Three new books on W. G. Sebald and some afterthoughts

Modernity, postmodernity, and the ‘neo-liberal world’

First, although Kilbourn’s statement that memory and the past are ‘at the heart of Sebald’s postsecular narrative’ (p. 7) is partially true, what Kilbourn calls ‘modernity’s ineluctable eroding of a former, ostensibly better world’ (p. 53) is nearer that centre and directly linked with loss of ‘Heimat’ (see Annäherungen, pp. 9–39). But he is correct in saying that by ‘modernity’ Sebald means ‘the catastrophe of catastrophes’, that is ‘modern civilization as it has evolved under capitalism, whose narrative he calls the natural history of disaster’ (p. 75). But because much of Sebald’s work is most obviously focused on a lost past to which his narrators are drawn, albeit ironically, by nostalgia, escapism, sorrow or remorse, it contrasts with that of his admirer Jonathan Coe (1997). For although Sebald is acutely conscious of the lethal aspects of postmodernity, he is less explicitly direct about them, and by discretely following Nietzsche’s aesthetics (see Section VIII of The Birth of Tragedy (1872)), he tends to veil a Dionysian reality by using such ‘tactful’ Apollonian techniques as masking, occlusion, dream work, dematerialization, distancing, obliqueness, omission, falsification and simplification. For example, Coe, who calls the Holocaust ‘the ultimate test of a writer’s tact’, points out that it is only towards the end of The Emigrants that the reader is ‘challenged by an explicit reference to the Holocaust, an event adumbrated by the other narratives, casting its noisome cloud over them, but never named or directly confronted’.

But less obvious examples of veiling occur throughout Sebald’s work. For example, the untimely deaths of his colleagues Michael Parkinson and Janine Dakyns that are narrated in Part I of TRoS were ‘quite unexpected’ and veiled by ‘unknown causes’ after an intervening gap of four months (TRoS, GO: 12–17 / ET: 6–9). ¹ But Sebald the author/narrator also understood that nothing troubled Michael ‘quite so much as the dire responsibility of performing his duties, under increasingly adverse conditions’ – a veiled way of describing the increasing governmental demands being made on academic staff by British universities which began in about 1985 and which Sebald would later call ‘stalinization’. So he probably also knew that from 1985 to 1993, Janine, Michael’s closest friend, performed the exacting task of compiling the Post-Romantic French Literature section of The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies in order to show that she, too, was carrying her fair share of professional burdens. The work involved locating and accessing a huge amount of raw material in the days before periodicals went on-line, speed-reading it, formulating fair and cogent summaries, and meeting the prescribed wordage by a set deadline. And Sebald certainly knew that both Janine and Michael were highly sensitive individuals who possessed a streak of eccentric genius that was akin to his own, an excessive conscientiousness that could make them obsessive about their own research, and a profound dislike of neo-liberal, utilitarian conceptions of education. Consequently, in TRoS Sebald hints that their early deaths were partly caused by stress (see also Annäherungen, pp. 66–7 and 129–31, F[letcher] (1995) and S[cott] (1995)), a conclusion that was reinforced by his growing awareness that his own self-imposed workload was aggravating the cardiac condition which he had inherited from his grandfather and which would eventually kill him (see Annäherungen, p. 69).

Environmental concern, impending apocalypse and the narratology of radical uncertainty

Second, Gertrude Aebischer, Sebald’s older sister, confirms that he was concerned by environmental problems at an early date (see Annäherungen, pp. 76–103), and when, on 18 August 1976, ‘crucidolite’, one of the minerals used industrially under the name of asbestos, was discovered in the ducts of three of UEA’s relatively new buildings – including Arts 1, which contained Sebald’s office – it had to be removed rapidly and carefully by H & S technicians who were dressed in what appeared to be space-suits. According to a letter of 27 August 1976 from HM Factory Inspectorate to UEA’s Estates Officer, the pollution was not great – ‘well below the industrial hygiene standard of 0.2 fibres per cc.’ Nevertheless, the whole episode made Sebald very nervous and caused him to stay away from UEA until he was absolutely sure that it was safe to return. Like many Germans, Sebald must have been even more disturbed by the infinitely greater levels of pollution produced by the Chernobyl disaster of 26 April 1986. But several people who knew him well, including Gertrude, have told me that they do not remember him saying anything about it – and nor do I. Chernobyl features neither in any of Sebald’s essays, nor in the extensive index that concludes the Sebald Handbook (Catling and Hibbitt, 2011), nor, to my knowledge, in the index to his interviews that is contained there (pp. 592–618). Indeed, his long-standing ‘fear of environmental catastrophe’ occurs there only once (pp. 492 and 607) – as one of the topics he addressed in his interview with Jochen Wittmann that appeared in the Stuttgarter Zeitung on 27 November 1997. So perhaps, Gertrude speculates, her brother was so convinced at an early age that such catastrophes were inevitable, that he was not particularly surprised when one occurred.

Given which, in Parts VII and/or VIII of TRoS, one might expect Sebald’s narrator to foreground the huge nuclear power station at Sizewell since it dominates the central part of the exposed Suffolk coast and its two Magnox reactors were active and controversial while Sebald was working on his most philosophical book: ‘A’ from 1966 to 2006 and ‘B’ from 1987 to 1995. ² Moreover, the Sizewell complex is about four miles north of Aldeburgh, two miles east of Leiston, six miles south of Dunwich and eight-and-a-half miles south of Southwold – all places that had fascinated Sebald since his arrival in East Anglia in 1970 (see Sebald, 1974, GO) / 2011, ET)).

But although Sizewell is clearly visible from Southwold and Dunwich, ³ it provides a more complex and ominous example of narratorial veiling than did the deaths Michael and Janine. First, it does not feature on the partial and barely legible map of Suffolk that is printed on the inside end covers of TRoS and in Part VIII (GO: 289 / ET: 232), and it is mentioned only once in Part VII: ‘Now night is almost over and the dawn about to break. The contours [die Umrisse] of the Sizewell power plant, its Magnox block a glowering mausoleum, begin to loom upon an island far out in the pallid waters where one believes the Dogger Bank to be’ (GO: 218 / ET: 175). This brief passage involves several incongruities. The Dogger Bank is a good 160 miles to the north, off the coast of South Yorkshire. Sizewell does not stand on an island far out in the sea but on a high embankment above the shingle beach well back from the sea – though the curvature of the coast could mislead a ‘furriner’, especially at first light. And although, for obvious reasons, Sebald’s two narrators liken Sizewell to a mausoleum, they see it in terms of its outlines and so dematerialize it, making it spectral rather than massively monstrous. Finally, the German word used for ‘dawn’ is not the everyday ‘Morgendämmerung’, but the rarer ‘Morgengrauen’, whose second half – ‘Grauen’ – suggests ‘terror’ as well as ‘greyness’.

But far from existing in a vacuum, the above lines come from two pages of prose in which Sebald’s narrator describes how, between midday and dusk, he became hopelessly disoriented while crossing Dunwich Heath en route to Middleton in order to visit his friend, the poet Michael Hamburger. He had presumably chosen the apparently direct path across the Heath to avoid the zig-zag road that links the two villages, but thanks to arbitrary, not to say meaningless sign-posting and deceptive ‘crooked sandy tracks’ (GO: 215 / ET: 172), he becomes increasingly irritated and dizzy as though he were having a nightmare, and finally suffers a bad panic attack that worsens his sense of being lost and plays havoc with his sense of time. The whole experience is so strange and inexplicable that for months, Sebald’s narrator tells us, he kept dreaming that he was still having the experience and unable to find his way ‘out of the maze’ which, he was convinced, had been created solely for him (GO: 215–16 / ET: 173). But the narrator then reports – and because the time sense of the passage is so confused, it is hard to judge whether his account refers to the original dream or the experience that triggered it or one of the subsequent replays – that he quite unexpectedly reached a raised area ‘where a little Chinese pavilion had been built, as in the middle of the yew maze at Somerleyton’. ⁴ Whereupon, he continues, still in a dream, he suddenly realized with ‘absolute certainty’ that the Somerleyton labyrinth resembled a cross-section of his brain (GO: 215–16 / ET: 173). And with this connection established, the German original continues with an italicized English translation of an incomplete and slightly inexact copy of the final five lines of the first stanza of one of Hamburger’s translations of Hölderlin’s elegy Brod und Wein: ‘Night, the astonishing, [there,] the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on.’ (GO: 216 / ET: 173–4: no italics in the English translation). ⁵ This passage, which lacks the word ‘there’ – presumably to diminish any sense of spatial stability – can be read either as a reassuring vision that tells Sebald’s narrator that he is near Hamburger’s house, or as a way of making an explanatory connection between the beautiful but dead moon, its hostility to humanity, and the state of mental imbalance that he has just experienced (i.e. lunacy).

But while Sebald’s narrator dreams that he is resting in the little Chinese pavilion, the ambivalent poetic passage triggers an additional dream vision. At first he seems to be standing ‘at the topmost point of the earth’ – wherever that is – gazing out southwards across Dunwich beach, where he notices that ‘to the south, entire headlands had broken off the coast and sunk beneath the waves’ and from where, in the daytime, he could have discerned Sizewell on the horizon. But he then spots a figure in a captain’s uniform ‘busying himself at a battery of searchlights, the beams of which, probing the darkness, reminded me of the War’, after which he espies, just below the cliff on which he is standing, the ‘shattered ruins of a house . . . on a black heap of earth’: ‘Wedged in among the remains of walls, broken chests of drawers, banisters, upended bathtubs and buckled heating pipes were the strangely contorted bodies of those people who had lived there and who, only moments before, had gone to sleep in their beds, [were sitting in front of the television, or had been cutting up a flounder with a fish-knife]’ (GO: 217–18 / ET: 174). ⁶ Although the television locates the passage in the postmodern world, the scene, set by the searchlights, points both forwards to the publication of Luftkrieg und Literature (1999) (On the Natural History of Destruction, 2003) and, simultaneously, backwards to two passages there. First, the place where Sebald cites Air Vice-Marshal Arthur (‘Bomber’) Harris (1892–1984) proclaiming in 1940 ‘that those who have loosed these horrors upon mankind will now in their homes and persons feel the shattering strokes of just retribution’, and second, the extended passage where Sebald describes the effects of Operation Gomorrah, the firestorm raids on Hamburg between 24 July and 3 August 1943 (GO: 28, 35–42 / ET: 19, 25–32).

After this ‘scene of devastation’ (GO: 218 / ET: 174), the reader of the German original finally reaches an italicized quotation from Act V, Scene 3 of King Lear, where the dishevelled old king, on the edge of madness, kneels beside the dead Cordelia to utter his ‘last, despairing plea’: ‘Lend me a looking glass; if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why, then she lives’ – a situation which is defamiliarized by the seemingly meaningless direction: ‘both of them tiny, as if on a stage that is miles away’. Sebald’s text then omits the responses of Kent and Edgar and ends as follows: ‘No, nothing. Nothing but dead silence. Then softly, barely audibly, the sound of a funeral march.’

Although the above discussion suggests ways in which TRoS veils Sizewell, it also shows how Sebald’s narrators associate it tactfully with several disturbed states of mind, including the ‘horror’ that haunts so much modernist literature and features verbatim in Kent’s response to Lear’s plea. It also supports Kilbourn’s view that Sebald’s narratology shifts in and out of focus, as the narrative point of view oscillates between reliability and unreliability and as apparently secure perspectives that involve a ‘quasi-omniscient objectivity’ suddenly give way to an ‘epistemological seasickness or vertigo’. Consequently, it also implies that Sebald’s prose fiction does not fit one narratological mould as it can and does move between several moulds – realist / modernist / postmodernist – with surprising rapidity and even, occasionally, appears to fit several moulds almost simultaneously (cf. Hessing and Lenzen, 2015: 107).

Linkage, dating errors and flawed narrators

Part VIII of TRoS may not actually mention Sizewell and the threat posed by nuclear power, but its final section begins by referring to the hurricane that devastated England on 15–16 October 1987 and was, according to Gertrude, the worst natural catastrophe experienced by her brother, since it did considerable damage to his very stylish garden. And although one might expect Sebald’s narrator to make more of that storm, he describes it only indirectly, in terms of its damage that is still evident six or seven years later near the eastern fringe of Rendlesham Forest and its similarity to the storm that he himself experiences there. And as though to flag up his narrator’s limitations when he attempts to deal with such a destructive event, Sebald has him date it to 16–17 October 1987, ⁷ which is then reduced in the English translation to 16 October 1987 (GO: 284–6 / ET: 228–9). So although Parts VII and VIII of TRoS convey a sense that the ‘real world’ is threatened by a destructive power that casts its ‘noisome cloud’ over the landscape and manifests itself in darkness, mental and emotional confusion, horror, terror, fascinating but lifeless beauty, the madness of kings, the death of the innocent, the vaporization of solid materials, mass destruction and, finally, elemental cataclysm, it is never ‘named or directly confronted’ (Coe, 1997) but concealed by an elaborate and finely spun complex of narrative veils. The narrative of TRoS does not, however, always move in such (post)modernist ways, for Sebald’s narrator can describe the cataclysmic end of Dunwich as a port on 14 January 1328, when a hurricane-force north-easterly wind threw a shingle bank across the harbour mouth, blocking it permanently, much more realistically and dispassionately – perhaps because the remote past works as a kind of veil in its own right (GO: 198–200 / ET: 157–9).

The minor dating error identified above connects unobtrusively with the passage involving KZ Belsen in Part III of TRoS (GO: 79–85 / ET: 59–64), for while Sebald’s narrator says that Belsen was liberated on 14 April 1945, the 249th Battery of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, RA, did not enter the camp until 15 April, after the SS guards had been allowed to leave two days earlier. This link is reinforced by an unattributed photograph of heaps of corpses lying in pinewoods that was definitely taken near KZ Belsen, ⁸ and this connects in turn with the uncaptioned photograph of shattered pine trees in a similarly sandy terrain near Rendlesham Forest (GO: 80–1, 284 / ET: 60–1, 228). At which point, the extract from King Lear discussed above connects with Lear’s speech in Act III, Scene 2, when, on ‘another part of the Heath’, the awfulness of his tragedy makes him call upon all the elements, including ‘You cataracts and hurricanoes’, to ‘crack nature’s moulds’ and destroy this terrible world in one cataclysmic event.

The discovery of a second minor dating error does not, however, close but complicates the question of what liberation might have meant for KZ Belsen’s inmates. In an unpublished memoir of 1949, ‘England: Eindrücke eines Ahnenlosen’, the Jewish writer and intellectual H. G. Adler (1910–88), who survived almost five years in a labour camp, in the ‘Paradise Ghetto’ of Terezín and in four KZs (including Belsen), states that for him, 11 February 1947, the day of his arrival in England, was the day of his ‘definitive liberation’ from the power of Hitler’s Germany, and attributes this to the kindness of the officials who received him at Croydon Airport (see Grenville, 2019). Mutatis mutandis, although all Belsen’s survivors were evacuated between 15 April and 19 May 1945, we cannot know how many of them were trapped by their negative memories for years to come. And what, Sebald might ask, of the thousands of victims who remained in mass graves within the camp’s boundaries? Does their ‘soundless wailing’ ⁹ still haunt the memorial site just as it haunts other sites of mass death such as Nagasaki, central Dresden, Oradour, Lidice and the woods around Verdun? So one could ask whether KZ Belsen was ever liberated in any final sense and whether institutionalizing a precise date actually simplifies a complex, not to say continuing event, making it more contained, more acceptable, less awful – and more forgettable. But besides being an example of narratorial unreliability and the inherent imprecision of would-be exactitude, 14 April had a special significance for Sebald, since it was the day in 1956 when Josef Egelhofer died. And this minor biographical fact adds weight to the idea that in TRoS, Sebald’s narrator quietly interlinks large-scale historical catastrophes, major natural catastrophes, and enduring personal catastrophes, seeing all of them as aspects of one Schopenhauerian process. So whereas Schwamborn links characters, objects and events in Sebald’s prose fiction that are, on the whole, either historical or (auto)biographical, it is possible that some of Sebald’s most imaginative and memorable episodes are those where he quietly moves the reader into making connections of quite a different order.

In the concluding section of Part VIII, Sebald’s narrator visits the ‘cuspate foreland shingle spit’ called Orford Ness (which Sebald’s German and English narrators turn – incorrectly – into Orfordness, a word that suggests the English abstract noun ‘awfulness’). Although this visit is far less traumatic for the narrator than his trek across Dunwich Heath, the two episodes share common features. To reach Orford Ness, the subject has, ominously, to pay a ferryman who regales him with dark stories about the place (GO: 290–1 / ET: 233–4), and when he lands, he is afflicted by a growing sense of emptiness which the sudden flight of a terrified hare – an animal that plays an important role in several mythologies and is knowingly deployed by Sebald elsewhere – turns into a panic attack (GO: 291–2 / ET: 234–5). ¹⁰ The episode also involves references to Chinese buildings (GO: 294–5 / ET: 236–7) and weapons of mass destruction (GO: 287 / ET: 231), and confronts Sebald’s narrator with the skeletal remains of an Anglo-American research facility that served military and civilian purposes from 1913 to 2011 and is now part of a major conservation area. But although this facility may well have historical links with atomic energy, the narrator is silent about them, and instinctively attributes its dark sense of menace to various rumours and legends rather than the uncharted complexities of postmodernity. Indeed, even when Orford Ness is reduced to one word, its second part resonates with one of Britain’s most popular legends, which persists despite the lack of scientific evidence. Nor – significantly – does Sebald’s narrator mention the Orford lighthouse, whose history goes back to the eighteenth century and which was automated in 1964, decommissioned in 2013, and is now a dubious tourist attraction as it is rarely visited and in danger of falling into the sea. More importantly, however, the Orford section of TRoS includes three uncaptioned, but sinister photographs. Although the first seems initially to depict a bridge with no far end whose railings lead the gaze to infinity, closer study shows that it leads to a miniaturized part of the abandoned facility – complete with a barely visible protruding chimney – and so evokes the familiar image of railway lines leading ‘in appetency’ ¹¹ into KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau. The second photo is equally cryptic, even if it does enable the reader to see a miniaturized version of the lighthouse. It involves waste space and prominent but mysterious mounds, and once Parts III and VIII of TRoS have been linked, it is easy to fantasize that these are tumuli, since Sebald’s narrator likens them to burial mounds – adding the explanation ‘probably because of their odd conical shape’ (GO: 296 / ET: 236). But this piece of narratorial rationalization is flawed, since the mounds are lower and flatter than a conventional cone, and only the strangeness of the setting allows the reader to accept the narrator’s explanation. Finally, once the latter’s shortcomings are perceived, the third photo fits into place with terrible ease. For although Sebald’s narrator cannot at first explain the purpose of its strange, temple- or pagoda-like buildings, as he approaches them he imagines with increasing conviction that he is standing like a bewildered stranger among the remains of our own civilization, which, like the ruined house on Dunwich beach, has already been destroyed ‘in some future catastrophe’ (GO: 294 / ET: 236–7). And when he elaborates by describing the ‘primitive contraptions and fittings inside the bunkers’: ‘the iron rails under the ceilings, ¹² the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, ¹³ the plate-sized showerheads [that might have served] the ramps [for loading and unloading] and the soakaway [ditches]’ (GO: 294–5 / ET: 237), ¹⁴ it does not require much imagination to see what is being suggested. Some critics have objected strongly to Sebald making such connections on the grounds that they involve an insensitive, not to say offensive, category confusion between history and fiction (see Schwamborn, 2017: 147, n. 508; Joch, 2019). But although Sebald’s ‘supremely tactful’ meta-narrator is almost invisible (Bird, 2016: 98), he, too, is morally opposed to such thoughtless intrusion on ground that has been hallowed by ‘enormous human suffering’ (Coe, 1997). Nor, as professional readers are increasingly realizing, does Sebald necessarily ask his readers to believe the words of his more visible narrators, but only to reflect on what they are saying and ask themselves about its truth-value and/or relevance. Why, we might ask, does Part VII of TRoS end on a cryptic reference to a fictitious letter that a late Romantic Austrian poet attributes to a seventeenth-century English nobleman who is suffering from writer’s block (OR: 190 / ET: 237)?