Landscape with Abyss

Tyree, Josh and Baker, Brian and Schad, John (2025) Landscape with Abyss. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Landscape with Abyss limns the research areas of travelogue, arts writing, and autobiography. The author retraces the journeys of W. G. Sebald in Europe and England from Vertigo (1990), alternating these travels abroad with walks in his home city, Washington, D.C., leading up to the January 6th U.S. Capitol riots. These parallel lines converge when the author recognizes that his obsession with the locations of the Great Fire and the Blitz in London, as described in Sebald book’s final pages, connects to an incident from his own childhood in Wisconsin when his house burned down. In tracing Sebald’s route to his hometown, the author recognizes that he needs to return to his own ‘origin story’ in order to try to understand what happened. In terms of creative-critical practice, this ‘spatial story’ (Michel de Certeau) and ‘anti-travel’ narrative (Carl Thompson) alternates between text and images. These images do not serve merely to illustrate or decorate, but instead juxtapose the text in order to create ruptures or indicate how gaps lead might lead into speculative reverie. These images include both travel photographs and pictures from movies. The latter often indicates the presence of a cinematic shadow text to Sebald’s book, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, which inter-threads the narrative as another key textual apparition. Just as there are parallel journeys relayed, and twinned fires at the centre of each, so, too, are there two postwar Vertigos haunting the author. An accompanying critical reflection, Ghost Dance, discusses the agonistic writing of Mark Fisher on Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and the meaning of the coast of Suffolk for both writers. Fisher’s difficulties with Sebald induce reflection on my own creative practices around ‘haunted journeys’ (Dennis Porter), in which writers retrace the footsteps of other artists in a seemingly endless chain.