Books & the Arts / Before Sebald Was Great By looking at his early work, we can better understand who the German writer was beyond his persona as the melancholy intellectual and serious man of letters.
W.G. Sebald, 1999.
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Since his death in 2001, the reputation of W.G. Sebald has become formidable, even imposing. At times, he feels like a totem: the Western world’s last Absolutely Serious Writer. The German English author of novels (or simply works of “prose” if you prefer, as he did) has cast a long and melancholy shadow over the literature of the 21st century: Deeply erudite and formally inventive, his work absorbed the weight (or burden) of European history and literature and established a new model for writers. For those unconvinced by “merely” aesthetic novelties, he was unafraid to wrestle with ethical questions, most famously Germany’s confrontations with historical memory and its inability to fully process the Holocaust. For many—he does have his detractors—he was the capstone of literature in the 20th century, both burnishing and waving goodbye to a sophisticated culture on the wane.
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Something he is not: funny. (Critics have occasionally argued otherwise, but I don’t really believe them.) If whimsy occasionally surfaces—the skull of Sir Thomas Browne in The Rings of Saturn, the nocturnal zoo of Austerlitz—there is also nothing frivolous. Irony only ever arrives in whispers. Sebald’s floating, elegiac intelligence stimulates a mindset: While reading him, we, too, can put away childish things and take up questions of truth and beauty; if we can hold ourselves there with him, we might glimpse the profound in ourselves. Most people today don’t inhabit a lifeworld like Sebald’s ruminations, and so perhaps this is his draw: Take him seriously, and thereby take yourself seriously, too.
Unsurprisingly, a huge body of criticism has piled up around Sebald, most of which follows the same broad strokes. You can stress-test his moral commitments, or analyze his technique in crossing the streams of fiction and nonfiction. You can point out his influence on “innovative” fiction writers of the last decade (Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Benjamín Labatut, etc.). These measurements of inheritance are frequent because they are one way that critics track a writer’s stock (leaving aside that Sebald was so often an enthusiast of supposedly minor artists, like the Swiss writer Robert Walser). Sebald’s iconic style has been incorporated into the literary bloodstream. In an essay for New Left Review, the critic Ryan Ruby helpfully characterizes its hallmarks:
Sebald’s writing is known for four things: its thematic preoccupation with the after-effects of the Holocaust and the Second World War; the interspersion of photographs, documents and reproductions of paintings and other visual media throughout the texts; the floridity, antiquarianism and melancholy tone of its prose; and, finally, its so-called ‘metaphysics of coincidence’, the way an apparently associative series of random details and incidents makes it difficult to tell how one sentence follows from the next, only for the whole to reveal itself, in the end, as having operated according to a complex, lattice-like order from the beginning.
Although it’s hard to dispute the accuracy, there’s also something a bit dispiriting in seeing the “Sebaldian” formula laid out so neatly. Mystery, where art thou?
Still, anyone who’s read a Sebald novel, or even part of one, can conjure it. There’s that slightly fuzzy and tweedy narrator, teasingly like Sebald himself. He’s out for a walk, or in a train station or some other threshold place. He is struck by an object—a picture postcard, a stray image in his sight line—and a little knot of story forms and is incorporated into the weave. Or maybe it’s not a story, but more of an essay, or a close reading; as one considers, it becomes less clear how these are distinguished. Uncertainty is part of the experience: We wend with the author, we dream, we associate, we search our own feelings. Without feeling a little lost, the prose has lost its purpose.
For a writer who thinks with poetic leaps and complex retracings of memory, Sebald, a quarter century on, has come to seem slightly dusty. Is there a way we might feel reenchanted by his writing? This is not to say that the reader of Sebald should abandon their critical faculties, but that it may be necessary to regain a view of the pleasures, both intellectual and aesthetic, that he can still offer, and think less in terms of reputation and reception. The way to do this might be to return to when he had none: to read a less “great” Sebald might help dislodge him from stereotype. Silent Catastrophes, a new English edition of Sebald’s early critical and academic writings—primarily on Austrian literature—translated by Jo Catling, allows us to catch sight of this less polished, mysterious figure. The essays are a personal genealogy of some of Sebald’s important German-language predecessors, and at the same time a window into an author in the process of self-making.
Sebald was born in 1944 in Wertach, a village just across the border in southern Bavaria. Catling remarks in her introduction that “this sense of being from the margins” helps explain Sebald’s affinity for the literature of neighboring Austria. This was a feeling of living on the periphery of world-historical disaster—World War II and above all the Holocaust: knowing without witnessing, feeling distanced but still inside the complicity of silence. In addition, what “Austrian literature” is, exactly, considering the shifting borders and cultures of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is another ambiguity that suits Sebald. He writes that he does not mean to be comprehensive, but his inventory includes writers well-known to the Anglophone reader—Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke—and writers less so, like the 19th-century adventurer Charles Sealsfield, whose wanderings in the American South make him sound like a character in a Sebald novel; and Adalbert Stifter, a petit bourgeois chronicler of natural beauty who would be rediscovered in the early 20th century as a master stylist. Jewish writers, as one might expect, are also well-represented, from Kafka to Joseph Roth to the Holocaust survivor and self-exiled writer Jean Améry, along with an essay on the micro-genre of life sketches from the Jewish ghetto.
Silent Catastrophes is really two separate books, their titles translated by Catling as The Description of Misfortune (1985) and Strange Homeland (1991). Gathered together, they bracket a formative period in Sebald’s career, arriving on either side of his emergence as a creative writer. In 1988 and 1990, respectively, Sebald published the poetry collection After Nature and his first prose fiction, Vertigo. Many of the essays in the new volume appeared in the Austrian journal manuskripte, the same place where early fragments from Vertigo and The Emigrants would be published. Similarly, subjects like the schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck and the Viennese writer Peter Altenberg became figures in Vertigo as well.
Sebald was working to invent himself as a writer in this period, and it’s clear in Silent Catastrophes that his method was already unorthodox. The essays often have little in the way of argument or real organization. Long block quotes can feel arbitrary, theorists are cited and then dispensed with, and the prose lurches between extended close readings and brilliant observations that jump off the page. For a reader new to Sebald, this collection would surely be the last place to start. Inevitably, many of Sebald’s epigrams feel aspirational for his own writing—when Sebald describes in Handke’s work a “hope for redemption from the guilt-ridden conditions of life, a hope fleetingly realized in art…which yet remains ever strange to us,” I sense his own striving. In their meandering style, the essays harbor an oppositional force welling up through the “correct” form of criticism.
Although the two books are closely related (essays on Kafka and Handke, for instance, show up in both) each is loosely based around a single idea. The Description of Misfortune deals with psychology, particularly “the unhappiness or misfortune [Unglück] of the writing subject.” Sebald’s attention to mental illness and misery evoke a curiously Romantic idea of the suffering artist, though he never commits to any overarching interpretation. He also explores some subjects that are rare in his fiction, particularly erotic desire and perversity, as illustrated in the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler (whose Dream Story is best known here as the loose source material for Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut). Freud, naturally, is the Viennese touchstone (“If it is true that one should not read Schnitzler without Freud, then the reverse is equally true”) against which Sebald asserts art’s unique ability to represent consciousness. Sebald wants to claim a privileged place for literature—that it can do something beyond what theory does—but finds himself working through the theoretical language that is native to him.