Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

And I have to think about seagulls. I have to not think about what Doctor Sandberg said, I have to take my hand away. I have to be allowed to paint again, I have to be allowed to paint clouds again, trees and poplars, big mountains. Because I am a painter, I am the landscape painter Lars Hertervig, a student of Hans Gude himself, trained at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. I am an artist, a painter. I am Lars Hertervig the painter. I have to not touch myself down between my legs. I have to think about seagulls.

It’s the 1850s. Hertervig feels he can no longer face the critique of his painting instructor and he has fallen madly in love with the fifteen-year old daughter of his German landlady, raising the suspicions of the girl’s uncle, who evicts him. Hertervig also happens to be delusional, insecure, sexually frustrated, and paranoid. In short, his entire relationship with the world has become undone. He can describe his actions and those of the few people with whom he interacts, but he can’t make much sense of it all. Ultimately, he is committed to an insane asylum where we spend a day in his company.

Melancholy is the first of Jon Fosse’s many novels to be translated from Norwegian into English, and for obvious stylistic and metaphysical reasons it’s not surprising that the publisher (Dalkey Archive) wants to position him in the lineage of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. Fosse has taken a huge risk to trap us in the mind of a man so unpleasant and seemingly unrewarding. This is how I imagine death by quicksand would feel - slow and suffocating. Nevertheless, with admirable resolve Fosse remains strictly within the boundaries of his narrator’s limited and largely uncomprehending mind as he sinks further into madness. Hertervig’s mind has latched onto repetition as a means of trying to stay methodically, but futilely, in control of himself. The result is a tour de force of writing that can make for periods of slow reading. The only times when Hertervig’s mind goes free are frightening hallucinatory moments when past and present blend in remarkable verbal collages of stunning, quickly tumbling images.

In spite of being a painter, Hertervig barely observes much about the world other than what is absolutely necessary. Here, Hertervig and other inmates shovel snow on the grounds of the asylum:

And the snow is white and powdery. I see the snow shovels of Helge and the others moving the whole time, down into the snow, then the snow shovels move up, then the snow falls off the snow shovels, then the snow shovels move down into the snow again and again the snow shovels move up.

Then, after two hundred and fifty pages, Melancholy becomes something entirely different. Fosse adds what amounts to a thirty-page coda at the end. It’s now 1991 and Vidme, an author hobbled by a sudden inability to write, is trying to start a novel about Hertervig, whose paintings have moved him deeply. For reasons he himself does not understand, he has arranged to visit a pastor of the Norwegian Church - perhaps to express an interest in joining the church, perhaps not. The pastor turns out to be newly appointed, young, female, and attractive.

He gives a short ring on the doorbell of the female pastor Maria. After pushing the button and hearing the bell ring, Vidme leans against the wall and looks at the floor, looks at the doormat of the young female pastor in the Norwegian Church,the one with the beautiful young voice and the beautiful name Maria. Vidme the writer stands there looking at the braided doormat. Vidme the writer stands there looking at the braided doormat of Maria the pastor. And then the door opens. And Vidme sees two bare feet in a pair of brown slippers and then Vidme sees a pair of light blue jeans and then heavy breasts behind a white shirt and then Vidme sees a few strands of blond hair and then a large mop of curly blond hair and then Vidme sees a mouth with thick lips and then Vidme sees two large eyes and then a high forehead.

Freed of the claustrophobic first-person narrative of Hertervig, Fosse’s writing becomes almost incantatory. The repetitious circling back of Fosse’s language is still there, but it’s less annoying and more evocative. Somewhat the opposite of Hertervig, Vidme is a man trying hard to reconstruct his ties to the world bit by bit, but always returning to home base just to make sure it is there before venturing once again into an uncertain universe.

Vidme, suddenly so uneasy with himself and unsure of his place in the world, finally realizes that the pastor has just moved into a completely furnished apartment and he observes her navigate effortlessly among objects and furniture that are not hers. She sits down in an armchair,

an armchair that was here when she moved into her furnished apartment, an armchair Maria has no kind of relationship to, an armchair Maria just sits in, it could be any armchair in the world, Maria didn’t buy it because she liked it or because it was cheap or comfortable to sit in. Maria sits in the to her meaningless armchair and she raises her wineglass toward Vidme, but Vidme just sits there staring straight ahead, as if lost in thought, but Maria says skoal!

At some point or other in our lives we all discover that we have all landed in a universe, which, it turns out, comes completely furnished. When I was younger this was called an existential crisis. Some people adapt more readily than others to this discovery. Fosse’s characters don’t react well. It’s a pity that Vidme’s story takes up less than one-ninth of the book, because Fosse’s gift is describing the constant inner push-pull of someone who simply cannot decide what he believes in. Vidme reacts to the big questions in life - like faith - with a rush of ambivalent, contradictory thoughts, and it is an absolute pleasure to wander through his mind for the brief moments he is on stage.

Because of my interest in W.G. Sebald, I’m likely to read just about anything with the word “melancholy” in the title. But I confess to being slightly puzzled by the use of the term as the title of Fosse’s book. One might be able to claim that Vidme has a good case of melancholy, but he’s a minor character. Hertervig, however, is clearly insane; he’s not depressed or suffering from any of the typical maladies known as melancholy.

Melancholy is a translation of Melancholia I. Fosse’s novel Melanchola II has not been translated yet, but a review of it can be found here on the indispensable site The Complete Reader.

I’ve been on the road recently and spent a bit too much of the past week staring at embroidered words that seemed to read: FAST! EAT BELT WHILE SEATED. That may be why I decided to read a new book of poems when I returned home.

Will Stone’s Glaciation came out in 2007 from Salt Publishing in Cambridge, England. According to the book jacket, he is a poet, photographer, and translator, with a degree in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. In an earlier post on Georges Rodenbach, I wrote about Stone’s translation of Rodenbach’s seminal photographically-illustrated novel Bruges-la-Morte, in which Stone updated the late 19th century photographs of Bruges with his own contemporary versions.

Stone’s poems dwell on the brute power of nature, the unending tragedy that is history, and the probable futility of throwing out fragile life lines in the form of art. Over and over, birds articulate the bitter truth like a Greek chorus.

Birds cry out sadly as they wheel again
back and forth over the sucking abyss,
over the monstrous plaster limb of ice.

from Glaciation

Toward the end of Glaciation, Stone includes a poem entitled SS Fort Breendonk, which is dedicated “In memory of WG Sebald.” Only a few pages into Sebald’s book Austerlitz, the title character Jacques Austerlitz gives what amounts to a brief history of the architecture of fortifications. The following day the book’s narrator takes a train from Antwerp (where the fortress conversation had taken place) to visit nearby Fort Breendonk, which had been a German prisoner of war camp run by the SS during WWII. “A monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence”; so begins the narrator’s desciption of his visit, which runs for some ten pages or so.

The narrator of Stone’s poem also explores “the surgical tunnels” of the fort where “men like us but not like us howled.”

They propped the condemned at the stake,
and afterwards got the Jews in
to collect the clogs, hose down the posts.
And the birds sang after the execution,
as was the custom.

And, like Sebald, Stone questions official attempts to memorialize places of horror and to educate present generations about the nearly unimaginable past.

‘The complexities of human nature are displayed here,’
states the tourist literature.
‘We welcome schoolchildren.’ And
‘It must never happen again.”
That sort of thing…

“Poems”, Stone writes, “are trapped passengers”

unable to decide how to tackle
the assailant.

from Explanation to an Academic

I recently upgraded my collection of books by W.G. Sebald by acquiring two rather hard to find copies of his 1990 book Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo). The first volume is one of the limited edition of 999 specially bound copies. These were done in a pale green leather and accompanied by an even paler green cardboard slipcase. This edition was issued simultaneously by Eichborn Verlag with the trade edition which had an initial print run of 10,000 copies. Internally, the only difference is the final page of the limited edition, which is hand numbered in ink but not signed by Sebald.

I also acquired a fine copy of the trade edition that includes the Cellophanschuber, or cellophane slipcover. My first copy of this book didn’t have one and now I understand why: it is an extremely fragile, almost transparent thing that probably got tossed or torn most of the time. The cellophanschuber boldly proclaims the enclosed book to be a first edition (erstausgabe). More intriguing, however, it also provides Sebald’s first work of prose fiction with a brief description or blurb that does not seem to have been used anywhere else:

Vom leisen Inferno der Depression und von der Unheimlichkeit des Glücks.

In my humble and no doubt amateur translation, this reads something like “From the quiet inferno of depression and the eeriness of fate…” (Anyone want to take a better shot at this?)

It appears to me that German booksellers use various terms for this kind of transparent paper slipcase, including Pergaminschuber and Rückenschild.  [The Rückenschild, I am told, is the pasted label on the spine.  Thanks, Claus.]

Last year I wrote about the various first editions of Schwindel. Gefühle and Vertigo here.

It’s very slim and has no writing on the spine, which is how I excuse the fact that I had not looked at this small green volume since I first acquired it years ago. But on second reading I am reminded of the vitality contained in this volume of essays, a spare 93 pages in length. The Anatomist of Melancholy: Essays in Memory of W.G. Sebald, edited by Rüdiger Görner, is a collection of uniformly excellent papers given at the University of London’s Institute of Germanic Studies (where Prof. Görner teaches) on January 31, 2003. The day was billed as “W. G. Sebald Memorial Day”, and Sebald, who said “these borders between the dead and the living are not hermetically sealed”, was clearly present in the minds of those who spoke that day.

“Still stunned by his sudden death, I can’t write anything as public as an obituary for W.G. Sebald, the author, or Max, my friend.” That was Michael Hamburger, in his brief opening remembrance. In a felicitous phrase, he refers to Sebald as a “collector of existential extremities.” After the stunned comments of Hamburger, who was the prime translator of Sebald’s poetry, the next contribution is by another of his translators, Anthea Bell. On Translating W.G. Sebald is an articulate and equally personal recollection of working closely with Sebald on several of his books, and provides insights both biographical and textual.

The core essay, if I may make such a distinction, is Jo Catling’s Gratwanderungen bis an den Rand der Natur: W.G. Sebald’s Landscapes of Memory, the longest and most ambitious piece in the collection (and nearly impossible to discuss in brief). Landscape, arguably, is the predominant motif in his books and Catling catalogs and clarifies, as it were, the multiple roles that landscapes (real, imagined, remembered) serve over the course of Sebald’s books. Interspersed throughout her essay, Catling drops in memories of Sebald, her colleague at the University of East Anglia - tantalizing tidbits, like the Walter Benjamin poster outside his office door or the readings he assigned some of his classes.

Elinor Shaffer’s essay W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Narrative is an early and excellent foray into an aspect of Sebaldology that has since become a cottage industry. What I like so much about her overview is her refusal to get bogged down in minutiae; she reproduces no images and spends little time analyzing individual images. Instead, Shaffer looks at the way in which images and text inflect each other in a kind of ebb and flow of reinforcement and contradiction. She’s a generous and careful reader who understands that it is equally important to come to grips with the absence of images at certain places in Sebald’s books.

Uwe Shütte’s “In einer wildfremden Gegend” - W.G. Sebald’s Essays über die österreichische Literatur is the only essay in German and deals with Sebald’s critical essays on Austrian literature.

Rüdiger Görner’s After Words. On W.G. Sebald’s Poetry reminds us that, in terms of his literary output, Sebald was a poet first (his 1988 book-length poem Nach der Natur did not appear in English until after all of his later prose works had been translated). Accordingly, in what feels to me like a refreshing tonic after writers who view Sebald’s poetry largely as an annex to the books of prose, Görner treats Sebald like a full-fledged poet.

Between the words falls the shadow of their etymology and usage. Word after word creates an echo of meaning and leaves behind a trail of associations. In poetry words often engage in paradoxical interplay between a sense of transience and feelings of finality. Signs of verbal playfulness can alter with expressions of melancholy and resignation.

Martin Swales’ Intertextuality, Authenticity, Metonymy?: On Reading W.G. Sebald tries to come to terms with three key aspects of Sebald’s work: “the documentary feel of Sebald’s prose; its wonderful, suggestive, literary quality; and the presence of a characteristic voice that is both urgently in evidence and immensely difficult to pin down.” Concisely and clearly, Swales hones in on the conundrum between presence and absence in Sebald’s writing (to greatly oversimplify the argument). Why is it that Sebald “never quite manages to say what he wants to say”? And why does he continually give us “the rings caused by destruction and deprivation, rather than the haemorraging centre”? Sebald, in other words, navigates between silence and the scream in order to bear witness. “It is a form of supremely valuable witness; perhaps the only manageable and endurable one there is. Not so much an anatomy, nor an allegory, nor a confession, nor an inventory of melancholy. But a hauntingly metonymic witness to it.”

The volume concludes with Will Stone’s elegaic poem To Max (For W.G. Sebald).

…
for you at least there is no oblivion,
the ink is dry.

As the treatises on Sebald start to mount up, The Anatomist of Melancholy really stands out despite, or perhaps because of, its size. Unfortunately, it currently appears to be a very difficult book to obtain. A superficial look around shows only a few copies all located in Germany; try Abebooks or Amazon.de.

“What is it about Germany and the travel book that puts them seemingly at odds?” queries the front flap of Michael Gorra’s The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (Princeton, 2004). Not far into his book Gorra, a professor of English literature at Smith College, answers by quoting a headline from the International Herald Tribune: “Germany Wants To Be Normal, but History Keeps Getting in the Way.” And, indeed, the years of National Socialism and the Holocaust cast indelible shadows across the Germany of today and even across Germany’s past. Visiting Weimar and vicinity, Gorra muses on the profound irony that the site of Goethe’s famous oak (which no longer survives) lies “halfway between the disinfection chambers and the crematorium” of Buchenwald.

Germany “is a land in which no behavior can be, not so much innocent, as innocently seen.” Gorra, ever conscientious, struggles with the Germany he finds and with himself. He feels guilty when he enjoys himself. When he starts to feel “at home” in Germany he wonders if he is in some way “normalizing” the horror. Dining out in Berlin, he eyes the crowd of “expensive, skinny people” and worries: “Germans enjoying themselves over tagliatelle al salmone and a glass of Pinot Grigio - a frightening idea, perhaps, but I was used to it by now.” On the other hand, perhaps there is a way to cope: “in Germany the practice of everyday life is not today a matter of accepting the presence of horror but rather of accepting its pastness…” Throughout The Bells in Their Silence, Gorra keeps turning this conundrum around and around, peering at it from different vantage points. Much to his credit, he does not turn his magnifying glass solely on Germany and the German psyche; he pays equal attention to his own contradictory responses to the German “problem.”

Here, it seems to me, is the real subject of Gorra’s book: how is a conscientious outsider supposed to feel about Germany? The fraught nature of Gorra’s inner struggle is embodied in the bells of his book’s title. The church bells of the Marienkirche in Thomas Mann’s city of Lubeck remain embedded in the floor exactly where they fell during an Allied raid in 1942. The bells have been left as a memorial - but to what? To German guilt? To Allied bombing of civilian populations? To all the war dead? To suffering in general? “The bells remember, but what they remember remains unsaid. Or rather, these found objects say many things, in different measure to different people, and their enigmatic power depends on saying no one of them exclusively.”

Even as the Holocaust manifests itself everywhere Gorra looks, The Bells in Their Silence is otherwise a very discrete view of contemporary Germany. Gorra obliquely refers to “some curious cable channels” and he walks past - but does not enter - a street of prostitution in Hamburg’s red light district. Otherwise he views Germany through the twin lenses of literature and history. He writes wonderfully about Goethe, George Eliot, Stendhal, Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, and Theodor Fontane, among others. He writes considerably less about a handful of places in Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Lubeck, Weimar, Buchenwald. But, like the best of travel literature (a term that seems to belittle the book’s seriousness and scope no matter how deliberately Gorra himself uses it), The Bells in Their Silence finds a balance between the inner travels prompted by our travels to confront the unfamiliar.

References to Sebald’s books - especially The Rings of Saturn and On the Natural History of Destruction, are scattered throughout Gorra’s book.

Sebald’s departures bring him back always to the same place, the same set of facts: to the industrial killing of the Holocaust….no matter how far he digresses, he is always drawn back, never closer to that history than when he seems farthest away. And it is dazzling, this failure to escape, failure and success at once…

[How German Is It is borrowed from the title of Walter Abish's 1979 novel; an essential read, I think. The lead image is: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, ca 1818 (Kunsthalle, Hamburg).]