Unrecounted: A Vortex in Time, A Bridge in Blythe and the Novels of W.G. Sebald
George Porcari
W. G. Sebald died in December of 2001 in a car accident in Norwich England during a particularly bad winter when the roads had turned to ice. "I don’t think you can write from a compromised moral position," he had said in an interview earlier that year. His commitment to this position put him at odds with much of the contemporary publishing industry. He was uneasy with cultural truisms or doctrines regardless of their acceptance in the academic milieu in which he lived. From the age of 46 to his death at 57, he published four novels that have been translated into English: The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo and Austerlitz. He published two posthumous books: an essay on the ambiguities in the relations between aggressor and victim called On the Natural History of Destruction and Unrecounted. The last is a collaboration with the fellow Bavarian artist Jan Peter Tripp. They both grew up just after the war, both experiencing the sense of alienation and dislocation that plagued so many artists, writers and filmmakers of that generation. This sense of displacement is most familiar to us from the filmmakers of the "golden age" of the film auteur: Jean-Luc Godard, Andrey Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Nicolas Roeg, Jean Rouch, Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, all captured some sense of emotional dislocation that was linked to the historical realities they experienced. Their vision of contemporary social life was anthropological–as was Sebalds’. The individual psyche of a character and the social reality that he/she inhabits seemed to co-exist in a way that was undefined yet palpably malevolent and perhaps ultimately unknowable. Regardless of their vast differences in temperament these artists shared that intuitive sense of the fluid co-existence of all things: theirs was a phenomenological art rooted in paradox.
Tripp’s work consists of hyper-realist lithographs and etchings of photographs he had taken or found of people that interested him: family, friends, Francis Bacon, Truman Capote, and the man who is in a sense the spiritual father of this collaboration, Rembrandt. The work then concentrates exclusively on the eyes, framing them in letterbox frames with Sebald’s haiku-like fragmentary poetry. At first the eyes appear to be photographs but the details of their depiction are too intensely concentrated in a way that is not true of photography, where the details are indiscriminately "all-over." The result is a powerful and moving litany on temporality and the nature of looking. Without a trace of irony, Tripp and Sebald create a highly successful fusion between images and poetry. The collaboration works in a formal sense rather simply: The drawings are always classically composed and rendered, and the text is fragmented, inconclusive and ambiguous. ("At the end / only so many will / remain as / can sit around / a drum.") The two incommensurate worlds act like positive and negative charges in a controlled experiment. The result is startling because it is so much of our time, and so much removed, so distanced by an encyclopedic knowledge of historical periods in art and literature. Who was W.G. Sebald?
He was born on Wertach im Allgau, Germany. In 1966 he became an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester in England, where he settled for good in 1970. He taught at the University of East Anglia from that time to his death in December of 2001. His novels, from the beginning, often had a German emigrant living in England as one of the characters, yet the autobiographical nature of the narratives was ambiguous. The sentences often run on in his work; the narrative voices are sometimes superimposed as in Conrad, but lacking the exotic associations with the "primitive" that haunt Conrad. Sebald was as conscious of the European literary tradition in careful linguistic constructions as Nabokov (who haunts the narrative of The Immigrants at different stages of his life). The works are elliptical and episodic to the extreme; this apparent open structure belies a highly formal architecture, a counterpoint of narrative strategies such as travel literature, history, essay and most insistently memoirs. The first person narrator always seemed to come from another level of consciousness already divorced from human concerns, beyond anger or lust or death. It appears as though that the vortex of history, of facts, has swallowed the narrator up and that he speaks from its depths, as haunted as any character in Poe or Borges. The narratives of various lives often interpenetrate, rendering them as evanescent landscapes lit up by fireworks before returning to darkness. They seem, for this reason, moribund, already a kind of obituary for our own time before our time is up. There are images throughout the books such as official portraits, handwritten notes, post-cards and, most conspicuously, snapshots that freeze some oblique moment in time.
The Emigrants begins with a photograph of a large tree surrounded by an old graveyard. The text after this startling opening begins the first of four narratives: "Dr. Henry Selwyn: At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live." The book opens with a paradox. The tree in the graveyard can’t help but suggest both the end of life and the endless organic recycling of life in various forms. The text opens with the laconic first person "I" searching for new beginnings–a house with Clara–in search of "somewhere to live". This will be the search for all the narrators in The Emigrants and in a sense all of the narrators in every book Sebald wrote. In that beginning the paradoxes of factual matter (gravestones under a tree) and narrative movement (searching for a home) come into play and set the stage for the dramas that follow.
The works often use the language of travel literature familiar from magazines or travelogues. There are often sudden shifts to historical narratives whose authenticity is, despite the seemingly serious tone, questionable. Readers sometimes wrote to Sebald pointing out "mistakes" in the novels. From The Rings of Saturn we get a good idea of Sebalds’ themes and his dry sense of humor: "Not far from the coast, between Southwold and Walberswick, a narrow iron bridge crosses the river Blyth where a long time ago ships heavily laden with wool made their way seaward…According to local historians, the train that ran on it had originally been built for the Emperor of China. Precisely which emperor had given this commission I have not succeeded in finding out, despite lengthy research; nor have I been able to discover why the order was never delivered or why this diminutive imperial train, which may have been intended to connect the Palace in Peking, then still surrounded by pinewoods, to one of the summer residences, ended up in service on a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway. The only thing the uncertain sources agree on is that the outlines of the imperial heraldic dragon, complete with a tail and somewhat clouded over by its own breath, could clearly be made out beneath the black paintwork of the carriages, which were used mainly by seaside holidaymakers and traveled at a maximum speed of sixteen miles per hour." A train meant for an unknown emperor in China–for reasons that will obviously remain a mystery–now services commuters on holiday in the suburbs of England. The heraldic dragon still on the side of the train becomes a comic metaphor for a "history" that has been almost obliterated; yet the original design comes through as in a palimpsest. So it is with histories writ large and small. The transplanted dragon in exile fades slowly into nothing in the workaday world of quotidian British tourism. History is forever being discarded and reused by the present, which in turn becomes a part of this inevitable and comically grotesque recycling. In Rabelais these aspects of life and death are rendered comical, in Sebald they are tragic. The past insistently haunts the present in ways that rational discourse can not cope with. From Austerlitz:
"Whenever I go out at Liverpool Street station on my way back to the East End, said Austerlitz, I would stay there at least a couple of hours sitting on a bench with other passengers…and feeling that constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time. I knew that on the site where the station stood marshy meadows had once extended to the city walls, meadows which froze over for months on end in the cold winters of the so-called Little Ice age…" The narrator then explains that the train station sits in a spot once occupied by a hospital for the insane named Bedlam: "Whenever I was in the station, said Austerlitz, I kept almost obsessively trying to imagine — through the ever changing maze of walls — the location in that huge space of the rooms where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we pass through them on our way through the station…"
Like Nabakov, Sebald believed that all of matter is organically related; so in a sense objects and places share the emotional history of humans and perhaps retain their own "memories." This synesthesia is Nabokovian at heart and Sebald owes a debt to that author’s Speak, Memory–including the use of photographs. Yet in Nabokov the photographs illustrate the text, in Sebald they compound the mystery of the text. Sebald’s photographs are already loaded with narrative possibilities of their own–the two narratives then bounce off each other as in a hall of mirrors. Linear continuity is shattered and in its place there are episodic passages that touch each other (in every sense). The detritus of everyday life, such as railway tickets, take on a powerful role in the narratives as evidence of a life that once was and is no more. Personal histories parallel the larger historical parts of the narrative but never in a one to one relationship; there is always some attenuation, some digression that links up with other obscure facts that make each situation unique and peculiar. Every moment of the present in Sebald’s works is an eccentric and mysterious intersection of possibilities in which thousands of years of planned and chance encounters have come down to "this moment." This makes each of these precious moments, or presents–what we mere mortals call now–a window of opportunity and a stage on which chance and fate play their respective parts. Such a sensibility cannot help but see comedy and tragedy, pivotal historical moments and everyday life, as an organic whole. In that sense Sebald’s writing stands very far from that of contemporary critical theorists and their illustrators in the world of fine art and academic literature. The fashionable idea in academies for the last few decades has been that all areas of human activity, such as sexual preferences, personal identity and forms of expression are culturally determined. For Sebald, this is not the case. Culture is as determined by biological and physiological necessity as biology and physiology come to be affected by culture. They are in a symbiotic relation.
Sebald I think described the present better than anyone at the end of a century that saw more people die violently or go into exile than any before it–a considerable record. The only way to convey the seriousness of these themes for him was to fill every page with the full weight of history. Only then could he achieve the overall effect that his work produces: We sense that we have seen the past in the form of the tip of an iceberg. The glimpse into this "vortex of time" is dizzying, for we intuit what might be under that tip. For Sebald in a sense there was no "history" and there was no "humanity." There were, and are, only specific individuals caught in specific places and times. "History" and "Humanity" are only concepts, marble statues that resemble us in form but lack all content, all "reality." Sebald in his novels returns this "reality" to us in fragments. Broken to bits because that is how we find it–piecemeal and incomplete. That’s us. His sense of ethics with respect to his narrative voice was profound. Other books and works of art suffer in comparison. It is impossible to look at the ironic fine art works of our time in that sense without a feeling of moral revulsion. The drawings in Unrecounted along with Sebald’s text play with serious themes in a European tradition that has all but vanished, and the melancholic voice in them–perhaps in mourning for itself–is most insistently of our time.
