4 - From the Weltschmerz of the Postwar Penitent to Capitalism and the “Racial Century”: Melancholy Diversity in W. G. Sebald's Work

Summary

Sebald's Melancholy Diversity

Melancholy in Sebald's work is one of the most debated subjects. His engagement with Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, with the melancholy writings of the seventeenth-century English thinker Thomas Browne, his play with space and perspective, and his melancholy representation of time feature prominently in this body of scholarship. And yet the fundamental ambivalence of Sebald's melancholy has not been sufficiently recognized. The following chapter illuminates the complexity of melancholy in his work. Indeed, it is more accurate to speak of “melancholies” in Sebald because he, like Günter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Peter Weiss, adapts and combines several discursive traditions. This diversity makes it difficult to derive a single overarching message from his use of melancholy. His conflation of the Freudian terms “melancholy” and “mourning” in his essayistic work further complicates matters.

As we have seen in previous chapters, melancholy, because of its long and diverse history, can become an overdetermined signifier in the literary text. Sebald, too, uses melancholy traditions to negotiate a self-conscious position on the place of affect and emotion in post-Holocaust memory. In the preface to his essay collection Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (Describing Unhappiness, 1985) Sebald suggests that literature often exceeds psychoanalysis in its ability to convey the nature of psychic formations and deformations. In his view, the modernism of the Austrian fin-de-siècle managed to express precisely the pathologies of sadness that preoccupied the psychiatric disciplines at the time.