The Stateless Novel: Refugees, Literary Form, and the Rise of Containerization

The Stateless Novel: Refugees, Literary Form, and the Rise of Containerization Sina Rahmani Halfway through Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald ) (2012), Christopher MacLehose, the original publisher of the English translation of The Rings of Saturn (1998), recounts an anecdote about W. G. Sebald’s debut on the anglophone literary stage: One of the questions we asked him was, “Which category would you like your book to be in?” And Max [Sebald] said, “Oh, I’d like all the categories. I want fiction, I want biography, I want autobiography, I want travel, I want history, I want . .” Well, he didn’t say Holocaust Studies, but anyways, there wasn’t a category he didn’t require. Max was very clear, what he was saying was, “Don’t put me in a box; I want to be in all the boxes. I’m not writing a familiar formula.” This essay would not have been possible without the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also benefited from helpful feedback from a number of patient readers: Imre Szeman, Todd Presner, Aamir Mufti, Jonathan Grossman, Yahya Elsaghe, Sanna Alas, Nada Ayad, Ian Newman, and Uwe Schütte. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. boundary 2 47:3 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 8524442 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/103/813788/0470103.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 104 boundary 2 / August 2020 MacLehose’s account of Sebald’s resistance to generic classifica- tion is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it perfectly mimics the technique of “periscopic narration” Sebald learned from Thomas Bernhard, mediating a character’s speech through the voice of another (Sebald 2011a: 235). Sec- ond, this open declaration of the formal boundlessness of Sebald’s “prose books” or “prose fiction”—his preferred, albeit vague, terms for Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz—speaks to one of the most elusive questions posed by his unorthodox career trajectory and the varie- gated body of work he left behind: What exactly constituted that unfamil- iar “formula” that attracted legions of readers and provoked enthusiastic praise from the literary establishment? Critics have tackled this question with gusto, compiling a long and growing list of coinages that attempt to identify the “undetermined” generic realm where some of his books reside: “faction,” “process books,” “novel memoirs,” “narrative texts,” “literary historiography,” to name only a hand- ful.1 That no consensus on the terminology has been reached adds a cer- tain poignancy to Sebald’s own rendering of English travel writer Bruce Chatwin: “Just as Chatwin himself ultimately remains an enigma, one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre” (2005: 173). With surprisingly little debate, however, commentators have man- aged to agree on one point—something with far- reaching implications for how we read Sebald. Namely, the bifurcation of Sebald’s oeuvre into “critical” and “literary” halves has become an axiomatic starting point for the majority of critics. This view, endorsed by Sebald (2011a: 236), was recently codified in the introductory lines of Saturn’s Moons: W. G. Sebald— A Handbook: “This publication [of Nach Der Nature in 1988] marks the moment when Sebald the university lecturer, academic researcher and critic, known to his friends and colleagues as Max, emerged publicly as the writer W. G. Sebald” (Catling and Hibbitt 2011: 1).2 This quasi- ontological distinction is reinforced in the bibliography published in the same volume (Sheppard 2011). The most authoritative English-language bibliography to date, it divides “Literary” works from “Critical” ones, with the former further 1. Respectively, Craven 1999; Torgovnick 2005: 117; Kochhar- Lindgren 2002; Jackman 2004: 466; Wolff 2011. 2. Mark McCulloh’s Understanding W. G. Sebald drops the plumb line at the same point but uses a more sociological wording: “His literary reputation in Germany was launched with the 1988 prose poem Nach der Natur: Ein Elemantergedict (After Nature)” (2003: xvi). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/103/813788/0470103.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Rahmani / The Stateless Novel 105 subdivided into other categories, including but not limited to “Prose Fic- tion,” “Poetry,” and “Other Independent Publications (Critical Articles and Essays).”3 But the borderline between the two Sebalds is far more porous than the pundits suggest. For starters, the labels “academic” and “essay” are misleading when applied to much of the work termed as such, since Sebald, beginning with his undergraduate thesis, flatly refused to abide by the most basic rules of the profession.4 This was most certainly rooted in deep- seated resentment of his professors, all of whom “had gotten jobs during the Brownshirt years and were therefore compromised, either because they had actually supported the regime or had been fellow trav- elers or otherwise been silent” (quoted in Atlas 1999: 290). His wholesale rejection of the disciplinary practices of academic literary studies—a “dis- missal of claims to scholarly objectivity more generally” (Pages 2007: 67)— is evident in his first major work of scholarship. As he would do in future writings, Sebald used a study of German Jewish writer and playwright Carl Sternheim to wage a “personal area- bombing campaign” (Sheppard 2011: 455) on not only the book’s main subject but also on scholars like Wilhelm Emrich, who, in Sebald’s view, championed Sternheim’s mediocre corpus to conceal personal involvement with National Socialism. And while the unsubstantiated accusations lobbed by the twenty-five- year- old Sebald were confirmed only after Emrich’s death in 1998, Sebald’s methods were often dubious and, in some instances, blatantly unethical. He often reverted to ad hominem attacks, tendentious sourcing and argumentation, and out- right calumny (Schütte 2014: 126). The consummate enfant terrible and “provocateur” (Simon 2005), Sebald, as his bibliographies signal, was dis- missive of the senior figures in the field. He largely abstained from both the digital revolution and specialist journals, preferring venues with a more gen- eral readership. Nor did he engage the radical modes of thinking imported 3. Some do not even acknowledge the poetry: “Although all of his major works—Vertigo, The Emigrants, the travelogue The Rings of Saturn, his novel Austerlitz, and Air War and Literature—constantly evolve around the themes of suffering . .” (Moser 2012: 66). 4. On the many problems plaguing Sebald’s Lizentiatsarbeit, see Sheppard 2009: “Here, careless and inconsistent footnoting, inaccurate, selective and tendentious citation, an inattention to punctuation, orthographic consistency and the strict rules of German gram- mar, a moralizing tone, generalized and unsubstantiated opinion, a refusal to read piles of secondary literature, and a fiercely polemical stance all point to someone who is assert- ing his right as a critic to ignore established authority and be thoroughly subjective, who is forcing his chosen subject into his own mould and who is fiercely antipathetic to ‘Ger- many,’ its literary metonyms, and its hierarchical university system” (87). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/103/813788/0470103.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 106 boundary 2 / August 2020 into literary studies from continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines during the 1970s and 1980s, even though he most likely would have found allies who shared his antipathy for the intellectual status quo. And yet, despite all his shortcomings as a modern academic, it is impossible to deny the profound marks that his scholarly training and decades of professional service left on his “literary” publications. In a way, his “English pilgrimage” through Suffolk is not fundamentally different than the two essay collections on Austrian literature. All three texts use a spe- cific geographic fiction to tie together a series of loosely connected explora- tions directly or indirectly related to the region in question. To push this line of thinking further, does the presence of the first- person narrator instantly transform The Rings of Saturn into something more “creative” (Blackler 2007: 90) than, say, the “essays” collected in Logis in einem Landhaus (A Place in the Country)?5 Why is Vertigo, which according to Sebald contains “literary biographical essays” (2011b: 350) on Stendhal and Kafka, with the third section recounting an excursion to his hometown, not con- sidered partly critical? Could the detailed rendering of Theresienstadt that Austerlitz distills from H. G. Adler’s monumental study (1955) have been possible without Sebald’s scholarly training? What, moreover, is to be done with the dozens of interviews he participated in during his lifetime? Does one separate, for instance, his “academic” contributions to a panel discus- sion on a Swiss radio program on Sternheim in 1971 from his publicity tour three decades later for his final “literary” work? And how does Sebald’s predilection to feed his interlocutors false information complicate the seem- ingly inherent factuality that enshrouds them? • • • • In this essay, I use Austerlitz to propose yet another conceptual term to analyze the puzzling and enigmatic question of Sebaldian form. I elaborate on Franz Loquai’s claim that Sebald’s writings constitute a single Proustian “cycle” that “weaves together the essays and After Nature, Ver- tigo, and The Emigrants, all the way to The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz” (2005: 252). Loquai sees a single work Sebald authored over decades— 5. “Logis in einem Landhaus is quite different from Max’s two earlier collections of essays: two of the pieces were hitherto unpublished, only one of the others had appeared in an academic journal, the book contains no footnotes and is a series of carefully constructed peregrinations around and ruminations on the life and work of five writers and one visual artist for whom Max felt such a close (elective) affinity” (Sheppard 2005: 451).

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