by W. G. Sebald
With admirable reticence, Sebald has given us no reason for the cause of his depression. But if only because we have just read the Beyle piece, and there are various tiny hints scattered here and there, we suspect that romance is at least part of the problem, or, as Dr. K. will think of it in the following piece: the impossibility of leading “the only possible life, to live together with a woman, each one free and independent.” Just to see the name Casanova, then, to think of that great seducer and endlessly resourceful schemer, produces a fierce contrast. Yet even Casanova experienced a period of depression and mental paralysis. When? When, like some hero of Kafka’s, he was imprisoned without explanation in the Doge’s Palace. And how did he escape? With the help of a coincidence.
In order to decide on what day he would attempt to break out of his cell, Casanova used a complicated random system to consult Orlando Furioso, thus, incredibly, happening on the words: “Between the end of October and the beginning of November.” The escape was successful. Casanova fled to France, where he later invented for himself the identity Chevalier de Seingalt. But just as remarkable as this propitious consultation of Orlando Furioso is the fact that October 31 turns out to be the very day upon which our author finds himself in Venice. Sebald is amazed, alarmed, fascinated.
Again and again it is coincidence, or uncanny repetition, those most evident outcroppings of the underlying mysterious-ness of existence, that jerks the melancholic out of his paralysis. It is as if, disillusioned to the point where certain follies have become unthinkable (and contemporary Europe, as Sebald showed in The Emigrants, has good reason for being thus disillusioned), we can only be set in motion by a fascination with life’s mysteries, which are simply forced upon us in all sorts of ways. Between, or perhaps after, passion and glory lie the uncertain resource of curiosity, the recurring emotions of amazement and alarm. Any act of remembering will offer a feast.
Toward that midnight between October and November, Sebald rows out on the Venetian lagoon with an acquaintance who points out the city incinerator, the fires of which burn in perpetuity, and explains that he has been thinking a great deal about death and resurrection. “He had no answers,” Sebald writes, “but believed the questions were quite sufficient to him.” It is an echo, conscious or otherwise, of Rilke’s advice to his “young poet” to “have patience with everything unresolved and try to love the questions themselves.” Rilke was another German writer who had considerable problems both with military academies and with love.
But it would be a mistake to imagine that Sebald presents coincidence in a positive light. Extraordinary parallels may, briefly, release the paralyzed mind from its cell, get it sorting through old diaries, or tracking down books in libraries, or comically attempting on a bus, as in Sebald’s case, to take photographs of twin boys who exactly resemble the adolescent Kafka, but they do this in the way that an alarm or a siren might. There is a destructive side to coincidence. It has a smell of death about it. What is the night “between the end of October and the beginning of November,” if not the night before All Saints’ Day, I morti, the Day of the Dead?
Why is this? To “coincide” is “to occupy the same place or time,” says Chambers’s dictionary, “to correspond, to be identical.” The coincidence that Stendhal, Kafka, and Sebald all take similar trips at similar times of year, the first two exactly a century apart, may set curiosity in motion, but it also removes uniqueness from these events; the recurrence diminishes the original, replaces it, falsifies it, the way Beyle reports finding his memories of landscapes destroyed by their painterly representations, the way even an old photograph may be considered as stealing something of its original.
Here we are approaching the core of Sebald’s vision, the spring at once of his pessimism, comedy, and lyricism. Engagement in the present inevitably involves devouring the past. Waking up in his Venice hotel on November 1, remarking on the silence, Sebald contrasts it to the ceaseless surging of traffic he hears in the hotels of other cities, the endless oceanic roar of cars and trucks released wave upon wave from traffic lights. He concludes his description: “For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.” To be set, with Casanova, in motion, is to be returned to the business of destruction. The chasseur, or hunter, he who consumes his own sport (and what was Casanova if not a hunter?), is a recurring figure in this book. Occasionally Sebald hears his arrow whistle past an ear.
It is uncanny, on reading a work that makes so much of coincidences, to find it coinciding in an unsettling way with one’s own life. Enviably adept at finding images and anecdotes that will deliver his vision, Sebald now tells us of his experiences in Verona, the town where I have lived for almost twenty years. Eating in a gloomy pizzeria, he is unsettled by the painting of a ship in peril on stormy seas. Trying to distract himself he reads an article in the paper about the so-called caso Ludwig. For some years a string of local murders were accompanied by the claims of a group calling itself Ludwig. Some of the victims were prostitutes, and there were incendiary attacks on discotheques which the murderers felt to be dens of sin. Again the sexual and the military seemed to have combined in the most disturbing fashion. How could Sebald not be appalled by the macabre German connection? And when the waiter brings his bill, he reads in the small print (again we have a reproduction) that the restaurant owner is one “Carlo Cadavero.” This is too much, and the author flees on the night train to Innsbruck.
Aside from the fact that I was able to look up Carlo Cadavero’s name in the Verona phone book, what struck me as uncanny was a comment from later in this piece where, returning to Verona seven years later, Sebald hears how the two adolescents, Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan, who created this terrible identity Ludwig, a sort of negative two-man Don Quixote, were tried and imprisoned. He remarks that although the evidence against them was “irrefutable,” “the investigation produced nothing that might have made it possible to comprehend a series of crimes extending over almost seven years.”
Irrefutable? It would have been about the same time as Sebald’s second trip that, while carrying out English oral exams at the University of Verona, I found myself looking at the ID of a young woman whose surname was Furlan. Seeing my eyebrows rise, she said, “Yes, I am his sister. And he is innocent.” She then went on to pass her exam, a conversation test, in exemplary fashion explaining to me with the utmost conviction that the whole thing was absurd and her brother the sweetest, most normal person on earth. Despite the irrefutable evidence, she believed this, as no doubt the sisters of those who later commit war crimes believe in all honesty that they are growing up in the most normal of families. They are. Not for nothing is Sebald’s writing frequently set alight with images of terrible conflagrations that inexplicably consume everything, leaving the world to start again from under a veil of ash. Never mentioned, Shiva presides.
The time has come to say something about this writer’s extraordinary prose, without which his rambling plots and ruminations would be merely clever and unsettling. Like the coincidences he speaks of, it is a style that recovers, devours, and displaces the past. He has Thomas Bernhard’s love of the alarming superlative, the tendency to describe states of the most devastating confusion with great precision and control. But the touch is much lighter than Bernhard’s, the instrument more flexible. Kafka is present here too, perhaps from time to time Robert Walser, and no doubt others as well. But all these predecessors have been completely digested, destroyed, and remade in Sebald and above all in his magnificent descriptions, which mediate so effectively between casual incident and grand reflection. One suspects too that Michael Hulse’s translation, which possesses a rare internal coherence of register and rhythm, is itself the product of a long process of digestion and recasting, a wonderful, as it were, coincidence. Some of the English is breathtaking. All the same, the most effective moments
are often the more modest stylistically. Here is the author in a railway carriage with two beautiful women; knowing what we know of him, any approach to them is impossible, yet how attractive they are in their mystery!
Outside, in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, the poplars and fields of Lombardy went by. Opposite me sat a Franciscan nun of about thirty or thirty-five and a young girl with a colorful patchwork jacket over her shoulders. The girl had got on at Brescia, while the nun had already been on the train at Desenzano. The nun was reading her breviary, and the girl, no less immersed, was reading a photo story. Both were consummately beautiful, both very much present and yet altogether elsewhere. I admired the profound seriousness with which each of them turned the pages. Now the Franciscan nun would turn a page over, now the girl in the colorful jacket, then the girl again and then the Franciscan nun once more. Thus the time passed without my ever being able to exchange a glance with either the one or the other. I therefore tried to practice a like modesty, and took out Der Beredte Italiener, a handbook published in 1878 in Berne, for all who wish to make speedy and assured progress in colloquial Italian.
Only Sebald, one suspects, would study an out-of-date phrase book while missing the chance to speak to two attractive ladies. The determinedly old-fashioned aura that hangs about all his prose is part and parcel of his decidedly modern version of non-engagement. Yet from the “insane loquacity” of the romantic Beyle to the charming picture in the book’s last piece of Sebald enamored of his teacher and “filling my exercise books with a web of lines and numbers in which I hoped to entangle Fraulein Rauch forever,” few writers make us more aware of the seductive powers of language. Sebald’s literary enticements seek to achieve an intimacy that will not be so destructive as other follies: the direct encounter, the hunter’s knife. This truly is a “madness most discreet.”
All of which leads us to the only possible objection that I can imagine being raised against this remarkable writer. That to succumb to his seduction is to resign oneself to more of the same: the broken lives, the coincidences, these unhappy men and enigmatic women. Is it a problem? With his accustomed blend of slyness and grim comedy, Sebald tackles the issue himself in a section from the last piece of Vertigo. Sitting in the hotel in the Bavarian village of his childhood, he observes a gloomy painting depicting woodcutters at work and recalls that the artist, Hengge, was famous for his pictures of woodcutters. “His murals, always in dark shades of brown, were to be seen on the walls of buildings all around W. and the surrounding area, and were always of his favored motifs.” The author sets out to tramp around the surrounding woods and villages to rediscover all these paintings, finding them “most unsettling,” which is to say, for Sebald, good, since only what is unsettling attracts his attention, heightens sensibility, warns of life’s dangers, recuperates its horrors in pathos. He then gives us the following comment on Hengge’s tendency always to paint the same subject, ending with a moment of alarming but also amusing vertigo, that dizzying empty space that Sebald finds at the core of every intensity:Hengge the painter was perfectly capable of extending his repertoire. But whenever he was able to follow his own artistic inclination, he would paint only pictures of woodcutters. Even after the war, when for a variety of reasons his monumental works were no longer much in demand, he continued in the same vein. In the end, his house was said to have been so crammed with pictures of woodcutters that there was scarcely room for Hengge himself, and death, so the obituary said, caught him in the midst of a work showing a woodcutter on a sledge hurtling down into the valley below.
As long as Sebald shows this kind of resourcefulness, my only regret, when his task obliges him to repeat himself, will be the tendency of the new book to eclipse the old.
Ghost Hunter
by Eleanor Wachtel
ELEANOR WACHTEL: Sebald writes a requiem for a generation in The Emigrants, an extraordinary book about memory, exile, and death. The writing is lyrical, the mood elegiac. These are stories of absence and displacement, loss and suicide, Germans and Jews, written in the most evocative, haunting, and understated way. The Emigrants is variously called a novel, a narrative quartet, or simply unclassifiable. How would you describe it?
W. G. SEBALD: It’s a form of prose fiction. I imagine it exists more frequently on the European continent than in the Anglo-Saxon world, i.e., dialogue plays hardly any part in it at all. Everything is related round various corners in a periscopic sort of way. In that sense it doesn’t conform to the patterns that standard fiction has established. There isn’t an authorial narrator. And there are various limitations of this kind that seem to push the book into a special category. But what exactly to call it, I don’t know.
EW: You’ve put together four stories of four different lives that have connections and resonate but seem to be discrete in the telling. Why did you want to write about them together in The Emigrants?
A version of this interview, recorded on October 16, 1997, was broadcast on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company on April 18, 1998, and produced by Sandra Rabinovitch.
WGS: Because the patterns are remarkably similar. They are all stories about suicide or, to be more precise, suicides at an advanced age, which is relatively rare but quite frequent as a symptom of what we know as the survivor syndrome.
I was familiar with that particular symptom in the abstract, through such cases as Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski, and various others who failed to escape the shadows which were cast over their lives by the Shoah and ultimately succumbed to the weight of memory. That tends to happen quite late in these people’s lives, when they’re in retirement age, as it were, when all of a sudden some kind of void opens up. The duties of professional life recede into the background and then, you know, time for thought is there all of a sudden. As I was working at one point round about 1989, 1990 on Jean Améry in particular because he originated from an area not far from the area in which I grew up, it occurred to me that in fact I did know four people who fitted that particular category almost exactly. And it was at that point that I became preoccupied with these lives, started looking into them, traveled, tried to find all the traces I could possibly find, and in the end, had to write this down.
The stories as they appear in the book follow pretty much the lines or the trajectories of these four lives as they were in reality. The changes that I made, i.e., extending certain vectors, foreshortening certain things, adding here and there, taking something away, are marginal changes, changes of style rather than changes of substance. In the first three stories there is almost a one-to-one relationship between these lives and the lives of the people I knew. In the case of the fourth story I used two different foils, one of a painter who currently still works in England and the other a landlord I had in Manchester when I first moved there. And because the landlord I had in Manchester is still alive today, I didn’t want him to appear, as it were, in an undisguised form in what is essentially a work of documentary fiction, so I introduced this second foil in order to make it less obvious. But they’re pretty much the same life stations that these people went through that I knew very well.
EW: You say at one point that it’s “as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them.” This idea seems to preoccupy you.
WGS: Well, I don’t quite know what the reason for that is, except that death entered my own life at a very early point. I grew up in a very small village, very high up in the Alps, about three thousand feet above sea level. And in the immediate postwar years when I grew up there, it was in many ways quite an archaic place. For instance, you couldn’t bury the dead in the winter because the ground was frozen and there was no way of digging it up. So you had to leave them in the woodshed for a month or two until the thaw came. You grew up with this knowledge that death is around you, and when and if someone died, it happened in the middle or in the center of the house, as it were, the dead person went through their agonies in the living room, and then before the burial they would be s
till part of the family for possibly three, four days. So I was from a very early point on very familiar, much more familiar than people are nowadays, with the dead and the dying. I have always had at the back of my mind this notion that of course these people aren’t really gone, they just hover somewhere at the perimeter of our lives and keep coming in on brief visits. And photographs are for me, as it were, one of the emanations of the dead, especially these older photographs of people no longer with us. Nevertheless, through these pictures, they do have what seems to me some sort of a spectral presence. And I’ve always been intrigued by that. It’s got nothing to do with the mystical or the mysterious. It is just a remnant of a much more archaic way of looking at things.
If you go for instance to a place like Corsica . . . Nowadays of course it’s not quite the same any more, but very recently, twenty years ago, the dead in Corsican culture had an unquestioned presence in the lives of the living. They were always reckoned with, they were always seen to be just round the corner, they were always seen to be coming into the house of an evening to get a crust of bread or to march down the main street as a gang with drums and fifes. And in more atavistic cultures, of which there were pockets in Europe until, I would think, about the 1960s, there is always a presence of these departed. And certainly there were areas in the Alps in the postwar years where that was also the case. Now it’s all obliterated, of course. But somehow it got stuck in my mind, and I think it’s possibly from that quarter that my preoccupation stems.