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  • The World After Progress:The Thomas Browne of W. G. Sebald
  • Dawn Morgan (bio)

The Late Twentieth-Century Prose Fiction of the German writer W. G. Sebald is noted for its novelty and strangeness, even, and perhaps especially, by readers of the English translations (Long 3–4). The work translated into English as The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage (1998) is doubly strange for the English reader because it is generated in part by reviving and recasting English genres of the seventeenth century, particularly those of natural history and anatomy, as formulated in English works by Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. To an interviewer from the Observer, Sebald described his astonishment at what he found in such works:

It so happens that a friend of mine was in the process of translating into German—which is quite an impossible task—Aubrey’s Brief Lives [1693], and he did it in the most brilliant way by inventing an artificial seventeenth-century German, and so I got more and more into reading seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English authors, and the density of the miraculous achievements is staggering.

(McCrum 17) [End Page 217]

Sebald’s reliance on and, in some instances, verbatim re-voicing of Browne’s prose in The Rings of Saturn seems to exploit generic potentials not suspected or detected by recent writers of English, or at least not with the same breadth of cross-linguistic appeal. As well as a poet and fiction writer, Sebald was a literary scholar with the linguistic means and critical inclinations to take seriously and envision new relevance for what are otherwise considered to be historically exhausted forms of writing. An examination here of the generic potentials that Sebald liberates from the English and develops for his own German works leads to an important reassessment of these old genres and texts and of those by Sir Thomas Browne in particular. Consideration of Browne’s genres and the uses to which they are put in Sebald helps also to account for a difficult aspect of Sebald’s work—its laughter—and the ways in which that laughter is produced in yoking seventeenth-century English to a sustained and entirely earnest critique of progress. By progress, I mean the Whig view of the past as inevitably leading to, and therefore legitimizing, present prevailing conditions, which are by this means projected into the future (Butterfield v). But whereas Butterfield was addressing historians and what he takes to be volitional ideological practices of historiography, his definition is augmented through the present reading with the assertion that the idea of progress is more or less seamlessly bound up with the historical process of secularization. I understand secularization as a displacement of the seventeenth-century Christian trajectory of history. Sebald’s critique of progress is a productive effect of his recuperation of texts and genres that are not themselves scientifically modern but that helped to make available the identity and displacement of redemption with progress as the justifying telos of scientific modernity. The Rings of Saturn instructs us in how Thomas Browne locates and refuses the trope of progress, providing Sebald with a model of the generic process by which to locate his own critique.

Genres, History, Laughter

That a writer from outside the English language should recognize and activate Browne’s genres for new uses in the twentieth- and twenty-first century is as it should be, according to M. M. Bakhtin’s socio-historical theory of genre, which stresses the value of “outsideness,” of perspectives from outside a culture, and, in this case, outside the language, for recognizing generic potentials. Like all meanings, the fullest capacities of a genre only become apparent “once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning” and “they engage in a kind of dialogue. … We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself [End Page 218] … and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths” (Speech Genres 7). “Outsideness” in Bakhtin’s formulation designates his embrace of otherness as constitutive of identities and texts. It refers also to temporal positioning, which explains how...

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