Bernhard's cause

"An Indication of the Cause" (Die Ursache, 1975) by Thomas Bernhard, in Gathering Evidence: A Memoir, translated by David McLintock, collected in Gathering Evidence and My Prizes (Vintage, 2011)

I found the city increasingly intolerable as a result of hundreds of sad, squalid, appalling, and mortifying experiences, and essentially it has remained intolerable to this day. To pretend otherwise would be untrue, hypocritical, and dishonest, and it is imperative that I should set down this record now and not later—I must set it down now, while I am still capable of fully recreating my experience as a child and an adolescent in Salzburg, of recreating it with all the factualness and scrupulous regard for truth which are necessary if I am to give a true indication of what it was like to be a schoolboy there. I have to seize this moment when it is still possible for me to say what has to be said, to indicate what has to be indicated, and so vindicate, if only partially, the truth as it was then, the true facts and the true reality. For all too soon the time may come when everything that was unpleasant will be unwarrantably mitigated and appear in a pleasanter light; and whatever Salzburg was to me as a schoolboy, it was never a pleasant or tolerable place, and I should not wish to spare it now by falsifying the true picture.

Thomas Bernhard's motive for his autobiography was clear. When his mental faculties were still clear, and his health still permitted it, he wanted to produce an account of his childhood and schooldays in the blighted city of Salzburg. And so, between the years 1975 and 1982, Bernhard produced the five parts of his memoir. His novels, too, are practically the same hate mail to his city of childhood, with its "mindless blend of National Socialism and Catholicism." W. G. Sebald attributed Bernhard's "factualness and scrupulous regard for truth" to the impending knock on the door, as he mentioned in an interview in December 2001, eight days before he himself received the knock.

Thomas Bernhard was in quite a different league because he occupied a position which was absolute. Which had to do with the fact that he was mortally ill since late adolescence and knew that any day the knock could come at the door. And so he took the liberty which other writers shied away from taking. And what he achieved, I think, was also to move away from the standard pattern of the standard novel. He only tells you in his books what he heard from others.

Much more so in Gathering Evidence, the novelist was openly testifying using his own voice, or voices—the voice of his childhood and the retrospective voice of the writer—the horrific experiences he endured firsthand before, during, and after the war. While remembering-slash-writing, his current self was trying to recapture the wounded feelings of his former, thirteen-year old self. Yet he would like to differentiate his description of "how I felt at the time" with "the way I think now". The bursting energy of his tale was derived in part from layers of memory soaked in varying densities of perception. He would shift pronouns from "I" to "he" on page 79, then go back to "I" on page 83. David McLintock also noted his use of shifting perspective in the translator's preface: sometimes he views his youth from the standpoint of the present, at others from another intermediate point.

His appeal to "the true facts and the true reality", however, remained guarded. He knew his story was not distorted because they were based on factual evidence, but he could only give an indication of what he remembers.

The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history—which is of course part of natural history—and pass it on in falsified form just because it is customary to do so, when we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form.

From which we can gather that the writer had divested himself of all illusions of an accurate account of history. And from which we sense that his only protection from falsification was to perceive and create a version of history to the best of his memory and to the best of his ability. He simply had to make the attempt. Here we read about his recollection of multiple suicides of school boys his age and the air attacks skirted by Sebald in his lecture in On the Natural History of Destruction. Bernhard's descriptions of the air raids and their aftermath were some of the most brilliant writing he wrote. They could surpass the supreme irony in Heinrich Böll's accounts of air bombing destruction in The Silent Angel.

Bernhard's aesthetics of falsification was similar to Sebald's own, but only to an extent. Sebald was concerned with the truth (moral rightness) embedded in aesthetic form and feeling. The rightness and truthfulness of a narrative could be gleaned from its aesthetic and literary design. Bernhard, for his part, was concerned with the content and the desire (i.e., personal indications) to communicate the truth of that content. Both confessed to subjectivity. Bernhard acknowledged the impossibility of depicting the absolute reality of the past and, hence, its truth. But in refusing to give up and stand aside, in continuing to write what he knew and remember in order to set the record straight according to his own personal convictions, he was after the truth or an indicative version of it.

What is described here is the truth, and yet at the same time it is not the truth, because it cannot be. In all the years we have spent reading, we have never encountered a single truth, even if again and again what we have read has been factual. Again and again it was lies in the form of truth and truth in the form of lies, etc. What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even though I now know that it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth-content of the lie. For a long time reason has forbidden me to tell and write the truth, because that only means telling and writing a lie; but writing is a vital necessity for me, and this is the reason why I write, even if everything I write is bound to be nothing but lies which are conveyed through me as truth. Of course we may demand truth, but if we are honest with ourselves we know that there is no such thing as truth. What is described here is the truth, and at the same time it is not, for the simple reason that truth is only a pious wish on our part. [from "The Cellar: An Escape", italics in the original, bold emphasis mine]

The immediacy and the urgency of Bernhard's account of the war must be set off against what Sebald diagnosed as a collective repression of wartime narratives and against the self-censorship by leading writers of the time who could not summon their energies to give witness. "Time makes its witnesses forget", Bernhard concluded when nobody remembered what happened on a site of destruction after he questioned them years after the bombing of a building on the same site which killed many employees working in it: "rows of bodies covered by sheets, their bare feet visible on the dusty grass behind the iron railings of the so-called Co-op, and ... trucks arriving ... with enormous consignments of coffins ..." Sebald's thesis on forgetting certainly was indebted to Bernhard's anguish against people who deliberately wanted to forget. Whenever Bernhard talked to people and asked them about what they went through during the war, he was met with "extreme annoyance, ignorance, and forgetfulness." He found this offensive to the spirit, this concerted determination to forget. His desire to remember was his "pious wish" to settle his personal account of history.

The cat in the box was simultaneously dead and alive. But someone, the novelist, had to dare to be the first one to open the box. All that matters is the truth-content of the lie.

In the penal colony

"In the Penal Colony", from The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories by Franz Kafka, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (Scribner, 1993)

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities by Jean Améry, tr. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Indiana University Press, 1980)




In Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", a foreign diplomat visited the machine used for torturing and executing all criminals. There was no distinction among the crimes being punished. Whether the offense be petty or serious, the offenders would be uniformly subjected to the penal system and would have to suffer the precise mechanism and motions of the death machine, "the apparatus".  

Does the condemned man know his judgment? the diplomat asked of the executioner. No. He doesn't know his own judgment. The diplomat again asked, But he does know that he has been condemned? The reply was again a no. Then the man doesn't yet know how his defense was received? And again the reply: He had no opportunity to defend himself. The diplomat rises to his chair. He must have had an opportunity to defend himself.

"This is how things stand," said the officer. "I have been appointed judge here in the penal colony. Despite my youth. For I assisted the former commander in all criminal matters and I am also the person most familiar with the apparatus. The principle on which I base my decision is: guilt is always beyond doubt.

 
A man is guilty and he cannot be proven innocent. The observation was later made that "the injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution were beyond all doubt." The detailed description of the apparatus and the mechanical procedure of execution was some of Kafka's most graphic writing.

Both the bed and the draftsman have an electric battery each; the bed needs one for itself, the draftsman needs one for the harrow. Once the man is strapped tight, the bed is set in motion. It quivers in tiny, very rapid twitches, both sideways and up and down. You must have seen similar apparatuses in sanitariums; except that in our bed all the movements are precisely calculated. You see, they have to be meticulously geared to the motions of the harrow. But this harrow has the job of actually carrying out the judgment.

The harrow, the harrow. Among Kafka's corpus "In the Penal Colony" explicitly revealed one abiding subject of his fiction: systematic violation of human rights. If in his other novels and stories an invisible tormentor or aggressor, maybe an absentee landlord, circled around the protagonist, in this long story we were in direct contact with the torturer, explaining his wares and his violent procedures. The systematic reduction of a human being, physically and psychologically, was through the slow process of dying. It would take approximately 12 hours for the condemned to expire under the harrow. The harrowing harrow was the horrifying image of man's inhumanity to man.

* * *

I don't recall the word "dignity" being used in this story. But alongside human life, human dignity was the casualty of this inhumane penal system. Dignity was a slippery concept, but it was traditionally seen as the articulation of inalienable human rights. "To die with dignity" was a contradiction in state justice systems that execute its own kind.

In his encyclical of last year, Pope Francis talked at length about dignity in the context of climate change and inequality. The challenge for the disenfranchised and the poor was how to (in the pope's words) be "able to live in a way worthy of their human dignity." Disenfranchisement of access to basic resources lowers the quality of life and robs one of human dignity.

Jean Améry (1912-1978), the German writer imprisoned and tortured during the Nazi occupation, sought to personally define human dignity. What is dignity, really? he asked in At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. He came to equate it with life, or with the antithesis of destruction and degradation and death. "I believed to recognize that dignity is the right to live", he wrote. But it is a right "granted by society."

If I was correct that the deprivation of dignity was nothing other than the potential deprivation of life, then dignity would have to be the right to live. If it was also correct when I said that the granting and depriving of dignity are acts of social agreement, sentences against which there is no appeal on the grounds of one's "self-understanding," so that it would be senseless to argue against the social body that deprives us of our dignity with the claim that we do indeed "feel" worthy—if all of this were valid, then every effort to regain our dignity would have been of no value, and it would still be so today. Degradation, that is, living under the threat of death, would be an inescapable fate. But luckily, things are not entirely the way this logic claims. It is certainly true that dignity can be bestowed only by society, whether it be the dignity of some office, a professional or, very generally speaking, civil dignity; and the merely individual, subjective claim ("I am a human being and as such I have my dignity, no matter what you may do or say!") is an empty academic game, or madness. Still, the degraded person, threatened with death, is able—and here we break through the logic of the final sentencing—to convince society of his dignity by taking his fate upon himself and at the same time rising in revolt against it.

While being detained for posting anti-Nazi propaganda and receiving the first blow from the Gestapo, Améry had lost trust in the world. Disillusioned, he had come to renounce his citizenship and his German name. Born Hanns Chaim Mayer, he opted to use a pseudonym in his writing, choosing a French-sounding name that is an anagram of his last name. Améry was a post-national writer adrift in "memory and cruelty" of history.

In describing his harrowing experience of torture, the victim was limited by the capacity of words to describe his condition. It was both a limitation imposed by language and the mind. In reaching beyond the "mind's limits", one was constrained to go back to the sources of language. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! he wrote after describing a painful twisting and dislocation of his arms and shoulders while being suspended on an "apparatus".

In the bunker there hung from the vaulted ceiling a chain that above ran into a roll. At its bottom end it bore a heavy, broadly curved iron hook. I was led to the instrument. The hook gripped into the shackle that held my hands together behind my back. Then I was raised with the chain until I hung about a meter over the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold at a half-oblique through muscular force.

To twist. There was no redeeming wordplay or pun but the original word. The writer's fallback was the gratuitous qualities of words in their original intent. (In describing a scene from Poison, Shadow and Farewell, the protagonist of Javier Marías had also to recognize a Latin root word to describe his helpless situation: "A poison was entering me, and when I use that word 'poison', I'm not doing so lightly or purely metaphorically, but because something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus', from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could no longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them.")

The reminiscences of Améry had affected W. G. Sebald to the extent that he had written about him in an essay in On the Natural History of Destruction and in the novel Austerlitz, both translated by Anthea Bell. In the novel, the narrator Austerlitz visited the same Breendonk fortress where Améry was imprisoned and tortured.

It was only a few years later that I read Jean Améry's description of the dreadful physical closeness between torturers and their victims, and of the tortures he suffered in Breendonk when he was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and a splintering sound which, as he says, he had not yet forgotten when he came to write this account [At the Mind's Limits], his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling as they were wrenched up behind him and twisted together above his head.

The torture chambers in Kafka and in Améry were there to discredit the right to live, hence to dignity. Améry had to borrow Kafka's terms for his tortured condition: Those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug, as dark powers had once done to the protagonist of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, were themselves an abomination to the victorious camp. Améry was turned into a monstrous insect by the Gestapo, something non-human.

Josef K in The Trial was forever denied due process. K in The Castle and Gregor in The Metamorphosis were denied the right to work with dignity intact. Kafka had documented the various labyrinthine ways in which humans were marginalized, deprived of their rights and physically and mentally tortured by being kept in the dark about their condition and judgment. Torture was an offense against the body and mind, bringing one to immediate shame and indignity. For Améry, torture has an indelible character: "Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected. The permanence of torture gives the one who underwent it the right to speculative flights, which need not be lofty ones and still may claim a certain validity. [emphasis added]"

Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him. Fear—and also what is called resentments. They remain, and have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.

Because the tortured had learned of the human capacity to inflict pain and suffering, the tortured had also come to acquire the character of the torturer because he had the imagination to relive his torture and the acts of the torturer.

Kafka had inverted this sense in "In the Penal Colony". The torturer, who was arguably a madman, upon learning that his "justice system" might be abolished in case the travelling diplomat hand in a negative report, decided to become the tortured. He had come to accept the normalcy of his system. He would rather succumb to his harrow and be robbed of dignity than to face a life without the pleasure of seeing offenders suffer under his apparatus. The torturer and the tortured were one.

Monosyllabic snails

In an essay in Campo Santo (2003), a posthumous collection of prose writings, W. G. Sebald provided a critical review of From the Diary of a Snail (1974) by Günter Grass. The critique in "Constructs of Mourning: Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer" was consistent to Sebald's championing of factual context in fiction, instead of unsupported imagination, to deal with episodes of the war and war bombings.

Grass died less than a month ago at the age of 87. One read his many obituaries and found there a coverage of a literary life that inevitably highlighted, that never failed to mention, the novelist's controversial revelation of serving in the Waffen SS at age 17. The admission came very late in his life, recounted in the autobiographical work Peeling the Onion (2006). For some this has tainted the legacy of a novelist who had been seen as a leading voice or conscience of a generation.

Why did it take so long for him to share this information. He wrote in his memoir: “What I had accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it.”

In Sebald's essay, published way back in 1983, a detection and analysis of this tendency was already apparent. The insight into a writer's internal anguish was spot on.

From time to time a sense of fraternity in a common cause spreads among the generation of "quadragenarians" who hope for a new political dawn and who, Grass thinks, "seem to be trying to compensate by overproduction for the reduced achievement of a few decimated war years." The reader almost feels that the author finds absolution for what still irks him about the German past, although he knows himself innocent of it, in his practical commitment to a better German political system, and that only in active politics and the hectic taste of traveling—identified by [Heinrich] Böll in his Frankfurt Lectures as a particularly German form of desperation—can he keep a little way ahead of those resolute, monosyllabic snails Guilt and Shame. [emphasis supplied]

Sebald provided the source for the monosyllabic snails in a footnote.

In Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail), Grass tells his children: "It's true: you're innocent. I, too, born almost late enough, am held to be free from guilt. Only if I wanted to forget, if you were unwilling to learn how it slowly happened, only then might words of one syllable catch up with us: words like guilt and shame; they, too, resolute snails, impossible to stop" (p. 13; Eng., p. 13). The most notable feature of this passage is the less than convincing logic of the last couple of lines.

His negative assessment in that last sentence, in the light of Grass's revelation, took on a double-edged meaning. There was hindsight in that sentence. A leveling of the insurmountable burden of guilt progressing into the field with a pace as slow and as laborious as a snail's.


Campo Santo was translated by Anthea Bell, From the Diary of a Snail was translated by Ralph Manheim, and Peeling the Onion was translated by Michael Henry Heim.

Sebald's art of restitution

The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W. G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Seven Stories Press, 2010)


"So what is literature good for?" asked Sebald in an essay which appeared in his posthumous collection Campo Santo. He quoted Hölderlin at length before giving a direct answer.

Am I, Hölderlin asked himself, to fare like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love but were seized by the avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises immortality in sighs alone? The synoptic view across the barrier of death presented by the poet in these lines is both overshadowed and illuminated, however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done.

The answer came at the penultimate sentence of the essay. "There are many forms of writing," he noted; "only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship."

For Sebald, restitution was a delicate function of literature that must be pursued creatively, actively, and at all costs. The object of such restitution was memory ("the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done"). As Ruth Franklin wrote in "Rings of Smoke," the penultimate essay in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W. G. Sebald: "Art is the preserver of memory, but it is also the destroyer of memory."

This is the final tug-of-war in Sebald's work and the most fundamental one. As he searches for patterns in the constellation of grief that his books record, he runs the risk that the patterns themselves, by virtue of their very beauty, will extinguish the grief that they seek to contain. Sebald's peculiar alchemy of aestheticism and sorrow unwittingly underscores its own insubstantiality. Even as he investigates the roots of memory, Sebald, like the weavers whom he finds so emblematic, continually unravels his own creations.

Unraveling was the fate of Sebald's narrators in their life and in their work, whether artistic or occupational work. This was the "destructive" working method of the painter Max Ferber in The Emigrants. "When memory is lacking, art will suffice," Franklin observed in the tendency of Sebald's narrators to use artworks (paintings) as surrogate or representation of their anguish. "Sebald aestheticizes history, but he never mistakes history for art."

Franklin's inquiry led her to question Sebald's "shocking" "ahistorical" treatment of air war in his controversial lectures about the carpet bombing of Germany in World War II. Sebald did not give a political or moral context to his taking to task the German writers for failing to write about their experiences in the imaginative sphere of fiction.

Sebald's patterning amounts to an aestheticizing of catastrophe, and thus it annihilates causality. We appreciate the beauty of the image that the writer discerns, but it adds nothing to our understanding of why things happened as they did. And this is the great problem with a "natural history" of the bombings [in his "Air War and Literature" lectures]. The air war over Hitler's Germany was not a natural disaster, like the eclipse of 1502. It was not random in its causes or its effects; and so, morally speaking, it was worse than a natural disaster. The bombings may have the physical impact of an earthquake, but they cannot be understood in the same way, because to do so is to ignore the fact that this catastrophe was man-made, a human action, and thus more complicated and more terrible than another inevitable repetition of nature's rich but meaningless pattern of disaster.

Franklin here assumed that the lack of historical context in Sebald's lectures and narratives about man-made catastrophes "adds nothing" to the comprehension of these tragic events. Sebald's use of the "natural history" framework was problematic, according to her, because of the apparent gloss over the moral (human) transactions that accompany wartime disasters. Franklin's literal interpretation of "natural" in natural history excluded human nature which was still part of the "ecosystem approach" to history.

Sebald's ecological philosophy was in fact more complex than she gave him credit for. Franklin's focus on the agency of decision making in man-made disasters failed to recognize how, throughout history, violence was a natural state of humans. Sebald's depiction of environmental disasters, whether natural or man-made (e.g., the declining population of the herring and the powerful hurricane that leveled millions of trees in The Rings of Saturn), was not much explored in criticism about him.

In Sebaldian poetics, environmental collapse was closely aligned with the collapse or breakdown of morals. As he said in an interview, "We're living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we're driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells."

Moreover, the metaphoric use of natural disasters for man-made disasters was closely related with how cruelty and violence were hardwired in humans. The mess produced by wars had the same or comparable destructive impact or effect as, say, extreme weather events. (Even our capacity for self-destruction was more and more evident with the way we influence the climate system to give rise to anthropogenic climate change.) Sebald's "natural history" should in fact be read in terms of his "ecopoetics." Critics have yet to give emphasis, let alone explore, the ecological aspect of his writings.

Franklin went on to question Sebald's tendency to equate gap in literature with gaps in memory. "Sebald looks to art to fill gaps in memory, and the air war is his own biggest gap," she noted, and later she went on, "But gaps in memory are experience that is forever lost; and art cannot take its place."

Art surely cannot replace memory but it can build or (re)imagine one. If it is successful in doing so then it can bring something tangible or intangible to its readers. It could offer consolation or engender sympathy. Or it could convey simple understanding or suggest hints of recognition. Sebald's essays and stories were in fact an attempt at restitution through the recreation or preservation of memories. So that the individual stories would not simply vanish in smoke.

Conversations with Sebald

The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W. G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Seven Stories Press, 2010)

I had a good reading plan for German Literature Month—including writing something about one volume from Thomas Bernhard's masterful memoirs, a play by Peter Weiss, a journal issue dedicated to Robert Walser, and a novel by Elfriede Jelinek. But alas, the month was over and I only managed to cover a book of interviews with and essays about W. G. Sebald. It was not even strictly a German book although it offered critical readings of Sebald's works in German or in translation and candid conversations with him about his themes, his influences, and his writing methods.

The pieces in The Emergence of Memory reveal important aspects of Sebald's spectral writings and personality which added to an appreciation of his literary enterprise. That project was centered on elusive, illusory memory and truth and their recovery and representations in art and literature. The greatest essays in this book were those that attempt to describe the nuances of his project, its totality, and its vision. An essay by Tim Parks, for example, tried to define the core of Sebald's vision as "engagement in the present inevitably ... devouring the past." (However, I disagree with Parks's characterization of his prose style as "much lighter" and "more flexible" than Thomas Bernhard's.)

In interviews Sebald made frequent mentions of the "conspiracy of silence" about German war crimes and war experiences in his household, community, and university. This seemed to be the main thing that his writings were trying to respond to. His temperament was often seen as melancholic, his disposition as pessimist. And yet these views were grounded in a playful mental landscape. His powers of association were an instance of a wandering imagination; his solitary walks and constant agitations were not symptoms of a decadent spirit. He was a loner engaged in the natural state of his natural world. Destruction and ruins and madness were the ashes from which he found words of staggering beauty. Nothing could be more paradoxical than Sebald's finding beauty in destruction.

It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn't what it should be. And we're out of our depth all the time. We're living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we're driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our physical and emotional makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub against each other is where the sources of pain are. Memory is one of those phenomena. It's what qualifies us as emotional creatures, psychozootica or however one might describe them.

Deadpan as always. The border between comedy and tragedy in Sebald could hardly matter at all. Tragedy could be uplifting? It could offer consolation? It was a matter of perspective.

There is of course a degree of self-deception at work when you're looking at the past, even if you redesign it in terms of tragedy, because tragedy is still a pattern of order and an attempt to give meaning to something, to a life or to a series of lives. It's still, as it were, a positive way of looking at things. Whereas, in fact, it might just have been one damn thing after another with no sense to it at all.

In writing about horrific subjects, the necessity for restraint was not only a literary requirement. Restraint had to be the only way to get to the core of cruelty and violence. A reinforcement, if not a variation, of Adorno's dictum.

I've always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of vilification of minorities, the attempt, well-nigh achieved, to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it's practically impossible to do this; to write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible. So you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something on your mind but that you do not necessarily roll out, you know, on every other page. The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience, that he is and has been perhaps for a long time engaged with these questions. And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly addressed. I think it is sufficient to remind people, because we've all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things. And also paralyze, as it were, our moral capacity. So the only way in which one can approach these things, in my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.

Two other fascinating essays in the book were contributed by Michael Hofmann and Ruth Franklin. Hofmann was critical of Sebald. His short review essay was puzzled (bitter) at Sebald's success, while Franklin's essay was incisive yet possibly misdirected. I will try to post something on them later.


The November German Lit Month is hosted by Caroline (Beauty is a Sleeping Cat) and Lizzy (Lizzy's Literary Life).

An exercise in destruction

PORTRAIT OF JULIA (1992) by FRANK AUERBACH

This wraps up my posting on W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, a haunting prose work on memory, falsification, and amnesia. The poet Michael Hulse has to be acknowledged for his sterling version of Sebald's language and idioms. As in the case of Javier Marías's masterful exploration of memory and guilt in Your Face Tomorrow (2002-2007, trans. Margaret Jull Costa), I am reminded of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur's appropriation of Freud's idea of work in On Translation (2004, trans. Eileen Brennan): The work of translation is a work of remembering and a work of mourning. In Hulse's writing, these two kinds of work are not mutually exclusive.

In "translating" the story of his fourth and last subject (Max Ferber), Sebald might as well describe the quandary of all translators. This can be gleaned from his narrator's despair after thoroughly investigating the life of the painter Ferber. It is a metafictional moment of self-consciousness and inadequacy.

During the winter of 1990/91, in the little free time I had ... I was working on the account of Max Ferber given above [the foregoing text]. It was an arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a "final" version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched.

Capturing memory is hard work. It can be likened to producing early drafts of translation – "crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions" – or at least revising and rewriting several thoughts (passages) and fine-tuning one's perception of events (language). This passage comes right after describing a natural template of perpetual destruction, that of the production of salt through the "ceaseless flow" of water: "that theatre of water ... the long term and (I believe) impenetrable process which, as the concentration of salts increases in the water, produces the very strangest of petrified or crystallized forms, imitating the growth patterns of Nature even as it is being dissolved."

It is not that different from Ferber's unusual approach to portrait painting, described as "an exercise in destruction". It is a combination of successive erasures of paint off the canvas and the continuous reconstruction and application of paint over the surface: "The moment the model had sat down and he had taken a look at him or her, he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction." For the narrator, it all "amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust." Dust is the constant material hovering all around Ferber's work.

The routine of remembering is a form of work; it can be physically and mentally taxing. It can be unsettling, literally backbreaking and extremely painful, especially if it requires unearthing memory within a memory within a memory.

The flood of memory, little of which remains with me now, began with my recalling a Friday morning some years ago when I was suddenly struck by the paroxysm of pain that a slipped disc can occasion, pain of a kind I had never experienced before. I had simply bent down to the cat, and as I straightened up the tissue tore and the nucleus pulposus jammed into the nerves. At that moment, all I knew was that I mustn't move a fraction of an inch, that my whole life had shrunk to that one tiny point of absolute pain, and that even breathing in made everything go black.... I also remember that the crooked position I was forced to stand in reminded me, even in my pain, of a photograph my father had taken of me in the second form at school, bent over my writing. In Colmar, at any rate, said Ferber after a lengthy pause, I began to remember, and it was probably those recollections that prompted me to go on to Lake Geneva after eight days, to retrace another old memory that had long been buried and which I had never dared disturb.... On my train journey through Switzerland, which truly is amazingly beautiful, I was already remembering these scenes and images of thirty years before, said Ferber.

This extended remembrance within a remembrance is not without its side effect of forgetting. There are gaps in the narrative of remembrance, stretches of unaccounted for events – "memory block", we might call them. The work of remembering may induce not only vertigo but physical infirmity. In the case of Ferber, it seems to confirm even his "inner constitution" at a young age, an apparent scoliosis or propensity to be bent while concentrating at work. The one who remembers, voluntarily or accidentally, with such "painful clarity" (as if the events happened only yesterday), carries the load of memory on his back like a sack or baggage, sometimes so heavy he is forced to stoop and become crooked and bent. It is a handicap experienced by those who spent their lives doing the same things over and over. How memory can bring physical infirmity is prefigured early on in the second section of the book when the narrator encounters the aged porter of an inn: "He was so doubled over that he cannot have been able to see more than the lower half of anyone standing in front of him. Because of this handicap, no doubt, he had already taken a quick glance at the latecomer outside the glazed door before he crossed the hall, a glance that was the more penetrating for being brief."

The "business of writing" is questionable in the first place because the writer exercises his creative license in selecting and falsifying some details and elements of his "historical" narrative. Ethics and aesthetics collide in the process. In order to get his ideas across, the writer is forced to invent connections in the narrative, connections that may not be there in the first place. There is inherent contradiction in the reliance on memory to tell a story and in acknowledging the unreliable turns memory sometimes make. Between memory and forgetting, however, the writer has already made his choice. The path of least resistance is not for him. The balance of truth and fiction must remain precarious and suspect. In interviews, Sebald has expressed his personal reservations on his appropriating the lives of real people (like the painter Frank Auerbach) in his narratives. Yet the aesthetic choices he makes in the service of his art brings to the forefront the function of fiction to produce not a tidy reality but untidy composites of that reality.

In consciously altering historical, reality-based narratives and in bringing to the surface the falsifications of memory, Sebald treads the line between moral and aesthetic scruples. What makes for great art – or what makes for a strong potential for greatness in certain art – seems to be its capacity to exercise the memory of those who read, view, hear, or see it. Great art must prick the conscience, let loose the sympathetic imagination. Thus, pictures of great suffering like Grünewald's "Entombment of Christ" or Tiepolo's fresco or breathtaking natural landscapes (as opposed to man-made art) seen up close, occasioned in Max Ferber a flood of remembrances – "one thing had led to another" – of his childhood and youth. And thus, his mother Luisa, facing an imminent threat, suddenly takes the task of remembering to articulate her childhood memories. Resisting death through memory and mourning. It seems the most natural thing to do.

From the top, the road runs down, along the edge of the woods, to Höhn, where the fields open out and the hills of the Rhön can be seen in the distance. The Saale meadows spread before you, the Windheim woods nestle in a gentle curve, and there are the top of the church tower and the old castle – Steinach! Now the road crosses the stream and enters the village, up to the square by the inn, then down to the right to the lower part of the village, which Luisa calls her real home.

Luisa's first person memoir occupies a large part of Ferber's story. It continues to describe the minutiae of life in her village, the rise and fall of her family fortunes, the impending danger from Nazism. The obvious model for Luisa's clean and clear prose style is Adalbert Stifter in Rock Crystal (1843, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore): "Among the high mountains of our country there is a little village with a small but needle-fine church spire. Conspicuous above the green of abundant fruit-trees, this spire—because the slates are painted vermilion—can be seen far and wide against the faint blue of the mountains. The hamlet nestles in the very center of a fairly wide valley that is an almost perfect ellipse...."

In her restrained and devastating memoir, Luisa lists the names of her neighbors and their occupations: the Lions who supply oil for the lamps, Meier Frei the merchant, Gessner the baker, Liebmann the slaughterer, Salomon Stern the flour merchant, Fröhlich the plumber, and so on. It is not now surprising to observe how in this work of fiction, Sebald's subjects and their relatives and acquaintances are portrayed as dedicated to their work, some of them to the point of obsession: Paul Bereyter as tutor and schoolteacher, Ferber as painter, the narrator's uncle Kasimir as a construction worker atop skyscrapers, his great-uncle Adelwarth as majordomo and butler, Dr. Selwyn's father as proprietor of emporium, etc. They are emigrants who work for a living, braving the wear and tear of life and its accompanying experiences and memories. To work and remember is to postpone dying.

It is thus fitting that the book ends with a series of photographs (described, not shown) of ghetto workers in Polish production sites – women sitting making baskets, child apprentices in metalwork shop, men making bullets, men in the nail factory or rag depot, three young women behind a loom. The narrator sees in the workers a resigned engagement in the daily grind of production. They, the dutiful workers, are not entirely voiceless in the photographs. They proclaim in a silent chorus the assumption of their work, the source of their salvation and destruction.

... faces, countless faces, who looked up from their work (and were permitted to do so) purposely and solely for the fraction of a second that it took to take the photograph. Work is our only course, they said.

An outsize toyland

The third section of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants (trans. Michale Hulse) was about the narrator's great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth and his ward Cosmo Solomon, a scion of a rich American businessman. Ambros's story began with the narrator's early memory of his great-uncle during a family reunion in Germany and later, when the narrator traveled to America, it was picked up by the reminiscences of Ambros's relatives and fellow emigrants there. The narrator also interviewed a doctor's assistant his great-uncle came into contact with during his last days in the sanatorium.

After leaving his home as a teenager, Ambros took jobs in Germany, Switzerland, England, Japan, and America before finally hired as a personal assistant of Cosmo Solomon and later as a butler in the Solomon household. Despite the suggested emotional conflict and loneliness brewing inside Ambros, he was a portrait of decorum, according to the narrator's aunt.

Uncle Adelwarth had more than half a dozen servants under him, not counting the gardeners and chauffeurs. His work took all his time and energy. Looking back, you might say that Ambros Adelwarth the private man had ceased to exist, that nothing was left but his shell of decorum. I could not possibly have imagined him in his shirtsleeves, or in stocking feet without his half-boots, which were unfailingly polished till they shone, and it was always a mystery to me when, or if, he ever slept, or simply rested a little. At that time he had no interest in talking about the past at all. All that mattered to him was that the hours and days in the Solomon's household should pass without any disruption.

This was after the death of his close friend and ward Cosmo, who wasted away in a sanatorium. The image of Stevens the elegant, dedicated, but ultimately pathetic and stiff butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day came to mind here. At least in terms of repression of memory and apparent unreliability, these two characters shared some affinity. By the end of the story, the words of Ambros himself was transcribed from a notebook diary where the whole tricky exercise of excavating events from traitorous memory was encapsulated in a postcript.
 

Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

It seemed like an elaboration of the pun of the German title of Sebald's previous novel Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo). Like the previous two subjects, Dr. Henry Selwyn and Paul Bereyter, Ambros was at first hesitant to talk about the past. It was only when he was old and felt the intimations of death did he begin to share stories to a relative.

Even the least of his reminiscences, which he fetched up very slowly from depths that were evidently unfathomable, was of astounding precision, so that, listening to him, I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself. [emphasis added]

Compare "astounding precision" with Paul Bereyter's "greatest clarity" ("He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams.") or Dr. Selwyn's memory ("returning once again") of his family's exodus ("all of it ... I can now live through again, as if it were only yesterday"). So, reconstruction of the past for these men was a kind of necessity and salvation; at the same time it also seemed to hasten their undoing. Where previously they were not open to talk of their past lives, there was now somehow a compulsion for them to do so, as if the last shreds of meaning in their lives were incumbent upon uncovering their untold stories. Stories which were, however, marked not only by lasting friendships but by bitterness and anguish.

The narrator's journalistic investigation into these sad lives added a hyper-real dimension to the increasingly dream-like quality of the writing. The concept of dreams was alluded to in so many ways. Reading the profusion of remembered or recorded past events in the book was like watching an unrestored black and white film. The photographs and references to old films in the book only seemed to reinforce the grainy texture of its reality.

The interlocking motifs, devices, and concerns within The Emigrants and among the other prose fiction made me rethink Sebald's deliberate and careful selection of details as opposed to free association of images and ideas. The whole intertextual tapestry governed by a balance of spontaneous delivery of memories and perfectly timed deployment and repetition of images.

I still remember, said Aunt Fini, standing with Uncle Adelwarth by his window one crystal-clear Indian Summer morning. The air was coming in from outside and we were looking over the almost motionless trees towards a meadow that reminded me of the Altach marsh when a middle-aged man appeared, holding a white net on a pile in front of him and occasionally taking curious jumps. Uncle Adelwarth stared straight ahead, but he registered my bewilderment all the same, and said: It's the butterfly man, you know.

A lot had been said about the figure of the butterfly man, the book's resident literary angel or spirit, the same way Kafka's spirit presided over the previous novel and Borges's over the next one. Let me just note how the passage was here characteristic of Sebald's clean and transparent prose, accessible in spite of the profusion of prepositions. Crystal-clear like the Indian Summer morning being described, like the prose of Adalbert Stifter (incidentally the author of a book translated as Indian Summer).
  
The continuity of vision was also apparent in the powerful scene of Ambros's electroshock therapy in the sanatorium which reminded one of Rembrandt's painting of the violation of the subject in "The Anatomy Lesson" in The Rings of Saturn. It seemed again like a critique of the "progress" of science (and civilization): the vicious assault on the helpless human body standing for the assault on humanism. The insensitivity to the afflictions of the body, the fanatical zeal of the doctor who administered the shock treatment and who believed he had discovered a "psychiatric miracle cure" with his cruel method. These tendencies were symptomatic, as one character put it, of "our appalling ignorance and corruptibility", perhaps of our fallibility to unthinkable, single-minded ideologies and prejudices.

More ominous lines in this passage: "I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned. It was as if the car had a will of its own on the broad highway." An extraordinary passage, with a hint of darkness and lightness to it, but also unsettling, given the tragic circumstances of the author's death.

An indication of the cause

W. G. Sebald mutes Thomas Bernhard's suicidal clamour, writes James Wood in The Guardian. Indeed, in contrast to Bernhard's, Sebald's were tempered rants, but rants no less effective for giving voice to the muted anger, desperation, and madness of exiles. In The Emigrants (trans. Michael Hulse), memory seems the only stable nationality of its eponymous characters and its narrator. The narrator particularly weaves his story in an anachronistic voice, closely identifying with his subjects who are all uprooted from their homes. Only in the compass of memory can the peripatetic narrator and his subjects seem to find their moorings. Like Dr. Henry Selwyn in the first section of The Emigrants, the narrator of the second section and his subject (his former teacher Paul Bereyter) are both physically and spiritually displaced, exiled not to some nearby place but much farther, "halfway round the world":

In December 1952 my family moved from the village of W to the small town of S, 19 kilometres away. The journey – during which I [the narrator] gazed out of the cab of Alpenvogel's wine-red furniture van at the endless lines of trees along the roadsides, thickly frosted over and appearing before us out of the lightless morning mist – seemed like a voyage halfway round the world, though it will have lasted an hour at the very most.

...

He was in Poland, Belgium, France, the Balkans, Russia and the Mediterranean, and doubtless saw more than any heart or eye can bear. The seasons and the years came and went. A Walloon autumn was followed by an unending white winter near Berdichev, spring in the Departement Haute-Saône, summer on the coast of Dalmatia or in Romania, and always, as Paul wrote under this photograph [a photograph of a man was included in the text], one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.

Paul Bereyter was increasingly losing his qualities because his race (a quarter Jewish or "only three quarters an Aryan") is an issue to some people around him. As he came face to face with the cruelty of these people, he preferred to live in a dream instead, a form of exile but a bearable one in any case. People like Paul Bereyter chose to forget, an act akin to dying.

Do you know, she said on one of my visits to Yverdon, the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget, is nothing more than the other side of the perfidious way in which Schöferle, who ran a coffee house in S., informed Paul's mother Thekla, who had been on stage for some time in Nuremberg, that the presence of a lady who was married to a half Jew might be embarrassing to his respectable clientele, and begged to request her, with respect of course, not to take her afternoon coffee at his house anymore.

With respect of course!!! (Sebald chose to be restrained about it. But telling the same story, Bernhard's characters would have gone on for many pages to register their outrage.)

Paul Bereyter's fallback was the memory of his childhood, although it was already darkened by history. The story of Paul's life was filtered through Lucy Landau, Paul's friend and the one who arranged for his burial after he ended his life. So we hear the story of Paul as he tells it to Mme Landau who tells it to the narrator – a familiar Bernhardian device of narrative attribution where the narrator is at one or several removes from his tale.

Paul once described that wonderful emporium to her in detail, said Mme Landau, when he was in hospital in Berne in 1975, his eyes bandaged after an operation for cataracts. He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him. In his childhood, everything in the emporium seemed far too high up for him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four metres up to the ceiling. The light in the emporium. coming through the small transom windonws let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days, and it must have seemed all the murkier to him as a child, Paul had said, as he moved on his tricycle, mostly on the lowest level, through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a variety of smells ... [emphases added]

And then Paul, through Mme Landau, went on to enumerate the various smells and the magical contents and the proprietor (Paul's father) and staff of the emporium. The inventory of memory was so precise and detailed it could bring out the murky quality of light as it struck the surface of the emporium. Common objects were recalled with "the greatest clarity". The novelist was here a kind of historian (or proprietor) of memory, the emporium being a representative image of object collection which Sebald used in other forms: like the Antwerp Nocturama and Antikos Bazar in Austerlitz.

Near the end of his life Paul, like Dr. Selwyn, is ready to come to terms with history, to make "endless notes" about it. What eats him so much, more than the systematic abuse the Jews suffered in Gunzenhausen, on Palm Sunday 1934, is the involvement of children in that notorious event.

For this reason, Mme Landau explained, Paul for a long time had only a partial grasp of what had happened in S in 1935 and 1936, and did not care to correct his patchy knowledge of the past. It was only in the last decade of his life, which he largely spent in Yverdon, that reconstructing those events became important to him, indeed vital, said Mme Landau. Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Guzenhausenm ... but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schadenfreude that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazaar in the town the following morning, taking several weeks' supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

I would bet that there really exists such newspaper article. Real news items have a way of finding themselves in Sebald's prose. In The Rings of Saturn, the writer appropriated in the text an article in The Independent about the Balkan war crimes. These articles are part of the "endless notes" and documentary materials that strengthen the historical basis of the story. They are also part of the evidence that Sebald's characters collect in order to make sense of the violent era they lived in. The evidence confirms Paul's suspicion of the capacity of humans for cruelty and violence. Suicide – death, annihilation of memories, termination of possibilities – appears on the horizon as a possible response to "the logic of the whole wretched sequence of events".

He read and read – Altenberg, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Friedell, Hasenclever, Toller, Tucholsky, Klaus Mann, Ossietzky, Benjamin, Koestler and Zweig: almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives or had been close to doing so. He copied out passages into notebooks [two facing photographs of cursive writing accompany this quoted passage] which give a good idea of how much the lives of these particular authors interested him. Paul copied out hundreds of pages, mostly in Gabelsberg shorthand because otherwise he would not have been able to write fast enough, and time and again one comes across stories of suicide. It seemed to me, said Mme Landau, handing me the black oilcloth books, as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belong to the exiles and not to the people of S. [emphasis added]

"Gathering evidence" is of course the title of Bernhard's five-part childhood memoirs which appeared individually in German from 1975 to 1982 and in English as a collected volume in 1985. The first volume ("An Indication of the Cause") appeared as the second part of Gathering Evidence (trans. David McLintock) and contained this epigraph:
 

Two thousand people every year attempt to put an end to their lives in the

province of Salzburg. A tenth of these suicide attempts are successful. This

means that in Austria, which together with Hungary and Sweden has the

highest suicide rate in the world, Salzburg holds the national record.

SALZBURGER NACHRICHTEN, 6 May 1975

Obsession with suicides and the suicidals characterizes the novels of Bernhard. His treatment of the subject, however, is not deadly serious. He can be mordantly funny about it. Whereas Sebald's humor is rare and dry and his treatment of suicide quite proper, Bernhard's is poker-faced hysterical and radical. An excerpt from Gathering Evidence:

Many boys actually did commit suicide at the boarding house in the Schrannengasse, though, curiously enough, none of them did so in the shoe closet, which would have been the ideal place: they all threw themselves out of windows in the dormitory or the lavatories or hanged themselves from the showers in the washroom. They were able to summon up the necessary courage, but he never had the strength, the decisiveness, or firmness of character required for suicide. During the short time he spent there during the Nazi period—between his arrival in autumn 1943 and his departure in autumn 1944—four pupils at the boarding house actually killed themselves by jumping out of windows or hanging themselves (how many others must have done so before and since!), and many others living in the city, having set off for school, were driven by unendurable despair to deviate from their usual route and throw themselves down from one of the hills, usually the Mönchsberg, onto the asphalt of the Müllner Hauptstrasse—the suicide street, as I used to call it. I often saw shattered bodies lying in this street, the bodies of schoolchildren and others, though mainly schoolchildren, lumps of flesh wrapped in bright-coloured clothes appropriate to the time of year. Today, thirty years later, I read reports at regular intervals (though more frequently in spring and autumn) about schoolchildren and others who have committed suicide. Every year there are dozens of such reports, though the real number of suicides runs into hundreds, as I have reason to know. It is probably true that in boarding establishments, especially those with exceedingly sadistic régimes and exceedingly bad climatic conditions, like the one in Schrannengasse, the subject which preoccupies the minds of the pupils is suicide—in other words, a completely unscientific subject, not one of the mass of subjects on the syllabus but one with which they are all intensely concerned. Of course the truth is that suicide and the idea of suicide are pre-eminently scientific subjects, though this is a fact which our hypocritical society cannot comprehend. Living with one's fellow pupils has always meant living with the idea of suicide: the idea of suicide comes first, the subjects of the syllabus second. I was by no means the only pupil who was obliged to spend the greater part of his time contemplating suicide. This was forced on me on the one hand by the brutality, ruthlessness, and utter viciousness that surrounded me, on the other by the extreme sensibility and vulnerability that is inherent in all young people. The time of one's life spent in learning and study is above all a time for thinking about suicide—whoever denies this has forgotten everything. The times I walked through the city thinking only of suicide, of blotting out my existence, wondering where and how I should do it, whether alone or in compact with others! There must have been hundreds of times. But these thoughts and speculations, prompted by everything I experienced in the city, led me back time and again to the prison of the boarding house. Every boy privately harboured the thought of suicide; it was the only thought that was both enduring and potent. Some were immediately destroyed by it, others merely broken, broken for the rest of their lives. The idea of suicide and the phenomenon of suicide were continually debated, but always in silence. And again and again we had a real suicide in our midst. I will not mention their names, most of which I have forgotten anyway; but I saw all of them hanging or lying shattered on the ground, the ultimate proof of the terrible suffering they had endured. I know of a number of burials at the Communal Cemetery and Maxglan Cemetery where boys of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, having been done to death by society, were unceremoniously dumped in the ground, not properly buried, for in this strictly Catholic city suicides were naturally not given a proper burial but simply dumped in a hole and covered with earth in utterly depressing circumstances, which shed a most revealing light on humanity. These two cemeteries are full of evidence to prove my recollections correct. I am thankful to say that these recollections are in no way distorted, but here I must confine myself to giving simply an indication of what I remember.

Despite the marked difference in their temperaments, Sebald and Bernhard both gathered evidence of personal griefs to produce layered and resonant images of horrific events. The images of peoples persecuted beyond belief, those who experienced things "more than any heart or eye can bear" – these images pile up and their cumulative value amounts to experiences fully lived and remembered. Reading the prose works of these writers is an attempt to understand the indications of their causes. Reading as a radical act of gathering evidence itself.




Winstonsdad's Thomas Bernhard Reading Week
1-7 July 2013

An unexpected return

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1996)



W. G. Sebald's subjects in The Emigrants, and elsewhere in his fiction, seem to be not themselves. They are loners and eccentrics, old and weary. Exiled souls wandering through life as if already dead. Take the first of four character portraits in The Emigrants. At the twilight of his life, Dr. Henry Selwyn starts to confide to the narrator certain moments of his life. (The best summary of Dr. Selwyn's story is contained in the review of Gabriel Josipovici in the Jewish Quarterly, reprinted in the Vertigo blog, here).

I think of Dr. Selwyn as a continuation of the Sebald persona in "Il ritorno in patria", the final section of Sebald's first novel Vertigo, the prose work immediately preceding The Emigrants. The narrator of that section, when he finally visited his village W. after a long time, was able to remember the past with stunning clarity (just like Dr. Selwyn). The eponymous character in Sebald's final novel Austerlitz, too, suddenly remembered all the obscured details of his transport on a train at a very young age. So, in a sense, Dr. Selwyn is a representative Sebaldian figure who was jolted from his zombie-like reverie, confronted by momentous events of the past, every fine detail of his recollection recalled in all its hyper-real color, contour, and texture. Memory lapse was lifted like a veil, or a dam releasing huge amounts of water.

Max Sebald's stories are often about memory and storytelling. For him, forgetting is like losing the substance of one's humanity. Put in another way, if one was without memory then one might as well be dead. As long as we commemorate the dead, they are alive within us or in us. Throughout the narrator's several encounters with him, Dr. Selwyn was depicted almost like a ghost already. His ghostly presence, however, is belied by the fascinating stories of his past. Up to a certain point, the doctor seems to resist death through remembering. And in imparting his story to the narrator, the doctor is now a part of the narrator's memory and so he (the narrator) remembers the old man and he (Dr. Selwyn) is fully alive in the narrator's memory.

Dr. Selwyn yearns for the past that was initially like a blank wall to him. But gaps in his memory are suddenly being filled with details he thought he'd lost. He has fond memories of his friend Johannes Naegeli, a mountain guide who went missing and was believed to have met a certain accident by falling into a crevasse of a glacier.

Yet the transference of memory does not stop between the narrator and Dr. Selwyn. The narrator is also passing it on to us, enlisting our confidence. Sebald has implicated us, the reader, in the old man's story. We become privy to Dr. Selwyn's past, and so even if he's dead (in the story), things that concern the doctor concern us now too.

Naegeli is one of the dead who returned in the story, but miraculously through an accident too, a natural process at that – the melting of the glacier that covered him for more than seventy years. At that point of the discovery of the frozen body, no one would have remembered the long buried Naegeli anymore (the only one who had the capacity to do so – Dr. Selwyn – was already dead, by his own hands, at that point in the story) were it not for the remembrance imparted by Dr. Selwyn to the narrator. And from the narrator to us, readers.  – "Certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence."

We now remember the dead, his humanity, even if we didn't know him personally because we have learned a part of his history. In a way, Sebald here demonstrated the power of sharing stories, of storytelling, of fiction in general, to preserve memories. To memorialize history and people against the eternal forgetting. Against the irreversible.

A lateral reading of W. G. Sebald's apocalypse

At the end of Vertigo, W. G. Sebald's narrator was travelling on a train and fell into sleep after browsing "at random" through the diary of Samuel Pepys (Everyman's Library, 1913). He had a dream, a dessicated mountain landscape fading into a vision of apocalypse:

Into that breathless void, then, words returned to me as an echo that had almost faded away – fragments from the account of the Great Fire of London as recorded by Samuel Pepys.

The Great Fire of London lasted for all of three days in early September 1666. The "fire" in the narrator's dream is a recreation of memory and subconscious as right before falling asleep, the narrator "found [himself] going over the same few lines [passages in the diary] again and again without any notion what they meant."

Here I'm juxtaposing the dream account of Sebald's narrator and Pepys's first hand account of the fire. I borrow the method of comparison from James L. Cowan's "Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library". All emphases below are mine.

Passage	Sebald and Hulse, Vertigo	Pepys, 2 September 1666
1	We saw the fire grow. It was not bright, it was a gruesome, evil, bloody flame, sweeping, before the wind, through all the City.	When we could endure no more upon the water; we to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the ‘Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire.
2	Pigeons lay destroyed upon the pavements, in hundreds, their feathers singed and burned.	And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.
3	A crowd of looters roams through Lincoln's Inn.	Soon as dined, I and Moone away, and walked, through the City, the streets full of nothing but people and horses and carts loaden with goods, ready to run over one another, and, removing goods from one burned house to another.
4	The churches, houses, the woodwork and the building stones, ablaze at once.	The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once ...
5	The churchyard yews ignited, each one a lighted torch, a shower of sparks now tumbling to the ground.	... and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, and among other things the poor steeple by which pretty Mrs. ———— lives, and whereof my old school-fellow Elborough is parson, taken fire in the very top, an there burned till it fell down.
6	And Bishop Braybrooke's grave is opened up, his body disinterred.	(see Pepys, 12 November 1666)
7	Is this the end of the world?
8	A muffled, fearful, thudding sound, moving, like waves, throughout the air. The powder house exploded.	... and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins.
9	We flee onto the water.	Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another.
10	The glare around us everywhere, and yonder, before the darkened skies, in one great arc the jagged wall of fire.	We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it.
11	And, the day after, a silent rain of ashes, westward, as far as Windsor Park.

From this we can get a glimpse of how novelist's "aesthetics of falsification" works by (i) summarizing the event from a source text and (ii) adding in some details from his own imagination.

We can also observe how Sebald and translator Michael Hulse reproduced or reworded phrases from Pepys's diary. The "filter of memory" was not a perfect reproduction and was prone to periphrastic addition of details that tried to capture the sense of the apocalyptic.

The 6th passage is notable for its lack of counterpart to the day's diary. There is no mention of Bishop Braybrooke in the diary entries from September 2 to 6. But in a later entry, two months after the fire, Pepys did mention the fate of Bishop Robert Braybrooke's remains.

This afternoon going towards Westminster, Creed and I did stop, the Duke of York being just going away from seeing of it, at Paul’s, and in the Convocation House Yard did there see the body of Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London, that died 1404: He fell down in his tomb out of the great church into St. Fayth’s this late fire, and is here seen his skeleton with the flesh on; but all tough and dry like a spongy dry leather, or touchwood all upon his bones. His head turned aside. A great man in his time, and Lord Chancellor; and his skeletons now exposed to be handled and derided by some, though admired for its duration by others. Many flocking to see it. (Pepys, 12 November 1666)

This detail of the bishop's miraculously unburnt corpse was too far advanced in the diary, and it was amusing that Sebald's narrator included this in his dream account. For the novelist, the preserved state of the corpse after the conflagration was a posthumous fact that was just too good to pass up (see this commentary about the state of the corpse and also this one about a strange case of necrophilia).

The chilling question, "Is this the end of the world?", is also pure Sebald. It is the kind of statement a person in the midst of a tragic event, or while observing one, is expected to make. (During this month's heavy flooding in Manila, for example, J. texted me the same thing, which I immediately contradicted. I realized, however, that in these times we indeed live through a series of apocalypses.)

The final sentence in Sebald's depiction of the fire is another passage that I cannot correlate from Pepys's diaries. Windsor Park and Lincoln Inn (in passage # 3) are also absent in the diaries.

The blog Vertigo mentioned that the original German edition of the novel ends with the number "2013" before the word "Ende". It also speculated that the 1913 edition of Pepys's diary could be made up by Sebald.

Depicting a true catastrophic event with a few imaginative alterations is Sebald's way of imagining himself in the narrative and appropriating the role of first hand witness for himself. What feels aesthetically right is morally right, he said in an interview. He is one sublime novelist who used his creative license to select real dramatic details to represent the essence of the thing and to introduce extra details to intensify the experience of lateral reading.


Pepys's eyes; Sebald's eyes; Related posts

A note on W. G. Sebald's prose

"Il ritorno in patria", from Vertigo (1990) by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse (Vintage Books, 2011)



The fourth and final section of W. G. Sebald's first novel starts rather singsong-like.

In November 1987, after spending the last weeks of the summer in Verona, working on my various tasks, and the month of October, because I could not bear to wait any longer for the onset of winter, in a hotel high above Bruneck, near the tree line, I decided one afternoon, when the Großvenediger emerged from behind a grey snow cloud in an especially ominous way, that I should return to England, but before that go to W. for a while, where I had not been since my childhood.

The qualifying clauses extended an otherwise straightforward statement. Removing the obfuscating clauses, what the narrator was saying was simply, "I decided one afternoon ... that I should return to England, but before that go to W. for a while, where I had not been since my childhood."

It was "a good thirty years" since the narrator had left W. (Sebald himself was born in Wertach im Allgäu.) It was about time to come back. But his manner of saying so through the words of his translator, in a roundabout way, creating a staccato rhythm, with clipped clauses separated by commas piling up like lines of a poem, was a signal that we were once again about to enter a labyrinth. Of memories, dreams, hallucinations, ghosts. But mainly ghosts.

Going home. Nothing could better artistically map out the structure of memory, reveal the writer's hyperreal recollections in polished prose. Nothing could exercise his tragic worldviews than a jog through home-grown memories. W. was the fixed destination; but the mental itinerary and landscapes were ever fluid. The narrator's voice unfolded just as ponderously with Sebald, shaped and refined by a singular sensitivity and sensibility.

For that purpose, he boarded a train and espied the countryside and gossiping passengers. The scenery outside was transparent, yet the atmosphere was dense. He seemed to be accelerating toward something catastrophic, if not apocalyptic. The ominous train journey could remind one of the cold hysteria enveloping the opening scene of The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, with whom Sebald shared some literary affinities.

Encountering a dozen hens on an open field affected the narrator deeply, "for some reason that [he] still cannot fathom". "I do not know what it is about certain things or creatures that sometimes moves me like this."

As if to counterbalance the awkwardness of his opening lines, the ensuing sentences flowed rather magically. The Sebald sentence could be a treasure. Deadly funny or serious, it had a Walserian compactness that nudged ordinary objects towards their lifelong destiny.

The doorbell clanged, and there we were, standing in the small shop in which a host of long-case clocks, wall-mounted regulators, kitchen and living room clocks, alarm clocks, pocket and wrist watches were all ticking at once, just as if one clock on its own could not destroy enough time.

Mounted on the walls above the brown-painted panelling, stuffed martens, lynxes, capercaillies, vultures and other exterminated creatures were awaiting their time until they could take their long overdue revenge.

The novelist's conveyance of his aesthetics required the paraphrasing of his reference materials (diary entries, news articles, short stories, books, memoirs, frescoes). It also involved periphrasis or the extension of words, phrases, and sentences – a device he probably borrowed from classical German writers. Hence, "further and further" instead of just "further", "more and more" and nothing less.

A periphrastic exposition was obvious from the awakenings of memory. It was there in the Bernhard-inspired attributions (he said, she said) in conversations. The mechanism of memory was not forced but rather delicately prodded, as when a neighbor of the narrator required him to participate in the remembering:

When I inquired about the origins of the books, Lukas was able to tell me only that Mathild had always been a great reader, and because of this, as I might perhaps remember, was thought of by the villagers as peculiar, if not deranged.

...

To the contrary, said Lukas, she evidently came to feel quite comfortable in her detachment, and indeed the way in which, year after year, she went about among the villagers whom she despised, forever dressed in a black frock or a black coat, and always in a hat and never, even in the finest weather, without an umbrella, had, as I might remember from my own childhood days, something blissful about it. [my emphases]

The elevated style of translation was perhaps faithful to the courteous original. The topic was madness and/or memory and yet the elegant shape of the sentences had a hint of darkish humor in them.

Then again, the narrator was, like his novelist, coming face to face with the legacy of his sanitized memory, the unexplained rubble and ruins in German cities he encountered as a child every fortnight in a newsreel, signs of wartime disgrace never to be talked about. Dealing with the amnesia – cheated, swindled memory – that saddled his growing up was quite possibly the narrator and the novelist's raison d'etre, the "indication of the cause" (Die Ursache), as the title of Thomas Bernhard's memoir of air bombings would have it. Unlike Bernhard's having witnessed firsthand the bombing of cities and hence being exposed to the true "natural history of destruction", the narrator was mourning his ignorance of the meaning of the images in the newsreel – "Almost every week we saw the mountains of rubble in places like Berlin and Hamburg, which for a long time I did not associate with the destruction wrought in the closing years of the war, knowing nothing of it, but considered them a natural condition of all larger cities." It was necessary for him to go back to W. to pick up the pieces of his family history and to start to bear witness to his muddled existence.

Even as a precocious little child, the young narrator already had a penchant for collecting documents, photographs, and found objects.

The door to the Engelwirt landlady's room was usually left slightly ajar, and I frequently went in to her and would spend hours looking at the collection of postcards she kept in three large folio volumes. The landlady, wine glass in hand, sometimes sat next to me at the table as I browsed, but only ever spoke to tell me the name of the town I happened to be pointing to. As the minutes passed by this resulted in a long topographical litany of place names such as Chur, Bregenz, Innsbruck, Altaussee, Hallstatt, Salzburg, Vienna, Pilsen, Marienbad, Bad Kissingen, Würzburg, Bad Homburg and Frank am Main. There were also numerous Italian cards from Merano, Bolzano, Riva, Verona, Milan, Ferrara, Rome and Naples. One of these postcards, showing the smoking peak of Vesuvius, somehow or other got into an album belonging to my parents, and so has come into my possession. [emphases mine; a photograph of the smoking crater of Vesuvius was shown on the page]

Two things to note in this passage. First is I would have liked to put all those proper place names in ellipses but they were obviously part of the periphrasis. It was necessary to itemize these names, to the point of brute force method of remembering, because that was the point of remembering. Not mentioning them, and not reproducing the post card of Mt. Vesuvius, could throw into question the whole account. These were evidences made to bear on the telling, to authenticate the details, to punctuate their reality. (Sebald's periphrasis came to full utility in the extra-long sentence in Austerlitz. Cf. the seemingly endless crime scenes in Roberto Bolaño's 2666, and José Saramago's litany of saints martyred by every conceivable means in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.) The second point is that the "somehow or other" could be an indirect admission that the child had filched the postcard from the landlady!

Sebald's use of the two devices in his prose, one that lengthens (periphrasis) and one that foreshortens (paraphrase), was not rigid. The two usually worked in combination. Franz Kafka's story "The Hunter Gracchus", was directly alluded to and paraphrased in the third section. It was already hinted at in the second section, with one of the characters named Salvatore, just like in the Kafka story. The story was reenacted, or adapted, in a sort of false or made-up version (a periphrasis) in this section when Sebald introduced a Gracchus figure. The paraphrase and the periphrastic were the potent tools of Sebald's aesthetics of falsification.

The reader was also suddenly winked back to the first part of the book, the Stendhal section. Touching an old, hanging uniform sleeve brought the narrator "utter horror" as the clothing "crumbled into dust". And then we were told it belonged to an Austrian who fought the French in 1800, the year Stendhal started his campaign. In fact, it was the year mentioned in the first sentence of the novel.

In Sebald's calculated writing, memories and coincidences speak the same language. The seemingly hidden, invisible, or fictional(ized) ideas are collapsed or augmented. The syntactical structures and textures of poetic prose point to a robust instance of transtextuality.