Tikkun: W.G. Sebald's Melancholy Messianism

Shortly before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald made what amounts to a mission statement for his literary endeavors under the title "Ein Versuch der Restitution. (An Attempt at Restitution). In this brief address, Sebald maintains that his work can be seen as an attempt to make amends for a history of catastrophe. I argue in this dissertation that Sebald's self-appointed and self-proclaimed mission of mending history's tragedies corresponds to a view of the modern world as broken and needing redemption that Sebald adopted as he read Max Horkheimer's and Theodor Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). Sebald came to see the modern world as broken by instrumental reason and in need of redemption. He rejected, however, the strategies others had adopted to realize a better world. Sebald remained estranged from organized religion, eschewed the kinds of political engagement adopted by his contemporaries, and ultimately even refused Horkheimer's and Adorno's own solution, the application of supposedly 'healthy' reason to counteract instrumental reason. What was left to him was the creation of an idiosyncratic "literature of restitution" which relied on willed association rather than on the discovery of causal relationships to structure the episodic narratives he collected and to reclaim individual histories from the anonymity of a history of calamity. This vision of a redemptive function for literature grew out of one of his early academic fascinations: the German-Jewish messianic discourse, particularly as it found expression in the work of Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Franz Kafka. I will argue that Sebald's concept of the messiah, developed in his scholarly pursuits, played itself out in his imaginative literature as the adopting of a melancholic register. The paradoxical sensibility of hopeful despondency characterized a number of German-Jewish thinkers in the first quarter of the 20th century, all of whom informed, to one degree or another, Sebald's understanding of what constituted an ethical response to the disasters of human history. Sebald's goal in invoking this melancholia is to point toward a need for an as-yet impossible solution to ongoing human crimes (both against other humans and nature). The Hebrew term Tikkun---roughly translated as "mending the world"---to which Sebald refers in his early writing, represents the mission of the messiah; but this mission, rooted in the ancient world, is no longer as clear-cut and plausible in the wake of modernity and the seeming irrelevance of metaphysics. Melancholia is then both a signpost pointing to the need for redemption as well as a dirge born of the recognition that redemption has never seemed so unattainable.