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

Sebald’s writing has been more often praised than accurately described; the “beauty” so often reflexively attested to I frankly don’t see. The dominant gesture is of something rigid in its peculiarity, or rigid in response to peculiarity. (The closest you get to drama in Sebald are certain moments of vaunting strangeness, promontories built out into the ectoplasmic sea in which the books have their being.) The sentences are grammatically complex and strictly correct. There is something paralyzed or immobilized about them. The manner is insouciantly, provocatively grandiloquent, neither sharp nor blunt. Inevitably, anything modern or contemporary distinctly threatens it: Canary Wharf appears anonymously as “sparkling glass towers”; one meeting between the narrator and Austerlitz is claimed, to the reader’s utter disbelief, to take place in a McDonald’s. It is a style that moves between stiff correctness, cliché (“white as a sheet”) and jargon (boys at school who “hatched plots to extend their power bases”). A fire in an invalid’s room has “yellowish smoke that rose from the glowing coals”—an impossibility, I would have thought — while moths flying round a lamp at night are seen “describing thousands of different arcs and spirals and loops”—where I would similarly query “different” as a bit of descriptive cant.

To me, Sebald’s books have something gothic about them, a chilly extravagance, a numbed obsessiveness. Even their placid-ness and vagueness are gothic. On almost every page, I had the sense that I might have been reading Poe, or de L’Isle-Adam, or Hofmannsthal’s Chandos letter, something learned and constrained and almost frightful: “Soon I would be overcome by this terrible anxiety in the midst of the simplest actions: tying my shoelaces, washing up tea-cups, waiting for the kettle to boil.” At the same time, though, there is a complacency and lack of urgency in Sebald’s academic sleuthing and the pedantic rosters of his prose catalogues that kept me from taking it as seriously as, say, Hofmannsthal.

Beyond that, the presence of descriptive tropes lifted straight from Kafka baffled me: the labyrinthine architecture of the Brussels Palace of Justice, ending in “dark cul-de-sacs with roll-top cupboards, lecterns, writing desks, office chairs and other items of furniture.” Or the two messengers, “who were strikingly alike and had faces that seemed somehow indistinct, with flickering outlines, wore jackets furnished with assorted pleats, pockets, button facings and a belt, garments which looked especially versatile although it was not clear what purpose they served.” Is Sebald using his novel to proclaim that Kafka was a realist? Or does he simply suspend his fiction for the occasional homage? Is he happy to be a postmodern pasticheur, to take the Observer ’s praise for his originality, and run with it? Or has he merely gambled — probably correctly — that an English readership will be unfamiliar with the first page of The Trial, which goes on, in the new translation by Idris Parry, “a close-fitting black suit which was provided, in the manner of travelling outfits, with various pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons and a belt, and which consequently seemed eminently practical, though one could not be quite sure what its purpose was.” It might have been different if the bit of Sebald’s own writing that the Kafka has been fitted onto had amounted to anything, but the faces are just “somehow indistinct,” in fact, they “seemed somehow indistinct.” This is like nailing literature onto a homemade fog — or perhaps a nineteenth-century ready-made fog.

JOSEPH CUOMO: On the surface at least, The Rings of Saturn is a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. But all sorts of allusions and observations come in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as he walks or looks out over a cliff or sits on his bed in a hotel room. And so we encounter with him any number of things, from the works of Sir Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad to Borges to Swinburne to the life of the Empress Dowager. This description of the book is accurate, but it doesn’t seem to describe what the novel actually does, what it accomplishes. And I think one of the difficulties we face in trying to describe the book is that in it you seem to have reinvented the narrative form. In fact, the narrative conceit of the novel seems virtually invisible, so much so that we are unaware of it as we read. There seems to be no artificial mechanism, no construct mediating between the reader and the experience of the page. A friend of mine, a very good writer, said to me that as soon as he had finished reading The Rings of Saturn he immediately started from the beginning again, because what had just happened to him — he couldn’t

Copyright © 2007 by Joseph Cuomo. From an interview conducted on March 13, 2001, as part of the Queens College Evening Readings in New York. The interview was subsequently broadcast on Metro TV’s The Unblinking Eye and published as “The Meaning of Coincidence: An Interview with Writer W. G. Sebald” in The New Yorker Online . A more complete version of the interview is published here for the first time.

figure out how it had happened. I was wondering how you approached this in the writing of it, the idea of narrative form. Was the structure a function largely of your unconscious associations during the writing process? Or was it something you plotted out in advance in a very deliberate way?

W. G. SEBALD: I can’t quite remember how it worked. I had this idea of writing a few short pieces for the feuilletons of the German papers in order to pay for this extravagance of a fortnight’s rambling tour. That was the plan. But then as you walk along, you find things. I think that’s the advantage of walking. It’s just one of the reasons why I do that a lot. You find things by the wayside or you buy a brochure written by a local historian, which is in a tiny little museum somewhere, which you would never find in London. And in that you find odd details which lead you somewhere else, and so it’s a form of unsystematic searching, which of course for an academic is far from orthodoxy, because we’re meant to do things systematically.

But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was always done in a random, haphazard fashion. And the more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way, i.e., in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he’s looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. [Audience laughter.] And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they’ll connect up. But they’ll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn’t, in terms of writing something new, very productive. So you have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before. That’s how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you. For instance, this whole business about this atrocious Chinese civil war in the nineteenth century, which we know so little about in the West — I knew nothing about it — I’d found that remark in a tiny little booklet written, I think, in 1948, which was still there for sale, that this little local train which ran around there [over the River Blyth in England] had been destined originally for the court of the emperor of China, which was a very bizarre, erratic fact. And then of course you wonder which emperor, and you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 and you rummage around there, and it goes on like this. Which is the most pleasurable part of the work, as you uncover these things and move from one astonishing thing to the other. The actual writing, of course, is a different story. That’s far from a pleasant occupation. [Audience laughter.]