Getting Under Your Skin: Sebald on Chatwin and Flaubert

I want to approach, in this essay, some of the forms of “doubling”—between skin and text, text and skin—that are at work in Sebald’s writing. I will argue that there is in these forms a high degree of reflexivity, such that it is in his attention to the literary endeavor as such, particularly to the work of other writers or scholars of literature, that Sebald comes closest to the skin. I will also argue that Sebald subjects the skin to a variety of more or less subtle forms of aggression, forms which move, in broad terms, between the extremities of contraction and expansion, between the skin as shrunken or desiccated relic, and the skin as a surface susceptible to loosening, layering, and forms of contagious consumption. Anzieu’s “psychic envelope,” the “multiply folded surface” Kay draws from Deleuze, are rendered in Sebald as a surface prone to catastrophe and conflagration, to an erasure or effacement of the world; Sebald’s surfaces seem destined in this sense to fade to black. And yet, something remains; towards the end of the essay, through a return to Santner’s commentary and a subsequent recourse to Walter Benjamin, I will address the questions posed by this paradox of loss and retention. In an essay on Bruce Chatwin titled “The Mystery of the Red-Brown Skin: an approach to Bruce Chatwin,” included in the posthumous collection Campo Santo, Sebald comments on the “avidity” with which Chatwin approaches the undiscovered. Avidity, which later in the essay semantically generates the idea of promiscuity, both terms qualifying Chatwin’s writing and life, are also, for Sebald, associated with death, since he later describes Chatwin’s writing as “a late flowering of those early traveller’s tales going back to Marco Polo where reality is constantly entering the realm of the metaphysical and miraculous, and the way through the world is taken from the first with an eye fixed on the writer’s own end.” This latter point announces the theme of mortality and associates avidity and promiscuity with the risk of an untimely end. There follows the first of a series of references to canonical texts of French literature. Sebald refers to Flaubert’s “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” as “one of Chatwin’s favourite books”; but the slight impetus here surely bears the heavier weight of a line in Sebald’s writing, connecting the motif of skin to that of mortality. In effect, Flaubert’s tale serves ostensibly as the basis for a commentary by Sebald on the psychological