Sun After Dark

by Pico Iyer

  Yet part of what possesses one about these passages is that Sebald gives us nothing to hold on to, no background or cause and effect: nothing except the seraphic scraps that seem to belong to the album of a person now departed. His journeys are never undertaken in a spirit of adventure or delight—they often take place in areas or on trains that have unexplained “unpleasant associations” for him—and they never come to any discernible end. Often, unsettlingly, they pass between this world and the next, dreams and a kind of waking. As he wanders around Italy in the second section of Vertigo, the narrator spots Dante, then King Ludwig II of Bavaria; more often, though, he looks at the people around him and sees “a circle of severed heads” or (in Venice, of all places) “a moving cortege.” Everything comes to him from very far away, with some dimension missing: people are seen moving in slow motion and there is a soundlessness, a stillness, to everything, as if it were being seen through several panes of glass. The narrator himself hardly knows whether he is in the “land of the living or already in another place.”

  Sebald has only to open an old book, in fact, to see, inside the front cover, the name of a person no longer alive. The only attachment he confesses to in the three works is one Clara, but both times she appears, it is in the context of a death. An inn-keeper has merely to touch him, indeed, and the narrator starts, with a sense of something “ghoulish or disembodied.” Though it’s customary to refer to a writer of such impeccable prose as writing like an angel, in the case of Sebald, sitting alone on a bench at twilight and presenting us with nothing but his back, it might be truer to say that he writes like a wraith.

  And the theme of all his books is, at some level, nothing more than the effects they pass on to us: of restlessness, of panic, of being caught up in a lightless labyrinth (the shadow of Kafka is everywhere in these stories). The titles themselves announce their subjects as vertigo, the fact of being saturnine (The Rings of Saturn), and a compulsion to wander (The Emigrants). In some ways Sebald is working, with his hypnotic, spellbound prose, to put us into the very state he inhabits, unmoored, at a loss, in the dark. Lacking all explanations, offering no sense of before and after, his journeys come to us a little as the Ancient Mariner’s come to Coleridge’s wedding guest.

  The only things that do fit together here, moreover, are coincidences, which impart a sense of being caught up in some script written by Fates we can’t imagine to be benign (a believer, in most religions, holds that nothing is an accident—all is mandated by God; Sebald gives us the shadow side of that condition). Thus at one point the narrator leads a madman to the St. Agnes home, and we notice from the date given a little later that it is close to Saint Agnes’ Eve. He tells us the story of Casanova, and we recall, a little unsettlingly, that Stendhal, in the first movement of the book, died on the street now known as rue Danielle-Casanova. The archetypal Sebald moment, you could say, comes when he walks into a pizza parlor in Verona (a pizza parlor!), and sees that the owner’s name is Carlo Cadavero (lest this detail seem too Sebaldian to be true, he offers us a photograph of his bill from the restaurant). Later, returning to the place, he finds it all boarded up, blinds drawn on the apartment above, and the photographer next door so silent that we can only assume that the poor Cadavero has attained the state of his name. The odd keepsakes pasted into the text—here we see a picture of the shuttered restaurant—have the almost desperate air of pieces of evidence in a trial, aimed to show us (or the narrator himself) that all this really happened and he is not, in fact, mad.

  Just as I was writing this sentence, I should here note, my partner came into the room, looking pale, and told me that, on a routine trip to the office just now, she had come upon a dead body laid out on the station platform. A long white sheet, she said, and a woman’s shoes protruding from under it. I went into the next room—this is in Japan—to the desk I share with her teenage daughter, and saw on it a sample English-language sentence: “Last night there was a fire in our neighborhood, and an old woman burned to death.” Clearly, the spell was working.

  Sebald is always scrupulous with dates and street names and places—as if, again, to try to convince himself and us that all he is recording is not just the product of a deranged imagination— and if you read Vertigo on the factual level, its first section is an account of the life of Stendhal, and his trials in love and war. He became fascinated, we are told, with a woman of “great melancholy beauty,” and, soon thereafter, we are shown a picture of some hands (the woman’s?), another photo, of a pair of eyes (Stendhal’s?), then a drawing of an ulcer. The writer’s one inescapable theme, we read, before his death from syphilis, was “What is it that undoes a writer?”

  The second section of the book follows the Sebald-seeming narrator’s journey through Vienna, Venice, and Verona in 1980, in search, he only suggests, of details about the life of Kafka and clues about a series of grisly cult murders. The third movement tells us the story of Dr. K., another man tortured in life and love (and at this point the sharp-eyed reader may notice that some of the images, the cadences, even the details and events of Vertigo come from Kafka’s terrifying story of a dead man’s tale, “The Hunter Graccus”). And in the closing section of the book, the narrator returns to his hometown in Germany, which he can only bear to call “W.” (though the dust jacket matter-of-factly identifies it as Wertach im Allgäu).

  Across the four narratives images recur and echo like footsteps in a labyrinth, and with each recurrence their air of portent or meaning (albeit a meaning we can’t guess, or perhaps don’t want to know) intensifies. We see, again and again, in different contexts, people waving as on a distant ship, as if about to voyage off (as Sebald might put it) to the other shore. We revert frequently to a man (now the narrator, now Dr. K.) lying in a small hotel room, arms crossed behind his head, as the sounds of life come to him from the street outside. We see glimpses of “dust-blown expanses and tidal plains” that are, we are told, the landscape of the future. The force of these recurrences—even a sign above the narrator, when arriving in Milan, says LA PROSSIMA COINCIDENZA—is to make us feel as if we’re simply sleepwalking through some diabolical plot that we can’t follow. More than once, the narrator notices, in Italy, two men, always walking together, watching him from afar; later we learn that two men, always walking together, have been arrested in connection with the ritual murders.

  It doesn’t matter whether these are the same two men; what is important is that the narrator thinks they are: irrational fear and a sense of being hunted are the only home Sebald knows. He is like someone who has fallen through a trapdoor into some parallel world in which correspondences and patterns impress themselves more forcibly than does the real stuff of life. Thus the action proceeds (in his mind) almost like an allegory (and those two men come to seem agents of Charon, waiting to carry the narrator away); certain obvious things have no meaning, and certain covert things have too much. At one point, in an inn, another visitor (German, of course) makes off, by mistake, with the narrator’s passport, and we feel that his very identity has been stolen. He buys a map in Milan, to guide him through the city, and on the cover is a labyrinth.

  The reader who declines to succumb to the spell will say that Sebald is seeking out—to some extent creating—a world that will mirror his own brokenheartedness and dread; it is nearly always twilight in his stories, and the season he keeps returning to is autumn (especially November, “the month of the dead,” as he characteristically calls it). The year with which he is fascinated in Vertigo is 1913, a time when everything, to us now, seems shadowed by what came soon thereafter, making even the tiniest detail (an inscription in a book, dated 1913) seem haunted. To some extent Sebald is almost addicted to the dark, and when he makes for an “unprepossessing, ill-omened hotel” on arrival in Milan, it’s no surprise that the “wizen-faced creature” who receives him there resembles all the other dwarves and misshapen beings we’ve met.

  Sebald would reply that this is precisely his point: to one born with his legacy, all
life is a memento mori. He is running from a world in his head from which there can be no release but death. And the figures on the far-off ship, so hushed from afar, give the impression they are heading to a place from which they will never return; the outline of a lone man, in a small dark room, begins to seem a metaphor for the narrator’s life, alone in a temporary habitation, laid out as in his resting place, the sounds of real life coming to him at a distance. To a dead man, Sebald might be saying, all the world’s a funeral.

  Such grim and comfortless sensations would doubtless make for very painful reading indeed were it not for the “great melancholy beauty” of the prose, which even in translation (by the poet Michael Hulse, but surely with more than a little help from the English-fluent Sebald) rises to a pitch of antique sonorousness and majesty that makes everything else one comes across seem small. The spirits hovering over it—or behind it—are Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Sebald’s fellow East Anglian, Sir Thomas Browne, who once wrote that if you watch sleeping bodies from on high, and pass across the globe, following the setting sun, you can imagine the whole world to be a city of the dead (the image is so dear to Sebald that he uses it twice). Though Sebald’s flights are seldom flights in the modern aeronautic sense—he usually travels by foot, or on a boat or train—they do offer the prospect of the world as seen from a very great height (as in the light of Eternity, or death). Their psychological key might be said to be the word “unheimlich” —or “uncanny”—a Freudian term that has to do with “obsessive paths of action,” a “repetition compulsion,” and what one scholar calls “a flood of repressed memories that fill the subject with both dread and pleasure.” (Two years after writing this sentence, I might add, I found that one of Sebald’s untranslated critical works was actually called Unheimliche Heimat, or “Unhomelike Home.”)

  The Emigrants introduced us in the English-speaking world to this new kind of travel writing, and as one proceeds through it—noting, very slowly, that its subject is all the things that are being forcibly left out or suppressed (the empty rooms and blank pages of the last days of the war)—one begins to see that the very title, so hopeful in another context, in this book has much more a sense of the fugitive (a sense that comes over more strongly in the German title of the work, Die Ausgewanderten). Its subject is really the people who are forced out of one world and yet never really arrive in another, and so pass all their days as specters of a kind, not really living and not truly dead.

  Those who concluded from that book that Sebald was writing about the Holocaust had to revise their opinions with the translation of The Rings of Saturn, for that work suggests a much larger sense of desolation. As Sebald’s narrator wanders around the lonely empty spaces of England—always the last passenger on the bus, the only guest at the inn—all he sees are ruined castles, abandoned factories, cemeteries that are overgrown. And the pressing sense on every side of the end of Empire pushes him towards much larger thoughts of ruin and decline (to a Buddhist, he might be reminding us, every meeting ends in a departure). The book begins with its narrator in a hospital “in a state of almost total immobility.”

  In Vertigo, the sense of exile becomes most apparent when the narrator returns to his hometown. His family home has been turned into a hotel, he finds, and, checking in, he can only identify himself as a “foreign correspondent” (even as, of course, living in East Anglia, he writes in a language that none of his neighbors can follow). Every afternoon he sits alone in the “empty bar room,” and in the evenings he watches the regulars from the corner, a kind of shellshocked Rip Van Winkle. Those who find this too metaphorical to be true might here recall that the opening movement of the book told us that everything that Stendhal remembered of the campaign in Italy was a fiction: what is important is not just what happened, but what our fevered minds imagine to have happened.

  At one point, though—and just in time, perhaps—as he sits on a Tyrolean bus full of old crones complaining about the darkness and the rain, their blighted crops, suddenly the sun comes out and floods the green pastures with a kind of radiance (and, it must be said, angels are one of the presences that recur in Vertigo). Even the Italian titles he gives to two sections of his book seem, now, to be ways to try to alchemize his dark memories into something else, in a more sunlit, hopeful tongue; part of his lifelong flight from German. His theme, after all, is not the people destroyed by the war, but those only wounded, permanently incapacitated by it, the sound of knelling bells always in the distance.

  Those who hear that Sebald’s books are part of a never-ending excavation of memory may wonder about his relation to the poet of the cork-lined room, likewise famous for his shortness of breath. Yet where memory in Proust seems to bring back lost loves and careless afternoons, in Sebald it can only conjure up the dead. The memories that await him in his hometown are all of hearses and sudden deaths; of unexplained departures, or people who live their lives mute and stunned in their own rooms. (The fact, only slipped in, that the narrator’s father served in the Reich becomes the least terrifying detail of all.)

  A closer parallel is with that other maker of obsessive journeys, Melville, afflicted as he was with a sense of being caught in a tangle of the Fates, and yet committed to exploring deeps that were inseparable from the dark. Think of how Ishmael, a proto-Sebald, talks in the opening paragraph of Moby-Dick of how he goes off to sea whenever he feels “a damp drizzly November in my soul” and notices himself passing coffin warehouses. And yet the intensity, even the delirium, of Melville comes from our sense that his craziness is carrying him away, as strong waves might the sturdiest boat. What terrifies in Sebald is, if anything, the opposite: his almost posthumous calm, as of a frozen ship upon a frozen ocean.

  “Nature is a Haunted House,” he might be saying, with Emily Dickinson, “Art—a House that tries to be haunted.”

  2000

  A NEW YEAR

  On the minivan, driving through the deserted moonscape of the East, not far from Djibouti—it could be not far from almost anywhere—I found myself next to a man, a former journalist, who exulted in the chance to talk about his trip to London, and asked me how Broadway was doing (compared, he said, with those other centers of world culture, Frankfurt Airport and Heathrow). The man on the other side of me, an agricultural student, looked on with wonder at these signs of worldliness. It was coming on for New Year, and a new page in Ethiopian history. The country had held its first free elections in sixteen hundred years, and everyone now was waiting to see how the three-year-old government of Meles Zenawi would fare. After centuries of emperors, and seventeen years of Communist madness at the hands of Colonel Mengistu, Ethiopia was trying the new Western tool of democracy.

  “All politics is prostitution,” the man (whose family name was Flahflah) pronounced, and the agricultural student nodded meaningfully. “Rome was not built in a day.” He talked of how the English had devastated India, how despots were as much a part of his history as of Europe’s, how all men were brothers.

  “Americans say democracy, English say democracy,” he went on. “But this imported democracy is sometimes inapplicable. Look at me: I am a Moslem, I have four wives, seven children. In my home, I must make all the decisions. I do not allow the debate. I am in control. So how can I talk about democracy in the country when I do not allow it at home?”

  He pulled up his monogrammed briefcase, and showed me a diploma from Egypt, from fourteen years before. He had dined with many famous men, he said. “We in Africa are very low. So our leaders are very low. But in Washington, a man from the international aid development office, a very high man, I talked to him, he took me to lunch, and he said, ‘Here in America also, it is corrupt. But here, the difference is, a man chooses his friends, and they are qualified. In Africa, a leader chooses his friends, and they are illiterate—and he does not choose the qualified man.’ But it is the same. Tribalism in both cases, but we call it something different.”

  Zenawi was not perfect, he acknowle
dged, but nor was Bill Clinton. “What you say in office, and what you say out of office, they are never the same. Too many interests.”

  The agricultural student nodded once more.

  Back in Addis Ababa, the rich Indians were taking drinks on the veranda of Unity House, while local trendies revved up their Toyotas (with Harvard University stickers on them) and pale expats sweetened up their local girlfriends. Addis is almost like a rough draft of a capital, or an esprit d’escalier—a clever idea that came too late—with its buildings (OFFICE OF THE AD HOC COMMITTEE FOR PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT) set against outstretched beggars, and its signs (ADDIS ABABA SHERATON PROJECT) pointing to vacant lots. It is also, like many capitals in politically unstable countries (like Cairo, or Delhi, or Manila, say), a city of whispers. At the next table in the Beijing Restaurant, two Africans were thrashing out “Realpolitik” and “alternative programs,” while, outside, the Mercedes of the hotels and the purring BMWs of the Amhara elite carried their passengers to Christmas feasts, or to places like the Ghion Riviera, where a black-tie band was serenading the plump, and girls were crooning love songs in front of the sunlit swimming pool (“It is strictly forbidden to swim immediately after taking meals”).

  “They are brutalizing the country,” said one of the men in the next booth, feelingly. “It is a revolution ten times more powerful than Mengistu’s revolution. Because that was based on— nothing. This is based on people’s deepest feelings.”

  “Yah, man. It is like the prisoners in the Greek myth, who for thirty years took the shade as reality. They took the shade for reality!”

  They talked about the BBC World Service, while outside the former officers of Mengistu’s army walked the streets, trying to hit up foreigners for money, and children banged on cars at stop-lights, crying, “Father, father! By Jesus Christ! Hungry people!”