‘With an eye to their later existence as ruins’: Language, materiality and the ruin in the work of W.G. Sebald.

This essay builds on Walter Benjamin’s allegory of the ruin to explore how W.G. Sebald’s work draws on ruination as a structural esthetic. The prevalence of destruction, wastelands, and discarded matter in Sebald’s writing has been criticized as a shortcut to signification playing into the hand of the melancholic rambler, with the Holocaust in the role of master signifier. The present essay offers a counter-narrative to these perspectives, intervening on two fronts: firstly, as a critical correction to dominant interpretations of Sebald’s emphasis on destruction and melancholy as apolitical; secondly, as a theory of reading materiality in literary works that actively resist political and historical determination. Expanding on and complicating the recent interest in studying material environments and objects in literature, this essay argues for a material understanding of language. It shows how Sebald casts the ruin into the role of witness that both calls for a readership and indexes the limits of restitution. The focus on residual materiality moves our understanding of Sebald’s ethical-esthetic process away from the melancholic subject-position, to that of a material-driven political imperative. To support its readings, the essay concentrates on Austerlitz and makes extensive use of Sebald’s essays and interviews.