Paper short abstract:

What happens when history is seen through Borges' literary models? This paper aims to answer by reading Sebald's texts where the Borgesian labyrinthine logic is reproduced for a historical hermeneutics that finds its key in melancholia.

Paper long abstract:

Both Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz can be read as borgesian experimentations of time and space operating on history. As with many short stories in Borges, the tension between time and space collapse. The effects in Sebald, however, are haunting. In Rings of Saturn, it is precisely the gravity of twentieth century history that blows up the stability of time as experienced in memory. This is done through a first person account of a nameless meandering figure that incorporates history, literature and nature into a phenomenological interpretation of the surroundings, yielding melancholia and not meaning. In order to shape this overbearing mood into a novel, Sebald introduces a proper character in Austerlitz. An expert in European architectural history, Austerlitz is portrayed as the personification of non linear temporality who goes around Europe finding preserved pockets of meaning and memory in old buildings and ruins.

I want to read both novels as unexpected literary borgesian legacies. I want to consider Sebald's work as the result of stuffing Borges' conceptual literature with history, and argue that it is through this operation that the Argentinian's short story is able to expand into a novel, while warping its conventions as genre. On the side of history, I want to read Borges as a model of time underlying a historiographic method in Sebald where the labyrinthine logic is reproduced for a historical hermeneutics that finds its key in melancholia.