Literature, Life, and Modernity

In a poignant passage in the introduction to his Lectures on Fine Art (1820), Hegel describes how, in his view, human subjects express themselves in the world through practical activity in order to recognize themselves.¹

Man brings himself before himself by practical activity, since he has the impulse, in whatever is directly given to him, in what is present to him externally, to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself. This aim he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things; a boy throws stones into a river and marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing.²

Poignant though this passage is, one may nonetheless wonder at its claims. Is it the first impulse of human subjects, as subjects, to seek recognition of themselves and of the reasonableness of their doings in relation to external things? How dominant is this impulse in comparison with other impulses? (Many problems of survival, of coping with life, and of satisfying one’s wants seem to have little on the face of it to do with seeking self-recognition.) Worse yet, how far is it genuinely possible to win self-recognition or to gain “an intuition of something that is [one’s own] doing”? Perhaps such intuitions are only relatively fleeting in the face of the chaos and press of life, and perhaps they are available also only to the few who have “enough”—enough means, time, and training—and who live in good enough societies in which to carry out their efforts at self-expression and self-recognition. Perhaps there are other things that many people care about more fundamentally than they care about gaining a stable intuition of something that is one’s own free and reasonable doing.

Hegel concedes that the life of Spirit, which includes at least the lives of human subjects in historical time, is marked by “tarrying with the negative” and by “death and devastation.”³ Establishing or expressing anything requires negation and its working through, always;⁴ the life of Spirit is continually reforming itself in historical time. As Stephen Houlgate notes, “Hegel’s philosophy … contains within itself a principle of aesthetic and religious resistance to its own ‘totalizing claims.’”⁵ Whatever their capacities for conceptually structured self-regulation and satisfaction within meaningful social roles, human beings remain also sensuous beings who stand in some need of feeling imaginatively that life makes (enough) sense. Moreover, as Terry Pinkard remarks, the shapes of our lives are not simply given, according to Hegel. Rather, “we come to be the kinds of agents we are,” and so bear, at least potentially, at each moment “a ‘negative’ stance toward ourselves”: we could become something we are, so far, not. This negative stance or open stance toward future possibility then “inflicts a kind of ‘wound,’ a Zerissenheit, a manner of being internally torn apart that demands healing,”⁶ as we seek greater self-unity and more meaningful satisfaction. Or as Hegel himself puts it, “in the spiritual nature of man duality and inner conflict burgeon, and in their contradiction he is tossed about.”⁷

And yet, according to Hegel, philosophy, together with the life of the Spirit—human life in time—with which it is interwoven, “proceeds to the cancellation”⁸ of this opposition.” Hegel argues that we are historically on the cusp of a time in which “basically everyone” will be able “to satisfy [his or her] knowledge and volition … within the actuality of the state,”⁹ that is, within the framework of the modern democratic nation-state and its institutions of right. Basically all subjects will be able to see reflections of themselves in their doings, in ways that are simultaneously individual and yet stable and reasonable under modern institutions. Structural social revolution is and should be a thing of the past, and we may reasonably claim to live in large measure in reconciliation with actuality.¹⁰

After the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, and with awareness of the persistence of problems of poverty and radical inequality, it scarcely requires much perceptiveness to wonder whether this is really possible. When one then considers further the insights of Marx and Althusser and of Nietzsche and Freud into social life and into standing pressures on individual psyches, then the prospects for a shared life of right—a community of reciprocal respect and recognition among free subjects who freely lead lives that are meaningful and reasonable under shared social institutions—seem dimmer yet. Even if a system of liberal civil rights is a relatively good idea for maintaining a degree of social peace and affording subjects a measure of liberty, no routes of direct political action promise to lead to a life of full freedom and right. Nor does theoretical-representational knowing as it is rigorously pursued in the experimental and mathematical sciences much point to solving problems of self-recognition and reciprocal recognition in worldly practice. We might then conclude that human subjects either do not or should not much care about the pursuit of recognition—the pursuit, that is, of stable senses, maintained by others and by themselves, of their own doings as individually chosen, free, reasonable, and satisfying. Yet that conclusion then makes it hard to see how human subjects engage in either self-cultivation or the cultivation of their social relations at all. These forms of cultivation—the sheer existences of cultures—do seem to embody the pursuit of some sort of expressive power, coherence, and means for the development and recognition of stable, reasonable, and satisfying identity. And yet such pursuits seem always to founder, perhaps inevitably to founder to some extent.

Walter Benjamin’s writings on language, history, and culture offer us one way to think about how human beings live with the all but impossible task of the pursuit of recognition. Unlike Hegel, Benjamin begins from the thought that fullness of recognition—what would amount to a paradise of free and meaningful life on earth—is unavailable either on the basis of history as we have inherited it or through any particular specifiable efforts, political, cultural, or theoretical. In an essay written in 1916 but unpublished in his lifetime, Benjamin formulates the unavailability of utopia through or from present courses of culture by contrasting the fullness of the meaning of things to and for God with the standing failure to engage with things (and with each other) in fully meaningful ways that characterizes all human culture. He contrasts God’s meaningful naming of things, bound up with understanding them in their proper places and interrelations, with what he calls the human overnaming of things, bound up with our taking them specifically this way or that, as objects of particular use, say, without living in full “resonance” with them. “Things have no proper names except in God. For in his creative word God called them into being, calling them by their proper names. In the language of men, however, they are overnamed…. The naming word in the knowledge of man must fall short of the creative word of God.”¹¹ God, who made things freely and in accordance with fullness of understanding, knows and engages with things according to their proper natures and significances. The ways of knowing and engaging with things that is characteristic of human beings are contrasted with the way of God. No matter, then, what one thinks about the existence of God, the point must be that the ways of knowing and engaging with things that are characteristic of human beings are, all of them, one-sided and reflective of conflicts over what things are and how they are to be used. Culture—which is the embodiment of ways of conceiving of things and of making use of them—as it is made by human beings perpetuates one-sidedness and conflict rather than resolving them. Overnaming or living within particular mimetic circuits of conception and use is a form of overspecification that does not let things be in their full significance and prevents human beings from engaging with either materiality or with one another in ways that embody fullness of meaning. Overnaming is, therefore, “the deepest reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate muteness. Overnaming as the linguistic being of melancholy points to another curious relation of language: the overprecision that obtains in the tragic relationship between the languages of human speakers.”¹²

To say that relations between languages are tragic and characterized by overprecision is to say that some dimension of what is meant in a given language is somehow missed in its rendering in a second language, with tragic consequences. And that in turn must be because, to some extent, the ways of conceiving of and engaging with things opened up within a given language are not fully available for expression in a second language. All actual languages are marked by overprecise falling away from the fullness of meaning and attention embodied in the divine language. Given, further, that the boundaries of language identity may be as narrow as those of an individual speaker’s idiolect, Benjamin’s picture is of human subjects generally failing to some degree to understand how other human subjects “take” things and engage with them, hence failing to some degree to understand what other human subjects are doing, what might be reasonable and sensible.

This picture need by no means be taken as a Whorfian picture of subjects as somehow wholly sealed off from one another by boundaries of language and culture that are impermeable to translation. There is some good reason to think that some considerable success in translation and in understanding what others are up to is always possible in relation to any being whom we can recognize as a language-deploying and thinking subject at all.¹³ But conflict nonetheless remains. There are standing practical difficulties among subjects in undertaking fully to understand how other subjects “take” things, what they are up to in engaging with them, and, so, what a free, meaningful, and reasonable life together under common “takings” might be like. There is, for us, no standpoint available outside the partiality that attaches to any point of view that any of us might occupy as finite subjects, no way to see things “whole” and untainted by overnaming within the always partly particularized mimetic circuits that one has inherited and developed. Practical problems of human relationship persist. That is the thought captured in Benjamin’s contrast between God’s calling things by their proper names and human overnaming.

Our ways of taking things conceptually and of engaging with them—no matter how widely shared, pragmatically useful, and historically sensible they may be—are not grounded on any grasp of ultimate, sempiternal reality. Something, some fullness of significance, is somehow missed in any way of taking and engaging with things (or with one another). And so, “within all linguistic formation [and within all repertoires of culture] a conflict is waged between what is expressed and expressible and what is inexpressible and unexpressed.”¹⁴ We are, always, failing to mean fully and transparently to others and to ourselves everything that might reasonably be meant in engaging with things and so failing also to live fully and transparently and meaningfully with others according to reason. Our languages and cultural practices ultimately express these facts, at least in certain moments in certain pockets of use. Experience is, therefore, not a matter only of simple classification of objects under concepts, without remainder, and it is not a matter of human subjects each fully knowing what they and each other are up to, according to articulated good reasons. Experience is rather a form of human life in which, sometimes, things happen unpredictably, coincidentally, and yet in such a way that unarticulated significances are displayed and felt. From within the repressed history of a language, something can make itself felt, and present overprecision can be disturbed. Such disturbances can also appear when one undertakes (but in some measure fails at) literary translation or through dislocations of one’s ordinary habits of perception, as in travel.

Michael Rosen usefully characterizes Benjamin’s understanding of experience as including a sense of the existence of “unseen affinities”: relations among things or significances of things that are somehow missed within our ordinary articulations of what we are up to (within our ordinary “overnamings”) but that nonetheless sometimes make themselves manifest. As Rosen puts it, “‘unseen affinities’ [such as the ‘passion for roulette’ in relation to ‘the vogue for panoramas’], referring, as they do, to a subterranean level of awareness, are not such as, immediately and unambiguously, to strike the uninstructed observer; and yet it is their existence that provides Benjamin’s concept of experience with its only possible verification.”¹⁵ There are, that is to say, within experience, ways of taking things and ways of engaging with things that seem to disrupt ordinary, articulated, planned ways of thinking, living, and working, and that in disrupting them seem to show exactly how specifically partial those ordinary ways are, just insofar as they are bound up with specific mimetic circuits of overnaming. Attention to these moments of surprise and disruption functions, then, not only as a verification of Benjamin’s concept of experience as always partial and fallen but also as a reminder of our finitude and of what we have failed to achieve in the way of fullness of significance within the predominant parts of daily cultural life. Since such moments are always possible—since some surprises and disruptions always remain unrecuperated to transparent and reasonable social life, no matter how it develops—there can be no Hegelian recipe in the face of their permanent presence within life for achieving full human freedom in cultural life according to reason. For this reason, Benjamin characterizes his own method as that of evidencing the disruptive rather than that of prescribing the normative, as that of showing rather than saying. “Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say—only to show.”¹⁶

Early reviewers and critics of W. G. Sebald’s books have not been slow to notice the burden of sadness carried by his form of literary attention to life. Something in human life is not going well. Disruption, distraction, threat, and anxiety—all modes of failing easily to settle in routines of given cultural life—are all but omnipresent. Anthony Lane calls attention to Sebald’s focusing on the happenstantial, on whatever disrupts smoothness of emplotment, in remarking that Sebald “raised modesty to the brink of metaphysics.”¹⁷ Susan Sontag finds in Sebald “a mind in mourning”¹⁸ somehow on behalf of us all, for experience failing to become fully and transparently meaningful. This mind expresses itself in a “laconically evoked mental distress” that embodies “a mysterious surplus of pathos” that is “never solipsistic.”¹⁹ Franz Loquai notes that Sebald’s writing is marked by a sense that “the actuality of experience is apparently not to be trusted”; that is, things that actually and effectively happen or are to happen according to life plans that a traditional plot might track are continuously being disrupted by the unplanned, the surprising, and the sheerly contingent.²⁰

Frank Farrell explains the existence of disruptions in part as a result of the fact that Sebald’s narrator figure (a character sometimes called W. G. Sebald) is an emigrant, as are both many of the living figures whom he encounters and many of the historical figures upon whom he reflects.²¹ In addition to geographic emigration, both the narrator figure and many of those whom he encounters seem to suffer from a kind of developmental or psychic emigration. Childhood, with its parental figures superintending a round of daily rituals, has somehow been left behind, and adulthood seems to offer no relations and routines of comparable stability and sureness of significance. Sebald’s world, as Farrell puts it, “is unable to incarnate the present meanings of an ongoing life because of the need for a ritualized return of what can no longer come back.”²²

One might be tempted to find either the Sebald figure or the characters whose wanderings are narrated uninteresting, on the ground that their senses of loss and their mournings are somehow pathological in being determined by a failure to form stable adult attachments into which most people need not and do not fall. But exactly how clear is it that we genuinely do better in a world dominated by getting and spending, commodity exchange, cultural slippage, and the fragmentation of work? Sebald’s figures occupy “a world of ruins and absences, with no features immanent to it that suggest any possibility of renewal.”²³ If we reject the relevance to us of this world and the figures within it, then we shall have somehow to sustain a sense of the existence immanently within our world of features that do suggest renewal, and that is not obviously so easy to do.

Mark R. McCulloh focuses similarly on Sebald’s sense of outsiderliness in the face of cultural habits that seem to lack significance. “What Sebald does is display openly, from the perspective of a wandering outsider who happens to have certain literary leanings, the very oddness of people, of history and its calamities, of the very predicament of being alive. Sebald’s subject … is in the last analysis the unsettling strangeness of the familiar.”²⁴ In the face of this unsettling strangeness, the best that one can do, Sebald suggests, is to bear witness to it and to the traumas that somehow lie behind it. This witness, however, includes a sense, as in Benjamin, that traumas are intrinsic to historical life as such; no overcoming of trauma through either political revolution or cognition is available. Sebald himself as a critic characterized the work of the early twentieth-century German novelist Alfred Döblin as offering “an exact illustration of the new concept of history, which is not based on the idea of progress, as the old bourgeois concept was, but on the notion of self-perpetuating catastrophe.”²⁵

Eric L. Santner describes a “‘poetics of exposure’ that would become the signature style and method of Sebald’s fiction.”²⁶ Human subjects are exposed to damage, trauma, loss, and in general to failures to form stable and fulfilling attachments. The lives of human subjects hence seem to have something in common with certain other “privileged materials and objects” that recur in Sebald’s fiction: “dust, ash, moth, bones, flayed skin, silk.”²⁷ Disintegration, fragility, and decay are substantially more prominent than integration, construction, and progress, both for human subjects and for material things.

Santner traces Sebald’s poetics of exposure, sense of the fragility of human life, and feeling for the pervasiveness of trauma in history both to the conditions of subject or ego formation in general and to the specific shape of those conditions in late commodity society. He suggests that Sebald shares Benjamin’s sense of our “irreducible exposure to the violence of history.”²⁸ This exposure makes allegory (or at least the kind of deliberately overstylized, ritualized, “bald,” antieschatological, unparsable allegory characteristic of the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel as Benjamin understood it) “the symbolic mode proper to”²⁹ our experience, and it makes melancholy—lingering in a persistent sense of damage, trauma, and loss—the appropriate tonality for serious writing that would register the deepest tenor of human experience.

Santner argues that the continuing presence of trauma in human life in such a way that only damaged, outsiderly, less than wholehearted subjects are formed is due initially to the basis of civilization in the renunciation of parricide, as Freud described that basis in Totemism and Taboo. There is originally, at least for adolescent male subjects, a primordial impulse to parricide, so that they may displace the primal father in the tribe and come to enjoy a position of unrivaled possession and enjoyment of its women. At some point, however, this parricidal impulse is renounced for the sake of social peace but therein also displaced and continued in a distorted form. “The renunciation of the parricidal impulse (along with the fantasy of absolute jouissance entailed by the yearned-for position of the primal father) can be fully sustained only by a compulsion to enjoy that same impulse, though at the significant symbolic remove of ritual performance.”³⁰ Given this renunciation and remove, male subjects come to exist in a damaged state of both permanent excitation and dissatisfaction. “The primal horde pattern [of actual slaying of the primal father] and its ‘mythic violence’ are in some sense both sustained and suspended in the same stroke”³¹ with the introduction of settled civilization, superego formation and the renunciations it entails, and the law. With their lives as subjects founded on renunciations overlying excitations and unsatisfied wishes for perfect enjoyment, (male) subjects are incapable of full and stable enjoyments, and they perpetuate violence and trauma through their rivalries and competitive pursuits of objects that are in the end always in some measure unsatisfying. Open murder is renounced, but rivalry is not.

The damage continually wrought on and by (male) subjects is then exacerbated by life in modern commodity society, which displays a “paradoxical mixture of deadness and excitation, stuckness and agitation,” a “nihilistic vitality,” and “surplus excitation and agitation.”³² (Compare Wordsworth on the Bartholomew Fair: a “perpetual whirl of / Of trivial objects, melted and reduced / To one identity, by differences / That have no meaning, and no end”³³ and Hegel on Civil Society: “particularity … indulging itself in all directions as it satisfies its needs, contingent arbitrariness, and subjective caprice [so that it] destroys itself and its substantial concept in the act of enjoyment … infinitely agitated and continually dependent on external contingency.”)³⁴ Nor are nonmale subjects freed from the circuits of damage that result from surplus excitation and agitation. In a world that contains circuits of damage and in which commodity production, acquisition, and exchange have displaced stable social relations and rituals, it is difficult for anyone to grow up into accomplished subjectivity bound up in stable and meaningful commitments.

It is no accident, then, that Santner wonders, against the background of this story about the development and plights of contemporary subjectivity, whether there is any room, in either the contemporary world or in Sebald’s conception of it, for “a shift in subjective dispositions”³⁵ that might result in more meaningful life. The prospects are not on the face of it encouraging.

Sebald is utterly uninterested in what we might call the “new age” solutions to the dilemma, that is, the various therapies and techniques that proliferate throughout contemporary culture for reducing stress, enhancing well-being, and optimizing the pleasure/reality principle—in a word, for soothing the agitations of creaturely life. The relevant question with respect to Sebald is whether his way of constructing our historical situation leaves open the possibility of an event, a radical shift of perspective whereby something genuinely new could emerge.³⁶

Santner himself offers two interrelated suggestions in response to this question. Building on work by Jonathan Lear on the possibilities of achieving a good enough psychoanalytic cure, that is, of coming to be able, as Freud is supposed to have remarked, “to work and to love,” Santner proposes that it is sometimes possible “to catch a lucky break in life,” that is, to become able to “appropriate the ‘the possibilities for new possibilities’ that are, as [Lear] puts it, ‘ breaking out all the time.’”³⁷ Building on late work by Jacques Lacan, Santner adds that the possibility of a lucky break in forming relations to other subjects may be significantly held open by the fact that women, though shaped in part by traumas attendant upon subject formation, are, in Lacan’s term, “Not all,” “not wholly determined by [the phallic function].”³⁸ As a result, there are modes of enjoyment and of investment in activity and in subject-subject relations open to women that are not so readily available to male subjects. They may have more diffuse enjoyments and investments in activity and in relationships that are not so obsessively marked by rivalry and the playing out of displaced aggression, and human subjects in general may hope that such enjoyments and investments may spread out more widely within both personal and social life.

The suggestion that the miracle of a lucky break might happen, specifically that it might happen through the agency of women in forming other modes of subject-subject relation, is by no means unimportant, and it perhaps captures well the sort of forward-looking adaptiveness in forming and maintaining relationships that figures in the personal and occupational affairs of relatively normal and happy people. When it comes to Sebald, however, this suggestion faces a number of difficulties. Though chance and coincidence abound, relatively happy, forward-looking characters capable of adaptation do not much figure in Sebald’s fiction. Nor are women much present in his writings, and anything resembling a marriage plot is entirely absent. Nor does this suggestion by itself capture the work of Sebald’s style and form of attention to life, which remain considerably more melancholic than celebratory of luck. Most important, this suggestion does not really address either the continuing dynamics of trauma that underlie subject formation within settled social life or the particular shape those dynamics have taken in advanced commodity society.

Santner’s second suggestion builds on Terry Eagleton’s reading of Benjamin, who likewise addressed the problem of “the possibility of an event.” In response to the plights of subject development in contemporary life, we might, Eagleton proposes, either regress to an imaginary past, remain marooned in melancholia, or somehow, while remembering the traumatic, nonetheless “re-channel desire from both past and present to the future: to detect in the decline of the aura the form of new social and libidinal relations, realizable by revolutionary practice.”³⁹ This suggestion, however, raises the questions of exactly how the rechanneling of desire is possible and whether Sebald’s works present any plausible models for such a rechanneling. Just how and where are the forms of new social and libidinal relations to be detected? There is no hint of any turn toward revolutionary praxis in Sebald. Nor do any rechannelings of desire seem visibly present in the itineraries of Sebald’s principal figures, unless, somehow, something like this, in a muted form, is accomplished within the consciousness of the narrator figure. This narrator figure manages somehow to go on with life, despite an omnipresent melancholy and consciousness of trauma, and it is possible that the possibility of going on is thereby somehow opened up to us as well. And here Santner suggests that there is in Sebald’s writing “the performance of acts of witnessing” that express a “love of neighbor” that functions as “the ‘miraculous’ opening of a social link” first between the narrator figure and those whom he encounters and then, further, between us and like figures in our worlds.⁴⁰ This love of neighbor in the form of witness offers us “the resources for intervening in and supplementing the superego bind”⁴¹ that haunts subject formation and that motivates the perpetuation of trauma.

The acts of witnessing Sebald carries out in and through his narrator figure are not simply a journalistic reporting of evident injury, loss, and suffering. Daily newspapers and local television news reports are already replete with such reportings, and they function within the commodity space of news reporting more to titillate, entertain, and numb their audiences than to mobilize fullness of attention. Instead, Santner argues, Sebald’s attention to life takes the form of what Benjamin called “erstarrte Unruhe, petrified unrest.”⁴² Like the figure of the halted traveler in Wordsworth, or like Rilke frozen before the commanding sculpture of Apollo’s torso, the narrator figure finds himself stopped and plunged into reflection and feeling. Attention is suddenly held all but obsessively by something simultaneously strange and indecipherable yet altogether ordinary.

This combination of strangeness and indecipherability with ordinariness is the signature of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) as Freud conceived of it. Sebald himself quotes and endorses Benjamin’s remark that “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world.”⁴³ Mark McCulloh observes that “it is this restoration of a sense of the uncanny (as well as of the sublime) to everyday experience that accounts for much of Sebald’s appeal.”⁴⁴ To see something—something strange, indecipherable, and yet strangely familiar within the ordinary—and then to dwell on this something in reflection—not to explain it, but to follow and play out the sense of strangeness, familiarity, and significance—is to reanimate one’s sense of life as a human subject. It is to remind oneself, in detail, that one is capable of noticing and feeling and of sustaining attention to the strange phenomena of life in time. Such a reminder joins the narrator figure with those whom he encounters who have suffered traumas of which they are uncannily reminded and also with readers who are brought to their own sense of the presence of the traumatic and of the strangely familiar within their lives.

This form of attention to human life is a small thing. It is not an explicit praxis of economic or political-institutional life, it is neither the achievement of a happy marriage or partner-relation nor the story of one, and it is not therapy that immediately adjusts one to a workplace or to family life. But it is a small thing that might run through and renovate any of the politicoeconomic praxes, human relationships, or modes of work and family life one might take up. Without the reanimation of subject attention, there is only compulsive repetition, unthinking habit, surpluses of excitation and agitation, anomie, and dullness. With it there is a chance to lead a human life more actively, more expressively, and with more wholeheartedness of interest.

It is not easy to characterize stylistically, formally, technically, or linguistically the nature of the fullness of attention some writers achieve and in which we can participate by reading. Different works written in different historical circumstances and with different subject matters will have strikingly different ways formally to achieve fullness of attention. One way, however, to begin a characterization is to note the differences of fullness of literary attention from both theorizing or discursive-classificatory thinking that makes use of preexistent categories, on the one hand, and more or less instantaneous intuition or perception, on the other. This, in fact, is exactly how Benjamin, is his masterpiece essay “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,”⁴⁵ both explains and extends Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of the achievement of literature as an art. Schlegel, Benjamin writes, found it

necessary … to seek a mediation between discursive thinking and intellectual intuition, since the one did not satisfy his imperative of intuitive comprehension, whereas the other failed to satisfy his systematic interests. He thus found himself … faced with the problem of combining the maximum systematic range of thought with the most extreme truncation of discursive thinking…. He searches for a noneidetic intuition of the system, and he finds this in language. (139–140)

The system in question here is the system of achieved freedom or of a more fully human way of life, involving full and stable care, reflection, and investment in activity. To say that intellectual intuition fails to satisfy an interest in this system is to say that such a way of life is not simply there to be grasped in either an instantaneous intellectual intuition of the whole or in a moment of blinding perception of the actual. But more temporally extended discursive-theoretic characterization of such a way of life remains, for Schlegel, abstract, or something whose availability and worth we are unable to feel directly. So one needs not a theory of freedom, the right or the good, but a more intuitive yet also temporally extended comprehension, achieved in relation to feeling, of what is possible and valuable for us.

Schlegel, then, described a certain use of language as a vehicle of attention in the successful literary work. The task of criticism is to follow and participate in the deployment of attention within the work. In so conceiving of criticism, Benjamin argues,

Schlegel’s concept of criticism achieve[d] freedom from heteronomous aesthetic doctrines, [and] it made this freedom possible in the first place by setting up for artworks a criterion other than the rule—namely, the criterion of an immanent structure specific to the work itself. He did this not with the general concepts of harmony and organization which, in the case of Herder or Moritz, were incapable of establishing a criticism of art, but with a genuine theory of art … as a medium of reflection and of the work as a center of reflection. (155)

There are, that is to say, no a priori knowable forms, use of which is either necessary or sufficient for success in art. Nor is there any definite content that is required. As Benjamin remarks, “the concept of measure is remote from Romanticism, which paid no heed to an a priori of content, something to be measured in art” (184). Instead, “the value of a work depends solely on whether it makes its immanent critique possible or not” (159), that is, on whether it supports critical or readerly participation in its deployments of attention. Benjamin himself argues that this conception of the value of a work of art remains dominant for us today, even where it is contested by either staler classicisms, on the one hand, or by the vulgarizations of commodity valuation and psychobiographic cults of personality, on the other. Citing Flaubert and the Stefan George circle, Benjamin claims that “the doctrine that art and its works are essentially neither appearances of beauty nor manifestations of immediately inspired emotions, but media of forms, resting in themselves, has not fallen into oblivion since the Romantics, at least not in the spirit of artistic development itself” (177), where the forms in question are not those of classical rules or unities but forms of fuller attention.

Form, then, does the work of reflection or of attention that blends thought with feeling.

Form is the objective expression of the reflection proper to the work, the reflection that constitutes its essence. Form is the possibility of reflection in the work. It grounds the work a priori, therefore, as a principle of existence; it is through its form that the work of art is a living center of reflection. In the medium of reflection in art, new centers of reflection are continually forming…. The infinitude of art attains to reflection first of all only in such a center, as in a limiting value; that is, it attains to self-comprehension and therewith to comprehension generally. This limit-value is the form of presentation [Darstellungsweise]⁴⁶ of the individual work. On it rests the possibility of a relative unity and closure of the work in the medium of art, [even though] the work remains burdened with a moment of contingency. (156)

The relative unity and closure that Benjamin has in mind differ from the putatively absolute closure of a demonstrative argument, on the one hand, and the lack of closure that characterizes the merely incidental or episodic, on the other. Instead, the author’s attention and interest are excited by an initiating scene or incident. In and through the act of writing, the writer imagines what might further happen, or what thoughts and feelings are in play in relation to the initiator, as well as how, exactly, to work out in words the presentation of initiator, consequents, and attendant thoughts and feelings. A material form of presentation is here achieved in relation to the initiator, as an immanent structure rather than as form imposed from without. A center of reflection is formed in the work in relation to the initiator. The relative closure and unity of the work are achieved when attention calms itself in a feeling of completeness, signaled in a sense that “yes, it was all so.” (Compare Herbert Marcuse’s discussion of aesthetic unity, understood as culminating in the sense that “Es war doch so schön”⁴⁷—it was all so beautiful anyway; it made sense; the work has clarified the initiating scene, even in the absence of complete system of freedom, theory of value, or demonstrated moral.)

Certain claims about the proper way of reading a literary work follow immediately from the conception of it as a material form of presentation of energies of attention, focused on an initiator and its consequents, in relation to further thoughts and feelings, in the face of the persistent onwardness of life. As Schlegel himself observed in his critique of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, “it is fine and necessary to abandon oneself utterly to the impression a poetic work makes … and perhaps only in particular cases to confirm one’s feeling through reflection and to raise it to the level of thought … and complete it. But it is no less necessary to be able to abstract from all that is particular, so that—hovering—one grasps the universal” (as cited in Benjamin, 153).⁴⁸ In reading, a certain abandonment to the literary text—to its energies, forms, and movements of attention—will be necessary, as one follows reflection in the process of forming itself. But it will also be necessary sometimes, intermittently, to stand back in one’s own reflections, so as to balance the movement of thought one has followed against life itself, as one reflects on it, and against other courses of embodied reflection. Within these two movements of reading and with the work and its writer one can then, sometimes, for a time, come to say and feel, “yes, it was all so.”

In order to track and grasp more concretely this mode of conclusion and its manner of achievement through literary form, we may turn to a particular case, W. G. Sebald’s long story “Paul Bereyter,” the second of his four long stories published together as The Emigrants.⁴⁹ Like the other stories in this collection, “Paul Bereyter” focuses on its single titular character, in this case as that character is considered by a first-person narrator who had once been Paul’s student in grammar school. It is a kind of muted elegy or meditation, opening with the lines: “In January 1984, the news reached me from S that on the evening of the 30th of December, a week after his seventy-fourth birthday, Paul Bereyter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life. A short distance from S, where the railway track curves out of a willow copse into the open fields, he had lain himself down in front of a train” (27/41).

This first sentence already embodies Sebald’s striking personal style, somewhat more natural in German than in English. It begins with a prepositional phrase, the main verb is in the passive voice, two time indications delay the appearance of the noun subject “Paul Bereyter” of the main dependent clause that gives the news, and again a relative clause stands between that subject-noun phrase and its verb phrase. The second sentence continues the interrupting focus on details, as two place indications, the second in explicatory apposition to the first and offering the perceptible details of the curving track and the willow copse, precede an independent clause in the past perfect. In the German, in fact, these two sentences are one long sentence, with the dramatic “sich … vor den Zug legte” coming only at the very end. In addition, the clauses in German are connected by explicatory conjunctions that the English omits: “thus a week after his 74th birthday” (“also eine Woche nach seinem 74. Geburtstag”) and “in that he had …” (“indem er sich”). The railway line leads itself out in a curve (“in einem Bogen … herausführt”) and then attains the open field (“das offene Feld gewinnt”) almost as though it, too, were a character. These two sentences are accompanied by a somewhat blurry black-and-white photograph, showing in the foreground, where it occupies about half of the picture plane at its front edge, a single rail, with to the far right edge a dark companion rail curving along with it toward the right, away from trees on the left and toward a field. It is all, already, almost unbearably evocative and melancholy. The effect of the style and the photograph is one of delay in details that, we may presume, have some significance in holding the narrator’s attention, though this significance is not spelled out: rather, these details are to accumulate—both in the narrator’s consciousness and in the consciousness of we who follow his consciousness—until they form a pattern whose significance can almost, but not quite, be explicated in a moral or secret key to the story. Instead of a moral or secret key, what the narrator gets, and what we get, is a more nearly unverbalizable sense of the pattern and of the pathos, and the beauty and fragility amid the pathos, that this life (Paul Bereyter’s life) and human life (both the narrator’s life and our lives) all embody.

Following this opening sentence, the narrative plays out in this style through roughly nine further scenes, as the narrator attempts to come to terms with Paul Bereyter’s life, more or less as follows.

(1) The narrator notes that the obituary in the local newspaper from S fails to mention “that Paul Bereyter had died of his own freewill” (aus freien Stücken) (27/42) and that, besides describing his dedication to his pupils, his inventiveness as a teacher, and his love of music, it “added, with no further explanation [In einer weiter nicht erläuterten Bemerkung], that during the Third Reich Paul Bereyter had been prevented from practicing his chosen profession” (27/42). As a result of the manner of death and of “this curiously unconnected, inconsequential statement” (“Diese gänzlich unverbundene und unverbindliche Feststellung”) (27/42), the narrator concerns himself more and more with Paul Bereyter (“mich … immer häufiger mit Paul Bereyter beschäftige”), resolving to “get beyond” his own fond memories of him in order to find out more about his secret history.

(2) The narrator returns to S, where he has been only occasionally since leaving school, in order to visit Paul’s apartment and to talk with the villagers. He remembers how the students, like everyone else in the village, had spoken of their teacher simply as “Paul” (28/43), and he imagines Paul lying on his balcony, skating in winter, and stretched out on the track (29/44). Or, rather, “I saw him on the airy balcony, his face vaulted over by the host of stars” (“Ich sah ihn liegen auf dem geschindelten Altan, seiner sommerlichen Schlafstatt, das Gesicht überwolbt von den Heerzügen der Gestirne”) (29/44). These investigations and imaginings, however, do not bring him any closer to Paul, except in a few “emotional moments that seemed presumptuous to me” (“in gewissen Ausuferungen des Gefühls [overflowings of feelings], wie sie mir unzulässig [inadmissible, forbidden] erscheinen”) (29/45). As a result, he has now written down “what I know of Paul Bereyter” (“zu deren Vermeidung ich jetzt aufgeschrieben habe, was ich von Paul Bereyter weiß und im Verlauf meiner Erkundigen über ihn in Erfahrung bringen konnte”) (29/45).

(3) The narrator describes his family’s move from W to S, “19 kilometers away” (32/45), and his joining Paul Bereyter’s third class. He recalls his friendship with Fritz Binswanger, a slow boy who exactly shared the narrator’s “incorrigibly sloppy handwriting” (“unverbesserlich schweinisch Handschrift”) (31/47). They study cockchafer beetles together and share lunches. Once they each receive a present of “a white butterpear” (32/49). Fritz later became a chef of “international renown” (32/49). The narrator and Fritz later meet in London, in 1984, “in the reading room of the British Museum, where I was researching the history of Bering’s Alaska expedition and Fritz was studying eighteenth-century French cookbooks” (32/49).

(4) The narrator describes the layout of the classroom in S, with “twenty-six desks screwed fast to the oiled floorboards” (33/50–51). A sketch accompanies this description. Paul’s bearing and teaching style are described. He often stood not at the front but “in one of the window bays towards the head of the room half facing the class and half turned to look out, his face at a slightly upturned angle with the sunlight glinting on his glasses; and from that position he would talk across to us” (34/52). He spoke “in well-structured sentences” “without any touch of dialect but with a slight impediment of speech or timbre, as if the sound were coming not from the larynx but from somewhere near the heart” (34–35/52). Paul’s freethinking in religion and his “aversion to hypocrisy of any description” (“die Abneigung Pauls gegen alles Scheinheilige”) are described (36/55). He did not attend church. Instead of using the prescribed text, he taught from a collection of stories, “the Rheinische Hausfreund” (37/56) that he “had procured, I suspect at his own expense” (37/56–57). He spoke fluent French. He emphasized natural history, and he often took the class on visits to interesting sites: a brewery, a gunsmith’s, a castle, and an abandoned coal mine. He played the clarinet and was strikingly good at whistling, favoring melodies that the narrator only later recognized as by Brahms and Bellini (41/61). He once brought to the class a young conservatory violinist, and Paul was “far from being able to hide the emotion that [the] playing produced in him [and] had to remove his glasses because his eyes had filled with tears” (41/62). Often “he might stop or sit down somewhere, alone and apart from us all, as if he, who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself” (“die Untröstlichkeit selber”) (42/62). This teaching style, and these and other incidents, are strikingly close to what we know of Wittgenstein’s career as a rural schoolteacher, and Wittgenstein is mentioned later in the text.

(5) The narrator describes what he has learned about Paul from Lucy Landau, who now lives in the Villa Bonlieu in Yverdon, Switzerland, and who had arranged Paul’s burial in S. Since his retirement from teaching in 1971, Paul had mostly lived in Yverdon. He and Lucy had met each other at Salin-les-Bains in the French Jura, where she had been reading Nabokov’s autobiography on a park bench (43/65). Some of Lucy’s own childhood in Switzerland is recounted. Paul had explained to her in Salin-les-Bains that his “condition” and his “claustrophobia” had now made him unable to teach (43/65). His condition included now seeing “his pupils, although he had always felt affection for them (he stressed this), as contemptible and repulsive creatures [verächtliche und hassenswerte Kreaturen], the very sight of whom had prompted an utterly groundless violence in him on more than one occasion” that he had felt break out in him (43–44/65–66). Paul, we are told Lucy said, “was almost consumed by the loneliness within him [von seiner inneren Einsamkeit nahezu aufgefressenen],” though he was “the most considerate and entertaining companion one could wish for” (44/66–67). In conversation, Paul “had linked the bourgeois concept of Utopia and order … with the progressive destruction of natural life” (45/67). She herself, when gazing with Paul at Lake Geneva from the top of Montrond, “had for the first time in her life … a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings” (“die widersprüchlichen Dimensionen unserer Sehnsucht”) (45/68). Lucy explains to the narrator that Paul had earlier lived in France, from 1935 to 1939, and she gives the narrator an album of photographs and notes, kept by Paul, that covers “almost the whole of [his] life” (45/68).

(6) The narrator reports that “since then I have returned to [the album] time and time again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them” (46/68–69). Various photographs from the album are reproduced in the narrator’s story we are reading. The album and the photos tell of “a happy childhood” (46/69) and years “in a country boarding school” (46/69). Paul had submitted to the narrow-minded and morbidly Catholic demands of a teacher training school solely in order to be able to teach children (46–47/69). In the summer following a year of probationary teaching in S in 1934–1935, Paul spent a good deal of time with Helen Hollaender from Vienna, “an independent-spirited, clever woman” whose “waters ran deep” and in which “Paul liked to see his own reflection” (48/72), at least as Mme. Landau interprets the photographs to the narrator. In autumn 1935, Paul took up a teaching post “in the remote village of W” but was almost immediately dismissed “because of the new laws” (48/72). Meanwhile, Helen had returned with her mother to Vienna, from where “there could be little doubt that Helen and her mother had been deported, in one of those special trains that left Vienna at dawn, probably to Theresienstadt in the first instance” (40–50/73).

(7) Paul too, Mme. Landau reports to the narrator, is one-quarter Jewish, the grandson of the Jewish merchant Amschel Bereyter from Gunzenhausen in Franconia, and the son of Theodor, who had trained in a department store in Nuremberg before opening his own shop in S (50–51/75). “In his childhood,” Mme. Landau reports Paul to have said,

everything in the emporium seemed far too high up for him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four metres up to the ceiling. The light in the emporium, coming through the small transom windows let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days, and it must have seemed all the murkier to him as a child, Paul had said, as he moved on his tricycle, mostly on the lowest level, through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a variety of smells—mothballs and lily-of-the-valley soap were always the most pungent, while felted wool and loden cloth assailed the nose only in wet weather, herrings and linseed oil in hot. (51/76)

Paul’s father Theo died of a heart attack on Palm Sunday, 1936, but perhaps also from “the fury and fear that had been consuming him, ever since, precisely two years before his death, the Jewish families, resident in his home town of Gunzenhausen for generations, had been the target of violent attacks” (53/79). Even though it “could not be ‘Aryanized’” officially, the shop had nevertheless to be sold for “next to nothing,” and Paul’s mother Thela “died within a few weeks” (53–54/79–80).

(8) After it became “no longer tenable” (55/81) for him as a German to serve as a tutor in France, Paul returned to Berlin in 1939 to work at an office job in a garage. A few months later he was called up, and he spent six years in the motorized artillery, serving on all three fronts. Under one photograph of himself from this period, Paul wrote that “day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract” (56/83). In 1945, “a German to the marrow” (“von Grund auf”) (57/84), Paul returned to S, “which in fact he loathed … said Mme. Landau” (57/84), again to teach. He “spent a lot of time gardening” (57/85). During this time, he read “Altenberg, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Friedell, Hasenclever, Toller, Tucholsky, Klaus Mann, Ossietzky, Benjamin, Koestler, and Zweig: almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives or been close to doing so” (58/86). He “copied out hundreds of pages” into his notebooks, “time and again … stories of suicides” (58/86), as though to convince himself “that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S” (59/87–88). He retired in 1971 and thereafter lived principally in Yverdon, near Mme. Landau, where he devoted himself to his gardening and reading.

(9) In 1982, Paul’s vision once again began to deteriorate. In autumn 1983, he informed Lucy that he wished to give up his flat in S. “Not long after Christmas” (60/89), they traveled to S together to settle affairs. “No snow had fallen, there was no sign anywhere of any winter tourism…. On the third day a spell of mild föhn weather set in, quite unusual for the time of year. The pine forests were black on the mountainsides, the windows gleamed like lead, and the sky was so low and dark one expected ink to run out of it any moment” (60–61/89–90). While Mme. Landau was sleeping in the afternoon from a headache, Paul went out. Upon being informed of his death, she thought of the railway timetables and directories he had collected and of “the Märklin model railway he had laid” (61/91) out in his rooms. Hearing this, the narrator thinks of “the stations, tracks, goods depots and signal boxes” that he had as a child to copy from the blackboard in Paul’s classroom (61/91). Paul had told Mme. Landau of a summer holiday in his own childhood that he had spent watching trains pass “from the mainland to the island and from the island to the mainland” (62/92). At that time, Paul’s uncle had said he would “end up on the railways” (“bei der Eisenbahn enden”) (63/92). Though this struck her as “darkly foreboding” (“er hatte auf mich die dunkle Wirkung eines Orakelspruchs”) (63/93), Mme. Landau reported that “the disquiet I experienced lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight” (“ging über mich hinweg wie der Schatten eines Vogels im Flug”) (63/93).

The action of this story, like the action of lyric, takes place entirely in memory, within the consciousness of the narrator and in the past tense. Also like lyric, the overall structural pattern of the story is out-in-out. That is, an initiating scene or incident in the world (here the news of Paul Bereyter’s suicide and the subsequent newspaper account of it) prompts a course of memory, reflection, and further action, all of which are then recollected in the past tense of the narrative itself. The narrative then ends with a turn again out toward the world—the image of Mme. Landau reporting the passing over her of her disquiet—so as to let the world go its own way.

The recollective actions and attentions of the narrator model for us our attentions to details of our own lives, as we too seem sometimes to haunt the world, from within our reserves of loneliness, yet also seem sometimes to be bound up in things, without any clear sense of the forces or logic of loneliness and activity. As in lyric, we participate in the narrator’s own recollections and attentions. In the case of the sixteen photographs and diagrams that appear within the story, we literally see what the narrator sees. The photographs and diagrams are chosen and placed by the author (who may or may not be the narrator), and it is not clear that they are in each case documentary in relation to the incidents of the story. Sometimes they seem documentary; sometimes they seem more general than that, to be deposited more for the sake of a mood or tonality that they evoke in relation to incidents than out of a documentary intention. This ambiguity heightens the sense of the uncanny and of “unseen affinities” between narrated events and some felt but scarcely verbalizable significances.

Similarly, the narrator himself, and we through the narrator, sometimes seem to see and feel what Paul or Lucy see and feel, especially, for example, in the long description of the details of Theo Bereyter’s emporium, with its high windows, dim light, and pungent smells. It is easy for us here to recall the fuguelike actions of play (riding a tricycle down the aisles) and seemingly giant scale of objects of our own childhoods. And yet, stopped by the photographs, we seem sometimes to be thrown back on ourselves, seem to see only their mysteriously evocative black on white, detached from any narrative arc. With the narrator, and perhaps with anyone who reflects, we find ourselves left outside the plot, if there is a plot at all.

A philosophical or theological theory might hope to describe the essence of the situation that we share, to some extent, with Paul, Lucy, and the narrator. A political or sexual history might hope to sort out and explain the relative influences on Paul, and on us, of Jewishness (or another religion) or of sexual longing of one or another shape, subsuming Paul and us under its generalizations. Such descriptions and generalizations might be apt. But something nonetheless would be missed in them: the intimate detail and density of consciousness and its movements in perception, as it finds itself now in this situation, now in that, struck by surprises and intensities that seem to resist full capture by either essential descriptions or subsumptive generalizations. A task of literature—or at least of this kind of intensely lyrical and elegiac literature—is to render some of these movements for our identification, thus enabling us, along with their narrators (and writers) to work them through, so as to be all at once ourselves, in our particular personalities, lonelinesses, and intensities of perception and recollection, and also in the world, able, in the end, to let it go its own way, with an appropriate sense of mystery and wonder at it, and at how one has been in it, but not, quite, ever altogether of it. The movement of working through is as important or more important than the events that are narrated. Sebald’s literary technique heightens our awareness of this through his continual use of devices of interruption: narratively through shifts from the narrator’s own investigations, to what Mme. Landau said, to what is actually in Paul’s album; syntactically through the interjection of prepositional and appositional phrases, piling up details for perception, in between noun phrase subjects and verbs. These details invite reflections, both historical and philosophical; were there no such invitations, we would encounter only the incidental or episodic. But reflection is not allowed to settle into any definite metaphysical, sociohistorical, or psychoanalytic systems for interpretation. (One must, as Schlegel remarked, both abandon oneself to the poetry of the text and hover above it, seeking the universal. New centers of reflection are continually forming.) This kind of literature presents for our working through what this story has itself called “a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings” (“die widersprüchlichen Dimensionen unserer Sehnsucht”) (45/68), as we ourselves move through its details and in doing so reflect on them.

The story “Paul Bereyter” is headed by a motto, “Manche Nebelflecken löset kein Auge auf,” well enough translated as “There is mist that no eye can dispel” (25/39). In fact, however, this motto is a quotation from a quite special context: Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, part 1, section 3, paragraph 14, entitled “Instinct of Genius or the Matter of Genius” (“Instinkt des Genies oder genialer Stoff”). The full passage runs as follows:

Many godlike spirits have been impressed by destiny with a grotesque [unförmliche] form, as Socrates had the body of a satyr; for time governs the form, but not the inner matter. Thus the poetic mirror with which Jakob Böhme rendered heaven and earth hung in a dark place; also in some places the glass lacks the foil. In this way the great Hamann is a deep heaven full of telescopic stars, and some nebula spots [Nebelflecken] no eye can penetrate.⁵⁰

The immediate sense here is that Hamann’s deep writings, writings that capture as it were the whole world and Hamann the man himself, have features that no one can understand. Discursive thought, seeking essential descriptions and subsumptive generalizations, will miss at least something of what they contain and present. These somethings can at best be looked on from a certain distance and with a certain awareness of one’s own incomprehension. In the phrase “in a dark place” (“in einem dunklen Orte”), there is a further distant echo of Dante’s “in a dark wood” in the opening lines of the Inferno:

Midway through this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.⁵¹

We lead our lives in time and as finite subjects, where the relations between the form (the social shape) of a life and the internal matter (one’s particular personality, feeling, and longing) remain always, to some extent, other than transparent. This lack of transparency shows itself especially in certain perplexing, initiating scenes and incidents and then in the emotionally modulating reflections that follow them, as one seeks in reflection more transparency, a better fit, or fuller attention—until in the end life is allowed to go on, on its own. Literature—some literature, this lyric literature of Sebald’s—knows this and makes it manifest for us. To see and feel this, and to see and feel it in detail, through perception and accompanying reflection, is to be, in a certain way, more fully seduced to life.