Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald

2. Natural History: Becoming in Dissolution

2 Natural History Becoming in Dissolution§1 Saturn’s Scythe: Tarrying with the Negative In “Aesthetica in Nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose” (1762), J. G. Hamann asks: “But how are we to raise the defunct language of Nature from the dead?” The evocations of nature in Sebald’s stories seem as if written in meditation on this still troubling questions.1 Natural history is, in fact, at the very heart of all Sebald’s writings, provoking questions about how the writer, compelled by a sense of responsibility, can bring the memory of this history into the mediations of language. And its representation in his writings makes possible at least an intuitive grasp of the gravity of our contemporary conditions. But Sebald’s writings are marked, afflicted, and indeed scarred, because of their preoccupation with natural history, the setting for representations of a ceaseless strife between the forces of nature—what Heidegger calls “earth”—and the world that we human beings have created by grace of nature’s tolerance. His works register the terrible strife that rules natural history, not only in their narratives, taking the causes and effects of this strife as their subject matter, their thematic content, but also in their form; for his works, like all things that human beings have created and built, though belonging to the world, are vividly conscious of the fact that they are ultimately made of earth and reducible to dust, deeply affected by the terms of their engagement with the natural history of the world.2 Understanding themselves as part of the very nature whose processes they register in words and images, these works of literature do not conceal their fragmentation, their interruptions, their disorder, the contingencies that 147 148 / REDEEMING WORDS shaped them, the strife they cannot comprehend. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger observes: The opposition [Der Gegeneinander] of world and earth is strife. But we would surely all too easily falsify its essence if we were to confound strife with discord and dispute, and thus see it only as disorder and destruction [Störung und Zerstörung]. [. . .] In essential strife, the opponents raise each other into the selfaffirmation [Selbstbehauptung] of their essential natures. [. . .] In strife, each opponent carries the other beyond itself. Thus, the strife becomes ever more intense as striving, and more properly what it is. [. . .] In setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is an instigating [Anstiftung] of this strife. This does not happen so that the work should at the same time settle and put an end to strife by an insipid agreement [in einem faden Übereinkommen], but so that the strife may remain strife. Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work accomplishes [vollbringt] this strife. The work-being of the work consists in the instigation [Bestreitung] of strife between world and earth. It is because the strife arrives at its high point in the simplicity of intimacy [im Einfachen der Innigkeit] that the unity of the work comes about in the instigation of strife. And he follows this by asking us to think: “In what way does truth happen in the work-being of the work, which now means to say, how does truth happen in the instigation of strife between world and earth? What is truth?”3 Whatever unity, whatever truth Sebald’s works achieve has come about because they have exposed themselves to this strife between world and nature—exposed themselves to it, and even made sacrifices, for the sake of bearing witness to its significance in natural history. Natural history figures in the dissolution of reification, transforming petrified forms of life by showing their true condition in the context of historical processes; moreover, at the same time that it effects this transformation , it brings to light the damage that things in their disenchantment have undergone and of course the sufferings that all life has endured, drawing our attention not only to the processes of destruction that have been wrought by reification, but also, through them, to the fragile promise that lies, awaiting its moment of recognizability, in the processes of becoming. Waking up to the noises of Venice resounding through its narrow canals, the narrator in “All’estero,” presumably, as often, a fictionalized double of the author, tells us that: NATURAL HISTORY / 149 For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din...