The journeys and the "rewriting" in Vertigo by W. G. Sebald

Abstract

W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) is considered one of the important authors in German literature after World War II and also is a writer with a special influence in contemporary world literature. Sebald’s first prose work, Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle), carries in embryonic form all the motifs that can be encountered in the Sebaldian corpus, specifically the motif of travel, in close connection with the theme of memory. Based on the intertextuality approach, the article aims to interpret the relationship between different kinds of texts on the plot of many vertiginous journeys through space, time, and point out the borders between history and representation, text/image and reality, life, and writing. In doing this research, the author uses the qualitative method with a descriptive approach to disclose the discursive strategies of a superposition of text types in a highly complex narrative. The article has analyzed the plot’s structure of four parts and the overlapping text layers in the novel and found that Vertigo is written in travel style. The story is like a pilgrimage; however, the narrator is not a tourist, but like a “flâneur” on drift journeys (according to Guy Debord’s dérive theory). And Sebald, in a way, always tended to portray scenes haunted by grief and loss. The physical spaces in Sebald’s work are always inlaid with historical, cultural, metaphysical, and psychological sediments, making it not simply a place to visit. The Sebald-flâneur’s journey often deliberately drifts to the periphery, wandering in the edge, they are a traveller who does not intend to relax, whose movement is drawn from emotions arising from the outside landscape. Moreover, from the result of analysing Sebald’s narrative techniques, the author has demonstrated that Vertigo is also a hypertext, that every symbol in a text is also a collection of networks of links to innumerable other texts. It is a labyrinth expressing the concept of the “rewriting” of existing texts. Sebald seems to want to create a feeling of “schwindel” (vertigo) to encourage a viewing, which reads as if it were against the tyranny of a mono-discourse. The novel becomes a space for experiments to break down genre boundaries. The work is a warning for the “reading” since fiction could be nonfiction and vice versa. Therefore, this novel can be read as a collection of short stories with the idea: the “writing” merely “rewriting” over existing texts.