Posts tagged ‘W.G.Sebald’

March 24, 2011

Memories More Permanent than Stone

Austerlitz, the main (the only?!) character of Austerlitz, the novel by W. G. Sebald, is not telling the story of his life. Or rather, we get very few facts of his biography. The novel is one long tale of moments he spent with other people, mostly retelling things they tell him. This whole poly-thread narrative (if one can call it that) is wrapped in the voice of a nameless, almost non-existent narrator (indeed, but for the frequent reminders “Austerlitz said,” he would be imperceptible), who does not sound any different than Austerlitz himself. Like in Vertigo, the narration slips fluidly from character to character without any real indication of change. You’d be excused for thinking that all the human voices in the book are one character, tied into the name Austerlitz.

Which is only his second second name. Jacques Austerlitz really remembers his childhood name being Dafydd Elias, adopted son of a Welsh preacher. After the death of the preacher and his wife, the boy is told in boarding school that he was adopted at age four on the eve of World War II. It is only in his old age, in the 1980s, that he goes in search of his roots in Prague, where the Austerlitz family is from. From scraps, old photos, records, stories, museum notes, left over objects, and of course stories of other people, he reconstructs that Austerlitz who wasn’t. Only, reconstruct is not the right word. It’s more an archeology of an Austerlitz who wasn’t. It’s all there, in the name, it just needs to be brought out. When he sees a photo of himself, a self he did not remember until that moment, Austerlitz tells us that “the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives.”

This permanence of memory, of past and others’ lives dissolves time itself. The present is endlessly bound up with the past and the invisibility of history makes it all the more present. Looking out over Paris, an acquaintance says: “Sometimes, so Lemoine told me, said Austerlitz, he felt the current of time streaming round his temples and brow when he was up here, but perhaps, he added, that is only a reflex of the awareness formed in my mind over the years of the various layers which have been superimposed on each other to form the carapace of the city.”


To the archeology of the human voices the book opposes the architecture of the inhuman. From the beginning to the end of the book we get descriptions of various castles, towers, fortifications, walls. All of which were built with ruthless precision, unyielding reason, planned out to the last detail and made from the hardest stone. “…a kind of ideal typical pattern derived from the Golden Section, which indeed, as study of the intricately sketched plans of such fortified complexes as those of Coevorden, Neuf-Brisach, and Saarlouis will show, immediately strikes the layman as an emblem both of absolute power and of the ingenuity the engineers put to the service of that power.” Not only do these fortresses fail to protect the people they are designed to protect, however, they become the perfect place to imprison, torture and from which to terrorize people. Like the fort of Mechelen in Belgium, which had “the result that the entire Belgian army would have been insufficient to garrison the fortifications.” Or indeed “the fortress of Breendonk, said Austerlitz, a fort completed just before the outbreak of the First World War in which, within a few months, it proved completely useless for the defense of the city and the country.

One such fortification build in the 18th century is Terezín in Bohemia. The Gestapo converted it into Theresienstadt, a concentration camp where Agáta, Austerlitz’s mother is deported after he himself is sent to England. Despite the horror of the camp (or perhaps because of it), to try and understand the architecture of such a place only renders it less, not more real. In reading a book about the architecture of the camp, he tells us:

“The long compounds, not listed in my dictionary, which were obviously being spawned the whole time by the pseudo-technical jargon governing everything in Theresienstadt had to be unraveled syllable by syllable. When I finally discovered the meaning of such terms and concepts as Barackenbestandteillager, Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein, Bagatellreparaturwerkstätte, Menagetransportkolonnen, Küchenbeschwerdeorgane, Reinlichkeitsreihenuntersuchung, and Entwesungsübersiedlung […] when I had worked out what they meant, he continued, I had to make just as much of an effort to fit the presumptive sense of my reconstructions into the sentences and the wider context, which kept threatening to elude me, first because it quite often took me until midnight to master a single page, and a good deal was lost in this lengthy process, and second because in its almost futuristic deformation of social life the ghetto system had something incomprehensible and unreal about it, even though Adler describes it down to the last detail in its objective actuality.”

The actuality of it, does not make it real, but precisely unreal. The reality of the stones of Terezín is measured here against something more real: words. Even the fake architecture of putting words together can be broken down into its own bricks. And the whole thing would completely fall apart were it not for the context of memory and consciousness holding it together.


I am of two minds whether Austerlitz can be said to be about the Holocaust. I mean, of course the Holocaust is ever present in the book; but I am not sure if it is more than a backdrop. But I wonder if since the end of WWII there have been six million books written worldwide about the people who perished in it?

March 20, 2011

On Sebald’s Vertigo

I didn’t know who Marie Henri Beyle was. Immediately, I want to ask two questions: does it matter, and does it matter? Reading the book, is it important to know who that was, or can he be regarded as just a character in a novel (whether based in history or not)? And secondly, does this question matter in writing about this book.

Let’s back up a bit. The book is Vertigo the first novel by W. G. Sebald, published in 1990.

It is divided into four parts: the second and fourth are largely about ‘himself,’ the narration is in the first person. The third section is about Franz Kafka towards the end of his life. The first section, however, is about the aforementioned Mari Henri Beyle, which is the birth name of the author otherwise known as Stendhal.

I admit there were clues. Sebald directly references a couple of his works. But my ignorance of Stendhal extends even to his works, not counting The Red and The Black, which Sebald does not mention, so I didn’t pick up on it.

(In the section on Kafka, the narrator imitates Kafka’s writing style, so it’s entirely possible that he does a similar thing in the first section, but again, not having read any Stendhal, I wouldn’t know.)

The reason I looked up the name Marie Henri Beyle when I finished the book was that I knew Sebald bases his characters on real authors, artists, scientists from the past, not only Vertigo, but in After Nature as well.

So I got back to my questions: does it matter for the text, and does it matter to my writing here? (Ok, I suppose it matters here because I’ve been talking about it for this long.) What I mean by introducing the book by referencing my ignorance of Stenhal’s life, I’m calling attention to a difference between Marie Henri Beyle and Stendhal. One is the man, the other the author. They are not strictly separate entities (on the contrary!), but they are two and not the same. The difference in name illustrates this nicely.

The whole book, in fact, is that same layering of personalities or persons. The narrator slips in and out of persons, either the man, Marie Henri Beyle, or the author Stendhal, or ‘himself,’ his childhood, people he remembers. In his own trips he is retracing the travels of Stendhal, Kafka and Casanova (the persons), and revisiting certain places where those authors had significant moments in their lives.

Or rather than describing it as different persons the narrator slips in and out, they could be the various things that come to bear on an individual conscience. The trip he takes through central Europe and Italy recalls history of the region, its art, the stories of the lives of the artists who left the art behind, the story of the artists who passed there but didn’t write or create art about it (like Kafka’s story in Riva which cannot be found in his fiction but rather in his diaries), the narrator’s own previous trip(s) (he mentions taking the same train in 1980 and 1987), the personal past of the narrator…all this comes to bear on, or comes into play when we read a description of a restaurant, or a walk-down a street. Perhaps individual consciousness is something very, very small in itself, and the only way it makes sense of a world much too big and complex is to draw on threads from personal and collective history, texts its read, art it found meaningful, trips taken to foreign places; conversely, what if all the things consciousness uses to constitute itself then weigh on it and lead it in directions the will is no longer capable of controlling.

There is one more level mixed in. Throughout these travels he refers several times to his writing. The book however, is not a travelogue, and doesn’t read like a record of travels in an unknown land. What is he writing? How much of what we are reading is what he is writing? Are we witnesses of the book being created (meaning that the writing coincides perfectly with the book); or is he writing something completely different which has nothing to do with the account we have before us? How is his act of writing related to understanding the various sources of consciousness? Those sources are mostly in text form (history, literature, even art), and now memory becomes part of that weave.

Le me go back to one of my questions. Does it matter to me here whether or not the reader of the book (in this case, my previous self) knows that Marie Henri Beyle is Stendhal? Is what I’m writing here simply a record of my reading of the novel, or does it subsequently reconstruct my understanding of the novel? Nothing but head-spinning questions…

The cover of my copy of Vertigo includes a quote from the NYT review where Sebald is likened to “memory’s Einstein.” I’m not sure what that means exactly, except that the subject of the book is going to be an intellectual investigation, an almost philosophical topic. This is the kind of writing that Cormac McCarthy deemed unworthy. I read somewhere that McCarthy does not consider Proust and the like literature because it doesn’t deal with life and death.

Indeed, I keep thinking how the writing of the two authors could not be more different. Sebald’s features no violence, there are no descriptions of desperation or overt injustice. The heros in McCarthy are strong figures (whether good or bad), while in Sebald not just the characters, but the narrator too dissipates between various levels. Where McCarthy’s narrator intensifies the cruelty of the story with his (and make no mistake it’s a he) indifferent story-telling, Sebald’s narrator would be whiney and pathetic in his weakness if it weren’t for his sense of humor and self-mocking.

Even the one thing they have in common they go about doing in opposite ways: McCarthy’s sentences are austere, dramatic, and they stand each on its own, forcing the reader to hold them together or fall between the cracks; Sebald’s sentences are casual, almost banal, giving off the feeling that there is no importance to them, to the point that the narration becomes so filigreed and threadbare it requires a reader with a very careful touch, otherwise it tears or melts in one’s hands as the snow in the Alps.
You have been warned.


February 24, 2011

Crossing Paths

Once upon a time, on the old Telemachus, I wrote a little post about a couple of letters of Joris-Karl Huysmans. A French writer of Dutch origin (hence the name), he is best remembered for his novel A Rebours, which is usually translated into English as Against Nature. The novel was a reaction against Emile Zola’s L’Assomoir (1877). Until that point, Huysmans was Zola’s example of a true naturalist writer, the writing style Zola aggressively advocated. When A Rebours came out, the split with the then and now much more popular Zola – who was also known to go after his ideological and aesthetic opponents with his sharp journalistic pen – was highly publicized.

However, the two men knew better. Here are the two letters I was referring to earlier. (In my translation, anachronistically.)

J.K. Hysmans’ letter to Jules Destrée (Nov. 22, 1884):
As far as the split between Zola and myself, shouted from the rooftops, it’s idiotic. We often discuss amicably questions in which we disagree completely, but we are old friends from before L’Assomoir. I take it as proof of quality of our friendship that all the claims of the press to the contrary have not been able to chip away at it.

E. Zola’s letter to J.K. Huysmans (May 20, 1884):
There, my dear friend, are all my reservations. I didn’t want to hide them, for you know me well enough, don’t you, to know that the fictional is not my cup of tea. Luckily, there is in you something else, a sort of outrageousness of art that excites me, an originality of strong feelings that is enough to set you apart, put you on a high pedestal. Bottom line is that I spent three happy evenings with your book. It will count at the very least as a curiosity in your oeuvre. And you should be proud of it. What will people say? If they don’t calm down, they might very well celebrate it ecstatically. Or they will throw it back at you, at us, as the latest rotting corpse of our literature. I smell nonsense in the air.

I bring this up because I found out that Huysmans is credited with something else as well. According to (a certain) Dorothea von Mücke, he is responsible for bringing back to light the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald (c.1470-1528). Says Mücke, over at
But around 1900 the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans made a passionate plea for the relevance and modernity of Grünewald. In his description of the altar at Isenheim, Huysmans called attention to Grünewald’s shocking insistence on the physical details of Christ’s suffering, alerting its beholder to the disgusting marks of torture and the signs of dying and decomposing flesh. Such a Christ, Huysmans observed, is no longer the well-groomed, handsome man who has been venerated by the rich and powerful throughout the ages. Grünewald’s Christ is rather the “God of the Poor. The one who chose the company of those in misery and of those who had been rejected, of all those for whose ugliness and need the world could only feel contempt.” And it was exactly this approach to pain and suffering highlighted by Huysmans that subsequently became a point of reference for many artists who invoked Grünewald’s work, especially when they cited the triptych from the Isenheim altarpiece or The Mockery of Christ from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Here are the two works she is referring to:

Isenheim Altarpiece, First view (Crucifixion), c. 1512–15, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France. Limewood, 269 x 650 cm

The Mockery of Christ, c. 1503–05, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

Grünewald also liked to put his self-portrait into his paintings. It can be found in many of his works, including these two. In the Mockery of Christ, he is the Commiserator, the only one not attacking Christ. In the altar piece he is St. Sebastian, the figure on the left.

Self-portrait, c. 1512–16 Nürnberg, Germany.

Commiserator, detail from Mockery of Christ

St.Sebastian, detail Isenheim Altarpiece









What brought all of this to my attention is W.G. Sebald’s After Nature. It is a triptych in verse with the enigmatic motto “As the Snow on the Alps… .” The first part is about Matthias Grünewald, and at the very beginning Sebald tells us that
“… The face of the unknown
Grünewald emerges again and again
in his work as a witness
to the snow miracle, a hermit
in the desert, a commiserator…
…Always the same
gentleness,  the same burden of grief,
the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled
and sliding sideways down into loneliness.”

Right after that Sebald wraps up my entire post of curious connections throughout history.

Grünewald’s face reappears, too,
in a Basel painting by Holbein
the Younger of a crowned female saint.
These were strangely disguised
instances of resemblance, wrote Fraenger
whose books were burned by the fascists.
Indeed it seemed as though in such works of art
men had revered each other like brothers, and
often made monuments in each other’s
image where their paths had crossed.”