The Desire for Influence

In a stimulating article on travel in W. G. Sebald's writing, John Zilcosky puts forward the argument that Sebald overturns a Romantic and postmodern travel strategy, which consists of getting lost only to recover oneself finally with greater clarity and a more assured sense of identity. Such a travel paradigm is based on upholding a clear dichotomy between home and away. Zilcosky argues that Sebald's deconstruction of this traditional opposition differentiates him from contemporaries such as Roland Barthes, who transform the margin into a new home, making it into familiar territory. Resisting any “disingenuous attempt to turn the margin into a new centre,” Sebald's travel texts instead present all locations in terms of the in-between zone of the familiar-strange, the uncanny. According to Zilcosky, being hopelessly lost is therefore not the central image of these texts. On the contrary, it is the “ … inability to lose one's way that haunts Sebald's travel narratives” (Z, 104). With this in mind, Zilcosky goes on to provide an interesting psychoanalytically-based reading of Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo, 1990) and Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, 1992), arguing that in these texts the glimpse of the familiarstrange is always accompanied by a sense of dismay and fear (Z, 107). This is because familiarity is an impediment to the invention of a creative self. The consequences of the persistence of the familiar and the already-known are devastating for the burgeoning writer, as in the case of Schwindel.