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

WGS: Yes, it is that. Bernhard’s mode of telling a tale is related to all manner of things, not least the theatrical monologue. In the early book that bears the English title Gargoyles and in German is called Die Verstörung , the whole of the second part is the monologue of the Prince of Salla, and it would make a wonderful piece on the stage. So it has the intensity, the presence that one can experience in the theater — he brings that to fiction.

MS: I’ve been very amused because critics of your work in America seem to be bewildered by its tone, and I don’t, in fact, find its tone bewildering. I think they are unfamiliar with it because of its tenderness, a tenderness brought to bear on subjects that have usually compelled indignation, scorn, and, certainly in Beckett and in Bernhard, a huge and glittering kind of contempt or scorn. Here it really has that quality of — am I wrong here? — of infinite care taken in listening to speakers who are not being reviled in the slightest.

WGS: Yes. I don’t know where it quite comes from, but I do like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another. Because in my experience once they begin to talk, they have things to tell you that you won’t be able to get from anywhere else. And I felt that need of being able to listen to people telling me things from very early on, not least I think because I grew up in postwar Germany where there was — I say this quite often — something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e., your parents never told you anything about their experiences because there was at the very least a great deal of shame attached to these experiences. So one kept them under lock and seal. And I for one doubt that my mother and father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any of these subjects. There wasn’t a written or spoken agreement about these things. It was a tacit agreement. It was something that was never touched on. So I’ve always. . I’ve grown up feeling that there is some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses one can trust. And once I started. . I would never have encountered these witnesses if I hadn’t left my native country at the age of twenty, because the people who could tell you the truth, or something at least approximating the truth, did not exist in that country any longer. But one could find them in Manchester and in Leeds or in North London or in Paris — in various places, Belgium and so on.

MS: I find it almost spooky how frequently these critics — I guess expecting the austerities and harshnesses of certain postwar prose — don’t see that this is characterized by tenderness, bewilderment, horror, infinite pity, and a kind of almost willed self-mortification. That is, I am willing to hear and place great acts of attention on all things with the chance and hope that revelation will occur.

WGS: Well, I suppose if there is such a thing as a revelation, if there can be a moment in a text which is surrounded by something like claritas, veritas , and the other facets that qualify epiphanies, then it can be achieved only by actually going to certain places, by looking, by expending great amounts of time in actually exposing oneself to places that no one else goes to. These can be backyards in cities, they can be places like that fortress of Breendonk in Austerlitz . I had read about Breendonk before, in connection with Jean Améry. But the difference is staggering, you know — whether you’ve just read about it or whether you actually go and spend several days in and around there to see what these things are actually like.

MS: It was once explained to me that there was in German prose something called das Glück im Winkel , happiness in a corner. I think that your radical contribution to prose is to bring the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world. So that a completely or newly forgotten prose tone is being brought into the postmodern century, and the extraordinary echo, the almost immediate abyss that opens between the prose and the subject, is what results. Automatically, ghosts, echoes, trance states — it’s almost as if you are allowing the world to howl into the seashell of this prose style.

WGS: Well, I think [Walter] Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast. The old-fashionedness of the diction or of the narrative tone is therefore nothing to do with nostalgia for a better age that’s gone past but is simply something that, as it were, heightens the awareness of that which we have managed to engineer in this century.

One of the most striking developments in English-language publishing in the past five years has been the extraordinary success of the books of W. G. Sebald. The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn , and Vertigo were received — pretty unanimously, as far as I could tell — with deference and superlatives. This is the more unlikely as I don’t think such a success could have been predicted for them or their author. Sebald, a professor at the University of East Anglia for many years and settled in England since 1970, nevertheless insisted on writing in his native German — and then taking a hand in the heavy, somewhat dated English presentation of his books. These books, furnished with, one presumed, the author’s own photographs, hovered coquettishly on the verge of nonfiction; certainly, their elaboration of what appeared to be painstakingly researched historical narratives and circumstances contained much of their appeal. They called themselves novels, but they were more like introverted lectures, suites of digression, their form given them by the knowledge they contained; like water, finding its own levels everywhere, pooling and dribbling, with excurses on such things as silk, herrings, architecture, battles.

It was strange to see so many of England’s hidden stops—

Originally appeared in Arts and Books, Prospect , September 20, 2001.

snobbery, gossip, melancholy, privileged information, eccentricities, the countryside reliably full of rich Keatsian glooms, daylight ghosts, dead machines, hulks of buildings, your Edward Thomas, your Pevsner, your Larkin, your Motion — so expertly manipulated by someone not even writing in English. But what was even stranger was that Sebald operated without any of the rigmarole or the pleasantnesses of the novel. The complete absence of humor, charm, grace, touch is startling — as startling as the fact that books written without them could enjoy any sort of success in England. Or, to take a different measure, that books without much pretense of character or action, but where the role of story is taken by thought or reading — or even more starkly, by the memory of thought or reading — could catch on at all. It is almost unaccountable to me that in the culture of “the good read” or “the book at bedtime” people would bother with books where the action — history — is always going on elsewhere, where the connection between the speaker and the hero or the plot is unspoken, unexamined, possibly nonexistent; where for the dearly loved cogs and springs of conventional fiction there is no greater lubricant or persuader than ruminant curiosity.

In Austerlitz , the unnamed first-person writer gives us his memories of encounters he has had with the eponymous Austerlitz, a figure who has obviously exercised considerable fascination over him: first in a station in Belgium, then in London, in Paris, and elsewhere. The encounters, the personality, the relationship are never particularly keenly seen; most of the book is made up of the divagations of Austerlitz’s reported speech (a mode which in English is hard to distinguish over long stretches from ordinary narrative). Think of Thomas Bernhard’s monologizing novels, but substitute repression for spill, airy scholarship for furious effect, and you have the general idea. Austerlitz’s story — there seems to be pressure on Sebald to make it matter, as though his shimmering vitrines of facts are not enough by themselves — is that of a European Jew, born in Prague in 1934, put on one of the Kindertransporte in 1939, raised by a Welsh nonconformist minister and his wife, and later made aware of his origins and possible “identity,” and finally consumed by them and by the thought of Terezin and Drancy, where his parents presumably met their deaths. The story, told in easy sequence, in meetings with ordered witnesses, is inevitably trite.