Between Kafka and Stendhal: literary criticism and history in the documental literature Vertigem, by W. G. Sebald

Abstract

Vertigem, published in 1990 in Germany, begins W. G. Sebald’s prose narratives. The work is divided into four parts, two of which are inspired by the life of Stendhal and Kafka and resemble critical essays, the other two are based on a first-person narrator. In the author’s collection, in Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Germany, it is possible to contact the research sources used in the writing of Vertigem and to observe influences of the process of fictionalization of documents. As an example there are two journalistic articles: the first, entitled “Kafka in Riva, 1913”, by Anthony Northey, published in the weekly newspaper "Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, at the “Literatur und Kunst” session, dated April 24, 1987; and the second, “Die Gnadenlosen”, published in the “German newspaper Die Zeit”, on December 5, 1986, by Erwin Brunner. Both make extra literary references, mainly for the way the process of inserting [Einbetten] sources fits in with an [Einschachten] entanglement of the stories of the characters and the narrator. Therefore, the analysis will be centered on the documents archived by the narrator-author and
on how the inscription of the archives becomes a way to bring them back to use, transformed into new ways of reading and representing reality.