The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald

Abstract

1. You know picture. A lone figure dressed in a black cloak stands at edge of an empty shore and looks out onto a dark, windswept sea, which merges imperceptibly with inky sky. Because his back is turned to us, and because we cannot quite tell if he is wearing a monk's habit or a traveler's cape, figure remains a cipher to us, a mysterious presence inviting identification. What are his thoughts as he gazes into infinite, vertiginous theater before him? What has led him to seek out this forsaken spot at edge of human habitation, with only natural, cosmic order before him? Nothing in world can be as lonely and as unsettling as this place, Heinrich von Kleist wrote in a contemporary review, the only spark of life in wide realm of death, lonely midpoint of a lonely circle. Although he never mentioned this figure from Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by Sea (1809-10), W. G. Sebald might well have claimed him as emblem for his recent prose writings, all of which trace journey of solitary wanderers who make their way to very edge of human world and gaze into void. This is edge of darkness, a German relative says to narrator in The Emigrants while standing on New Jersey shore and reflecting on forty years he has spent in America, far from their native village in Bavaria. And in truth it seemed as if mainland were submerged behind us and as if there were nothing above watery waste but this narrow strip of sand running up to north and down towards south. Then, in Sebald's German text, we hear this dislocated German emigrant speak to his German nephew in English: often come out here, sagte Onkel Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where.l Until his untimely death in December 2001, W. G. Sebald wrote from a similar position of self-imposed exile and marginality, between languages and national identities. Publishing four books in span of eleven years, he became an international literary sensation and one of most unlikely success stories of contemporary German literature. Born in a Bavarian village during last year

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