An Illustrated “Restitution”

Verlag Ulrich Keicher in Warmbronn, Germany has recently issued a wonderful edition of W.G. Sebald’s Zerstreute Reminiszenzen, the speech he gave on November 17, 2001 at the opening of the Stuttgarter literaturhauses.  This was published as An Attempt at Restitution in The New Yorker (December 20-27, 2004) and was anthologized in Campo Santo. What makes this publication is fun are the illustrations and the loose inserts.

The illustrations include many of the things mentioned by Sebald, from the Quelle mail-order catalog that his father showed him for Christmas 1949 to newspaper clippings (above) and photographs from the Sebald archive in Marbach.  A few sections of Sebald’s own typescript of the speech are reproduced.

To add to the fun, two facsimiles are tucked into a small pocket on the final page.  The first is a postcard of from Sebald’s collection referred to when Sebald recounts his memories of the “angular brutalist architecture” of Stuttgart Central Station (designed by Paul Bonatz).  Sebald mentions a postcard he owns

written by an English schoolgirl of about fifteen (judging from the clumsy handwriting) on holiday in Stuttgart to a Mrs. J. Winn in Saltburn in the county of Yorkshire on the back of a picture postcard, which came into my hands at the end of the 1960s in a Salvation Army junk shop in Manchester, and which shows three other tall buildings and Bonatz’s railway station…

The second inserted facsimile is Sebald’s very first entry in the literary world – a 1961 student literary magazine called Der Wecker, co-edited by Sebald and his friend Jan-Peter Tripp.  (Cover photograph below by Tripp.)  All sixteen pages are reproduced including articles on Algeria and Albert Camus and ads for beer and Coca Cola.

This small pamphlet was issued in September in an edition of 800 for only 16 Euros, but seems to be available only from the publisher.  [Note: a reader clarifies that the pamphlet is only available for purchase through the bookshop at the Stuttgart Literaturhaus - contact info@literaturhaus-stuttgart.de or fax Frau Leutner 0711-2842905.]

Speak, Memory

To some extent, every artist creates his or her own artistic predecessors, and in doing so resequences the artistic DNA of their precursors to be a bit more in alignment with their own. Vladimir Nabokov’s photograph-laden memoir Speak, Memory is frequently mentioned as an important source for the memoir-like prose fictions of W.G. Sebald. As has been pointed out many times, Nabokov hovers as a ghostly presence throughout The Emigrants, even appearing in a photograph.

It’s a little hard to imagine two writers as different as Nabokov and Sebald. Raised amongst wealth and privilege in a close-knit family, Nabokov recalls his life in pre-Revolutionary Russia with nearly unbroken nostalgic pleasure. Whatever nostalgia Sebald might have had for his youthful years in a remote Bavarian village becomes largely tainted for him by the facts of German history. Nabokov’s father was an anti-Tsarist, imprisoned, exiled, and ultimately killed for his fearless activism. Sebald’s father served in the German military before and during World War II.

Early in Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells of two encounters his father had fifteen years apart with a man named Kuropatkin, both stories involving matches.

What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme…The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.

This is how Speak, Memory, operates then – thematically rather than chronologically. In each chapter Nabokov returns anew to his early childhood and reels in, as it were, the memories associated with certain themes. Then he turns, faces a new direction, and casts his line again. But, it must be said, the pleasure that the thematic approach gives Nabokov seems largely poetic, as if the highest ecstasy arises from making a great rhyme.

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors…Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech.

Sebald, too, enjoyed the harmonies of memory and of history, but more often than not he used them to find the underlying horror. For Nabokov, childhood in Russia was a Garden of Eden. For Sebald, the Garden of Eden was a lie. In many ways, reading Speak, Memory serves as a reminder of what themes are not to be found in Sebald’s writing: innocence, romance, sexuality, and familial love, amongst others.

When Sebald himself wrote about Speak, Memory, as he did in Dream Textures, published in Campo Santo, he extracted a theme of spirits, of ghosts, of seances.

Nabokov repeatedly tries…to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our lives… [on the spirits who] tread the border between life and the world beyond.

Dream Textures is a remarkable piece of writing, a single paragraph ten pages long in which Sebald goes about the task of creating the Nabokov that he absorbed when Nabokov’s memories spoke to him.

Bruce and Max

One never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre. Inspired by a kind of avidity for the undiscovered, they move along a line where the points of demarcation are those strange manifestations and objects of which one cannot say whether they are real, or whether they are among the phantasms generated in our minds from time immemorial. Anthropological and mythological studies in the tradition of Tristes Tropiques, adventure stories looking back to our early childhood reading, collections of facts, dream books, regional novels, examples of lush exoticism, puritanical penance, sweeping baroque vision, self-denial, and personal confession – they are all these things together. It probably does them most justice to see their promiscuity, which breaks the mold of the modernist concept, as a late flowering of those traveler’s tales, going back to Marco Polo, where reality is constantly entering the realm of the metaphysical and miraculous, and the way through the world is taken from the first with an eye fixed on the writer’s own end.

W.G. Sebald could have been describing his own books, but his article The Mystery of the Red-Brown Skin was about Bruce Chatwin. In their own ways, both Bruce Chatwin and Max Sebald were fascinated by history, by travel, by walking, and their books tore down the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. Both perfected the art of wildly digressing, forcing the reader’s attention to careen from topic to topic down their pages like a pinball.

I went back to re-read Chatwin’s In Patagonia in the Penguin Classics edition with Nicholas Shakespeare’s Introduction and fell under the spell again. As with Sebald’s books, the attraction to In Patagonia is slightly sinister because the book is a horrific tale of self-delusion, dishonesty, madness, suicide, and death – all conducted in one of the most dismal climates on the planet. Sebald greatly admired the way in which Chatwin’s obsession for a piece of ancient skin from in his grandmother’s cupboard – skin reputedly, but falsely, attributed to be mastodon flesh – propelled Chatwin on his fabulous quest for its source at the tail end of South America. (It was, in Hitchcockian terms, Chatwin’s MacGuffin.)

As many have remarked, In Patagonia is not even close to being a traditional travel book. Chatwin, in fact, wanted his agent to make sure it wouldn’t be placed in the Travel section of bookstores. Chatwin described In Patagonia as “a symbolic voyage which is a meditation on the restlessness and exile.” He scarcely describes the landscape at all, telling, instead, a series of loosely connected stories about the people he meets. His chapters tend to start like this: “Anselmo told me to go and see the poet. ‘The Maestro,’ he said.” And: “A man I met in Rio Grande passed me on to his cousins who farmed close to the Chilean border.” Chatwin was profoundly attracted to those exiles for whom the home country had become a myth, a myth as powerful as it is indistinct and incorrect. Chatwin’s brilliance, it seems to me, was to be able to nail the personalities in a handful of sentences, and by the end of the book we begin to see the many facets of the colonial mind as it disintegrates during the post-colonial world. For this is what In Patagonia is really about, the pathological kinship between colonialism and self-deception, which we witness through the inability and unwillingness of so many in this book to disentangle themselves from the past. Throughout all of In Patagonia, I think there is only one soul who has “gone native” and come to terms with his adopted country.

Just as the ever-present undercurrent to Sebald’s books was the Nazi-led Holocaust, the recurring theme to In Patagonia is the holocaust that led to the near-extermination of South America’s indigenous peoples – the Alakaluf, the Yaghan, the Onas, the Haush. (Collector that he was, Chatwin specialized in rare words.) In one example Chatwin describes the 1593 voyage of the Desire up the coast of Brazil, and the resulting slaughter of warriors from the Tehuelches and other tribes. During the respite between fighting the natives, the men of the well-named ship Desire take time to club to death 20,000 penguins, determined to return with a hold full of penguin meat. But on shipboard, the penguins carcasses took their revenge, breeding worms that nearly killed every sailor during the return voyage.

As craftsmen, though, Chatwin and Sebald could hardly be more dissimilar. Chatwin’s color-infused, perfunctory sentences are the polar opposite of Sebald’s meandering prose.

As we drove into Esquel, a bush fire was burning on one of the tight brown hills that hemmed in the town. I ate at a green restaurant on the main street. A zinc counter ran the length of the room. At one end a glass vitrine displayed steaks and kidneys and racks of lamb and sausages. The wine was acid and came in pottery penguins. There were hard black hats at every table. The gauchos wore boots creased like concertinas and black bombachas.

The style that Chatwin uses, seemingly straight off the pages of noir, tough-guy writers like Raymond Chandler, is perfectly suited to this book in which the threat of crime and murder lurks continually.

Nicholas Shakespeare writes about the influence of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his idea of “the decisive moment” on Chatwin, not on Chatwin’s photographs, which are static, overly scenic images of Patagonia safely tucked into a clump of glossy pages in the middle of the book, but on Chatwin’s writing. With razor-sharp incisiveness, Chatwin can drop a decisive image onto the page when one least expects it. In Chapter 84, which is only two paragraphs long, Chatwin attends church in Puntas Arenas, where the minister asks the congregation to pray for General Pinochet, then the head of Chile’s repressive military junta. Here is the second and final paragraph of the chapter in its entirety.

I also met an American lady ornithologist, down here to study the fighting behavior of Darwin’s Rheas. She said the two males locked necks and whirled round in circles: the one who got dizzy first was the loser.

W.G. Sebald’s review of Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Chatwin was first published in German in 2000 in Literaturen, and is translated in Sebald’s anthology Campo Santo.

Women, Discrete Messengers of the Past

[Léonard-Alexis Daligé de Fontenay, Maison natale de Napoléon Ier à Ajaccio (détail)]

In W.G. Sebald’s short prose piece A Little Excursion to Ajaccio, the narrator purchases an admission ticket to Casa Napoleon (Napoleon’s birthplace museum) from a cashier of “very stately proportions.” He imagines her on an operatic stage singing “Lasciate mi morire or some such aria.”

Lasciatemi morire, also known as Ariadne’s Lament, comes from Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’Arianna of 1608. This aria is the only surviving remnant of the opera, and it is only known because Monteverdi later published it separately as a madrigal, which is how it is usually found on recordings today.L’Arianna is the story of Ariadne, who has been left behind on the island Naxos by Theseus (the same event which inspired Richard Strauss’ wonderful opera Ariadne auf Naxos).As Ariadne sees her lover sail away, the aria Lasciate mi morire conveys her conviction that death is her only option.

Let me die!
And who do you think can comfort me
in such harsh misfortune,
in such great torment?

Sebald’s conflation of the cashier and Ariadne, who had been abandoned by the warrior-king of Athens, subtly reinforces a gender dichotomy that exists in the three longer pieces that comprise his uncompleted Corsican prose work (I’m ignoring the brief piece called La coeur de l’ancienne ecole, which appears to bear only a tangential relation to Sebald’s larger purpose in this work). In this gender dichotomy, to be brief, men destroy and women are left behind to hold the flame of remembrance alight and the household together.

[The alcove where Napoleon was born in 1769]

Wandering through Casa Napoleon, Sebald’s narrator encounters another woman, a museum docent or caretaker, dressed in the colors of the tricolor, who also strikes him as being “of Napoleonic descent.”She brings to his attention an extraordinary piece of folk art, an elaborate Napoleonic family tree in the form of a giant oak, created at the end of the 19th century by the daughter of a local notary. “Whether out of love for the Emperor or for her father [another admirer of Napoleon], she must have devoted endless hours to her work.” The notary’s daughter is one of those obsessive characters that Sebald found fascinating (not all of whom, admittedly, were women), but here Sebald implies she is part of a long line of women from Napoleon’s era to our day who maintain and venerate the memory of the Emperor. Women serve as “discrete messengers of the past.”

By contrast, the only men that the narrator meets in Corsica “were participating in a ritual of destruction which long ago became pointless” – hunting. In his Corsican story The Alps in the Sea, Sebald’s narrator observes “the fever of the chase” that consumes the men of Corsica every September, as they attempt to hunt the animals that long ago were hunted nearly out of existence by their ancestors. Driving jeeps, dressed in paramilitary gear, bearing rifles and ammunition, “the Corsican hunters are not to be trifled with if you happen to stray into their territory.”

In the Corsican newspapers, the so-called ouverture de la chasses (the start of the hunting season) is one of the main subjects of reporting in September, together with the never-ending accounts of the bombing of police stations, local authority tax offices, and other public institutions.

All of this violence against animals and authority leads the narrator to recall Flaubert’s story Saint Julien l’hospitalier, an “utterly perverse tale of the despicable nature of human violence.”

We must remember that the Corsican texts posthumously assembled and published in the anthology titled Campo Santo are just the fragments of an uncompleted work that might have resembled Vertigo or The Rings of Saturn. Nevertheless the male/female roles seem so deliberately laid out that I would venture to say this was a theme that would have been developed further. In fact, there really isn’t an episode in the Corsican texts when men and women appear together except for the anonymous hordes of tourists the narrator encounters in Ajaccio or in the cemetery at Pliana, where the genders are intermingled indiscriminately.

Finally, here is an excerpt from the narrator’s description of a painting in the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, a double portrait by Pietro Paolini of a woman with melancholy eyes and a dress “the color of the night” and her daughter.

Her right arm protectively embraces her small daughter, who stands in front of her turning sideways, toward the edge of the picture, but with her grave face, upon which the tears have only just dried, turned toward the observer in a kind of silent challenge. The little girl wears a brick-red dress, and the soldier doll hardly three inches high which she is holding out to us, whether in memory of her father who has gone to war or to ward off the evil eye we may be casting on her, also wears red. I stood in front of this double portrait for a long time, seeing in it, as I thought at the time, an annulment of all the unfathomable misfortune of life.

It is my sense that the word “annulment” is a miscue in the translation. Here is the original German:

Lange habe ich vor diesem Doppelporträit gestanden und in ihm, wie ich damals glaubte, das ganze unergründliche Unglück des Lebens aufgehoben gesehen. [Campo Santo, Hanser, page 9]

I think Sebald’s intention was more along the lines of ” an abandonment of all the unfathomable misfortune of life”. Would anyone care to weigh in with a better translation of this sentence?

Swimming and Walking: A Report on Peripatetic Liminality

No, the report isn’t here. You have to visit The Selfdivider to read his excellent account of attending Christian Moser’s recent lecture at Columbia University’s Deutsches Haus – “Peripatetic Liminality” – on the cultural history of walking and W.G. Sebald.

One sentence in particular caught my attention.

Drawing from passages from Browne’s Religio Medici and other works, Moser established that there is a sense of levitation in Browne’s prose and philosophy (which Sebald also noted), and that Browne combines the myopic vision of the walker with the cosmic perspective of a flyer.

This sentence brought into sharp focus for me the episode in Campo Santo when Sebald leaves a hiking trail with its “terrifying curves, sharp bends and zigzags, [and] …rocky precipices” to go for a swim in the Bay of Ficajola.

I swam out to sea with a great sense of lightness, very far out, so far that I felt I could simply let myself drift away into the evening and so into the night. But as soon as, obeying the strange instinct that binds us to life, I turned back after all and made for the land which, from this distance, resembled a foreign continent, swimming became more and more difficult with every stroke, and not as if I were laboring against the current that had been carrying me on before; no, I was inclined to think that I was swimming steadily uphill, if one can say so of a stretch of water. The view before my eyes seem to have tipped out of its frame, was leaning toward me, swaying and flickering of its own accord, with the upper rim of the picture skewed several degrees in my direction and the lower rim skewed away from me to the same extent. And sometimes I felt as if the prospect towering so menacingly in front of me was not a part of the real world but the reproduction of a now insuperable inner faintness, turned inside out and shot through with blue-black markings. Even harder than reaching the bank was the climb later up the winding road… It took me a good hour and a half to climb to Piana again, but once there I could walk as if weightlessly, like a man who has mastered the art of levitation… [pages 16-17]

In this passage, in which swimming is bracketed by descriptions of treacherous and agonizing hikes, Sebald’s time in the water offers him a powerful – and temptingly final – release from the world. Nevertheless, when he finally returns to the village of Piana (where he immediately visits the local graveyard!), a sense of weightlessness and levitation returns.The agony of coping with the world and resisting death, of simple human perseverance, somehow leads to momentary ecstasy, and then, a few seconds later, Sebald is returned to normalcy, pondering the world around him with renewed curiosity.

Now click over to The Selfdivider, read for a few minutes, then go outside and take a walk.Or go for a swim.