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

The title of this collection of essays on travel as a structuring device and motif in W.G. Sebald’s œuvre sounds oxymoronic—Sebald and his idiosyncratic literary itinerary have been mapped to an extent that leaves hardly any space for new discoveries. Yet Markus Zisselsberger’s book fills a void in Sebald scholarship, as it is the first devoted exclusively to the constitutive feature of journeys in Sebald’s methodology. The Undiscover’d Country investigates travel “as a hidden nexus” in Sebald’s work and charts the “aesthetic and imaginative border crossings” therein (7). The result is a stimulating and rigorous collection with essays that add to the conversation on “Travel and Walking” started by Massimo Leone, John Beck, and John Zilcosky in W.G. Sebald—A Critical Companion (2004) and later continued by Bianca Theisen, Claudia Öhlschläger, Todd Presner, and others, proving that there is indeed much left to explore.

Twelve essays constitute this collection, divided into four sections of three essays each. The first section, “Departures,” is concerned with travel as a literal traversing of terrestrial space, and situates Sebald within the context of travel writing with essays on peripatetic literature, anti-tourism, and (somewhat less fittingly) absent-mindedness. The second section “Textual Excursions, Expeditions, and Adventures,” could have been titled “Destinations”—a three-part title suggests a lack of thematic cohesion—as it follows Sebald’s narrators to concrete destinations, from a preliminary sojourn in spas to the furthest reaches of the world, one literal and one imagined (the polar circle and the underworld). The third section, “Traveling Companions and Convergences” presents travel as a metaphor for intertextuality and describes Sebald traveling through and with the works of his predecessors (Chatwin, Stifter, Conrad). The fourth and last section, “Topographies and Theories,” includes a spatial model of Die Ringe des Saturn and two essays analyzing the vagaries of modernity from the viewpoints of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

The most noteworthy essays in this collection analyze recurring aspects of traveling in the Sebaldian landscape: walking, sightseeing, and armchair travel. Christian Moser’s “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk” is a long-overdue piece that places Sebald in a genealogy of 18^th- and 19^th-century peripatetic writers from a German, French, and British context. Since this essay focuses on Die Ringe des Saturn, which is set in Suffolk and references predominantly British artists, an inclusion of more literary walkers from the British Romantic tradition would have added yet more layers to this insightful investigation. J.J. Long convincingly locates Sebald in between the opposite poles of travel and tourism in “W.G. Sebald: The Anti-Tourist” and concludes that, in the end, the photographs in his works contribute to the production of a reductive tourist industry rather than subverting it. However, Long’s analysis that Sebald’s narrators “search for a ‘back region,’ an example of genuine indigenous culture” away from the infrastructure of tourism leaves room for debate (69), as Sebald’s narrators repeatedly find encounters with reality frightening and alienating. Barbara Hui’s essay “Mapping Historical Networks in Die Ringe des Saturn” shows how Sebald’s narrator moves through local space with a global imagination. Hui’s analysis of Sebald’s oscillation between a postmodern “networked” model of space and Thomas Browne’s “cosmological” worldview illuminates Sebald’s most difficult prose text, which has attracted a number of obfuscating interpretations, in a deceptively simple way with spatial logic.

Two other essays stand out in their combination of an analysis of Sebald’s literary precursors with a study of travel as both theme and method: Margaret Bruzelius’s “Adventure, Imprisonment, and Melancholy: Heart of Darkness and Die Ringe des Saturn” which unexpectedly approaches Sebald’s text as a romance, and James Martin’s “Campi deserti: Polar Landscapes and the Limits of Knowledge in Sebald and Ransmayr.” Bruzelius argues that “[a]dventure, despite its derring-do, is...