W.G. Sebald and the poetics of total destruction

Abstract

This paper considers the literature of WG Sebald from a perspective which develops an aesthetics of destruction and characterises Sebald’s work as responding to the failure in constructed modes of experience and expression. Focussing on The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz, this essay first examines the manner in which the previous two centuries have disabled the direct representation of the universally-felt erosion of experience. Walter Benjamin will be crucial in contextualising Sebald’s diagnosis. The essay then examines Sebald’s response and argues that Sebald crafts a literature wherein images, relegated to a dubious realism, are related to one another in mosaics which accumulate into a dense structure where the experience of the text mirrors its content. Sebald’s poetics of destruction has the double effect of saying and performing, therefore negotiating a new ethics of the gaze which steps around the pitfalls of paradigmatic expression. Sebald mobilises syntactically fluid textual instances in a performance of absolute magnitude which causes the experience of reading his texts to occasion the sublime. This will be understood through the conceptual architecture set out in Kant’s Third Critique and will lead to an examination of the ethical dimension implied therein.