Illness and Sebald’s Dialectics of Literary Historiography

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines how Sebald exploits the time-honored literary theme of illness to maintain his dialectics of literary historiography. On the one hand, Sebald exhorts writers and readers to involve creative imagination when trying to approach a traumatic past. On the other hand, he warns about the peril of mistaking imagination for historical truths. Readers should understand that what literature offers are aesthetic truths, not historical ones. Sebald demonstrates a balanced attitude toward the power of literature in understanding history through his literary representation of illness. On the one hand, Sebald uses Austerlitz’s speech loss to illustrate the danger of abstention from imaginative investment and overreliance on the archive. On the other hand, Sebald employs mental breakdowns as a strategy to create an impasse whereby he refrains from offering overarching meaning to the past he is reconstructing. The impasse indicates the impossibility of attaining historical truths through literary imagination.