Category: German Literature

Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I read in the original German, is not a book that brought me much pleasure. It is probably the best-known work by the Austrian author Peter Handke, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Thankfully, it is quite short. I covered my copy with annotations, but with me, that is not always the sign of a good book. In fact, I was quite convinced the novel was a complete waste of time and energy until somewhere around the halfway mark when I began to perceive some actual sense in it and dutifully upgraded it to merely a book I will be glad both to have read and never to have to read again.

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is a novel about Bloch, a former goalkeeper who loses his job, murders a random woman, and then loses his mind, though possibly not in that order. The murder happens early on and after it, Bloch leaves town and spends time loafing about near the Austrian border. He gets into fights and flirts with various women, and he goes on walks and goes mad while looking at things. This is all that happens. From such nothingness, it is for us as readers to work out why the book has gathered the reputation of a literary masterwork. As much as I want to complain, I will try to turn my complaints into strengths for the book.

The way I found to appreciate this book was to consider it as part of the rather rich tradition of German literary works dealing with madness, such as Büchner’s “Lenz”, Hoffmann’s “Sandman”, and Heym’s “The Madman”. As a theme, madness is a rich one because it naturally turns itself around to raise questions about who is actually mad – Bloch, us, or society. At the same time, the particular form of Bloch’s madness, which so often seems to relate to perception and speech, connects The Goalie’s Anxiety… to the language crisis affecting German letters at the beginning of the 20th century, where Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were only some of the big names that tried to consider our ability to represent anything at all with words.

Translations are my own.

Language of Experience

In a way, reading in another language gives you a sort of madness akin to the one afflicting Bloch. Much more so even than when we closely read on our own, we notice thingswhen we have to trudge through a foreign tongue. Words and phrases that repeat strike us, and odd formulations strike us too. From the beginning, The Goalie’s Anxiety… strikes us with its numbness. The very first word in German is “dem” – the dative, telling us that something is happening to Bloch, rather than the other way around. That something is his firing.

The passive voice we tend to associate with passivity and numbness, and that is the dominant note of the book. The language is simple, and the sentences are short. Handke’s narrator typically refers to characters with their roles, not their names. Even Bloch’s ex-wife and child are deprived of the emotional significance that a name would give them. Most of the dialogue is reported, rather than given directly so that it too is numb. When Bloch calls a woman, he has to talk for some time “until she knew who he was.”

This numbness is Bloch’s world. Sometimes he stretches out to play an active role, as when he commits murder, but mostly things happen to him, like random fights and his anxiety in the city. He reads a lot of newspapers but there’s no real sense that he takes anything in. It seems compulsive more than anything. But newspapers themselves, like the cinema that plays an important role, are sites where we are passive receivers rather than active agents. A newspaper tells you, in essence, that something was happening in the world, but you weren’t involved. Just as a film shows action you also can only see as a spectator.

This general numbness is what makes the book hard to read. There are paragraphs, but nothing like white space for pauses or chapters. This has, again, a levelling effect. Everything that happens, from murder to looking at a field, is equally important – or, we might better conclude, equally unimportant. It also leads to a certain perception of determinism because there are no breaks to the logic. One thing just follows on from the other, except for the “plötzlich” (“suddenly”) that begins the paragraph with the murder. In other words, the way the story comes to us makes us numb and feel our own powerlessness.

Bloch’s Madness

We never really see into Bloch’s mind, only as far as his perceptions of things. Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else”, where mental collapse is seen from within, here madness is seen almost from without – “Everything he saw disturbed him”. We learn, at other times, how things disturbed him. But the language is thoroughly unemotive. “Bloch was” either “excited”, or “not at peace”, or “disturbed” – this is a typical and repeated sentence. He does not have an inner world, at least not one that is revealed. Neither firing nor murder actually results in any feeling that we can see.

Instead, our understanding of Bloch comes from the surface, both from his actions and perceptions. The least interesting thing is that he struggles with any kind of commitment or acknowledgement of others’ existence – he is numb to the idea of it. He has no real friends; his marriage has collapsed; he organises meetings with women and then leaves the bar with another person before the original person arrives; he casually murders another woman after a night together.

More interesting, though is his perception of things. Martin Swales’ comment on Büchner’s “Lenz”, that it is the tale of “a mind already unhinged, in the sense that there is no coherent and sustaining relationship to the world”, is perfectly apt here. In that novella, there is no violence, but there is the same problem – a man walking about trying to make sense of things and failing utterly. (“Lenz”, about a poet who went mad, is more enjoyable to read for Büchner’s beautiful language, which shows that poetic mind at work.)

Bloch’s problems circle around sensory problems and odd fixations, but these specific problems change. At one point, he notices persistence – of urine on a market wall, of shells he was chewing the day before. At another, he becomes obsessed with asking the price of objects. At still another, he wants to find something that has been lost and refuses to believe that someone else has found it when he is told, as if he wants to be some kind of hero.

What links these oddities and all the others? Perhaps the key one to me is the idea of control. In the numbness of Bloch’s world, fixations – like murder – are a way of trying to impart a framework and meaning and personal presence onto things. They are a reaction to individual powerlessness. We read the word “wehr” (“defence”) more than a few times here in the context of Bloch’s attempts to survive life. He is actually trying to find some way of holding on to his grip on things, even if that way looks even more mad than what came before it to us.

Words, words, words.

Which brings us to the language problem. Ultimately, stories like The Goalie’s Anxiety… are made of words. So, madness must come to us in words. Bloch’s final collapse comes to us as a “Wortspielkrankeit”, a “problem of language games” or “punning”. He stops finding any meaning in language. He hears a woman scream and thinks it has no meaning, so he ignores it. He tries to tell a story but finds he needs to explain the meaning of every single word before he can use it, so he is unable to tell the story at all. Things swerve rapidly into an overabundance of meaning, however, when Bloch becomes paranoid and convinced that everything is a code only he can read if only he can see behind the language. Still, words are failing him – giving him too much, or altogether too little.

In Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century, something similar was happening. Language had been exhausted by realism, and poets like Rilke, Trakl, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought to recover the meaning of words like “spirit” from simple definitions that killed their significance. There was both a huge sense of hidden meaning, with Freud gaining popularity and showing hidden mental worlds even we could not access, and a striving to find meaning in the desperately desolate world left by god-killing thinkers like Max Weber and Nietzsche. Sometimes the struggle was too much. Hofmannsthal gave up on poetry with the fictional “Letter of Lord Chandos”, which shares much with Bloch’s own problem.

In that work, the fictional Lord struggles with the fact that he has “totally lost the ability to put anything coherent together in word or thought.” He has only a personal language, uncommunicable. “Words… break apart in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”. This is what Bloch has too. He stops being able to communicate, so he just becomes more and more isolated from others while his internal language grows stranger and stranger. He is left adrift in a world he cannot find words for, but nobody cares.  

Whose madness? Film and Society

The “Letter of Lord Chandos” is a letter, written by one man. The Goalie’s Anxiety… puts the same kind of madness into a social setting. How does that change our understanding of that madness? For one, we see that it goes beyond just Bloch. Near the end of the book he talks to a village schoolmaster who reveals that nearly all the children there are unable to create full sentences. If that is the case, then the problem is not just Bloch’s. We know this already, though. Bloch is subject to random violence himself, and on the streets, he greets people who don’t return that greeting. The world itself is numb and cruel. If it is so, then the same solutions – conspiracist thinking, odd fixations, and finally murder – may appear to others too. It’s not just noblemen who get word-sick.

Then there is the cinema, a modern intrusion Hofmannsthal did not have to worry about. Like the newspapers that Bloch is constantly reading, cinema runs through the book – the woman he kills works at one, and Bloch regularly compares things in real life with things he has seen in films. The significance of cinema, it seems to me, is twofold. I have already mentioned how it numbs the world by making it seem like life is elsewhere. For example, Bloch reads about the police hunting him in the paper, but he does not react to it – because it does not feel real, it feels like it is happening somewhere else. But then, films also represent reality without being a reality. They create a space for us to lose our sense that the world we see is the real world, and in that space Bloch wanders, unable to see sense.

Conclusion

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is thus a novel of madness and the breakdown of language, rather than just a boring story about a man who commits a murder and then mooches around. It sits in a tradition of such works in German literature and contributes to it by having a perspective – external and sensory rather than stream-of-consciousness as in Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” – and a focus – language collapse as social rather than purely individual, as in Büchner’s “Lenz” – which sets it apart from other works. It is a strange little novel.

But reading it brought me no joy, and analysing it, now that I don’t pay professors to read that analysis and say nice things about it, was not very joyous either. If our world is as numb and miserable as Bloch’s, why read about it? As for Bloch himself, the perspective choice means that even if he were charming (Humbert Humbert was dead wrong when he said “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), we would hardly know it. Else is likeable – I feel sad when she goes nuts. Bloch was an empty, violent man from the beginning. His only character development consists of actually losing his mind.

So, interesting, but a tale that’s hard to recommend. “Lenz” is much shorter and more beautiful, “Else” much more emotionally impactful, and “Lord Chandos” more likely to come to mind when you try to live and say things in this world of ours. Handke kicks the ball, but it hits the post.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna and the Approach to his Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born British philosopher, “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating” (Bertrand Russell), was a master logician who studied under Frege and Russell before, like any great apprentice, overcoming them in one fell linguistic swoop with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

In that work he put to bed all the codswallop about metaphysics and morals, ethics and eschatology, which had bedevilled philosophy for centuries, nay, millennia, with his canonical “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and his dismissal of all the above as nonsense. Wittgenstein was a knife that cut away all the gristle. All that mattered was logic, cold and hard.

But is that what he was really about? Is that what the Tractatus was really about?

This slender book, first published in 1921 and now out of copyright, has started recently reappearing in a flurry of new translations in English, one of which has prompted me to write to you today. But much more than the book, the main subject is the approach to the book. Is it really, with its crystalline numbered tree structure, a structured work of logic alone, or is there reason to think there is more to it?

The introduction to my edition, and what it passes over

I first wrote about Wittgenstein the man after reading Ray Monk’s biography, but could not make my way through any of his actual works. It was all too alien to me. Now I have finally gone through the Tractatus in the new OUP translation made by Michael Beaney, who to judge from his various distinguished positions is extremely successful in his field of study. In fact, the book is more introduction than Wittgenstein, with a long traditional introduction and then a long note on the text, explaining the publication history of the work, and finally the seventy pages of the Tractatus itself, followed by an annex with simplified “tree-structure” of the propositions, notes and glossary.

Beaney talks a lot about logic and the influence on Wittgenstein of Russell and Frege, two titans of funny letters and mathematical squiggles. He mentions contemporary scientists Boltzmann and Hertz and the philosopher Schopenhauer as other influences, whilst giving an indication of in what this influence consisted, at least in his opinion. But there is something funny in this, even to one little versed in philosophy. Schopenhauer, for example, this arch pessimist, is reduced to a reaction to Kant and his understanding of sensory and rational experience. Pessimism, in Beaney’s reading of influence, or the ethics which followed on from Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, does not get a look in.

This is the first hint of dissatisfaction, but there is more to come. The account of the sixth section of the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein wrote after the experience front line action in the First World War, is merely the part that “gave Wittgenstein the most trouble.” The trouble, however, is logical for Beaney. The statements on ethics and the meaning of life and human happiness, are given a single paragraph in his account. They do not appear to be important, more aberrations to be passed over in relative silence.

Yet is this man just a genius of logic?

Bertrand Russell, finally meeting Wittgenstein after the war where he had fought bravely before ending up in Italian prisoner-of-war camp, wrote home to complain of him: “He has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and [German mystic religious writer] Angelus Silesius, he seriously contemplates becoming a monk.” The remark is quoted by Beaney, but only in the context of Wittgenstein’s attempts to get the Tractatus published. Another famous letter, to Ludwig von Ficker, a publisher, is also introduced in a way that suggests we must assume it is of no importance at all to understanding the book:

“it will probably be a help to you if I write a few words about my book. You see, I am quite sure that you won’t get all that much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; it’s subject matter will seem quite alien to you. But it isn’t really alien to you, because the book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits”

During the war, Wittgenstein carried around a copy of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he said “saved” his life. His fellow soldiers even took to calling him “the man with the Gospels.” He disliked Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus, which was necessary for the work to be published in English, saying that Russell had misunderstood him. This misunderstanding seemed only to increase with time. Russell thought the later Wittgenstein had squandered his talents completely.

Other things about Wittgenstein’s behaviour seem odd. I remember from Monk’s biography how Wittgenstein would go into Russell’s chambers at Cambridge late at night and pace around, saying that he would kill himself once he left, thinking and pacing for hours at a time until he resolved whatever was bothering him. And when he met the men who became the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, he shocked them by reading them poetry and recommending someone as “illogical” as Heidegger. In short, Wittgenstein himself, in his living, seemed anything but a merely logical genius. He seemed animated by another force. And if the man was animated by another force, is it not likely that his first work was animated by another force too? 

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

I bought this book, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, back when I first thought I would read Wittgenstein. It has proven the work which has most helped me to engage with the Tractatus, far more than Beaney’s introduction or any other which I have read, which is funny given that the Tractatus is scarcely quoted here, and Wittgenstein is part of the shadows, certainly not the main act like the title might imply. But the arguments in the work are convincing. Wittgenstein, as part of his journey to the Tractatus, contacted the eminent philosophers Frege and Russell. But why did he do this? Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein was already engaged with some problems – for why else would he reach out? And that after meeting the logicians, he was given a set of tools that let him resolve them. But logic was never the main thing. It was just the means to another end.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna is an attempt, circumstantially we might say, to consider what these problems were. Vienna was an extraordinary place in the early 1900s, with Freud and Schoenberg and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, to name just a few of the leading literary and cultural lights. To their number Janik and Toulmin add others of whom I was less aware, like the architect Adolf Loos, and most importantly to their argument, the firebrand writer Karl Kraus. Through depicting the state of intellectual upheaval in Vienna at this time, and all its components, they lead us to see that the Tractatus was not a link in a logical chain, but rather a response to a problem that was at the time particularly Viennese.

They have, perhaps, some good reason for this. Professor von Wright, Wittgenstein’s literary executor, said to them that the two most important facts about Wittgenstein were that he was Viennese, and that he was an engineer with a thorough knowledge of physics. Both of these flow into Janik and Toulmin’s analysis, and both lead to a very different picture of the Tractatus to the one we might be used to.

Context: The Proving Ground for World Destruction

It was the Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, who called the city the “Proving Ground for World Destruction”. And it is he who looms large as one of the central influences on the milieu that a young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in. Vienna, towards the end of the Habsburg Empire, was a place that produced some of the most brilliant art and philosophy that we have – and for its time, some of the most experimental, most modernist. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, are just some of these names which have in one way or another made their mark on culture, and often been featured here on the blog. But as so often happens with great art, much of that was produced in response to its environment, rather than thanks to it, as the hostile forces artists experienced in their daily lives were rejected and transformed in works of art.

Vienna at this time was a place where the gulf between appearance and reality was as great as it has perhaps ever been anywhere. The “City of Dreams” shone with palaces and parks, it seethed with its rapidly growing population – it quadrupled in size over about fifty years, without growing its city limits nearly so much – and its multinational, multiethnic population, led by a benevolent sovereign, lived according to the great values of that land: reason, order, disciplined conformity to good taste. Some families had done well, like the Wittgensteins, who through canny business decisions had risen to become some of the richest people in Europe. But many more people found themselves trapped in accommodation far too small for them, unable to feed themselves on puny wages.

Ethnic harmony was a lie that was increasingly hard to paper over, and antisemitism was shifting from an unfortunately common personal conviction to a political programme. The lights that the city shone with were not often electric, because the Emperor Franz Joseph plugged any hole that modernity might seep through, keeping the toilets in the palaces without modern plumbing, and the lights running on gas. Like the Russian Empire at that time, society was rigid to the extreme and taboos were rigorously enforced. It seems no surprise that Freud should have his first successes here, working with women who felt things they were not allowed to feel, and had no way of managing those feelings. For a literary response to female sexuality, we need look no further than Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, one of my favourite works of the period.

What was said and what wasn’t, what was unimportant and what was, were completely out of order. If in people’s personal lives this led to the rise of psychoanalysis and associated topics – Alfred Adler discovered the “inferiority complex” while in Vienna – in the arts this led to what we might call a crisis of representation. Perhaps this was most obvious in the case of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, some of whose poetry I’ve previously translated here. The enfant terrible of Austrian letters suddenly discovered, after a few years of effortless brilliant poems, that he had “lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently”. This much he wrote in his fictional Letter of Lord Chandos, where he talks about words failing him. It is not that he cannot write, it is that words cannot express what he wishes they could. In short, he can only write – now in prose – of his inability to write and other things. But not of what is higher.

This inability or unwillingness to express things was not just the case with Hofmannsthal. In architecture, Adolf Loos created buildings that were extremely stripped down, with a huge shift away from ornamentation. Schoenberg in music was doing something similar, as were the first non-representational, abstract painters. All of them took inspiration from Kraus, who had a strong sense of mission and morality. In his works he was constantly taking to task politicians and intellectuals for using language badly, often by simply repeating their words back to them. One of the pranks he used to play was sending in fictitious letters to newspapers, claiming to be an expert in a given field (e.g. metallurgy) and watching as they included his deliberate fantasy, without daring to challenge it.

Kraus saw a person’s language as reflecting her morality. In other words, he adopted a holistic view of a human being, where everything can and must be judged together. We can see this in an aphorism of his: “Worthy opinions are valueless; it depends on whose opinions they are.” Kraus was well aware of the emptiness – or in some sense, performativeness – of many of the words and speeches his contemporaries made out of social decorum. His ideal, meanwhile, was a kind of authenticity, where action and speech and person were united. In this he reflected a growing interest in the works of Kierkegaard, and the intellectual dominance of Schopenhauer during this time.

Just as Tolstoy discovered Schopenhauer when writing Anna Karenina, leading him to see the world as full of frustrated desires we had little control over, so too did the Viennese around the turn of the century, where the philosopher was massively in vogue. In his rejection of the external world as controlled by will, and his emphasis on internality, he appealed to intellectuals who found Vienna more fake than real. He was joined by Kierkegaard, who also re-emerged out of obscurity in an environment where authenticity appeared to people like Kraus as the overriding ethical impulse, society be damned.

This crisis of representation and being in the world was not just limited to the arts. In the sciences and philosophy, people like Hertz, Boltzmann, and Mach were also considering questions about what could or should be said and shown. Take this statement of Hertz’s: “When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” He had been discussing the idea of “force”, which seems harder to pin down the more you think about it. But the conclusion he came to was remarkably similar to the one Wittgenstein himself had to the problems of life – the solution is not the answer to the question, but the end of the questioning:

6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.

               (Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)

The young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in the heart of this culture. As one of the richest families in Austria, his home was filled with artists and cultural figures – as was only proper. Many of his siblings had great artistic talents, especially musically. There were also several suicides among his brothers, and as noted above Ludwig regularly spoke of such an end for himself. He hoped to become an aeronautical engineer, first studying in Manchester before being overtaken by philosophy. This led him to Frege, and thence to Bertrand Russell. Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein turned to them because he was already vexed by questions of representation that he naturally encountered, growing up in Vienna, about what could and couldn’t be said and how to think about ethics, and thought logic might help him sort all of this out. Logic was merely a means to solve that all-important (for some) question – how should I live?

The Evidence Does Not Quite Add Up

The evidence for Janik and Toulmin’s view is, they readily acknowledge, circumstantial. Their book, far better than I could, explores the way this crisis penetrated every aspect of Viennese society, so that Wittgenstein simply could not have avoided it. At the same time, we know how the Tractatus was actually written, and the chronology seems wrong. Wittgenstein’s interest in ethics and mysticism seems, or at least the point where it becomes part of the Tractatus, to have come from his experience fighting in the first World War.

Wittgenstein was already odd – for example, he had a superstitious idea that he was soon to die. But it seems that the focus on ethics and God came a little later, when death and he became closely acquainted. “What do I know of God and the purpose of my life?” He wrote in his diary, after the beginning of a particularly brutal offensive on the Eastern Front. It was then that he wrote much of the sixth section of the Tractatus, where he discusses ethics and meaning and what cannot ultimately be spoken. With that said, Russell, meeting Wittgenstein after the war for the first time and finding him a complete “mystic”, also blames William James and Wittgenstein’s experience living and working alone in Norway just before the war.

Conclusion

Yet all this is not particularly important, either way. Wittgenstein’s Vienna cannot conclusively prove that Wittgenstein was concerned with questions about the sayable and authenticity before he met Russell and Frege, but it can certainly show that these were the questions he would not have been able to avoid as a young man surrounded by the culture of his native city. It seems obvious to me, based on my knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life and the genesis of the Tractatus, that these questions of ethics and representability certainly became important to him, probably more important than the rest of the book. And they are what is most important to me, reading the book now.

One slightly mean aside in the book which I nevertheless find myself nodding to, is the suggestion that we in the UK and US undoubtedly understood Wittgenstein very poorly. The cultural shock of this man who was concerned with ethics and life with a passion that in Britain we have rarely allowed ourselves to experience, meant that we almost certainly corralled him into appearing as a figure he was not in reality. Just as in Russia, in Vienna people were taking seriously problems that we have struggled even to see as problems. And rather than see them as problems, we prefer to dismiss them as ravings and madness. Much to our discredit as human beings and inhabitants of this world.

Having read through the book in English now, I am returning to it in the German original. I expect it will take me a long time to understand the Tractatus properly. But I am not trying to understand the logic; at least that is not my primary goal. Instead, I am trying to understand the soul the work contains, and the fire that inspired it. Still, that seems a more worthy aim than merely running around in circles calling things nonsense and tautologies, thinking I am the cleverest fellow in the room.

The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald

We hear occasionally of writer’s writers, but surely W. G. Sebald is the writer who most deserves the title of the professor’s writer. There was not a lecturer in all the German department at university who was not constantly in rapture over the fellow, which is perhaps a little ironic given that the kind of essays Sebald writes in his fiction would receive very low marks were they ever handed in to a supervisor. Sebald is a magical writer because he is entirely sui generis. His fiction, so far as I can make out, with Austerlitz and The Emigrants and a few of his essays under my belt, consists entirely of slightly befuddled narrators wandering about and reading inscriptions, letters, journals, architecture, and other remnants of the past out of a malaise they cannot quite give a name to.

Where in essays we are told to write arguments that are clear and precise, where in fiction we are told to show, rather than tell, Sebald does the opposite with his storytelling. Yet is it not a little curious that precisely this kind of obstruction in prose produces works which, when an intellect is applied to them like a knife to a whetstone, give that intellect the highest of pleasures? The joy of Sebald consists of being led from place to place, from thought to thought, from figure to figure, and being dimly aware of the significance of it all. There is a pattern, a web of connection, spreading across the words on the page – we just cannot see it all. Like those other extremely visceral writers (Borges, Mann), we feel a little stupid when we read him. But as with those writers, what little we do understand leaves us elated, proud, and wiser.

The Rings of Saturn is about a walking tour of Suffolk in England. Structurally, it has something in common with Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in that its ostensible travel through the English countryside pales beside the distances travelled in the mind. But where Ishiguro’s story is about Stevens’s personal history, Sebald’s novel is more general. Throughout its ten chapters we encounter many individuals and delve into many real pasts, but the narrator is always a spectator, a witness. His heart and his story is always closed, so we are left to draw the connections between, and the emotional significance of, what he relates entirely by ourselves.

What is told concerns the more melancholy side of the world we are but brief guests in: death, decay, destruction. Countless dying towns and discarded mansions provide the narrator ample opportunities to reflect upon everything from the opium wars to the consequences of Thatcherism and EU farming policy, from the Troubles to the French Revolution. Each place and sight sweeps the narrator into the past. As a writer, Sebald has a strange familial linkage to those adventure and ghost narratives involving material stumbled upon by outsiders. In considering the past he uses among others letters, memoirs, conversations, and old educational films. Taken together, they add a documentary precision to the story. It is one of those reasons why we can think of Sebald as a supremely realistic writer. It helps that The Rings of Saturn is one of those strange books that is neither fiction nor memoir, but somewhere in between.

This style is extremely distinctive, hence also easily parodied. In each chapter we have some physical movement by the narrator, followed by the reflections on a place, which lead to a reflection on the people who lived there. People encountered, in body or spirit, include Joseph Conrad, Sir Thomas Browne, Chateaubriand, a Chinese Empress, various Austrian monarchs, and many others. We read about the decay of British seaside towns, the collapse into the sea of the medieval village of Dunwich, the slow overgrowth of a still-inhabited Irish manor house. What separates Sebald’s narrator’s musings from that of the average educated individual at some prestige literary magazine is Sebald’s magnificently broad erudition and the alarming ease with which he shifts from topic to topic. The prose is so smooth you have to slow yourself down or you might miss the brutality of almost everything Sebald actually narrates.

For it is with a certain resignation that Sebald compasses human existence with his vision. Human nature is not on some glorious ramp of improvement. Destruction seems to be in our very veins, we feel as we read descriptions of the vast burnings of old-growth forest in England by its first settlers and then thousands of years later, of Chinese palaces by British soldiers during the Opium Wars. We seem, as a species, determined to exploit and destroy. The very image of our mastery for Sebald is the light we send across the darkened sky, but it is for him a thing more of disquiet than of joy. At one point he notes a vision of an historical village, still lit late at night by the workers forced to weave the silk that contributed to the beginnings of Great Britain’s economic hegemony. We create light, through fires, fuelled by things we destroy – from forests to the buildings annihilated in the Allied firebombing campaign in World War II.

The first chapter states something that might seem ridiculous, I think, to the average Brit – that as Sebald’s narrator began his walk he had been attacked with “the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.” Yet The Rings of Saturn is a document of so many of these horrors that I, who confess to finding the landscape of England for the most part forgettable and uninspiring, now think I shall never be able to look at it in quite the same way. We may dismissively say that Sebald’s narrator demonstrates the dangers of education, in revealing to us too much. But really what he does is explore the networks of complicity and guilt that bind us all to the earth and which can sometimes be easily missed.

Now, naturally, we are wiser to the worst excesses of our past. At the National Portrait Gallery, where I was yesterday, I heard a small boy ask his mother whether one of the people on the wall was “like Colston”. This struck me, on balance, as progress. That the wealth behind many manor houses came from exploitative practices is not likely to come as news to many, but perhaps the range of practices is. We see the decline of the herring through overfishing, the decline of fishing as a result of that, and then the decline of the countryside as the gentry became obsessed with hunting to the detriment of all else. We see, all told, humanity overstepping limits it did not know or else refused to recognise, and being crushed by an indifferent nature, in the form of fire and of storm, the latter of which destroyed the great village of Dunwich, casting it into the sea.

The sea, appropriately for a walking tour of Suffolk, is probably the central image in The Rings of Saturn. It reflects the cyclical view of history that Sebald presents here, where destruction follows creation, ebb follows flow. For if this book were merely a chronicle of human failings, it would be perhaps too bleak to read. Instead, it is chequered with human successes, some of them well worthy of recollection. We have a man recreating the temple of Jerusalem in miniature, we have the memories of the towns and houses before they fell into their present states, we have good men like Roger Casement, who reported on colonial atrocities and fought for Irish independence, and we have so many achievements of the mind – in Browne, in Conrad, in Swinburne, in Edward Fitzgerald.

Reading a book like The Rings of Saturn is something like a game, more so than even other serious literary works which at least have a story for us to follow. Here we are constantly on the lookout for connections, for patterns in this grand tapestry of historical tragedy. I wrote little diagrams at the end of some of the chapters, with lines connecting the topics. A train was connected to Dunwich and China, which were both in turn connected, albeit separately, to the poet Swinburne. The educational film on herring in chapter III led Sebald also to the documentation of silkworm cultivation in the Third Reich which ends the final chapter. Thomas Browne pops up here and there, as does Borges’ mysterious story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Throughout history, we see the destructive power of the sea and of fire, and a constant disregard for proper burial. Browne was reburied, as was Sir Roger Casement.

Reading Sebald is always an experience. On the one hand, the pleasure of finding these connections, of joining him in the recovery of the past, is great. On the other, there’s something false about the narrator’s reticence. He describes, but his emotions are always kept locked away. This refusal to provide answers might make the work intellectually rewarding, but it also makes the work emotionally ambiguous. Why not condemn what is worthy of it, why not say explicitly what you wish to say? I feel like that sometimes, but there is a counterpoint below which on reflection is probably more valid.

This short article, which says precisely the opposite of what I am saying, is worth glancing at. Sebald is, after all, one of those people who is deeply occupied with the Holocaust, indeed with all holocausts. He knows, we can fairly say, the limits to our expression. After all, it becomes trite after a while to say that war is bad or men are cruel. These are just words, however great the feeling behind them is. And words repeated empty themselves of their own meaning, their own force. Perhaps the effort of drawing the connections between the objects of his novel is precisely what Sebald thinks is the only morally responsible way of engaging with our past, so that when we step back, having finished with our diagrammatic representation of the work, covering our entire wall from floor to ceiling, only then are we able to truly appreciate the sinews of pain and mourning that are the one true and constant keynote in human history.

Yes, no doubt he is right.