Melancholy Competitions

This article examines how W.G. Sebald's melancholy understanding of history influences his reading of Günter Grass's Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke und Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Tynset . Sebald pits Grass against Hildesheimer in a melancholy competition which tests the authenticity of 1960s discourse on ‘Trauer’. His criteria for the standard of authentic sadness are obscured, however, by his analysis of the writers’ use of symbols and references from Western writing on melancholy. Going beyond this surface of literary criticism, the article finds that Sebald's understanding and representation of history as melancholy is motivated by complexities of generational affiliation, ethnic identity and historical absenteeism. It is argued that Sebald's preference for what Dominick LaCapra terms the ‘transhistorical’ overlaps with aspects of American trauma theory, and that this tendency, alongside his critique of postwar Germany and his identification with the Jewish victims of history, accounts for his literary judgment in this instance. The article concludes that Sebald's strategy of argumentation favours an understanding of ‘Trauer’ as terminal melancholy, and further, that this register, as distinct from modes of mourning and ‘working‐through’, is the only acceptable discourse in which to commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust

Aesthetics · Anger · Art · Criticism · Identity (music · Judaism · Literary criticism · Literature · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Representation (politics · Sadness · The Holocaust · Theology · History · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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