Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience (review)

Deane Blackler's book assembles an impressive breadth of material on W. G. Sebald, including a biographical sketch, a survey of recent secondary literature, and a series of sensitive close readings of aspects of his four prose texts, Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz. Her central thesis, that Sebald's texts engender an adventurous and "disobedient" reader, is explored with respect to several Sebaldian themes, such as travel, photography, and space, as well as the (pseudo)documentary character of his texts. Yet what Blackler's book attests to best is the difficulty of organizing any extended commentary on W. G. Sebald's dense, hybrid, and notoriously hard-to-categorize oeuvre. Sebald's prose texts are so cross-referential and studded with intertextual allusions and quotations – not to mention photographs – and hint at such a wealth of interlinked themes that they seem to defy ordered framing. Blackler's three chapters are prefaced by forty-five pages of ruminating preliminary material, in the form of "Notes Toward an Itinerary" and a so-called "Pre-amble," among others – a tip of the hat to Sebald's peripatetic mode of inquiry. The three chapters following this introduction are subdivided into two to five page-long passages under subheadings not listed in the table of contents. The third chapter is further split into three "stages," each of which is also arranged by the four primary texts they cover. This gives the book a disjointed feel that its author might well have intended to produce, mirroring what she reads as the disorienting quality of Sebald's narrative style. With its Sebaldian sentence constructions (such as paragraph-long sentences), especially in the "Pre-amble," Blackler's book also attests to the pitfalls of producing a scholarly text on an admired author, especially one who blurred the boundaries between academic work and creative compositions in his own writing. Vladimir Nabokov's inimitable style has similarly inspired an apologetic and emulating scholarship.

Within this somewhat convoluted organization, Blackler's response to Sebald's oeuvre is careful and heartfelt, at times luminous, but ultimately bound by the limitations of any reader-response criticism that envisions a generalizable "reader." Her thesis, that the text produces a disobedient, emancipated reader, is built upon a patronizing supposition. She seeks to contrast a regular, "obedient" reader (modelled after Umberto Eco's critique) with a Sebaldian "disobedient" one, yet her depiction of the latter is a caricature of a wide-eyed and disoriented reader, discombobulated by Sebald's trickster moves, the blurred genres of his texts, and their implied questioning of authenticity. She envisions a reader who needs prodding in order to think beyond the boundaries of the text and who, say, slept through all literature and literary criticism produced in the second half of the twentieth century. Disobedience, Blackler argues, is triggered by some texts in the dialogical tradition of Mikhail Bakhtin, rather than by a practice of reading. While she consistently uncovers the often unrecognized humorous and carnivalesque traces in Sebald's prose, her model of Sebald is didactic rather than adventurous, and her model of disobedience remains tame.

Blackler devotes much attention to dissociating "Max" Sebald the author from "his narrator," but seems convinced that they represent a meaningful dyad. She (obediently) assumes, for instance, that the narrating "I" in all of the four voices of The Emigrants is a continuous persona, and overall she does not distinguish between the narrators of the different texts. In a similar vein, she (obediently) reads Jacques Austerlitz as a distinct figure rather than allowing for the possibility that he is a figment of an unreliable narrator's imagination. Her whole second chapter is devoted to Sebald's biography, which further stifles her attempts at untangling the quasi-autobiographical elements of Sebald's text from the fictitious ones. Hence Blackler quite obediently follows the trajectory Sebald has laid out in his texts, reading his narrator(s) as the author's inadequately coded alter ego...