Angels Visit the Scene of Disgrace: Melancholy and Trauma from Sebald to Benjamin and Back

Abstract

Angels Visit the Scene of DisgraceMelancholy and Trauma from Sebald to Benjamin and Back David Kaufmann (bio) Saturn—the cold, majestic planet of melancholy—presided over the hour of W. G. Sebald's birth. He tells us this towards the end of After Nature, his inaugural "early" work, published when he was entering his mid-forties. Sebald mentions Saturn's rather unpropitious influence to explain a fascination with calamities that might otherwise be inexplicable: . . . I grew up, / despite the dreadful course / of events elsewhere / . . . / without any / idea of destruction. But the habit /of often falling down in the street and / often sitting with bandaged hands / by the open window between the potted / fuschias . . . early on induced me to imagine / a silent catastrophe that occurs/almost unperceived. (Sebald 2002, 88) There is, as Sigrid Löffler has pointed out, a literary joke at work here. Sebald is contrasting his doleful fate to the lucky constellation under which Goethe claimed to be born (Löffler 2003, 103–4). (And what German author does not consider him- or herself unlucky in comparison to Goethe?)At the same time, this vignette confronts us with one of the oddities of Sebald's works. While the books that made him famous—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, On the Natural History of Destruction (Luftkrieg und Literatur), and Austerlitz—are densely imagined indexes of modern calamity, the man who wrote them missed the very catastrophes (most notably, World War II) that seem to obsess him. His taste for disaster searches constantly and never conclusively for its origin and its cause. Sebald's mocking self-portrait (as the hapless kid with the scuffed-up hands whose pain seems a reflection or an intimation of catastrophe) begs as many questions as it answers. And that seems to be the point. It is one of the commonplaces of the psychological discourse of [End Page 94] melancholy that the disease is "sadness without a cause." Those who suffer from depression and those who write about it take this absent cause as an incitement to speculation. It is also a commonplace of this discourse that melancholy entails something more than a mere pathology. It voices wisdom. It expresses both an accurate understanding of the world and a protest against its ways. This notion underwrites Sebald's claim, put forward in a study of Austrian literature, that the melancholic contemplation of disaster embodies a form of resistance to injustice (Löffler 2003, 107). There is, of course, another—in this case, a politico-theological and resolutely unpsychological—way of understanding melancholy. Walter Benjamin's later work is a deep study in and of melancholy, of the often intractable sense that one is caught in a web of sheer immanence. This melancholy is world-disclosive as well and tells us a truth. But, as I shall argue, for Benjamin it is not conclusive and is not meant to be. In the essay that follows, I will look at the way Sebald draws on all these conceptions of melancholy. I will begin broadly, if somewhat loosely, to argue that the psychological account in which melancholy is marked by its lack of apparent cause explains why depressives try to bind their dejection to external traumas. I will go on to show how this applies to a few of Sebald's works—Vertigo, Austerlitz, and the Zurich lectures on the extensive Allied bombing of German cities during World War II, recently published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction. I will pay special attention to Sebald's references to Benjamin in this last work, precisely because he invokes Benjamin as an authority on and a witness to melancholy's wisdom. I will show that Sebald misuses Benjamin and that this misuse tells us something important about both Sebald and the critical function of melancholy. In this way, I will be engaging the problem that has interested a number of critics. I will ask, to quote Eric Santner, to what degree "Benjamin and, especially, Sebald remain under the spell . . . of mythic violence when they evoke . . . the vision of history as a singular catastrophe" (Santner 2006, 75).1 About a year after W. G. Sebald...