The Five Dials Goldmine

The new issue of Five Dials is very much an issue devoted to W.G. Sebald.  Nearly half of the 32 pages are related to him in one way or another. The issue opens with a “Letter from the Editor” (Craig Taylor) entitled On Translation and Sebald.  This is followed by A Little Trick of the Mind, in which four translators ( including Sebald’s primary English translator Anthea Bell) discuss “the world’s second oldest profession.”  (Bell’s father edited The Times crossword puzzle, we learn.)  She talks about translating the Asterix books and Sebald, although most of what she says here about Sebald she has said elsewhere.

Joe Dunthorne, a writer and, perhaps more importantly, a striker for the England Writers’ Football Team, writes about reading Austerlitz and what it meant to him as he moved to London.

But the gold mine is The Collected ‘Maxims.’ Robert MacGill and David Lambert were students in Sebald’s last fiction workshop, held in 2001.  They’ve combined many of the notes they made about what Sebald said in class.

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time; everything co-exists.  Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion.  Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can.  No one will ever notice.  You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.

Simon Prosser (publishing director for Hamish Hamilton) provides An A to Z of W.G. Sebald, an alphabetical soup of reminiscences grouped under subheadings  such as Bavaria, Climate, Kant, Lac de Bienne (the one place Sebald felt truly at home), Smoking, and Zembla.

And lastly there is a short piece by the late author Roger Deakin.

Best of all, Five Dials is on online magazine published Hamish Hamilton, W.G. Sebald’s British publisher.  It is a .pdf file for Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The Natural History of Capitalism

Many a time, at the end of a working day, Janine would talk to me about Flaubert’s view of the world, in her office where there were such quantities of lecture notes, letters and other documents lying around that it was like standing amidst a flood of paper. On the desk, which was both the origin and the focal point of this amazing profusion of paper, a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around on the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the centre of the room. Years ago, Janine had been obliged by the ever-increasing masses of paper on her desk to bring further tables into use, and these tables, where similar processes of accretion had subsequently taken place, represented later epochs, so to speak, in the evolution of Janine’s paper universe. The carpet, too, had long since vanished beneath several inches of paper; indeed, the paper had begun climbing from the floor, on which, year after year, it had settled, and was now up the walls as high as the top of the door frame, page upon page of memoranda and notes pinned up in multiple layers, all of them by just one corner. Wherever it was possible there were piles of papers on the books on her shelves as well….Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Durer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection.  And the fact was that whatever she might be looking for amongst her papers or her books, or in her head, she was generally able to find right away. - from W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn.

It seems to typical of Sebald to lovingly and at great length describe the total dissolution of his colleague’s office only, in the end, to insist that there is an abiding order of some sort.  This, it seems to me, is one of the central dualities of Sebald’s work: behind our apprehension that life, history, and nature ceaselessly cascade into chaos, Sebald continually searched for order and for ways to adequately describe the patterns that he saw.

On a sporadic basis I have read more than halfway through the essays in W.G. Sebald and the Writing of History, edited by Anne Fuchs and J.J. Long.  Mary Cosgrove’s Sebald for our Time: The Politics of Melancholy and the Critique of Capitalism in his Work is the first essay to really capture my full attention.  With Dürer’s etching Melancholia I (1514) as her centerpiece, Cosgrove describes Sebald’s subject in The Rings of Saturn and his other works as “the interdependence of human and natural history and the extreme difficulty of developing an adequate temporal sense for grasping this ‘world history’ intellectually.”  In my words then, a main motive in Sebald’s enterprise is to somehow overcome the human inability to have perspective on time and space.  Durer’s image suggests to Cosgrove that melancholy is “a problem specific to the intellectual” because it is “a basic problem of knowledge and understanding,” and she points out how many melancholic intellectuals we encounter in The Rings of Saturn, which she views as an “epistemological framework that would somehow capture the interconnectedness of persons, regions, and events across space and time and that would explain…the place of mankind in the late twentieth century.”

…the starting point for Sebald’s temporal framework [is] the beginnings, through travel, conquest, exploitation and profit, of the Western world’s expansion into an increasingly domineering, interdependent and integrated global system.

In the core section of her essay, entitled The Natural History of Capitalism, Cosgrove ties together numerous threads that are woven throughout Sebald’s works, making a strong case that Sebald represents “history as an ambitious attempt to communicate the strange tempo of capitalism’s espansion.”  I’m with Cosgrove on the importance that capitalism plays in Sebald’s work, but I still don’t feel that capitalism was the holy grail for Sebald,  or, as Cosgrove puts it, the “unifying perspective.”  The history of capitalism doesn’t fully explain (to me, at least) the two men who loom so large (albeit mostly unseen) in Sebald’s work: Napoleon and Hitler.

All of this made me think of Richard Sheppard’s remarkable essay Dexter – sinister: Some observations on decrypting the mors code in the work of W. G. Sebald (Journal of European Studies 2005). Ostensibly a book review of W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, edited by Jonathan Long and Anne Whitehead, Sheppard’s text cuts a wide and intelligent swathe across Sebald’s work. But the brief quote I want to pull out is this:

But [essayist Greg] Bond demonstrably gets it wrong when he claims that Max sees the Holocaust as the point when ‘everything began to go downhill’. In an interview of August 2001 that was published ten days after his death, Max explicitly dated that juncture as ‘spätestens mit Napoleon’ (‘with Napoleon at the latest’). In Max’s view, colonialism and the technologically driven excesses of the twentieth century were latter-day aspects of the Napoleonic ‘Traum, aus diesem sehr unordentlichen Kontinent Europa etwas viel Ordentlicheres, Geregeltes, Durchorganisiertes, Machtvolles zu machen’ (‘dream of turning this very disorderly continent of Europe into something much more orderly, rule-governed, thoroughly organized, powerful’) (Pralle, 2001). In making this point, I am not just correcting a factual error. Rather, it seems to me that Napoleon came, in Max’s mind, to personify the Symbolic Order that governed modernizing Europe and that Max spent his entire life as a writer of academic and fictional work in conflict with its allegedly repressive, totalitarian and exploitative nature. Once this point is understood, yet another reason becomes clear why Max gave his last major work the name of a battle that Napoleon decisively won.

To be honest, I sense that Sebald treated these larger than life protagonists in history more as ahistorical characters, not as products of imperialism or capitalism but almost as natural disasters.Even though the shadows of Napoleon and Hitler loom over nearly every page Sebald wrote, they never really appear in their own right and he never attempts to “understand” them in any fashion.  And maybe this partly answers why I have always felt that Sebald was ultimately pessimistic, for while we might be able to sense patterns and reasons for capitalism’s failures, history-shaking figures like Napoleon and Hitler are ultimately as unpredictable, uncontainable, and apparently inevitable as a volcanic eruption.

Scholar or Celebrity Critic? The Scratch-and-Sniff Test

One night last week as the early signs of winter began to settle in around me – the leaves have fallen, the rhubarb plants and potted herbs have succumbed to the frost, and I’ve ordered a new pair of snow boots from Land’s End – I cozied into the corner of the couch to read a newly received anthology of essays on W.G. Sebald.  Even though it had been published more than a year ago and contains only English-language essays, W.G. Sebald and the Writing of History (Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007) is currently only available in Germany (try Abebooks or Amazon.de).  Go figure.

Co-edited by well-known Sebald scholars Anne Fuchs and J.J. Long, W.G. Sebald and the Writing of History begins with a piece by Long called W.G. Sebald: A Bibliographical Essay in Current Research, in which he summarizes the research (i.e. the critical positions) of numerous scholars who have written about Sebald.  Long’s overview provides a welcome assessment of the areas of Sebald’s writing that have proven to be particularly rich for scholars, and I was just about to move onto the next essay in the book when one phrase caught my eye.  Long makes reference to an essay by Scott Denham (Davidson College) on the critical reception of Sebald’s books.

[Denham] considers the role of celebrity critics, such as Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, Gabriel Josipovici, Cynthia Ozick, and James Wood…

What, I wondered, does this mean.  Is a celebrity critic first cousin to a celebrity chef?  Do we suspect that Susan Sontag really doesn’t know how to make a proper soufflé or that someone ghost-wrote James Wood’s recipes? I knew I should have been suspicious when Gabriel Josipovici brought out his own line of cookware.  And what is Auster doing in this list?  He’s never written about Sebald.  His crime, apparently, was to provide a jacket blurb for Vertigo.

So, with all due respect to the excellent Professor Denham, here is my modest proposal.  We need a simple scratch-and-sniff test to help separate true scholars from celebrity critics.  Something so easy it comes with a money-back guarantee.  Maybe like this:

Real scholars don’t blurb.
Real scholars don’t scrimp on footnotes.
Real scholars do research; celebrities do reviews.
Real scholars never write fiction on the side.
Real scholars never have their portrait made by Annie Leibowitz or Elizabeth Peyton.

Well, it’s a start.  I’ll just have to give this a little more thought as I read the rest of the essays on the anthology, not one of which appears to have been written by a celebrity chef.

Saturn’s Moons

The British publisher Legenda has just announced a new book on Sebald being edited by Jo Catling (of the University of East Anglia) and Richard Hibbitt (of the University of Leeds): Saturn’s Moons: A W G Sebald Handbook. (Catling was a teaching colleague of Sebald’s and her elegy, Silent Catastrophe: In Memoriam W. G. (Max) Sebald 1944 – 2001, can be found here at New Books in German, along with many other very interesting articles on German-language literature.)

On the Legenda website, there are links to distributors where the volume can be pre-ordered in Great Britain or in the US. Or you can find it already listed on Amazon.uk. Here is the description of the book (cut and pasted from the publisher), which is set to appear in December 2008.

The German novelist, poet and critic W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) has in recent years attracted a phenomenal international following for his evocative prose works, such as “Die Ausgewanderten” (“The Emigrants”), “Die Ringe des Saturn” (“The Rings of Saturn”) and “Austerlitz”, spellbinding elegiac narratives which, through their deliberate blurring of genre boundaries and provocative use of photography, explore questions of Heimat and exile, memory and loss, history and natural history, art and nature. “Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook” brings together in one volume a wealth of new critical and visual material on Sebald’s life and works, encompassing a range of first-hand accounts by his former colleagues and students.The contributions cover various phases and facets of the writer’s career, including Sebald as teacher, as founder of the British Centre for Literary Translation at UEA, and as scholar and critic. Lavishly illustrated, the Handbook contains definitive primary and secondary bibliographies, details of audiovisual material and interviews, and a catalogue of Sebald’s library.

The contributors include Jo Catling, Florian Radvan, Clive Scott, Richard Sheppard, Gordon Turner and Ulrich von Bulow. Drawing on a range of original sources from the Sebald Nachlass – the most important part of which is now held in Marbach, where it will be the subject of a major exhibition in 2008-9 – “Saturn’s Moons” provides an invaluable source for future Sebald studies in English and German alike, complementing recent critical works on subjects such as history, memory, modernity, reader response and the visual.