Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

I suppose one could use psychogeography to look closer at the current attempts by Manchester United (”the world’s most popular football team”) to keep its Portuguese-born star Ronaldo from defecting to the Spanish team Real Madrid, but Manchester artists are using that same discipline (perhaps to better advantage) to explore the post-industrial status of their city. Earlier I wrote about the city of Manchester in connection with its appearances in two novels: W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Michel Butor’s Passing Time. In this connection, I recommend a new blog Ruinous Recollections:

Ruinous Recollections is an art project established by two Manchester-based curators, Darien Jane Rozentals and Robert Knifton. Taking multiple stories of the city as its start point, it will create works that etch memories into Manchester’s urban canvas, re-imagining and adding layers to an already fluid city. This blog will document the project as it evolves…

Especially of interest to me was this post, describing the project by photographer Victoria Lem. As her contribution to the exhibition:

Vic photographs post-industrial ruins, uncovering ghostly remnants of preserved memory, often adding extra layers of palimpsestuous reading to her artefacts by using a time-based pin hole camera techniques and by making spectral fragmented screen prints of the images she captures - the dramatic photograph above is from a series Vic took at Barnes Hospital. Re-tracing the footsteps of Sebald, Vic will add her own memories and fictions to the city.

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.

Christian Boltanski, from Gymnasium Chases, 1991 (photogravures)

In an interview with Christian Scholz, published in the new book Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald, Sebald talks about photographs and their role in his books. At one point he speaks about the experience of looking at family albums that one has not seen for decades.

Normally you’ve already leafed through these albums as a child, in complete naiveté; you had no term for history, no concept of history; you didn’t know anything about the Third Reich; you didn’t know what role your parents might have played in this historical phase, what position they had. You just aimlessly leafed through these things. And then you left them in a drawer without paying further attention. When you pick them up again, lets say as a forty-year old, after a period of twenty-five or twenty years, then the whole thing has something of a negative revelation. Because in the meantime you have learned what history is. You know what happened.

You know what happened. What Sebald is pointing to here is not foreshadowing, the hinting at the outcome. He’s saying that we are implicated in history once we know what happened. That he could never look at his family’s photographs - or at his family - the same once he knew what had happened. (Sebald often suggests that portraits and viewers engage in a visual dialogue.) Sebald uses foreshadowing when he begins The Emigrants with a photograph of a graveyard. But by the end of the book, as the four quiet stories each conclude with their own private nightmares of despair and death, the dead are staring back at us from their photographs.

Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera…..the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long.

The visual artist that I immediately think of is Christian Boltanski. While his work is frequently in the form of memorials to victims of the Holocaust, his work is also about memory itself. In 1991, Boltanski made a particularly haunting portfolio of twenty-four photogravures published by Crown Point Press under the title Gymnasium Chases. The images depict the 1931 graduating class of the Gymnasium Chases, a Jewish High School in Vienna. Our frisson as viewers comes partly from foreshadowing the fate that awaits these students as we connect the dots between …Jewish…Vienna…1931. But Boltanski goes beyond relying on us to connect the dots. He smudges around with the portraits until their distinguishing features are encased in shadow. The students smile or stare back at us while we helplessly watch their faces turn to skulls, which makes it that much easier for us to superimpose our own features on the face of death as if we were suddenly able to foreshadow and witness our own death at the same moment.

For me at least, a reaction this powerful seems possible only with photographs. Thanks to a casual reference that Alex Ross made recently on his blog, last night I pulled down a CD to play. Steve Reich’s 1988 piece for string quartet and recorded voices called Different Trains struck me as the musical equivalent of the enterprise that both Sebald and Boltanski were undertaking. Reich’s piece, which is a kind of musical documentary, weaves recorded voices of three Holocaust survivors into the train-like sounds of the strings. Remembering childhood train rides in America between his divorced parents, Reich says: “I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.” Different Trains is a strong piece, but for me the effect of voices could not compare with the chilling effect of photographs. Maybe this is simply that our culture privileges the visual or maybe it is something deeply rooted in being human.

This is the first of what will be several posts as I slowly - and rather randomly - read Searching for Sebald, the new 632-page book that is a goldmine to anyone interested in Sebald.

Almost from the moment its invention was made public in 1839, photography embraced death. I immediately think of French artist Hippolyte Bayard who, in 1840, famously made a self-portrait as a drowned man. Nineteenth century commercial photographers quickly discovered there was a business to be had making portraits of the newly deceased - usually posed to look as if they were sleeping. Not surprisingly, the act of leafing through a photograph album or discovering a cache of family photographs is a staple (more often a cliché) of literature.

I recently finished reading Jacques Roubaud’s autobiographical novel The Great Fire of London (originally published in France in 1989), which I wrote about earlier. At one point in the book Roubaud sets out to organize the photographs and other family memorabilia that he finds in a closet:

The essential core of the letters and photographs is in the closet, on the upper shelf, in old cookie tins, or in archaic photo albums where numerous pages are empty, or rather emptied, as in those stamp collections amassed and arranged with infinite patience and then brutally ransacked by their owner’s thoughtlessness or a child’s curiosity. That summer I had attempted to establish a basic chronological classification of the photographs, a task made difficult by the mix-ups, occasionally incongruous, introduced into the albums by the series of house moves and room rearrangements (and by those special migrations of pictures occasioned by a person’s death). Most of all, my difficulty stemmed from that widespread, almost incorrigible and exasperating habit of hoarding photographs because their (intended) purpose extends far beyond their moment (a democratic version of the Horatian aere perennius); this, coupled with the habit of not recording when they have been taken, nor where, nor - far worse - which people are depicted. And yet, after so few years, how murky and uncertain it all becomes, even for the original owner of the album….

I have inherited a double tradition, of silence and bereavement, where the dead, still everywhere present after twenty, thirty, or fifty years, appear only in empty silences, maintaining a violent presence of black holes skirted by speech but thereby made manifest in the movement of a story: blanks in album pages, pictures that look to be perpetually in flames but not completely consumed to the point where their shadow, their odor, have become indiscernible.

In all four of Sebald’s prose fictions - but especially in The Emigrants and Austerlitz - photographs are constant reminders of death. During the story Paul Bereyter in The Emigrants, a book in which photograph albums appear with frequency, Sebald’s narrator is given an album documenting much of Bereyter’s life:

I leafed through the album that afternoon, and since then I have returned to it time and again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them.

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel of the CBC, Sebald elaborated on death and photography:

So I was from a very early point on very familiar, much more familiar than people are nowadays, with the dead and the dying. I have always had at the back of my mind this notion that of course these people aren’t really gone, they just hover somewhere at the perimeter of our lives and keep coming in on brief visits. And photographs are for me, as it were, one of the emanations of the dead, especially those older photographs of people no longer with us. Nevertheless, through these pictures, they do have what seems to me some sort of spectral presence. And I’ve always been intrigued by that. It’s got nothing to do with the mystical or the mysterious. It is just a remnant of a much more archaic way of looking at things.

Southworth and Hawes, Postmortem Unidentified Child, ca. 1850 [George Eastman House Collection/ICP]

Both Roubaud and Sebald evoke a reverence for family snapshots, but it is curious to look at the nuances. The absence of a photograph signals a death for Roubaud. One presumes the missing photograph has been returned to a grieving relative or destroyed in despair or has perhaps been used in some way relating to an obituary or memorial service. For Sebald, photographs are a portal by which the living and the dead find each other again. But, having started this “dialogue” between Roubaud and Sebald, a sudden inspiration sent me to the bookshelf to look again at Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, another book which equates photography and death:

It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to be to the excited world of the living, challenges each of us, one by one…

Here was an opportunity to think for a moment about Barthes’ book anew (a book which has always perplexed me for its narrow reading of photography). Halfway through Camera Lucida, Barthes shifts his discussion from public photographs (journalism, advertisements and the like) to private photographs:

Now, one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs. I had no hope of “finding” her, I expected nothing from these “photographs of a being thinking of him or her” (Proust). I had acknowledged that fatality, one of the most agonizing features of mourning, which decreed that however often I might consult such images, I could never recall her features (summon them up as a totality)….I could not even say that I loved [these photographs]: I was not sitting down to contemplate them, I was not engulfing myself in them. I was sorting them, but none seemed to me really “right”: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face. If I were ever to show them to friends I could doubt that these photographs would speak.

It has always seemed to me that Barthes expected too much from these photographs of his mother. Barthes, who takes an absolutist position here, decides that photography is inadequate to the task of resurrecting his mother’s “being.” Nevertheless, as he looks at photograph after photograph he does admit to “gradually moving back in time with her”: he hears again the sound of the lid of an ivory powder box and he can recall “the rumpled softness of her crêpe de Chine and the perfume of her rice powder.”But then, suddenly, he turns up a photograph that provides “the truth of the face I had loved,” thus redeeming the promise of photography.

The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time…

And so for two pages, in a gesture he compares to Proust, Barthes has an ecstatic reunion with his mother thanks to an ancient, scarcely visible image of her as a small child. As we learn momentarily, this image has triggered memories of his mother’s final months, when Barthes had to feed her from a bowl. “She had become my little girl”. “Ultimately I experienced her…as my feminine child.” This is a very different level of response than Sebald’s encounter with the dead. It’s hard for me to feel that the photograph had much role in Barthes’ response. I would rather say that Barthes has finally found a photograph that he can use for his own emotional purposes.

I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary”….

What are we to make of these three responses to the humble family photograph? Let’s look from a different perspective, that of loss. Roubaud has lost his wife, who he loved wildly; and the nineteen-year effort to write The Great Fire of London was an attempt - which failed at times - to hold the emotions of loss at a distance. Barthes has lost his mother, on whom he doted, and he desperately sought to find her “being” again through photographs. The encounters that Roubaud and Barthes have with photographs are distinctly, painfully personal. Barthes goes so far as to declare that “once I am gone, no one will any longer be able to testify to this [photograph]: nothing will remain but an indifferent Nature.”

The losses in Sebald’s books are not those of his own family; the deaths he reports on are occasionally of acquaintances, but are usually of people he had never met. As Ruth Franklin notes in her essay Rings of Smoke: “Sebald…witnessed none of World War II; and he feels this gap in his experience as painfully as most people feel the experience of trauma.” As Franklin sees it, this ‘disengagement” permits Sebald to “trace the pattern of human suffering” - but only at the cost of “distance from actual horror.” The portrait photographs and family albums of others permitted Sebald (a voracious collector of all kinds of photographs) to immerse himself in the past he had not experienced. Sebald’s role, then, so apparent in The Emigrants and Austerlitz, was to absorb the traces of the dead and become, we could almost say, a living archive. As a writer, he saw both the responsibility and the opportunity to transmute those experiences into a new kind of literature.

[Eleanor Wachtel's interview with W.G. Sebald Ghost Hunter and Ruth Franklin's essay Rings of Smoke appear in the new book The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. A report is forthcoming.]

Melania G. Mazzucco’s Vita is a book about what history does to people. It is also a book that blends fiction and autobiography, using photographs as touchstones to the past, making it a cousin of W.G. Sebald’s book The Emigrants. Vita is the story of Vita and Diamante, two young Italian immigrants thrust into the Lower East Side largely on their own in 1903. It is also, in part, the story of Italian writer Melania Mazzucco’s search to understand her family history; Diamante was her grandfather.

On shipboard to America, nine-year old Vita and her slightly older friend Diamante sneak up from steerage and spend a night in one of the lifeboats, a night that becomes transformed in their minds as the closest they will ever get to love or to the dream they thought they were emigrating to. As Vita recalls:

We were so close that night, Diamante and I - inside an empty universe, full of possibilities and space, the two of us inside that universe, whole and untouched - and I wished we’d never been discovered…

But from the moment the two land at Ellis island until 1912 when Diamante re-emigrates to Italy, they are subjected to a world of intense cruelty, prejudice, and hardship that crushes every hope they had for the future. Diamante is ultimately defeated, his only hope for dignity is a return to the country of his birth, while Vita withdraws entirely from the “burdens” of other people’s lives.

For Mazzucco, history is one inescapable tragedy after another, a process from which no one escapes. People only survive their disillusionment through lies and self-deception. Cruelly, history doesn’t even reward heroism, idealism or love any better than it does treachery or indifference.

And as Mazzucco the researcher discovers, history’s traces can be just as cruel as history itself. Often the only clues and facts that remain behind after lives of poverty, struggle, and vanished dreams are a few postcards, newspaper clippings, a set of fingerprints in the police files. Instead, what remains in quantity are statistics, lists, and other faceless facts that shed some light on the terrible lives of Italian and other immigrants to the New World at the start of the twentieth century, but which do little to illuminate individual lives.

It is into this void that Mazzucco the author steps, imaginatively filling in the gaps in the historical record. Mazzucco is a confident, intelligent writer who never fetishizes the past, never gratuitously converts history into ambiance.Written mostly in present tense, Vita shows off Mazzucco’s ability to propel the story through vivid sections of condensed, impressionistic, almost cinematographic writing, which is especially well-suited for the book’s many scenes of violence, crowds, flight, and the like. There is a terrific section that centers on Vita’s son, who volunteers to participate in the Allied invasion of Italy in 1944 in order to see what is left of his ancestral village. This, along with Ian McEwan’s description of World War II in Atonement, are two of the best pieces of war writing I have encountered recently.

Mazzucco rarely distinguishes between those parts of her story which are built around the factual record and those which are pure imagination (did Diamante really meet Charlie Chaplin in Denver?). I think her point, which is reinforced by her use of visual elements, is that the paucity and randomness of historical records perfectly symbolizes history’s utter disregard for individuals. She doesn’t overdo the deployment of photographs (there are only nine in a book that is 430 pages long). Like Sebald, the images she has chosen are mundane and often elliptical. It’s the discrepancy between the violence of these lives and the fragile, nearly anonymous traces they leave behind that makes them so powerful.

The American publication of Vita: A Novel. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) appears to be the first English-language edition of Vita, which was originally published in Italy in 2003. The English translation by Virginia Jewiss reads beautifully.