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

EW: And you still write in German.

WGS: And I still write in German, yes. There are very few writers who write in two languages, even people as accomplished as Nabokov in more than one language. Once Nabokov had moved across from Russian to English, he stayed in English. He still used Russian for translation purposes. But he didn’t, as far as I know, write in that language after he had made the transition. Making the transition as Nabokov does, say, is a very, very risky and harrowing business. And so far I have tried to avoid making that decision. There aren’t many other writers that I can think of who had to contend with that particular problem. There is Elias Canetti, who lived for many decades in London before he returned to Zurich, who spoke English perfectly well but never wrote a line in English, to the best of my knowledge. I think it is quite difficult to reach a level of sophisticated competence in a language. Even if you can babble on, it doesn’t mean that you can write it well. That’s quite a different proposal.

EW: Since you mention Vladimir Nabokov, there are references in The Emigrants to a man with a butterfly net, the boy with the butterfly net, Nabokov himself. Why does he hover over this book?

WGS: I think the idea came to me when I was thinking of writing the story of that painter. This particular story, as you know, contains among other things, as a secondary narrative, as it were, the childhood memoirs of the painter’s mother. These are to quite a substantial extent authentic, based on authentic materials. I had the disjointed notes which that lady had written in the years between her son’s emigration to England and her own deportation; she had about eighteen months to write these notes. As you know from the text, this family had lived in a small village in northern Bavaria, upper Franconia, called Steinach, then around 1900 moved to the nearest town, the spa town of Bad Kissingen. And if you read Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, his autobiography, which to my mind is a wonderful book, there is an episode in it where he says that his family went to Bad Kissingen several times in exactly those years. So the temptation was very great to let these two exiles meet unbeknownst to each other in the story. And I also knew — and this is based on fact, it’s not something that I artificially adjusted later on — that my great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth had interned himself in an asylum in Ithaca, which is where Nabokov taught for many years. And where, as one knows from his writings, he was always in his spare time going out with his butterfly net. So it seemed a very, very strange coincidence that two locations in the stories that I would have to write about were also Nabokov locations. Of course I also knew extremely well, from my time in the French part of Switzerland, the area around Lac Le Mans and Montreux and Vevey and Basel-Stadt and Lausanne. I knew all these places quite intimately. I didn’t know of Nabokov, of course, when I was a student there; I hadn’t got quite that far. I didn’t know he lived there, and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have dared to call on him, as you can imagine. But I knew the whole territory and I knew these lifts going up into the mountains that he talks about. And so it seemed an obvious thing to do and, again, an opportunity to create something which has a kind of haunting, spectral quality to it, something that appears, forms of apparitions of virtual presence that have, vanishing though they are, a certain intensity which can otherwise be not very easily achieved.

EW: I think one critic sees it as a sign of joy and another as foretelling death.

WGS: It’s both, of course. People always want what seem to them to be symbolic elements in a text to have single meanings. But of course that isn’t how symbols work. If they are any good at all they are usually multivalent. They are simply there to give you a sense that there must be something of significance here at that point, but what it is and what the significance is, is entirely a different matter.

I think that it was a question of trying to find, in a text of this kind, ways of expressing heightened sensations, as it were, in the form of symbols which are perhaps not obvious. But certainly the railway business, for instance. The railway played a very, very prominent part, as one knows, in the whole process of deportation. If you look at Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah film, which to my mind is one of the most impressive documents of this whole fraught business, there are trains all the time, between each episode. They run along the tracks, you see the wagons, and you see the signals and you see railway lines in Poland and in the Czech Republic and in Austria and in Italy and in Belgium. The whole logistics of deportation was based on the logistics of the railway system. And I do pick that up at one point when I talk about my primary schoolteacher’s obsession with the railways. So it seemed a fairly obvious thing to do. It always depends of course on how you put this into practice. The more obvious you make a symbol in a text, the less genuine, as it were, it becomes, so you have to try and do it very obliquely, so that the reader might read over it without really noticing it. You just try and set up certain reverberations in a text and the whole acquires significance that it might not otherwise have. And that is the same with other images in the text: the track, certainly, the smoke, and certainly the dust.

EW: Memory seems harder to escape the older that your subjects get. And most of them succumb, in a sense, through withdrawal or suicide. Why is memory so ineluctable and so destructive?

WGS: It’s a question of specific weight, I think. The older you get, in a sense, the more you forget. That is certainly true. Vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density, a very high degree of specific weight. And of course once you are weighed down with these kinds of weight, it’s not unlikely that they will sink you. Memories of that sort do have a tendency to encumber you emotionally.

EW: I’m thinking of your uncle Ambros, who suffered so acutely from his memories that he voluntarily submitted himself to shock treatment. And his psychiatrist describes how he wanted “an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.” Why so extreme?

WGS: It’s in many senses quite an extreme tale. What is hinted at in this story is that there was, between this Ambros Adelwarth and his employer’s son, Cosmo Solomon, a relationship which went beyond the strictly professional, that they were to each other, to say the least, like brothers, possibly even like lovers. And that particular story and the way in which it unfolded in the grand years before the First World War went against the grain of history, across the fissures of history and contained within it at least something like a semblance of salvation. And you are permitted as a reader to imagine — the text never tells you to and never really makes it explicit — but you are permitted as a reader to imagine that these two young men, when they were together in Istanbul and down by the Dead Sea, lived through what for them were very blissful times. And it is the weight of that which brings him down, I think, in the end. You know, it’s the old Dante notion that nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

EW: So many of your characters take such extreme action against memory. Is there any alternative? Is there any way to live with a memory? One of your characters, Max Ferber, says that while physical pain has a limit because eventually you’ll lose consciousness, mental pain is without end.

WGS: Well, it is. There is a great deal of mental anguish in the world, and some of it we see and some of it we try to deal with. And it is increasing. I think the physical and the mental pain in a sense is increasing. If you imagine the amount of painkillers that are consumed, say, in the city of New York every year, you might be able to make a mountain out of it on which you could go skiing — you know, all the aspirin, powders. Of course we do see some of it, but people usually suffer in silence or in privacy. And certainly when it’s a question of mental anguish, not all of it, only very little of it is ever revealed. We live, as it were, unaware; those of us who are spared this live unaware of the fact that there are these huge mental asylums everywhere and that there is a fluctuating part of the population which is forever wandering through them. It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn’t what it should be. And we’re out of our depth all the time. We’re living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we’re driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our physical and emotional makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub against each other is where the sources of pain are. Memory is one of those phenomena. It’s what qualifies us as emotional creatures, psychozootica or however one might describe them. And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. The only thing that you can do, and that most people seem to be able to do very successfully, is to subdue it. And if you can do that by, I don’t know, playing baseball or watching football on television, then that’s possibly a good thing, I don’t know.