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If a writer were to eliminate the paragraph altogether, would
we care? Would it change our experience of the book very much? Would
it give us some pleasures and effects that we would enjoy? Would it
be a gimmick or a real artistic choice with consequences that mattered
to us? Why would a writer want to do this? To take us back to the 19th
century? To give us a sense of the uninterrupted flow of story linked
to other stories? W. G. Sebald raises questions like these in our minds
as we read his books. He doesn’t eliminate the paragraph but he seems
to nearly do so, or to really want to do so. Also section breaks, chapters.
Perhaps this is especially so in his last book, Austerlitz. I like to imagine a complete edition of Sebald’s
work, a memorial edition, that would experiment with this and do away
with all breaks and give us an unending flow of text. He published one
book of poems, For Years Now, done in collaboration with
the painter Tess Jaray. These would go at the beginning, or perhaps
at the end, of the four “novels.” (One more book is due out next June,
After Nature.) His death a few weeks ago
was a terrible shock, a terrible loss. There is no other way to say
it. I have not felt as saddened by the death of a writer since the death
of Bruce Chatwin. I only discovered Sebald about six weeks ago and when
I got into the midst of The Rings of Saturn, I thought of Chatwin’s
books, Chatwin’s style. I was then taking the book as a travel memoir,
not as fiction, and it felt reminiscent of Chatwin in some ways. We
grasp for analogues when we are reading a truly new writer. Sebald baffled
and entranced me. What was he doing? So many fascinating things, such
a simple and new way of telling stories, of weaving things together,
and yet as old as memory and association and the search for connections
among people and places and buildings and landscape. The friend who
had stopped me and told me I had to read Rings
shortly thereafter photocopied a passage from Vivian Gornick’s new book
on the memoir. After I finished it, I learned that Sebald made clear
that his books were fiction, even if they felt like memoirs, and surely
in some ways they must be. But this genre difference really didn’t matter
and didn’t demand much attention. Sebald blends everything together,
blurs distinctions, so the narrative moves forward effortlessly becoming
essay, prose lyric, fabulation, history, criticism, literary history,
and travel album. Photographs lace the books. Drawings, maps, scraps
of illustrations. Some seem to be old postcards, or photos from
family albums. These punctuate the text, give the reader pause, double
the sense of the uncanny. Sebald wanders around a city or the countryside
and thinks about what he is seeing and looking for. The narrator is
never named so we take him to be “Sebald” in the same way we take “Marcel” to be Proust. There is a lot of Proust
behind Sebald’s work, and Borges, and many other writers. Anthony Lane says “he is an easy read, just as
Kafka is.” In The Emigrants
Sebald travels to the US and re-traces the steps of German
Jewish exiles. Long Island is one place. The more haunting locale is Ithaca. Homelessness, nostalgia, remembrance
of lost lives, these are themes of Sebald’s wanderings—catastrophes and horrors like the wars, the Holocaust,
the Slave trade of the Belgian Congo, Napoleon’s campaigns, the ugliness
of buildings in some European capitals, the beauties of Venice and the
small Bavarian village where Sebald was born. It is impossible to convey
how richly Sebald’s mind, his consciousness, plays over the things he
gathers to ponder as he wanders, the richness of his historical imagination,
his historical consciousness, his lyric imagination, the ways he interweaves
everything, his accuracy of detail, both real and invented, the sense
he creates that he has no agenda, no argument to make, and yet the sense
that he does know that by the end of his tales all does create a whole,
a cosmic view of the human drama as it is played through the facets
he has chosen to use. It doesn’t do to list his topics and themes, or
to decide that the fate of European Jewry, or the Holocaust, or the
memory of his generation of the war, or the drag of pain and loss are
his primary subjects or concerns. As the painter Wolfe Kahn likes to
say of his own paintings, always landscapes, with trees, sometimes with
barns, “the subject is never the subject.” If we’re not to see the painting
as “of a barn,” neither are we to read Sebald’s books as “about recent
German history or about the search for lost people.”
Sebald deals with tragic events and stories, he wander in landscapes
of noble monumentality and abysmal desolation. The effect is often of
great sadness, of melancholy, of “germanic romanticism” filtered through
the techniques of post-post-modernism, but the overall, final effect
is much more than any of these temporary feelings. On one book cover
Cynthia Ozick says simply “Sublime.” I am afraid I have to agree with
her. We are so used to seeing book jacket quotations and dismissing
them skeptically as part of the game of publishing hype. But once I
had finished one of Sebald’s books and now that I’ve finished them all
and look forward to re-reading all of them as soon as possible, I look
at the the extravagant claims made by reviewers (these are on the American
editions) and I nod my head in agreement and want to shout Yes from
the rooftops to all of them: “He
makes narration a state of investigative bliss.” says W. S. Di Piero.
Yes. Anthony Lane says “an addiction.” Yes. James Wood says “This is
very beautiful, and its strangeness is what is beautiful… one of the
most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers…“ Yes.
I have two quotations from German press on the back of the British
Harvill edition of Rings: Neue Züricher Zeitung says “Sebald
has borrowed his way of writing from the dreaming…” Yes. And Weltwoche
says “Sebald’s prose makes the reader feel free, light and as if suspended
in thin air. This is perhaps the greatest delight of a book rich with
beauty.” Yes & Yes & Yes! Vertigo
is the title of one of the books, and a perfect description the word
is, of one of the many effects the books have on you. And an upward
vertigo as well as a downward one. Is “euphoria” the antonym of “vertigo?”
Or “elation,” or “enlightened tranquillity?” The sublime, in fact. Just
after Christmas I read Sebald’s final book, Austerlitz. I wondered, with the news of his death, if this effect
of lightness could still be true. Temporarily, perhaps not. But the
works will last and I am sure when I begin to re-read them I will experience
this strange and new lightness once again. Perhaps it is a feeling new
to literature? (Sontag says of The
Emigrants, “perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read.”)
Certainly to literature written in my lifetime, which started the same
year as Sebald’s, 1944. How important it can be to feel that someone
in your time has accomplished writing that marks your own generation
memorably and might carry beyond your own death and your generation’s
death. And what if he has created a new lightness born not of escaping
meditations on the horrors of our times but of facing them, if indirectly,
and from roundabout and odd angles?
© Robert E. Garlitz 2002
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