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.
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