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

JC: I was wondering if what the narrator in The Emigrants says in the Paul Bereyter section had some bearing when you were writing Austerlitz :

I imagined him, stretched out on the track [where he committed suicide]. . Such endeavors to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seem presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.

He was a teacher of yours.

WGS: Yes, a primary-school teacher.

JC: And Austerlitz is dealing with a similar subject as in The Emigrants : a man, Jacques Austerlitz, left Czechoslovakia in 1939 as a young boy, and then he doesn’t remember most of what had happened until he’s at a more advanced age. First of all, was this someone that you did know, as in The Emigrants ?

WGS: The Austerlitz character has two models and bits from other lives also. There was a colleague of mine, a distant colleague in London — London is a hundred miles from Norwich, but I had some contacts there — and I had bumped into this man a number of times fortuitously, in Belgium of all places, in the late 1960s, in unlikely places. He was an architectural historian, somewhat older than me, about ten, twelve years older, a born, very gifted teacher. And whenever we met I just listened to him. Before I came to England I hadn’t had any teachers apart from this primary schoolteacher who I wanted to listen to. And this chap was interested in the architecture of the capitalist era — opera houses, railway stations, that sort of thing — and he could go on endlessly about the most fascinating details. Then I lost sight of him for a while, and in the 1990s we made contact again. So this is one foil of the story.

But there is another foil, which is the life story of a woman, and that story I came across, as one does sometimes, on television. You know how ephemeral these appearances are on television — you see a film or you don’t see it, and then it vanishes forever and you can’t get a copy of it despite your best efforts. But there was this story of a woman who together with her twin sister had also come to Britain on one of these Kindertransporte , as they were called, trains with very young children leaving Germany or Czechoslovakia or Austria just before the outbreak of war. And those two girls were, I think, two-and-a-half to three years old. They came out of a Jewish Munich orphanage and they were fostered by a Welsh fundamentalist childless couple who then went on to erase their identity. And both foster parents ended tragically, as one might say, the father in a lunatic asylum, the mother through an early death. And so the children never really knew who they were. This is just one strand, as it were, of the story which I then put together with that other life history.

JC: I was wondering if that fear of presumption is what was so inhibiting in the writing of Austerlitz .

WGS: Well, it’s always there. I think certainly for a German gentile to write about Jewish lives is not unproblematic. There are examples of that, writers attempting this in Germany in the 1960s and 70s, and many of these attempts are — one can’t say it really otherwise — shameful. In the sense that they usurp the lives of these people. Perhaps not consciously so; they might be done with the best of intentions, but in the making it comes so that it isn’t right, morally not right. That is, something is spun out of the lives of these victims which is gratifying for the author or for the author’s audience. It’s very, very difficult terrain. I don’t know whether I succeed in this, but I was certainly conscious from the beginning that even in talking to the people who you perhaps might want to portray, there are thresholds which you cannot cross, where you have to keep your distance. It’s difficult and every case is different. Yet at the same time, of course, the likes of us ought to try to say how they receive these stories. But there isn’t a self-evident way of going about it. It’s a more acute variation of a problem that all writers have. So one has to be very careful.

JC: You’ve said that After Nature was very freeing because you could do it more or less by yourself. Were Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn also free writing experiences?

WGS: Certainly with Vertigo I had hardly any trouble at all. The last section of it, I wrote in very agreeable surroundings without consulting anything particularly, just wrote it down. But as I go along it seems to get more difficult. And pretty much in the same measure. The Emigrants was more difficult than this, and the last one I could hardly do, so I dread to think what the next one will be like. [Audience laughter.] I’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not like being a solicitor or a surgeon, you know: if you have taken out 125 appendixes, then the 126th one you can do in your sleep. With writing it’s the other way around.

JC: One thing we’ve discussed a couple of times, which is in The Rings of Saturn, is the degree to which the writing process is self-contained or illusionary for the writer as well as for the audience. Michael Hamburger and the narrator — Michael Hamburger also happens to be the translator for After Nature and he’s in The Rings of Saturn as a character — Michael Hamburger and the narrator are discussing the writing process. From the novel:

For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

This seems to be a theme that’s all over your work, which is that the part of the world that we know is minuscule. And the part of the world that we don’t know is enormous. Yet within the part that we do know — there’s such a great deal of agonizing in your work over getting that part right and getting the voice true. And yet, it may be that we’re trying to do this just to convince ourselves that we do know something about the world after all.

WGS: I think that’s pretty much how it is. You can’t always see, I think, the reality of what we’re doing in the pathological variant, because all modes of behavior have pathological variants. And writing and creating something is about elaboration. You have a few elements. You build something. You elaborate until you have something that looks like something. And elaboration is, of course, the vice of paranoia. If you read texts written by paranoiacs, they’re syntactically correct, the orthography is all right, but the content is insane, because they start from a series of axioms which are out of synch. But the degree of elaboration is absolutely fantastical. It goes on and on and on and on. You can see from that that the degree of elaboration is not the measure of truth. And that is exactly the same problem because, certainly in prose fiction, you have to elaborate. You have one image and you have to make something of it — half a page, or three-quarters, or one-and-a-half — and it only works through linguistic or imaginative elaboration. Of course you might well think, as you do this, that you are directing some form of sham reality.