Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

Whenever anyone summarizes W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, they usually paraphrase his American publisher New Directions and mention the “restless literary ghosts” that Sebald pursues in the book: Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka. I’m a little surprised how long it took me to ask: What’s wrong with this list? Stendhal, Casanova, Kafka? Why is Casanova in that triumvirate? Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), whose name has become has become a noun meaning “a man who engages in promiscuous love affairs” (Shorter OED 5th ed.), doesn’t immediately seem to fit into the Sebald pantheon.

So I went back this week and re-read the second chapter of Vertigo, called All’estero.In October 1980, Sebald’s narrator travels from Vienna to Venice, whereupon he starts to read the sections on Venice from Franz Grillparzer’s Italian Diary. On reading Grillparzer’s comments about the Doge’s palace, the narrator notes that

the resolutions passed here by the Council of State must surely be mysterious, immutable, and harsh, [Grillparzer] observed, calling the palace an enigma in stone. The nature of that enigma was apparently dread, and for as long as he was in Venice Grillparzer could not shake off a sense of the uncanny. Trained in the law himself, he dwelt on that palace where the legal authorities resided and in the inmost cavern of which , as he put it, the Invisible Principle brooded. (page 54)

Sebald’s narrator then shifts to “one of the victims of Venetian justice,” Casanova, who spent more than a year imprisoned there. (In 1788, Casanova published his memoir of imprisonment and escape.)

Casanova considered the limits of human reason. He established that, while it might be rare for a man to be driven insane, little was required to tip the balance. All that was needed was a slight shift, and nothing would be as it formerly was. In these deliberations, Casanova likened a lucid mind to a glass, which does not break of its own accord. Yet how easily it is shattered. One wrong move is all that it takes… It was soon apparent that the condemned in that gaol were honorable persons to a man, but for reasons which were known only to their Excellencies, and were not disclosed to the detainees, they had had to be removed from society. When the tribunal seized a criminal, it was already convinced of his guilt. After all, the rules by which the tribunal proceeded were underwritten by senators elected from among the most capable and virtuous of men. Casanova realised that he would have to come to terms with the fact that the standards which now applied were those of the legal system of the Republic rather than of his own sense of justice. (pages 56-7)

On reading this paragraph, which runs to more than four pages, I realized that Sebald seems to be suggesting the Republic of Venice as a kind of precursor to the “untouchable organization”(1) of Kafka’s The Castle or perhaps the legal bureaucracy of The Trial. One obvious difference is that Giacomo C. manages to escape the Doge’s prison while there is no escape for the land surveyor K. or the clerk Joseph K. I don’t think there is any way to read this brief section of Vertigo and not see strong Kafkaesque connotations.

Almost as if to reinforce the parallel Sebald draws between Casanova and Kafka, the same chapter of Vertigo continues with the narrator’s return visit to Venice seven years later. But rather than stay in Venice, the narrator immediately decides to follow in the footsteps of Kafka who visited Lake Garda in 1913. There, reading newspapers in a hotel, the narrator:

came across a report which did have a special meaning for me. It was a brief preview of a play that was due to be performed the next day in Bolzano. [pages 96-7]

The play is not named, but a photograph embedded in the text shows that its subject is Casanova, while Bolzano is the city in which Casanova first reappeared after escaping prison in Venice. Sebald’s pursuit of Kafka, at least momentarily, led him once again to Casanova. [Recommended reading: Sandor Marai's Casanova in Bolzano.]

One final note on Sebald’s interest in Casanova. In Austerlitz, Austerlitz dreams of Casanova, “the old roué“, serving out the end of his days as the librarian in Count Waldenstein’s castle in Dux (now in the Czech Republic). [pages 202-3]

Federico Fellini, Il Teatro Di Dresda, lithograph, ca. 1968. Fellini, who directed Fellini’s Casanova (1976), depicts Casanova on the stage of the Dresden Theater. In 1752, not long before his imprisonment in Venice, Casanova translated the libretto to Rameau’s opera Zoroastro for its performance in Dresden.

Note (1). W.G. Sebald, “The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in the Castle.” In Franz Kuna, Ed. On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives. London: Elek Books, 1976, p. 42.

Several of W.G. Sebald’s earliest monographs deal with German-language literature and authors and are extremely difficult to find in first editions. His MA thesis Carl Sternheim: Kritiker und Opfer der Wilhelminischen Ära (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1969) (crudely translated as “Carl Sternheim: Critic and Victim of the Kaiser Wilhelm II Era”) and his Ph.D. dissertation Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Klett, 1980) (loosely translated as The Mythos of Destruction in the Work of Döblins) were monographs on single authors. Sternheim (1878-1942) was a German novelist and dramatist, while Döblin (1878-1957) made his name as a German expressionist writer and is most remembered for his sprawling novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.

In 1985, the Austrian publisher Residenz Verlag published Sebald’s Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Literature von Stifter bis Handke, an anthology of previously published essays from 1972 through 1985. The title might loosely be translated as Describing Disaster: On Austrian Literature from Stifter to Handke (even though one author discussed - Kafka - can hardly be considered Austrian). It included essays on Adalbert Stifter, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Ernst Herbeck, and Gerhard Roth. Only the essay on Hofmannsthal had not been published earlier. The first edition is a simple, rather handsome volume bound in silver cloth with author and title black-stamped discretely on the spine. My copy lacks a dust jacket - was it issued with one?

Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur (a loose translation might be Uneasy Home: Essays on Austrian Literature) was published in 1991, also by Residenz Verlag. It, too, is an anthology of previously published essays from 1976 through 1989 on Charles Sealsfield, Karl Emil Franzos, Peter Altenberg, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Leopold Kompert, Hermann Broch, Jean Améry, Gerhard Roth, and Peter Handke. Only the essay on Handke had not been not published earlier. The first edition is less elegant than the earlier volume by Residenz Verlag, being bound in bright orange boards with a somewhat bolder typeface used on the black-stamped spine. The simple dust jacket is orange and brown.

Since none of these titles have yet been translated into English, the only way a non-German reader can sample these early critical writings is to seek out the two essays on Kafka, both of which are on The Castle and have been published in English-language sources. The essay from Die Beschreibung des Unglücks,The Undiscover’d Country: The Death Motif in Kafka’s The Castle, appeared in the Journal of European Studies (2), 1972, while the essay from Unheimliche Heimat,The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in The Castle, can be found in the anthology On Kafka – Semi-Centenary Perspectives, edited by Franz Kuna (London: Paul Elek, 1976). Kuna was Sebald’s colleague on the Department of European Studies at the University of East Anglia.

The final work by Sebald that remains untranslated is Logis in einem Landhaus (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998). The volume includes essays on Robert Walser, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, and Jan Peter Tripp. Undoubtedly influenced by his earlier forays into fiction - Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Die Ringe des Saturn (1995) - Sebald inserts images of all types into each of the essays in Logis in Einem Landhaus. Images include 18th century calendar pages, photographs of books, reproductions of historic etchings and drawings, a dozen portraits of the author Robert Walser at various stages of his life along with samples of his handwriting, examples of Jan Peter Tripp’s extraordinary contemporary etchings, and, in a typically Sebaldian move, an enigmatic, grainy photograph of a hot air balloon hovering over treetops. Furthermore, each of the six essays receives a large foldout image in full color. The only essay from Logis in Einem Landhaus to have appeared so far in English is the one on artist Jan Peter Tripp, which is included in the British and American editions of Unrecounted, the book on which Sebald and Tripp collaborated. The essay, originally titled Wie Tag und Nacht: über die Bilder Jan Peter Tripps, appears as Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp. It deals with trompe l’oeil, memory, and other Sebaldian subjects.This is the first book put out by Sebald’s new German publisher Carl Hanser Verlag and it is a beautiful production. It is bound in a dark, almost wasabi green cloth with a maroon and gold-stamped title on the spine.

If ever there was a subject to be avoided by novelists, it ought to be writer’s block, a theme that screams “self-indulgence.” Nevertheless, the opening paragraph of Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas’ novel Montano proudly proclaims that we are about to be subjected to 326 pages concerning one man’s “tragic inability to write”. Originally published in Spain in 2002 as El Mal de Montano (“Montano’s Malady”), Harvill Secker published Jonathan Dunne’s translation in 2007 under the simpler title Montano. I was drawn to the book by the jacket’s claim that “Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Perec, Bolaño, Coetzee, Sebald and Magris cross endlessly surprising paths.”

As the book opens, Montano’s narrator, a literature critic, has “literature sickness,” an apparently incurable obsession with literature. In this case, the sickness is so strong that it has started to inhibit his ability to write. Having recently finished a novel about writers who gave up writing, the narrator finds he can no longer write anything except his private diary (which he keeps sharing with us). Frankly, I found this first section, called Montano’s Malady, rough going. “It is well known that there is no better way to overcome an obsession than by writing about it,” the literature sick narrator says. What he doesn’t ponder is whether readers want to watch a writer struggling to figure out how to write. The book’s dust jacket generously calls him an “unreliable narrator” (in quotes, even), which is true. But more than unreliable, this narrator is grievously undecided.

When his editors send him W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to review, he feels they have sent this title “so that its style of an extreme glacial beauty would finish me off.” Let’s pause for a moment and read the succinct summary of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn from the narrator’s diary: ”The narrator viewed the world dominated by a strange quietness, as if all we humans looked through various sheets of glass. At times the narrator did not know whether he was in the ‘land of the living or already in another place.’ Anxiety everywhere. The narrator set off to walk the county of Suffolk, ‘in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.’ Visiting small villages, landscapes and solitary ruins, he was confronted by traces of a past which referred him to the entire world. His pilgrimage along the coast lacked joy, light and vivacity. For a dead man – the narrator seemed to be saying – the whole world is one long funeral.”

The first section abruptly ends and the narrator begins the next by announcing that very little that was written in the first 96 pages was true. The narrator (not a literary critic after all, but a novelist) now declares that he is instead going to write “a short dictionary which would tell nothing but truths about my fragmented life and reveal my more human side and, in short, make me more accessible to my readers.” Determined that “I should not like to hide behind my creative texts, I am with W.G. Sebald when he says he has the sensation that it is necessary for whoever writes a fictional text to show his hand, to say something about himself, to allow an image of himself.”

Accordingly, the second section, Dictionary of Timid Love for Life, is structured vaguely like a dictionary devoted to the diaries of literary and artistic figures, interspersed with more of the narrator’s own diary entries. The cast of characters includes Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Salvador Dalí, André Gide, Witold Gombrowicz, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, W. Somerset Maugham, Robert Musil, Cesare Pavese, Fernando Pessoa, Sergio Pitol, Jules Renard, Sebald, Paul Valery, Robert Walser, among others. On occasion, the dictionary entries read like extended book reviews, but mostly they spark Proustian memories that immediately distract the narrator and cause him to dwell on fragments of his own autobiography. The result is an episodic journey that circles and circles to very little purpose around the narrator’s largely uninteresting life.

Near the end of this section, the narrator uses Sebald as his touchstone for an entry called “Something Sparkles through the Worn Fabric” (pp. 189-195), a phrase torn from a sentence in The Rings of Saturn: “These are not coincidences, somewhere there is a relation that from time to time sparkles through a worn fabric.” This fabric, the narrator asserts, is the human need to connect with and commemorate the past and the dead.

The short third section of Montano is called Theory of Budapest, a reference to an entry in the previous section that consisted of an extract from his mother’s secret diary in which she wrote about the act of writing private journals. As the narrator explains, in spite of the title that his mother used for this piece of writing, it had nothing whatsoever to do with either theory or the city of Budapest. But perhaps as an act of closure, this section actually purports to be a speech that the narrator delivers in Budapest during a symposium on the diary as narrative. True to form, halfway through the speech he declares that most of what he has just said is untrue and he will try to speak only the truth for the remainder.

The spirits and the deaths of Franz Kafka and Robert Walser (aided by Robert Musil and Sebald) preside over Diary of a Deceived Man, the penultimate section. In a short episode that is both touching and telling, the narrator visits the room in Prague where Kafka died and has tea with an old lady down the hall, an old lady who does not read books at all, much less Kafka. Instead, she looks to the cosmic theories provided by Stephen Hawking for her conception of the larger world. A few pages later, when the events of September 11, 2001 intrude briefly into the narrator’s literary reveries, his response is to find a copy of Kafka’s diaries to see what he wrote on September 11, 1910. These two episodes present the core argument of Montano in a nutshell, stripped of the book’s endless diversions, repetitions, and re-tellings.

As I turned to the final dozen pages, called The Spirit’s Salvation, I had great hopes that Vila-Matas would pull off something that would cause the rest of Montano to snap into place. There was talk of the soul. There was a trip to the Swiss Alps, somewhat in the spirit of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to attend an improbable gathering of writers. And the wise writing of Michel de Montaigne accompanied the narrator on his journey. Alas, the mountaintop event turns into a cartoonish version of a typical writer’s festival, in which the writers are all intent on their careers, killing literature in the process. The narrator’s summation in defense of literature is both lame and, significantly, pulled from literature itself – not from experience. At book’s end, he doesn’t seem to have learned a thing and neither had I.

To be fair, Montano cannot be summarized, it can only be experienced. It may well be a book in which the journey is more important that the goal. But most of the time I didn’t much care.

As I read I kept asking myself if Montano was a Sebaldian book in any sense. Vila-Matas forcefully invokes Sebald’s example when the narrator first decides that he can no longer “hide behind” his fictional text, but must aim for something more complex. The big Sebaldian themes are present: melancholy, death, the landscape, travel, literature, the past. And, of course, Kafka. Like Sebald – well, sort of like Sebald – Vila-Matas’ narration meanders and leaps between places and times. But reading Montano and thinking of Sebald was a bit like reading a bad graphic novel version of Moby Dick – it had no subtlety but instead hit the reader over the head not once but repeatedly with its message. Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that what Vila-Matas does with these themes doesn’t much resemble Sebald’s work nor does it compare favorably. Too, there is a danger to inviting such an all-star cast of authors into your novel and quoting them at length; the reader is inevitably going to be reminded how much better these other writers are.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy reading the book from time to time. Vila-Matas is an astute and original reader of literature and his observations on other writers were fascinating. (However, this is the first time I have ever wished that a novel was, instead, written as a work of academic exposition, complete with footnotes!) And even though it sometimes ran against the required grain of the narrative, there were moments when Vila-Matas indulged in some great descriptive writing. Now I do want to read Bartleby & Co., his first novel to be translated into English, and see what that is like.

As a coda, I should add that the choice of dust jacket illustrator is inspired. The dreamy, ethereal, and very tentative pencil sketches by the Swedish-born artist and illustrator Karin Ǻkesson, who currently lives in London, seems the perfect match for Vila-Matas’ style. Curiously, the drawing for Montano (shown on the left below) bears a resemblance for the detail of the Quint Buchholz painting used on the cover of Norbert Gstrein’s The English Years (also published by Harvill), which I have mentioned elsewhere because Sebald wrote the front cover blurb for the book.