Between ‘surface illusionism’ and ‘awful depth’: Reflections on the poetological and generic ambivalence of W. G. Sebald’s Logis in einem Landhaus

Within W. G. Sebald’s oeuvre, Logis in einem Landhaus (LieL, 1998), a collection of essays on five writers who wrote in Swabian-Alemanic or Swiss (French/German) and Jan Peter Tripp, the illusionist painter from the Allgäu, has a multiply ambivalent position. Although the essays can be characterized as Dichterporträts that are rounded off by a more conventional art-historical study, the former have clear generic affinities with biography, the literary-critical essay, literary history and autobiography. As such, they oscillate between the depiction of what is known on the one hand and critical reflection on the other. Sebald said that beneath the apparently realistic surface of Tripp’s visual work there lay concealed ‘an awful depth’ (LieL: 181), and his portraits have the same ambivalence about them: carefully arranged collections of well-known fragments that recall individual writers conceal dizzying reflections about the nature of (auto)biography, literary criticism and literary history.