California Literary Review

There is a scene in Reservoir Dogs which ranks as one of the finest in modern cinema. I should perhaps qualify that. It is not a scene, but more like several knitted together by theme and narrative purpose; that purpose being for the audience to learn about Mr. Orange’s role as an undercover cop. It begins in a diner where Mr. Orange and another policeman discuss the job he is to take on. He is told he needs a tall tale, something with which to ingratiate himself with the hoods, to make him appear one of them, a story to give him credibility, kudos even. From the diner we are taken to a yard where Mr. Orange practises his story before a gratified wall. The other policeman stands in front of him, directing the telling. From there we are transported to a bar where, surrounded by alcohol, cigarette smoke and the other members of the heist team, Mr. Orange delivers his story, essentially a simple one of how he once thought he was going to be busted for possession of drugs. From there we journey into the very story itself, walking with Mr Orange into the washroom. He carries a briefcase full of marijuana. Enter a group of smug-looking cops with a dog. Tension. The bark of the dog. The sudden interest of the police. Mr. Orange hits the dryer and there is a moment in which it seems as if he is going to be nabbed. But then it turns off and in an instant the whole thing is over.

In the hands of a lesser talent than Quentin Tarantino this scene might have been nothing more than a conversation between Mr. Orange and the other policeman in the diner. Yet Tarantino, through the sheer verve of his storytelling, manufactured one of the most memorable moments in his debut film.

It is precisely this fluid evolution of narrative, this continuous flow from one part of the story to the next, the use of a shifting narrator, driving the reader deeply within the world of the fiction, which distinguishes the work of W.G. Sebald, who, were he not to have met an untimely death on an East Anglian road in 2001, would undoubtedly have become a Nobel laureate.

Winfried Georg Maximillian Sebald, known as Max by friends and family, was born in Bavaria in Germany in 1944. After studying German language and literature in Germany, Switzerland and England, he became an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester in 1966. After settling permanently in England in 1970, he went on to become Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, a post he held until his death.

Regularly compared to Kafka, Nabakov, Borges and Thomas Bernhard, Sebald has rightly been celebrated as one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. The reason for his taking up of a non-academic pen was to challenge his country’s stubborn refusal to remember the past. He had little interest in the conventional novel, holding nothing but disdain for the crude mechanics of “June laid the book down gently on the dining room table and moved wistfully to the drinks cabinet,” which, to his mind, did nothing but foreground the whole artificiality of the process. He was also critical of much of contemporary fiction’s fixation with relationships. Sebald wrote what he called “prose fiction,” and is widely credited with the invention of a new literary form; a hybrid of memoir, essay, travelogue and fiction, which often involves the experiences of one “W.G. Sebald”, a German writer long settled in East Anglia. Sebald’s fictional persona is alluring, persuasive and, at times, mesmeric. Erudite, deadpan comic, with a broad depth of intellectual reference, he seems removed from modern times, suspended above it in some way, out of time. He keeps us in what Paul Auster has described as a “state of permanent disequilibrium.”

Other writers such as Geoff Dyer and Alain de Botton have also established themselves as exponents of a similar type of hybrid writing style. Yet they are more obviously producing non-fiction and neither has written anything to rival Austerlitz, the best of Sebald’s work. Austerlitz is one of the most vital, daringly original and monumental displays of literary brilliance that the postwar world has seen. It concerns one Jacques Austerlitz who, in his 50s, recovers memories of having arrived in Britain from Prague on the kindertransport. The book recounts journeys that are physical, emotional and temporal. The slow yet relentless unravelling of the fabric of Austerlitz’s protective identity, and the discovery of his true buried self, is harrowing and heartbreaking. Sebald’s treatment of the pain of remembering, especially when set in the context of tragedy on a scale unimaginable, is, in its stylistic elegance and unashamed refusal to ignore the significance of what has gone before, beautifully hypnotic. His work reads like the expression of truth; it has the hauntingly sublime quality of all great art. It insinuates itself into your consciousness, setting itself up there as a profound comment, an expression of exquisitely drawn lucidity, a sustained meditation on what it is to be in possession of an intelligence, forever attempting to knock the shapeless form of the world into something real, recognizable and permanent.

Sebald’s new form enabled him to express the very particular problems that have afflicted the German nation since the Second World War: principally, those of an almost psychopathic act of forgetting. Sebald was the poet of a nation’s historical laconism and referred to the postwar attitude to the Nazi era as a “conspiracy of silence.” “Until I was 16 or 17,” he said, “ I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945.” In the ruined towns and cities of postwar Germany, the causes of the destruction of an entire society were never discussed. His father, who spent time in a French PoW camp after the war, said nothing about what had happened. Sebald believed that the ruins he saw around him were a feature of all cities, a belief he didn’t lose until his mid teens. His approach to these subjects, to the remembrance of things past, is so utterly removed from all other attempts to excavate the desperate consequences of the Nazi era, as to make everything else seem almost hollow in comparison.

Sebald scorned the Holocaust “industry” represented by books such as Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, which, of course, was made into Spielberg’s massively successful Schindler’s List, and an appreciation of which is to this day, somehow proof to others that you are in possession of a monumental conscience and therefore beyond moral questions. Sebald loathed what he saw as the official culture of mourning and remembering; he had no interest in second hand portrayals of the horrors of the Second World War, which he felt tipped too easily into sentimentality or sensationalism. He believed, and defended this belief with passion, that those who had never experienced Auschwitz were not capable of describing what happened there, that they were guilty of claiming the worst kind of false intimacy. He saw any direct attempt to address the Holocaust as presumption. “I don’t think one can write from a compromised moral position,” he once said.

Therefore he developed a way of approaching the past from an oblique angle. You will find no descriptions of life in concentration camps in Sebald’s work. That is why we have Primo Levi. Nor will you find him slipping into the easy transformation of the events of the war into a simple battle between unquestioned tyrants and impossibly heroic world-savers. Instead you will find a blurring of the boundaries between the real and the fictional, the crafting of a form which is documentary in style, a kind of creative history or imaginative essay, with an almost tangible sense of ‘the real’ pervading every line of his work.

Sebald was a devoted, even obsessive photographer, and he revelled in the scattering of images throughout his books. They are of all manner of things, postcards, ticket stubs, found objects, shops, paintings, and do not come accompanied with explanatory captions. They only acquire meaning therefore, from the surrounding text. They are suggestive rather than didactic, and help establish this palpable aura of authenticity.

Although Sebald worked very closely with his translators and spent most of his adult life living in England, he declined to write in English, as he feared losing one of the chief characteristics of his work, the clarity of his expression. The remarkable fact of the translations, mostly done by Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell, is that they do not for one moment feel like translations. John Carey, the emeritus Professor of Literature at Oxford and chief book critic for The Sunday Times, said that “poetry is what is lost in translation.” If something has been lost in the case of bringing Sebald’s work to an English-speaking readership then it is frightening to think how good the books must be in German.

Sebald first came to the attention of the English-speaking world with the 1996 publication of Die Ausgewanderten: Vier Lange Erzahlungen (The Emigrants), originally published in German in 1992. A tale of four eldery men displaced by the Second World War, told with restraint and sensitivity, it was a book which arrived laden with prizes from the German-speaking world. It was met with instant and unanimous acclaim. A line from The Emigrants, “And so they are always returning to us, the dead” reads like a primer to the whole of Sebald’s work. It is what we do when the past return to us, when repressed memories resurface with unsettling force, that Sebald’s work addresses in a way which is entirely new.

As you will no doubt have deduced from reading this, Sebald is a writer for whom hyperbole doesn’t seem to serve the purpose. When even the acknowledgement that describing someone as a genius is a cliché, is a cliché in itself, one knows that the critical engine is running on empty. But to hell with it, Sebald is, or rather was, a genius. If by that we consider genius in light of John Cleese’s definition, that of being able to do what everyone else can, only to seem to do it without any effort at all. Susan Sontag acclaimed Sebald as the “contemporary master of the literature of lament and mental restlessness.” “Master” is an apposite word. From Emigrants to Vertigo to Austerlitz, Sebald gave the lie to the cynical belief that there is no longer such a thing as artistic originality. His death has robbed the world of one of its greatest writers. Anyone who professes a love of literature should turn to his work. There can be no way of knowing of what more he might have been capable of achieving with the written word had he not died a few years shy of his sixtieth birthday. There is, however, the consolation of knowing that there are many books of his to read and re-read. As well as is his “prose fiction” there are works of poetry and non-fiction. But if you read only one book by W.G. Sebald, make it Austerlitz. “The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory,” he once said. Austerlitz, more than any other book in recent years, helps strengthen that very backbone.

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