Abstract
If brevity is the soul of wit, then one might expect Uwe Schütte’s new and admirably short book to offer its readership a laugh a minute, especially as the mills of the ‘Sebald Industrial Complex’ have been grinding more slowly over the past few years. But this expectation would be misplaced, since the book’s succinctness is less the mark of a will-to-humour and more a sign that a critic who knows his subject extremely well is offering a lucid, jargon-free account of Sebald’s brief life (‘Biographical Outline’, pp. ix–xii and Chapter 1), and the ways in which that life connects with his sometimes puzzling work. Chapter 1 introduces Sebald as a maverick academic critic but does not shrink from giving an account of the major weaknesses in his critical work; Chapter 2 deals with him as a complex poet; and Chapters 3–6 present him as the author of four allegedly ‘post-modern’ (p. 43) works of fiction that take the reader into such ‘borderline states’ as the underworld and the realm of the dead (p. 55). Then, by identifying and deploying the most important aspects of the prevailing critical orthodoxy, Schütte produces what is easily the best available introduction to Sebald’s prose fiction for such relatively inexperienced readers as sixth-formers and first- and second-year students of German literature.
But two of Schütte’s chapters have something for the more experienced reader. As far as I can see, Chapter 2 is the best and most coherent introduction on the market to Nach der Natur (1988), a text that ‘appeared during the heyday of the German Green Movement’ following the Chernobyl disaster of 26 April 1986 (p. 33); and Chapter 7, ‘The Cult of Sebald’, Schütte’s substitute for a conclusion, breaks new ground.
Schütte starts from the base-line that Sebald’s epic poem is ‘a self-portrait in triplicate’ (p. 32) that displays many of his major writerly assets, for example: ‘his facility in fusing genres, in the reconstruction of biographies, his thematization of exile and melancholia, and his acute attention to paintings and images’ (p. 31). But Schütte’s core contention is that the true subject of Sebald’s poem is ‘the advent of instrumental reason: what was originally conceived out of respect and deference to the magnitude and diversity of creation is distorted into a guide for the profit-oriented exploitation of nature and its resources’ (p. 36). Consequently, Schütte argues that Nach der Natur reverses the conventional perspective of Western thinking, ‘which places man over nature’ so that, for example, Vitus Bering’s expedition, which took more than a decade to prepare, is also ‘a poignant precursor of the megalomania characteristic of those contemporary undertakings whose inevitable failure is inscribed beforehand in the hypertrophic nature of their ambitions’ (pp. 35–6). But he then adds that Sebald’s triptych shows that ‘human evolution and history are governed by a calamitous predisposition that outweighs all resistance and allows for no remedy: an overmastering destructive tendency’ (pp. 36–7). Consequently, its third poem is said to link Mancunian industry with the Holocaust by showing that ‘factory and death factory … are part of one continuum’ (p. 39), and that the real focus of the observer-narrator’s attention is Altdorfer’s ‘grandiose depiction of nature [as] an immense vista with an apocalyptic storm looming in the background’ (p. 41) – a tragic Dionysiac insight, whose contemporary import is all too apparent despite the reassuring Apollonian veil that covers it. In Chapter 7 the Anglo-Saxon reader is offered a less than flattering explanation for Sebald’s relative popularity in his/her world (p. 114), though there are other, more ideological reasons why bien-pensant liberals do not seem able to bear very much Sebaldian reality. So, equally importantly, Chapter 7’s fascinating foray into reception theory makes the tacit but entirely convincing case that the time has now arrived for someone to undertake an exhaustive study of Sebald’s reception in the English-speaking world where, in the view of some prophetic environmentalists, the last Trump is already audible.