Tag: W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

How do we write biography? Well, depending on whether the subject has shuffled off this mortal coil or not, we could talk to them or else their relatives, friends, and enemies. Most likely we will spend a lot of time in archives, scattered around the country or world, reading journals and diaries, letters, and memoirs. To recreate the past we may need to read some history books, or better yet newspapers. If we are writing about a creative person we ought to read their books or watch their films, over and over. And yet if we do only this, we may still end up with something rather soulless.

Richard Holmes employed the “footsteps method”. He would literally retrace the steps of his quarries throughout their lives, allowing himself to imagine his way into their lives in a way that merely memorising poetry could not do. I myself have been to a Dostoevsky house museum in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, two Tolstoy ones in the former city, and there is a Dickens museum not far from me where I am now staying in London. Sometimes seeing these old places can really bring the writers back to life, but more often it seems to be the objects inside them that do that. The Akhmatova museum in Petersburg stands out as doing a great job of reminding me how awful that period of the Soviet Union was for many of its people.

Julian Barnes’ novel and non-fiction work, Flaubert’s Parrot, is an attempt at writing a biography of Flaubert. I say attempt only because its failure is deliberate, and the fault of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, rather than his creator. We learn a great deal about Flaubert, but far more about the nature of biography. Each chapter seems to employ a different approach to dealing with Flaubert as if Braithwaite is trying to work out which approach will stick. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

We have a chronology chapter, which contains three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life with a little bit of editorial commentary. In the first, Flaubert emerges as a successful, cheery, and social being; in the second his life is one of misery, disappointment, and financial problems; the third is made of extracts from his letters. Each chronology, in fact, quotes from Flaubert, but each ends up leading to an entirely different impression of the man. The authority that we expect to come from the primary source – his letters – only serves to make us look silly for trusting any of the chronologies at all. One message we might take away is just how easy biography, even a simple chronology, can be used to manipulate or mislead.

Another chapter imagines Louise Colet, Flaubert’s legendary mistress (who saved an awful lot of his most fascinating letters for us lucky readers in posterity), and the story she would tell of him. This is imaginative biography, giving us another perspective. One chapter looks at Flaubert through the various animals he used to compare himself to (bears, dogs, sheep, camels etc); another looks at him through the books he hadn’t written, the decisions he hadn’t made in life – a sort of “what if” biography; still another explores his attitude to that most awful of modern inventions, the choo-choo train. What is so brilliant about Flaubert’s Parrot is that each of these angles manages, even while occasionally (deliberately) sharing choice extracts from the letters and novels, to tell us something new about Flaubert, and cast him in a completely different light. Nothing alone, certainly not traditional biography, can fully capture the soul.

A murky patch in Flaubert’s biography concerns an English governess, so Barnes creates some letters that have fallen into the hands of a rival academic (Braithwaite is actually a doctor) which would blow open the academic consensus and bring our narrator fame and glory. The academic relates the story of how he came upon these letters, tells what they contained, but finally informs Braithwaite that he burned them out of respect for Flaubert’s wishes on the matter. Our narrator is outraged – his chances at fame and glory have gone down drastically.

But here there is also something else at play. Biography is often about solving mysteries, eliminating those last few blank spots in the chronology with a fantastic discovery. One of the most memorable pieces of Holmes’ Footsteps concerns his travels around Italy, attempting to work out the truth of Percy Shelley’s relationship with Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife during their own time there. Biography is about taking control over the past and bringing it into order, and Braithwaite has just had the past rebuff him. There were several times as I was reading Flaubert’s Parrot where I thought of W.G. Sebald’s novels – Austerlitz or The Emigrants. In both we have a narrator attempting to recover the past, by all possible means, only to be disappointed. It is not so easy to recapture the world.

Just as literature is not the real world, so too is a biography of a literary figure not the same as that of a friend. Initially, our impression of Braithwaite places him as one of those stock characters we see in 20th-century fiction – the cynical old man spitting on the world and obsessed with his work. For example, Braithwaite gets more upset by moments in Flaubert’s life than he does revisiting memories of his participation in the Second World War. During the chapter involving the letters, he seems positively monomaniacal. But as the book progresses, we get hints of a troubled relationship with his wife, and finally her suicide. For example, we linger longer on the topic of adultery than perhaps even a book on Flaubert warrants.

All this puts the experiments at writing Flaubert’s life in a new light. We might say that Braithwaite is trying to work out what kind of biography might allow him to make sense of his own life, his own loss. Is it a little dictionary of important people, or is it a fictionalised telling of his wife’s side of things? His cynicism finally seems more tragic than tedious, because we see immediately what it takes him a whole book to realise – that life and literature, research, and intimate biography, are separated by a chasm:

“Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

Fiction is a way of building a world where things make sense. And biography is just fiction that sticks close to its source material. But life does not make sense. Letters are burned, lives are ended, in ways that are incomprehensible, and no moral waits for us at the end of the tunnel. Flaubert’s Parrot tells us about Flaubert, and it tells us about Braithwaite’s wife. But it is only Flaubert who seems comprehensible by the book’s end, only Flaubert whose actions can be explained by whichever explanation offered by the book seems to make the most sense to us.

We come away from the novel with a sense of a world that is limited. After the humour (which Flaubert’s Parrot is full of) and the literary games, there comes unease. Biography is so much less comprehensive than we had previously imagined, so much less respective of the truth – because we see that the truth is impossible to determine. Literature appears a refuge, as always, but a cowardly one. And so, we return to the real world, uncertain, because that’s the only thing for it.

I really enjoyed the novel, in case that does not come through. It’s really good fun, and its experimentation serves an obvious purpose. At the same time, it is informative on Flaubert in a way that feels far more useful than a full biography. For example, there’s a chapter on common complaints about Flaubert (his politics, his pessimism, his women) and their rebuttals. This kind of approach is far more exciting and dynamic than just a footnote in a stodgy tome. The novel achieves what the best experimental fiction of our age does – it reveals that there are more ways to read and write than we had hitherto realised and that what is familiar may not even be the best. In this Flaubert’s Parrot is not just inspiring, it’s vital too.

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.