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

exposing the throat and often turning

the face towards a blinding light

is the extreme response of our bodies

to the absence of balance in nature

which blindly makes one experiment after another

and like a senseless botcher undoes

the thing it has only just achieved.

Was that idea, that theme, something that came to you in the writing of After Nature ?

WGS: No, it’s something that’s preoccupied me for a long time. And I don’t quite know why. But I think if you have grown up as I have done, in a village in the postwar years of the Alps where there weren’t any cars or indeed any other machines worth speaking of, then you still know what silence is, you live in a house where the sounds are made by the house itself as it expands or contracts in the heat or the cold. You’re not listening to the fridge going on and off all the time or the television in the other room or the central heating doing its thing. If you took a kind of closed-circuit camera film of, I don’t know, a house here in Queens, you might well be excused if you got the idea that the people in it are only there to service the machines. [Audience laughter.] In terms of evolution, they are of the higher order, there’s no doubt about it. Whether they are intelligent or not is neither here nor there, but they are of the higher order. They come after us. It is encapsulated in that wonderful image of the dog listening to the gramophone. There is that nagging sense that we’re being kept, as it were, on sufferance. And I find the idea that perhaps one day a very severely decimated number of us might be kept like the dogs are now kept in New York not very appealing.

There was, as it were, a décalage or discontinuity in time so that in a sense in the late forties and early fifties in the Alps, you lived in the eighteenth century, for a few years. It’s changed very rapidly. There was this unevenness of time. It’s now very difficult to find any spaces where the twenty-first century isn’t as yet. Certainly Germany has all been leveled out. Even in the 1960s, the frontier tracks in the east towards Czechoslovakia were, way back in time, underdeveloped, predeveloped. And that has all changed. So I think we move out of our earlier forms of existence or arrangements with nature at a price, always. There is always something we have to give up.

JC: Yes, I was feeling that today. I was typing up some of the notes here, and the computer program I was using was changing the letters. I would type a lowercase “a” because it was at the left margin of the poem, and the computer would change it to a capital. [Audience laughter.] I would go to the next line, and it would do the same thing.

WGS: Yes, my translator in the book that’s coming out in the autumn [ Austerlitz ] has some Czech bits in it, which I found quite hard to write. At any rate, I haven’t got a machine but the translator had a machine, and whenever she put those Czech bits in, the computer then put a one-and-a-half space for the next line, without explanation, without rhyme or reason. He’s not answerable. This is the strange thing, that there’s the same gap of incomprehension between us and these machines as there is between us and the animals we look at in the zoo. [Audience laughter.] There is a gap of incomprehension. We guess at what they might think about us, but we’re not entirely sure.

JC: The fault line in your work seems to be the conflict between nature and civilization, and for you the fear is that nature is going to be destroyed. .

WGS: Well, in one sense, organic nature is going to vanish. We see it vanishing by the yard. It’s not very difficult — I mean, you can hear the grass creak. Once you have an eye for it, if you go to the Mediterranean you can see that there used to be forests all along the Dalmatian coast. The whole of the Iberian Peninsula was wooded; you could walk from the Atlas Mountains to Cairo in the shade at the time of Scipio. It’s been going on for a long time, it’s not just now. There are pockets, Corsica, for instance, where you can see what these forests looked like. The trees were much taller. They were like the American trees, straight up, some sixty yards. But there are only pockets of it left. And you can see that it’s a process of attrition that’s gone on for a long time and that organic nature is being replaced through the agency of the psychozootic power, whatever one might call them, i.e., us — it’s being replaced by something else, by chemistry, dust, and stones, which function in some form or other. And we don’t know what it’s going to be. On the whole, the thing evolves under its own steam. There’s very little we can do to steer it.

JC: Of the four books which I know in English, The Emigrants seems to be the one that’s least like the others in structure. There are four sections about four individuals, all of whom are more or less drawn from life. You’ve used the term “documentary fiction” to describe The Emigrants . I was wondering if that same description fits the other three novels at all.

WGS: Not really. They’re all different. I think this one [ Austerlitz ] is much more in the form of an elegy, really, a long prose elegy. The first one, Vertigo , has very strong autobiographical elements, i.e., it looks at a period of disturbance in the narrator’s life and tries to intimate how that might have come about. And it is also in the nature of crime fiction, in the sense that there are unresolved crimes. Which really happened — these gruesome murders in Italy which are described in that book — I mean, these are authentic elements.

JC: And the death of Schlag the hunter at the end of Vertigo ?

WGS: That is also how it happened to me as I grew up in that village. But the image of the hunter is projected backward in the text in an illicit sort of way. So there are a few instances, certainly in the Stendhal and in the Kafka story, where some kind of legerdemain arranges things in a way suitable for the text.

JC: There is the effect in Vertigo when we read the last section — the narrator returning to his home town, W., which is also first the initial of your hometown — where we suddenly see what we’ve read before in a new light, and this turns around our perception of the earlier chapters. Was that something that came to you when you got to the last chapter?

WGS: No, that happens. For instance, as in psychoanalysis, when the narrative is finished, its beginnings show up in a new light. And in fact it happens with all forms of tales and stories, that the end really provides. . I mean, after the tock comes the tick again.

JC: Was The Emigrants , then, very different from the other books, in the writing of it?

WGS: Different in the sense that Vertigo was very much a thing I did by myself, but with The Emigrants I had interlocutors, i.e., people whom I had known and was talking to, as it were, after their death, remembering who they were. Or people who, as in the case of the last story, were still alive. The last story is based on two figures, on a well-known contemporary painter and on a landlord I had in Manchester who was an émigré and came to Manchester in 1933; all the details about the childhood of his mother are from his mother. And this was for me quite a momentous experience, this whole Manchester business, because growing up in Germany you do perhaps learn the odd thing or did at the time. . I mean, one didn’t really talk about the Holocaust, as it is called, in the 1960s in schools, nor did your parents ever mention it, God forbid, and they didn’t talk about it amongst themselves either. So this was a huge taboo zone. But then pressure eventually saw to it that in schools the subject would be raised. It was usually done in the form of documentary films which were shown to us without comment. So, you know, it was a sunny June afternoon, and you would see one of those liberation of Dachau or Belsen films, and then you would go and play football because you didn’t really know what you should do with it.