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

JC: Two more things I want to get into before we close. One is — and this is that same theme again — in The Rings of Saturn :

The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond. . And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence.

There’s something in that quote which reminds me of a passage from The Brothers Karamazov , Father Zossima saying,

Many things on earth are hidden from us. . and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say that it is impossible to comprehend the essential nature of things on earth. . what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. .

One other connection would be to the work of Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski, and Joseph Brodsky. Do you see yourself as writing in a similar vein, thematically?

WGS: Well, what I think some of these people have in common is an interest in metaphysics. Certainly in Dostoyevsky this is evident. I think the best sections in Dostoyevsky’s writings are those which are metaphysical rather than religious. And metaphysics is something that’s always interested me, in the sense that one wants to speculate about these areas that are beyond one’s ken, as it were. I’ve always thought it very regrettable and, in a sense, also foolish, that the philosophers decided somewhere in the nineteenth century that metaphysics wasn’t a respectable discipline and had to be thrown overboard, and reduced themselves to becoming logicians and statisticians. It seemed a very poor diet, somehow, to me.

So metaphysics, I think, is a legitimate concern. Writers like Kafka, for instance, are interested in metaphysics. If you read a story like “The Investigations of a Dog,” it has a subject whose epistemological horizon is very low. He doesn’t realize anything above the height of one foot. He makes incantations so that the bread comes down from the dinner table. How it comes down, he doesn’t know. But he knows that if he performs certain rites, then certain events will follow. And then he goes, this dog, through the most extravagant speculations about reality, which we know is quite different. As he, the dog, has this limited capacity of understanding, so do we. And so it’s quite legitimate to ask — and of course it can become a parlor game, as it did in Bloomsbury — these philosophers said, “Are we sure that we’re really sitting here at this table?”

JC: I haven’t asked you about the photographs in the books. Two things occur to me. In The Emigrants, you’ve said, I think, that 90 percent of the photographs are authentic. But there’s a passage in Vertigo , speaking of Kafka, where the narrator is on a bus and he encounters two twin boys who look exactly like Franz Kafka did at that age. He’s traveling to a place where Kafka had spent some time, and he wants to get a photograph of these two boys. He asks the parents of the boys to send him a photograph, without giving their names, just because he needs to have this photograph. Of course the parents think that he’s a pederast and don’t want to have anything to do with him. But then the passage ends, “I remained motionless on that bus seat from then on, embarrassed to the utmost degree and consumed with an impotent rage at the fact that I would now have no evidence whatsoever to document this most improbable coincidence.” I was wondering if this was another form of documentation — for the photographs in the books to document coincidence itself.

WGS: Well, that particular episode actually happened as it is described, and it was from that time onwards that I always have one of those small cameras in my pocket. [Audience laughter.] It was a completely unnerving afternoon. It was really terrible. But, you know, it does happen. Doubles do exist. The irony is, of course, that Kafka’s prose fiction is full of twins or triplets. And that it should happen in real life seemed to me quite implausible. I mean, sometimes one asks oneself later on whether one’s made it up or not. And it’s not always quite clear.

JC: The last question is, again, about coincidence. I was wondering, going back to the theme that we discussed earlier on, the fault line between nature and civilization, if you feel sometimes that coincidence or duplication is a way in which nature is breaking through the surface of our civilized lives. We may not know what it means, but we have a sense that something beyond us is taking place.

WGS: Well, I don’t think I could speculate about this, but one sometimes does have a sense that there is a double floor someplace, or that events are outside your control. This notion of the autonomous individual who is in charge of his or her fate is one that I couldn’t really subscribe to. Certainly my own life experience is that always when I thought I had things sorted out and I was in control, the next day something happened which completely undid everything I had wanted to do. And so it goes on. The illusion that I had some control over my life goes up to about my thirty-fifth birthday and then it stopped. [Audience laughter.] Now I’m out of control.

If there is an underworld where the darkest nightmares of the twentieth century dwell, W. G. Sebald could be its Charon. Starting with Vertigo , which combines sketches of Kafka and Stendhal with a fictionalized record of travels in Italy and elsewhere, and ending with Austerlitz , the story of a boy sent to England via Kindertransporte in 1939 and brought up under a false name, all of Sebald’s books have been about bridging gaps and about the impossibility of bridging gaps — between memory and forgetting, between art and reality, between the living and the dead. These extraordinary works are different on each reading, constantly in flux. Sebald’s sudden death in a car accident last December was tragic for many reasons, but for his readers foremost because his books, all of them variations on a small group of themes, seemed parts of a whole that had not yet been brought to completion but had already broken new literary ground.

Like the origami figures that open and close with a twist of the fingers, Sebald’s prose moves simultaneously inward and outward. The opening of Austerlitz is exemplary:

Originally appeared in The New Republic , September 23, 2002. Reprinted by permission of The New Republic , © 2002, The New Republic, LLC.

In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks.

On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer’s day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name. Even on my arrival, as the train rolled slowly over the viaduct with its curious pointed turrets on both sides and into the dark station concourse, I had begun to feel unwell, and this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my visit to Belgium on that occasion. I still remember the uncertainty of my footsteps as I walked all round the inner city, down Jeruzalemstraat, Nachtegaalstraat, Pelikaanstraat, Paradijsstraat, Immerseelstraat, and many other streets and alleyways, until at last, plagued by a headache and my uneasy thoughts, I took refuge in the zoo by the Astridplein, next to the Centraal Station, waiting for the pain to subside. I sat there on a bench in dappled shade, beside an aviary full of brightly feathered finches and siskins fluttering about. As the afternoon drew to a close I walked through the park, and finally went to see the Nocturama, which had first been opened only a few months earlier. It was some time before my eyes became used to its artificial dusk and I could make out different animals leading their sombrous lives behind the glass by the light of a pale moon. I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice, and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting back and forth over the grayish-yellow sandy ground, or disappearing into a bamboo thicket. The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own.