Sebald’s Apparitional Nabokov

Abstract

When truly approaches Other he is uprooted from history. --Levinas, Totality and Infinity However fleetingly, various incarnations of Vladimir Nabokov materialize within four segments of W. G. Sebald's hybrid 1992 work, The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten). To begin with some details: Nabokov appears photographically in Henry Selwyn section of Tim Emigrants (Figure 1) in which Dr. Selwyn presides over showing of glass slides, an activity which itself echoes chapter in Speak, Memory (1967); when Lucy Landau first meets Paul Bereyter, she been reading precisely Nabokov's autobiography (43); Ambros Adelwarth, following his self-incarceration in an Ithaca, New York sanatorium (a city where Nabokov once lived), is preoccupied with apparition of the man (a title Nabokov might bear) who acquires for him totemic significance; Max Ferber recalls being restrained from self-destructive impulse on Swiss peak Grammont by carrying large white gauze net who becomes subject of his agonized, unfinished painting, with Butterfly Net (173-74); finally, embedded in diary of Ferber's mother, Luisa Lanzberg, is her recollection of a boy of about ten who had been chasing butterflies during youthful encounter, whom she retrospectively characterizes as a messenger of joy (214). (1) Nabokov is named only once (in connection with photograph, which is ambiguously designated), and after that, apparitional butterfly man is never directly identified. The purposes of these individual moments are not immediately legible, nor are these appearances suggestive of any obvious cumulative or retrospective understanding. What, then, do these details mean? [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] While number of critics have explored dimensions of this question, I'd prefer to locate those dimensions in broader synthesizing and philosophical framework. (2) Sebald's inclusion of Nabokov as sequence of textual details, I would suggest, is more than just clever homage to Speak, Memory, work which, in its fusion of autobiographical and fictional elements, its incorporation of photographs, its obsession with exile and memory, and its prefiguring of such episodes as showing of glass slides, undoubtedly exerted an enormous imaginative and formal influence on The Emigrants. (3) Nor is it enough to presume that textual intrusions are primarily meant to destabilize realist dimensions of text in favor of more postmodern, constructed understandings of subjectivity and history--though, to be sure, these should be counted among their narrative effects. Certainly of some importance is way that Nabokov is chiefly incarnated indirectly as the Butterfly Man or with Butterfly Net, language which reminds us of his lifelong obsession with lepidoptera at same time that it exploits butterfly's numerous resonances for Sebald's text: from evocation of processes of metamorphosis and migration that speak to questions of emigre subjectivity; (4) to capture and preservation of fleeting, which corresponds to The Emigrants's obsessive quest to see and to know past; to refiguration of medium of photography, butterfly's linkage to which is made most conspicuously in Speak, Memory through an emphasis on butterfly's mimetic powers, and through ways butterfly's metamorphic form residually preserves, like photography, both spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, as Barthes describes it in Camera Lucida. But Sebald's engagement with Nabokov is still more profound than this inventory of connections would suggest. To begin with, The Emigrants fundamentally revises career of detail in Speak, Memory, and its complex relations to ideas of totality--that state, associated with coherence, primal unity, wholeness, order, harmony, plenitude, and community, that is, as Martin Jay articulates it, typically opposed to alienation, fragmentation, disorder, conflict, contradiction, atomization, and estrangement (21). …