Subject
"Kafka,
Nabokov? Sebald: Intertextuality and Redemption in Vertigo and
The Emigrants"
Nabokov? Sebald: Intertextuality and Redemption in Vertigo and
The Emigrants"
From
Date
Body
18. Russell Kilbourn, McMaster University, rjakilbourn@sympatico.ca
Russell Kilbourn completed his Ph.D. dissertation on negation and alterity in Kafka, Beckett, and Nabokov in 1999, in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. After three years as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Toronto, in September 2002 he will be at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, as an Assistant Professor in the English Department, teaching cultural studies. Russell has published on Kafka, Nabokov, and Beckett (forthcoming), as well as on Wagner, Polish director Krystof Kieslowski and the film 'The Matrix.' Currently he is working on a book project based on his dissertation, for publication with Louisiana State UP, as part of a series on American Theory and Culture. He is also pursuing research on identity and unrepresentability in contemporary popular culture (foregrounding cinema) vis-a-vis the Western European literary-philosophical canon. In general Russell is interested in bridging the gap between cultural studies and more traditional scholarship, and his recent work on Sebald is a primary extension of this goal.
"Kafka, Nabokov? Sebald: Intertextuality and Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants"
A New York Times online review singled out for censure one feature of The Emigrants: "?the man with the butterfly net, a Nabokovian figure, who keeps appearing and disappearing. I found him blatantly symbolic and literary" (Jefferson 3). This rather unreflective response nevertheless raises interesting questions about just what such a blatantly 'Nabokovian figure' is doing in the novel, and why it appears when it does. Further, assuming that this figure is blatantly symbolic, what might it 'symbolize,' given its literal provenance not in one of Vladimir Nabokov's novels but rather in Speak, Memory (1967), where his autobiographical self (whose photo is reproduced in Emigrants) assumes this role? Curiously, perhaps, the same review fails to accuse Vertigo of the analogous sin of blatant literariness, in its even heavier reliance upon the central motif of Franz Kafka's narrative fragment "The Hunter Gracchus" (1917).
It is no mystery that Kafka and Nabokov are two of Sebald's primary literary antecedents. What is less clear is, first, how these diverse intertextual elements signify within each novel, and, second, what relation, if any, they bear to each other. This paper will analyze, on the one hand, the Gracchus story (as well as specific Diary entries) as a parable of the crossing of the aleatory with 'fate,' in an ironically temporized Jewish Messianism. Here Messiah and subject of experience are identified in the figure of the Hunter, in the 'typical' Kafkan conflation of extremes of self and Other in the protagonist. On the other hand, I will treat the butterfly/moth motif in Speak, Memory (and perhaps Bend Sinister [1947]) as a kind of allegory for a christological paradigm of salvation turned inside out in a 'typical' Nabokovian metafictional aporia - a paradox only concealed by what many critics prefer to read as Nabokov's metaphorical staging of the possibility of redemption. The quasi-allegorical Nabokovian "butterfly man" represents in The Emigrants the always-imminent promise, if not the immanent reality, of redemption; a metonymy of if not a metaphor for an ever-deferred salvific principle that is nevertheless paradoxically 'present' in this seemingly heavy-handed intertextual homage. Kafka's Hunter Gracchus, in Vertigo, functions more obliquely as an intertextual avatar for the Kafkan subject, forever doomed not to death as such but to a living 'death' of endless waiting, an eternity spent ceaselessly travelling over the world's seas after a second 'accident' sent his ship off course (the first accident being the fall from the cliff that inaugurated the journey to the land of the dead now gone awry). Neither properly alive nor properly dead, now permanently erroneous, the Hunter figure appears in several forms across Sebald's first novel, providing not a thematic or formal focus but rather a sort of vertiginously ironic 'justification' for Sebald's quasi-autobiographical narrator's circuitous wanderings through a space which is variously one of history, memory and imagination. In either case, Sebald, like Kafka, resists the Nabokovian resort to a metafictional 'solution.'
Beginning from Sebald's own Kafka scholarship, this paper will chart Sebald's use of these explicit and well-documented Nabokovian and Kafkan elements in order to compare the earlier novels on the basis of their establishment of an attitude toward the problematic conjunction in fictional narrative of the theme of redemption and the aleatory principle - an attitude which can only now be called 'Sebaldian,' at once comprehensive and consistent, and yet manifesting itself in significantly different ways in the two novels, due to the radical differences in the 'source' texts by Nabokov and Kafka. At issue is the fictional - and, ultimately, literal - status of death: the 'reality principle' that even the most glibly 'postmodernist' narrative fails to subvert, and by subverting negate. Hence the perhaps ironic abiding of redemption as a literary theme and formal fulcrum. Officially, one might say, redemption has been long since revalued in the gradual shift to a so-called secular late modernity. To think the revaluing of redemption as a 'redeeming' of redemption is a pleonasm, but a functional one. In the Nietzschean revaluation of redemption, a positively revalued death intervenes to 'redeem' a life negatively revalued in the idealist-Romantic tradition. Death acts in the service of life to save a life revalued in terms of death - 'death' as interruption, rupture, discontinuity. Sebald's novels in their different ways extend Kafka's and Nabokov's separate critiques of the persistence of a naively conceived redemptive power (a conception generally affirmed in the work of generations of Nabokov and Kafka scholars alike). This paper will explore the manner in which Sebald goes beyond the ironically metafictional Nabokovian solution, as well as the more radical because interminably open-ended non-solution adumbrated in Kafka, by offering a deeply ethical fictional response to the untenable but persistent messianic and christological paradigms in a contemporary literary-cultural context. Works Cited: Jefferson, Margo. "Writing in the Shadows." Books. The New York Times On the Web. 18 March 2001. Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories (1883-1924). Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York:
Schocken, 1971. ----. The Diaries (1910-1923). Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schocken, 1976. Nabokov, Vladimir. Bend Sinister. New York: Vintage, 1990 (1947). ----. Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1989 (1967). Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1996 (1992). ---. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1999 (1990).
Russell Kilbourn completed his Ph.D. dissertation on negation and alterity in Kafka, Beckett, and Nabokov in 1999, in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. After three years as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Toronto, in September 2002 he will be at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, as an Assistant Professor in the English Department, teaching cultural studies. Russell has published on Kafka, Nabokov, and Beckett (forthcoming), as well as on Wagner, Polish director Krystof Kieslowski and the film 'The Matrix.' Currently he is working on a book project based on his dissertation, for publication with Louisiana State UP, as part of a series on American Theory and Culture. He is also pursuing research on identity and unrepresentability in contemporary popular culture (foregrounding cinema) vis-a-vis the Western European literary-philosophical canon. In general Russell is interested in bridging the gap between cultural studies and more traditional scholarship, and his recent work on Sebald is a primary extension of this goal.
"Kafka, Nabokov? Sebald: Intertextuality and Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants"
A New York Times online review singled out for censure one feature of The Emigrants: "?the man with the butterfly net, a Nabokovian figure, who keeps appearing and disappearing. I found him blatantly symbolic and literary" (Jefferson 3). This rather unreflective response nevertheless raises interesting questions about just what such a blatantly 'Nabokovian figure' is doing in the novel, and why it appears when it does. Further, assuming that this figure is blatantly symbolic, what might it 'symbolize,' given its literal provenance not in one of Vladimir Nabokov's novels but rather in Speak, Memory (1967), where his autobiographical self (whose photo is reproduced in Emigrants) assumes this role? Curiously, perhaps, the same review fails to accuse Vertigo of the analogous sin of blatant literariness, in its even heavier reliance upon the central motif of Franz Kafka's narrative fragment "The Hunter Gracchus" (1917).
It is no mystery that Kafka and Nabokov are two of Sebald's primary literary antecedents. What is less clear is, first, how these diverse intertextual elements signify within each novel, and, second, what relation, if any, they bear to each other. This paper will analyze, on the one hand, the Gracchus story (as well as specific Diary entries) as a parable of the crossing of the aleatory with 'fate,' in an ironically temporized Jewish Messianism. Here Messiah and subject of experience are identified in the figure of the Hunter, in the 'typical' Kafkan conflation of extremes of self and Other in the protagonist. On the other hand, I will treat the butterfly/moth motif in Speak, Memory (and perhaps Bend Sinister [1947]) as a kind of allegory for a christological paradigm of salvation turned inside out in a 'typical' Nabokovian metafictional aporia - a paradox only concealed by what many critics prefer to read as Nabokov's metaphorical staging of the possibility of redemption. The quasi-allegorical Nabokovian "butterfly man" represents in The Emigrants the always-imminent promise, if not the immanent reality, of redemption; a metonymy of if not a metaphor for an ever-deferred salvific principle that is nevertheless paradoxically 'present' in this seemingly heavy-handed intertextual homage. Kafka's Hunter Gracchus, in Vertigo, functions more obliquely as an intertextual avatar for the Kafkan subject, forever doomed not to death as such but to a living 'death' of endless waiting, an eternity spent ceaselessly travelling over the world's seas after a second 'accident' sent his ship off course (the first accident being the fall from the cliff that inaugurated the journey to the land of the dead now gone awry). Neither properly alive nor properly dead, now permanently erroneous, the Hunter figure appears in several forms across Sebald's first novel, providing not a thematic or formal focus but rather a sort of vertiginously ironic 'justification' for Sebald's quasi-autobiographical narrator's circuitous wanderings through a space which is variously one of history, memory and imagination. In either case, Sebald, like Kafka, resists the Nabokovian resort to a metafictional 'solution.'
Beginning from Sebald's own Kafka scholarship, this paper will chart Sebald's use of these explicit and well-documented Nabokovian and Kafkan elements in order to compare the earlier novels on the basis of their establishment of an attitude toward the problematic conjunction in fictional narrative of the theme of redemption and the aleatory principle - an attitude which can only now be called 'Sebaldian,' at once comprehensive and consistent, and yet manifesting itself in significantly different ways in the two novels, due to the radical differences in the 'source' texts by Nabokov and Kafka. At issue is the fictional - and, ultimately, literal - status of death: the 'reality principle' that even the most glibly 'postmodernist' narrative fails to subvert, and by subverting negate. Hence the perhaps ironic abiding of redemption as a literary theme and formal fulcrum. Officially, one might say, redemption has been long since revalued in the gradual shift to a so-called secular late modernity. To think the revaluing of redemption as a 'redeeming' of redemption is a pleonasm, but a functional one. In the Nietzschean revaluation of redemption, a positively revalued death intervenes to 'redeem' a life negatively revalued in the idealist-Romantic tradition. Death acts in the service of life to save a life revalued in terms of death - 'death' as interruption, rupture, discontinuity. Sebald's novels in their different ways extend Kafka's and Nabokov's separate critiques of the persistence of a naively conceived redemptive power (a conception generally affirmed in the work of generations of Nabokov and Kafka scholars alike). This paper will explore the manner in which Sebald goes beyond the ironically metafictional Nabokovian solution, as well as the more radical because interminably open-ended non-solution adumbrated in Kafka, by offering a deeply ethical fictional response to the untenable but persistent messianic and christological paradigms in a contemporary literary-cultural context. Works Cited: Jefferson, Margo. "Writing in the Shadows." Books. The New York Times On the Web. 18 March 2001. Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories (1883-1924). Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York:
Schocken, 1971. ----. The Diaries (1910-1923). Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schocken, 1976. Nabokov, Vladimir. Bend Sinister. New York: Vintage, 1990 (1947). ----. Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1989 (1967). Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1996 (1992). ---. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1999 (1990).