‘The contrarieties that are in our yearnings’: Allegorical,nostalgic and transcendent spaces in the work of W. G. Sebald

Abstract

Sebald’s biomorphic depictions of cities involve the conjunction of Nature and History within the broader topoi of ineluctable decline and omnipresent decay. But Sebald’s pessimistic narratives are made bearable – all too bearable even – because they point beyond themselves: either backwards, in a gesture of nostalgia, towards a past that is idealized and lost, or outwards, in a gesture of transcendence, towards a post-human, anorganic world that is encapsulated in the image of pristine frozen landscapes. Because these two vanishing points are absent from the Jerusalem episode of ‘Ambrose Adelwarth’, Adelwarth’s travel diary, with its disgusting, expressionistoid depictions of decay and decline, is almost unique within Sebald’s prose fiction because it involves a decisive break with his normal narrative mode. Here then, for reasons that I shall explain, Sebald is disobeying his own aesthetic strictures and allowing the monstrous and horrific − ‘myth’ or the ‘mythological’, as he called it in Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (MZ) − to occupy the foreground of his narrative.