The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel (review)

death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveler returns ShakespeareHamlet

The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, edited by Markus Zisselsberger, will take its place on the map of Sebald studies, assembling as it does a wide range of (mostly) excellent essays. Travel remains one of the most significant dimensions of Sebald’s oeuvre, not least for Anglophone readers whose appreciation of the four prose narratives—translated as The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999), Austerlitz (2001)—and the long poem, After Nature (2003) as travel literature is not dependent on a knowledge of German. That said, all quotations in this volume are given first in the original German, and there is even one republished prose piece, “Die Kunst des Fliegens” (“The Art of Flying”), reproduced in German only, which might be frustrating for monolingual Sebaldians.

The book’s subtitle does not imply that the thirteen essays (including the introduction) shy away from the kind of political postcolonial reading pioneered by John Zilcosky in his much-cited work on Sebald as travel writer. Even though these essays tend to emphasize aesthetic and intertextual issues with a focus on travel as metaphorical or figurative movement through time and interior worlds as much as real physical spaces, they all, implicitly or explicitly, figure travel as a trope within a broader context of exploration, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. In his lengthy introduction Zisselsberger argues that Sebald’s “Art of Flying” text exemplifies the significance of travel for the author, bearing “traces of the generic combination of travelogue with biography; the representation of travel as an antidote to melancholy; the traversal of physical space as a means to arrest time; and, more generally, travel as a structuring principle for a kind of narrative in which the distinction between real, imaginative, and textual travel becomes blurred” (5).

The introduction voices the critical hope for an “unknown promised land of a new kind of literary writing, an “undiscover’d country” by the name of W. G. Sebald (17). Zisselsberger notes the provenance of the book’s title in Hamlet, act 3, scene 1, but neither he nor any of the contributing authors acknowledge that “country” is a euphemism for death: the one place from which the traveler (in Hamlet’s cosmology) never returns. The titular reference to Shakespeare’s play signifies throughout this book neither as a figure for death nor for the past alone as much as for the intertextually-inflected interior spaces of individual subjectivity, especially with respect to the subject’s memorial relation to past and present. When it is invoked in these pages, Hamlet’s line is generally taken at face value, signifying a place heretofore unknown or something unfamiliar in the midst of the familiar. In Zisselsberger’s view, Sebald’s “Art of Flying”

ultimately points to a paradox that generally characterizes the later prose texts on several levels: his narrators and protagonist are all avid travelers but the narratives themselves, in the high level of self-reflexivity, in the way they draw attention to their own status as fictional constructions, and in their creation of memorial spaces in which time slows down or is even suspended, tend strangely toward stasis.

(6)

The real value of this collection lies in the individual essays connected by the master trope of travel. Caroline Duttlinger’s “‘A Wrong Turn of the Wheel’: Sebald’s Journeys of (In)Attention,” epitomizes a critical tendency to read travel in Sebald through a too-literal, realist lens. In her discussion of Vertigo’s Kafkan intertext, Duttlinger neglects to consider the significance of the metaphorical or allegorical value of the Hunter Gracchus’s epistemological and ontological (as much as psychological) ‘lostness’: “whereas Gracchus leaves his Heimat for good, the narrator returns home” (100). Where the first type of traveler represents a subjectivity predicated upon a journey without return (what James Martin in his essay terms...