Near-Coincidences: Digression and the Literature of the Age of the Internet

Metadata

Author: Gianluca Didino
Full Title: Near-Coincidences: Digression and the Literature of the Age of the Internet
Category: #articles
URL: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/near-coincidences-digression-and-the-literature-of-the-age-of-the-internet

Highlights

the narrative technique in which Sebald, like Homer, excelled: digression, or to be more precise that specific type of digression that Mendelsohn calls “ring composition.” He continues: “[T]he narrative appears to meander away into a digression […] although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end to be a circle, since the narration will return to the precise point in the action from which it had strayed.”
- Note: cf. Andy M.’s evergreen note structures
the narratives based on ring composition are “optimistic,” because they affirm the “possibility of infinite digressions within an existing story, of a potentially endless series of smaller concentric circles nested within a larger one.”
This is where the “near-coincidences” of Sebald’s writing come into play — the net of connections that in his novels gives us the impression, never confirmed nor denied, that the elements of a story are linked together to form a higher meaning, that there is a meaningful relation between the hecatomb of herrings and the history of coastal Norfolk, between Dr K. and the village of W., or between Austerlitz and Sebald himself. Sebald, who is a master in the art of vertigo, chases the amphetaminic ecstasy typical of our internet age, where everything seems connected to everything else. At the same time, he is too sophisticated, or perhaps just too disillusioned, to believe that a higher meaning actually exists. The reader is left with a powerful, yet disorienting, feeling of likeness, as happens in a déjà vu — as when a word stubbornly eludes our memory.