Bisse ins Sacktuch. Zur mehrfachkodierten Intertextualität bei W.G. Sebald by Espen Ingebrigtsen (review)

“Intertextuality is the last major field of Sebald research,” claimed J.J. Long ten years ago, and it is now hard to think of a critical study of Sebald that does not, in some way, engage with intertextuality (J.J. Long. W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, New York 2007 [ed. note: see review article in Monatshefte 101.1, Spring 2009, 88– 105]). Susanne Schedel’s survey “Wer weiß, wie es vor Zeiten wirklich gewesen ist?” Textbeziehungen als Mittel der Geschichtsdarstellung bei W.G. Sebald provided a robust typology of the functions and modes of intertextuality in Sebald’s writings (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004). Espen Ingebrigtsen’s new publication, Bisse ins Sacktuch. Zur mehrfachkodierten Intertextualität bei W.G. Sebald, although it would thus seem to address a well-worn topic, nonetheless comes as a welcome surprise for its originality and rigour. Ingebrigtsen clearly lays out his points of departure from Schedel’s work. Rather than depending on her typology, which orders intertextual references according to the degree and way in which they are ‘marked’ in Sebald’s text, his intention is to develop a more differentiated and critical approach to Sebald’s intertextuality.

For Ingebrigtsen, a study of Sebald’s intertextual methodology reveals the ways in which intertextual references not only support his overarching critique of historical violence, as Schedel argued, but also serve as a form of ethical restitution. Further, Sebald’s choice of intertextual references reveals his aesthetic tastes and biographical sympathies. Central to Ingebrigtsen’s project is the assertion that it is essential to pay attention to how and why each intertextual reference functions in the way that it does. Not all figures on loan have a uniform symbolism; not all textual citations, no matter how they are marked, carry the same poetic weight. Ingebrigtsen is not afraid to point out ethical problems, questionable citation practices and downright inaccuracies in Sebald’s work, while drawing on his own research in Sebald’s Arbeitsbibliothek to produce some new and intriguing insights into Sebald’s texts.

The full set of Sebald’s intertextual references are not worked through systematically—such an undertaking would hardly be possible—in keeping with Ingebrigtsen’s central assertion that intertextual references in Sebald are never fixed codes, and therefore that it is not possible to establish a stable meaning for any one intertextual reference. Instead, he selects a representative assortment of case studies. First, he examines how the “archival subject” (Long 2007) of Jacques Austerlitz is composed via a series of references to outsider figures congenial to Sebald. Ingebrigtsen argues that a view of Jacques Austerlitz as a material, feeling subject can augment his primary function as “archival subject” in a novel that functions as an alternative medium of cognition and sedimentation. Sebald’s intertextual practice here means that Austerlitz generates an excess of meaning, as his suggestive name indicates, going beyond a merely traumatic style of discourse to one that creates an alternative family for Austerlitz in the form of a literary network of elective affinities.

Not all of Sebald’s literary affinities are with marginal, exilic figures; Ingebrigtsen includes a study of Sebald’s references to the canonical figures of Kafka, Hofmannsthal, and Proust. Again, these are not systematic studies—each of these authors would merit an entire book-length study in relation to Sebald—but instead demonstrate further functions of intertextuality. Ingebrigtsen’s references to Kafka are chosen to show how Sebald cites Kafka to add an edge of the uncanny to seemingly realistic descriptions, such as that of the deportation of Agáta Austerlitzova from Prague. He argues that such references posit an anti-metaphysical, literary truth and faith instead of the historical truth about his family that Austerlitz is fruitlessly seeking. Hofmannsthal is mainly significant for his Chandos letter, references to which are strewn through Sebald’s work; however, Ingebrigtsen argues that Sebald transforms this pretext in a way that demonstrates a negative conception...