Memory, Place and Pain in W.G. Sebald's: The Emigrants

When we discuss the concept of place, we mostly do so geographically, or as a metaphor. That is, by representing what we think about by geographical notions. This paper avoids this literary tendency by discussing directly the role of actual place in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. Not only that, While still acknowledging melancholy's main role in the novel, and the way in which it is discussed in Freud and through Freud et al, the paper takes this melancholy to be a phenomenological spring board for explicating the centrality of place within The Emigrants's melancholy. In order to do this, the paper discusses the role of place within major phenomenological thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the way their discussion dissolves the classical dichotomy of subject/object. However, as this dichotomy is dissolved, it becomes clearer as to the way places do not only belong to human-beings – simultaneously, humans belong to places. Through explicating this, we come to understand in The Emigrants what makes it such a tragic story. While the emigrants find their home to be rooted in places and memories of places, these places carry at the same time a mood of being-at-home and alongside that, a sense of ruins which haunt. Thus they become trapped between the conflicting urges of running toward and running from these memories. A dilemma that is finally solved only, in the novel, through death.