A Thousand Darknesses

In a post that I wrote more than two years ago about the anthology of interviews and essays The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, I said that Ruth Franklin’s essay Rings of Smoke, from The New Republic, “is the outstanding one by a country mile. She discusses most of Sebald’s books and quickly gets to the heart of each one. She is also capable, as [editor Lynne Sharon] Schwartz puts it, of assessing ‘the risks involved in what she sees as Sebald’s aestheticizing of collective disaster.’”  Franklin is Senior Editor at The New Republic and a frequent book reviewer.  Her review of Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction for Slate handled that odd volume with great intelligence, I thought.  So I am really looking forward to her forthcoming book A Thousand Darknesses: Truth and Lies in Holocaust Literature (Oxford University Press, fall 2010), which will deal with Sebald, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, and others.

On March 3, Franklin will be speaking on her book in the Baltimore area at Goucher College at 7:00 PM (details here).

For what it is worth, the phrase that Franklin is using for her forthcoming book title  – a thousand darknesses – has some curious prior usages.  Without saying how she came by the phrase, Franklin herself originally used it as the title for her in-depth 2006 review of Elie Wiesel’s Night, a review written for The New Republic on the occasion of what turned out to be a somewhat controversial new translation by Marion Wiesel, the author’s wife.   I can find several possible sources (including a line in a poem by Paul Celan that I cannot locate).  First, there is the unattributed Islamic quotation “To light a single candle is better than to sit and complain about a thousand darknesses.”

But for purposes of referring to the Holocaust, a more apt usage is found in James Stephens’ tale The Story of Tuan Mac Cairill, from his 1920 book Irish Fairy Tales.

The night came, and with it a thousand darknesses fell from the screeching sky. Not a round-eyed creature of the night might pierce an inch of that multiplied gloom. Not a creature dared creep or stand. For a great wind strode the world lashing its league-long whips in cracks of thunder, and singing to itself,now in a world-wide yell, now in an ear- dizzying hum and buzz;or with a long snarl and whine it hovered over the world searching for life to destroy.

One of Arthur Rackham's illustrations for Irish Fairy Tales, 1920

Dresden, the Blanche DuBois of Germany

Studio Daniel Libeskind - Military History Museum, Dresden

The February 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker contains an article by George Packer about the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945, the topic of W.G. Sebald’s lectures in On the Natural History of Destruction.  The New Yorker online has a summary of the article and a short slide show, but the full text of Packer’s article can only be read by subscribers or in the print edition.

Packer is interested in how the city has attempted to recuperate its self-image (was it the guilty party or the victim?) through its still-ongoing reconstruction.   In a reference to Tennessee William’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, he calls Dresden “the Blanche DuBois of German cities – violated, complicit in its violation, desperate to recover its innocence.”

Packer also talks with Daniel Libeskind, who is transforming the city’s Alberstadt arsenal into a Military History Museum, which, Packer says, “will surely cause outrage when it is completed.”  Libeskind calls the design for the building “an interruption.”  “It will be impossible for visitors to tour the traditional rooms without passing through the trapezoidal openings in Libeskind’s disorientingly angled concrete-slab walls ” – walls that soar “upward in every conceivable angle except ninety degrees.”

As Libeskind tours Packer around the construction site they reach the top floor, which, fittingly, is not level. Libeskind turns to Packer and says: “It’s like a collapse, isn’t it?  You feel it in your knees – do you feel it?  Maybe it’s the reflex of a body feeling that a building’s collapsing on it.  You can’t be neutral in these spaces.”  Sebald, it seems to me, often intervened in history so that the floors were no longer level, giving the reader the feeling that everything was on the verge of collapsing inward.

There’s more information about this project on Daniel Libeskind’s website.

Will Self’s Sebald Lecture

As several readers of Vertigo have mentioned, an “edited” version of Will Self’s January 11, 2010 lecture on W.G. Sebald has been published in the Times Online.  Self touches on several of Sebald’s books and a cast of characters that includes Woody Allen, Albert Speer, Alexander Kluge,Bernhard Schlink, Hannah Arendt, and many others.  It’s a complex, dense, thoughtful, broad ranging and controversial speech that is definitely worth reading.  Here are a few quotes:

Sebald is rightly seen as the non-Jewish German writer who through his works did most to mourn the murder of the Jews.

To read Sebald is to be confronted with European history not as an ideologically determined diachronic phenomenon – as proposed by Hegelians and Spenglerians alike – nor as a synchronic one to be subjected to Baudrillard’s postmodern analysis. Rather, for Sebald, history is a palimpsest, the meaning of which can only be divined by rubbing away a little bit here, adding on some over there, and then – most importantly – stepping back to allow for a synoptic view that remains inherently suspect.

In England, Sebald’s one-time presence among us – even if we would never be so crass as to think this, let alone articulate it – is registered as further confirmation that we won, and won because of our righteousness, our liberality, our inclusiveness and our tolerance. Where else could the Good German have sprouted so readily?

Writing as Weaving

A page from an album of silk designs by James Leman in the Victoria & Albert Museum
Various dates, 1706-1730, watercolor on paper

For three entire pages at the start of the last chapter of The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald lists fabulous and wholly imaginary items inventoried in the Musæum Clausum of Sir Thomas Browne, ending, finally, with this fanciful object:

..the bamboo cane in which, at the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinianus, two Persian friars who had long been in China to discover the secrets of sericulture had brought the first eggs of the silkworm over the Empire’s borders into the Western world.

This prompts Sebald to embark on one of the longer and more complex of the meandering themes that comprise The Rings of Saturn – a more than twenty page meditation on the biology of silkworm moths and an abbreviated history of silk production spanning nearly 5,000 years from ancient China to the Nazi era.  At one point, he mentions the mid-17th century revocation of the freedoms proclaimed in the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which caused some 50,000 Huguenots to flee France and emigrate to England, many of whom were experienced silkworm breeders and producers of silk goods.  Of particular interest to Sebald was the fact that many of these silk workers settled in Norwich, creating “the wealthiest, most influential and cultivated class of entrepreneurs in the entire kingdom.”

…a traveler approaching Norwich under the black sky of a winter night would be amazed by the glare over the city, caused by the light coming from the windows of the workshops, still busy at this late hour.

Within a few sentences, however, Sebald makes a most remarkable turn by likening the hard labor of the weavers with that of “scholars and writers with whom they had much in common.”  Weavers, scholars, and writers, Sebald claims, tend “to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, [and] it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created.”

It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.

And so there, in a revealing metaphor drawn from silk weaving, Sebald has described the doubt that plagues writers, who weave with words that are infinitely more gossamer than silk.    It’s not hard to imagine that Sebald is speaking personally here.  Remember that at the very beginning of The Rings of Saturn the narrator is to be found lying in a hospital in a state of “almost total immobility”  resulting from “the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” Perhaps this emptiness also encloses the fear that, as a writer, he might “have got hold of the wrong thread.”   Most of us would argue that Sebald did not get hold of the wrong thread, no matter how difficult it might be for the reader to discern patterns to a book like The Rings of Saturn.  And Sebald, too, immediately shifts to the upside of these melancholic professions.  He points out that in spite of the mental illnesses that the silk weavers suffered they also managed to create some of the most beautiful, intricate, and lasting treasures out of the liquid thread that emerged from the mouths of silkworms.  And he proceeds to list some of these treasures using the most dazzling array of words:

…silk brocades and watered tabinets, satins and satinettes, camblets and cheveretts, prunelles, callimancoes and florentines, diamantines and grenadines, blondines, bombazines, belle-isles and martiniques…That, at any rate, is what I think when I look at the marvellous strips of color in the pattern books, the edges and gaps filled with mysterious figures and symbols, that are kept in the small museum of Strangers Hall, which was once the town house of just such a family of silk weavers who had been exiled from France.

It was with great surprise and pleasure, then, that I stumbled upon a reference to the wonderful blog Venetian Red, where there is an extensive and well-illustrated article by Christine Cariati on James Leman and Anna Maria Garthwaite, two 18th century silk weavers of Spitalfields, the section of East London, which had once been the textile center for the city.  Like Sebald, Cariati carries the story of the English silk industry beyond its demise and into our time.

An interesting aside to the Huguenot story is that one of the most prominent Huguenot families to settle in England was the Courtaulds, who fled from France in the 1680s and later became silk weavers. A descendant of this family, Samuel Courtauld, who took control of the company in 1908 (the firm invented rayon, a synthetic silk, in 1910), achieved great renown as an art collector. In 1932 he founded the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, to which he bequeathed his collection upon his death in 1947.

If you have never visited the galleries of the Courtauld in person, you may take a virtual tour at their website.

Collecting Sebald

I’ve recently contributed an article to the new book-collecting portal called Hyraxia on how my book collection evolved when I began collecting the first editions of W.G. Sebald.  Rather than reprint the article here, I’ll send you to Hyraxia where you can explore the site for yourself.

But, in answer to the obvious question, no, I don’t know what Hyraxia means.  A hyrax, according to Wikipedia, is a species of “fairly small, thickset, herbivorous mammals.” They are, curiously enough, perhaps the closest living relatives to the elephant.  Right now, I’d trade one of my cats for a hyrax.

Hyrax on Mount Kenya (Image courtesy Wikipedia)