Last week I was in New York City and had the opportunity to see two-thirds of the exhibition After Nature at the new New Museum. (The exhibition is opening in stages and the installation of the second floor - the floor which “sets the tone for the exhibition”, according to curator Massimiliano Gioni - was not ready when I was there.) After enjoying the panoramic views of New York from the rooftop I took the stairs down and began the exhibition on the fourth floor. Stepping into a gallery, I immediately encountered a slim woman in jeans and shirt writhing in slow motion on the floor, long hair covering her face most of the time. Perhaps I was seeing the exhibition in reverse, I realized; but it was too late.

Maurizio Cattelan, untitled, 2007 (taxidermied horse skin, fiberglass resin) [installation photograph from site other than the New Museum]

The exhibition’s title, of course, is borrowed from W.G. Sebald’s book-length poem After Nature. Gioni explains that his exhibition “aspires to a similar hallucinatory confusion [as Sebald's writings], a conflation of temporalities, a blurring of facts and fictions - an exhibition as a visual novel or wunderkammer.” In addition to Sebald, the acknowledged guiding spirits are filmmaker Werner Herzog and novelist Cormac McCarthy. Rather than trying to define anything, After Nature seems to spiral outward in multiple directions: “offended sceneries and scorched earth”, “private cosmologies and universes untouched by man”, “ancient traditions and arcane faiths”, and the “bliss” or “madness” we might experience at the end of the world. There are already a number of exhibition reviews online already, some of which point out the exhibition’s lack of focus. But whether that’s a problem or not (a characteristic like “focus” usually isn’t a goal for exhibitions at the New Museum), there are wonderful pieces to be seen, including Maurizio Cattelan’s untitled (2007) comic/apocalyptic horse implanted some twenty feet off the ground into a gallery wall and Robert Kusmirowski’s Unacabine (2008), a replica of “Unibomber” Theodore Kaczynski’s cabin. And then there was the writhing woman, who, it turns out, is one of several performers in Tino Sehgal’s piece Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000).

On the way out, I stopped and bought the eponymous shrink-wrapped exhibition catalog for After Nature ($24.95). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it consisted of a dust wrapper that unfolded to six panels neatly tucked around a Modern Library paperback copy of W.G. Sebald’s After Nature ($11.95). That’s a nifty mark-up for what is essentially a dust jacket. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire book appropriated like this before. The wrapper includes an essay by Gioni and a checklist noted as accurate “as of June 25, 2008″.

[Still from Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, 1992]

Two new exhibitions in New York claim W.G. Sebald for inspiration. The first is the New Museum’s After Nature. According to their website part of the exhibition will be viewable as of July 9 (the 3rd and 4th floors), while the dates for the full exhibition (including the 2nd floor) are July 17 - September 21, 2008. Here’s a blurb from their website:

Departing from the fictional documentaries of Werner Herzog and drawing its title from W.G. Sebald’s visionary book of the same name, “After Nature” unfolds as a visual novel, depicting a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. Bringing together an international and multigenerational group of contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders, many of whom are showing in an American museum for the first time, the exhibition is a feverish examination of humankind’s relationship to nature. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, the show spans three floors and includes over ninety works.

Part dystopian fantasy, part ethnographic museum of a lost civilization that eerily resembles our own, “After Nature” brings together artists and artworks that possess a strange, prophetic intensity. When seen in this context, Zoe Leonard’s giant sculpture of a crippled tree, Maurizio Cattelan’s fallen horse, Reverend Howard Finster’s delirious sermon cards, and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s apocalyptic finger paintings resonate like a requiem for a vanishing planet.

Artists such as Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Robert Kusmirowski, Diego Perrone, and Artur Zmijewski seem fascinated by mystic apparitions, arcane rites, and spiritual illuminations, while Allora and Calzadilla, Nancy Graves, and William Christenberry depict a universe in which the traces of humans have been erased and new ecological systems struggle to find a precarious balance.

The works of Huma Bhabha, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Thomas Schütte share an archaic quality. Their magic realism transforms sculpture into myth-making and gives birth to a cast of fantastical creatures, including sylvan beings, totemic figures, and neo-primitive idols. These elements also find life in Tino Sehgal’s intricate choreographies: for the duration of the exhibition dancers carry out gestures that could be seen as mysterious rituals and states of ecstasy. Recuperating ancient techniques, Pawel Althamer uses grass and animal intestines to produce vulnerable sculptures and puppets to arrive at a new form of storytelling. Other works, like the animations of Nathalie Djurberg, the imaginary maps of Roberto Cuoghi, or the video travelogue of Erik van Lieshout, guide viewers to the edge of the earth, taking us for a walk in the fictional woods of our near future, while expressing a sincere preoccupation for the world as it is now.

The exhibition will include work by Allora and Calzadilla, Pawel Althamer, Micol Assaël, Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, William Christenberry, Roberto Cuoghi, Bill Daniel, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Nathalie Djurberg, Reverend Howard Finster, Nancy Graves, Werner Herzog, Robert Kusmirowski, Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Erik van Lieshout, Diego Perrone, Thomas Schütte, Dana Schutz, Tino Sehgal, August Strindberg, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Artur Zmijewski.

“After Nature” is made possible by the Leadership Council of the New Museum. Major support provided by David Teiger. Additional support provided by Kati Lovaas, Randy Slifka, and the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund.

The second exhibition occurs across the East River in Brooklyn at a place called Jack the Pelican Presents. It’s a collaborative exhibition between artists Tyler Coburn and Sebastian Craig called Ghostwriters and it runs only from July 10 - August 10, 2008:

Ireland’s non-profit RTE Radio 1 recently interviewed poet and translator George Szirtes and Aengus Woods, a philosophy student at the New School, about W.G. Sebald. The eighteen minute conversation is fascinating, intelligent, and much too short. Aengus reads a short section from The Rings of Saturn and George reads briefly from Austerlitz, which made me think again about the differences between reading literature and listening to it. To listen to a good reading (and both of these speakers have wonderful voices) is a seductive experience - perhaps too seductive, I realized, as I found myself building a different narrator to suit each of their voices. But on further reflection I also realized that even when I read silently to myself I am somehow shaping a narrator around my own voice and pronunciation. Curiously, when the program’s host Seán Rocks asks George and Aengus about Sebald’s “voice,” he’s referring to something about Sebald’s style, not Sebald’s voice.

Just as a reminder, if you really want to hear Sebald’s voice you can, thanks to Michael Silverblatt’s program “Bookworm” for radio station KCRW.

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…

It should come as no surprise to any reader of W.G. Sebald that Nature wins out in the end. Hundreds of square blocks of downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I live, are flooded - not by inches of water but by many feet of water. While I and my family are safe, many of the things that are important to the place I call home are not - museums, theaters, libraries, businesses run by friends, my bank… - are endangered.

My days are busy with gas-powered generators and water pumps and other things I did not receive training for in college. My nights are filled with sleep. When life returns to a balance, I should be able to complete my commentary on Adam Thirlwell’s book The Delightful States.

I received an email today that I thought was worth sharing. The website Words Without Borders hosts an online book club that’s worth checking out. Of interest to all readers of W.G. Sebald is the fact that the book being discussed this June is Robert Walser’s The Assistant.

Sam “Golden Rule” Jones acts as moderator for the discussion and we’re joined by a host of Walser lovers who will take turns discussing the author and his work. Susan Bernofsky’s afterword to the book is already up, as is Sam’s introduction. Head over to the page and take a look, and be sure to check back often as we roll out work from Tom Whalen, Damion Searls, Tamara Evans, Mark Harman, Millay Hyatt, Jonathon Taylor, Bernhard Echte, Peter Utz, James Tweedie and others. We hope that after reading the commentary from our group of artists, writers, scholars, and Walser translators and aficionados, you’ll feel moved to add your own thoughts over at our Walser Discussion Forum.

The books to be discussed for the months September 2008 through March 2009 are already posted and the lineup is terrific.

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.

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.

If you live anywhere near Swansea (birthplace of Dylan Thomas), you can look forward to i-witness, a new play based on the writings of W.G. Sebald, which will be performed at the Volcano Theatre Company sometime this fall. The company’s website has an advance description of the play, but here’s a fragment:

Three women and three men present six short chapters, each with its own style and characters. Join their haunted tour through strange and ordinary landscapes, following clues, signs and connections laid down in their individual and shared histories. A search for beauty in the shadow of barbarism. i-witness is brutal, meditative, and darkly funny theatre that explores what it means to live in a world full of the echoes and whisperings of the past.