W. G. Sebald: The Pleasure and Pain of Beauty

Abstract

Beauty plays a central but ambivalent role in Sebald's writings. Echoing Kant's aesthetic theory, Sebald's texts emphasise the disinterested and free nature of aesthetic pleasure, but they also argue that this pleasure is increasingly threatened in the modern age, as the human relationship towards nature becomes informed by a desire for domination and exploitation. In a cross-reading of Sebald's literary works and his essays on Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller, this article shows how Sebald's own texts attempt to resist this development. By highlighting the beauty of the natural world, they prepare the ground for renewed appreciation, but also for encounter and compassion. Yet the beauty thus displayed is often situated within the context of suffering and death, and by depicting it, Sebald's texts risk becoming complicit with the very structures which they try to undermine. A similar complicity between pleasure and domination also shapes the realm of man-made artefacts. Sebald's texts attempt to escape this double-bind in passages which abandon conventionally realist representation in favour of more abstract tableaux of beautiful patterns and colours. This movement towards abstraction serves to shield beauty from the dictates of instrumental reason, fostering an aesthetic pleasure which remains open to compassion.Kant's aesthetic theory is a theory of pleasure. In his Kritik der Urteilskraft, he famously divides human pleasure into three categories, distinguishing the enjoyment we derive from the beautiful from the kinds of pleasure created by other experiences, such as the agreeable and the good. 1 As Kant argues, only aesthetic pleasure is truly disinterested, in that it depends neither on the body -on our subjective tastes and preferences, nor on reason -on logical arguments or explanations: Man kann sagen: daß unter allen diesen drei Arten des Wohlgefallens das des Geschmacks am Schönen einzig und allein ein uninteressirtes und freies Wohlgefallen sei; denn kein Interesse, weder das der Sinne, noch das der Vernunft, zwingt den Beifall ab (KdU , p. 210). 2

Cultural Pleasure: An Introduction

“…G. Sebald: The Pleasure and Pain of Beauty'. By tracing Sebald's subtle engagements with forms of natural beauty that bear the marks 'of an underlying "Verstörung"', 19 Duttlinger readdresses a prime site of aesthetic pleasure from a postlapsarian perspective. As is clear from her analysis, there can be little doubt about Sebald's aesthetic and ethical seriousness.…”