Tag: Memory

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

I remember first seeing Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending at school. Twenty copies used to sit in one of the classrooms I had English lessons in – I imagined it was on some A-level syllabus as a recent masterpiece, which predisposed me to dislike it. (It was some time before I realised authors could write alright without first being dead.) It did win the Man Booker Prize in 2011, which is practically yesterday, after all. And certainly, if we want to be uncharitable, this is a book that can be knocked down by pigeonholing it as one of those books that seems written to secure a place on a syllabus. We have a textbook unreliable narrator, a dualistic structure to consider, a limited number of characters, things to talk about, literary references, school days, and a length which means even the laziest schoolkid might actually read it, or at least be able to sprint through it on the night before the exam. With that said, readers expecting me to rehash my criticism of Schlink’s dreadful The Reader will be disappointed for the simple reason that The Sense of an Ending is actually pretty good.

There are two stories here, one for each of the novel’s two parts. Tony Webster tells his life story in the first part, or at least the life story he thought was his own. He goes to school and has three friends including the intelligent Adrian Finn, then they head their separate ways and begin drifting apart. At university, Tony meets a girl, Veronica, stays once at her house for the weekend and later introduces her to his friends, before eventually breaking up with her. He later discovers that Adrian, who ended up at Cambridge, is now going out with Veronica. He writes them a postcard and a letter, the latter of which he barely remembers, and then sometime later learns that Adrian has committed suicide. In his note, Adrian explains his decision with reference to philosophy and the importance of free will. This existential flourish seems in line with the Adrian that Tony knew at school, so he agrees with his friends that the death is a shame, but not out of character. Tony then finishes university, gets married and has a child, gets divorced and retires, and that’s really as much as we get. “And that’s a life, isn’t it?” – one told from beginning to apparent end. There are some disappointments, some pleasures, but really it is a slightly cautious, empty thing.

The second part begins when the older Tony receives information that he has been given a little money and two documents through the will of a certain Mrs Ford – Veronica’s mother. We are just as confused as he is. The first of these documents is a short and ambiguous letter from Mrs Ford, while the second is a diary – Adrian’s diary – which has been taken by Veronica and which Tony then spends much of the second story trying to get back. Here is our mystery. Why does Mrs Ford have the diary, why is she giving him the money? Tony’s rather confused attempts at working all this out and what he discovers along the way is what The Sense of an Ending is, in essence, about. It completely changes our reading of the first part because it turns out not that Tony has been coy about the truth, but rather that he has simply forgotten it and let it fade. The new information of the second part is a rude awakening that forces him to look back at his life again and interrogate how it all really took place.

Narrative

At its heart, The Sense of an Ending is about the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about the lies that Tony has told himself his whole life, and the “truth” he eventually discovers. Adrian, ever precocious, quotes the Frenchman Patrick Lagrange: ‘“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”’ The first part of the novel is one certainty, the certainty that Tony has about his life based on the memories he has retained of it. The second part concerns the new “history” that writes itself when he finds documentation that does not sit easily next to his original view of things.  

Tony is well aware of how this all works. The novel is full of philosophical asides that work well to hammer in its themes. “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.” Tony does meet Veronica again, but he never sees more than a page of the diary – for she has burned it. Her excuse, “People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries”, is not unreasonable. To read a diary in which you figure is guaranteed to knock you off balance, because it reveals the unadulterated vision of history that belongs to someone else, and thus necessarily contradicts your own.

Worse still is when Tony receives a copy of the letter that he had sent to Adrian and Veronica after hearing that they were going out. In the novel’s first part the letter is passed over briefly as if it were of no importance at all, but we later see that this is an evasion – by Tony or by his subconscious, we cannot say. The letter is brutal, nasty, and exceptionally spiteful. And it is the last thing he ever sent to his friend before he died. Tony cannot deny that it is his letter, but he does not seem able to accept it fully either:

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

Taken as a whole, The Sense of an Ending is full of things that seem to separate us from anything close to the truth, with language itself being a particular target. Early on, for example, Tony notes how the word “going out” has changed in its definition over the course of his own lifetime, making us aware of how at a basic level the words we read and understand now may not correspond to what Tony is actually trying to convey. At another point, after talking to a solicitor, Tony notes how his own linguistic independence seems to be lost in conversation with them – “Have you noticed how, when you talk to someone like a solicitor, after a while you stop sounding like yourself and end up sounding like them?” Finally, there is the newspaper report of Adrian’s death, the ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’, which is so cliché at this point that the words are essentially empty.

It’s not for nothing, then, that Veronica seems to spend the entire book telling Tony that he just doesn’t “get it”. If our memories are faulty, just as faulty will likely be our attempts to fix them. Early on in the first part, while discussing history writing, Adrian says that the only way to understand a given work of history is to understand its author’s biases. But we cannot, because they are too complicated, and often too deeply hidden. One comes away from The Sense of an Ending rather battered, clutching the solution to the mystery that Tony does eventually reach, but with a feeling that so much has been lost in the search for it that we might have been better off just staying in the novel’s staid and stable first part.

All in all, I did enjoy The Sense of an Ending. I had read some rather hostile reviews that had said it was a work of philosophy with nary a novel in sight. This criticism falls flat to me. Of course, the novel does indulge in a lot of introspection, but it does not feel out of place. As far as I am aware, older people do tend to reflect on their lives – Tony is not unique in this. Its main fault is that Tony does tend to repeat himself and the same ideas in only slightly varying phrases, which is tedious by the end. The plot here is sufficiently meaty, the characters sufficiently real, to satisfy me, even if it does suffer from that problem that most introspective works do, namely that it’s a little claustrophobic and airless. There are not enough characters, nor enough vibrancy, at times.

To end with I want to note that it’s interesting how we have come to this sort of novel. The great modernist writers loved their interiority and stream-of-consciousness. Now, with that vein fully excavated, we move from the experience of the present into the experience of the past and the failures of memory and interpretation – as we did in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Sebald’s The Emigrants. This is a mere musing on my part, not an exact science – after all, Ford’s The Good Soldier came out in 1915. However, perhaps what I am trying to suggest is that there is no sense that Tony is deliberately confounding us here. Instead, we simply have a world that is hard to make sense of because we are all, all of us, reliant upon memories that do not match up with those of others or to the world itself. In this sense at least it is a somewhat forgiving novel, and one that possesses a message valid for our own lives.

Anyway, it’s an interesting little book and easily readable in a single sitting.

Fragments of Pain – W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants

The Emigrants is the second novel by W.G. Sebald, the late German academic who was based at the University of East Anglia, that I have read after Austerlitz. I read Austerlitz a few weeks ago and was not as affected by it as I felt I was supposed to be, and so I decided not to write a post about it. The Emigrants is concerned with many of the same themes as Austerlitz – memory, trauma, and the like – but it explores them in a way that was slightly more approachable and, as a result, more impactful. Sebald is a pretty unique phenomenon, and even if the horrors of central Europe’s twentieth century do not interest you, his way of writing about them is another reason to read him.

Austerlitz tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, a man who discovers at the end of his schooldays that he is not the Welshman he thought he was, but a Jew from the Prague. This leads him to an odyssey of discovery as he tries to find out the truth of his origins, and whatever became of his parents. Austerlitz’s story comes to us mediated through a narrator who meets Austerlitz over the course of several years, often by complete chance. The Emigrants adopts a similar approach, but because it is made up of four short stories, ranging in length from under thirty pages to almost one hundred, the stories end up easier to follow, and their characters are a little easier to believe in.

Each of the stories focuses on a different émigré, emigrant, or exile, from the lands inhabited by the Jews and Germans, with a final emigrant – Sebald’s narrator himself – as the one who hears and transcribes the stories of others, either from notebooks or diaries or from conversations. One thing that Sebald does well is emphasise the subjectivity of experience. This was perhaps a necessity in Postwar German literature – after all, how could one possibly write objectively about the Holocaust? The Holocaust isn’t even mentioned in The Emigrants, but all but one of the emigrants are Jews, at least in part, and in the suicides and despairs that fill the book’s pages the Holocaust is always present in the background. The Emigrants is less the record of the lives of four emigrants so much as the record of trying to record the lives of four emigrants.

James Wood, the critic, writes of Sebald’s great skill at conveying “whole lives”. Rather than the false omniscience of the third person, or the boundedness of the first, Sebald’s approach is a hybrid form that lets us see from the outside the course of a life – from youth to death – as other people perceive it, even as we understand that those same people are flawed and limited in their perceptions, and never able to see the whole picture. But what we hear in these stories is not to be completely trusted not only because people can never know everything, but also because people will know things and conceal them. We arrive too late to hear the full picture, but we can try to build it out of the fragments the narrator picks up from others. The emigrants have all left their country, and one obvious question that we can never fully answer, is why?

Looking at the first two stories, which were probably my favourites, will make it clearer how Sebald operates in The Emigrants.

Dr Selwyn

Sebald’s narrator meets Dr Selwyn while looking for a place to rent. He lets Sebald and his wife rent part of his house in the English countryside and he reveals the story of his life to them over time. Selwyn is an old man, almost eighty, with a wife of his own, though she is rarely in the house. The house and grounds themselves are all in a state of decay. Selwyn’s great passion, tennis, is one he no longer indulges in. He has a servant who is mentally ill, and apparently no friends at all. But one day a guest does arrive, and the two men invite Sebald and his wife to dinner.

Selwyn describes how in his youth he felt a certain attraction for a mountaineering guide, Johannes Naegeli – “never in his life, neither before not later, did he feel as good as he did then, in the company of that man”. These are the words Sebald’s narrator gives to us, and they are not exactly definite in their meaning. Naegeli, we then learn, died in a mountaineering accident. A short while later Selwyn breaks off his narrative, saying it was probably not interesting. He starts showing slides from a trip he undertook with his guest ten years ago, and Sebald watches them, aware that they are sharing memories, but he remains on the outside.

At another time, Selwyn mentions being afflicted by homesickness more and more. He explains that his family originally came from near Grodno in the Russian Empire. We don’t learn why his family left, though the implication – and it is only an implication – is that antisemitism drove them out. Selwyn explains how he told his wife “the secret of my origins”, and perhaps that is to blame for the decline of their relationship – Selwyn’s name is an anglicised version of his original Seweryn. He also mentions perhaps having sold, “at one point, my soul.” A page later and Selwyn has shot himself.

At the end of each of the stories in The Emigrants I found it was useful to ask myself what the story was trying to say. With “Dr Selwyn” I ended up coming to the conclusion that what it was trying to say was precisely that it is impossible to say everything, and often impossible even to say enough. Like a shattered vase we only have the pieces of Selwyn’s dialogue with which to try to make sense of the shape of his life – his emigration, his possibly homosexual love, his cold marriage, his homesickness and death. We can perhaps put them all together, but the glue can only ever be our imaginations, and as a result, unreliable. In the face of the horror of suicide, we have nothing concrete to offer. We simply don’t know enough.

Paul Bereyter

Dr Selwyn was alive to tell his story, but Paul Bereyter is not so lucky. Instead, Sebald’s narrator learns of his old schoolteacher’s death through the papers: “Grief at the Loss of a Popular Teacher”. But immediately the narrator informs us that the article is, if not full of lies, at least dishonest. It does not say that Bereyter had killed himself as well, by laying himself down on the tracks before an oncoming train, or that Bereyter had been prevented during the Third Reich from teaching because he was a quarter Jewish. Newspapers, though we often hope to rely on them for facts, are just as unreliable as everything else in Sebald’s world when it comes to trying to piece together something approaching truth out of all its many fragments.

Sebald’s narrator’s attempt to recover Bereyter is not easy. Much has been destroyed. Architecture, which in Austerlitz is a way holding on to memory, here does the opposite – Bereyter’s house has been taken down and replaced by a block of flats. In S, the village where Bereyter had taught, people after the war either kept quiet about their role in the gradual removal of Jewish, even slightly Jewish, people from public life, or even forgot it altogether – and we cannot know which. Instead, for the narrator, growing up in the postwar years, Bereyter has a reputation that obscures all that. He has perhaps not grown up properly, he is a bit strange, a bit of a free-thinker. A kind of collective refusal to accept responsibility for Bereyter’s dismissal from his post hangs over the town.

Of course, Bereyter gets his job back and teaches and eventually finds what appears to be companionship in life. His suicide, then, is more complicated than simply his temporary loss of work. The words of the woman he spent much of his later years with describes the way he began an attempt to recover a sense of the lost past, of the suffering of the Jews. He reads authors who suffered as a result of the Nazi era, or those who flirted with suicide – Wittgenstein, Trakl, Mann, Benjamin. The woman seems to suggest that the result of this reading, this research, was that Bereyter no longer felt he could belong in the village where he had once taught. The weight of the guilt that he had revealed to himself was too much. And that, perhaps, is why he ended his life.

The other two stories contain many of the same themes and ideas of the first two, expanding on them, and approaching them from different angles. One thing that is particularly interesting is to consider the role of Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants. We read about those whose obsession with the past and regrets eventually destroyed them. But our narrator too, is scouring the past, reconstructing lives. Where does all this place him? He too is a figure, trying to master a history that is too broad and too horrific for the human heart to bear. The question is, as always, why he does this. There is a moral value in trying to recover the past, but The Emigrants is not wholeheartedly in favour of archive-scouring either. It seems to suggest an approach to the past that acknowledges its own limitations: we cannot know everything, but we must know enough.

Style

The greatest influence on Sebald’s prose was probably the German writer, Adalbert Stifter, who is not read much in English these days. (Though NYRB released a new translation of Motley Stones just last week!). Stifter’s stories are slow, meandering, and don’t appear to be going anywhere. But at the same time, from the few I’ve read, there’s a certain magic in them all the same. Because they are so obviously stories, it is hard to feel pressure to get to the point. We wouldn’t hurry up someone telling a story by the fire – it’s the same feeling. The stories of The Emigrants, whatever their moral heftiness, are also broken up by long stretches of… nothing. Nature descriptions, pointless events, whatever.

“At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.” Thus begins “Dr Selwyn”, not with a bang, but with a drive. This style is so unusual because we are everywhere taught to focus, to not waste time. Even in our reading, we want to be entertained. But I don’t think Sebald’s style here is merely the result of a desire to try my patience, though it does that. I think there is a kind of moral purpose here. Sebald is determined to notice things, to make a record, and this demands attention to the world around us. I also think that the style further adds to the contingency of the stories – Sebald’s narrator comes across them or their authors by chance. Things are found and saved from forgetting only by luck.

It’s worth mentioning the Sebald also uses black and white photographs in his works, another innovation. They generally depict things from the text, or at least seem to. Their low quality, and dubious authenticity, reflects back on the narrative. We often take the accuracy of a photo for granted, even though in reality they are just as unreliable a record as prose. Sebald’s use of photos at first suggests an additional investment in making his stories seem real, but in the end they only further contribute to the destruction of certainty, of wholeness, that takes place in whatever he writes.

Conclusion

In a way, I am not sure how to approach Sebald here. His fiction is unique among authors I’ve read. His stories juxtapose the quiet peace of nature and travel writing against the horrors of the earth, whether Holocaust of repression or whatever else. And yet at the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for the poet Michael Hofmann, who accused Sebald of “nailing literature on to a home-made fog – or perhaps a nineteenth-century ready-made fog.” Hofmann’s description is apt. Sebald’s writing takes us into a fog, into a world of uncertainty and confusion. Like your blogger, Sebald cannot write a simple sentence. And if everything on the earth circles around scepticism about being able to know anything, because our memories and perceptions are hopelessly corrupt, what are we supposed to take away from this?

There are some fantastic descriptions, and I think that Sebald’s topics are valuable. This is not so much Germans berating themselves over their guilt, as one German looking at the way lives can be maimed by trauma. The despair of The Emigrants is unavoidable. But when one’s dealing with that part of the 20th century, I don’t know what else one has any right to say.

For more sad Germans, check out Adorno and Grass.