The one-winged angel: History and memory in the literary discourse of W. G. Sebald

Abstract

This study explores an ambiguity in W. G. Sebald's literary discourse. The author presents writing as a way to resist the fatality of the historical process and to overcome the limits of historical representation. His narratives are founded on the recognition that it is ethically necessary to speak in the name of the victims, but epistemologically impossible to do so. In order to overcome his scepticism, Sebald developed a discourse of memory largely inspired by Nabokov's and Benjamin's ideas of aesthetic redemption. The reader should be transformed through a sort of epiphany, an aesthetic illumination that works in his imagination and engages him in a ritual of mourning. This discourse, however, hides a tendency to glorify the figure of the melancholy writer, portraying him as a cultural hero. The narrator of Sebald's fictions is not just a critical witness of the catastrophic course of the world, but an image of the poet who struggles heroically against fatality and is redeemed, not because he triumphs, but precisely because he fails. It is my contention that Sebald's concept of the writer as a sublime tragic figure - what I call 'the one-winged angel' - undermines the political, if not the ethical, significance of his artistic legacy. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.