foreignness. As Wood puts it, “Sebald deliberately layers and recesses his narrative, so that Austerlitz is difficult to get close to” (2011: xi). Yet this distance is precisely what Wood knowingly denies readers with his recapitulation of the title character’s origin story, confessing as much upon its conclusion:

This short recital, poignant though its content is, represents a kind of vandalism to Sebald’s beautiful novel, and I offer it only in the spirit

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of orientation. It leaves out, most importantly, all the ways in which Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a bro- ken, recessed enigma, whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue. Though Austerlitz, and hence the reader too, is involved in a journey of detection, the book really represents the deliberated frustration of detection, the perpetuations of an enigma. By the end of Sebald’s novel, we certainly know a great deal about Jacques Austerlitz—about the tragic turns of his life, his family background, about his obsessions and anxieties and breakdowns—but it can’t be said that we really know him. He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and indeed seems to quit the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered it. (x–xi)

Wood assures any disconcerted Anglophones that this disorienting, “unknowable” book—with no direct dialogue, chapters, or paragraph breaks, bearing an odd title, narrated by an even odder first-person autho- rial stand-in, and interwoven with uncaptioned photographic reproduc- tions—is a “beautiful novel” and plotted accordingly, a text that belongs in and to their world. Even if it is not surprising to see an artist’s principled stance sacri- ficed upon the altar of marketability, the question nevertheless needs to be asked: Is this map necessary? In the hopes of making an “undetermined” text more heimlich for the anglophone market, Wood obscures what one critic sees as another kind of foreignness underpinning Sebald’s oeuvre. Franz Loquai forgoes the traditional division of Sebald’s work between academic and literary, and instead reads it as a single Proustian “cycle” that “weaves together the critical essays and After Nature, Vertigo, and The Emigrants, all the way to The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz” (2005: 252). The potential anxiety of reading Austerlitz, which for Loquai is the culmina- tion (Abschluss) of Sebald’s search for lost time, stems in large part from the uncertainty it generates about its generic pedigree. This is not to suggest that some kind of readerly purity has been adulterated by Wood’s intervention between Austerlitz’s covers. Debating the “vandalism” of any paratextual addition is ultimately an academic exer- cise.3 More important are the manifold questions of textual distance pro- voked by Wood’s comment on the void Sebald hollows out between the title

3. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s introduction to the collection of Sebald’s English-language interviews (2007) is another example of “a kind of vandalism” to his oeuvre.

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character and the world around him. These questions extend far beyond Austerlitz to the hermeneutical impasse to which the debate around world literatures and the hegemonic power of English has come. The trench between English and its others and what gets lost in that in-between space is playing an increasingly dominant role in not just literature but all domains of cultural production.

“Unapproachable” Human propinquity looms powerfully over the book’s most affectively novelistic scene, when Austerlitz is confronted by his lover, Marie de Ver- neuil, during their visit to Marienbad: “Marie moved closer to me and asked whether I had remembered that tomorrow was my birthday. When we wake up tomorrow, she said, I shall wish you every happiness, and it will be like telling a machine working by some unknown mechanism that I hope it will run well. Can’t you tell me the reason, she asked, said Austerlitz, why you remain so unapproachable?” (Sebald 2001: 215). Marie’s question is never properly answered, nor can it be. Despite Wood’s act of “vandalism” and the stamping of the word novel all over it, Austerlitz’s formal unapproach-

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ability cannot be overwritten. This “prose book of an undetermined kind” eludes the logic of mapping and the modes of “distant” reading reverberat- ing so loudly in the debate around the worldliness of contemporary literatures. To the contrary, Sebald was an unrepentant believer in close reading, although not in the traditional sense of the term. “[T]raveling by foot,” according to him,

is certainly the best way to get around, particularly in cities. In big cities you can travel very easily between A and B with the subway, but you see very little. . . . When you travel by foot, you have the ability to see. I very much believe that when it comes to prose, things trans- form into visual images. This means as the result of these cast metal types swirling around on a blank page, the reader is confronted with images. I consider the visual element as very, very important—as well as the prosodic, the rhythm. And this most certainly has something to do with this form of movement. In short: not hasty. You can’t walk through Antwerp hastily—it’ll wipe you out pretty quickly. One must stop and pause to a certain degree. And I really believe that there is something that could be called the physiology of literature. In other words, our physicality and the manner in which we move our bodies can be articulated in literature. And if you haven’t accounted for this, then something is missing, no? (Sebald 2011: 250–51)

The proximity to a text is thus for Sebald not limited to the relationship between the eyes and the words on a page. In many parts of his oeuvre, the earth itself is transformed into a textual site of perambulation either literally (The Rings of Saturn) or figuratively (A House in the Country, Austerlitz). The role of the critic in this formulation stretches literally from head to toe, expanding the meaning of textuality to encompass an array of significations that two essays in this issue take up in different ways and from different national traditions. Yahya Elsaghe’s contribution focuses on the foundational role of the crossword puzzle in Austerlitz’s narrative archi- tecture. Stuart Burrows maps the recurring figurations of labyrinths through the question of Sebald’s translation of three-dimensional spaces into two- dimensional literary forms. The Rings of Saturn contains more than just one embodiment of the critic. The narrator, who famously is and is not Sebald, forges an intimate connection with the forgotten countryside of East Anglia and performs a close reading of many of its dustier passages. The itinerant, almost pica- resque journey around and through the region recalls and revivifies the

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ghosts of this once-bustling center of industry and tourism. The narrator engages helpful strangers en route, ventures into the shrine-like Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, and survives a perilous encounter with an undercooked fish. The flexibility of this form of reading also allows for the narrator to link the localities of East Anglia to far-off lands and historical contexts like the Taiping Rebellion or the encounter between Roger Case- ment and Joseph Conrad in the Congo. Standing in stark contrast to the narrator are Suffolk’s few remaining solitary subsistence fishermen, “men who sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise, or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness” (Sebald 1998: 41). The echoes of that intense fixation on the blankness of the sea can be heard in the recent emergence of data-driven modes of reading4 (including the so-called cognitive turn), and, more disturbingly, in the cor- ridors of the US military-industrial complex, where distant reading has been embraced in recent years with great enthusiasm. Above all, the rise of drone warfare, which, according to Grégoire Chamayou, turns on the transformation of the “eye . . . into a weapon” (2015: 11), represents the most recent development in the two-centuries- old history of Orientalism. In a sense, the drone is the perfect robotic hybrid of scholar and soldier, an agent of both analytic reconnaissance and armed intervention. Before the invasion of Egypt, Orientalist projects could do very little in advance to ensure their success. But Napoleon, according to Edward Said, “wanted nothing less than to take the whole of Egypt, and his advance preparations were of unparalleled magnitude and thoroughness” (1979: 80). The con- scription of dozens of “savants” in the hopes of building a “living archive for the expedition” (81) is the definitive illustration of the dialectical bond between worldly knowledge and global conquest. Until the advent of the remote-controlled drone—whose history is discussed in the interview with Emran Feroz in this issue—the fantasy of mapping the world in limitless detail required an army of fearless surveyors. “The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems,” according to one mili-

4. “Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something” (Moretti 2000: 57).

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tary official, “is that they allow you to project power without projecting vul- nerability” (quoted in Chamayou 2015: 12). Drones did more than automate surveillance. The confluence of the rapid advancements in digital photogra- phy, data storage, and satellite communications gives the drone the ability to fabricate a “living archive” of any given corner of the globe, “a movie of a city-size area, with the goal of tracking all the moving vehicles and people” (39). In 2009, American drones compiled nearly a quarter-century’s worth of video imagery (41). On the future of drones, Chamayou writes:

We should imagine eventual scribe-machines, flying robotized clerks that, in real time, would record the smallest actions occur- ring in the world below—as if, in parallel to the life of human beings, the cameras that already capture animated images would now set about producing a circumstantial account of them. But those lines of text, a meticulous chronicle of every fact and gesture, would at the same time constitute something more: a great index, an informative catalog of an immense video library in which everyone’s life would become retrospectively researchable. (41)

This image of the flying “scribe-machines” inverts the historical paradox Sebald tackles in a series of controversial public lectures in Zurich, which he elaborated on and published in book form in 1998 as Luftkrieg und Literatur (available in English as The Natural History of Destruction). Sebald, who reveled in stirring the most sensitive of pots, tackles a blind spot in the quasi-official doctrine of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—namely, the absence of any serious human bookkeeping of the catastrophic carpet- bombing of German cities and the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians by Allied forces. More specifically, he ponders “the question of why German writers would not or could not describe the destruction of the German cities as millions experienced it” (2003: 62). Sebald’s pro- vocative insights, “at times strangely confused, unbalanced, and contra- dictory” (Vees-Gulani 2003: 124), inflamed the simmering and often bitter argument in the Germanic world around the right to claim victimhood. Sebald’s concern for this issue is visible in The Rings of Saturn, when the narrator strikes up a conversation with William Hazel, the head gardener at Somerleyton Hall and an eyewitness to this history. During his youth, Hazel’s

thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were estab- lished in East Anglia after 1940. People nowadays hardly have any

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idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the airfleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somer- leyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I picture in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms set- ting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins. One day, Lord Somerleyton was helping me prune the vines in this greenhouse, for something to do, said Hazel, he explained the Allied carpet-bombing strategy to me, and some time later he brought me a big relief map of Germany. All the place names I heard on the news were marked in strange letters alongside symbolic pictures of towns that varied in the number of gables, turrets, and towers according to the size of the population; and moreover, in the case of particularly important cities, there were emblems of features associated with then, such as Cologne cathedral, the Römer in Frankfurt, or the statue of Roland in Bremen. Those tiny images of towns, about the size of postage stamps, looked like romantic castles, and I pictured the German Reich as a medieval and vastly enigmatic land. (Sebald 1998: 38–39)

Neither man can fathom the violent horrors unleashed upon German cities by the planes departing the relative equanimity of East Anglia, instead turn- ing to abstract statistical figures and “symbolic pictures.” Thus, Sebald’s repeated assertion of his antipathy toward popu- lar representations of the Holocaust is more than simple contrarianism. It is a refusal to exonerate our continued inability to recognize the horrible atrocities perpetuated by our governments in the name of civilization and democracy—a denial that has crystallized into a foundational myth of post- war Europe: “I’ve been told that we’ve been living in fifty years of peace, right? This is a real achievement, fifty years of peace, no?” (Sebald 2011: 247). The Final Solution was to Sebald another gruesome chapter of the centuries-long epic of state violence: “We could be talking about the First World War and how many trenches stretched from the Belgian coast all the way to Switzerland; or the Franco-Prussian War, which reads in history books like a comical affair; or the Crimean War. These wars of the nine- teenth century, including the American Civil War, were all great wars in the horrible sense of the word, wars that can no longer really be properly depicted” (244). Citing the recent bombing campaigns in the former Yugo-

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Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina, September 2009.

slavia, Sebald marvels at both the “collective lunacy” that still drive us to author more “campaigns of destruction,” as well as our ability to “somehow sweep them all away afterwards” (246). Even though drone warfare as a form of violence is in many ways diametrically opposed to carpet-bombing—its precision, the technocrats and their lackeys in the media assure us, insures against civilian casualties (Chamayou 2015: 140–49)—the cloak of invisibility wrapped around state- sanctioned political violence is more effective than ever. This despite the thousands of high-definition cameras in the hands of both amateurs and professionals documenting the cataclysmic internecine wars taking place under direct US supervision in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Israel/ Palestine as I write (and more than likely as you read) this very sentence. The countless millions of dead or displaced are no less visible to contemporary Americans than the millions of Germans were to Hazel seven decades ago. The same logic that drove a cultivated Englishman in East Anglia to use a map as a stand-in for living geographies and cultures reigns with even more cognitive force in the twenty-four- hour news cycle. The lazy clichés and shameless racism Said maps in Covering Islam are still very much the

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discursive order of the day. This is even more depressing given the fact that the Middle East has never been closer to the daily lives of Americans. The main headquarters of US Central Command—the effective nerve center of the seemingly permanent American imperial occupation of vast swaths of the Middle East and North Africa that has been festering for nearly four decades (Vine 2016), where decisions are made to end human lives thousands of miles away everyday—is located less than five miles from down- town Tampa. And yet, the average university student in the United States would be hard-pressed to name the capital cities or the main languages of the countries I just mentioned. After almost four decades of direct military involvement across the region and untold billions of dollars literally having gone up in smoke, the Middle East remains the “medieval and vastly enigmatic land” it has been for centuries. Sebald was no Lenin. His politics were largely negative, insofar as he rejected the status quo and retired into a kind of rural exile. Nor was he immune to the perceptions that imperialism and class injustice inflict on societies, attested to by his routine use of the word Neger, an issue that Schütte situates against the backdrop of twentieth-century German history. Also evident is Sebald’s very bourgeois revulsion at the “rows of run-down houses with grotesque front yards” in the depressed port town of Lowestoft (1998: 42, translation slightly amended). But close reading once again avails a more nuanced understanding of his apparent snob- bery, for this bleak portrait of the erstwhile tourist enclaves of Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn is a veiled allusion to one of most famous lines penned by Joseph Conrad, the focus of a detailed biographical portrait later in the book. Although aware of the town’s economic decline, Sebald admits that he “was unprepared for the feeling of wretchedness that instantly seized hold of me in Lowestoft, for it is one thing to read about unemployment blackspots in the newspapers and quite another to walk, on a cheerless evening, past . . . amusement arcades, bingo halls, betting shops, video stores, pubs that emit a sour reek of being from their dark doorways” (42, emphasis in original). As he would do with other seemingly civilized Euro- pean locales, Sebald’s view of Lowestoft, “the easternmost point in the British Isles,” channels Marlowe’s observation that the English capital, too, “has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Conrad 2007: 5). Sebald, however, was also no nihilist. As Ben Hutchinson argues, “Sebald consistently insisted that aesthetic problems were also ethical ones, the term ‘ethisch-ästhetisch’ can thus be seen as proleptic of his own artistic project . . . since it signifies his desire to reconcile artwork and envi-

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ronment, close reading and History” (2011: 270). His belief in what could be called the ethos of textuality—which for him did not always entail accu- racy of citation and rational, factual reasoning—can also be recognized in his militant dedication to the art and practice of literary translation, cham- pioned by many as the closest form of reading. Even though he lost the war against “the inexorable spread of ignorance . . . to the universities” (Sebald 2001: 120), Sebald scored a victory in battle by founding and lead- ing the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) at UEA in 1989. Dur- ing his five-year stint as director, he helped create residencies; forged links between translators, local writers, and booksellers; and organized countless lectures, workshops, and symposia (Vivis et al. 2011). There was obvi- ously a degree of self-interest in this venture. Sebald’s growing disillusion- ment encouraged him to turn away from scholarly writing to projects that allowed for greater creative autonomy that could potentially reach a wider audience. Nach der Natur was published in 1988, and fragments of Vertigo and The Emigrants began appearing in various German-language literary venues around this time. Although he was in no apparent rush to do so, Sebald knew that success in this domain would hinge on high-quality translation—particularly into the language of his adopted homeland. Marie’s question articulates the definitive dilemma undergirding the global literary marketplace increasingly polarized between English and everyone else. Three percent, the abysmal amount of terrain occupied by literary translation in the US publishing industry, captures the perilous condition of the non-English writer forced to cope with an “unapproachable” cultural behemoth (Post 2011). To make matters worse, while simulta- neously walling out foreigners, English behaves beyond its shores like an “invasive species,” to borrow Esther Allen’s phrasing, “resisting and sup- planting whatever is not written in itself, speaking in the loudest of voices while failing to pay attention at all to anything said in any other language” (2007: 21). Sebald’s own career allegorizes these two processes working side by side. Despite the inroads made by the BCLT and his own growing reputation as a writer of note, Sebald was powerless during the 1990s as UEA dramatically reduced or consolidated foreign language departments, and forcibly transferred him, of all places, to the School of English and American Studies. Sebald’s case underscores not only the urgency of literary translation—that such a reminder is needed sadly reflects the dominance of Anglocentrism—but also the importance of including scholarly and critical work under the rubric of the “task” of translation. Clearly, universities

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in the anglophone world no longer feel any need to support professionals like Sebald who are primarily engaged in debates taking place beyond the pale of English. (Nor do they seem particularly concerned with the absurdly low numbers of their students enrolled in foreign-language classes. Even more dispiriting than a 2015 survey of American colleges that found only 7 percent of students enrolled in a language course is the 1 percent of that nation’s adult population proficient in a tongue learned or acquired at the postsecondary level.) Those unfortunate enough to have trained in non-English- speaking universities are increasingly being required to publish in the supposedly global vernacular of science. Michael H. Heim and Andrzej W. Tymowski lay out the dangers of forcing scholars to adopt English as a language of intellectual composition:

The growing hegemony of a single language has had several dele- terious effects. First, authors writing in a second language, no mat- ter how well they have learned it, are less likely to express their ideas with precision and sophisticated nuance than authors writing in their own language. Secondly, the lack of a thriving social science literature in a given natural language undercuts the basis for communication about disciplinary issues in that linguistic community. Thirdly, the forms of thought and argumentation in the Anglo- American social science community have become a Procrustean bed to whose dimensions all conceptualizations must fit. The result is an increasing homogenization and impoverishment of social science discourse. (2006: 27)

With this appeal in mind, this special issue of boundary 2 has sought out translations of articles and reviews of different Sebald texts. The Global Critical Forum highlights the array of responses and mixed feelings Sebald solicits in different national contexts. First appearing in the Israeli news- paper Yedioth Ahronoth, Nissim Calderon’s “Sebald or Gewalt?” takes a dim view of The Rings of Saturn. Released in Hebrew after The Emigrants and Austerlitz, both of which the reviewer considers as “summits of mod- ern prose,” Sebald’s literary jaunt through Suffolk is, according to Calde- ron, “a journey [that] does not arrive at any station.” Against the absurd and frankly irresponsible claim made in one very prominent American venue that Sebald was “the prime speaker of the Holocaust” (Eder 2001), the Israeli reviewer denounces the analogic ties the text knots between the Shoah and the Suffolk. A different kind of skepticism underwrites “The Sebald Case,” Rodrigo Fresán’s combative encounter with what he sees as an

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excessive fandom that celebrates one author while ignoring others. Fre- sán is particularly critical of “those fans that prefer not to see in his supposedly indisputable originality any antecedents or contemporaneous rep- resentatives of the form.” The other two contributions to the Global Critical Forum represent engagements with Sebald in markets where much less of his work has been translated. Originally published in the Russian literary magazine Notes from the Homeland: A Journal for Slow Reading, Maria Malikova’s “Witnessing the Past in the Work of W. G. Sebald” tackles questions of the memory and aesthetics through the work of Jan Peter Tripp. Malikova reads Austerlitz alongside Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for the centrality of the human gaze in Sebald’s imagination. He Ning’s review of Austerlitz for China’s Trends of Foreign Literature also focuses on the text’s aesthetic register, and, more specifically, the link between the art of memory and Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of “bricolage.” “Sixty years after the massacre of the Jews,” Ning writes, “we cannot help worrying about these lingering memories of violence, as memories themselves are as sus- ceptible to corruption as the bodies of those witnesses to the atrocities.” Indeed, this question goes to the heart of not just Austerlitz but the wider significance of Sebald’s strange oeuvre and the unorthodox trek he made to global fame. As a toddler, Vera informs us, the title character was “constantly troubled” by the same question while he watched urban squirrels fight for their survival. “If it’s all white [with snow], how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard?” Vera confirms the importance of this question, “How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?” (Sebald 2001: 204).

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sci- ence and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as the Depart- ment of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, which hosted me for two years and provided professional assistance and resources. There are also many people who advised me on various aspects of this issue: Imre Szeman, Aamir Mufti, Yahya Elsaghe, Uwe Schütte, and Stuart Burrows all provided helpful feedback since the project’s inception. I would also like to thank a number of allies and colleagues for their input and assistance: Sanna Alas, Danial Amirabyaz, Darren Biles, Daoud Clarke, Evan Nicoll Johnston, Todd Presner, and Jonathan Grossman. Particularly

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indebted am I to the four translators who made the Global Critical Forum possible. Finally, I benefited from the sharp insights of many undergraduate students who read Austerlitz with me at UCLA. This issue is dedicated to Michael Henry Heim.

References

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