Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

Ireland’s non-profit RTE Radio 1 recently interviewed poet and translator George Szirtes and Aengus Woods, a philosophy student at the New School, about W.G. Sebald. The eighteen minute conversation is fascinating, intelligent, and much too short. Aengus reads a short section from The Rings of Saturn and George reads briefly from Austerlitz, which made me think again about the differences between reading literature and listening to it. To listen to a good reading (and both of these speakers have wonderful voices) is a seductive experience - perhaps too seductive, I realized, as I found myself building a different narrator to suit each of their voices. But on further reflection I also realized that even when I read silently to myself I am somehow shaping a narrator around my own voice and pronunciation. Curiously, when the program’s host Seán Rocks asks George and Aengus about Sebald’s “voice,” he’s referring to something about Sebald’s style, not Sebald’s voice.

Just as a reminder, if you really want to hear Sebald’s voice you can, thanks to Michael Silverblatt’s program “Bookworm” for radio station KCRW.

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’m in the middle of traveling and reading in hotel rooms. So permit me to redirect your attention to dovegreyreader, who clearly has too much time on her hands. How can anyone read so many books and write with such felicity? At any rate, scroll down to her post for January 16 and take in her response to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. She made it through the book on her second attempt and finds the journey well worth it. Her response is both great fun and on target. After that, scroll around and learn about the other gems she’s reading, then wish you had more free time.

I think most people would judge Austerlitz to be the least user-friendly of Sebald’s books and as a result it doesn’t get the attention that The Rings of Saturn and, to a lesser extent, Vertigo do. But my guess is that Austerlitz will end up being the book by Sebald that lasts and lasts.

(And no baby at selfdivider yet.)

Elective affinities…are the type of willful connections made among disparate objects which go beyond actual correspondences such as shared dates or locations. [James P. Martin]

Hot off the press is the 2007 Gegenwarts Literatur: A German Studies Yearbook, which focuses on W.G. Sebald through nine essays (four in German, five in English). The secret word (to invoke Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life) that pops up repeatedly is Goethe’s phrase “elective affinities,” which seems about as good a phrase as any to describe the collective thrust of these essays. Here are my quick and greatly oversimplified summaries of the ones in English.

Richard Langston (Elective Affinities: Sebald and Kluge on Feeling History) simultaneously contributes to and examines the ever-growing aftermath to Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction by dissecting Sebald’s complex re-thinking of Alexander Kluge, especially on Geschichtsgefühl, or feelings about history.

Ben Hutchinson (Der Erzähler als Schutzengel: W.G. Sebald’s Reading of Giorgio Bassani) speculates on the influence that Bassani had on Sebald, based in part on a close examination of the marked-up copies of Bassani’s books in Sebald’s archive. When Sebald was asked about the writers that most influenced him, Bassani was the only non-German writer in the list.

James P. Martin (W.G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn) discusses the roles that melancholy and exile play in the construction of Sebald’s narrators.

At the heart of this project [Der Ringe des Saturn] is the Sebaldian narrator, a melancholic wanderer whose deliberately peripheral, emigrant perspective evokes the flood of memories and significations in the representation of catastrophic events. [page 132]

The inability of atrocity to be conveyed in its totality using representational language, demands an oblique approach to history and a peripheral perspective upon the traces of destruction in material culture….Sebald’s wandering narrator recognizes that a condition of being-in the-world, in a Heideggerian sense, is that one is forced to continually interpret reality in order to create meaning, and that this process necessarily entails a partial destruction of that reality…in order to create the possibility of a new meaning… [page 133]

Karen Remmler (The Shape of Remembering: W.G. Sebald’s Die Ringe der Saturn and Austerlitz) deals with the way in which memory functions in these two novels, especially the memory of traumatic pasts. She explores the various geometric patterns which recur and which both store and trigger memories (think of the quincunx and the fortress at Breendonk).

Peter O. Arnds (Dans la Salle des Pas Perdus: Wandering, Dwelling, and Myth in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz) reads Austerlitz and Sebald through the lens of Heidegger.

Authors writing on Sebald in German are Doren Wohlleben, Claudia Öhlschläger, Elena Agazzi, and Yahya Elsaghe.Other essays in the volume deal with Elfriede Jelinek, Turkish-German writer Ermine Sevgi Özdamar, and Urs Widmer.

I purchased my copy directly from the website of the publisher Stauffenburg Verlag, where there is a much fuller description of the contents.

It would be easy to miss Rick Poynor’s piece on W.G. Sebald called Writing in Pictures, which feels somewhat misplaced in his book Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). Who would think of finding something about Sebald in a book that promotes itself as an exploration of “the past decade of advertising and design and the invasion of sexual imagery into everyday life”? Designing Pornotopia is largely about graphic design, architecture, men’s magazines, and fashion. Nevertheless, Writing in Pictures, Poynor’s multi-layered reflection on Austerlitz, and his brief history of the cover designs for J.G. Ballard’s cult book Crash (1973) should not be overlooked.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, typographers and book designers are intrigued by the challenge of the embedded photographs in Sebald’s books, so it really is not a surprise that Poynor would write about Sebald, as he has done in several places that are easily found online. Poynor calls Sebald “one of the greatest European writers of recent years” and he feels that Austerlitz is a “masterpiece” and represents “Sebald’s most sophisticated marriage of writing and imagery.” In Writing in Pictures, he intelligently addresses Sebald as a “brilliantly visual” writer, both in his prose and his use of photographs. Poynor zeros in on one of the central issues in Sebald’s work: memory. “His eye records with photographic accuracy and then these perceptions are recovered from memory and reconstituted as fictional experience with the same exhilaratingly scrupulous fidelity.” Although he doesn’t elaborate, Poynor is suggesting that a necessary transformation has occurred when experiences re-emerge from memory.
Poynor, who is extremely interested in Sebald’s use of photography, extracts a revealing comment Sebald made in an interview: “I’ve always collected stray photographs; there’s a great deal of memory in them.” The question this raises for me is: are these two types of memories the same? Do the memories drawn from experience function the same as memories drawn from photographs - especially these “stray” photographs (by which I assume he means the anonymous photographs he collected in flea markets and antique stores)? To some extent, this depends on what kind of memories Sebald referred to when he talked about his “stray photographs.” Was he selecting photographs that invoked his own memories, that reminded him of something in his own experience? Or was he suggesting that some element of the original owner’s memory is contained in and transferable from photographs? I think it is fair to say that memory is the central process in Sebald’s work, but I don’t think memory is limited to one function.

[Pages 194-5 of Austerlitz]

In an appropriately Sebaldian move, Poynor visited Terezin (or Theresienstadt), the Czech Jewish ghetto and concentration camp that is a key location in Austerlitz, while attending a conference in Prague in 2004. He was curious “to find out how closely Sebald’s description of the town compared with reality.” He was especially interested in especially the two sequences of photographs undoubtedly taken by Sebald which appear between pages 190 and 197 of the American edition. The first is a series of four photographs of doorways, the last apparently being a doorway into one of the gas chambers. The second series depicts the window displays of a store called the Antikos Bazar on the town square.Poynor re-photographed in color some of the locations shown in Austerlitz and he includes three of his own versions in Writing with Pictures. Read an unillustrated version of Poynor’s article at Design Observer.