Wittgenstein and Sebald: The Place of Home and the Grammar of Memory

D. Schalkwyk
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Abstract

Wittgenstein appears in W.G. Sebald’s work in a variety of forms, both explicit and implicit. My paper traces the place of the Austrian philosopher in the German novelist’s fiction by examining the common role of the concept of the loss or search for home in each via the grammar of memory. Sebald invokes Wittgenstein explicitly in his novel Austerlitz, and the tales that make up The Emigrants and Vertigo. But there are also more implicit, suggestive modes of interaction between them. I argue that if Wittgenstein thought of himself as the inventor of similes, Sebald, as it were, returns his philosophical similes to their place or home in the world, giving them a literal historicity that is paradoxically also fictional. Sebald calls upon Wittgenstein’s idea of returning language to its “home” by examining the devastating effects of the mid-European, and especially Jewish, withdrawal of home and the devastation of memory which Wittgenstein’s philosophical work passes over in silence. The evocation of the biographical figure of Wittgenstein in Sebald’s attempts to come to terms with loss and denial following the Holocaust in characters like Jacques Austerlitz, Paul Bereyter, Max Ferber, and the narrator himself, suggests that an ethics of memory consonant with the demands of human suffering from the Belgian Congo to Theriesenstadt lies in following Wittgenstein’s disavowal of causal explanation for the never-ending quest for “seeing conncetions”.
维特根斯坦和西博尔德:《家的地方和记忆的语法》
维特根斯坦以各种形式出现在W.G.西博尔德的作品中,既有显性的,也有隐性的。我的论文追溯了奥地利哲学家在德国小说家小说中的地位,通过记忆的语法考察了失落或寻找家的概念在每个小说中的共同作用。西巴尔德在他的小说《奥斯特里茨》中明确地引用了维特根斯坦,以及构成《移民》和《迷魂记》的故事。但他们之间也有更含蓄的、暗示性的互动模式。我认为,如果维特根斯坦认为自己是明喻的发明者,那么西博尔德,可以说,将他的哲学明喻回归到它们在世界上的位置或家园,赋予它们一种字面上的历史性,矛盾的是,这也是虚构的。西巴尔德呼吁维特根斯坦将语言回归“家园”的想法,通过研究中欧,特别是犹太人,对家园的撤离和记忆的破坏所产生的破坏性影响,维特根斯坦的哲学著作沉默地忽略了这一点。西巴尔德试图与大屠杀后雅克·奥斯特里茨、保罗·贝雷特、马克斯·费伯和叙述者自己等人物的损失和否认达成协议,这让人想起维特根斯坦的传记人物,这表明,从比属刚果到特里森施塔特,与人类苦难要求一致的记忆伦理在于遵循维特根斯坦对因果解释的否认,即对“看到联系”的无休止追求。
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