On Creaturely Life: Rilke Benjamin Sebald by Eric L. Santner

On Creaturely Life: Rilke Benjamin Sebald by Eric L. Santner

Author:Eric L. Santner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2006-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


II

Against this background, it makes sense that the question of humor in Sebald’s work has been little discussed in the critical literature. One rightly wonders whether there is room for humor in the bleak world of historical suffering his work seems to live and breathe. It is almost as if one were to ask whether Benjamin’s angel of history was capable of a good laugh amid all that wreckage piling up before his eyes. But given the deep affinities we have observed between Sebald’s work and that of Kafka, a writer with a considerable, if unusual, sense of humor, one might be prepared for encountering humor in Sebald as well. My sense is that it is at just those points of creatureliness I have been trying to isolate that Sebaldian humor arises; these are the points where the nonsensical aspect of what I have referred to as “signifying stress” becomes manifest to us, the point where we catch a glimpse of the mechanical stupidity of our jouissance, the very “Thing” that matters most to us. Here is one brief example to illustrate this strange feature where the point of greatest melancholy can become an occasion of laughter.

In the seventh chapter of The Rings of Saturn, the narrator recalls an earlier visit to Ireland during which he had occasion to live, very briefly, in the home of a Mrs. Ashbury and her four grown children. The Ashburys were among the last remnants of a British landowning class in Ireland whose impoverishment in the wake of the civil war left them in a state “like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up” (210/250). We find the familiar Sebaldian motifs of Naturgeschichte, of a historical form of life succumbing to “natural” decay and decomposition: crumbling houses, rotting wood, walls stripped of paper “which had traces of whitewash with bluish streaks like the skin of a dying body” (210/251). In a certain sense, that is just what natural history means for Sebald: a form of life becoming manifest as a decomposing corpse. But in the midst of all this decay, the behavior of the “survivors,” in this case Mrs. Ashbury and her children, assumes an aspect of utter and nonsensical purposelessness—of repetition compulsion as a weird sort of comedy. Edmund, the youngest of the Ashbury children, has spent years working on a boat that will never sail: “As he casually informed me, he knew nothing about boat-building and had no intention of ever going to sea in his unshapely barge. It’s not going be launched. It’s just something I do. I have to have something to do” (211/251). The three daughters, Catherine, Clarissa, and Christina, sew together vast quantities of fabric remnants and then take them apart, “like children under an evil spell” (212/252). At one point the daughters considered starting an interior decorating business, “but the plan came to nothing . . . both because of their inexperience and because there was no call in their neighborhood for such a service” (212/252).



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