Getting out of history: Levitation and paralysis in Sebald and Nabokov

Abstract

Abstract Nabokov and Sebald confronted the dark sides of their national histories and tried to exempt themselves from them. Nabokov liberated himself from its burden by escaping into levitation, whereas Sebald’s willing exposure to its consequences ended in paralysis. Nabokov appears in his Emigrants as the equivocal figure of the ‘butterfly man’ who is simultaneously mobilizing and immobilizing. This is like the Russian writer himself, who used to adopt butterflies’ metamorphoses as a writer and paralyze them as a lepidopterist. Contrary to him, Sebald was horrified by their immobilization and sincerely empathized with them. Eluding the detached position of an ultimate authority and making his author deeply attached to all kinds of ‘nocturnal’ creatures, he created an unreliable but indispensable narrative agency. If Nabokov was at pains to deaden the uneasy memories of his past in order to relieve the present of their contamination, Sebald took the other way around, adhering to the most painful of them in order to enlighten their subterranean existence. He was committed to manifest these deeply buried remnants via his protagonists and narrators, however this amounted to the expulsion of those among them that had no other choice but to stick to life in darkness.