The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald

by W. G. Sebald

  As we stroll back across the grass, I reflect that it could hardly be otherwise. If he didn’t put his writing first, The Emigrants wouldn’t be the great work of art it is. Curiously, the final proof of this for me is not a photograph, but the absence of one. The book ends with a description of three young women sitting at a carpet loom in the Lodz ghetto in 1940, weaving literally (but as we know, in vain) to save their lives. I am convinced that I have seen their photograph on the last page; I remember the loom, their hands, their faces. But it isn’t there.

  A Poem of an Invisible Subject

  by Michael Silverblatt

  MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I’m honored to have as my guest W. G. Sebald, the author of some of the most important prose writing of the century, including the novels Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and now, Austerlitz. The prose has the breaths and cadences of poetry, and I wanted to begin by asking, were you influenced by German poetry?

  W. G. SEBALD: No, not at all by German poetry. The influence came, if from anywhere, from nineteenth-century German prose writing, which also has prosodic rhythms that are very pronounced, where prose is more important than, say, social background or plot in any manifest sense. And this nineteenth-century German prose writing even at the time was very provincial. It never was received outside Germany to any extent worth mentioning. But it’s always been very close to me, not least because the writers all hailed from the periphery of the German-speaking lands, where I also come from. Adelbert Stifter in Austria. Gottfried Keller in Switzerland. They are both absolutely wonderful writers who achieved a very, very high intensity in their prose. One can see that for them it’s never a question of getting to the nextBookworm interview, KCRW, Santa Monica, CA, December 6, 2001.

  phase of the plot, but that they devote a great deal of care and attention to each individual page, very much the way a poet has to do.

  What they all have in common is this precedence of the carefully composed page of prose over the mechanisms of the novel such as dominated fiction writing elsewhere, in France and in England, notably, at that time.

  MS: When I started reading The Emigrants I was thrilled to encounter a kind of sentence that I had thought people had stopped being able to write, and I felt great relief at its gravity, its melancholy, but also its playfulness, its generosity. How did you find the way to reinvent such a sentence? It’s not of this time.

  WGS: It’s not of this time. There are hypotactical syntax forms in these sentences which have been abandoned by practically all the writers now for reasons of convenience. Also because simply they are no longer accustomed to it. But if you dip into any form of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century discursive prose—the English essayists, for instance—these forms exist in previous ages of literature and they simply have fallen into disrepair.

  MS: The wandering that the prose does, both syntactically and in terms of subjects, reminds me a bit of my favorite of the English essayists, de Quincey: the need, in a sense, to almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one center of attention to another, and a feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts. This I think is among the loveliest qualities, especially in the new book, Austerlitz.

  WGS: Well, certainly, moving from one subject, from one theme, from one concern to another always requires some kind of sleight of hand.

  MS: I was struck in the opening of Austerlitz by the way in which the narrator moves from a zoo, from the . . . what is it called?

  WGS: The Nocturama.

  MS: The Nocturama. It’s a structure for animals that are awake only at night. And before long, the train station to which he returns becomes the double for the zoo. The eyes of certain thinkers become the doubles for the intense eyes of the nocturnal animals. Then the train station recalls a fortress, and there’s a gradual opening out, an unfolding of structures and interpositions. The speaker might well be the person spoken to, by virtue of this logic. And it extends with, it seems to me, an invisible referent—that as we go from the zoo to the train station, from the train station to the fortress, from the fortress to the jail, to the insane asylum, that the missing term is the concentration camp . . .

  WGS: Yes.

  MS: And that always circling is this silent presence being left out but always gestured toward. Is that correct?

  WGS: Yes. I mean, your description corresponds very much to my intentions. I’ve always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of vilification of minorities, the attempt, well-nigh achieved, to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it’s practically impossible to do this; to write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible. So you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something on your mind but that you do not necessarily roll out, you know, on every other page. The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience, that he is and has been perhaps for a long time engaged with these questions. And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly addressed. I think it is sufficient to remind people, because we’ve all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things. And also paralyze, as it were, our moral capacity. So the only way in which one can approach these things, in my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.

  MS: It seems to me, though, that in addition, it is the invisible subject as one reads the book and one watches moths dying or many of the images. It’s almost as if this has become a poem of an invisible subject, all of whose images refer back to it, a metaphor that has no statement of its ground, only of its vehicle, as they used to say.

  WGS: Yes, precisely. You know, there is in Virginia Woolf this—probably known better to you than to me—wonderful example of her description of a moth coming to its end on a window-pane somewhere in Sussex. This is a passage of some two pages only, I think, and it’s written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. There’s no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls, the souls of those who got away, and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern.

  MS: I notice in the work, in particular in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, the tradition of the walker. I’m thinking of Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and thinking, too, that it was once beautifully common for a prose writer to write what he sees on his walk. In fact, the naturalist Louis Agassiz said that Thoreau sometimes used to bring things to him in the laboratory at Harvard, and that the things Thoreau picked up by accident were never less than unique. It was necessary for a writer to develop an eye. And it seems to my ear that the rhythms here have to do a great deal with the writing of entomologists and naturalists.

  WGS: Yes, the study of nature in all its forms. The walker’s approach to viewing nature is a phenomenological one and the scientist’s approach is a much more incisive one, but they all belong together. And in my view, even today it is true that scientists very frequently write better than novelists. So I tend to read scientists by preference almost, and I’ve always found them a great source of inspiration. It doesn’t matter particularly whether they’re eighteenth-century scientists—Humboldt—or someone contemporary like Rupert Sheldrake. These are all very close to me, and people without whom I couldn’t pursue my work.

  MS: It seems that in Austerlitz, even more so than in the other books, there is a ghostly prose. Dust laden, mist laden, penetrated by odd and misdirecting lights . . . as if the attempt here is really to become lost in a fog.

  WGS: Yes, well, these kinds of natural phenomena like fog, like mist, which render the environment and
one’s ability to see it almost impossible, have always interested me greatly. One of the great strokes of genius in standard nineteenth-century fiction, I always thought, was the fog in Bleak House. This ability to make of one natural phenomenon a thread that runs through a whole text and then kind of upholds this extended metaphor is something that I find very, very attractive in a writer.

  MS: It seems to me that this book is truly the first to pay extended stylistic respects to the writer who, it’s been said, has been your mentor and model, Thomas Bernhard. I wondered, was it after three books that one felt comfortable in creating a work that could be compared to the writing of a master and a mentor?

  WGS: Yes, I was always, as it were, tempted to declare openly from quite early on my great debt of gratitude to Thomas Bernhard. But I was also conscious of the fact that one oughtn’t to do that too openly, because then immediately one gets put in a drawer which says Thomas Bernhard, a follower of Thomas Bernhard, etc., and these labels never go away. Once one has them they stay with one. But nevertheless, it was necessary for me eventually to acknowledge his constant presence, as it were, by my side. What Thomas Bernhard did to postwar fiction writing in the German language was to bring to it a new radicality which didn’t exist before, which wasn’t compromised in any sense. Much of German prose fiction writing, of the fifties certainly, but of the sixties and seventies also, is severely compromised, morally compromised, and because of that, aesthetically frequently insufficient. And Thomas Bernhard was in quite a different league because he occupied a position which was absolute. Which had to do with the fact that he was mortally ill since late adolescence and knew that any day the knock could come at the door. And so he took the liberty which other writers shied away from taking. And what he achieved, I think, was also to move away from the standard pattern of the standard novel. He only tells you in his books what he heard from others. So he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative. You’re always sure that what he tells you is related, at one remove, at two removes, at two or three. That appealed to me very much, because this notion of the omniscient narrator who pushes around the flats on the stage of the novel, you know, cranks things up on page three and moves them along on page four and one sees him constantly working behind the scenes, is something that I think one can’t do very easily any longer. So Bernhard, single-handedly I think, invented a new form of narrating which appealed to me from the start.

  MS: It’s not only a new form of narrating. It’s a new form of making things stop in space. Because the Bernhard works are often composed in one long paragraph, sometimes in one long sentence, if I’m not mistaken. The effect is of a dream, of being spoken to in a dream, and your attention can’t help but flicker in and out. You can move back a page or two and discover the very careful links of the chain. But the intensity has been so nonstop that it’s almost as if it breaks the mind’s attempt to hold it in a chain.

  WGS: Yes, it is that. Bernhard’s mode of telling a tale is related to all manner of things, not least the theatrical monologue. In the early book that bears the English title Gargoyles and in German is called Die Verstörung, the whole of the second part is the monologue of the Prince of Salla, and it would make a wonderful piece on the stage. So it has the intensity, the presence that one can experience in the theater—he brings that to fiction.

  MS: I’ve been very amused because critics of your work in America seem to be bewildered by its tone, and I don’t, in fact, find its tone bewildering. I think they are unfamiliar with it because of its tenderness, a tenderness brought to bear on subjects that have usually compelled indignation, scorn, and, certainly in Beckett and in Bernhard, a huge and glittering kind of contempt or scorn. Here it really has that quality of—am I wrong here?—of infinite care taken in listening to speakers who are not being reviled in the slightest.

  WGS: Yes. I don’t know where it quite comes from, but I do like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another. Because in my experience once they begin to talk, they have things to tell you that you won’t be able to get from anywhere else. And I felt that need of being able to listen to people telling me things from very early on, not least I think because I grew up in postwar Germany where there was—I say this quite often—something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e., your parents never told you anything about their experiences because there was at the very least a great deal of shame attached to these experiences. So one kept them under lock and seal. And I for one doubt that my mother and father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any of these subjects. There wasn’t a written or spoken agreement about these things. It was a tacit agreement. It was something that was never touched on. So I’ve always . . . I’ve grown up feeling that there is some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses one can trust. And once I started . . . I would never have encountered these witnesses if I hadn’t left my native country at the age of twenty, because the people who could tell you the truth, or something at least approximating the truth, did not exist in that country any longer. But one could find them in Manchester and in Leeds or in North London or in Paris—in various places, Belgium and so on.

  MS: I find it almost spooky how frequently these critics—I guess expecting the austerities and harshnesses of certain postwar prose—don’t see that this is characterized by tenderness, bewilderment, horror, infinite pity, and a kind of almost willed self-mortification. That is, I am willing to hear and place great acts of attention on all things with the chance and hope that revelation will occur.

  WGS: Well, I suppose if there is such a thing as a revelation, if there can be a moment in a text which is surrounded by something like claritas, veritas, and the other facets that qualify epiphanies, then it can be achieved only by actually going to certain places, by looking, by expending great amounts of time in actually exposing oneself to places that no one else goes to. These can be backyards in cities, they can be places like that fortress of Breendonk in Austerlitz. I had read about Breendonk before, in connection with Jean Améry. But the difference is staggering, you know—whether you’ve just read about it or whether you actually go and spend several days in and around there to see what these things are actually like.

  MS: It was once explained to me that there was in German prose something called das Glück im Winkel, happiness in a corner. I think that your radical contribution to prose is to bring the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world. So that a completely or newly forgotten prose tone is being brought into the postmodern century, and the extraordinary echo, the almost immediate abyss that opens between the prose and the subject, is what results. Automatically, ghosts, echoes, trance states—it’s almost as if you are allowing the world to howl into the seashell of this prose style.

  WGS: Well, I think [Walter] Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast. The old-fashionedness of the diction or of the narrative tone is therefore nothing to do with nostalgia for a better age that’s gone past but is simply something that, as it were, heightens the awareness of that which we have managed to engineer in this century.

  A Chilly Extravagance

  by Michael Hofmann

  One of the most striking developments in English-language publishing in the past five years has been the extraordinary success of the books of W. G. Sebald. The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo were received—pretty unanimously, as far as I could tell—with deference and superlatives. This is the more unlikely as I don’t think such a success could have been predicted for them or their author. Sebald, a professor at the University of East Anglia for many years an
d settled in England since 1970, nevertheless insisted on writing in his native German—and then taking a hand in the heavy, somewhat dated English presentation of his books. These books, furnished with, one presumed, the author’s own photographs, hovered coquettishly on the verge of nonfiction; certainly, their elaboration of what appeared to be painstakingly researched historical narratives and circumstances contained much of their appeal. They called themselves novels, but they were more like introverted lectures, suites of digression, their form given them by the knowledge they contained; like water, finding its own levels everywhere, pooling and dribbling, with excurses on such things as silk, herrings, architecture, battles.

  It was strange to see so many of England’s hidden stops—Originally appeared in Arts and Books, Prospect, September 20, 2001.

  snobbery, gossip, melancholy, privileged information, eccentricities, the countryside reliably full of rich Keatsian glooms, daylight ghosts, dead machines, hulks of buildings, your Edward Thomas, your Pevsner, your Larkin, your Motion—so expertly manipulated by someone not even writing in English. But what was even stranger was that Sebald operated without any of the rigmarole or the pleasantnesses of the novel. The complete absence of humor, charm, grace, touch is startling—as startling as the fact that books written without them could enjoy any sort of success in England. Or, to take a different measure, that books without much pretense of character or action, but where the role of story is taken by thought or reading—or even more starkly, by the memory of thought or reading—could catch on at all. It is almost unaccountable to me that in the culture of “the good read” or “the book at bedtime” people would bother with books where the action—history—is always going on elsewhere, where the connection between the speaker and the hero or the plot is unspoken, unexamined, possibly nonexistent; where for the dearly loved cogs and springs of conventional fiction there is no greater lubricant or persuader than ruminant curiosity.