[In the following review of Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, Swales faults Sebald's view of the literary critic as an interpreter of authorial pathology.]

In his collection of ten essays [Die Beschreibung des Unglücks] (nine of which are reworked versions of earlier papers) W. G. Sebald highlights particular topographical features of the Austrian literary landscape from Stifter to Handke (and, in view of the prominence accorded to descriptions of natural phenomena in that literary tradition, the notion of a ‘literary landscape’ is by no means only a metaphor). By any standards, it is not a very cheering journey. Stifter figures at both the beginning and the end. Dr Sebald is at pains to stress the repressions and pathological tensions in Stifter's own psyche (particularly his ‘unüberwindlichen Freβzwang’), and to suggest that the literary work, in its desperate attempt to vindicate rationality and orderliness, intimates the catastrophic possibilities that it wishes to keep at arm's length. Schnitzler's Traumnovelle is interpreted with respect to the role of woman within the corporate (male) imagination of declining Austria-Hungary. Sebald sees Andreas as Hofmannsthal's most daring venture into the realms of perversion and cruelty, arguing that in conception it is ‘eine pornographische Etüde auf dem höchsten Niveau der Kunst, … der absolute Gegensatz also zum Konzept des Bildungsromans’. Kafka's Das Schloβ is interpreted as a journey located in the domain of death, and Canetti is seen as the diagnostician of the pathology of power, a pathology that works through imagination, mind, and language. Sebald discusses Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, arguing that they portray conditions of psychological disturbance in such a way that pathology becomes revelation, fantasy becomes the agency of a precise retracing of the contours of unaccommodated—and therefore truthful—existence. The volume concludes with essays on the suggestive power of Ernst Herbeck's dislocated texts, on Gerhard Roth's Winterreise (this is the most critical essay in the collection, highlighting the atrophied narrative mode in which the passages of sexual explicitness become mere pornography), and on the eschatological impetus behind both Stifter's and Handke's art, an impulse which decrees that immediate things are treated with a weight of narrative constatation that transforms them into last things.

Sebald writes well and there is a splendid urgency to every analysis that he offers. It is fascinating to see that Stifter, the only writer from the nineteenth century who is discussed, should emerge as the patron saint of so much twentieth-century Austrian prose. Yet certain problems remain. Sebald writes at one point: ‘Wenig Wunder, daβ Stifter, bewegt von den chaotischen Vorgängen in seinem Innern und von der naturwissenschaftlichen Einsicht in die grauenvolle Ausgesetztheit der Welt, zeit seines Lebens in einer Art literarischer Autotherapie an der Darstellung einer helleren Welt sich abgearbeitet hat’ (p. 174), and, in a later passage, he argues that literature ‘verwandelt … das Fleisch und Blut der Wirklichkeit in eine ohne Beschwernis verzehrbare Speise vermittels eines Rituals der Transsubstantiation und dient zur Beschwichtigung eines schlechten Gewissens, das, wie wir am Fall Stifters sehen konnten, weniger im Herzen als im Magen des Autors seinen Sitz hat’ (p. 180). The argument here is that literature is an act of compensation, is the creation of a beautiful lie which it is the task of the critic to reconvert into the substance of authorial pathology. I am far from wishing to reinstate the notion of an intact, high-mindedly pedagogic Stifter, and I agree with Sebald that the art is remarkable for the tensions and undercurrents that disturb the placid surface. But one must beware of seeing art as the biography writ (or, more accurately, rewrit) large, and Sebald, in his discussion of Stifter, comes perilously close to this seductive heresy. But with the twentieth-century writers he obviously feels surer of his ground, and the discussion of the works is for the most part conducted without reference to the biographical circumstances from which they derive. But then, there is hardly any need for such delving, because with Canetti, Bernhard, Handke, Herbeck, and Gerhard Roth the pathology is foregrounded in the texts themselves. But there still remains a problem. Without wishing to sound censorious, one has to ask why these unashamedly pathological themes should be found truthful and persuasive. Why, in other words, should the unaccommodated existence be more truthful than the accommodated one, why should it be the case (to quote Sebald again) that ‘die Motorik der Trostlosigkeit und diejenige der Erkenntnis identische Exekutiven sind’? Why should pathology be insight—and not simply delusion or a symptom of cultural and social decadence (an argument that Marxist critics are never slow to advance)? Here one detects a weakness in Sebald's study, a weakness that may derive from the fact that his book began its life as separate essays. As I have already mentioned, he is critical of Gerhard Roth's Winterreise. One wishes that the arguments in respect of literary value (or lack of it) had been sustained throughout the book. Sebald leaves us in no doubt that he regards Winterreise as inferior, as pornographic, whereas he sees other works (by, for example, Hofmannsthal or Schnitzler) as exploring (rather than succumbing to) the pornographic imagination. The distinction is, of course, a valid one. But the line that divides diagnosis from muck-raking is a fine one. Similarly, with Handke, the line that divides critique of linguistic atrophy from succumbing to linguistic atrophy is by no means self-evident. But Sebald simply asserts the distinction, without showing it. It is, at one level, a matter of style (and Sebald is—rightly—stern with the limpness of Roth's narrative). But more needs to be said on, for example, the sheer elation and vitality of Bernhard's prose (a vitality that differentiates the stultifying matter of his writing), on the obliqueness and intensely associative range of Kafka's art, one which infuses the bleakness with a strangely generous range of concerns. Granted, the blight of mere pathology, of ‘sour kitsch', of pornography is never far away. But it is exorcized in a triumph of art. Sebald knows this too, of course; but he takes it for granted. And, given the kind of literature which concerns him in this book [Die Beschreibung des Unglücks], he owes it to himself, to the authors he values, and to us his readers, to spell out that triumph.