Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

In the 847 days that must elapse between the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition’s departure from and return to Vienna, Johann Haller uses an exclamation mark only twice in his journal entries: both times on the day of the machinist’s death. The punctuation of mourning or horror - I do not presume to judge. I have simply preserved these marks and passed them on, so delicate and so natural, as fossils of an unrepeatable emotion.

The narrator of Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991) tells an absorbing three-tiered tale of Arctic exploration. The main story recounts the ill-fated Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1872-74. A second, somewhat minor story follows an Arctic-obsessed young man named Josef Mazzini who disappeared into the far north in 1981. And the third layer concerns the narrator himself, who claims to have known Mazzini briefly in Vienna and whose subsequent obsession leads him not into the Arctic but into the archives.

The story of the is told

Ransmayr writes in a documentary prose style that occasionally drifts quietly into a kind of poetic hysteria. The documentary style is particularly well-suited to the story of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition, where the narrator includes many quotations from diaries and other historical sources. Here’s Julius Payer, one of the leaders of the 1872-74 Expedition, writing in his diary as their ship becomes locked in Arctic ice:

The rumbling scaffolds of ice rise, jerk, and collapse, like a foundering city…New masses break off from the circumference of our small floe; the slabs sway vertically above the sea, an incalculable force raising them in arches and vaults, the fields literally lifting as bubbles, a grim reminder of the elasticity of ice. Crystalline hosts wage war on all sides, and between their flanks the surging water floods into the sunken basins; cliffs of ice plunge to ruin, and rivers of snow flow from their bursting slopes.

Payer’s diary is filled with the lush, beautifully obscure language of geology and the sciences:

The dolerite of Franz Josef Land is medium-grained, dark leek-green in color, and consists of plagioclase, augite, olivine, titaniterous iron, and iron chlorite.

The Expedition, which spent two terrible winters stuck in the ice, suffered horribly, all for the honor of hoping to discover something new. Nevertheless, it was the kind of historic event that enthralled Josef Mazzini, a young rebellious man from Trieste, who fell hard for the tales of heroism and adventure that comprise Arctic history. After drifting through Vienna, Mazzini set out for the same spot where the Austro-Hungarian Expedition departed - Longyearbyen, a small town located on a group of Norwegian islands far above the Arctic Circle. There, he convinced a local oceanographer to teach him the difficult tasks required to manage a dog sled team. One November day in 1981, when the oceanographer was away delivering a research paper, Mazzini stole his dog sled team and disappeared forever into the void.

Initially, the narrator is only curious about the motives that drove his acquaintance to fling himself into the Arctic. “Who would go to the Arctic just to imagine what once was…?” But as the narrator plunges into the history of Arctic exploration, he finds, instead of heroism and idealism, a “chronicle of failure”, a “dance of death.” The narrator comes to see that beneath the veneer of science and bravery the real motivating traits for Arctic exploration were egotism, vanity, willful blindness, nationalistic ambition, greed, and a powerful capacity for self-delusion. On top of that, the rapidity with which advances in technology rendered the previous generation’s “heroism” obsolete only added to the absurdity of the quest to inch closer and closer to the North Pole and the Northeast Passage. Here the narrator imagines Mazzini as he flies north toward his Arctic destination:

Nowadays every scurvy vacationer could fly over the fuckin’ pole in a Boeing - yeah, wearing a coat and tie, eating steak from a plastic bag on his knees, and holding his Kodak to the porthole.

The narrator roams through the minds of the main characters, but retains a curious reticence that occasionally forces him to pull up short.

Do they talk a lot about women? Or do they sometimes have a desire to lean against each other, to embrace? The world they come from severely punishes such love. But what laws are valid in the ice? Is it enough just to have the doctor or whoever is on nursing duty stroke their brows when they lie there with fever? I do not know.

The two harrowing tales of Arctic obsession are delivered with economy and suspense, but it is the narrator - elusive and often invisible - who is the real crux of the novel. Like the narrators in the works of W.G. Sebald, Ransmayr’s self-effacing narrator provides the moral compass and historical corrective and who turns the past into parables.

While my imagination pictures the Admiral Tegetthoff steaming past its first fields of drift ice and Josef Mazzini on his Scandinavian Airlines flight watching clouds tower up from below, I let myself sink gently back into the darkness of time, glide down through the centuries to the beginnings of a great longing.

And:

Time is a circle. Things return that they thought had sunk from sight long ago. One morning the cadaver of Bop, the Newfoundland that had been swallowed by the winter’s ice, is lying there on the snow again…as if he had died yesterday…Everything, including every hope, must be buried here twice, three times, again and again.

And:

This report is also an ongoing tribunal held in judgment of the past. I weigh, consider, imagine, and play with the possibilities of reality.

As the reader who brought Ransmayr to my attention noted to me, the tangents between Ransmayr and Sebald are tantalizing. The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, which was originally published in Germany (as Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis) in 1984, includes historic photographs and some of Julius Payer’s Arctic drawings, much as Sebald would do four years later when he began publishing extracts from his novel Schwindel. Gefuhle in the magazine Manuskripte in 1988. Ransmayr, like Sebald, pits mankind’s delusional quests against a chaotic, but all-powerful Nature.

There is no more melancholy scene than the whispering death of ice under the clouds of a night sky. In slow and proud ceremonial procession the white coffins are relentlessly borne to their graves beneath a southern sun. [Julius Payer]

When was the last time anyone saw a hard cover dos-à-dos book in the new literature section of the bookstore? As a kid I used to read cheap back-to-back science fiction paperbacks. As soon as you finished one you flipped if over and started on the second. Sometime in the 1980s Capra Press issued a series of back-to-backs with short stories by authors like Robert Coover, Raymond Carver, Ed Abbey and others. So, the moment I picked it up I suppose it was inevitable that I would buy Adam Thirlwell’s book The Delighted States with its back-to-back companion of Thirlwell’s translation of the Nabokov story Mademoiselle O.

Although The Delighted States poses as a paean to books (it reproduces the original title pages of many of the books that Thirlwell discusses) and to the act of reading, reading The Delighted States is more like settling in for a long evening with an erudite, witty conversationalist. Everything Thirlwell says sounds great as it passes between one’s ears. But in the pauses, one wonders if there is any substance beneath the extraordinary verbiage. The answer for me is a qualified yes. This is a book for the tolerant reader, for those who love the act of reading and puzzling out meaning, but it will frustrate those who seek anything less than a unified theory of literature. It’s a book of nuggets, not great veins of gold ore.

That’s not to say that Thirlwell doesn’t attack big questions. In fact, the book is basically an attempt to understand and discuss literary style and its concomitant problem - translation. Does style exist, is it different from or integral to content, and how do you translate style from one language to another? Hence, Thirlwell’s own translation of Mademoiselle O, chosen, in large part, because Nabokov originally wrote it in French (not Nabokov’s first language), then translated into English, then Russian, and then back into English. And with each translation, Nabokov also altered parts of the text.

It also helps if you take the book’s subtitle as little more than a playful homage to 19th century literature: A Book of Novels, Romances, Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes. If you think that tells you much, you will be sadly mistaken. (Just imagine: this book was titled, even less helpfully, Miss Herbert when published last year in Great Britain.)

The Delighted States is deliberately digressive and irreverent, glib, and full of gratuitous details and throw-away lines. A cafe where everyone’s playing ping-pong; that’s my new definition of literary history. It contains quirky illustrations somewhat in the manner of W.G. Sebald’s books. Deliberately eccentric, it includes an Index of Real Life (which is mostly an index to the actions of characters in novels, like “Leopold Bloom eats an erotic sandwich”), as well as an Index of Squiggles (with ten entries). All of this is more or less in keeping with the novelists that Thirlwell most admires and discusses. Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Svevo, Kafka, Joyce, Borges, Perec, Gombrowicz, Chekhov, and Nabokov are more or less his literary dream team

Thirlwell has the same kind of passion for literature that others have for things like Formula One racing or English football, and I actually found reading it contagious (although I can imagine it will irritate purists no end). Think of this book as expert color commentary for three centuries of literature.

[The theory of literature] has to cope with the persistent conspiracy of themes signaling to each other, with no regard for time or place…

As I read Aldalbert Stifter’s 1845 Christmas story Rock Crystal, which was published in 1999 as a petite volume by London’s Pushkin Press, it was easy to see why W.G. Sebald admired this nineteenth-century writer so much. Rock Crystal contains the bits and pieces required to construct a morality piece, but in the end Nature shoves everything aside with all of the rudeness of an avalanche.

South of the village you see a snowy mountain with dazzling horn-shaped peaks.

A shoemaker from one village successfully woos the daughter of a wealthy dyer from a village on the other side of the mountain. But more than a mountain separates the two villages. The dyer’s daughter has broken tradition by crossing over to the other village, and her father responds by withholding most of the dowry. Within a few years, the shoemaker and his wife have two young children who regularly trek across the mountain to spend a few hours with their grandparents before returning home.

Mothers may love their children and tenderly long for them when they are absent, but a grandmother’s love for her grandchildren amounts almost to a morbid craving.

One year on the day before Christmas, after a dry and warm autumn, the two children cross over the mountain for a holiday meal with the grandparents. They are dutifully warned about the dangers of winter storms by their father before the depart and they receive the same ominous warning from the grandparents as they set out on the return trip. Naturally, halfway home, a furious snowstorm suddenly begins.

But on every side there was nothing but a blinding whiteness, white everywhere that none the less drew its ever narrow circle about them, paling beyond into fog that came down in waves, devouring and shrouding everything till there was nothing but the voracious snow.

The two children are soon hopelessly lost in an environment that becomes less and less real and more and more dangerous.

As far as the eye could reach there was only ice. Pointed masses and irregular clumps thrusting up from the fearsome snow-encrusted ice. Instead of a barricade that could be surmounted, with snow beyond, as they had expected, yet other walls of ice rose from the buttress, cracked and fissured, with innumerable meandering blue veins, and beyond these walls, others like them; and beyond, others, until the falling snow blurred the distance in its veil of gray.

At night they take shelter beneath to massive boulders and struggle to stay awake and alive. The blinding storm abates and reveals its opposite - the infinite universe of the sky.

The arch of heaven was an even blue, so dark it was almost black, spangled with stars blazing in countless array, and through their midst a broad luminous band was woven, pale as milk…

The following day the two children are found, rescue parties from both villages having set out in a symbolic breaking with the past. Stifter makes token mention of the improved relations between the villages, but the last word, as it were, goes to the mountain.

The children, however, can never forget the mountain, and earnestly fix their gaze upon it when in the garden, when as in times past the sun is out bright and warm, the lime tree diffuses its fragrance, the bees are humming, and the mountain looks down upon them as serene and blue as the sky above.

The sublime beauty and terror of snow, ice, alpine heights, and northern extremes is a thread that runs through Sebald’s book-length poem After Nature. In the first section, devoted to the sixteenth-century German painter Matthias Grünewald, we see “the ice age, the glaringly white / towering of the summits…” in the background of Grünewald’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. At the end of this section, Sebald imagines Grünewald staring at the landscape, mourning the death of his teen-aged son.

The forest recedes, truly,
so far that one cannot tell
where it once lay, and the ice-house
opens, and rime, on to the field, traces
a colourless image of the Earth.
So, when the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air
all turns as white as
the snow on the Alps.

In the second section of After Nature, Sebald writes of the voyage of exploration of Vitus Bering, who pursued the “vast tracts of whiteness” of the Arctic Ocean between Siberia and Alaska.

All was a grayness, without direction,
with no above or below, nature
in a process of dissolution, in a state
of pure dementia.

And in the final, autobiographical section, Sebald recounts how, at the hour he was born, a freak mountain storm killed four canopy bearers who were helping with the blessing of the fields on Ascension Day.

…Many
terrible midnights
of doubt have I passed
since that time, but now peace
returns to the dust and I read
of the eighteenth century how a
verdant land is submerged
in the blue shadows of the Jurassus
and in the end only the age-old
ice on the Alps retains a faint
afterglow…

For more reading along these lines, try Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), possibly the ultimate novel of the Alps and the Arctic, and Peter Davidson’s wide-ranging study The Idea of North (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). The cover illustration for Rock Crystal, by the way, is from a painting by the British artist Jason Martin.

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