Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

Indeed, the first of these essays to be written was the one which forms a coda to the volume, on the paintings of Sebald’s contemporary Jan Peter Tripp, which was originally published in 1993 in a catalog of the latter’s work entitled Die Aufzählung der Schwierigkeiten ( The Enumeration of the Difficulties ) — an allusion to which title, establishing a link between Tripp’s work and his own methods, closes Sebald’s Foreword: “there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection [or, in homage to Michael Hamburger’s translation of Unrecounted , “recounting”] of things.” The remaining five essays were written during the course of 1997—as the dates on the manuscript in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, in Sebald’s characteristic Roman numerals, tell us — starting with the piece on Eduard Mörike, given as a speech on receipt of the Mörike-Preis in Fellbach (near the Swabian capital, Stuttgart) in April of that year, and subsequently published in association with that prize. There then follows the essay on Robert Walser, written in March, an extract of which was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in May 1997; the pieces on Keller and Hebel are composed in June and July respectively, and the essay on Rousseau in August of that year (this last was published a year later, in a slightly different form and without any of the accompanying images, under the title “Rousseau auf der Île de Saint-Pierre,” in Sinn und Form in July/August 1998, shortly before the book’s publication). The Foreword, finally, was added early in 1998.

Although the essays in this volume stand as individual pieces in their own right, they are nevertheless linked by “a web of interlocking signs,” motifs and images which recur from one essay to the next, linking, say, Hebel with Rousseau, Walser with Mörike, Keller with Tripp, whether via the obsessive attention to detail of the writer’s (and artist’s) craft, the predilection for small things and worlds in miniature, the unexpected mentions of Kleist and Hölderlin, or a boating trip across the water. This last, in particular, recurs in one form or another in almost all the essays, symbolic perhaps of the quest for a rural retreat set apart from both the modern world and “the hubbub of literary business”—even though such a retreat can only ever provide at best a temporary respite from the “eternal business of cogitation” to which all writers, Sebald seems to suggest, are inexorably prone. This notwithstanding, in an interview with Arthur Lubow in 2001, Sebald describes his own visit to the Île Saint-Pierre — a visit which apparently inspired the essay on Rousseau — in the most idyllic, even nostalgic, of terms:

I felt at home, strangely, because it is a miniature world.… One manor house, one farmhouse. A vineyard, a field of potatoes, a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard. It has one of everything, so it is in a sense an ark. It is like when you draw a place when you are a child. I don’t like large-scale things, not in architecture or evolutionary leaps. I think it’s an aberration. This notion of something that is small and self-contained is for me a moral and aesthetic ideal.

This artistic (and by implication moral) credo echoes throughout these essays, a rejection of the relentless “general expansionism” that so characterizes the onset of the modern age. However, as readers of Sebald’s fiction will know, he is always keenly aware of the vertiginous depths lurking “beneath the surface illusionism,” as he writes in the essay on Jan Peter Tripp. Of his fiction he remarks in the interview with Piet de Moor in 1992, pointing out the way that the “beatific moments” serve to reveal the “full measure of the horror,” that

the old-fashionedness of the diction or of the narrative tone is … nothing to do with nostalgia for a better age that’s gone past but is simply something that, as it were, heightens the awareness of that which we have managed to engineer in this century.

It is this awareness of the “inherent contradiction between this nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress towards the brink of the abyss,” of the storm clouds always gathering on the historical and mental horizon, which renders so poignant and so precarious the perverse perseverance, the “awful tenacity” as Sebald says in the Foreword, of those who devote their lives to literature, “the hapless writers trapped in their web of words,” who, in spite of everything, nevertheless “sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide.”

Jo Catling

Norwich, England

JANUARY 2013

It is a good thirty years since I first became acquainted with the writers who are the subjects of the essays in this volume. I can still remember quite clearly how, when I set out from Switzerland for Manchester in the early autumn of 1966, I placed Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich , Johann Peter Hebel’s Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreunds , and a disintegrating copy of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten in my suitcase. 1The countless pages I have read since then have done nothing to diminish my appreciation of these books and their authors, and if today I were obliged to move again to another island, I am sure they would once again find a place in my luggage. This unwavering affection for Hebel, Keller, and Walser was what gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late. The two pieces on Rousseau and Mörike had their origins elsewhere, but as it turns out they are by no means out of place in this context. The essays in this volume span a period of almost two hundred years — which goes to show how little has altered, in all this time, when it comes to that peculiar behavioral disturbance which causes every emotion to be transformed into letters on the page and which bypasses life with such extraordinary precision. What I found most surprising in the course of these observations is the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing. There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at that critical age when, as Keller remarks, one every day runs the risk of becoming simpleminded and longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one’s head. Rousseau, who in his refuge on the Île Saint-Pierre — he is fifty-three years old at this point — already longs for an end to the eternal business of cogitation, nevertheless keeps on writing up to the very end. Mörike, too, carries on tinkering with his novel long after it has ceased to be worth the trouble. Keller retires at fifty-six from his official position as a civil servant in order to surrender himself completely to his literary work, and Walser can only free himself from the obsessive compulsion to write by as it were disenfranchising himself and withdrawing from society altogether. In view of this drastic measure, watching a French television documentary a few months ago I was profoundly moved by a remark by a former orderly from the asylum at Herisau, one Josef Wehrle, who related how Walser, despite having completely turned his back on literature, would always carry with him in his waistcoat pocket a pencil stub and a few scraps of paper, carefully cut to size, on which he would often jot down one thing or another. However, Josef Wehrle continued, Walser was always quick to conceal these scraps of paper if he thought anyone was watching, as if he had been caught in the act of doing something wrong, or even shameful. Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible. From the writer’s point of view, there is almost nothing to be said in its defense, so little does it have to offer by way of gratification. Perhaps it would really be better simply to set down — as Keller originally intended — a brief novel with the career of a young artist tragically cut short, and a cypress-dark ending that sees everyone dead and buried, before laying aside the pen for good. The reader, though, would stand to lose much thereby, for the hapless writers trapped in their web of words sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide. And so it is as a reader, first and foremost, that I wish to pay tribute to these colleagues who have gone before me, in the form of these extended marginal notes and glosses, which do not otherwise have any particular claim to make. That the final essay has a painter as its subject is also right and proper, not merely because for quite some time Jan Peter Tripp and I went to school together in Oberstdorf, and because Keller and Walser mean a great deal to both of us, but also because from his pictures I have learned how it is essential to gaze far beneath the surface, that art is nothing without patient handiwork, and that there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.