Missed Encounters: Stendhal, Sebald and the Return of Waterloo

This article focusses on the representation of the Battle of Waterloo in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma (1839) and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995). In doing so the article also considers broader questions about wartime experience and the persistence of traumatic memory in Stendhal’s autobiographical writings, while reflecting on Sebald’s sustained engagement with the unsettling effects of war in Stendhal’s life and work in Vertigo (1990) and Austerlitz (2001). Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s account of trauma as a “history that can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence”, the article claims that what Stendhal and Sebald share in their unorthodox accounts of Waterloo and the Napoleonic wars is an interest in the potential of traumatic memory to disrupt narrative time and thus, via Lacan, to open up history to the return of the Real. Key to this reading is a focus on the disparity between official, commemorative accounts of Waterloo, and the interest displayed by Stendhal and Sebald alike in the ghastly, inert residue that remains when such accounts fail to capture the Real of war.