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

  In Austerlitz, the unnamed first-person writer gives us his memories of encounters he has had with the eponymous Austerlitz, a figure who has obviously exercised considerable fascination over him: first in a station in Belgium, then in London, in Paris, and elsewhere. The encounters, the personality, the relationship are never particularly keenly seen; most of the book is made up of the divagations of Austerlitz’s reported speech (a mode which in English is hard to distinguish over long stretches from ordinary narrative). Think of Thomas Bernhard’s monologizing novels, but substitute repression for spill, airy scholarship for furious effect, and you have the general idea. Austerlitz’s story—there seems to be pressure on Sebald to make it matter, as though his shimmering vitrines of facts are not enough by themselves—is that of a European Jew, born in Prague in 1934, put on one of the Kindertransporte in 1939, raised by a Welsh nonconformist minister and his wife, and later made aware of his origins and possible “identity,” and finally consumed by them and by the thought of Terezin and Drancy, where his parents presumably met their deaths. The story, told in easy sequence, in meetings with ordered witnesses, is inevitably trite.

  Sebald’s writing has been more often praised than accurately described; the “beauty” so often reflexively attested to I frankly don’t see. The dominant gesture is of something rigid in its peculiarity, or rigid in response to peculiarity. (The closest you get to drama in Sebald are certain moments of vaunting strangeness, promontories built out into the ectoplasmic sea in which the books have their being.) The sentences are grammatically complex and strictly correct. There is something paralyzed or immobilized about them. The manner is insouciantly, provocatively grandiloquent, neither sharp nor blunt. Inevitably, anything modern or contemporary distinctly threatens it: Canary Wharf appears anonymously as “sparkling glass towers”; one meeting between the narrator and Austerlitz is claimed, to the reader’s utter disbelief, to take place in a McDonald’s. It is a style that moves between stiff correctness, cliché (“white as a sheet”) and jargon (boys at school who “hatched plots to extend their power bases”). A fire in an invalid’s room has “yellowish smoke that rose from the glowing coals”—an impossibility, I would have thought—while moths flying round a lamp at night are seen “describing thousands of different arcs and spirals and loops”—where I would similarly query “different” as a bit of descriptive cant.

  To me, Sebald’s books have something gothic about them, a chilly extravagance, a numbed obsessiveness. Even their placid-ness and vagueness are gothic. On almost every page, I had the sense that I might have been reading Poe, or de L’Isle-Adam, or Hofmannsthal’s Chandos letter, something learned and constrained and almost frightful: “Soon I would be overcome by this terrible anxiety in the midst of the simplest actions: tying my shoelaces, washing up tea-cups, waiting for the kettle to boil.” At the same time, though, there is a complacency and lack of urgency in Sebald’s academic sleuthing and the pedantic rosters of his prose catalogues that kept me from taking it as seriously as, say, Hofmannsthal.

  Beyond that, the presence of descriptive tropes lifted straight from Kafka baffled me: the labyrinthine architecture of the Brussels Palace of Justice, ending in “dark cul-de-sacs with roll-top cupboards, lecterns, writing desks, office chairs and other items of furniture.” Or the two messengers, “who were strikingly alike and had faces that seemed somehow indistinct, with flickering outlines, wore jackets furnished with assorted pleats, pockets, button facings and a belt, garments which looked especially versatile although it was not clear what purpose they served.” Is Sebald using his novel to proclaim that Kafka was a realist? Or does he simply suspend his fiction for the occasional homage? Is he happy to be a postmodern pasticheur, to take the Observer’s praise for his originality, and run with it? Or has he merely gambled—probably correctly—that an English readership will be unfamiliar with the first page of The Trial, which goes on, in the new translation by Idris Parry, “a close-fitting black suit which was provided, in the manner of travelling outfits, with various pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons and a belt, and which consequently seemed eminently practical, though one could not be quite sure what its purpose was.” It might have been different if the bit of Sebald’s own writing that the Kafka has been fitted onto had amounted to anything, but the faces are just “somehow indistinct,” in fact, they “seemed somehow indistinct.” This is like nailing literature onto a homemade fog—or perhaps a nineteenth-century ready-made fog.

  A Conversation with W. G. Sebald

  by Joseph Cuomo

  JOSEPH CUOMO: On the surface at least, The Rings of Saturn is a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. But all sorts of allusions and observations come in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as he walks or looks out over a cliff or sits on his bed in a hotel room. And so we encounter with him any number of things, from the works of Sir Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad to Borges to Swinburne to the life of the Empress Dowager. This description of the book is accurate, but it doesn’t seem to describe what the novel actually does, what it accomplishes. And I think one of the difficulties we face in trying to describe the book is that in it you seem to have reinvented the narrative form. In fact, the narrative conceit of the novel seems virtually invisible, so much so that we are unaware of it as we read. There seems to be no artificial mechanism, no construct mediating between the reader and the experience of the page. A friend of mine, a very good writer, said to me that as soon as he had finished reading The Rings of Saturn he immediately started from the beginning again, because what had just happened to him—he couldn’tCopyright © 2007 by Joseph Cuomo. From an interview conducted on March 13, 2001, as part of the Queens College Evening Readings in New York. The interview was subsequently broadcast on Metro TV’s The Unblinking Eye and published as “The Meaning of Coincidence: An Interview with Writer W. G. Sebald” in The New Yorker Online. A more complete version of the interview is published here for the first time.

  figure out how it had happened. I was wondering how you approached this in the writing of it, the idea of narrative form. Was the structure a function largely of your unconscious associations during the writing process? Or was it something you plotted out in advance in a very deliberate way?

  W. G. SEBALD: I can’t quite remember how it worked. I had this idea of writing a few short pieces for the feuilletons of the German papers in order to pay for this extravagance of a fortnight’s rambling tour. That was the plan. But then as you walk along, you find things. I think that’s the advantage of walking. It’s just one of the reasons why I do that a lot. You find things by the wayside or you buy a brochure written by a local historian, which is in a tiny little museum somewhere, which you would never find in London. And in that you find odd details which lead you somewhere else, and so it’s a form of unsystematic searching, which of course for an academic is far from orthodoxy, because we’re meant to do things systematically.

  But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was always done in a random, haphazard fashion. And the more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way, i.e., in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he’s looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. [Audience laughter.] And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they’ll connect up. But they’ll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn’t, in terms of writing something new, very productive. So you have to take hete
rogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before. That’s how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you. For instance, this whole business about this atrocious Chinese civil war in the nineteenth century, which we know so little about in the West—I knew nothing about it—I’d found that remark in a tiny little booklet written, I think, in 1948, which was still there for sale, that this little local train which ran around there [over the River Blyth in England] had been destined originally for the court of the emperor of China, which was a very bizarre, erratic fact. And then of course you wonder which emperor, and you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 and you rummage around there, and it goes on like this. Which is the most pleasurable part of the work, as you uncover these things and move from one astonishing thing to the other. The actual writing, of course, is a different story. That’s far from a pleasant occupation. [Audience laughter.]

  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 the
me is perceived:. . . the panic-stricken

  kink in the neck to be seen

  in all of Grünewald’s subjects

  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.