Consider a representative Sebaldian scene: A man wanders ...

Consider a representative Sebaldian scene: A man wanders the historical quarter of a European city in which he is a stranger, and stops at a shabby caf��. A clock chimes on the wall of that caf��, and it reminds him reminds him of a totally different clock in a totally different caf�� in a totally different part of a different city. He recalls that in the other city, he had been neighbors with a man whose father was a professional clockmaker. This neighbor was not himself a professional clockmaker, but he had an amateur passion for horology and an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the clock-making industry back to the 15th century. The narrator recalls the apartment in which he spent hours drinking lukewarm coffee with this neighbor and talking, talking, talking about the mechanics and history of clocks. Then the narrator recalls, vividly, perhaps for the first time in many years, that one day this neighbor, the clockmaker���s son, disappeared, packed off for another city without saying goodbye. And then the narrator remembers the first meal he had after the neighbor���s disappearance, a tuna sandwich very much like the one he is eating right now, in this very caf��, where this clock is still chiming, chiming, chiming.

The above is not a scene one can find in any actual Sebald text, but that���s the point. The working of memory���the narrator���s own, that of others, both of particular others (the neighbor) and of whole groups (the clockmakers of Europe)���is simultaneously the content and form of the novel, and the method of its composition. Anyone who���s ever struggled to produce pages on a deadline can see the appeal of this ��criture that is seemingly as contingent and abundant as life itself. If Sartre famously admired Husserlian phenomenology because it was a system of thought with which one ���philosophize about an ashtray,��� Sebald developed an aesthetic program that could in theory produce a whole novel or a whole series of novels about a spoon, or a particular variety of fig.

Wittgenstein says that ���a language is a form-of-life.��� Cards on the table: I think that the visceral appeal of the Sebaldian mode lies not in the method of composition nor in the style of his novels, but in the form-of-life of which that style is a concrete expression. That form-of-life need not and perhaps could not have been Sebald���s own, biographically, but is rather that of an ideal and idealized Sebaldian subject. In short, the Sebaldian narrator models a mode of being-in-the-world, a way of relating to one���s own life and to the (inevitably tragic) fact of one���s historicity, a mode that is particularly attractive to a certain class of writers today.

Melancholy sounds pretty damn unpleasant, but it occupies a privileged epistemological and ethical place in Sebald���s work. The melancholic knows something, and persists in that knowledge. He might suffer for what he knows, but at least he is not duped. This, I think, is how I and my contemporaries encounter Sebald���if not as a great pessimist, then at least as an honest skeptic, a writer who simply cannot accept the infantile compensations of narrative. And so his narrators move through these old European cities in a curiously disembodied way: they are described as hungry and thirsty, feverish and panicked, frantically paranoid or near-catatonic, but they never completely shedding their dignity even in the gutter, never retreat into the arms of a comforting illusion. There is a stillness deep inside each of them, what Virginia Woolf once called a ���wedge shaped core of darkness��� at the bottom of each self that is untouched by the world, that is the self, that is thereby somehow the condition of possibility for the extraordinary negative capability that these selves exhibit in their self-dissolving journeys through the winding gyre of Memory with a capital M.

Sebald���s narrators are haunted by something, and critics have long identified this ���something��� with the Holocaust: a historical event that remains absolutely unrepresentable, unassimilable to any coherent historical narrative, even as it demands the practice of a kind of aesthetic negative theology, the constant attempt at representation that always fails and encodes its own failure within itself, of which the latest celebrated attempt is of course the astounding film Zone of Interest. According to this logic, still hegemonic nearly 80 years after Adorno declared it barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, the Holocaust becomes for the late-modernists the dialectical inverse of that other impossible object���History itself, conceived as a total dynamic process without Origin or Telos.

And so the world of the Sebaldian novel, shattered by the Great Trauma, appears as a massive open set of fragments without a whole (lost or otherwise), connected purely by coincidence and adjacency, by a Deleuzean logic of pure conjunction, of the ���and.��� The narrator is the agent of these connections, which come into their foggy pseudo-being only through his heroic memory, and his unflagging attention to the tiny details of urban European life are cast as a contemporary version of Tiresias drinking the blood and calling up the shades from Hades to say their lines and disappear again. An ontology of coincidence, and an ethics of bracketing, of bracketing the self and refusing to stake out any point of certainty about the Whole, to persist absolutely in melancholy.

What Sebald���s melancholic encounters among these fragments is not History, nor any particular properly historical situation, but mere historicity. He does not live in this time, this place, this life, this moment in medias res, but always in ���a��� time, ���a��� place, ���a��� life, ���a��� moment, as purely abstract singularities. The details recounted ultimately indicate nothing but the fact of their being ���mere��� details, reminders to always and exclusively speak of oneself and one���s own with the indefinite article���in effect, self-cancellations.

Finitude, singularity, limitation-as-such are the index of all the Sebaldian subject���s encounters, however infinitely precise his sensory apparatus and however infinitely obscure the facts are that these sensations dredge up in his memory. It was Sebald���s genius to develop from this ontology of finitude the infinite variety of this spiraling and self-reflexive text. The price he paid for that infinity was History itself, which he could only bear after having reduced it to a cabinet of curiosities, stinking of formaldehyde, inert and unredeemed.

Source unknow.