W. G. Sebald's aesthetics of falsification

"Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva", from Vertigo (1990) by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse (Vintage Books, 2011)

Amazon.co.uk: At the beginning of Vertigo, you follow the young Stendhal in Napoleon's army and introduce the central theme of the book: the unknowability of the past and memory's unreliability. As a writer you must draw on memory--do you feel that all the stories we tell are fictions, or do some stories have more truth than others?

Sebald: Seen from the outside, some stories have more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. The truth value depends on how it is framed and phrased. If a story is aesthetically right, then it is probably also morally right. You cannot really translate one to one from reality. If you try to do that, in order to get at a truth value through writing, you have to falsify and lie. And that is one of the moral quandaries of the whole business.

...

[Photographs] are part of [my working] process. They act as a token of authenticity--but they can be deduced, forged or purloined. And of course that in turn throws up one of the central problems of fiction writing, which is that of legitimacy and the arrival at the truth on a crooked route. This is why "vertigo" in German has a double meaning--schwindel in German means "swindle". What right do you have to write about any of these things? Have you been there, and felt these things for yourself?

– "The Questionable Business of Writing", interview with Toby Green (undated)

The figure of Kafka finally appears, as Dr K., in the third section of W. G. Sebald's Vertigo. Dr K. journeys to Vienna in a "fretful state of mind". He notices things with the same feverish intensity as Stendhal in the first section.

So, the odd chapters (I and III) of Vertigo talk about the travels of two European novelists while the even ones (II and IV) follow the narrator in his own physically and mentally taxing adventures.The lengths of the stories are about the same for each pairing (30 pages for the odd chapters; roughly 100 for the even chapters).

The novel's four-story structure hints at a "mirroring effect". Doppelgängers and doubles frequently appear. Connections and coincidences, unintended or not, are implied. Out of well-selected facts and events, dates and places, coincidence is unifying the details. To what ends? "It's this whole business of coincidence," Sebald explained, "which is very prominent in my writing":

I hope it's not obtrusive. But, you know, it does come up in the first book, in "Vertigo," a good deal. I don't particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you—the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more . . . and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn't, as we all know. [from "The Meaning of Coincidence", interview with Joe Cuomo, New Yorker, 2001, emphasis added]

Sebald seems to be delineating an artistic point of view and using his K.-type characters to make sense of confounding personal and collective experiences. Memory comes to grips with the history of destruction. It learns it cannot catch up. Yet memory is what all these literary artists have in common, the main instrument of their vocation. Exercising memory brings them to uncanny associations of previous experiences, delivering to their senses extensive bouts of vertigo. Memory undoes the writers even as it consoles their troubled souls.

Dr K.'s travel was on September 1913. "The Stoker", the first chapter of Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika (The Missing Person), was published in May of the same year. "The Stoker" started with 17-year old Karl Rossmann sailing into New York and coming into view of the Statue of Liberty. ("The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.") In Vertigo, Dr K. also encountered a similar figure but in a different form. While resting in a hotel room, where stray sounds from the outside drifted in "through curtains stirred by the breeze", Dr K. imagined "an iron angel who kills travellers from the north". In his hallucination he saw the ceiling of the room breaking open "in a cloud of plaster dust" to reveal "a figure [descending] on great silk-white wings, swathed in bluish-violet vestments and bound with golden cords, the upraised arm with the sword pointing forwards." It's not quite the altered version of the statue in Kafka's Amerika. The vision of the killer angel suddenly vanished and dissolved into the actual painting of a ship's figurehead on the ceiling. (This imagery was probably closer to the picture of a bushman with spear and painted shield as seen by Gracchus on his bed aboard a ship in another Kafka story, "The Hunter Gracchus".)

Paranoia, to which Dr K. was of course prone, was a manifestation of Stendhal syndrome. But Dr K. seemed to be suffering from a more mysterious tendency. Sebald approached his subject very indirectly, relying on presumed feelings and attitudes of his veritably Kafkaesque character. The fictionalization (alteration, invention, appropriation, presumption) of Kafkaesque details here followed Sebald's aesthetics of falsification. "If a story is aesthetically right, then it is probably also morally right." The sword was pointed forwards (towards Dr K., the intended victim, on the bed) instead of upwards. This vision, like any vision, was untrue, but it was at least consistent to the character's state of mind, and hence in some ways aesthetically right. Falsifications are ever justified if they carry the story along and are not derived from a tin ear.

Narratorial slips confessed that the tale we are reading was limited by lack of knowledge: "How Dr K. passed his few days in Venice in reality, we do not know. At all events, his sombre mood does not appear to have lifted. [emphasis added]" And later: "We know, as I have said, nothing of what he really saw." And again later: "However, there is nothing in Dr K.'s Desenzano notes to tell us of what he saw on that 20th of September in Verona." Ignorance, however, did not prevent the narrator from speculating about what Dr K. witnessed and felt on that fateful day. And the next day: "We have no record of how long the people of Desenzano continued their watch for the Deputy Secretary from Prague that afternoon, nor when, disappointed, they finally dispersed." And so on.

Regardless of this freely acknowledged constraint, the story proceeded to pile a lot of suggestive details. Due to the fabrication of some story elements, the Sebald aesthetic was, paradoxically, both truthful and unreliable. Within the limits of narrative design and structure, the plot seemed to amble along according to the law of entropy, chaos theory, or uncertainty. A mostly silent old general, another K.-like figure, talked to Dr K. about this.

When one thinks about it, a vast range of unfathomable contingencies come between the logic of the battleplan and that of the final despatches [...] Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything! [...] Tiny details, but they weigh as heavy as 50,000 dead soldiers and horses at Waterloo. The fact is that ultimately it all comes down to specific gravity. [...] It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies.

The wrong turn of the helm,"a moment of inattention on the part of the helmsman", was the reason the hunter Gracchus, in the story by Kafka paraphrased by the narrator, was not ferried by a passing barque. Gracchus now travels "the seas of the world ever since, without respite."

The third section ended with a philosophical reflection on the Gracchus's destiny in Dr K.'s short story, a stalking of a middle-aged man by Dr K. à la Gustav von Aschenbach, and a letter to his dear Felice telling her of this "illicit emotion", this "lusting" for an unattractive son of a Jewish bookshop owner. The homoerotic ending lent a mystifying perspective to what went on in the story. Might not this episode explain Dr K.'s repressed temperament throughout the whole section?

The text of "Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva" was accompanied by 10 photographs and illustrations. By their immutable, black-and-white silences, the images enact the Sebald aesthetic. The text resists their false presence. But on the same page, their surface ink are of the same substance. Through both modes of expression runs the same subtle pretense.

On Kafka, these studies/essays by Sebald should be worth a look.

1. "The Undiscover'd Country: The Death Motif in Kafka's The Castle" can be found in Franz Kafka's the Castle (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) (Chelsea House Publications, 1988), a collection of essays on The Castle, edited by Harold Bloom. It was also published in Journal of European Studies (March 1972).

2. "The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in The Castle" is in the anthology On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives, edited by Franz Kuna (London: Paul Elek, 1976).

3. "To the Brothel by Way of Switzerland: On Kafka's Travel Diaries" and "Kafka Goes to the Movies" are in Campo Santo (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005; New York: Random House, 2005), translated by Anthea Bell.

4. Silent Catastrophes (Penguin Books, 2014), translated by Jo Catling, is an upcoming English omnibus of two essay collections of Sebald on Austrian writers (Stifter, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Canetti, Bernhard, Handke, Joseph Roth, Broch, Améry, etc.).

All'estero: Sebald syndrome 2

Vertigo

  noun
[mass noun]
a sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height, or caused by disease affecting the inner ear or the vestibular nerve; giddiness.

Origin:
late Middle English: from Latin, 'whirling', from vertere 'to turn'

– Oxford Dictionaries

The narrator of the second section of Max Sebald's first novel was recounting a visit to a home for the elderly with his companion Clara. The recollection came as a digression from a previous remembrance of his visit in the very same spot two years later, in 1980. As was his wont, Sebald broke off his memory-narratives in order to enter other memories, shuttling back and forth in time, weaving a tapestry of many pasts whose collisions and juxtapositions induced feelings of melancholy and dizziness in the narrator.

Through the barred, deeply recessed windows there was a view down onto the tops of the trees on the steeply sloping ground to the rear of the house. It was like looking upon a heaving sea. The mainland, it seemed to me, had already sunk below the horizon. A foghorn droned. Further and further out the ship plied its passage upon the waters. From the engine room came the steady throb of the turbines. Out in the corridor, stray passengers went past, some of them on the arm of a nurse. It took an eternity, on these slow-motion walks, for them to cross from one side of the doorway to the other. How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time. The parquet floor shifted beneath my feet. A low murmuring, rustling, dragging, praying and moaning filled the room. Clara was sitting beside her grandmother, stroking her hand. The semolina was doled out. The foghorn sounded again. A little way further out in the green and hilly water landscape, another steamer passed. On the bridge, his legs astride and the ribbons on his cap flying, stood a mariner, signalling in semaphore with two colourful flags. Clara held her grandmother close as they parted, and promised to come again soon.

The narrator imagined his surroundings to be a heaving sea, a comparison brought about by "the steeply sloping ground to the rear of the house." (This novel was full of sloping surfaces and objects moving along inclined angles.) His vivid imagination transformed the home into a "water landscape" complete with foghorn, steamers, engine rooms, and mariners. The elderly became passengers walking infinitely slowly from one doorway to another. They seemed to tread slowly so as not to lose their balance. The narrator felt like "leaning against the current of time", the current seemingly like a force intent on destroying lives and memories.

Elsewhere in this section, the narrator's frequent travels abroad brought him face to face with strange events that he strongly felt were strangely connected to each other. The section's title All'estero (Abroad) alluded to the partly Italian setting of his journey, but a play on the word estero (estuary or creek) could be intended in a work full of references to water bodies (tidal waves, canal crossings, wave surges, lakes).

Interspersed with his wanderings were his ruminations on the diary entries of Grillparzer and Casanova, often reflecting about each writer's experience of injustice in the legal system and the imminence of death. He also saw several artworks, describing in detail the frescoes of Tiepolo, Pisanello, and Giotto. While seated on a cafeteria he imagined people around him as looking "like a circle of severed heads." He had a nagging feeling of being observed and, sure enough, when he glanced around he saw two men with their eyes on him. He believed that he crossed paths with them before.

He took notice of the news from the papers announcing the anniversary of the date on which an unknown group claimed responsibility for a chain of murders committed in Italy three years before. Looking at a receipt from a pizzeria dated the day after the anniversary, the word CADAVERO swam before his eyes.

Other misadventures followed the narrator in a later (1987) travel in the same territories of Vienna, Venice, and Verona. Once he was unfortunately mistaken for a pederast. At another time he lost his passport. A new one was eventually issued him, with a photograph crossed with a vertical black strip but clearly bearing the likeness and signature of a certain "Sebald". He also recalled the travels in the same waters of Riva by Dr K., and feelings of being followed by two men still assailed him.

He had conversations with a waiter about the story right before WWI from the book 1912+1 by Leonardo Sciascia. Salvatore, the waiter, said to Sebald: "Once I am at leisure, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentence, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane."

Later, Salvatore visualized an imaginary showing of Aida in a Cairo opera house:

Christmas Eve, 1871. For the first time the strains of the Aida overture are heard. With every bar, the incline of the stalls becomes a fraction steeper. The first ship glides through the Suez Canal. On the bridge stands a motionless figure in the white uniform of an admiral, observing the desert through a telescope.

That image was to be swallowed by fire, also conjured, breaking out in the opera house. Fire was yet another persistent image that leveled off objects and memories in the book. Fire and water. The turnings of memory are for ever threatened by elements, engineered by nature or man.

Sebald syndrome

Vertigo by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse (Vintage Books, 2011)


"Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet", the first section of Max Sebald's Vertigo, is a portrait of the French novelist Stendhal (1783-1842), based on his diaries and autobiographical works. It tells of his wartime experiences as a soldier under Napoleon, the destruction and death he had witnessed during that time, and the numerous love affairs he fell into and suffered from. The portrait also makes references to the inadequacy of his memory to record events. Yet memory is all Stendhal had and often he had to remember scenes and events from the vantage of different times under different psychological states. He is not usually satisfied by what his memory unearths for him. The discrepancy between what he imagines and what he remembers causes him "various difficulties", including vertigo.

Now, however, he gazed upon the plain, noted the few stark trees, and saw, scattered over a vast area, the bones of perhaps 16,000 men and 4,000 horses that had lost their lives there, already bleached and shining with dew. The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion such as he had never previously experienced.

In this Beyle section Sebald introduces motifs and themes that were to recur later in the succeeding three chapters. The most prominent of which include the slippery acts of remembering and feelings of dizziness, themes that also haunt his other novels.

The section also makes mention of Stendhal's suffering from syphilis and other physiological conditions: "... his sleeplessness, his giddiness, the roaring in his ears, his palpitating pulse, and the shaking that was at times so bad that he could not use a knife and fork". His heart is gradually failing.

There is in medical science what is called "Stendhal syndrome".

Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world. (Wikipedia)

This sickness is named after the writer as it was something he described as having experienced from his visit to Florence. Dizzy spells. These have been experienced as well by the protagonists in the rest of the novel's sections as they constantly travel and visit museums.

The "Sebald syndrome", however, seems to be a more general disease, a literary one. It's a singular affliction attacking a reader through free associative images, through stretches of lucid, lyrical passages. Schwindel. Gefühle.

Reading list: Fiction and poetry books with photographs

Terry Pitts, the author of the Vertigo blog on Max Sebald, collects fiction and poetry books embedded with photographs. He records a bibliography of these books in LibraryThing site (this link).

It's a surprising catalog for me since I see some of the books in stores but didn't realize they have photographs in them.

Max's maxims

It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not perhaps trust ‘facts’ in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognized pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies. Unlike in the urban setting, there, mental affliction goes unrecognized.

There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.

The collected maxims of W. G. Sebald can be found in the fifth issue of Five Dials, a magazine of his UK publisher Hamish Hamilton. The issue (at this link, in pdf) was mostly dedicated to Max. There's an "A to Z" guide on him where one reads, for instance, under "X":

Coincidence, the point where paths cross, is at the heart of Max’s writing – and the X at the end of his name always seemed emblematic to me. When I asked him once about the role of coincidence he said that whatever path he took in his writing he always, sooner or later, came across another path which led quickly back to some detail from his own life. He also said that the more one was attuned to look out for such things, the more frequently they occurred.

Five Dials is a recommended online literary resource. You can subscribe to the magazine here.



(via Vertigo)

Austerlitz (W G Sebald)

The story of Austerlitz is told in the voice of an unnamed narrator. Its setting constantly changes from one European country to the next. Its themes appear to be the same ones Max Sebald tackled in his other works of fiction: memory, melancholy, ghosts, the Holocaust. It shares a lot of obsessions and motifs with his other books (e.g., constant travel and detailed descriptions of architecture of buildings and railway stations). The style is in his trademark style. Long paragraphs contain long sinuous sentences. Uncaptioned photographs accompany the text. A difference with the other novels is that Austerlitz is one long sustained story of a troubled life. By Sebald's exacting standards, this is a conventional novel, but it's no less enchanting. And still, like his other novels, the text is built up of fragments of travel, biography, memoir, and natural history. At the time it was published, before his untimely demise in 2001, it already represents a distillation of his strengths as a writer. It displays all his strengths as a consistently sublime writer and proves to be an astonishing variation of his earlier fiction.

The gleam of gold and silver on the huge, half-obscured mirrors on the wall facing the windows was not yet entirely extinguished before a subterranean twilight filled the waiting-room, where a few travellers sat far apart, silent and motionless. Like the creatures in the Nocturama, which had included a striking number of dwarf species - tiny fennec foxes, springhares, hamsters - the railway passengers seemed to me somehow miniaturized, whether by the unusual height of the ceiling or because of the gathering dusk, and it was this, I suppose, which prompted the passing thought, nonsensical in itself, that they were the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland, and that because they alone survived they wore the same sorrowful expression as the creatures in the zoo.

The story opened up with an unsettling image of the Nocturama. The eyes of recluse philosophers were juxtaposed beside the eyes of animals. The narrator and Austerlitz were presented as solitary characters and the people surrounding them are also depicted as distant figures, like ghosts. People and objects were described as foreshortened or miniaturized. This physical aberration was implied as a kind of consequence of historical or natural events. Physically humans shrank in size when they get old, but there's a kind of length contraction that Sebald described that was somehow related to an accelerated passage of time. One may think of the principle of physics, specifically the length contraction described by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

I have to admit I found it hard to get into the rhythm of this book. I abandoned it after a few pages the first time I tried to read it 3 years ago. I thought "boring" was written all over it. There's something suffocating in reading the early passages. It must be the quality of the translation and/or the darker aspects of the book. It would require a specific mental state to tolerate Sebald's assault on the psyche. The deliberate lack of paragraphing didn't help ease the feeling of helplessness and oppressiveness. Some blocks of text are encased in a creepy, menacing, breathless, and ghostly atmosphere; they require lungfuls of air to get through. Here's a passage, plucked out of a longer one, telling of entering a passage in an old building structure.

Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken - and now, in writing this, I do remember that such [an] idea occurred to me at the time - as if they were the mortal frames of those who once lay there in that darkness. I also recollect now that as I went on down the tunnel which could be said to form the backbone of the fort, I had to resist the feeling taking root in my heart, one which to this day often comes over me in macabre places, a sense that with every forward step the air was growing thinner and the weight above me heavier.

The novel seemed to be creating narrative momentum and tension through the same connect-the-dots approach he deployed in his hybrid fiction, as exemplified by the image of Sir Thomas Browne's quincunx in The Rings of Saturn. The narrative building blocks of the novel relied on streams of memories and digressions, with temporal and narrative shifts announcing sharp transitions. What's brilliant about it was the seamless integration of otherwise disparate ideas. A brilliant example was Austerlitz's discussion of the casement torture chambers, which led to his reflection on Jean Améry's torture (cf. the essay in On the Natural History of Destruction), and then to a passage in Simon Claude's memoir Le Jardin des Plantes which described that torture. That memoir contained a profile of a certain Gastone Novelli who was also tortured and later had some dealings with a Brazilian tribe, documenting their language: "[Novelli] adopted [the tribe's] customs, and to the best of his ability compiled a dictionary of their language, consisting almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations of intonation and emphasis ..." Later, Novelli became a painter and incorporated the letter A in his pictures, tracing them out closely together and on top of each other, "rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream".

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Like this visual painting, the progression of ideas in Austerlitz, based on the selected facts of the novelist's reading of writers and thinkers, were "crowding closely together and above one another". Just like the quincunx, the novel was becoming a network of stories tied together by the novelist's sensibility. The drawn-out scream was like the anguished expression of tortured individuals.

For more on Novelli's painting, these two articles are recommended:

Vertigo blog: "Sebald, Simon, Novelli and the Long-Drawn-Out Scream"

The Silo: "Gastone Novelli" by Raphael Rubinstein

The recurring phrase "_____ told me, said Austerlitz" in the book was too conspicuous. It represented a two-tiered (or even three-tiered) narrative attribution wherein the recounting was filtered and shaped by distant memories. In an essay, "Terrible Rain: W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard and the bombing of Europe" (2003), the English novelist Geoff Dyer traced this mannerism to Thomas Bernhard:

It was from Bernhard that Sebald derived his inverse telescoping of reported speech ("I was particularly anxious, Vera told me, said Austerlitz") whereby the narrative recedes in the act of progressing. The comic obsessiveness and neurosis common to many of Sebald's characters are like a sedated version of the raging frenzy into which Bernhard's narrators habitually drive themselves. The influence was most explicit in Austerlitz, whose long pages of unparagraphed meanderings even look like Bernhard's.

Specifically, the influence came from Bernhard's Old Masters. Dyer expanded on this essay and described the "inverse telescoping" narrative device by Sebald - from "W.G. Sebald, Bombing, and Thomas Bernhard," in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011), quoted in Conversational Reading - as emphasized below.

It is possible that the similarities between the two appear more striking in the English translations than in the German originals, but it was, surely, from Bernhard that Sebald derived the inverse telescoping whereby the reliability of the narrative recedes and diminishes the more incessantly it is vouched for. “You concealed your shock very well, I said to the Englishman, Reger said to me,” writes Atzbacher, the narrator of Bernhard’s Old Masters. “I was particularly anxious, Vera told me, said Austerlitz,” writes the narrator of Sebald’s Austerlitz.

I don't totally buy Dyer's explanation of the narrative receding and diminishing the more repeatedly it is vouched for. It seemed Sebald was constantly using the double attributive phrase to convey a sense of reliance on memory rather than on undermining it. Memories were like ghosts haunting the characters. The transfer of memory through telling and retelling was the only way to exorcize the ghosts. They may not always be clear, objective, and 100% accurate, but the insistence on attribution strengthened the narration from memory and brought out to the light of day what was otherwise receding from the background. Sebald himself called this a periscope, instead of an inverse telescope (yes, there was a difference!). His last interview (KCRW interview, December 2001) bore this out:

What he [Bernhard] 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 so he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative so you're always sure that what he tells you is related at one remove, at two removes, at two or three. And that appeals to me very much.... Bernhard single-handedly, I think, invented a new form of narrating which appealed to me from the start.

The periscopic form of narration only tells what is heard from others. In this way, perhaps, the question of reliability was minimized and the role of memory to give witness, in the face of selective or total amnesia, whether voluntary or involuntary, was justified.

The Stalin Front (Gert Ledig)

The Stalin Front, also published as The Stalin Organ, by Gert Ledig (1921-1999) is a novel about Russo-German fighting during World War II. It was first published in German in 1955, sixteen years after the author volunteered in the army. The English translation by Michael Hofmann appeared only recently in 2004. The novel constitutes Ledig's graphic reminiscences of the war. Its imagery brings to my mind recent war films like Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg and The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick.

The novelist must have an acute memory to be able to indelibly register such brutal and cruel moments of war - but what else to expect of bloody wars - or else an abnormal capacity to absorb the violence. The mess and chaos are sustained throughout the entire book in a visceral, realistic, and natural prose style. Consider the opening scenes in the prologue:

The Lance-Corporal couldn't turn in his grave, because he didn't have one. Some three versts from Podrova, forty versts south of Leningrad, he had been caught in a salvo of rockets, been thrown up in the air, and with severed hands and head dangling, been impaled on the skeletal branches of what once had been a tree.

   The NCO who was writhing on the ground with a piece of shrapnel in his belly, had no idea what was keeping his machine-gunner. It didn't occur to him to look up. He had his hands full with himself.

Such is the cinematic power of Ledig's novel that the words paint battle scenes in color, albeit the gray and brown and black colors of smoking tanks, muddy fields, and filthy uniforms, and the deep red color of blood spurting like merry fountains. More than reading a shooting script or screenplay, the reader seems to be watching the whole thing unfold on the big screen. The sound effects are deafening; the chamber music is literally absent; the editing is sharply executed. The pauses and the silences in between the hail of bullets do not give respite to the viewer. Instead they provoke a heightened sense of danger. The novel replicates the dread, boredom, over-fatigue, and nervous breakdown in a large modern scale war.

The story follows a group of soldiers as they try to either defend their position in the front or to attack the enemy. The "Stalin organ" refers to the automatic weapon (multiple rocket launcher) used by the Russian side to efficiently wipe out the Germans. Ledig picks up both points of view of the Russian and German soldiers that the reader is sometimes confused which side he is reading about. Eventually it dawns on us that it doesn't matter whether the story told is that of the German or the Russian side. Humanity has the same face and every one is interchangeable. Every man is an everyman whose life is readily extinguished by a bullet or bayonet.

The story is broken into short chapters that show the characters in the midst of combat and deliberating moral choices that test and define their physical and moral resilience. The characters, instead of being called by their names, are often reduced to their ranks (i.e., the Lance-Corporal, the Runner, the Sergeant, the Major, the Captain). Michael Hoffman, the translator of the novel from the German, mentioned in his introduction that he purposely capitalized the ranks of the characters to make them more distinct from each other. This stylistic choice of substituting ranks to names allows for easy recognition of the characters. One can imagine the difficulty of trying to ascertain the identities of soldiers through all the chaos and wasteland. This choice of the translator, however, may have undermined Ledig's apparent vision of the universality of men. That, again, every man is everyone in war, and each soldier (the lance-corporal, the runner, the sergeant, the major, the captain) slides into anonymity in the face of annihilation. Each may be acting according to his rank, with winning the war as the primary objective, but this is superseded by a more pressing individual concern, which is the concern of all: to survive, to preserve one's critically endangered life.

I bought this book on the strength of W. G. Sebald's blurb at the back of the NYRB edition. The blurb is taken from Sebald's essay "Air War and Literature," from the book On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald's essay takes to task the postwar German writers for failing to record the destruction wrought by wars. For Sebald, the books of Ledig, as well as that of Heinrich Böll and Peter Weiss, among others, are a rare exception to this apparent defect in the German letters. Sebald champions the kind of novels that speak plainly and precisely, and with unpretentious objectivity, as opposed to novels full of "aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects." He favors the concrete and documentary style of writing over the abstract and imaginary. For Sebald, accounts of suffering must be commensurate to the magnitude of the human loss; these are the kind of novels worth writing about in the face of total destruction.

What particularly sets Ledig's first novel apart from other stories of modern war and conflict is its own sense of the poetic injustice of men fighting fellow men, its cast-iron sense of irony, and its non-compromised portrayal of a "natural history of destruction." The natural history of war, in its literal sense, can pertain to a respect for Nature and the idea of war as a direct assault against it. This is achieved through poetic engagement with the natural world and the senseless plight of human beings in this theater. One can think of the images of the flowing grass and the wildlife in The Thin Red Line, but with less gratuitous intent as the images are part of or combined in the action. The insects and the trees have their own cameo roles in the novel:

   As soon as he entered the wood, he felt alone. The brush, the birch trunks - everything was silent. The log-road, built by Russian soldiers who had long since died of starvation or been shot, swayed silently underfoot. A swarm of mosquitoes danced over a dead body in the murky puddle in the clearing. A beetle in shining armour dragged a blade of grass across the path. A ring of scorched grass, an uprooted tree and a pile of broken boughs indicated that death had been at work, days previously, just yesterday, or even a matter of hours ago. A few sunbeams managed to break through the leaves and reach the ground. . . .

 
Men, together with their misplaced intelligence, play their tragic roles in theaters of war: to fight the other side to the death. The war rages on while, all around the very brave and noble and heroic combatants, millions of other species - lowly plants and animals - get on with their lives. Whether they are uprooted or remain rooted to the spot, the trees in the forest stand at attention in their precarious positions, awaiting their decimation. Yet the natural world is implacable in the face of material and human loss - the millions of human lives lost.

In The Stalin Front, wars are shown as machines that reduce humanity and nature into useless objects. Wars are shown for what in the first place they amount to: lost causes. The novel builds an argument for literature as a corrective to this dark history. It asks the same question that the purveyors of war never get to answer sufficiently. Why, after the curtain falls on these theaters of the past, do people today still want to engage in the same acts of destruction?



I read this book as part of the ongoing NYRB Reading Week (7-13 November 2010). This week of reading and reviewing great books is spearheaded by Honey at Coffespoons and Mrs. B at The Literary Stew. This is also part of the "NYRB Reading Plan" that I made back in January, in which I aimed to read at least 5 books published by NYRB this year. This is the 3rd NYRB book I read, after The Engagement by Georges Simenon and Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati.

"The Remorse of the Heart: On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss" (W. G. Sebald)

THE PEDDLER (1940)

W. G. Sebald's essay on Peter Weiss (1916-1982) is the last one in On the Natural History of Destruction. It mixes literary criticism and art (paintings) criticism. What is puzzling here is that, given Sebald's penchant for illustrating his books with photographs, this essay did not reproduce the many paintings mentioned in the text. The essay began with a description of a painting called Der Hausierer (1940) by Peter Weiss. It shows a circus right in front of an industrial complex. It's the one pictured above. Sebald interpreted this "self-portrait" of Weiss as an expression of the artist's (the peddler in the picture) need to enter the dwellings of the dead, represented by the circus tent. Death is closely associated with the painter, who survived the death of his sister, bosom friend, parents, and "all the other victims of history." Sebald expounded on this death motif and, in the process, perhaps shared his self-identification with Weiss:

The process of writing which Weiss has recently planned, now that he is about to embark on his literary work Ästhetik de Widerstands ("Aesthetic of Resistance"), is the struggle against the "art of forgetting," a struggle that is as much part of life as melancholy is of death, a struggle consisting in the constant transfer of recollection into written signs. Despite our fits of "absence" and "weakness," writing is an attempt "to preserve our equilibrium among the living with all our dead within us, as we lament the dead and with our own death before our eyes," in order to set memory to work, since it alone justifies survival in the shadow of a mountain of guilt.

Sympathy (one that goes "beyond mere pity"), added Sebald, is the element which reinforces the recollection of the dead against forgetfulness of the living. These sources of Weiss's writings—death, melancholy, memory, guilt, pain and sympathy—are ever present in Sebald's novels. As with Jean Améry, the novelist’s identification with this forerunner is grounded in the attempts of men to make sense of cruelty and evil in history. The two writers are speaking for the dead, who returns to us.

From this first painting Sebald moved on to Weiss's Das grosse welttheater ("Great World Theater," 1937, pictured below) which he compared to Albrecht Altdorfer Alexanderschlacht's "Battle of Alexander" (1529). The latter painting was also mentioned in Sebald's prose poem After Nature.

GREAT WORLD THEATER (1937)

The other paintings discussed include Weiss's "Concert in the Garden" (1938) and the anatomical painting of a corpse lying on a dissecting table (1946), which led Sebald to once again reflect on Rembrandt van Rijn's (1606-1669) "The Anatomy Lesson," the one about Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and the guild of surgeons surrounding the body of Aris Kindt. This painting was written about at length in the first chapter of The Rings of Saturn and Sebald here reiterated its significance to Weiss's work and, possibly to his own: "Rembrandt's picture of the dissection of a hanged body in the interests of higher ideals is an unsettling comment on the particular kind of knowledge to which we owe progress."

THE ANATOMY LESSON OF DR NICOLAES TULP (1632), REMBRANDT

Sebald's fixation with "The Anatomy Lesson" in his novel and here in the essay on Weiss reflects a particular obsession with suffering and mortality. The context surrounding his investigation of the painting in the novel starts with the search for the skull of Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a contemporary of Rembrandt. Here is a summary from my previous post:

Sebald speculated on Browne’s possible presence in an "anatomy lesson" conducted in Amsterdam in 1632. In fact, Sebald speculated on the presence of three men in that lesson: Browne, Descartes, and Rembrandt.

...

Sebald’s description of the painting betrayed his sympathy for Aris Kindt, the criminal whose body was being dissected. Sebald thought of the anatomy lesson as an extension of the corporal punishment on earth of a man hanged just a moment before. He seemed to be giving something of a critique of the scientific enlightenment that the lesson was providing its onlookers. In any case, it was hard not to detect an aversion on the part of Sebald while viewing the painting as if he himself was present during the entire operation, watching the Guild of Surgeons surrounding the body on the table, each surgeon fixated on the "open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being."

It was likely that Sebald identified with the body prostrate on the table as he returned to his recollections of his time in the hospital after his own surgery....

In the light of the painting's explication in Weiss's essay, it is apparent that the dissection of a body represents more than a personal association for Sebald but his central critique of human capacity for cruelty and capital punishment. Sebald can be said to be viewing the autopsy and harvest of a dead man's vital organs as the second death of the man already punished by men on earth. This is highlighted by the reactions of the onlookers in the painting which treat the body as only a material or life's residue to be learned from, the remains of a man already devoid of humanity or soul.

Says Sebald in introducing the first anatomical picture of Weiss, "... there undoubtedly lies panic terror of an execution that will inflict further destruction, even after death, on the guilty victim's body.... [Weiss] diagnoses this process not merely as a legal measure in those societies which make a public festival of capital punishment ... but points out that even (and indeed more particularly) "enlightened" civilizations have not abandoned that most drastic form of penalty which consists of cutting up and disemboweling the human body, thus literally making detritus of it."

One can safely assume that Sebald, humanist novelist that he is, is not a proponent of the death penalty. This is, in fact, the first cruelty prior to the lesson in anatomy. Weiss himself painted two versions of the dissection, which constitutes the second act of cruelty. The first picture is a cubist work in which the expressions on the faces of the three men (abstract, contemplative, indifferent, professional) were likened by Sebald to the vague, blank expressions of the guild of surgeons in Rembrandt's first painting.

DISSECTION PICTURE BY WEISS, 1946

Of the second "much more primitive anatomical picture" painted two years earlier, Sebald detected a "far more humane and far more cruel" stance, a disturbing contradiction. Sebald saw the possibility in the picture that "Peter Weiss felt a certain morbid interest in the process and identified with the anatomist":

One cannot be certain whether the painter imagined himself subjected to the procedure he shows, or whether, like Descartes (known to have been an enthusiastic amateur surgeon who in all historical probability attended several of Dr. Tulp's anatomy lessons), he thought that he could discover the secret of the human machine in the dissection of bodies, a subject to which he returns again and again.... [W]ith a knife in his right hand, an organ he has removed in his left, and bending over the human body he [the anatomist, though it could apply to the painter as well] has opened up with an expression of utter desolation.

DISSECTION PICTURE BY WEISS, 1944

(It is interesting to note that both Rembrandt and Weiss painted two anatomy lessons each. The Aquarium of the Vulcan blog pointed out that there was speculation in 1950 that Thomas Browne may be a sitter in the second dissection by Rembrandt, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Deyman" (1656). This could lend credence to Sebald's supposition that Browne may have attended an anatomy lesson. Sebald may not be aware of this connection to Browne for otherwise he would certainly include this possibility in his novel full of circular references to Browne and to discussion of pictures from the perspective and point of view of painters. The dead man in the second picture is Joris Fonteijn, a condemned thief just like Aris Kindt in the earlier Rembrandt. The skull cap is being held by Deyman's assistant (the possible Browne study), Gysbrecht Matthijsz Calcoen, while Deyman is removing a piece from the brain.

According to the records of the Anatomy Theatre, Amsterdam: "on January 28th 1656, there was punished Joris Fonteijn of Diest, who by the worshipful lords of the law court was granted to us an anatomical specimen. On the 29th Dr Joan Deyman made his first demonstration on him in the Anatomy Theatre, three lessons altogether" (Haas, 1992, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry.) The Republic of Togo issued a commemorative stamp of the painting in 1968.)

In the essay, Sebald also mentioned Weiss's history of the painter Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) in Aesthetics of Resistance which once again demonstrated Weiss's use of the death motif in his art: "Such an affinity with the dead, impelled by a desire for knowledge but also implying a libidinous occupation of the dissected body, makes one suspect that the handling of paint in a case like Géricault's, an example of the extremist practice of art to which Weiss too subscribes, is ultimately equivalent to an attempt by the subject, horrified as he is by human life, to do away with himself through successive acts of destruction."

THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA (1818-1819),

Théodore Géricault

The rest of the paintings in "The Remorse of the Heart" are collected in this German site:

http://www.wgsebald.de/weiss.html

* * *

The human body, the physical body, is a theater of war. As foreign instruments invade the skin and penetrate the muscles and tissues, they invade the territory of man's shell-casing. The humanity and the cruelty, or just the plain cruelty, of the exercise are exemplified by the systematic cutting and processing of the shell-casing and in laying out and labeling of the component parts. Knowledge generated and gained from the exploitative procedure, to be exploited by medical science, does not matter because, as Sebald notes, it "makes little difference to the process itself." It's double death arriving, driving home the truth of cruelty to the first cruelty, that is death by hanging or torture.

THE FOUR STAGES OF CRUELTY: THE REWARD OF CRUELTY (1751), JOHN HOGARTH

The idea of the dissection as torture is clearly evinced from another representation of the dissection by William Hogarth (1697-1764). "The Reward of Cruelty" is the final engraving in the series "Four Stages of Cruelty." Hogarth here depicted a criminal on a dissecting table amid a flurry of spectators. The novelty of the picture is that the dead victim is represented as alive or like someone still alive, his mouth open as if protesting and suffering in the indignation. Hogarth, who is referenced at the end of Chapter VI of The Rings of Saturn, presents the idea of dissection as torture and as a just reward for the dead criminal on the table who inflicted his many shares of cruelty when he was still alive. This engraving is a "propaganda" to deter criminal acts by showing the possible consequence of criminal behaviors. The chief surgeon supervises the guild atop his chair like a judge, thereby extending the death sentence of the hanged criminal. The picture is presented as a fictional story in four parts, with the dissection as the culminating picture. It is suggested, however, that the protagonists in it are based on real persons.

It makes no difference whether the man being dissected (or injured) is dead or alive. In the case of Jean Améry, torture can be seen as a dissection of a live person, whose anatomies are being inflicted with assortments of pain and whose "medical" resistance is tested to its mind's limits. It also makes no difference whether the dissection is done to a single person, in groups, or to an entire race or community of people. The human body or bodies (i.e., humanity), under dissection, under autopsy, under conflict, under air war, under extermination, under destruction, is humanity undergoing cruelty. The far-reaching grasp of cruelty is such that it applies both to the scale of one man and to millions of men.

The epigraph of Sebald's essay came from Léon Bloy: "L’homme a des endroits de son pauvre Coeur qui n’existent pas encore et où la douleur entre afin qu’ils soient." ("There are places in the heart that do not yet exist; suffering has to enter in for them to come to be.")

In Hogarth's dissection picture, the dead man's entrails are trailing down the table where a dog starts to feed on the heart. Throughout history, the default punishment for cruelty is cruelty, and its reward is the remorse of the heart.

Visiones de Marías

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico is the latest book I've read and I'm still constructing my thoughts about it. It's a bad bad book, and I mean that in the wild wild west sense. I read it ahead of the other books I bought in my recent book-hunting in Manila, a rare opportunity to stock my shelf with goodies. I decided to read it for its sheer brevity in length, a mere 57 pages of Marías-concentrate, in one of the beautifully spare designs of New Directions Pearls. I also bought The Literary Conference by César Aira, a writer I've only started reading this year, an instant favorite with his surreal Ghosts and the lighted landscapes of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. My other purchases are Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel García Márquez, Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. I was also very fortunate to come across a used copy of "AN ADVANCED READING COPY FROM UNCORRECTED PROOFS" of The Seventh Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Its final published title would be The Last Samurai (no, not the). The reference is to Akira Kurosawa's celebrated movie. I've started reading a few pages of DeWitt and ... BIG WOW. This is the Fall book selection of Conversational Reading. Oh and I also got the bad bad (I really meant this in a bad way) The Body Artist by Don DeLillo. I only picked it up to go with the DeWitt book for the buy-one-take-one promo in the used book store.

I'm still thinking a lot about the ending of Bad Nature. It is tearing me apart. And the frequent references to "dark back" (as in, Dark Back of Time) had me in stitches. The book is about a translator/interpreter who worked for Elvis Presley in a movie set in Acapulco, Mexico. In one of their bar hops, one of the guys in Elvis's contingent offended a Mexican gangster. Inevitably, Elvis and his companions became embroiled in an argument with the gangster's group. The translator is the only person who could communicate the insults shuttling back and forth between the two factions. As is usual with Marias, the currents of terror are at first gliding innocently on the surface of the story and then breaks to the surface to take over the story. As I understand it from this story: the bad nature resides in all of us. The gangsters and also Elvis can be bad, as in evil, anytime. The key to world peace is tolerating "the other" but this is impossible because there is always a barrier of communication. Language and the significations of language can get the better of people. If we can not get past our own linguistic (i.e., cultural) prejudices then we are at a permanent state of conflict. Even gestures, like language, can be fatal. (The key scene in Bad Nature reminds me of a disturbing story, told as a joke, in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 where a simple handshake between a French scientist and an indigenous tribesman in Borneo, a pat on the shoulder, and an intent look in the eyes were all misconstrued by the native as an act of violence or rape or the eating of soul.)

At the back of the book With Elvis in Mexico (why not use the alternate title alone? Sometimes I'd like to refer to McCarthy's meridional bloodbath as The Evening Redness in the West. In some ways, the Elvis and the Redness books share a theme, but I'm not stretching it.), at the back of this short story (really too short to be called a novella) is a sketch (shown below) by Marías. They have one for each of the authors in the Pearls edition. Below the sketch is the blurb "Admired by Bolaño, Ashbery, Sebald, Pamuk, and Coetzee." In a paperback copy of the earlier published Fever and Spear, the back cover blurb only mentions "Pahmuk [sic], Coetzee, and Sebald." Bolaño is a late addition to the roster of Marías admirers but he was really an avid reader of the Spanish writer from early on.

JAVIER MARÍAS

Javier Marías is already internationally renowned as many of his books were translated in several languages and were awarded prestigious literary prizes (in original and translations). His books also sold already in the millions. Born in 1951, Marías is one of the leading contemporary writers in Spain. He is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, newspaper columnist, and translator. He published his first novel at age 19, finished his degree of Philosophy and Letters at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and taught in Spain, UK (Oxford University) and the United States. Among the writers he translated into Spanish are Conrad, Hardy, Faulkner, Nabokov, Thomas Browne, Sterne, Shakespeare, Yeats, Auden, and Wallace Stevens. At present he reigns as the King of Redonda, an island in the Caribbean.


TRANSLATED BOOKS

Marías is a prolific writer. He has over 30 titles to his name. About a dozen of his books were available in English so far. Everything was translated by Margaret Jull Costa save for Dark Back of Time and Bad Nature (both translated by Esther Allen) and Voyage Along the Horizon (by Kristina Cordero). Some of his nonfiction pieces appeared in The New Republic, Granta, The New York Times, The Believer, and The Threepenny Review.


NOVELS

Voyage Along the Horizon
The Man of Feeling
All Souls
A Heart So White
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
Your Face Tomorrow [in 3 volumes - Fever and Spear; Dance and Dream; Poison, Shadow and Farewell]


FALSE NOVEL

Dark Back of Time [a "false" sequel to All Souls]


SHORT STORIES

When I Was Mortal [one story "Fewer Scruples" is online at The Barcelona Review]
While the Women Are Sleeping [forthcoming this year, the title story is at the New Yorker]


NONFICTION

Written Lives


SINGLE-STORY BOOKS

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico
Gualta [this story of fantasy can be read online, only if your eyes permit it]
While the Women Are Sleeping


MARÍAS & BOLAÑO

It's not hard to see why the writer is admired by great contemporary writers such as Bolaño and Sebald. He is a great one himself. Bolaño was impressed by Marías's early books, books that have yet to appear in English. He praised Los dominios de lobo (1971) ("The Dominions of the Wolf"), the very first novel Marías wrote at age 18 and published a year later. For Bolaño, this book (along with La asesina ilustrada by Vila-Matas) "marked a point of departure for our generation." In his essay "Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories" Bolaño listed a handful of "highly recommended books and authors", among them Marías’s story collection Mientras ellas duermen (Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 1990). The English translation of this book, While the Women Are Sleeping, is forthcoming from New Directions in November. Bolaño admitted to having been influenced by Marías. He once spoke to the journalist Sergio González Rodríguez whom he consulted in the writing of his final unfinished novel. The critic Marcela Valdes wrote about it in her review in The New Republic: "Listen, Bolaño joked, I'm going to make you [Sergio González Rodríguez] a character in my novel [2666]. I'm going to plagiarize the idea from Javier Marías, who made you a character in La negra espalda del tiempo [sic] [Dark Back of Time]." The plagiarizing of a great writer by another great one is not surprising. The "secret" connectivity in the body of work of Marías is comparable to the expanding universe of the Bolaño oeuvre.

I’m not sure how Marías himself view the Chilean writer’s works. But there's no question that Bolaño belongs to the fandom of Marías. In a 1999 interview for Capital (collected in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview), Héctor Soto and Matías Bravo asked the writer: "Between Latin America and Spanish writers, where is your literary brotherhood?" Bolaño replied at length, the perfect blurb really:

Basically among the Latin Americans—but also among the Spaniards. I don't believe in the separation of Latin American and Spanish writers. We all inhabit the same language. At least I think I cross those frontiers. And in my generation there is a mixed nucleus of writers, Spaniards and Latin Americans, the same way they were mixed in another era of Modernism, possibly the most revolutionary movement in Spanish literature of this century. Because of his strength, I think someone like Javier Marías is forced to influence Latin American literature, and he does. He is a great writer. By the same token, young Spanish writers should be influenced by someone like Rodrigo Rey Rosa or Juan Villoro, two enormous writers. I am extraordinarily blessed by a photograph of all of us together, from this and that side of the Atlantic. Rey Rosa, Villoro, Marías, Vila-Matas, Belén Gopegui, Victoria de Stefano.

Now where is that photograph?


MARÍAS & SEBALD

Max Sebald was known to personally admire the books of Marías. As king of the Island of Redonda, Marías instituted a prize where artists (authors, filmmakers, etc.) were given a title in his kingdom. The winners are selected by current reigning dukes and duchesses. Sebald was given the title "Duke of Vertigo." The other "royal appointments" include, among many others, Francis Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalopolis), Pedro Almodóvar (Duke of Trémula), A. S. Byatt (Duchess of Morpho Eugenia), William Boyd (Duke of Brazzaville), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Duke of Tigres). In his own work in the posthumous Unrecounted, Max also used a picture of Marías's eyes, one of the several pictures of "visions" in his books. He was also known to indorse the works of the Marías. The themes and prose styles of the writers are comparable to some extent. They are two writers whose whose writing projects are conceived with a view to the totality of their works. Their emblematic images persist in their books which often cross-reference each other. Like Sebald, Marías produced "picture books" where the subtexts of images seem to speak to the reader as much as the text itself. The picture books of Marías are essentially the unofficial "Deza trilogy": All Souls, a roman à clef semi-autobiographical novel and a comedy of the High Table; Dark Back of Time, a "false novel" which dissects the previous one; and Your Face Tomorrow, a novel about espionage and betrayal. (See also the Vertigo blog.)

The nonfiction Written Lives, a collection of biographic entries on literary writers, also contains portraits of writers. In this book, Marías literally became a "writer’s writer." Here he sketched some famous and obscure literary lives, in snippets or vignettes, not really in objective fashion, highlighting certain aspects of the writers' personalities, shattering some myths about them, perpetuating others. I think that the vignette form afforded Marías a perfect exercise in the selection of details. Out of so many facets of a writer's life, he has chosen the details that freeze the writer into a striking relief. This high selectivity of details is also comparable to the "nonfictional" novels of Sebald (as in the quartets of eccentric-melancholic personages in The Emigrants and Vertigo and in the moon-like fragments of The Rings of Saturn). It is also interesting to compare Bolaño's "political" creations of unorthodox writers in Nazi Literature in the Americas with Marías's mini-bios of real "political" writers in Written Lives.

"Against the Irreversible" (W. G. Sebald)

When he crossed the border into exile in Belgium, and had to take on himself the Jewish quality of homelessness, of being elsewhere, être ailleurs, he did not yet know how hard it would be to endure the tension between his native land as it became ever more foreign and the land of his foreign exile as it became ever more familiar. Seen in this light, Améry's suicide in Salzburg resolved the insoluble conflict between being both at home and in exile, "entre le foyer et le lontain."
                         - W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

Sebald's claim of the inadequacy of postwar German literature extended not only to the subject of destruction from air bombings but to the entire postwar experience. For him, the literary world then was characterized by a "huge moral deficit" that was gradually being addressed by a handful of writers slowly emerging from their labyrinths of silence. One of these writers was Jean Améry (1912-1978), the subject of Sebald's third essay in On the Natural History of Destruction. Améry started late into writing about his personal experiences of the war. He entered the literary debate in the 1960s when his essays on "exile, resistance, torture, and genocide" appeared. He wrote from the perspective of the victim, which is to say "the guilty one," guilty for being tortured and silenced and for having the memory to remember it all. Sebald's analysis of Améry's works often relied on role-playing and on the findings of William Niederland, a psychoanalyst. Sebald detected in Améry the "anguish of memory which is partly vague, partly full of a still acute fear of death." One could detect in Sebald's essay sympathy for a writer trying to come to terms with his own failure to memorialize (rationalize) what happened to him in the torture chamber. The attempt to articulate unspeakable emotions through language, Sebald observed, possibly led Améry to adopt the genre of essay in order to embrace the freedom of exposition. This was perhaps the only freedom one can enjoy when expressing the pain of suffering. Sebald quoted a passage of Améry's that exemplified the strategy of understatement (and irony) that the writer used to avoid "pity and self-pity." (Niederland found such avoidance to be typical of the accounts of torture victims.) Because the reconstruction of memory required a set of language which can dislocate the shoulders, the passage had to end in linguistic perversity: "... I had to give up rather quickly. And now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten to this hour. The balls sprang from their sockets. My own body weight caused luxation; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology!" This passage Sebald saw as reaching the breaking point of composure, as consciously "operating on the borders of what language can convey." When writing about the physicality of pain, the writer had to become the torturer himself. Torture has "an indelible character," Sebald quoted Améry: "Whoever was tortured, stays tortured." Whoever was killed in spirit, died ever after. And the long delayed terminus was never slow in coming. After writing the essays, which include At the Mind's Limits (1966) and On Suicide (1976), Améry's voluntary death was no twist of fate.

"Air War and Literature" (W. G. Sebald), 2

In "Air War and Literature," Sebald was trying to account for the unexplained disengagement from reality of the works of German literary writers right after the second world war. Self-righteousness, pedantry, insensitivity - these can be leveled against this attempt to recover some forgotten memory, soul, or conscience that was left in the ashes of ruined shelters and buildings. Why bring out to the surface what has been safely kept from sight? Given Sebald's high standing in contemporary literature - achieved through the publication of a series of radical novels which broke new genre grounds while essaying the stories of melancholic survivors of history and atrocity - his arguments cannot be easily dismissed. His persistence on the matter brought discomfort and provoked a critical examination of literature that has so far come out in Germany in the past half-century.

Sebald identified some consequences of his perceived literary self-censorship and selective amnesia. One is the lack of masterpieces. There is a clamor for the “great German epic of the wartime and postwar periods.” The economic miracle in Germany is another possible consequence. As if the citizens became conscientious traders and miracle workers to cover for their ruined livelihoods.

Whereas recounting “truthfully” is an activity that requires soul-searching, it is still not antithetical to hanging one’s own head in guilt. A neat explanation is impossible. Should the victims insulate their selves or express open grief? Sebald was right to refer to psychoanalytic explanations of the mental stress experienced by victims, but it is such a confounding phenomenon that his quotations are hardly definitive. One of the implicit causes of the breakdown of collective memory is the legacy of an unorthodox worldview. The assumption is that forgetfulness is a fruit of fascism: a lewd legacy of totalitarian regime.

A potential weakness of Sebald’s line of thinking is a pedantic critique of trauma and guilt as originators of desensitized mental state. One of the causes he gave is the shared guilt by the Germans to the holocaust. They cannot complain of massacre because their kind has done similar terrible crimes. This is the default “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” principle which in this case cannot be easily abstracted for its complex psychological nature. The causes and the effects of violence, cruelty, and evil may be so interchangeable that one does not know where one begins and the other ends. This is the bane of modern humanity.

* * *

Sebald decried the lack of German masterpieces yet failed to mention the novels of Günter Grass, notably The Tin Drum (as Hydriotaphia commented on the previous post). This novel is widely read and considered a masterpiece. It also contains scenes of the aftermath of bombings, as the critic Ruth Franklin pointed out. This elimination of Grass by Sebald speaks volumes. It can only mean that he does not subscribe to Grass's aesthetic representation of suffering.

Grass himself was critical of Sebald. He said in an interview with The New York Times that he welcomed books about the Allied bombing such as the one written by Jörg Friedrich (Der Brand, or The Fire):

But he agreed less with W. G. Sebald's essay, "Air War and Literature," published [in Germany] in 1999 and in English [in 2003], in a collection called, "On the Natural History of Destruction." Mr. Sebald, who died in 2001, argues that postwar German writers ignored German suffering during the war. "The novels of Henrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen deal with these things," Mr. Grass said. "If I had met Sebald, I would have asked him, 'Why don't you write a book about it?' "

The novelist did write something. In "Air War" itself, he provided a summation of what happened during that time. His problematique begins with a sweeping diagnosis: The Germans have abdicated their role to provide a credible witness to history’s errors. To correct this, the novelist has to produce his own version of the events with graphic details culled from the diaries of survivors. The novelist maintains that a synoptic and artificial view of the bombings are needed because eyewitness accounts are either unreliable or clichéd. In producing his own synopsis of the bombing, the novelist is reliving an un-witnessed carpet-bombing, enacting his own repressed history, reading the silent documents from the archives, and ultimately satisfying his own hunger for truth. He is lighting a new fuse, creating another possibility, and surviving his own firestorm. His means are his ends.