3 - Views from a “Coign of Vantage”

Summary

It's hard on publishers … you have to make sure it doesn't get in the travel section.

—Sebald in conversation with James Atlas, 1999

Literature … allows us vicariously to possess the continuum of experience in a way we are never able to in reality.

—David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel

Sommes-nous fatalement des esclaves de l’image? Ce n’est pas sûr, répondent les philosophes, par métier incertains, l’image est potentiellement un espace de liberté: elle anéantit la contrainte de l’objet modèle et lui substitut l’envol de la pensée, le vagabondage de l’imagination.

[Are we fatally enslaved by the visual? That's not always so, say the philosophers, professionally uncertain — the image is potentially a site of freedom: it annihilates the constraint imposed by the object which it represents, and puts in its place the line of flight that is thought, the wandering that is imagination.]

—Julia Kristeva, Visions capitales, 1998

Setting Out: Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz

In this Section, which suggests a reading practice, I argue that Sebald's reader is positioned to be disobedient, interrogating and constructing images according to his or her own engagement with the destabilizing and disconcerting verbal text. I consider three aspects central in the production of Sebald's disobedient reader.

First, Sebald's fiction eschews narrative in the conventional sense, abandoning conventions of plot and character, and employs a curiously homodiegetic first-person narrator, my focus in stage 1. This narrator is a solitary, soliloquizing writer, not interested in engaging the reader directly in a narrative contract of the usual kind, absorbed instead in the practice of writing which memorializes his own subject, a kind of spectral annunciatory presence that engenders the texts. The Sebaldian narrator is, a little like the Lucan archangel, mediating between two worlds: the textual imaginary and the historicity of prior reality. The disobedient reader, a funambulist too, balances artfully on the verbal tension which connects these two poles. He or she is free to locate his or her own position transgressively, both inside and outside the textual economy, seeing things on the journey in each text from her own “coign of vantage” (Macbeth, 1.6.9), sometimes but not always by the narrator's side.