The memorial writing by W.G. Sebald. A Ricoeurian approach

My intervention focuses on the relationship between peace and understanding with respect to the theme of memorial narrative. I would like to analyse in Ricoeurian terms the literary style of W.G. Sebald, which is linked to the avoidance of oblivion of the Holocaust, the disintegration of Germany and the inexplicable amnesia associated with these events. This kind of writing contrasts to Aristotelian intuitions: the characters described are not figures of an events unification, and the author cedes his omniscience in favour of an endless search for what must be rescued from human forgetfulness. Author and characters are witnesses to a continuous juxtaposition of fragmentary events that, in the instant of writing and being read, are restored to a human time. Sebald's novels trace a path with no certainty of a destination, other than that, which never really happened, of the subtraction from an otherwise inexorable destruction – a Natural History of Destruction, as he would say. Thus, this process could find an echo in the Ricoeurian aesthetic reflection dedicated to the overlap between historical and fictional writing. In fact, by drawing attention to the above-mentioned intersection, Ricoeur outlines the possibility of the writing of a human time: a time that overlaps, in the moment of being narrated and, then listened to, the quasi-past tense proper to fictional writing on the actual past proper to historical writing. The present article, thus, approaches Sebald’s work taking seriously what Ricoeur says about this kind of overlap: the fictional construction of a quasi-past becomes a “revealer of the possible hidden in the actual past” at the reader’s level, rescuing the narrated events from oblivion and guaranteeing them – although painful and unspeakable ones – a respectful understanding.