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  • Stilling Life:Deviant Realism in Sebald and Tripp
  • Naomi Beeman (bio)

Sebald on Tripp1

Several perplexing features of W. G. Sebald’s mixed-media prose raise the question of what “realism” means to him: 1) the frequency with which he refers to writers and visual artists who work in a traditional realist vein;2 2) the fact that his most sustained remarks on visual realism surface not with respect to photography, but in his interpretations of paintings by artists not generally regarded as “realistic” in an art-historical sense;3 3) the variety of terms of disparate cultural-historical and linguistic origins that Sebald conflates in his scattered reflections on aesthetic realism;4 and 4) the tendency of Sebald’s critics to read his work against the backdrop of genres, disciplines and media that are the historical organs of a realist ideology—realist literature and painting, autobiography, historiography, documentary and memorial [End Page 643] prose, photography and film—whether these categories are used to taxonomize Sebald’s work or are presented as fruitful points of contrast.

In this context, I would like to draw attention to an essay titled “Wie Tag und Nacht [As Day and Night]–” that Sebald wrote on his schoolfellow, the contemporary painter Jan Peter Tripp. “Wie Tag und Nacht–” is a work of art criticism driven by palpable artistic sympathy for the worldview enshrined in Tripp’s paintings. I read the essay as a tacit declaration of Sebald’s own aesthetic ideology in prose. I am particularly struck by Sebald’s explicit, polemical aim, which is to dislodge Tripp’s work from the tradition of trompe-l’oeil painting, photorealism and hyperrealism with which it has been, in his words, “almost compulsively” associated.5 Thus I ask whether his unorthodox interpretation of Tripp warns us against reading Sebald’s prose works through a (post-)realist lens.6 I would like to propose that here, as elsewhere, Sebald renders the term “realism” progressively stranger and more flexible by thinking against the grain of a certain historical reception of realist artworks. Finally, although a demonstration of this point exceeds the scope of this essay, the critique of visual realism Sebald puts forward in “Wie Tag und Nacht—” lays the groundwork for further study of Sebald’s prose fictions as a postmodern articulation of literary realism; it also provides us with the critical resources we need to interpret fully the commentaries on paintings embedded in his fictions, which have received more critical attention.7

Deviant Realism: “ … a much more deeply searching objectivity …”

Although Sebald concedes that “one cannot avoid the tiresome question of realism” in any discussion of Tripp’s images, he denies a realist agenda in all but Tripp’s earliest pieces: “The pictures of the first three or four years still show the clear influence of surrealism, of the Vienna [End Page 644] fantastic realists and of photorealism […] ; but very soon […] this […] trend [is] replaced by a much more deeply searching objectivity […] .”8 It is precisely the imposture of reality that, according to Sebald, “prevents us from seeing [Tripp’s] true achievement.”9 Reversing the conventional observation that representations mediate our access to reality, Sebald opens with the more shocking claim that our belief in reality mediates our access to representations, blinding us to the priority of the work of art.10 And this is the most unsettling thing about the realist aesthetic: that while it seems to prioritize reality, it in fact transforms the world from an end in itself to a kind of filter—a set of historically specific aesthetic imperatives that mediate our access to the artwork that is actually privileged by the realist aesthetic as by any other. When realist artworks refer us to an outside world, they use a rhetorical strategy not unlike Socrates’ assertion of his ignorance: realism denies its aesthetic authority only to smuggle it back in while we are busy making the detour it has recommended through the so-called “real world.” Rather than asking how Tripp’s realism allows us to see reality, therefore, Sebald asks how Tripp’s realism affects our ability to see Tripp’s paintings.

Nonetheless, Sebald misleads us when he describes Tripp’s...

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