Abstract
In November 1999, when W. G. Sebald’s reputation was growing, and at the same time as he was labouring under increasing pressures, he was interviewed by Toby Green. The interview is one of Sebald’s most interesting and sombre, dealing with the personal cost of his literary success as a writer, and first appeared on-line. As it is relatively unknown, the Journal of European Studies prints it here for the first time. Although Sebald’s attraction to Susan Sontag’s essays on photography began around 1982, and Sontag’s reciprocal admiration for his prose fiction began in mid-1996, they first met at a combined reading evening on 15 October 2001 in New York: their contributions are reprinted here. Sebald first met Professor Jürgen Wertheimer in January 1992 at a conference in Tübingen on post-Wende Europe. Sebald’s lecture provoked heated discussion and is one of his few explicitly political statements. Wertheimer subsequently kept in contact with Sebald until his death and hoped to entice him to Tübingen as a guest professor. On 3 July 2013 Wertheimer gave a spirited lecture in German which discussed the reception of Sebald’s work and raised difficult questions about the function of literature and criticism under late capitalism. An authorized English translation is published here.
Keywords
Introduction
Richard Sheppard
On 18 May 2014, W. G. (Max) Sebald would have celebrated – well, perhaps not celebrated – his seventieth birthday. So as a small tribute to someone who was involved with the Journal of European Studies from its inception, the Editors have generously permitted me, with of course the kind permission of the Estate of W. G. Sebald, to include in this issue three texts which deal with three encounters – two from the final two years of his life and one that extends over more than two decades.
The first encounter occurred in November 1999, and although by the end of that year Max was becoming an international literary figure for whom new professional possibilities were opening up – notably the NESTA Scholarship for which he would be invited to apply on 26 January 2000, he was not a happy man. His father, with whom he had had an ambivalent relationship, had died on 18 June; Michael Hulse, the first translator of his works into English, had given up this work in August; on 1 August, due mainly to the diminishing number of students who were applying to the University of East Anglia (UEA) to read modern foreign languages and their attendant literatures, the old School of European Studies, of which Max had been a member since 1970, was finally, after several other internal upheavals since 1977, broken into three and its faculty either made redundant or transferred elsewhere within the university. Max was also in the midst of writing Austerlitz, his final and most complex work of prose fiction; helping, albeit from the sidelines, to run the British Centre for Literary Translation, which he had persuaded UEA to set up in 1989 and he had directed until 1995; and taking on a punishing amount of work over and above his normal job – reading tours in Germany, interviews with journalists, liaison work with publishers, etc.
It was during this difficult transition period that Max agreed to be interviewed by Toby Green, a young author whose work he knew and with whom he would have had a natural affinity. Max tended not to lead interviewers and preferred to let them take him in their chosen direction, and it so happened that Green, arriving on a bleak November day in a bleak and unfamiliar East Anglian landscape, was in exactly the right frame of mind to probe Max’s increasingly melancholic views on literature, higher education and the universe in general. The resultant interview is, in my view at least, one of the most interesting that Max ever gave, but also one of the most sombre, and Green would soon realize that his well-judged questions had touched on the sense of personal cost that Max, as a successful writer, was paying for creating serious fiction ‘in dürftiger Zeit’. Far from bringing him a sense of satisfaction or fulfilment, Max’s success was intensifying his doubts about the value of what he was doing and the validity of his reasons for doing it. The interview is, however, insufficiently known to Sebald scholars – possibly because of where it originally appeared – and it is a great pleasure to be allowed to publish it in the academic journal where so many of Max’s early reviews first appeared.
Susan Sontag, who is the subject at the centre of the second encounter, probably first came across Max’s prose fiction in about August 1996, when the US version of Hulse’s translation of Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) appeared in print, some five months after its British counterpart. She then, like A. S. Byatt, contributed a glowing review to the Times Literary Supplement which appeared on 29 November 1996 (Byatt, Sontag et al. (1996)) and probably drew Max’s work to the attention of the Wylie Agency. But her enthusiasm for Max’s work reached its peak when, on 25 February 2000, she published ‘A mind in mourning’, a review of Hulse’s translation of Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo), in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books which involved an even more positive appreciation of Max’s work as a whole and brought him literary stardom in the USA. But unbeknown to Sontag, Max had formed an elective affinity with one major aspect of her work nearly two decades previously. He owned the 1982 Penguin edition of On Photography, a collection of Sontag’s essays that had first appeared in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977; he annotated his copy with nearly 30 underlinings or marginal linings, especially the chapter ‘Melancholy objects’ (Sontag, 1982: 51–112); and on the basis of his knowledge of these essays, he first referred in print to her ideas on photography in 1984, the year when his career as a writer really began. 1 Max also owned an edition of Under the Sign of Saturn (Sontag,1983), her third collection of critical essays, all but one of which had first appeared in The New York Review of Books between 1972 and 1980; he annotated his copy with nearly 40 underlinings or marginal linings, especially the chapter that deals with Walter Benjamin and is entitled ‘Under the sign of Saturn’ (1978) (Sontag, 1983: 109–34); and he almost certainly read it while on a flight to Dublin in order to read a paper on Hofmannsthal’s fragmentary novel Andreas at the Second Irish Symposium on Austrian Studies that took place in Trinity College from 28 February to 2 March 1985. 2
Ironically, the two writers almost met for the first time seven years later when, at 19.00 hours on 7 October 1992, Sontag read from her novel The Volcano Lover (1992) in UEA’s Lecture Theatre 1. 3 But by that juncture Sontag did not know any of Max’s writing, and as he was on study leave during the autumn term of 1992, he may well have been away on one of his numerous journeys. Professor Chris Bigsby, who organized the event, does not recall him being present either, but even if he had been, the novel’s concern with the elemental sides of Nature and human nature – ‘the mythical’ or ‘mythological’, as Max called them in his early work on Alfred Döblin – would not have appealed to him.
So Max and Sontag probably did not meet until the afternoon/evening of 15 October 2001, i.e. at the opening event of Max’s strenuous, ten-day reading tour in the USA, when the two of them read from their work at a well-known New York cultural venue. 4 The date of their meeting fell midway between the shocking events of 9/11 and Max’s death from an inherited heart condition. But on that particular evening Max said nothing about 9/11, though he would mention it briefly on three other public occasions during his journey across the USA, 5 and the two questions that were specifically addressed to him were run-of-the-mill and generated predictable answers. But if the contents of Max’s answers were somewhat disappointing, his delivery of those answers was not, since he clearly enjoyed putting on a drily understated, virtuoso performance in which he played the melancholic European intellectual before an appreciative North American audience. He also responded with visible gratitude to the sincerely meant, well-turned and deferential compliments from the doyenne of North American literary criticism. Consequently, his mood lightened as the evening went on and contrasts markedly with that of November 1999. But his contribution to the evening culminated – in more than the literal sense – in his final sentence of the evening, in which, for the only time known to me, he mentioned in public his one visit to Greece, during which he stayed on an unidentified island. 6 He then, in a sustained but carefully controlled burst of self-irony, told his listeners that this was where he wrote Il ritorno in patria, the last section of Schwindel. Gefühle, ‘without hesitation’ and ‘without any kind of aid, no book to look at, no newspaper to read, just a pad and a pencil’. This, he concluded, was for him ‘the most liberating moment’ in his ‘brief writing career and one that hasn’t been repeated since’. Given its implications, this insight makes the reading evening a more significant event and justifies reproducing it here.
Finally, it is a great pleasure to be able to include Jürgen Wertheimer’s spirited lecture on Max of 3 July 2013. Far from being an example of orotund incomprehensibility ex cathedra, it confronts its audience with tough, direct questions about the function of literary texts and literary criticism under late capitalism that would have gladdened Max’s heart. From 1963 to 1965 Max, as he tells Toby Green below, had experienced what he considered a reactionary form of Germanistik at an old-established German university (founded 1457). As he found a more acceptable form of that subject only when he spent time in three less ancient foundations abroad, 7 he must have been somewhat worried about participating in a Forum at a German university that was almost as ancient (founded 1477) as his own alma mater and had a reputation for being equally conservative. So on 15 January 1992, while he was spending the day writing ‘[die] Tübinger Arbeit über Europa’ (‘the lecture on Europe for Tübingen’), he grumpily noted in his engagement diary: ‘mir alles sehr zuwider. Kein[e] Lust dorthin zu fahren’ (‘it’s all deeply repugnant to me. No desire to go there at all’). But once on the platform at Tübingen, Max’s natural skill at provocation and controlled sense of theatricality enabled him to deliver an extremely punchy lecture on the state and future of Europe which called forth some very violent reactions from the politically hopeful, post-Wende young in the audience. Max’s lecture (Sebald, 1995) is rarely cited in secondary literature, but it indicates that as early as 1992 he was deeply sceptical about the way Europe was developing and clearly thought, rightly or wrongly, that the ‘European ideal’ to which Europe’s post-war founding fathers had subscribed was being ‘reconfigured’ – i.e. assimilated and recast along purely economic lines by a massive and irresistible capitalist machine that could homogenize, institutionalize, commodify and thereby neutralize anything – even, as Professor Wertheimer discusses in the latter part of his lecture, potentially subversive literary texts like Max’s and Kafka’s.
Or, to put it somewhat differently, although Max had little time for New Labour, he tended politically towards the left. But he was enough of a German intellectual to prefer abstract theory to the art of the possible and I cannot imagine him describing himself, as Sontag does below, as a ‘Yellow Dog Democrat’ or ‘an old-fashioned Liberal Democrat’. But by 1992, he had all but lost any classically Marxist sense he might have had that the capitalist system was beset by ‘objective’ contradictions whose dialectics would ultimately cause its destruction. In his earlier work, through elemental imagery involving storms, wind and fire, one can still find traces of the hope that an increasingly violated Nature might replace economics as the countervailing force within this dialectic. But by the mid-1990s, after more than a decade of Thatcherite hegemony in Britain, and despite the fact that Max never ceased to be a quietly committed environmentalist, such intimations had all but vanished. 8 So what could a writer do except seek out obscure, recherché refuges from the encroaching totalitarian system: Stuttgart graveyards, unpopulated islands, remote coastal villages, dusty hotels, forgotten museums, the cultivation of eccentricities – and even writing itself. Or, as Professor Wertheimer graphically puts it below, ‘old, invisible towns and cities, deserted pavilions, casemates, bastions, enclosures, platforms from which trains have long since ceased to depart, photos of people who have long since vanished, even from the memories of their dead contemporaries’. 9 Nor must we forget the defensive haven that is provided by ironic humour, like that which characterized such melancholic metaphysical clowns as Kafka and Karl Valentin, for Max came to believe that ‘melancholy objects’, but not in the same grammatical sense as the title of Susan Sontag’s seminal essay. 10 Nor, finally, must we forget the quality of ‘authenticity’ which both Max and Professor Wertheimer have found in such writers as Paul Celan, Alexander Kluge and Peter Weiss and which is defined below as the ‘deep-seated need that exists in all of us and prevents us, notwithstanding the value-system of postmodernism, from being palmed off with fake versions and simulacra of reality, and superficial accounts of what is happening to our world’.
Happy 70th Birthday, Max Your friends still remember you.
My meeting with Max: a prologue
Toby Green
When I was a (very) young writer, W. G. Sebald was one of the writers I admired enormously. I began to publish work in the late 1990s, just after the publication of the English version of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in June 1998. By this time, his work had garnered the critical acclaim that had pushed him to the forefront of the literary world. So when he very kindly offered an endorsement of my first book, Saddled with Darwin (1999), I was both excited and, at the same time, unaware of what this really meant, or what writing a book involved at all. At the time, like every ambitious and clueless would-be writer in their twenties, I was keen to take on any and every opportunity I could to extend my knowledge of the writing world. By 1999, I had been writing reviews for the Amazon website for over a year, and the opportunity arose to interview Sebald for the site, to coincide with the publication of the English version of Vertigo in December 1999. As usual, Sebald was far too generous and said he would be very pleased to meet me, and so we arranged that I should visit him in his office at the University of East Anglia one day early in November 1999.
At the time, I was still working as an assistant at a small literary agency, so I took the day off work and made my way to Liverpool Street and onto the train to Norwich. As the train cut though the Fens in the dead light of late autumn, I watched the wind blow the fallen leaves off the trees of the plains of East Anglia. I was still sufficiently deluded, and ambitious, not to have grasped the contradictions that exist between the writer’s professed aim to touch on truth and the tawdry reality that success produces an ever greater distancing from that truth. So I was keen to meet someone who had been so successful, and yet could still write such beautiful and profound books.
On my arrival in Norwich, I made my way to the University campus, where I met Sebald in his office on the ground floor of a [19]60s building. 11 It was a bitterly cold day, and Sebald had turned the heating up high. I recorded the interview with my dictaphone, whose wheels ground the tape round slowly throughout our meeting. At one point, when we were discussing the profusion of noise in the modern world, he commented on the noise made by my machine – another symbol of the accretion of mechanical noise that was one of the themes of our interview.
As we spoke together, Sebald’s face was flushed, and although I found that he was not as confident as I had expected, we were soon otherwise at ease. My overriding memory now is that he seemed both sympathetic and yet wearied by life, by expectations, and by writing and what it had brought him. While all he wanted was tranquillity, his chosen path had made this ever more impossible. His books were infused with a great melancholy, a sense of loss and distress, and there was more than something of this in the person before me. It was not a quality that I had expected.
When the interview was winding down and I had switched off the dictaphone, Sebald began to talk about his new projects, his longing to escape from the university and find some peace, to start again. ‘Do you not think this has all been good for you?’ I asked him. He looked at me candidly: ‘It has all been very bad for me’, he said. He was constantly being sent books to read and endorse which piled up week after week. Moreover, his publishers were always asking him for this and that and there was no escape. Finally, egos always needed massaging, and in spite of himself and his sense of dignity, it was impossible that his own was immune from this.
For me as a young writer, this was something of a reality check. It was easy to be swept away, and not to realize the pain, the constant battle with conscience, and the sheer difficulty involved in the process of writing. The image of this deeply humane man, traumatized by his own success and hurt beyond repair by his own experience of writing, was chastening, and I kept it close by me for some time. But it was only two years later that I fully grasped and articulated to myself the often irreconcilable tension that exists between writers and their material. A few months after that, W. G. Sebald died in a car crash after suffering an aneurysm. When I thought back to our exchange of November 1999, I wondered whether his inner conflicts – his inner turmoil over the dynamic of trust and betrayal that is required to write, the dialectic between the peace that he needed to write and the demands that were continually made on him as a writer – had killed him. Perhaps Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese Modernist who died of cirrhosis in Lisbon in 1935, penniless and unknown, had dealt more kindly with his own creative skill. On Pessoa’s death, his masterwork of extended prose, The Book of Disquiet, was found in scraps in a suitcase and had to be reassembled painstakingly by editors before it could be first published in 1982. In it, Pessoa – or his alter ego Bernardo Soares – recounted that he preferred ‘to fail having known the beauty of flowers than to triumph in a wilderness, for triumph is the blindness of the soul left alone with its worthlessness’ (Pessoa, 2010: 120 (section 107)).
When the interview with Sebald appeared, I did not mention these exchanges, for this would have seemed to me like a breach of confidence, and in a sense they still do. But I hope that he would not have disapproved too forcefully of his difficulties in helping me to make sense of the ‘questionable’, not to say ‘terrible business of writing’. So the interview that follows is not only a faithful account of our discussion, it is also a window onto the distance between the ideals that can bring us to write and the challenges that we have to accept when we do so.
‘The questionable business of writing’: an interview with Toby Green
In a rare interview, author, philosopher and academic W. G. Sebald talks to Toby Green about memory, modern culture and the truth of writing. 12
Following the publication of The Emigrants in 1996, the German author W. G. Sebald was hailed by writers as diverse as A. S. Byatt, Anita Brookner and Susan Sontag. 13 Sebald’s blend of personal narrative, investigation, fiction, history and travel writing created a passionate and wholehearted response. The publication of The Rings of Saturn in 1998 14 confirmed this reputation, and now [i.e. 1999 (RWS)] Harvill has brought out Vertigo, the book in which Sebald first employed his unique narrative style. 15
Toby Green – author of Saddled with Darwin – travelled to Norwich, where Sebald was Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and discussed with him his latest book.
Beginning with Vertigo, what was it that made you actually start the writing when you did?
I was in my mid-forties when I produced my first scribblings which were non-academic. 16 I went down to London. Completely randomly, I had picked out a book by an Austrian writer, Konrad Bayer, which I had not looked at for some time. The book had a footnote about a botanist who had been on Bering’s Alaskan expedition. 17 When I got to London, I went to the British Museum on a complete whim and read about it. I could not see how I could possibly write an essay or a monograph on this, but it so fascinated me that I just wrote it down in a long-hand prose poem. I had no intentions to publish it. It was very liberating at the time, because it was so intensely private.
At the beginning of Vertigo, you follow the young Stendhal in Napoleon’s army and introduce the central theme of the book: the unknowability of the past and memory’s unreliability. As a writer you must draw on memory – do you feel that all the stories we tell are fictions, or do some stories have more truth than others?
Seen from the outside, some stories have more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. The truth value depends on how it is framed and phrased. If a story is aesthetically right, then it is probably also morally right. You cannot really translate one to one from reality. If you try to do that, in order to get at a truth value through writing, you have to falsify and lie. And that is one of the moral quandaries of the whole business.
That’s a theme that is evident in your books, what you term in The Emigrants ‘the [entire] questionable business of writing’ [see n. 2 (RWS)] – why do people write?
One doesn’t know why one does it. You have no idea. If someone asks, you have to own up and say that you have no idea what your motives are. It could be a compulsive habit with neurotic dimensions. Or it could be vanity.
Do you think exhibitionism comes into it?
Oh yes – that is the less savoury side, along with the mercenary considerations.
So how do you find that you are viewed, as a writer?
Usually with a mixture of admiration and contempt! But there are, of course, some noble motives – trying to say something that is true, and being analytical about oneself. That’s all very laudable, but even these are mixed up with less savoury motives, and the commodification of literature has just made the whole thing worse.
Is that a contemporary phenomenon?
Chateaubriand was as vain and ambitious in the eighteenth century as anyone today. 18 And there have always been exceptions, people like Kafka – every line in his diary is so straight and sincere.
He’s a rarity because he didn’t want to be published.
But he couldn’t bring himself to burn the stuff.
Staying with Kafka, it struck me that Vertigo has some Kafkaesque elements to it – not just because he is one of the characters, but because of the sense of confusion, [of] being in a labyrinth, shifting realities, and so on. How much do you feel modern writing owes to Kafka?
A great deal, whether people know it or not. What particularly interested me about Kafka was this one story, which is one of his most enigmatic, about Gracchus the huntsman. What drew me in is the way in which literary and life experience overlap in that story. We are thrown into four or five cultural relationships of various types, and in turn the narrator is informed and programmed by this cultural knowledge. If one writes at this point in time, you [sic] cannot pretend that you are not programmed to a large extent by culture rather than by Nature.
Our culture certainly takes itself very seriously today. We live at a time when many people trumpet our understanding of material forces and human consciousness. What do you feel about the story we tell of our grasp of science and consciousness?
I think one can surmise that what is happening at the moment is a very critical mutation in our collective figurations. Here in the University I can see how people who were once meant to be critical thinkers are being de-autonomized and strapped into networks where they slave away at pointless tasks, while all the time people become less able to use their own language properly. We are being reduced to curiously gesticulating forms of spoken language, which mimic what we see on the screens before us. It is crucial that we have some knowledge of how far we have already been pushed as a species beyond our original form of dignity.
So it seems almost as if, while our culture is developing what we perceive to be objective knowledge, we are losing self-knowledge?
Yes, although by definition we cannot know what is actually happening to us now, because we have fears about it, we have this pain. My sense of it is that the fault-line between Nature and civilization – whatever that may be – runs right through our bodies and souls. The pain comes from the bizarre position we find ourselves in is that we have to catapult everything that ties us to the natural environment. Any sentimental notions we might have had about it are flattened, burnt out. And history is the other part of it – we have to catapult history, because we cannot bear to think about what, say, the River Rhine might have looked like in the nineteenth century.
This sense of oblivion is very important throughout your work. Do you feel that we have to confront our memories in order to achieve some sort of contentment?
The curious thing about collective memories of the past is that one looks back into the eighteenth century, and imagines, say, the Touraine as it was, and we have images which somehow are wonderful. And at the same time one knows that the whole thing was almost as frightful as it is now. But what the past is about, even if you look at it in its most gruesome form, is a kind of haven of safety. Because it’s already happened – the pain is already past.
Because we know how it was resolved?
The actual pain of those who have suffered has subsided, and you also know – irrespective of how horrid it was –that you know where you come from, and this is where you were at home. If that gets cut off, then yet another prop of our self-understanding is removed. That is why the historical flatness in which we live is so frightening. It is increasingly difficult to imagine what one or two generations mean, or what 1870 might have been like.
This refusal to confront the past, the sense of oblivion, is very important to your work. In The Rings of Saturn you wrote that Conrad incurred guilt just by being in the Congo – do you think that we incur guilt just by possessing the wealth which historically owes its riches to slave economies?
Yes, it’s all inextricably linked. Even the most idealistic poet, who has never taken a penny from anyone, is in that system – as much or as little as the most mercenary writer of trash fiction. There’s no way out of it.
In reviews of your books, the word ‘sublime’ has been mentioned. I wonder if that’s because the things you write about tend to be evocation of the past – do you think it’s possible to produce a piece of sublime art of this age?
Yes, I think it is possible. Sometimes writers pull off that trick – it is a kind of trick – and they don’t know how it works. There are passages in Nabokov’s memoirs which touch you physically when you read them. 19 But whether any of my stuff falls into that box I wouldn’t know. And even when you do produce a passage which you feel is quite good, you feel like a swindler at that moment, because you get a sense of gratification, of having pulled something off.
How have other people reacted to your work?
In Britain, in particular, I have had a lot of touching letters, recounting very personal elements of people’s lives. In this sense, at least, I have the feeling of not having completely wasted my time, and [of] not being someone who invariably lies through their teeth.
Talking of Britain, you clearly feel some sort of physical link to the region where you live – why is that?
I have been here for a long time. There are some corners of it which I like. I’m not remotely at home here, though – all I have to do is get into the taxi at the station and people ask me where I come from. 20
Let’s talk about wandering, then, because a lot of the writers who play roles in your work are wanderers. Is that because you identify with them yourself as an exile, or because there’s an intimate relationship between writing and restlessness?
Both are true. Even sedentary writers tend to be restless in a different sort of way – they pace up and down their studies! I think there must be a sense of restlessness [for one] to write. If you were content, you would never put pen to paper – but it’s difficult to convince people of this.
You talk of the culture industry – was Theodor Adorno a big influence on you?
Yes, he was the first glimmer of light I saw in the horrid atmosphere of German academia in the [19]60s, where you were surrounded by dissembling old fascists. The atmosphere was partly authoritarian and partly disingenuous, you couldn’t read anything that had any intelligence to it because it was all so wooden, dense, founded on lies. When I can across Walter Benjamin, I stared at what he had written in amazement. Adorno, too, was important, although in his later years he couldn’t avoid producing turgid works, too, like Negative Dialectics [1966] – just as boring as Hegel.
Just coming back to restlessness, I wanted to ask you whether you feel that there is a connection between this and one of the other main themes of your work – destructiveness?
Yes, in the fear that the ground is being cut from under our feet. And these days, of course, if you are born in parts of Washington or London, you only have Nature in a very reduced form. I’m sure that I sense this particularly because I grew up in such a remote part of Germany, and have felt very much, over the past thirty years, as if machines have been invading. And with the proliferation of machines has gone a proliferation of noise. Right now we can hear the traffic outside, the noise of the generator, the aeroplanes above – this proliferation just makes rigorous thought that much more impossible. It is impossible to imagine Wittgenstein thinking out a problem in front of an audience today. 21 Impossible.
How do you feel that this growth of noise has affected our perceptual abilities?
Enormously so. I received a letter from a librarian after the publication of The Rings of Saturn, claiming that he had seen archival material that said that the Battle of Sole Bay – off Lowestoft – had been heard in London. Newton heard it from Cambridge. This sort of thing is inconceivable today. We can barely even imagine how it was then. It just shows how much we are losing possession of our senses, and how much noisier our world is now than 22 it ever has been before. It has got much worse in the last ten years.
How do you feel about the acceleration of this process?
Everything is becoming generalized. I am the only person in the University not to have a computer, and that is regarded as quixotic. It is the only sort of eccentricity that is left. But when I first came here, almost every other colleague was slightly eccentric. That was the whole point – people were different, so they could tell you things from their different stand-points. They have all been eliminated. 23
Do you feel that computers control people more than any other form of machine, even the silk looms that you write about in The Rings of Saturn?
The two are the same phenomenon, equally addictive. The slavery is more manifest in the loom, but you can see people suffering equally with these machines today which are supposed to be your helpers. These systems have become error-driven. Financial management in an institution like a university has become a comedy of errors – no-one knows where the money is, whether it’s real or unreal, how it leaks out of one box and disappears in another. People just cannot cope with the error, and the enormous number of pieces of paper.
Talking about the quantity of objects, I’d like to ask you about your prose. You write in a way which has an obsession with detail. Do you feel that part of the problem we face today is that we are putting too much store in nebulous, big ideas, which is blinding us to the detail which actually constitutes our lives?
Yes, I think so. If you can imagine being a member of an Indian tribe, you would have a much more acute sensorium to what is going on around you. But we have been trained to cut off the detail, in terms of perception and articulation. So we don’t know the names of the trees any more, they are just trees. Whereas an Indian would know much more than just the name of a tree – they [sic] would know all of its qualities. But all this is just arcane information to us – problems, actually, to be controlled. And not just in perception, also in occupation. Jobs have become much more alike. I don’t feel any more that I’m working in a university – I feel that I might just as well be in Barclays.
So the actual detail of what people do is being lost in a generality?
Specificity is vanishing all the time. The same is true of language – biodiversity declines very rapidly, both between languages and within each language. What is spawned instead is a curiously mutant form of language, characterized by garbledness and inarticulation [inarticulateness? (RWS)]. These new forms of language on the machines seem to be very vibrant, but they’re very flabby and have no syntactical form to them at all. It’s a sign of something being taken away, and some substitute being proffered instead.
Finally, coming back to the way you put your books together, I wanted to ask you what the role of the pictorial element was in them?
I have always had a thing about old photographs. The older pictures have an uncanny ability of suggesting that there is another world where the departed are. A black-and-white photograph is a document of absence, and is almost curiously metaphysical. I have always hoarded them. They represent a sense of otherness. The figures in photographs have been muted and they stare out at you as if they are asking for a chance to say something. They have become part of my working process, part of the way in which I declare my position. Although I try to stay as anonymous as possible in the text, at the same time I’m anxious to declare my position. I don’t think one can now attempt to write a book which hasn’t got that notion of relativity in it.
And the photographs fulfil this function for you?
Yes, because they are part of the process. They act as a token of authenticity – but they can be deduced, forged or purloined. And, of course, that in turn throws up one of the central problems of fiction writing, which is that of legitimacy and the arrival at the truth on a crooked route. This is why ‘vertigo’ in German has a double meaning – Schwindel in German means ‘swindle’. What right do you have to write about any of these things? Have you been there and felt these things for yourself?
Transcribed by Richard Sheppard
A reading evening (15 October 2001) with W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) and Susan Sontag (1933–2004) 24
Held in the Kaufmann Concert Hall, at the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd St Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York. 25
[comes onto the podium] Good evening. I’m Hanna Arie-Gaifman, Director of the Tisch Center for the Arts here in 92nd Street Y, 26 and I’m very, very happy to welcome you here for the first reading of this season. I won’t make long speeches – the only thing I’ll do tonight is introduce our new Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, David Yezzi, who we have been expecting for a whole year. 27 Thank you very much. Enjoy the evening. And here is David Yezzi [sustained applause].
[comes onto the podium] Thank you Hanna. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming to Kaufmann Concert Hall. Your presence here confirms our feeling that literature is now more important than ever, not less. Now more than ever, authors should be freely heard. It is my great honour to succeed Karl Kirchwey as the Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center. 28 I have long admired Mr Kirchwey’s work, both as a curator and as a poet. Though Karl has handed on his Director’s robes after 16 distinguished years at the Y, I’m glad to say that he will be here, donning his poet’s robes, on two occasions this season. First, as part of a memorial tribute to the poet Yehuda Amichai, 29 and later, when he and Louise Glück 30 read from their own work.
It is my privilege to welcome you to the first event in our 63rd Season – a reading by W. G. Sebald and Susan Sontag. Mr Sebald and Ms Sontag will be introduced by André Aciman. 31 The readers have both agreed to take questions from the audience this evening. You should find an index card in your printed program, and if you have a question for either of tonight’s readers, please write it on your card as legibly as the lighting in Kaufmann Concert Hall allows, and pass it to one of the ushers who will bring it backstage. At the conclusion of her reading, Ms Sontag will leave the stage briefly, and then she and Mr Sebald will return to the stage to answer your questions.
Following tonight’s reading there will be a public reception in the Art Gallery, just adjacent to the Concert Hall. The readers’ books are on sale, thanks to Barnes & Noble, in the Hall of Mirrors which you passed on your way into the Hall. Also in the printed programme you received this evening you will find details about additional members’ benefits at the Unterberg Poetry Center, namely, the Literary Café, which will allow members to meet with certain writers, prior to their appearance here at the Y, and our Members’ Book Club, which will feature selected books by this season’s writers. If you would like to consider joining us as a season’s subscriber simply go to the Y box office with your ticket stub, and the cost of tonight’s show will be deducted from the cost of your membership. A membership is certainly the safest way of avoiding sold-out readings. Our next programme will take place a week from tonight, on October 22nd, at 8 o’clock here at the Kaufmann Concert Hall, when Jim Crace and Rick Moody 32 will read from their work. Participants in the memorial tribute to Yehuda Amichai on October 29th include Hanna Amichai, Derek Walcott, Grace Schulman, Leon Wieseltier and others. 33 Additional highlights this season include a tribute to Carson McCullers, and appearances by Saul Bellow and Edward Albee. I hope you will join us. While innumerable people have made the season possible, I’d like to thank three people in particular for their major contributions to this season: John Greenwood and Eva Colin Usdan who are the Co-Chairs of the Unterberg Poetry Committee, and Kate Swisher Irwin who created many of the programmes for this season. Many thanks, too, to the Poetry Center’s staff – Janet Polota, Jennifer Cayer and Miranda Beverly Whittemore – without whom these readings would not be possible.
Tonight’s introducer, André Aciman, is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1995, and False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2000). He is also the co-author and editor of Letters of Transit, published by the New Press in 1999. A recent Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, Mr Aciman is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books, he is currently working on a love novel entitled Over the Footbridge. 34 Please join me now in welcoming André Aciman as he introduces first W. G. Sebald and then Susan Sontag [applause].
[comes onto the podium] Allow me to read something: ‘If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog.’ 35
By the cadence alone, the author is unmistakable. As with great passions, there is in our encounter with all works of art an elusive, magical dream-zone that long precedes the moment when we finally become aware of the work itself. We may sense their presence the way we may sense someone from the corner of our eyes, but we remain quite oblivious. Later, of course, we’ll swear we knew about them all along but were not paying attention, hadn’t quite focused, were just too shy to get up and connect. Someone happens to mention a book about the Holocaust. We come across reviews, we may even see the book itself somewhere, but our worlds don’t mesh, we don’t meet. Often we confuse this book with another, the way at first we might confuse a person who will change our life with a woman who, on the same day, just happened to be wearing the same shoes. As with love and life-long friendships there is in every book that we read the untold tale of our failed encounters with it. Abelard and Héloïse or Paolo and Francesca just happened to be in the same building but not the same room. We go back to those failed encounters to go back to the first time – or beyond beginnings to a time when it was still possible to mistake one book for another. As though something quintessential about this book and about ourselves were already being worked out, but hadn’t quite jelled yet – and awaited a necessary confluence of a few more accidents. In love, such accidents are usually given the name of Fate; with books, Fate takes a less foreboding scope. But the perplexing question of how the unavoidable can hinge on the wholly incidental does not go away. We want to know not what is this book but who am I as a result of that book, and, by extension, who was I before the book, or what part of me have I uncovered and quarrelled with and can’t live down because of this book. Books are always more about ourselves than they are about themselves, and one of the reasons why we want to travel back is that sometimes the impact of some works is such that it is no longer possible to remember what kind of mind we had before we encountered them. And then, of course, comes the humbling realization that it would have taken a nothing, a combination of equally implausible sequences of events, for us to fail to connect this time as well. Tristan might never have sailed with Isolde, Romeo would never have sneaked into the house of the Capulets, Dante would never have run into Beatrice. The film Shoah changed my images of the Holocaust – but I saw it on television simply because it was raining one Sunday; I read Primo Levi because I mistook him at first for Carlo Levi 36 [subdued laughter]. It finally dawns on me that the truly uncanny thing, the most uncanny thing about all this is that no writer writing today has contexualized and made art out of the Holocaust as has the German novelist W. G. Sebald.
A few years ago, when reading Sebald’s The Emigrants (Sebald, 1996), I called a friend whose father had escaped the Holocaust as a boy on the last train to England. I urged my friend to buy his father the book. Half an hour later, on reading further in Sebald’s novel [sic], I called and countermanded my suggestion because the book might prove too painful for a man who had lost both parents in the Holocaust. For, like so many characters in Sebald’s works of prose fiction, my friend’s father had indeed received a package from his mother – many years after the camps. Yet a day later, unable to resist my original impulse, I called the publishers and had them mail a review copy directly to my friend’s parents who, as it turns out – and if this is not uncanny what could ever be? – knew people whom Sebald mentioned in the book. W. G. Sebald still corresponds with them today. But then, I, too, have my own little tale to tell. A few years ago I received a postcard from England. It was an antique photograph of my native city of Alexandria – taken presumably in the very early Twenties. I couldn’t recognize the hand-writing in the black ink, or the signature, so I skimmed it, thinking it was someone who had just read my book and wished to send me a picture of Alexandria. Right next to the writing, in fact, the antique postcard bore another handwriting, in sepia, probably that of the original sender, who must be long dead by now and who had no idea that someone would keep his postcard, sell it to an antique dealer, who would then in turn sell it to the person who finally took it upon himself to send it to me! What a nice touch, I thought, sending me palimpcestual greetings from abroad, from my past, from the by-gone world. When I looked again at the hand-writing in black ink, it suddenly dawned on me who the sender was. How just like him to have sent me this very card. It was, I am so very pleased to introduce to you: W.G. Sebald [applause].
[comes onto the podium] Hello [continuing applause]. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m very glad to be here with you tonight and I thank all those who went before me to welcome you – and I welcome you as well. The book from which I shall read you a passage – which will take about 25 minutes – is one that’s just been published in this country. It came out in Germany in its original version last March. It’s called Austerlitz – which isn’t the site of the famous battle but the name of the main character in it, a man called Jacques Austerlitz, who, as a boy of four years and a few months, had to leave his native city of Prague on one of the so-called Kindertransports which were arranged by the British at the time to bring some children out from under the threat of my compatriots. He arrived in England at a train station called Liverpool Street – which was famed, until it was reconstructed a few years ago, for its extreme gloominess [knowing laughter], and … to many people who had to pass through there, seemed like the entrance to Hell. He was picked up at that train station by his foster-parents-to-be, a childless Welsh couple, a Calvinist minister and his rather sallow wife, who brought him up in the depths of Wales and, as part of that upbringing, deprived him of his identity – i.e. never told him who he actually was and where he had hailed from. Austerlitz himself, as an adult, then conspired, as it were against his own will, in this erasing of his own identity and constructed in his mind a system of avoidance which allowed him to ignore that which constantly troubled him. But as he drew towards retirement age, as so often happens, he felt obliged to confront this problem, and he goes in search, as someone aged around 60, of his own identity – a route which eventually takes him back to his native city of Prague, where he meets a woman now in her eighties called Věra, who was his child-minder when his mother, an actress, was busy of an evening. And a large tract of the book is occupied with the conversations between Austerlitz and Věra, and just before he leaves her in order to return to England, she makes a remark about a summer vacation in Marienbad, the famous spa in Bohemia where she, Věra, and Jacques’s parents, and Jacques himself [had] spent the last summer [i.e. 1938 (RWS)] before that fatal summer of 1939. And it’s at that point that I pick up [the narrative (RWS)]. It concerns a memory that Jacques Austerlitz has of a visit he himself made in the company of a French woman called Marie de Verneuil 37 to Marienbad in the early 1970s, a time when Czechoslovakia was still in the middle of the Cold War and when the atmosphere in these kinds of spas was most peculiar. So this is where I start reading.
[WGS then reads from: ‘As we approached Marienbad along a road running further …’ to ‘… on one side of the path, they vanished again on the other’ (Sebald, 2001a: 295–309; 2001b: 291–305; 2001c: 207–17). ]
Thank you very much [applause] … Thank you. [WGS leaves the podium and
‘Style is the principle of decision in a work of art’. ‘The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences’. And finally this: ‘in the place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’; ‘in the place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’. This latter sentence, as well as the other two I’ve just read, were my introductions, call them my induction, to the work of Susan Sontag. 38 You hear the sentence, you repeat it to yourself many times, you want to unpack it because it seems so clearly wrapped in so many layers. You want to do something with it, but then you realize that the thing you’d like to do with it has already been done to it by the very person who fashioned and framed these words, and been done in a way that couldn’t possibly be done better. ‘In the place of a [sic] hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’. Its very transparency seemed arresting to the graduate student I was in Edward Saïd’s seminar so many years ago. Hearing these words for the first time invoked, not a new world, but a new manner. Call it a new style of thinking, of drawing insights, a way of thinking that took a word you thought you knew and turned it into a term and then sent this term you thought you had mastered back to you – but this time like a weapon. It was only a while later that I recognized the genetic coding here. It was not radical thinking, it was, at least to me, French, but it was French with that indelible, classical way that Pascal’s Provinciales are French. 39 They force you to step down, rethink your thoughts and then, when you have mulled things long enough, raise your finger and ask permission to speak. It is a long tradition that goes back all the way to the Sceptics. You are asked to think things all over again, but, as in the movies of Éric Rohmer, 40 what happens in the course of engaging new ways of thinking is that the heart gets involved, and suddenly you end up feeling things you never thought yourself capable of. You desire, even while you are thinking, or something like that. Over the years I have followed, indeed read, Susan Sontag’s work with great interest. Her short tribute to Barthes, when Barthes died 20 years ago, turned me from a disaffected Barthésien into a fanatic. Her essay on Walter Benjamin made me try to nurse Benjaminian thoughts – to no avail as far as I was concerned. 41 And her novels have garnered many prizes and have earned her the admiration of literally millions. A Frenchman who was discussing her most recent novel in America with me paid her the ultimate French compliment: ‘bien travaillé’ – well-wrought. Indeed, whatever she touches on, Susan Sontag’s signature is invariably the same – polished and provocative. We may not always agree, but in disagreeing we find ourselves forced to grapple with ideas and come up with things that may, sometimes, make us more intelligent. Ladies and gentlemen: Susan Sontag [applause].
[AA leaves the podium and
There are two glasses of water here and the one on the left has a little tape that says ‘W. G. Sebald’ and the one on the right says ‘Susan Sontag’. I think that’s very thoughtful, very special [laughter]. I don’t feel as if my thought is polished. It seems … [pause] very uncertain or post-certain actually [laughter]. I always feel – er, perhaps that’s the better way of putting it – that by the time I write anything, I’ve already started thinking something else. But of course I know that my work doesn’t always appear to other people as it appears to me – as I have recently learned [laughter]. 42 I’m going to read from a … collection of longer and shorter essays and pieces that have [sic] just appeared called Where the Stress Falls. It’s a new collection and, and some of the pieces and essays go back quite a long time − 18 years, I believe, is the oldest and some of them were written only a couple of months ago. And I’m going to read two from the later part of, of the book, which is more … personal. In the earlier part of the book there are appreciations of writers that have been very important to me, such as W. G. Sebald. There are going to be two pieces, the first one is a writer who was very important to me, maybe one of the very first writers who was very important to me, since I discovered him when I was seven years old, and the writers that you read when you are very young, of course, are indelible. This short essay is called ‘Homage to Halliburton’. 43
And now … That was written just a few months ago; it’s one of the very last things that went into the collection – which was just published last week. And now for something completely different, also towards the end of this book. It’s a … it’s not exactly a piece … It’s not polished. It’s ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, but I thought may be … it had some point to read now.
[SS then reads from ‘In May 1997 the French literary magazine La Règle du jeu …’ to ‘ … is the enemy himself.’ This text constitutes the entirety of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (Sontag, 2001: 294–8). She concludes:]
Thank you [applause]. [SS leaves the podium].
[short pause]
[DY, SS and WGS return to the podium; applause].
I’ll read a few questions. A question for Mr. Sebald:
Could you tell us more about the relationship between text and photos in your work? How do you choose the photos? Do they precede the writing?
Yes, they often do precede the writing … Er, can you hear me or should I go up to the … Maybe at the podium, yes? … They often do precede the writing. I have randomly collected scraps of paper and old photographs for many years before I started writing. So, clearly, they have precedence somehow. And very frequently, as in the case with the … the last book, the point of departure is a single picture, the one which is on the front cover of that particular edition. It is a photograph that I’ve had for many years. And as they form, these pictures, an intimate part of my working process, I saw no reason for excluding them from the book itself. And er … as I did though … er, when I wrote my first work of prose fiction, I didn’t know whether it would be published and I just put these pictures in – in the first instance, for my own satisfaction. But as I kept … kept doing this, I … I realized that conceivably they … they had other functions in the text which one could acknowledge. They hold up the flow of the discourse. And, er, as one knows as a reader, one … one tends to go down this, er, negative gradient with the book that one reads towards the end. So books have almost by definition an apocalyptic structure [knowing laughter]. And, er … it is as well, therefore, to put weirs in here and there who [sic] hold up, you know, the inevitable calamity [louder knowing laughter]. So, you know, there is that aspect of photographs. And there is the other most, or more mysterious aspect, that older photographs in particular, you know, these old, stray black-and-white pictures which come out of long-forgotten boxes, often have a secret appeal, and demand, er … that one addresses the lost lives which are represented in them. And what better, er … starting-point for a writer of fiction from that point of view also? I think, er … it is legitimate to use this picture [sic] because writing ought to be, as it were, a saving, or at least an attempt at the saving of souls, in a completely non-religious sense, needless to say [some nervous laughter]. The … pictures have one … one further function, that very frequently tends to, er … or is easily overlooked. They serve as, er … other forms of affirmation in texts, can do as tokens to the reader that the story that is being told is based in truth and not purely invented. Because we are credulous and we tend to believe photographs more than any other form of evidence. And this of course means that pictures can, if you look at the revers of this problem, also be used as a means of forgery. A photograph can be tampered with and, er … I must confess that I have tampered with not a few [subdued laughter] in these books that I have done over the last few years. There is, for instance, in The Emigrants, a diary, which, the narrator tells the reader, is a diary kept by his great-uncle on a journey to the Near East. Well, if you look carefully, the handwriting in that diary is my own [subdued laughter]. And so you can, you know, using visual material, develop complex games of hide-and-seek, which, I think, add to the interest of fictional experiment, for that is all that it is. Ja, I think I’d better stop here and not take up the whole evening [appreciative laughter].
This question was not addressed to either of the writers in particular, but Ms Sontag has agreed to field it. It turns out that there’s a connection to the Y involved in her answer, I believe.
Tell us something please about your admiration for Nabokov.
That … that was really addressed to both of us – that’s quite wonderful. I, I yes, I … I introduced Vladimir Nabokov, I believe, in his only reading at the Y – which was a … a great honor to … to have been requested by him to do so as I was a very young and new writer and Nabokov was the writer … the first writer whom I read [hesitates] who made me … er, er … feel very self-conscious about language. I think that he was a kind of revelation for many American readers and aspiring writers because he had this amazing command of our language and, er … but his work was bejeweled and ornate linguistically in a way that I was – um, … I, I didn’t … I don’t think that I’d appreciated up to that moment in my own reading, that such prose was possible in the second half of the twentieth century by someone living in the United States of America. I understood [that] John Donne might write in a very ornate way, or Sir Thomas Browne, but I didn’t realize there was a possibility of an extremely, um … refined … er … musical, hyper-verbal, hyper-ecstatic idea of prose – in English – until I, I read Nabokov – which isn’t to say I hadn’t read some wonderful writers from whom I might have drawn such a lesson – for instance Virginia Woolf. But Woolf, who was an earlier admiration than Nabokov, had not communicated to me that lesson, it was rather a lesson afterward that I drew also from reading Woolf. So it was the notion of … of excessive … excessively and therefore ideally wonderful language, I think, that attracted me and many other American … er … writers to Nabokov. I’m talking about the [19]60s really … um and I think he was a revelation to many American writers. And the other foreign writer who we read in translation rather than in English, but someone who had a very profound relation to English literature – who had a complementary, I think … exemplary and startling influence on many writers was Borges. The notion of that kind of … of thinking … um … perhaps goes back to Poe but [is] taken much further. These … these were new models, they were … they were elderly figures, but they were writing in our lifetime and I think they expanded our notion of what English prose could be and what fiction could be. [some applause].
These are two related questions for Mr Sebald about translation:
Why do you use a translator – you certainly have written scholarly articles in English? And is there … um … do you have a sense of different qualities of your work in German and in English?
Well, let’s begin with the last one. I mean, certainly there is a difference in the various language versions of a literary text. Invariably, if you try to get a text from one language into another, … certain shadings of the finer grain of the text may be lost. On odd occasions something can be gained. In the case of this particular book there is a passage of some ten pages which is a pastiche of the language of administration which my compatriots developed in the 1930s more or less unwittingly to describe their own activities in … in the game of vilifying, persecuting, and finally, if possible, eradicating so-called minorities. Now that language … er, which is a perverted form of German and, if one comes across it, you know, it seems almost unbelievable, is not capable of being reproduced either in French or in English or Spanish, or any other language. So, you know, for the English reader of that book … er, in these pages something inevitably gets lost. But on the whole, I think it is possible to translate books at a level which makes them as valuable for the foreign reader as for the reader of the original language. And we have countless examples of that. You know, if you read a page of … or a couple of pages of Marcel Proust, you cannot conceive how the syntactical complexity of these phrases could possibly be brought across … into another language. But it has been done, and it’s been done wonderfully well. Translators have to be extremely accomplished and there are such people, fortunately, who are able to do this, but they are few and far between, and as a writer you frequently get stuck with a translator who is not up to the task, and then, if you can do it, you have to intervene. Ummm – why don’t I translate my own books? Well – the main reason is that I started writing very late, in my mid-forties, and I haven’t got the time because I can already see the horizon looming [subdued laughter] and so, you know … and I have another full-time … er, job to attend to, and so becoming a translator as well as a writer, I think, would over-tax, probably, my nervous system [laughter]. So I thought I’d better not do it, and quite apart from the fact that I don’t entirely trust my English. I mean I can. There is a great difference, you know, if you get a poor draft of a text and if you are reasonably competent in the second language, then you can, perhaps, improve on that draft. But that is not the same as doing the draft yourself in the first place. And so, there are, you know … Sometimes, er, two incompetent people can make a competent pair [laughter].
For Ms Sontag:
What have been the consequences of your courageous short essay in the New Yorker about the events of September 11th [nervous laughter]? 44 How can we counter the current repression of critical thought?
Oh, well [pause]. I’d much rather talk about literature this evening, being lucky enough to be in the company of a writer I feel very close to and admire so much as Mr Sebald. But I will just say that it is a little scary and disheartening to offer an opinion or comment – what I wrote in the New Yorker was written on Thursday, September 13th. I was in Berlin; I had been planted for 48 hours in front of a television set in a hotel room in Berlin. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in New York when this horror happened and I was watching an event which was literally mediated for me. As I was in Berlin, I couldn’t get back … er, and I was reacting to – I thought – an extreme degree of inanity … er, mindlessness – in the early comments by major political figures which didn’t … er, suggest … er, that a very… er, an appropriate debate was in the offing. And … the, the point is not that I have been excoriated and vilified in certain quarters for what had been taken, entirely incorrectly, as unpatriotic or anti-American remarks. The point is that there is an atmosphere of fear and grief – I feel these things, myself … er, and… but a willingness to … once this situation we’re in is defined as a war, which I don’t think it is in any … any preceding sense … that people are willing to engage in self-censorship to an extraordinary degree and that’s quite scary. So it isn’t really about me, although I confess to being amazed by the slanderous attacks and misrepresentation of what I was saying. What worries me is that debate is now been [sic] identified with dissent. I thought what I said in that little tiny piece – which, again, was written 48 hours after September 11th − I was out of the country, I was reacting to words, and [I have (?)] a lot more to say on the subject. Er … but … er, what is scary is the extent to which people are afraid to … er, to disagree and to express opinions which seem to me absolutely centrist opinions, but, you see, 20 years of … of er … There’s been a metamorphosis of, of, of our political palette or spectrum – so that the Republican Far Right now looks like the Center and I’m, you know, what my beloved son calls a ‘Yellow Dog Democrat’. I’m … I’m an old-fashioned Liberal Democrat; I didn’t think that was off the map. Or neither do I think that that is a left-wing position, but there’s been a big tectonic shift, and so opinions, such as I ventured very sketchily and quickly in that, in that New Yorker … those remarks in the New Yorker, which I have amplified elsewhere in interviews and in some things that I’ve written for the European press … Not only do I think I was right, and I stand by what I said – alas, I was right: um, these are absolutely mainstream opinions; they should be a part of a central debate here; there’s nothing marginal or radical about these opinions and they are indeed the opinions that are widely held … they are mostly held in Europe. The majority of people in Europe view what is going on in that way – which is to say: this is an opportunity to re-think a lot of things and not simply to affirm the … our love of country. So I’m still hoping that there will be more debate as the complexities of the situation we have entered in[to] with this cowboy rhetoric become more obvious [prolonged applause and cheering].
And finally, and for both readers:
Of all the work that you have published, what is your favorite and why [prolonged audience laughter because the two readers cannot decide who should speak first]?
[laughing] I’m sure Max Sebald will have a much more interesting and diffident answer than I … I would just say I … I … like the last two novels by far, better than anything else I’ve ever written – The Volcano Lover and In America. 45 But I’m, I’m … This is where I am very American and therefore very different from Mr Sebald; I can’t help but believe in the continuous possibilities of self-transformation – [the] greatest and most endearing of American illusions – one to which I’m firmly attached. So I think I’m a work in progress and I actually think I’m getting to be a better writer, and … er, those are … those are sentiments which I’m sure Mr Sebald will find rather … ingenuous. Probably they are, but they’re mine [chuckles; applause].
Well, it’s a question I find very difficult to ask because I, I, I do have a problem – which, I … I think I share with several other writers and that is that books written appear to me like abandoned children, and … er, that renders one’s moral perspective on past efforts [sighs] … very, very difficult. Er … It is part, I think, of … of … the writer’s make-up that he always, or she always, frets about the work in hand and fears, you know, that it cannot be accomplished. And it’s out of this fear that one, you know, doesn’t want to look back over one’s shoulder because one gets the idea that one was able to do it once [raises eyebrows and grins at the audience] but no longer [closes his eyes and grins mischievously; laughter from the audience], and that’s a very nasty perspective. But … as writing is a painfully slow business, I cherish most those er, parts of books that I was able to write – and they’re very few and far between – as it were without hesitation. And this applies particularly to the last section of my first attempt at prose fiction which was translated into English under the title [of] Vertigo, and the last part of that book tells a kind … the story of a kind of homecoming, i.e. the narrator, who is on the loose in Italy … er, in a fit of panic returns to the small village on the northern fringe of the Alps where he grew up, and revisits, after I think 30 or 35 years, for the first time the place where he spent his, er, first … the eight or nine years of his life; and I remember writing this indeed without hesitation – it’s a chapter called Il ritorno in patria – on an island in Greece without any kind of aid, no book to look at, no newspaper to read, just a pad and a pencil. And that was for me the most liberating moment in my brief writing career and one that hasn’t been repeated since [grins broadly and happily at the audience; prolonged applause].
[applauding] Thank you very much.
Transcribed by Richard and Carolyn Sheppard
Introductory talk before a reading from W. G. (Max) Sebald, Austerlitz, at the Academy of the Spoken Word, Stuttgart, on 3 July 2013
Jürgen Wertheimer
A former UEA colleague of W. G. Sebald’s, who went on to teach at the University of Oxford for 17 years and who, until Sebald’s tragic death in a road traffic accident in 2001, was in close contact with him both as a friend and as a Germanist, told me recently that he had been asked by another friend of Max’s what he thought of the proposal to set up a ‘Sebald Society’. He apparently replied that in his view that was the best way of nailing down Sebald securely in his coffin once and for all. In saying this, he set out very precisely the vampyric character of inheritance as a literary institution, since the Draculas who work for literary supplements and write for academic journals really do take possession of the deceased with breath-taking impudence. This is because the critical world knows that the deceased is their creature: he was already their creature when he was alive and how much more is this the case once he is dead?
When, more than 20 years ago, I invited Sebald to take part in the Tübingen Literature Forum on the subject of ‘Europe: A Confused and Confusing Picture’ (‘Suchbild Europa’), I did so in all innocence and without any ulterior motive, in a completely unprofessional spirit and out of pure interest in his work. In the subsequent Proceedings (Sebald, 1995), I gave him a one-line blurb as a ‘writer and Germanist who is currently lecturing in Norwich’ alongside authors such as Gert Heidenreich, Lothar Baier, Gerhard Köpf, Emile Habibi und Maruša Krese. 46
For years after that I tried my hardest to get W. G. Sebald – or Max as he was generally known – to come across to Tübingen as our special lecturer on Poetics, and over and over again he was prevented from doing so because of prior commitments. But in 2001 we were nearly there and he had accepted the invitation for the summer term of 2004. He told me that until spring 2004 his time was so fully booked – either at the University of East Anglia, where he was obliged to work for six months of the year, or as a Fellow of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – that it was quite impossible for him to take on any additional commitments. But in a letter that he wrote to me on 12 May 2001, he finally said: ‘from summer 2004 things ought to lighten up’ – only then to add, with a wry scepticism: ‘or at least, I hope they will’. So when we met up in Stuttgart in the summer of 2001, we started discussing various possibilities, using Ernst Bloch’s ‘Principle of Hope’ as our basis – but even that was over-optimistic, as we would later painfully discover. Significantly, our peregrinations took us to a cemetery, for those were the places that Max most enjoyed visiting – his natural habitat, as it were.
At the Literature Forum, which took place in early 1992, we were not just indulging in dreams of a united Europe, we were also discussing ways in which those dreams might go badly wrong, and Max chose to focus on that particular topic right from the start of the Forum, setting out his fears very precisely, point by point, and in a tone of uncompromisingly melancholic perplexity. This was because he already sensed that the entire European project was ‘heading towards a European hypermarket of gigantic dimensions that would have disastrous consequences for human beings and the natural world’, and during the discussion he said: Es ist doch ganz sicher, wenn Sie nur ein bisschen um sich schauen, dass man nicht aufhört, bis alles erobert sein wird. Wir sind Zeugen eines restlosen Vernichtungsvorgangs, einer restlosen Kolonisierung jeder noch so entlegenen Provinz. If you just glance around you, you will see that it is absolutely certain that people will not stop until everything has been conquered. We are the witnesses of a process of total destruction, of a process of complete domination that will not cease until every area of life, no matter how remote, has been colonized.
For many of the audience this was far too pessimistic an assessment and many reacted to Sebald’s argument with unconcealed aggression, even though he had delivered it without any rhetorical flourishes and with barely a trace of emotion. Indeed, he delivered his contribution in that flat, deadpan tone of voice that was so characteristic of his writerly style. Here is his starting-point: – so etwas wie eine Nationalkultur [gibt es] eigentlich nicht … und wenn es schon eine Nationalkultur nicht gibt … dann ist natürlich eine Europakultur, also eine potenzierte Nationalkultur, eine Absurdität sondergleichen. Ich halte es nicht für möglich, eine geeinte Europakultur in irgendeiner Form herzustellen. – we don’t really have anything like a national culture any more … and if there isn’t a national culture … then a European culture, by which I mean a national culture but on a much larger scale, is the height of absurdity. I do not think that it is possible to create a unified European culture in any shape or form.
From which Sebald arrived at his second point, namely that the wishful ideal of a differentiated European culture such as existed, for example, during the Romantic epoch, was nowadays a non-starter: Ich glaube, dass die entscheidenden Prozesse heute an dem interface Naturgeschichte und Ökonomie stattfinden, und dass alles, was wir über Politik und Kultur sagen, sekundär, tertiär, bedeutungslos ist. Wie unser Leben in 10, 20, 30 Jahren aussieht, entscheidet sich einzig und allein an diesem Punkt. I believe that the really decisive processes are happening at the interface between Nature and the world of economics and that everything we say about politics and culture is of secondary, tertiary significance – meaningless even. What our way of life looks like in 10, 20, 30 years time will be decided according to this and only this consideration.
And from there he developed his third point, namely that the cult of differentiated pluralism [‘Differenz’] was nothing more than wishful thinking, for: Überall wird nach denselben Prinzipien gewirtschaftet, von Neuseeland bis nach Schottland. Es ist keine Differenz im Kollektivverhalten festzustellen. Everywhere, from New Zealand right up to Scotland, the economic system functions according to the same principles. It is impossible to discern any differences in our collective behaviour.
So, he continued, it seems as if the human species is obsessed with the compulsive urge to produce more and more, in order to be able to multiply – and vice versa. Which would make escape from the system impossible. Conclusion: bye-bye future, for: Der Riss zwischen Natur und dem, was nach der Natur kommt, geht mitten durch uns hindurch, durch unsere Körper und durch unsere Seelen, weil wir Agenten des Transformationsprozesses sind von Natur in etwas anderes … Man kann prinzipiell nicht sagen, was sich aus der Gegenwart entwickelt. The rift between Nature and what comes after Nature runs right through our midst, through our bodies and our souls, because we are the agents of a process whereby Nature is transformed into something else … One cannot, as a matter of principle, say what is going to develop out of the present.
Someone asked what literature could do in this situation – whether, indeed, it could do anything? Sebald simply emitted a half sorrowful, half embarrassed laugh and said: ‘No, I don’t think so. How could it? After all, it’s only a structure that we’re describing. We’re just sitting in the brake van, but the brake is broken. So the role of literature is a quantité négligeable.’ He then concluded: Ihre Zeit ist das Imperfekt. Ist dieses abgeschafft, dann hört auch das Erzählen auf. Bereits jetzt gibt es zahlreiche Texte, die daran kranken, daβ ihre Autoren keine eigene Erinnerung mehr haben. Immer öfter fällt mir auf, daβ die literarische Sprache vom Isotop der Ausdruckssprache mehr und mehr abgezogen wird und sich dem Isotop der Informationssprache nähert, die, alles andere als genau, bestimmt ist von einem hohen Grad an Redundanz. Literatur assimiliert das Gebrabbel der Kommunikation. Damit sind Tür und Tor geöffnet. Autor kann jetzt jeder werden. Bücher, auch literarische, gibt es weit mehr denn je. Eine absolut und relativ größere Menge von Menschen nimmt heute Anteil an künstlerischen Produkten und wird mit einer nie gekannten Vielfalt von solchen Produkten beliefert. Allein in der deutschen Schweiz, wo es im ersten Jahrhundertdrittel nur den einsamen Robert Walser gegeben hat und nachher, wie man weiß, lange Zeit nur den Frisch und Dürrenmatt, gibt es heute gute fünf Dutzend an die Öffentlichkeit getretene Schriftsteller mit Kulturanspruch. Das liegt nicht daran, daβ die Deutschschweizer dabei sind, eine Art kollektiven Geniestreich zu vollführen, wie man das seinerzeit von den Grazern mit gewissem Fug noch behaupten konnte,47 sondern es liegt an einem neuen Produktionssystem, das Jahr für Jahr mehr auswirft, wenn auch nicht viel halt- oder brauchbares. Und kommt doch einmal so etwas zustande wie eine gültige Beschreibung der Gegenwart, so geht es unter in dem von der hochentwickelten Marktwirtschaft beförderten Pluralismus, in dem alles gleich gültig ist. (Sebald, 1995: 67) Its tense is the aorist or past historic. But once this has been abolished then narration comes to an end. Nowadays, numerous texts already exist that suffer from the fact that their authors no longer have a memory of their own. It strikes me ever more frequently that literary language is being separated ever further from the isotope of expressive language and moving ever closer to the isotope of the language of information which, being anything but precise, involves a high degree of redundancy. Literature is absorbing the babble of communication. And with that the doors and gates are flung wide open. Anyone can become an author. There are far more books, including literary texts, than ever before. A larger number of people – in absolute as well as relative terms – are nowadays participating in artistic production and they are being supplied with an unprecedented variety of such products. In German-speaking Switzerland alone, where, for the first 30 years of the century, there was just the lonely Robert Walser, and after him, as we all know, just Frisch and Dürrenmatt, there are nowadays a good 60 people working in the public domain who can, with some justification, claim to be serious writers. And this is not because the German-speaking Swiss are busy putting on a collective show of genius, as one could once have said, with a certain amount of justification, of the Austrian Grazer Gruppe. No: it is because of a new system of production that churns out more year by year, even if a lot of what is produced is not very useful and rapidly reaches its sell-by date. And if that sounds like a valid description of what is going on today, it will soon be overtaken by the pluralistic situation that is encouraged by a highly developed free market economy in which everything is of equal value.
It was not just Sebald’s prognostications that were correct and realistic – we were only just beginning to hear the word ‘globalization’ – it was also his understanding of what a writer, even the most committed writer, could expect to achieve. Those people who sense things earlier than others are called ‘Cassandras’. In Sebald’s view one can still, as a writer, be an eye-witness, a compiler of official reports, a researcher, an archaeologist, and someone who digs around looking for things – but no more than that. And this is no mean achievement in an age and a culture where everything gets reconfigured, but to such an extent that it ceases to be recognizable. Moreover, it is not far short of miraculous and says a great deal about the healthy condition of the literary public that such an obsessively independent-minded, uncompromisingly precise debunker of life and literature – such an obsessively addicted collector of evidence and archaeologist – should have had the chance of being noticed, and to such a great extent that people want to share the precision of his hopeless quest for remains and relics and his decidedly unoptimistic mania for memorials. Paradoxically, his success, as his indisputable fame clearly demonstrates, resonates with an optimism and shows, despite all the mystifications that work for the benefit of the myth of ‘quota’, that people are still in need of a quality of authenticity. I use the word ‘authenticity’ advisedly, since, like the word ‘utopia’, it has gradually degenerated into a dirty word, but when I use it, I am trying to identify a deep-seated need that exists in all of us and prevents us, notwithstanding the value-system of postmodernism, from being palmed off with fake versions and simulacra of reality, and superficial accounts of what is happening to our world.
Sebald always penetrates below the surface of things and images. Like Alexander Kluge, whose work he much admired, 48 he has no confidence in either the power of images or the power of words on their own, and so he invites one to become a ‘disobedient reader’ by approaching his photos with the help of his words and concretizing verbal descriptions by means of his visual images. In this way, every object, every place and every character, even space itself, is brought into relief under two aspects, and in this way, too, Sebald, like a good (poetic) archaeologist, resurveys the surface of the surrounding terrain and the layers beneath it that have been deposited by our history. As, for example, when I came upon those pages in Austerlitz where the narrator, who is looking for himself, tells us about the convent in East London that, in days gone by, had housed nuns belonging to the order of Mary of Bethlehem, and the people who lived nearby: suddenly, the remains of some of those people come to light and emerge as orderly groups of skeletons from the muddy soil.
Ich bin damals des öfteren dort gewesen, sagte Austerlitz … und habe photographische Aufnahmen gemacht von den Überresten der Toten, und ich entsinne mich, wie einer der Archäologen … mir gesagt hat, daβ in jedem Kubikmeter Abraum, den man aus dieser Grube entfernte, die Gerippe von durchschnittlich acht Menschen gefunden worden sind. Über die solchermaβen mit dem Staub und den Knochen zusammengesunkenen Leiber versetzte Erdschicht hinweg war im Verlauf des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts die Stadt gewachsen. (Sebald, 2001a: 188) I went there quite often at the time, said Austerlitz … and I took photographs of the remains of the dead, and I remember [falling into conversation with] one of the archaeologists, who told me that on average the skeletons of eight people had been found in every cubic metre of spoil removed from the trench. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city had grown up above these layers of soil mingled with the dust and bones of decayed bodies. (Sebald, 2001b: 184 and 186; 2001c: 130)
At this juncture the narrator documents Austerlitz’s report by means of a full-page photograph which depicts four grinning skulls (Sebald, 2001a: 189; 2001b: 185; 2001c: 131), their mouths hanging open and lying in the damp clay soil of the archaeological dig, and which had been taken from such close range that one feels as though one could stretch out one’s hand and touch them. But then, in the very next sentence and one archaeological stratum higher, he examines and maps the traces of the urban world that followed. By now, the whole city has become a rotting heap of bones that are concealed beneath einem immer verwinkelter werdenden Gewirr fauliger Gassen und Häuser, zusammengebacken aus Balken, Lehmklumpen und jedem sonst verfügbaren Material für die niedrigsten Bewohner von London. Um 1860 und 1870 herum, vor Beginn der Bauarbeiten an den beiden nordöstlichen Bahnhöfen, wurden diese Elendsquartiere gewaltsam geräumt, und ungeheure Erdmassen, mitsamt den in ihnen Begrabenen, aufgewühlt und verschoben, damit die Eisenbahntrassen, die auf den von den Ingenieuren angefertigten Plänen sich ausnahmen wie Muskelund Nervenstränge in einem anatomischen Atlas, herangeführt werden konnten bis an den Rand der City. (Sebald, 2001a: 189–90) an increasingly tangled warren of putrid lanes and houses, cobbled together for the lowliest inhabitants of London out of beams, clods of clay, and any other material that came to hand. Around 1860 and 1870, before work on the construction of the two north-eastern termini began, these slum districts were forcibly cleared and vast quantities of soil, together with those who were buried in them, were churned up and removed, so that the railway lines, which, on the plans drawn up by the engineers, looked like muscles and sinews in an anatomical atlas, could be brought to the outskirts of the city. (Sebald, 2001b: 186; 2001c: 132)
It is like the resurrection, albeit not a metaphysical one, of the city’s structure from the decomposing corpses of its former inhabitants. But Sebald was not one of those writers who flirts with the morbidezza of decay, and the topos of the body’s biodegradability has barely been introduced in graphic close-up when there is a sharp cut in the narrative and we are offered, as though in counterpoint, a bird’s-eye view of the Victorian engineers’ plans for the complex network of railway lines that led into Broad Street and Liverpool Street stations (Sebald, 2001a: 191; 2001b: 187; 2001c: 133).
This continually oscillating focus – between description, alienation, concretization, distantiation, evocation and rupture – leads to that multi-dimensional narrative universe of which Sebald is not so much a master as an inhabitant. He was never, as the young Peter Handke once said of himself, ‘someone who dwelt in ivory towers’. No: Max Sebald inhabits, describes, described, labelled, transformed into writing, and set down in writing everything he came across, and then used it all as building material on his own creative construction site. This terrain is full of old, invisible towns and cities, deserted pavilions, casemates, bastions, enclosures, platforms from which trains have long since ceased to depart, photos of people who have long since vanished, even from the memories of their dead contemporaries. Everything and anything can be changed and brought back to life for that magical moment when the narrator narrates and the reader reads, even if, just one moment later, it all fades away in the night-time zone of some forgotten archive. Sometimes – and these are the most moving moments – a narrator catches a ghostly glimpse of himself, sitting and waiting somewhere or another in a past that is no more: Tatsächlich hatte ich das Gefühl, sagte Austerlitz, als enthalte der Wartesaal, in dessen Mitte ich wie ein Geblendeter stand, alle Stunden meiner Vergangenheit … als sei das schwarzweiße Rautenmuster der Steinplatten zu meinen Füßen das Feld für das Endspiel meines Lebens … Vielleicht sah ich darum auch in dem Halbdämmer des Saals zwei im Stil der dreißiger Jahre gekleidete Personen mittleren Alters [ … und] auch den Knaben, den sie abholen gekommen waren … Seine Beine, die in weißen Kniesocken steckten, reichten noch nicht bis an den Boden, und wäre das Rucksäckchen, das er auf seinem Schoß umfangen hielt, nicht gewesen, ich glaube, sagte Austerlitz, ich hätte ihn nicht erkannt. So aber erkannte ich ihn … und erinnerte ich mich zum erstenmal … an mich selber in dem Augenblick, in dem ich begriff, daβ es in diesem Wartesaal gewesen sein muβte, daβ ich in England angelangt war vor mehr als einem halben Jahrhundert. (Sebald, 2001a: 196–7) In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, as though the waiting-room, in whose centre I stood as if dazzled, contained all the hours of my past life … as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame of my life would be played … Perhaps that is why, in the gloomy light of the waiting-room, I also saw two middle-aged people dressed in the style of the thirties [ … and also] the boy they had come to meet … His legs, in white knee-length socks, did not reach the floor, and but for the small rucksack he was clutching on his lap I don’t think I would have known him, said Austerlitz. As it was, I recognized him by that rucksack of his, and for the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this same waiting-room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago. (Sebald 2001b:19–3; 2001c: 136–7)
This is not artistic fantasy running riot but a precise portrayal of one of those processes, at one and the same time both very simple and very complicated, from which daydreams are created and which we all experience from time to time, often without realizing what is going on. Unlike most of us average citizens, endowed as we are with run-of-the-mill imaginations and a conventional command of language, and in contrast – dare I say it – to many a one of his prolific critical colleagues, Sebald, an acknowledged virtuoso of remembrance and recollection, does not just content himself with conjuring up something vaguely similar to the experience of déjà-vu or poking around with clever abstractions in a quest for ‘magical realism’ or ‘surreal reifications’. Rather, he succeeds in documenting experiences, using as his material language things, images, words and feelings that re-trace this mental process after 50 years and then awaken it once more, possibly bringing it to the surface and making it into a tangible experience for the very first time. And this he does without any recourse to mysticism or the unsayable. If you like, Sebald is a latter-day Proust who is in search of his own time lost – but outside of the realm of the auratic and the aestheticizing so that it happens as though it were a reflex action.
Max Sebald’s ‘intensified magical realism’ takes everything to pieces with great sensitivity, then describes in minute detail both what is happening and how someone can learn to re-examine a lost image of him- or herself under a magnifying glass in the light of the present day, before finally resituating that lost image within the intellectual, affective and sensory co-ordinates of an age that is past.
Whether, as Ruth Klüger believes, 49 we as readers are accompanying Sebald for a while on his ‘peregrinations between inauthentic lives’ or, whether, as Sigrid Löffler puts it, 50 we are engaged in attempts, albeit futile ones, to re-enliven ‘fields of rubble that have been left by extinct ages’, or, whether, as Susan Sontag believes, we are participating in heart-rending threnodies for irreversible acts of destruction – it is striking how nearly all such literary connoisseurs, who are not well known for their critical restraint, adopt a reverentially respectful tone of voice when they are talking about Sebald.
Not, I hasten to add, that I wish to express the slightest reservations about the outstanding quality of Sebald’s writing – the solemn seriousness of his prose, its suppleness and its precision. I am merely trying to fathom out what underlies this respect and why it is so widespread. Alexander Kluge, for instance, the quality and range of whose work equals Sebald’s in more than one respect, is never accorded the same tone of voice. His two-volume Die Chronik der Gefühle (The Chronicle of Feelings) (2000) is acknowledged as an inventory and textbook for studying the collective store of memory and its author is viewed as a kind and clever man. Peter Weiss’s three-volume Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) (1975–81) – another type of book that is close to Sebald’s work – is valued, but rarely read, and although its author haunts the literary landscape, he does so as a writer who is almost faceless and whose importance has not yet been determined. I admit, however, that in comparison with the authors I have just mentioned, I am somewhat bothered by the kow-towing that goes on among Sebald-worshippers, and this is because I incline to the view that such excessive reverence rests on an error and a fundamental misunderstanding – a projection even. For many years, Sebald wrote only for the benefit of his desk-drawer, since he was hesitant about publishing his work, and according to one of Sebald’s last doctoral students, the Meister was chary of reading out new and unpublished work to his friends and colleagues lest they fell asleep and snored. From today’s perspective, it seems incredible that professional readers might fail to realize that they were listening to one of the greatest ‘verbal magicians’; that they were entering, as it were, ‘hallowed ground’ and experiencing ‘magic moments’; that they were wandering through ‘written worlds that were heavy with intoxicating blossoms’; that they were being permitted to decipher an ‘epitaph for life’ and listening to a ‘dark philosophy of history’ consisting of ‘bewitching and vertiginous ideas, all striving towards the point of completion’; that they were participating in an act of transcendental contemplation and meditation; and that moments of celestial revelation and transfiguration were busy rushing past them like a mighty wind. 51
These are just a few of the bouquets from their linguistic hothouses that literary critics have presented to Sebald over the past five years. Plus what almost amounts to an epidemic of prize-givings. Not to mention memorial celebrations and any number of encomia – all of course cast in preternaturally fine prose. Sebald is in danger! In danger of becoming a cult object for an elite. He of all people, one of the least pretentious and most straightforwardly level-headed people that one could hope to meet. The desire to venerate him and embrace him without expecting anything in return has turned into an excuse for pouring out self-indulgent and ill-considered praise. That is what happened to Paul Celan and Thomas Bernhard. By being enveloped in a mantle of acceptance and homage, these writers were raised up out of the everyday material world which is their proper environment and which was a central part of their lives and their work as authors. And should have remained as such.
Scarcely anyone has, by means of the written word, come as close as Max Sebald to the reality behind the husks of words and the reality of the words themselves – and is he now to be obscured by the fog of reviews that appear in the literary sections of newspapers? There is a form of sobriety that has to be experienced in a way that is both sober and sobering.
And there is scarcely another person who could be so enigmatically ironic, so wittily eccentric in such a fundamental way. But once the top literary critics – who have a lot in common with the top financiers – have decided to take someone seriously, then you can say goodbye to humour and off-beat asides. Kafka’s uncontrollably anarchic, childlike propensity to comedy has disappeared for the foreseeable future in the existential philosophy that dwells on his German-Jewish capacity for feeling pain. Celan’s concreteness and playfulness have been hidden behind the mask of obscurity. So let us not allow Max Sebald to be taken away from us in the same way. Instead of having acolytes solemnly parading around him, he needs to be discovered – by which, first and foremost, I mean read. And there will be moments of boredom, as in every life. As with every book there will be repetitious moments and phases that make it seem that one is perpetually reading the same thing. As always happens. But moments will also occur when one catches a glimpse of Karl Valentin. 52 Then it gets deadly serious. Then the seriousness crumbles. Then one recovers one’s composure once more.
We must not allow Max Sebald to become a canonical author. For when a writer has been canonized and no-one dares to laugh any more for fear of looking silly in front of the cognoscenti, that is when he or she is really dead. And that is why it is so good that extracts from his work are going to be read out here, this evening.
Translated by Richard Sheppard
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Toby Green’s interview with Sebald is reproduced here by kind permission of the Estate of W. G. Sebald, and Amazon EU Sarl. It was recorded in late 1999 just before the publication of Vertigo and first appeared on the Amazon website when Vertigo was published in December 1999; it appeared again after the publication of Austerlitz in autumn 2001. See: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=21586.
The text of the reading evening with Susan Sontag is published here for the first time by kind permission of the estates of W. G. Sebald and Susan Sontag and the management of the Unterberg Poetry Center, New York.
Professor Jürgen Wertheimer was kind enough to allow me to translate and publish my English translation of his lecture – which differs slightly in places from the German original.
I would like to thank the following individuals for their most valued help with the writing, transcription and editing of the above three contributions: Ute Sebald, Professor André Aciman, Scott Bartsch, Professor Chris Bigsby, Professor Paul Bishop, Dr Bojan Bujić, Heiko Kusiek, Professor Jonathan Long, Terry Pitts, Bernard Schwartz (director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, New York) and Professor Ralph Yarrow. For much of the footnote material I am indebted to Wikipedia articles.
Funding
The research involved in the above three contributions received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.