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Вестник Томского государственного университета. Филология. 2023. № 81. С. 241-255 Tomsk State University Journal of Philology. 2023. 81. рр. 241-255
Original article UDC 82
doi: 10.17223/19986645/81/13
The journeys and the "rewriting" in Vertigo by W.G. Sebald
Nguyen Phuong Khanh1
1 University of Science and Education (University of Danang), Danang City, Vietnam,
npkhanh@ued. udn.vn
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.
Keywords: Vertigo, journey, rewriting, hypertext, memory, German literature
Acknowledgements: This research is funded by the Ministry of Education and Training under Project No. B2021.DNA.04.
For citation: Nguyen, P.K. (2023) The journeys and the "rewriting" in Vertigo by W.G. Sebald. Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filologiya - Tomsk State University Journal of Philology. 81. рр. 241-255. doi: 10.17223/19986645/81/13
© Nguyen P.K., 2023
1. Introduction - Sebald's uniqueness on the contemporary German literary scene
W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) was a German writer with a rare and enormous talent, who can be said to be highly "unique" in the academic context of the second half of the twentieth century and up to the present. He was praised among critics as "a phenomenon" [1. P. 1], the most important and most gifted German author since the Second World War. Due to a car accident, the writer died quite early at the age of 57 so many readers and critics expressed regret when his work did not receive the Nobel Prize.
W.G. Sebald is famous for his quartet of novels: Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1995), The Rings of Saturn (1992), and Austerlitz (2001)1. These are all comprised of haunting and melancholy prose with strange and different writing styles, which blend the nature of memoirs, travel memoirs, non-fiction types of biography, history, and art. The hybrid of many genres, which destroy the boundaries of literary fiction, caused a constant conflict between reality and the fantastic, between the establishment of endless imagination and symbolic metaphors, and between the narration of a wise man and a sleepwalking madman. Although often lost in Sebald's dizzying narrative journey, readers still recognise memories and the loss of memory, the end of the physical world, and especially the deep black hole from the Holocaust which appears repeatedly as the central theme, and which forms the "leitmotif'2 in Sebald's maze. Sebald's story is hardly structured conventionally, with a minimal plot (plotless), always linking events to one or more distant journeys; hence his works are often called a kind of travel literature, characters are like pilgrims or peregrinator travellers. The protagonist travels by multiple vehicles (i.e., train, tram, car, and boat). Moreover, they are not only just wandering journeys through other areas in Europe, but also journeys through time, through different interiors, with so many turns, cuts, spatial and temporal superpositions of a labyrinth of details (i.e., fantastic imagination, historical events, descriptions of art, biographies), interspersed with text (e.g., countless pictures, postcards, and advertisements). This multiplicity makes the trips extremely confusing, complicated, and "Sebald's texts themselves can be invaluable for the development of a semiotics of travel" [2. P. 90]. In the book Understanding W.G. Sebald, the author Mark Richard McCulloh argues that "the act of travelling", both physically and
1 Vertigo, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz have been translated into Vietnamese and were published in 2019-2021. However, there are currently not many scholarly studies on Sebald's works in Vietnam.
2 The word "leitmotif' comes from the German word das Leitmotiv, which is a term in music, roughly translated as "main musical element". In general, "leitmotif' is used a lot in opera, but it also appears in other genres, such as skits (written for musical instruments), movie soundtracks, and game music. "Leitmotif' is simply a short piece of melody that is repeated many times in a work to represent an emotion, a character, an event, or a situation that will appear. Later, in the field of literature, this concept was also borrowed to refer to the theme of crosscutting in the works of some authors.
mentally, is at the heart of Sebald's work. Thus, reading Sebald is "to make a journey" [3. P. 6]. Those "reading" journeys are not easy because, following the trips, each scene and every story have no connection with each other. Still, this creates deeply melancholy emotion and distant fantasies, and powerfully evokes nostalgia, the lamenting of one's identity, and a reminder of irreparable trauma. Moreover, "Sebald's narratives and novels apprehend travel in its diverse historical facets and cultural motives: the pilgrimage, the educational journey, the Grand Tour, resort travel, adventure travel, exploration, colonial travel, emigration, and contemporary tourism" [4. P. 163].
Vertigo is the first work and can be said to establish Sebald's unique literary style immediately. The word "Vertigo" in English and "Chong mat", which is the Vietnamese title1, is a medical term referring to dizziness and a feeling of difficulty in balance, which can lead to nausea, vomiting, emotional disturbances. It occurs due to many different causes2. At work, the central character - who is also the narrator - sometimes feels wobbly, hungover, and dizzy for many reasons. Still, perhaps this symptom is highly consistent with the reader's feelings when following a series of journeys back to the past. The silhouettes of the deceased wait to appear in the tangled web of words, the optical traps appear continuously. The work bears the characteristics of Sebald's writing style, and, from the time it appeared in the literary world, it manifested the journey story (journey as a plot motif), the theme of the obsession of memory, and the decline of the physical structures. The narrator is emotionally disturbed, lost in meanings that are both real and distant, awake, and insane, and the juxtaposition of tissues describes and borrows different types of texts. The work is a warning for "the reading", as fiction could be non-fiction and vice versa. Is this a novel or a collection of short stories? Furthermore, is "the writing" merely quoting over existing texts? This study is aimed at pointing out the connections between the journeys and the hypertext lying at the heart of Sebald's complex way of writing, through the physical trips as a (hyper)textual travel, and discursive strategies as the "rewriting" (writing is rewriting, quotation and translation [5. P. 34] and a hypertext [6. P. 44] in the same way that Jorge Luis Borges implied in his short stories).
2. Vertigo by Sebald: The journeys of the living and the dead through many kinds of texts
The novel Vertigo consists of four parts. Parts I and III are relatively short, about a few dozen pages, and describe the life journey of a young man named
1 W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, Translated by Dang Thu (Vietnam: Publishers Association of Writers, 2001).
2 The original German version of the book is Schwindel. Gefühle. Schwindel means the same as Vertigo, but also means "nonsense, deception, hoax", and Gefühle is the feeling that has been omitted from Vietnamese translation (including the English version). Two words in the title are separated by a period. This other layer of meaning, and this break, is there another hint?
Marie Henri Beyle (the actual name of the French writer Stendhal) and the 1913 trip to Riva by Dr K. (the writer Franz Kafka). Parts II and IV, which are almost three times the length, are titled in Italian, All'estero ("Abroad") and Ritorno in Patria ("Back to the Homeland"). These are the journeys of an anonymous "I" narrator (his portrait is revealed) twice on the Vienna-Venice-Verona route, then back to his old hometown—a W. village. There are four seemingly unrelated parts, distant events, and no logical connection. However, Sebald's ghostly writing leads the reader into a labyrinth of past and present memories of the living dead, which are overlapping and complex, but captivating.
2.1. Following in the footsteps of Stendhal and Kafka—rewriting a bogus biography or a reckless "plagiarism" case?
Part I is set in the 19th century, with the story of a young man named MarieHenri Beyle, who describes the main events of his military career, which started when he was 17 in Italy to his traversing Europe, and his fall and death from internal bleeding in the streets of France. Readers may link the descriptions about Marie-Henri Beyle with Stendhal, a famous French writer. There are some reasons for this association. First, Marie-Henri Beyle is the actual name of the writer Stendhal. Moreover, there are clues hidden in the text implying the identity of Stendhal, such as his military life in Napoleon's army or the records in his autobiography (The Life of Henri Bruland), as well as his travels, his syphilis, lovers, illustrious literary careers up to the death of the narrator.
So, this is a purely biographical entry or a type of narrative about a celebrity researching something, such as what connection Stendhal's syndrome1 has to the novel title, or it describes Beyle's life journey with many mistresses and even a love-related disease like syphilis. Therefore, is it a metaphor for the idea that Love is a Madness Most Discreet2 that the title has set? About love, Stendhal himself is also known for On Love (De l'Amour), which describes the process of love going through seven stages3. This work is related to Stendhal's hopeless love for Metilde Dembowski, who appeared as a female character in this novel. Even the details of Beyle's journey from Bologna with a Madame Gherardi are
1 Stendhal syndrome in medicine refers to a mental state of dizziness, heart palpitations, even fainting and hallucinations when someone is exposed to great works of art, such as ancient masterpieces.
2 The first of Vertigo's four sections is titled "Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet". Love is "a madness most discreet" which is inspired by William Shakespeare in the play Romeo and Juliet (Act 1, Sc. 1). Stendhal, who never married, had many affairs and fell madly in love with Metilde Dembowski in Milan in 1818. His unrequited passion for her haunted him for the rest of his life.
3 In the section "Of the Birth of Love" of his essay On Love, Stendhal writes that the steps taken in the soul when falling in love are: 1. Admiration, 2. What pleasure, etc., 3. Hope, 4. Love is born, 5. First crystallization, 6. Doubt appears, 7. Second crystallization. See: Stendhal, On love, Translated by Philip Sidney Woolf and Cecil N. (London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2017).
narrated in detail in many pages. For example, when they came to the Hallein salt mine, Beyle sees this crystallisation process changing a dead twig into a magically beautiful object, a journey similar to the growth of love1.
While recounting the journeys in Beyle's life, the narrator also chooses the perspective of "recreating" overlapping layers of memories; and this is a mirror that reflects fragmentary flashbacks. All are layered in imagination, melancholy recollection, and mixed with the torments of Beyle's stomach, venereal disease, and, through it, the narrator's deliberate mysterious "incarnation" (possibly Sebald himself?).
In the narrative of Beyle's life, there are at least two actual texts of Stendhal mentioned and narrated: the autobiography The Life of Henri Brulard and the essay On Love. Nevertheless, despite retelling Stendhal's story, including copying many of Stendhal's drawings in his autobiography2, and then even paraphrasing it further, Sebald's narrator invariably includes numerous corrections and scepticism: "a journey that may have been wholly imaginary, made with a companion who may likewise have been a mere figment of his mind" [7. P. 3031]. The narrator also hypothesises Gherardi's character might be a code in which Beyle names various lovers of his, convincing the reader that the images provided by memory are just as authentic; they are not very believable. That makes the story slide from a biographical text, an essay comment on Beyle's life, or Beyle's works, to a type of text that overlaps with fiction, a mixed virtual reality.
Thus, by describing the journeys in the life of the character Beyle, it is possible that Sebald wanted to rewrite another "portrait" of the writer Stendhal, thereby creating the impression of a different "property" of reality through human imagination and external reality. This can be seen in the mirror detail that the narrator frequently mentions when he describes how Beyle looked at himself in the mirror. Every time he looks in the mirror and compares his imagination with the reflection in the mirror, he sometimes asks the question: "What is it that undoes a writer?" [7. P. 21]. And his incarnate emotions continued while enjoying Cimarosa's musicals, to the endless nightmares of Cimarosa's sudden death. Do these details remind us of Stendhal's conception of art in the flow of 19th-century Western critical realism when he compared the novel to a mirror on the road? In the 20th century, this was derided as a naive notion of realism. Instead, modern writers have experimented with more creative and disruptive forms. Deconstructionists go even further, questioning whether literature has any real reference to a world outside of its language. At the same time,
1 In the summer of 1818, Stendhal accompanied Madame Gherardi to a salt mine in Hallein near Salzburg, where he observed the crystallization of salt and used the term "crystallization" as a metaphor for the relationship between people; this is written about in De l'Amour.
2 In the autobiographical book The Life of Henri Brulard (written in 1835-1836, published in 1890), there are hundreds of hand-drawn sketches, diagrams of a village corner, a mountain, a room, some scene ... and at least four of them are pasted in Part I of the book Vertigo. See: Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, Translated by John Sturrock (New York: New York Review Books, 2002).
traditional historians challenge whether the novel is a reliable representation of history and society.
Perhaps the novelist Sebald wanted to dialogue again about literary fiction, about the task of recreating the reality of the novel through the narration of Stendhal's texts? Or is this just a prelude to another idea that, regardless of whether it is all real or not, readers have to follow the character's travels, and take in the emotions from there, instead of trying soberly to distinguish real from false, because under this sun nothing is new, any text is a rewrite of existing texts? Sebald's work leads us to a "dizzying series of questions on the work of art: as preserving life, as recording history, as a reminder of its materiality, and yet again as a bit of a prank, or rather an elaborate joke, under the guise of commentary" [8. P. 37].
Doubts about Sebald's real purpose in describing his life, in addition to doubts about Stendhal's writings, may arise when we read Part III, which is entirely about Dr K. in the same way that Part I is about Stendhal. However, this part is much shorter in terms of volume and regarding the length of the events, focusing only on the period K. went to get medical treatment in Riva. It opens on Saturday, 6 September 1913. However, the narrator often expresses the opinion that "there is no sign of it", and "there is not a single detail to prove" that Dr K. spent his days in Venice, but then "was" deep inside K.'s emotions and thoughts, and then became wholly immersed in it, confusing biographical facts about the writer Franz Kafka with many of his famous works. Moreover, there are many hypotheses related to K.'s whereabouts, what movies he watched, how he thought, how he felt. It includes many letters from Kafka to his fiancée Felice, and many "duplicate" passages as in his famous short story "The Hunter Gracchus" (1931).
Dr K.'s journey was from Prague to Vienna, then on 14 September to Trieste on a train trip which took more than eight hours. On 15 September he crossed the Adriatic Sea to Venice and stayed there for four days with heavy melancholy. On 19 September, he took a train from Santa Lucia to Verona; on 20 September, he was in Desenzano, and he arrived on the south shore of Lake Garda on 21 September, and spent three weeks in Riva for mineral water treatment. This is described in detail in Part III. We will find that this journey of K. will be repeated by the unnamed narrator in Part II not once but twice. He wandered in K.'s footsteps, often drifting in the streets at night, alone, dizzy, and scared like K. was. On 19 September 1913, he, like K., came to see Pisanello's fresco depicting Saint George on the entrance to the Pellegrini Chapel. He was constantly haunted by the angel holding a sword from above and the image of two men in a doublet with silver buttons carrying the body of the Hunter Gracchus. Sebald created a kind of a parallel person, where the passage of time means nothing; everything is empty, surreal, shifting, and continuously incarnating. Perhaps Sebald was strongly influenced by the irrational, variable description of reality, the invisible phobias that human beings are exiled and unable to explain. In the interruption and fragmentation of the narrative sections, readers are not able to explain why the "I" character in Part II (which will
continue in Part IV) and Dr K. have these psychopathic manifestations, such as sleepwalking and lunacy, being often staggered by the typical signs of the external landscape, which constantly distorts all external reality with feelings of death and weird, strange fear.
Like the writing in Part I, the details in Part III are drawn from Kafka's biographical sources, citing letters to Felice. Still, at the same time, Sebald drowns it all in an atmosphere of fiction with an absurd fantastic, surreal fusion of fact with inference and imagination. Although Sebald only writes the character's name with an alphabetic notation (in the same way that the writer Kafka himself named the character Joseph K. in the novel The Trial), readers still know that it is the story of the writer Kafka. Sebald even included the famous photo Kafka took with friends in Vienna in 1913 as an illustration. Readers are forced to prepare themselves as if they were viewers enjoying ancient Greek plays (taking a mythological theme), who know the cause and the end of this trip, and are just waiting for another explanation, another way of telling, another 'rewrite'. Readers are gradually led from accurate details related to K.'s journey to inner feelings and thoughts taken from letters and diaries. Then, some strange, unreal things appeared. Specifically, on 21 September, while the many citizens of the town gathered in the downtown to greet Dr K., he was wandering at Lake Garda. That is why people did not see him appear. Everything was happening like "waiting for Godot". In addition, there was a story readers could link to the plot of "The Hunter Gracchus" by Franz Kafka. For example, in Part III of Vertigo - a ship with a huge mast, drifting for three years to Riva, one man in a blue cloak ashore makes fast a rope. There is another detail: behind the boatmen, two figures in dark tunics with silver buttons carry a bier upon which lies, under a sizeable floral-patterned cover, "what was the body of a human being. It is Gracchus the huntsman" [7. P. 205]. The fitting into the text of Kafka's short story "The Hunter Gracchus", which was written in 1931, to interpret it by psychoanalysis seems to deliberately create the effect of a reckless "plagiarism", which happens more than a few times. The absurd details characteristic of Kafka's style in his infamous works are repeated, as well as hundreds of illustrations, many of which are of clear origin, and which are seemingly intended to increase authenticity or affirm the concept of reflecting the reality of literature.
Nevertheless, this soon annoys readers because this "copying" is openly a way of "playing" with reading and interpreting reading. Visual materials (pictures) and texts by forerunners (such as Stendhal or Kafka) have disoriented the reader. As a "reader", Sebald is "interpreting" the story of Stendhal or Kafka, but makes the authentic details pass through the strange, fantastic zone from time to time. The inherently real characters like Stendhal or Kafka are "condemned" to drift eternally in the world of Sebald, with a narrator who is a paranoid, "liar" companion suffering torment set by an irrational fate. Thus the details of an old ship with a broken mast, and two men in doublets carrying a hunter's body appear throughout the novel Vertigo, or the part Beyle and his imaginary lover Mme Gherardi see on their journey to Lake Garda (Part I), the
character "I" who frequently haunts two stalkers, the hunter, the Black Forest, the body-carrier (part II), the story of the hunter in the W. village (Part IV) look like an illegal "plagiarism" case. The readers feel the chaos of all of the above —what is told, what is hidden without explanation, some fragment of light that shines in various illustrative ways, specific texts broken apart and then glued on top of each other. It is terrifying to realise the heritage that seems to have been tagged as someone's property has ended up being invaded by reading, by interpretation when read, by critics' chatter, making it a footnote to history, a memory-evoking trail for the lunatic, sleepwalking, and paranoid. Is that why Kafka wishes to destroy all his literature? Furthermore, Sebald again warns against the impossibility of reading when words stand between solitude and standard rules, between silence and everyday speech. Then narrative turns into something absurd, crazy, dizzyingly confusing.
In an atmosphere of Kafka-style absurdity, Sebald has demonstrated a unique style of writing. From Stendhal, when the novel must take on a mission to mirror the real world, to Kafka, where existence is imprisoned, the desperate human journeys are conveyed in allegorical form, and the world becomes a maze. The journeys endlessly following the footprints of memories prove that existence is endless. Every trip is lost because we are not there, but we can exist in many layers of time at any moment. Borges once expressed the concept of a multi-way maze of time ("The Garden of Forking Paths"), and, with Sebald, we see that the most terrible maze is memory. Memory has no boundaries, is not limited to one person; it overlaps with historical time slices; through layers of people, it divides, multiplies, and emerges in the wake of humanity. Wherever we go, we stop, we see the imprint of collective memory. Gracchus on the dead ship that had drifted for ages before it appeared in Kafka's eyes? He has been sentenced to live like a dead man, so like the rural healer's drive to the unknown is K.'s commitment to the castle. In Vertigo, travelling is performed as a quest, Sebald's repetitive journey to search for the "incarnations" of existence, the silhouettes of "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". Therefore,
Sebald's readers are frequently haunted by a pervasive sense of discursive déjà vu, or more precisely déjà entendu or déjà lu, of having already heard or read these words before. The reiteration of motifs on the intertextual level of Sebald's oeuvre, and the allusion to the words and texts of others in their intertextual dimension, replicate in the domain of discursive practice the narrative and memorial return of what is "dead," lost, or forgotten. Inter- and intratextual practices, as repetitions, are thus fundamental to Sebald's ghostwriting, as a poetics of history [9. P. 5-6].
2.2. The parallel journeys in "All'estero" and the lonely exploration of memories when "Ritorno in Patria"
Parts II and IV of the novel Vertigo reveal the narrator - and the protagonist character of the journeys - a first-person narrator, claiming to be "I" but completely anonymous, hiding his face. Even when he intentionally showed a passport photo, stamped 4/8/1987, with his portrait on it, the photo was skewed
with a dark vertical line in the middle. Most of the faces in the passport photo were hidden. A passport is an official certificate of identity, but it was invalid, as a detail it did not confirm anything about the true identity of the narrator, from which it can be potentially inferred that this could be the author in disguise.
The content of Part II is a trip of the character "I" through many places in Italy, after nearly 25 years in England, to Vienna, Venice, and Verona. The character is always in a state of loneliness and fear, often wandering and encountering the ghosts of many people he does not know or has forgotten. He then feels vague fear in his heart, revealing it as a feeling of dizziness and spinning. Thus, compared to a distant association when reading Part I of Stendhal's syndrome with the element of "vertigo", Part II appears to be closer to the theme suggested by the work's title. Readers are not provided with any information about the character, the narrator, only to find that outside of writing hours, he is caught up in strange routes, which are repetitive, and do not cross some unintentionally predetermined boundary. He often walked, wandering around the city until late at night before returning to the hotel. This makes us think of the flâneur characters in the novels of the French writer Patrick Modiano, also surrounded by memories, often wandering between "fixed points" called On Neutral Zones1. Then he went further, taking the train from Vienna to Venice, and to Verona and Milan. The sight from the train haunted him like an animated painting in the Baroque style, and afterwards, the landscape at his destination was also tinged with oppressive, ghostly gloom. The nights he slept in the hotel, he often had nightmares, met the world of the dead long ago. When he woke up, he thought that he had been laying in the grave or had been wrapped up waiting for the day of burial. While he had to go out (i.e., to the restaurant, cathedral), everyone around him became the bizarre shapes (i.e., "ghosts", "a circle of severed heads", "a corpse that has been wrapped" or "wandering corpses"). He even saw people who lived years ago and had been reincarnated in the form of living people. For example, while wandering in Venice, he saw a man in a blue robe lying on a public watercraft, and confirmed it was King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), who lived at least a century before the time being narrated. Alternatively, on the bus to Riva, he noticed a pair of twins who looked exactly like the young writer Franz Kafka, and his attention made the children's parents suspect that he was a paedophile. In his eyes, Venice, a famous romantic Italian city, was a "fading splendour of this world", consisting of squares, railway stations, synagogues, chapels, gardens, amphitheatres ... where his visits were filled with such great darkness, emptiness, and nothingness. And no matter how many places "I" travelled he could not determine whether he was in the land of the living or another world.
In this part, the narrator moved by different means of passing through many places: by train, by boat, by bus, by car, and especially by wandering on foot. And the journey from England to Vienna, to Venice, and then to Verona went
1 A phrase—a symbol that appears many times in the novel In the Café of Lost Youth (Patrick Modiano).
through different stages, stops at many places, not only once, but twice, the first time at the end of October 1980, the second time in the summer of 1987, when the narrator stated that the purpose was to examine his somewhat inaccurate recollections of those tense and dangerous days, and possibly to jot down some old stories. The narrative became winding and difficult to follow since the journeys included various places by multiple different vehicles, as if making an endless escape. The ghostly hauntings, dizzying sensations seemed to make the narrator forget where he was and what he shared. Moreover, the narration was also interspersed with layers of framed stories that led to the focus being blurred, making it impossible for the reader to understand. So, in addition to the layers of memories rushing through the narrator's character, readers also must wade through the memories of a series of other characters such as the mad poet Herbeck, Miss Clara, the lucky-in-love traveller Casanova, or through the story of the character Salvatore (who is the writer Leonardo Sciascia).
Thus, in Part II, which is filled with places and events re-enacted in a stream of memories, we see not only the parallel trips in 1980 (from mid-October to 5 November) and 1987 (from mid-July to 5 August), but also overlapping stories of living people - dead people, layers of old - new memories that keep overlapping, then falling apart, blurring before being able to remember. Therefore, through two journeys, specific places in Austria, from Vienna to Klosterneuburg, to Italy-Venice-Verona, and on to Milan, are drawn over and over again with traces of railway stations, squares, streets, rivers, cliffs, fortresses, synagogues, chapels, libraries, piers, hotels, castles, nursing homes, but do not evoke a familiar and clear image for the reader about landscapes of famous places in Italy. These landscapes, through the eyes of the narrator, were tormented by the disease of "vertigo", nausea, and fear (as a manifestation of schizophrenia), without the usual architectural depiction, which is always just a "trace", a sign of history, of time, of the movements between life and death. Those landmarks and places exist because of attachment to the silhouettes of a specific character in the past, where they imprinted their creations and ideas, so with any street, street corner, squares, churches, pictures, whenever the storyteller passes by, it evokes layers of memories about culture, history, and art. Moreover, the minutiae were constantly attached everywhere in the long zigzag narrative which made the reader lost, as in the middle of a maze; just as the character "I" saw Milan as the maze shown on the map. The landscapes viewed through the lens of the Uncanny1 reveal strange, distorted, dying images with horrifying haunts like the look of the pizza waiter that made the "I" character run away, heart pounding, from Verona to Austria and at any moment: "When I was almost there I had a compulsive vision of an arrow whistling through the grey air, about to pierce my left shoulder blade and, with a distinctive, sickening
1 Uncanny is a concept in the psychology of Sigmund Freud, temporarily understood as "familiar strangeness", which refers to familiar phenomena appearing in strange and mysterious contexts that cause strange and difficult feelings, which are indescribable, and full of anxiety.
sound, penetrate my heart" [7. P. 90]. Then there were two strangers constantly stalking the "I" character who were reminiscent of the two law enforcement guys in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial; a series of murders took place in Milan, and then so many ghosts, of Kafka, Dante, Casanova, and Grillparzer, kept haunting the narrator.
On parallel journeys of the narrator, the routes are repeated, even though he left and returned to the same place, stayed at the same place, returned to a restaurant, and even watched the same opera. It was seven years between the two trips (1980 to 1987), which was not recalled by even a tiny detail. The seven years between the two journeys disappeared like an empty pit. But perhaps, by being so focused on Sebald's dizzy spells from the two voyages, the reader is no longer interested in what the narrator has done during those seven years. Perhaps it escaped his memory, but he has repeatedly admitted that he forgot many things. The second journey to Italy has quite a few thrilling events (including losing his passport), and repeats past passages. He returns to the places he had been before to check the "back hole" in his memory. Sebald redrew the map of famous regions of Italy and the landscape of this region with a different eye— the eye of a person suffering from "forgottenness", haunted by death and ghosts; thus, the splendid scenes of the most beautiful and romantic lands in the West appear to be quiet, fading, tinged with death, surrounded by reliefs, frescoes, chapels, cemeteries, and crematoria with the silent lament of the angels on high. Even the cliffs are depicted with sharp shapes pointing like they are about to crash into the train; the mountain caves open their mouths to swallow each train car, the waterfalls breathe cold air .; a black dog encountered on the street also gives the narrator chills, imagining that it can follow him in a gentle corpse, while its spirit will stalk, becoming a ghost that engulfs all the people in Kritzendorf. This evokes a feeling of horror as strange as the Gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
In the same year of 1987, after a summer of making a long journey through many landmarks in north-eastern Italy, in November, the anonymous narrator decided to return to England, but before that he would visit the W. village1 of his childhood, from which he had been away for more than 30 years.
Like previous trips in the Italian region, the narrator is always immersed in thoughts related to the scenery and vestiges of each passing place. Every reminder will lead to different famous people from the previous time. However, this time, all the signs are brought back to the memory area associated with the character's life. Unlike Kafka's indifferent, flat, emotionless, irrational, stifling writing style, Sebald always mixes fictional and paranoid details with many descriptions of scenes, spaces, and strange emotions within. The real world is unfolding before his eyes, and all the memories of the old village and the old house are mixed using teleporting in the mind as if 30 years apart is just a blink of an eye; the memory is intact there, and with just a hint, all will be reversed in
1 The symbol of the village name is W., evoking a small town called Wertach, in Gau Swabia, Germany, the hometown of Sebald.
an instant. Like the memory of the fool Benjy in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, everything connects, anchors without end, needs a homonym, a similar image, a similar gesture, that the past immediately interrupts. But Benjy is an out-of-time, unaware-of-time person, and Sebald's narrator is a man obsessed with memory and time, always stuck in his lonely melancholy, alien to what is presented in front of his eyes.
He stayed in the W. village for almost a month at the Engelwirt Hotel, his family's former house. From this place, he surveyed all the changes of scenery and people. The family history and the people here are partly revealed through the almost intact memory of the man who has been away from home for more than 30 years. If irrational realities haunt Kafka, it seems that the narrator of Sebald's novel (a monstrous mirror that reflects Sebald himself?) is besieged, dominated by memory - the mind trap - and this often appears as a dizzy spell, sometimes causing the character to be on the verge of a mental breakdown. Only imprisoned on trips, the character tracks other people in that memory area. When he deliberately "inserts" himself between the stories of others, he always forgets to erase the object/subject distinction of the paranoid memory domain. The stories about the narrator's village before and after the Second World War mostly revoke around the life and death of his neighbors, but do not seem to draw much information about the origin or childhood life of the narrator. However, some information on the events, neighbours' weird lifestyle, and the diphtheria in his childhood may help the reader to interpret the duplications in the previous parts of the novel. Sebald's narrator is like a masked man in a carnival; on each trip, he takes on a different identity—a journalist, crime writer, then a historian, and now an "international envoy". And in the maze of stories related to all fields such as painting, architecture, history, literature, journalism, movies, even murders, Sebald seems to want to create a feeling of schwindel to encourage a viewing, which reads as if it were against the tyranny of a single discourse. The modern novel is seen as a space for experiments to break down genre boundaries. However, in reality, the so-called "modernity" is still made up of a system of available structures and definitions. Thus, reading Sebald's novel, the reader is forced to tear apart the various masks of the narrator. Sebald gradually leads us away from the trap of modernity and toward a structure that breaks the rules (anti-disciplinary) [10. P. 19].
Part IV is the movement of memories in the labyrinth of time, with the primary emotion being death and decay of all things. The history of the W. village recorded in history class is only the timeline with many deadly events such as plague, fire, being burned by enemy troops, famine, death from war; in the narration of the "I" character the inhabitants of W. are described in terms of peculiar lifestyles and unusual deaths, and architectural landscapes are depicted as melancholy, deathly, and anguished. The old homeland is no longer what it used to be, which makes the fundamental theme of Part IV the "loss", but there is a quiet, natural desire to find old figures. The narrator becomes an "exile" in his homeland, both familiar and foreign; he is at the edge of memory, present and past, between thoughts and echoes of different voices from different pages
of books. Unlike Ulysses, he was under no obligation to return home: his return to his homeland reminded him, once again, of why he had to leave. In the novel's final paragraph, the narrator admits that his words mingle with Samuel Pepys's diary1 in the utter emptiness. The image of the apocalyptic fire which engulfed London in 1666 is now reviving in the dream as a foreshadowing.
At the end of the work, Sebald wrote: 2013. It is worth mentioning that the novel Schwindel. Gefühle was first published in German in 19902. The author passed away in 2001. So, what did Sebald mean by introducing a future timeline—did he mean the end of humanity, an apocalyptic statement? Furthermore, what is the connection between the years 1813 of Marie Beyle's journey and Dr K.'s 1913 trip to Riva with the 2013 figure relating to the journey of the character "I", Sebald's clone narrator? Alternatively, readers are engrossed in a series of short and long journeys, through many spaces and times, and tries to find real people and real stories in the paranoid, habitually still trying to distinguish what is real from what is fabricated. However, they see the number 2013 and "fall back", and they have been cheated in the end; is it all just a novel, a game, a carnival that mocks all the tyranny of reading?
3. Conclusion - A test is never your own
In the novel Vertigo, we see the stylistic features of Sebald's intention. First, this work is the beginning of the series of novels, written in travel style, the plot is like a pilgrimage, not a tourist, but like a "flâneur" according to Guy Debord's dérive theory3. 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. He is a traveller who does not intend to relax, whose movement is drawn from emotions arising from the environment. He is experiencing a state of self-alienation, and deliberately seeks these non-places. The character's trip to the old hometown is not a mythical motif about the hero's journey. The narrator must face a hopeless state of memory fragmentation; so, it is a trip into a world of unfathomable chaos (an unknown world) but never returns home with the prize of the victor, like the legendary
1 On the last page of the novel, the narrator mentions reading Samuel Pepys' diary about the great fire in London in the year 1666: "Into that breathless void, then, words returned to me as an echo that had almost faded away - fragments from the account of the Great Fire of London as recorded by Samuel Pepys" [7. P. 318].
2 However, there is no such detail in the English and Vietnamese translations.
3 The dérive theory of Guy Debord (1931-1994) expressed the concept of human journeys moving through many different spaces under the influence of a geo-psychological spirit. See more: Guy Debord, "Theory of the Dérive", Internationale Situationniste #2, Translated by Ken Knabb, 1958, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
hero in Joseph Campbell's original legendary model (monomyth)1. Journeys are a symbol of the lost, missing, perished, and forgotten.
Second, the novel is full of real people, real things, real places, actual works, illustrated with lots of pictures, photos, sketches. However, the biographical text mixes style, a philosophical brooding, with the kind of fiction that makes the "real" elements an illusion and is a kind of arbitrary "rewrite" that is entirely contrary to pre-existing knowledge. Thus, it becomes an act and creates a series of traps for "reading". As the book ends, when the protagonist returns to London, Sebald lets a warning voice at the surreal tube station repeat, "Mind the gap" [7. P. 16], this phrase penetrates the reader's mind like a closing mantra: be mindful of the gap between image and reality, between apparent truth and the veil of history, between forgotten dream and the pursuit of memory.
Third, constant duplicates are established throughout the story: the soldier Beyle and the writer Stendhal, Dr K., and Franz Kafka, the narrator, and Sebald, the journeys of "I" with the journey of K. Here, the doppelganger is the blurred overlap, similar but not what it is. This is a journey as if it were an autobiography, a passport photo, or a real place that is drowned in a mist of fiction, fantasy, and is mixed with the details of many other narrator's texts, threatening to destroy the real world, as the writer has described the decline of memory, cultural civilised times' onslaught. Alternatively, the name Dr K. in Part III, rather than "Kafka", essentially signals a "game" with available information about Kafka's life and writings, thereby creating two story layers— one layer represents the profile and composition left behind by Franz Kafka. The other represents an image of Dr K. that Sebald created.
Sebald constantly "transcribes" Kafka's fictions and overlaps with the story of the first narrator's journey, as if deliberately "usurping" them to force the reader to obliterate the known world like the way Tlon did in Borges' work2. Many critics wondered whether Sebald was trying to recklessly "imitate" the Kafkaesque style of his novel. However, is it glorious to step over the footsteps of the forerunners? Or is Sebald a co-creator, an advanced reader, looking for a different way of reading and a special connection to the preceding texts, thereby aiming for a discourse that breaks the rules and stereotype that has become legendary? We think of the book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 1973 by Harold Bloom. He points out that all literary creation is the result of the struggles of later writers trying to free themselves from the influence of their predecessors. The artist, like a moth, must free up the space of his imagination
1 The term "monomyth" was coined by the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which Campbell demonstrates that all stories have a common expression that he named "the Hero's Journey" or "the Monomyth" with a model of 17 basic steps (Campbell, 2004). See: Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Yogi Impressions, 2017).
2 The famous short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (who had a considerable influence on Sebald) named Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940). See: Steven Boldy, A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (Tamesis, 2009), p. 78.
through "misreading" the works of previous authors [11. P. XXIV]. Great poets and novelists must overcome this fear of influence, or else they are only derivative flatterers, never achieving their immortality. With this theory, Harold Bloom also posits that what underlies the Western literary tradition is an endless chain of anxiety and competition, passed down from generation to generation. Or like Borges's concept of the "rewriting" of existing texts, all chaos in the work represents an-order-as-yet-not-understood; Sebald's work is also a labyrinth, a hypertext which is confusing only for those who have not yet grasped the key. Sebald's desire, in his strangely original writing, was to explore the possibility of a hypertext, and to link separate facts in a meaningful order, with the text not only belonging to him but with every symbol in a text also being a collection of networks of links to innumerable other texts.
References
1. Denham, S. et al. (2006) W. G. Sebald: History - Memory - Trauma. De Gruyter.
2. Long, J.J. & Whitehead, A. (2004) W. G. Sebald - A Critical Companion. Edinburgh University Press.
3. McCulloh, M.R. (2003) Understanding W.G. Sebald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
4. Theisen, B. (2004) Prose of the World: W. G. Sebald's Literary Travels. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory. 79 (3). pp. 163-179.
5. Nguyen, K.P. (2013) Hypertextuality in Literature - Rereading Jorge Luis Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths. The Foreign Literature Journal. 2. pp. 21-35.
6. Bolter, J.D. & Joyce, M. (1987) Hypertext and creative writing. Hypertext. 1. pp. 41-54.
7. Sebald, W.G. (2001) Vertigo. Translated by Michael Hulse. A New Directions Book.
8. Jacobs, C. (2015) Sebald's Vision. Columbia University Press.
9. Gray, R.T. (2017) Ghostwriting: W. G. Sebald's Poetics of History. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
10. Long, J.J. (2007) Image, Achive, Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
11. Bloom, H. (1997) The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press.
Information about the author:
P.K. Nguyen, PhD, Department of Linguistics and Literature, senior researcher, University of Science and Education (University of Danang) (Danang City, Vietnam). E-mail: npkhanh@ued.udn.vn
The author declares no conflicts of interests.
The article was submitted 21.03.2022; approved after reviewing 15.06.2022; accepted for publication 12.01.2023.
Статья поступила в редакцию 21.03.2022; одобрена после рецензирования 15.06.2022; принята к публикации 12.01.2023.
