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

JC: This discovery process — the dog running in the field — is any of that happening while you’re actually writing? You made a distinction between the two things, the searching and the reading. .

WGS: Occasionally. I think when you write or do anything of the sort, there are times when you almost know that you’re on the right track. You don’t quite believe it, but you feel more positive about what you’re doing than at other times, and I think this is confirmed when things come in from the wings, you know, as you sit there, trying to straighten out a page. And, as it comes right, then quotations or figures or things that you hadn’t thought of for eighteen years offer themselves all of a sudden. And I’ve always found that quite a good measure — that once things are going in a certain way that you can trust, then even in the writing process itself, things happen. For instance, the last part of this book [ The Rings of Saturn ] is all about silk, and that section, in turn, finishes with a number of pages on the culture of mourning. And on the very day when I finished these pages, I looked in, I think it was the Times , the daily circular, and there were all the events I needed. You know, the list of what had happened on a certain day 130 years ago or 220 years ago. And they all slotted into the text, as if I had been writing towards that point. It was quite amazing, but it does happen in that way occasionally — and that’s very gratifying when it does.

JC: That process itself seems to be one that you describe in the novels: something inexplicable occurs; we don’t really know what to make of it, but the fact that it does occur seems to carry enormous significance.

WGS: Yes, I think it’s this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it’s not obtrusive. But, you know, it certainly does come up in the first book, in Vertigo , a good deal. I don’t particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or with Jungian theories about the subject. I find it all rather tedious. But it seems to me simply an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. And so you meet somebody who has the same birthday — the odds are one to 365, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person, then immediately this takes on major significance. [Audience laughter.] And so we build. I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of creed, all our constructions, even the technological ones, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, which there isn’t, as we all know. [Audience laughter.]

JC: One of the things that’s so remarkable about the books is that you never try to use these coincidences toward some end, which is, I think, the point you’re making: that we don’t feel that we’re being manipulated to see the world — I mean, in a lot of these pop-psychology novels there’s a realization that, “Oh, because our birthdays are on the same day it means we should stay married.” Or something like that. There’s a tendency to reduce the world to some theme that this then becomes the proof of. And it’s amazing to me that you resist that urge in novel after novel.

WGS: Well, it would trivialize it. Nevertheless, it has significance. The first section of Vertigo is about Stendhal, and this rather short piece finishes with Stendhal’s death in a certain street in Paris, which is now called the Rue Danielle Casanova. I didn’t know who Danielle Casanova was, except that Casanova meant something for me in the same context of that book, but not Danielle Casanova. The following summer I went to Corsica, walking through the mountains in Corsica, and I came to the coastal village of Piana, and there was a little house with a plaque on it, and it was a memorial plaque for Danielle Casanova, who had been murdered by my compatriots in Auschwitz. She’d been a dentist and a communist and was in the French Resistance. And I went past the house three or four times and it always seemed closed. Then on one occasion I went round the back and there was her sister. And then, you know, I talked to her for a week. [Audience laughter.] These things do happen. I have all her papers now, and I don’t know what I shall do with them, but. . it’s that sort of connection. And if that sort of thing happens to us, then we think, perhaps, that not everything is quite futile. It gives one a sort of passing sense of consolation, occasionally.

JC: We were talking backstage about your first book in German, After Nature , which is still in manuscript in English, about how that book came about. You’ve been quoted as saying that it was [the sixteenth-century painter Matthias] Grünewald who brought you into it, but then you were telling me that it was [Georg Wilhelm] Steller, who is in the second section, and that that came out of a footnote.

WGS: Yes. It may be of interest because you don’t know how I got into this strange business of writing books of this kind. I mean, I had never had any ambitions of becoming or being a writer. But what I felt towards the middle point of my life was that I was being hemmed in increasingly by the demands of my job at the university, by the demands of various other things that one has in one’s life, and that I needed some way out. And that coincided at the time — I just happened to be going down to London and reading a book by a rather obscure German writer called Konrad Bayer, who was one of the young surrealists, as it were, postwar surrealists who’d been kept down by the famous Gruppe 47, and who subsequently took his own life. He’d only written a number of very slender little things, among them a book called The Head of Vitus Bering , and that had in it a footnote reference to an eighteenth-century German botanist and zoologist called Georg Wilhelm Steller, who happens to have the same initials that I have [audience laughter], and happened to have been born in a place which my mother visited when she was pregnant in 1943, when she was going from Bamberg, which is in the north of Bavaria, down to the Alps, where her parents were, because the bombers were coming in increasingly. She couldn’t go through Nuremberg, which is the normal route, because Nuremberg had just been attacked that night and was all in flames. So she had to go around it. And she stayed in Windsheim, as that place is called, where a friend of hers had a house.

JC: Which is in the book.

WGS: Which is mentioned. This preoccupation with making something out of nothing, which is, after all, what writing is about, took me at that point. And what I liked about it was that if you just changed, as it were, the nature of your writing from academic monographs to something indefinable, then you had complete liberty; whereas, as you well know, as an academic, people constantly say, “Well, it’s not correct, what you put there. It’s not right.” Now, it doesn’t matter.

JC: There’s a theme in your work that seems to be present from After Nature on. You’ve said,

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. . And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. . I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook.

It seems that even in After Nature , particularly in Grünewald’s painting The Crucifixion , that this theme is perceived:

. . the panic-stricken

kink in the neck to be seen

in all of Grünewald’s subjects