W. G. Sebald and the Call to Bear Witness

• In Event: Complacency Unsettled: Sebaldian Approaches to Injustice

Abstract

In this presentation, I propose to approach W. G. Sebald’s internationally celebrated oeuvre as a form of bearing witness. In his unclassifiable works, Sebald attends determinedly both to the past and to fellow human beings marked by the events of that past. Like the ideal witness in court, Sebald is scrupulous about fact and detail. Like the expert witness, who is called upon to share judgments of facts rather than just the facts themselves, Sebald is consistently circumspect and yet, at times, persuasively direct and frank. Like the social witness, who rejects a hierarchical social order and attends to the marginalized and forgotten, Sebald devotes his energies to heeding persons chewed up by history and left by the wayside. Finally, like the moral witness, Sebald’s absorbing, evocative prose calls for a moral awakening, for remembrance, and for justice (cf. Agamben, 2002; Felman & Laub, 1992; Hatley, 2000; Oliver, 2001; Simon, 2005; Zembylas, 2009).
Sebald’s work speaks volumes in today’s educational zeitgeist dominated by an instrumental, means-ends calculus which has produced amoral policy, utter forgetfulness of deep educational values, and unjust forms of treating teachers and students alike. I discern in Sebald’s work a powerful call for educators to bear witness, themselves, to both the suffering of educators and students in our time, and to the possibilities they nonetheless continuously put forward in their quest for meaningful work and lives.
The challenge of learning to bear witness as an educator is real and, at first glance, quite daunting. To characterize this challenge, the presentation will highlight the educational odyssey that Sebald undertakes to ready himself aesthetically, epistemically, and ethically for the task. He knows that a person cannot ‘decide’ to be a witness and enact its obligations instantaneously. Rather, the person must accept an existential summons, or call, to pay heed to others and to repair ruptures between past, present, and future. This calling puts the person underway in cultivating the orientation of bearing witness, which translates into communicating to the best of one’s ability the dignity of human beings seeking a just and meaningful life. Such communication is fundamental, since witnessing is never complete until it has been shared and acknowledged by others (Peters, 2001; Turner, 2012).
Readying oneself to bear witness is one thing. As mentioned, it necessitates refining to the best of a person’s abilities his or her aesthetic, epistemic, and ethical sensibility. But it is yet another challenge to communicate justly one’s witness. Sebald is a profound guide for the educator who aspires to accept these dual demands. He is extraordinarily lucid in his self-awareness and in his grasp of the entailments of bearing witness. He never claims success. On the contrary, he returns repeatedly to his sense of getting things only half-right – if that – juxtaposed with his commitment to persevere. It is not solely the insights from Sebald’s witness that serve the educator, valuable as they are, but also his mode of reaching them.

Author

• David T. Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University