Remembering failure: Philosophy and the form of the novel (Winfried Georg Sebald, Ernst Wilhelm Haendler, Jacques Roubaud, France, Germany)

This dissertation analyzes projects by three contemporary German and French novelists—W. G. Sebald, Ernst-Wilhelm Händler, and Jacques Roubaud—as highlighting the pitfalls of memory work performed in the medium of written language. With Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and mind as a major source of intertextual references, these works challenge traditional theories of the novel that have cast the genre as the predominant literary form for reliable storage and retrieval of lived experience. In Part I of the dissertation I discuss the development of this theoretical tradition from Idealism to Hermeneutics, with individual chapters devoted to the work of G. W. F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Lukács, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. A counterpoint to the mnemonic restitution of totalities that emerges as the legacy of this lineage, Wittgenstein's skeptical view of private memory images as guarantors of linguistic meaning, analyzed in Chapter 5, inspires the appropriation of elements of his philosophy in the narratives considered in Part II of my study. Chapter 6 is devoted to W. G. Sebald's externalization of memory images by means of photographic images integrated into his text; I claim that with this formal device Sebald creates disturbing uncertainties about the verisimilitude of the ‘memories’ reported in writing, and calls the very notion of private experience into question. Ernst-Wilhelm Händler's novels, discussed in Chapter 7, describe systematic projects undertaken by characters across a spectrum of social systems (philosophy, business, literature, architecture), all of them eventually destabilized by the ‘grammar’ (Wittgenstein) of the language games required to realize these projects. Chapter 8 focuses on ‘le grand incendie de Londres,’ an ongoing prose project by the French writer Jacques Roubaud, that transforms the Wittgensteinian argument against the possibility of a radically private language into a principle of writing intent on destroying, rather than preserving, memories. As a whole, the dissertation advances the claim that by incorporating Wittgensteinian philosophical text, the literary works analyzed actively call into question a tradition of philosophical models that have argued in favor of the accessibility of the past through a seamlessly continuous transmission of mnemonic contents across time.