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]

A fellow book collector who also concentrates on the works of W.G. Sebald recently asked me if I had ever taken a close look at the uncorrected bookproof that Harvill Press issued in 1996 prior to the release of Sebald’s book The Emigrants. I had not; it had been sitting, ignored, on the shelf since I purchased it years ago.

I have written earlier about some of the changes that occurred when Sebald’s book Die Ausgewanderten was published in English. In the original German version the epynomic character of the fourth story is Max Aurach, but in Harvill’s published edition he becomes Max Ferber, in order to hide the fact that this figure was partly based on the living British painter Frank Auerbach. Two images also disappear from the book: a close-up photograph of Auerbach - mostly showing his nose and eye - and a reproduction of one of his artworks. But one of the things I had not noticed earlier is that these changes had not yet been made in the uncorrected bookproof, where Aurach is still Aurach and the two soon-to-be-abolished images can still be found.

The Emigrants was Sebald’s first work of photograph-laden prose fiction to be published in English and the uncorrected bookproof demonstrates that substantial tinkering was still going on with the size, sequencing, and exact placement of the images. There is a very nice demonstration of this on pages 134-135 of the uncorrected bookproof, where both images are shown in a different cropping than in the published form. When The Emigrants appeared in bookstores, the photograph of the young dervish is considerably cropped in order to become a horizontal image, while the photograph of the agenda was expanded to include the entire strap instead of cutting it off. (In the German edition, by the way, the dervish image is vertical and uncropped, while the agenda image is cropped horizontally above the strap and the image extends across two pages.) A close comparison of the Harvill uncorrected bookproof and the published edition shows the level of attention that someone - presumably Sebald - was paying to the images. There are instances when just a single line of text is moved up or down in relation to an image, changing the position of the image on the page or re-positioning the image to the needs of the text.

But most curious of all, as my my fellow book collector pointed out, was the last page of the uncorrected bookproof, which shows the beginning of a page of Notes, followed by a very odd word list. In fact, the Contents page shows that Harvill anticipated including a Notes section, apparently for the benefit of English-speaking readers since there are no notes in the German edition. Needless to say, the Notes section was dropped. But if any readers think they know what the word list (chairlift, château, crossbar…) connotes, please drop me a comment.

Florence Feiereisen and Daniel Pope discuss Sebald’s use of images in The Emigrants at great length in a highly recommended essay called True Fictions and Fictional Truths in the new volume Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald.

Several readers of Vertigo have been kind enough to tell me about books that I missed when I did a listing of novels from 2007 that have embedded photographs in the text. As I track down and read them, I’ll post something whenever a book strikes me as especially noteworthy. I just finished Every Day Is for the Thief, a deceptively modest novel by Teju Cole. Like so many books these days, its unnamed narrator might or might not be very much like the real author, who is described as “a writer and photographer currently based in New York.” The narrator returns from New York to a city that might or might not be Lagos, Nigeria (I’ve never been there) to visit relatives and friends. But his ecstasy at returning home is quickly destroyed by pervasive violence and corruption, and, before long, the narrator finds himself culturally marooned. His family fears he has been “softened” by his years in America, the vendors in the markets mistake his accent for an out-of-towner, and even he wonders how much of this he can really endure. He is thwarted at every attempt to find evidence of serious culture in Lagos (surely his visit to the National Museum must be the most pathetic description of a museum in literature). Hoping to find novels by young Nigerians and books about Nigeria’s history, he visits a major bookstore that he remembers from his youth, only to be disappointed once again.

Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices? I step out of the shop into the midday glare. All around me the unaware forest of flickering faces is visible. The area boys are still hard at work. The past is not even past.

In an internet cafe the narrator discovers the world of the “419 yahoo yahoos” (named after the section of the criminal code they violate), the young men whose endless email scams clog the in-boxes of computers around the globe. Horrified, yet fascinated, he begins to glimpse the creativity, hope, and persistence that is spawned by Nigeria’s desperation. The narrator, who has aspirations to be a writer, slowly realizes that there is a “wealth of stories available here” and no one to tell them. Like his literary heroes Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he muses on the possibility of telling those stories himself. With Every Day Is for the Thief, it seems to me that Cole extends to a new generation the great tradition of Nigerian writers that began in the 1950s with Amos Tutuola and, more to the point in Cole’s case, Chinua Achebe.

Like W.G. Sebald, Cole has inserted photographs in his text: small, enigmatic black-and-white images that he has chosen wisely. They look like they would be fantastic enlarged and hung on a gallery wall, but for the most part they work equally well small, giving a sense of things seen from the corner of one’s eye.

Every Day Is for the Thief (Abuja, Nigeria: Cassava Republic Pres, 2007) has no US distribution, so apparently the only way to buy it is through Amazon.com. Highly recommended.

Michal Govrin’s novel Snapshots tries, with only partial success, to be both a novel of a steamy love triangle and Israeli-Arab politics on the eve of Desert Storm and a novel of ideas, an exploratory meditation on physicality (the physicality of sex, the physicality of architecture) and on history (mostly on the burdens that families and nations bequeath us). (Snapshots, Govrin confides, “began in a conversation with Jacques Derrida…”)

At surface level, the bulk of Snapshots is a one-sided conversation between Ilani Greenenberg, world-famous architect with a radical and feminist bent (teaches in New York, office in Paris, escapee from Israel), and her recently deceased father, an ardent Zionist who she adored and and to whom she tells all - including her sexual passions. “I owe you an explanation, father, a belated one, on my leaving.” Her ongoing conversation with her father is interspersed with short diaristic entries and written “snapshots” - brief, highly descriptive observations about her immediate surroundings. As she puts it: “A precise quality of place - smell, light, touch on the skin, that no sketch, no photo, can convey.” These poetic utterances often serve as a kind of Greek chorus, grounding her (and the reader) in the very here and the right now. Here’s a snapshot taken from the bus near Newark Airport:

Fenced marshes. Reeds. High-tension wires. Plaits of cables.
Bulldozers biting a strip of forest. Preparing another brown surface of naked land for “development.”

Ilani is unhappily married to Alain, a conservative and paranoid Israeli who is convinced that a second Holocaust is inevitable and who globetrots in order to track down Nazi war criminals and other threats to Israel past and present. But Ilani has also been conducting a long-time affair with Sayyid Ashabi, a radical Palestinian theater director who seems to have more than one woman in every port. Ilani, ethically disturbed by the attitude of her father’s generation that the land of Zion was “theirs,” has spent her adulthood in voluntary exile from Israel, until she wins a UNESCO competition to design a monument to peace in Jerusalem. Her monument will be, in her words, an “anti-monument”, a “structure of memory.” She envisions a series of temporary structures called the Settlement of Huts, based on the temporary Sukkah that are built during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. More idealistic than practical, her Settlement of Huts would be a sort of visa-free territory where people from anywhere could live in communal peace for seven days. In keeping with Sukkot, the huts would be continuously destroyed and rebuilt and would serve as a reminder “that to live in this Land you’ve got to know how to let go.”

On the brink of Desert Storm, Ilani decides to take her two small children to Israel to carry on with her project in spite of UNESCO delays. Living in a small apartment and following government instructions to convert their apartments into secure, plastic-sealed environments against chemical attacks (a kind of perverse Sukkah), she and the other residents bond into a temporary community that doesn’t seem to exist elsewhere in her life. In between SCUD missile attacks and working on her project, Ilani visits the uninhabited house of her parents, where she rummages through her father’s archive and reads the memoir he drafted late in life. Up until this point, the uncomfortable and unresolved tensions that have existed between Ilani and her father, her husband, her lover, with, in fact, everyone, all served to keep the book moving nervously forward across a tightrope. But midway, the balancing act (and some of the momentum of the book, it seems to me) collapses. The tipping point comes during a yelling match over the phone with her husband, who is in Moscow researching newly opened KGB files. She wants to, but cannot, say to him: “There is no future without a past.” At that moment Ilani claimed Israel as her past and her future. After one last fling with Sayyid, Ilani feels the pull of family - present and past generations - and returns to Paris and her husband, where she soon discovers she is pregnant - whether by Sayyid or Alain she does not know.

Govrin gives Ilani great descriptive powers. She has an architect’s sensitivity to place, especially to cities, their outskirts, and all of their detritus. And the polyphony of her distinct voices - complex, contradictory, intelligent, articulate - kept me deeply engaged for most of the book. It was a jigsaw puzzle I didn’t particularly want to complete. The weakest link in Govrin’s writing is dialogue; her characters tend to lecture each other rather than talk, often to the point of self-caricature. I don’t even know what to think when Ilani says to a colleague: “I’m…one step beyond the symmetry of hatred, of mutual victimhood, or of guilt feelings.”

Ilani’s final “voice,” if you will, is visual, as befits an architect. The novel includes a dozen real snapshots, as well as several examples of her architectural sketches. The first group of snapshots depicts the desolate industrial wasteland seen from a bus window as Ilani travels from New Jersey to New York City. They serve to underscore her growing isolation in her marriage and her lack of connection to her temporary home in America. The other images were made at or near the proposed site of Ilani’s peace monument in Jerusalem. In these visually complex images, it’s hard to distinguish the rock and rubble of open land from the architectural jumble that is old Jerusalem. While the images themselves are very reminiscent of the deadpan photographs found in W.G. Sebald’s books, Govrin, it seems to me, uses her snapshots to provide a useful visual correlative to Ilani’s narrative. I was a bit disappointed that she used so few; in fact, she limits them to two very brief sections of the book, neither more than a dozen pages long.

I’d love to avoid writing about the opening six pages of the book, but I can’t. So let’s go back to the very beginning. As one first begins to read Snapshots, a young woman named Tirtsa Weintraub is describing a telephone conversation and a meeting she has had with Alain. Ilani has been killed in an automobile accident; Alain is distraught. Alain has also discovered that “personal notes…were in her handbag…everything in Hebrew. It will take me years to decipher. You know, our personal abyss.” (Author’s breathless ellipses, by the way.) Not only that, Tirtsa adds, there were “cartons of documents, piles of paper, photographs I couldn’t identify upside down.” Alain “placed a bundle” in her hands and sent Tirtsa on her way and the result is this book. As these first pages unfold, we also learn that Tirtsa had carried a lengthy, but unrequited crush for Ilani from afar. Ilani scarcely knew she existed and Tirtsa met Alain only for a “single, fleeting encounter” in the door of a cafe, yet we are to believe she is the person who Alain has appointed to stitch together Ilani’s memoirs. Tirtsa, needless, to say, doesn’t even merit a walk-on role in Ilani’s memoirs and after these opening pages she never appears again; she’s just a tool.

Govrin’s prelude seems to me wrong-headed in so many ways. It’s a way of speaking down to the reader; after all, we don’t really need to know how the Ilani’s posthumous narrative came into being. And then, to be blunt, what’s with the lesbian crush? It seems to have no better object than to signal that this book of ideas and politics promises to also deal with human emotions and sexual politics. Worse, Ilani’s convenient death is a soap opera cop-out, allowing Govrin to avoid the ultimate authorial decision: whose child is Ilani carrying? At book’s close, an exhausted Ilani stubbornly begins to drive from Paris to Munich, still talking quietly to her dead father, banally recording the minor details of the drive, and slowly becoming aware of the future that is growing within her own body. Ilani’s narrative abruptly ends, of course, just before her fatal accident. But this is precisely where Govrin’s novel of ideas would have gotten really interesting and it’s where Ilani would have had to finally make a decision worthy of the one her parents had made so many decades earlier when they chose their promised land.

My advice is simple. Read Snapshots but start on page 7.

[from Schwindel. Gefühle]

In March 1988, two years before W.G. Sebald’s book Schwindel. Gefühle was published, an early version of the first chapter appeared in Manuskripte: Zeitschrifte für Literatur 99. Titled Berg oder das…, this piece is devoted to the French writer Marie Henri Beyle (better known as Stendhal, the name he used as an author). After nearly twenty years of writing about literature, this was the one of first times that Sebald had ever published a piece of his own prose fiction. When my copy of Manuskripte arrived from a used book dealer in Germany I did a quick visual comparison between the periodical version and the book and found several differences. But one change immediately caught my eye. On page 16 of Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo in English), Sebald includes a portrait of Angela Pietragrua, one of the important loves of Stendhal’s life. Surprisingly, in the Manuskripte version, the overlying grid is missing.

In Schwindel. Gefühle, the first chapter is titled Beyle oder das merckwürdige Faktum der Liebe (which became Beyle, Or Love Is a Madness Most Discrete in subsequent English editions).In the course of a few sentences, Sebald summarizes the relationship between Beyle and Pietragrua as a belatedly requited love affair that led Beyle into a sustained melancholy. Stationed with Napoleon’s army in Milan in 1800, the 17- or 18-year old Beyle fell head over heels for Angela Pietragrua, the current mistress of one of his fellow soldiers. But he could not bring himself to confess his passion to her until he returned to Milan eleven years later. However, when he visited her in 1811, still engulfed by his secret love for her, she didn’t even remember him at first. Undeterred, Beyle embarked on an ardent courtship and finally succeeded in becoming Pietragrua’s lover. And almost immediately, worried that his infatuation had ended at the moment of apparent victory, Beyle once again departed Milan. “As darkness fell, the now familiar melancholy stole upon him”, Sebald writes.

When Beyle first met her, Pietragrua was 23 years old and married to a man who seemed largely unconcerned about her constant affairs. One of her earlier lovers had apparently been the French painter Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, probably best known for his painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague House at Jaffa of 1804. A true Romantic, Beyle’s suffering was as pleasurable as consummation. Perhaps more importantly, suffering led to achievements that were on a higher plane than the merely physical. Writing in his journals in 1811, Beyle recalled those early years in Milan and his then unrequited hunger for Pietragrua:

Those two years of sighs, tears, transports of love and melancholy, which I spent in Italy, without women…have undoubtedly given me this inexhaustible source of sensibility which today, at twenty-eight years of age, makes me feel everything down to the smallest details.

Sometime between the publication of the Beyle section in Manuskripte and its appearance as the opening chapter in book form, Sebald took a ruler and drew a simple grid across the face of Angela Pietragrua. The anonymous portrait - actually the “presumed” portrait - of Angela Pietragrua looks like a charcoal sketch, which Sebald obviously photographed or photocopied out of another book. The lower portion, which Sebald cropped out, shows a continuation of her shawl and what appears to be an unfinished hand. Artists, of course, draw a grid over a sketch to aid in the creation of the final painting. What was Sebald trying to suggest by this? Schwindel. Gefühle was Sebald’s first work of prose fiction and it clearly shows its status as a transitional work, halfway between the academic essays on literature that he had been writing for the previous two decades and his new liberated, experimental style. Here we also see Sebald figuring out how to embed images into his writing. He clearly didn’t want images to be illustrations, so he doesn’t use captions and he frequently leaves their relationship to the text uncertain. So it’s not surprising to find him still tinkering around between the version in Manuskripte and the book.

The Angela Pietragrua episode is just a way station as Sebald heads toward what is to him a more important destination. While this chapter is ostensibly about love, it seems that Sebald’s real point is to demonstrate how Beyle’s difficulties and failures at love converted him into a determined and great writer. After Beyle’s failure to win the next big love of his life - Méthilde - he “was inconsolable. For months he reproached himself, and not until he determined to set down his great passion in a meditation on love did he recover his emotional equilibrium.” Thus was born Beyle’s first semi-fictional book De l’Amour (1820).

[from The Life of Henri Brulard]

Sebald’s attraction to Beyle was manifold. Beyle had succeeded at the very enterprise on which Sebald was embarking: a writing career that included both scholarly texts as well as works of fiction. Furthermore, Beyle provided another type of model for Sebald. His barely disguised autobiography, The Life of Henri Brulard, had been posthumously published in the 1950s in an edition complete with reproductions of Beyle’s own drawings. Sebald clearly knew this book since he reproduced several of Beyle’s drawings in Schwindel. Gefühle. And it is hard not to believe that Sebald recognized himself when Beyle wrote about his “inexhaustible source of sensibility.”

The grid that Sebald drew suggests that something about this image is unfinished or - more properly - ready to be taken to the next stage. The theme of love in its Romantic and its carnal versions ripples through Beyle’s major books The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black, where love is at the nexus of power, family, and society. Sebald’s addition of the grid is his way of agreeing that Beyle’s career as a writer can be traced back to his youthful infatuation with Angela Pietragrua. It was almost like drawing a target on her portrait.