Conclusion: A Farewell Note

Summary

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?

— The Rings of Saturn

From Chaucer to Marcel Proust, the novel's substance is the unrepeatable, the singular flavour of souls.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Personality and the Buddha,” in The Total Library

Sebald's originality is in his form.

—Lilian Furst, Davidson College, 15 March 2003

The negative form of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, which means something like “unforgetting,” suggests that at a certain point searching for the unknown gives place to trying to remove the impediments to seeing what is there already.

—Northrop Frye, Words with Power

I have Argued that the prose fiction of W. G. Sebald, presenting to the reader as nonfiction, is fictional practice designed to engage the reader in a new way. This new way elicits or perhaps shapes the kind of reader I have called, after Umberto Eco's “model” or “obedient” reader (1995, 16), disobedient. This is a reader who is liberated from the tyranny of the text, from its authority, able to engage contemplatively and imaginatively in what Julia Kristeva described as l’envol de la pensée and le vagabondage de l’imagination, the flight of thought and the wandering imagination, which engages collaboratively in the construction of the textual imaginary.

Just as the historical or documentary claims of the opening of the Gospel of St Luke set up in the reader an expectation that what follows is the literal truth, because of Luke's use of a traditional rhetorical convention in his preface, only to be followed by mysterious stories in which metaphor appears to dominate in a literary or poetic practice soliciting a “leap of faith,” so here in Sebald's textual practice what is presented as nonfiction, as historical or documentary writing, is subverted by Sebald's manipulation of the reading protocols. The reader, postmodern and skeptically impatient with illusion, myth-making, and imaginative fiction, desires engagement with the real and the true, which the old lie of mimetic realism accommodated through the use of tropes which represented a prior reality.