Multiple Intertexts And Memory Oscillations

As a writer of the "post-war generation" who did not directly experience World War II,W.G.Sebald’s historical wounds left behind by his father constitute a memory gap between the clouds and trees,and how to trace the fractured memories after the war constitutes the purpose of his literary writing.When future generations are confronted with the total destruction caused by World War Ⅱ,they often feel a kind of ungraspable dizziness.W.G.Sebald takes this as the most common perceptual feeling of his characters,and presents it in his prose novels and poems,urging readers to go through the parade of fractured memories together,in order to form a sense of redemption in the face of destruction.Since its entry into literature,the perceptual sensation of vertigo has undergone three stages of evolution,from the classical period to the twentieth century,presenting itself as the emotional shock of subjectivation,the mental shock of extrapolation,and the existential normality of inescapability,respectively.W.G.Sebald compounded the characteristics of vertigo,emphasizing its manifestation in three dimensions:spatial disorientation,memory distortion and emotional resistance,using tense as a distinction,and correlating the production of vertigo with spatio-temporal excursions.Sebald seeks to convey a vertiginous quality in his writing,absorbing different textual materials in the form of multiple intertexts.From the perspective of crossmodal intertextuality of graphic texts,a large number of images are juxtaposed in the writing to realize three kinds of relationships between images and texts:designation,recognition,and denial;from the perspective of textual pluralization of former texts,both one text is pluralized into multiple texts and multiple texts are pluralized into one text;from the perspective of infinite derivation across layers,the infinite derivation proposed by Peirce is formed between story and narrative layers,textual content and textual structure.Sebald leads to the vertigo of memory by making the fragmented narrative clumps circulate like dust.Memory retrieval,as the main purpose of Sebald’s vertigious writing,intends to overcome the blindness caused by generational trauma and bypass the standardized historical narrative,so he uses the traces left by the leftover objects as the markers of private memory.The ideal path of memory retrieval is from the stimulation of lingering memories to the restoration of reconstructed memories,but memory subjects are often trapped in two memory cuttings,producing vertigo,which is caused by the separation of memory from home.Sebald is concerned with the connection between the instantaneous and the eternal under the ontology of language in order to achieve a reassignment of past events.The ideal that Sebald ultimately wants to achieve is the redemption of those who have been devastated by destruction.He complains about the unnoticed history of destruction beneath the surface of human civilization at the level of architectural history,colonial trade history,and war history,and discovers the selective affinity between human beings in a way that connects with nature,and uses this as a hope for eternal redemption,which he then preserves by writing.