Literature and Politics

First published in German in 1990 and then in English in 1999, W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo is a four chaptered account of European travels undertaken by literary figures (Stendhal and Kafka) and the no less literary and no less figurative narrator “W. G. Sebald”.

Vertigo represents a design of disparate moments and locations, networked by the wanderings of a narrator who is often suffering from self-diagnosed illnesses that hamper his perceptions. History is balled together and re-told as if it were permanently caught in the act of leaving. As a result, far off happenings, both temporally and geographically, plague the narrator as if they were here and now.

Through a close reading of the text, I plan to demonstrate that the foreignness felt when abroad, and the dissolution felt when unwell, are both integrated into the substance of Sebald’s narrative, thereby thwarting tendencies to marginalise and to diagnose. Sebald’s narrator can be read as an anti-institutional figure, who slips through systems of identification (clinical and national) and saturates the told environment with an original foreignness.