A Bridge in Blythe, a Panorama in Waterloo and a Vortex in Time: Photography in the Novels of W.G. Sebald

Published in an abridged version in New York Arts 2005

Initially I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.

Vladimir Nabokov - Speak Memory

There is in every photograph: the return of the dead. 

Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

W. G. Sebald died in December of 2001 in a car accident in Norwich, England during a particularly bad winter when the roads had turned to ice. He suffered a heart attack while driving with his daughter as a passenger, and he drifted off the road. Fortunately she survived the accident but Sebald never regained consciousness and died in a hospital shortly after at the age of 57. He said in an interview earlier that year: “I don’t think you can write from a compromised moral position.”[1] This is a position that would, at times, put him at odds with sections of the publishing industry, critics, and fellow writers. At the time of his death he had established himself as a master writer of fiction in the European tradition, thanks in part to Susan Sontag, who championed his work in an influential essay from February 2000 in the Times Literary Supplement. He published Austerlitz (2001), arguably his best work, in an English translation only one month before the fatal accident.

Sebald’s work began to be appreciated in the 1990’s, when it was first published in Germany, by a small circle of admirers that grew exponentially over time, but from the start there were critics who expressed a dissenting opinion. One example of the lukewarm approach to Sebald is provided by the literary critic James Wood: “Even the sad photographs, the most elegiac ones, have a kind of cheekiness, an amusing impertinence, as they sit there in their careful novelty on the page, quietly ensuring that Sebald’s work can belong to no known literary genre.”(2) Wood is assuming that Sebald used photographs in order to make it impossible to classify his work - a typical strategy of post-modern artists, writers, and filmmakers from the 1980’s to the present. The clarity, careful construction, concise denseness, and self-conscious use of various classical, or even archaic writing styles makes it clear that this line of reasoning is specious and difficult to accept. Wood refers to Sebald’s presumed “amusing impertinence” because people at the time did not know what to make of the work’s use of photographs. Sebald’s novels insisted on a polyphonic, collage approach to text where the writing presupposed itself to exist inside a field for text and image – but this was a collage that looked like nothing anyone had seen before. The primary player was not the image or the text but the relationship between the two – a relationship that seemed, on the face it, obvious (an illustration), but that was often strangely distant, hermetic and unresolved. Some writers, such as Sontag, were enthralled by this intense ambiguity, while others, such as Gunther Grass, were skeptical and, at times, bluntly dismissive. What was Sebald up to?

In his lifetime he published four novels that were translated into English (in order of their creation): Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz. Other important works were posthumously published: his first literary work titled After Nature, published in 2002, explores the lives of three men emotionally connected by their sense of doubt and impending catastrophe, regarding the relationship of humankind and the natural world; Campo Santo (unfinished) published in 2003, consisted of intertwining essays – a convention that Sebald followed from his first book and made his own. These short pieces took place on the island of Corsica and its ruins and cemeteries, combining natural and man made history; a series of essays on five writers and one painter was published in 2013 under the title A Place in the Country; and a handful of haiku like poems that had appeared in small journals titled Across the Land and the Water was published in 2011. His only longer non-fiction work was On the Natural History of Destruction published in 1999. This was a study of the psychological effects on the civilian population of the allied bombing of Germany – even after the outcome of the war was certain - and the erasure of the memory of this catastrophic slaughter, and the subsequent confusion and trauma inflicted on the population at large.

Sebald always seemed able to scrupulously capture some sense of emotional dislocation linked to personal experience in the midst of shifting historical realities that were seemingly random and confusing. His characters always come to a crisis related to a past trauma that, often through a chance encounter, comes to the surface. The main characters experience an overpowering emotion that they can’t fully grasp - this despite, or because of, the large amounts of history and philosophy they’ve studied and carefully erected as a foundation to their sense of reality. In effect, the characters own education and erudition becomes a formidable defense mechanism that almost takes over the organism that it meant to protect – almost but not quite. In that sense the work makes use of Freudian ideas but without assuming that these are a road to truth, or even to self-knowledge, but merely one interesting approach among many others – one thread among many that go to make up a tapestry. The past is not so much coexisting with the present in some distant metaphysical space, but is a fully formed universe that envelops the present and lives alongside it, separated by a thin membrane whose makeup and parameters are unknown. Sebald surely appreciated the famous quote by William Faulkner: “The past is not only not dead, it is not even past.”

In his novels, a character’s delicate psyche is always rubbing up against bruising histories, both personal and historical. His characters are usually rational, serious, reflective, overly sensitive, and seemingly self-contained. Many of the characters are obsessively involved in some investigation or field of study that is taking up all their time and energy. These characters often have emotional difficulties coping with the photographs and ephemera that are often a part of their study. This study conjures the past in ways that insistently haunt the present in a mysterious way that Sebald himself seems to be investigating. There is an intuitive sense of the organic coexistence of all things, along with a strong sense of the relation between chance and historical determinism. In short, Sebald’s art was rooted in paradox.

Winfried Georg Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria, Germany in 1944. In 1966 he became an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling with some difficulties in this working class, industrial, English city. Sometime later he became professor of European literature in East Anglea, an area of England that includes Cambridge, Ely, and Norwich, where he lived until his death in 2001. While his novels often featured a transplanted German emigrant living in England, the autobiographical aspect of the complex, episodic narratives were ambiguous. Sentences often run on in his work, and the narrative voices are sometimes superimposed, in a way similar to Joseph Conrad, but without the associations to the “exotic” or the “primitive” that run through Conrad’s work. They are elliptical and ambiguous in the extreme, and as conscious of European literary traditions in their careful construction as Vladimir Nabokov, who inhabits the narrative of The Emigrants at different stages of his life.

Their apparent open structure belies a highly formal architecture, a counterpoint of narrative strategies, taking freely from such disparate elements as travel literature, geography, history, and most insistently memoirs. Sebald had no qualms about mixing categories, genres and styles, but did so with caution and deliberation, creating transitions that were sometimes seamless and at others hard and to-the-point with sharp turns. For a professor, Sebald seems to have been profoundly non-academic in his indifference to the rules of the game – or perhaps precisely because he was an academic he had a loathing for those rules and sought ways to use them while parodying, obliterating, or transgressing against them.

In Sebald’s University days, in the early 1960’s, the approaches of Semiology and Structuralism were in vogue but he seems to have favored the social and biographical context of his own favorite writers, Max Frisch, Robert Walser, Thomas Browne, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Franz Kafka. He described in detail what he was after in his study of these earlier masters: “People lose the faculty of remembering. This is the function of literature.”[3] (emphasis Sebald)  The book written towards the end of his life, A Place in the Country, is where Sebald turned to what Carole Angier, his biographer, called “a new kind of literary criticism: literary admiration, even literary love…It was a unique form of critical writing, which no one else had ever emulated, and Max’s (Sebald’s) last act of academic defiance, since expressing emotion is the last thing scholars are meant to do.”[4] It may have been the last thing scholars did but Sebald put emotions front and center in all of his writing – in his literary criticism it is, as Ms. Angier makes clear, right up front so you can’t miss it, but in the novels it is also present but hidden between the lines, or, more to the point, between text and image.

The first person narrator in Sebald’s novels always seemed to come from another level of consciousness divorced from human concerns, beyond anger, lust, or death. It appeared that the vortex of history had swallowed the narrator up and that he (always a man) spoke from its depths as haunted as any character in Poe or Borges. Susan Sontag called Sebald a “militant elegist,”(5) which is a wonderful description of his central passion. This concern with human mortality puts him in league with like-minded authors who preceded him such as Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). In Browne’s seminal book Urn Burial, for which Sebald wrote a moving introduction to the New Directions edition from 1995, he explains Browne’s aesthetic as one that attempts to put the brevity of life in perspective without sentimentality or a false sense of optimism for an afterlife - on the contrary Browne sought to go directly into the heart of the matter, coming to grips not only with the relatively short period of a human life span but with the vastness of geological or cosmological time, intuiting long before quantum physics that all matter has a built in clock that is winding down, including the universe itself.

The Emigrants begins with a photograph of a large tree surrounded by an old graveyard. The text thereafter consists of four narratives. This is how it begins: “At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.”[6] The book opens with a paradox. The photograph of the tree in the graveyard can’t help but suggest both death and the endless, organic recycling of life in various forms. The work opens with the laconic first person “I” searching for new beginnings – a house with Clara – in search of “somewhere to live.” This would be the search of all the narrators in The Emigrants and in a sense of all of the narrators in every book Sebald wrote. In that beginning, the paradoxes of factual matter (gravestones under a tree) and narrative movement (searching for a home) come into play, setting the stage for the drama that follows.

The works often used the familiar language of travel literature from magazines devoted to it but at times there were sudden shifts to academic historical narratives whose authenticity, despite the seemingly serious tone, was questionable. Readers sometimes wrote to Sebald explaining “mistakes” in the novels. From The Rings of Saturn, we get a good idea of his themes and his dry - one could say British - sense of humor: “Not far from the coast, between Southwold and Walberswick, a narrow iron bridge crosses the river Blyth where a long time ago ships heavily laden with wool made their way seaward…According to local historians, the train that ran on it had originally been built for the Emperor of China. Precisely which emperor had given this commission I have not succeeded in finding out, despite lengthy research; nor have I been able to discover why the order was never delivered or why this diminutive imperial train, which may have been intended to connect the Palace in Peking, then still surrounded by pinewoods, to one of the summer residences, ended up in service on a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway. The only thing the uncertain sources agree on is that the outlines of the imperial heraldic dragon, complete with a tail and somewhat clouded over by its own breath, could clearly be made out beneath the black paintwork of the carriages, which were used mainly by seaside holidaymakers and traveled at a maximum speed of sixteen miles per hour.”[7] A train meant for an unknown emperor in China, for reasons that clearly will remain a mystery, now services commuters on holiday in the suburbs of England. The heraldic dragon still on the side of the train becomes a comic metaphor of a history that has been almost obliterated, fading slowly in the workaday world of quotidian British tourism, yet the original design still comes through as in a palimpsest. So it is with histories writ large and small.

From Austerlitz:  “Whenever I go out at Liverpool Street station on my way back to the East End, said Austerlitz… and feeling that constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time… as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead as we pass through them on our way through the station. I knew that on the site where the station stood marshy meadows had once extended to the city walls, meadows which froze over for months on end in the cold winters of the so-called Little Ice Age.”[8] Like Nabokov, Sebald believed that all of matter is organically related, so in a sense, objects and places share the emotional history of humans and perhaps retain their own memories. In literature this synesthesia is Nabokovian at heart and Sebald owes a debt, including the use of photographs, to Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory (1951).

But in Nabokov’s work the photographs illustrate the text whereas in Sebald they compound the mystery of the novel by using photographs, already loaded with narrative possibilities of their own. The photographs then react to the narrative, and, as in a chemistry experiment, they create a new compound narrative. But unlike meta-text works of the same period, such as Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982) where her text makes critical observations – often comical - on Charles Dickens’s novel of the same name, in Sebald they create a sense of poetic reverie that suspends any clear and concise meaning. The text and the image work like various movements of a musical piece, in counterpoint. These movements then bounce off each other as in a hall of mirrors where ambiguity reaches a breaking point. At that point linear continuity is shattered and in its place there are episodic passages that touch each other (in every sense). 

Neither Sebald nor Nabokov were the first to use photography in their literary work. While photographs have been used as illustration since the beginning of the medium, starting with Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844). The use of pictures placed throughout a text enigmatically or poetically were first conceived, produced, and distributed by the artists of the early 20th century in collaboration with writers in an effort to create a new radical poetics that transformed the multilayered experience of the city into art. It was the Russian Constructivists, Dadaists, and Surrealists who sought ways of slowing down reading and looking by creating psychologically powerful enigmas in the confluence of text and image that would inspire curiosity, give pleasure, and take the work to a new level of meaning, or many meanings, simultaneously. The straightforward rationalism of images illustrating text in a direct one-to-one correspondence was not simply avoided, but consciously derided and ridiculed. Prominent examples are Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness, 1934), the photographs of Alexander Rodchenko in his collaboration with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in About This (1923), Richard Huelsenbeck and Hannah Hoch’s various collaborations with members of the Dada group, and Andre Breton’s collaboration with J.A. Boiffard in Najda (1928). By the postwar era such artist/writer collaborations had become more mainstream and programmatic with publishers offering limited edition books for collectors. Eventually more established publishers started to distribute esoteric work to the general public - for example in 1968 the artist Jim Dine brilliantly illustrated Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Poet Assassinated, for Holt Reinhart Winston, incorporating a series of enigmatic, contemporary, photographs to create comical digressions and violent non sequiturs that resonated with the satirical texts of Apollinaire. While there were precedents for Sebald’s work no one before had taken on both the writer and the illustrator role and then set to work on orchestrating that text/image in counterpoint.

 In Austerlitz we see a photograph of a pretty girl, about twelve years old, holding a dog on her lap with some dolls at her feet. The photograph has rounded edges that are associated with photo albums from the early 20th century. Accompanying this image the narrator explains that a damn had been built where the village of Llandwddyn once stood submerging “at least forty houses and farms, together with the church of St. John of Jerusalem, three chapels and three pubs, all of them drowned when the dam was finished in the autumn of 1888.”[9] Austerlitz then concludes with a rumination on “...this notion of mine about the subaquatic existence of the people of Llanwddyn that also had something to do with the album which Elias first showed me on our return home that evening containing several photographs of his birthplace, now sunk beneath the water.”[10] In the photograph of the little girl, the strange large shrub behind her does look like an underwater plant undulating with the movement of water. Austerlitz lets his imagination lead him: “…the little girl sitting in a chair in the garden with her little dog on her lap, became as familiar to me as if I were living with them down at the bottom of the lake. At night before I fell asleep in my cold room, I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water.”[11]

The effect Sebald describes here of looking at pictures – more specifically pictures of people who are dead – is very close to Roland Barthes’ punctum when looking at the “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother. But as Austerlitz never met the girl in the picture his emotional attachment is his own creation. Barthes sums up his feelings toward that photograph in a celebrated piece of writing: “All the world’s photographs formed a Labyrinth. I knew that at the center of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture, fulfilling Nietzsche’s prophecy: A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne. The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a sacred thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography.”[12] Roland Barthes here gets to the heart of Sebald’s emotional need to enter photography – that is to find his family – and the past that they shared intact. The Photograph is the key that unlocks the imaginative universe that was for Austerlitz lost in time.

One sees that same emotional need at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). The main character, an old, retired professor, imagines he remembers his parents as young, fully and deliriously in the moment, swimming in a lake, inviting him into the water to come and play and join in the fun. Bergman shows it in a medium long shot, as if it were from a point-of-view. Is the image a dream or a memory? We don’t know. But it’s an image of reconciliation and acceptance that for the professor in Bergman’s film links him to an earthly past that calls to him as part of a fragile chain of being, as it does Barthes in the imaginative presence of the Winter Garden Photograph, and in turn Austerlitz in the picture of the girl in front of a house holding the treasures from her childhood for a fraction of a second while a snapshot is taken.

 Photographs in this sense are a window into the world of the past from which the viewer is both invited and excluded – a foreign country as L.P. Hartley called it - but of course the metaphor of the window in photography is one that Barthes carefully avoided since, when he wrote Camera Lucida, this metaphor was considered academic sacrilege of the most insipid and bourgeois sort. Within such circles it could only be mentioned ironically. Barthes knew where all the mines and booby traps were hidden and masterfully navigated around all of them with his usual French elegance. Formalist and post-structuralist critics, such as John Tagg in The Burden of Representation (1993), pounced with boring predictability on Barthes’s emotionally loaded text and attempted to discredit his ideas by insisting that photographs are exclusively another form of text – a discursive system that does not represent “reality” or discover it. Photography under Tagg’s watch is a visual regime of sorts with traps laid for naïve observers. Most non-academics were more open to the idea of the very powerful, sometimes chilling effects that photography can induce whether we like it or not; affects that are still little understood. The arguments about photography, especially when articulated by academics such as Tagg, tend toward rigorous twaddle that misses the point. Intelligent people have been thinking about photographs for a long time and assumed that the images were mediated representations akin to illustrations, as well as windows-to-the-world as such.

Susan Sontag critically explains Virginia Woolf’s overly simple definition of photography anticipating Tagg’s sophistry: “Photographs Woolf claims are not an argument, they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. The truth is they are not “simply” anything, and certainly not regarded just as facts, by Woolf or anyone else… the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. This sleight of hand allows photographs to be both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality – a feat literature has long aspired to but could never attain in this literal sense.”[13] Sontag, in a few clear sentences, explains why photography is neither statement nor fact, but a complex image construction of a mediated reality that is received not only by the eyes, but by the body and the brain; both then set to work immediately, digesting the image, translating all of its effects and meanings into something intelligible. In effect every image, by this definition, is a meta-image. The photographs in Sebald’s work take narrative fiction to another level of complexity not seen since the early days of Modernism with Joyce, Apollinaire, Stein, Mayakovsky, Eliot, and Woolf herself. He, in effect, resurrected Modernism and brought it, as if on cue, to close out the 20th century.

In Austerlitz we get closer to the essence of Sebald’s photographic inquiry when the central narrator is shown a photograph of himself as a five year old dressed as a pageboy. It is the picture that is on the cover of the British and American editions of the book. He reflects that it is “as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives.”[14] Later, he claims to have examined the photograph in great detail with a magnifying glass “without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.”[15] Walter Benjamin articulated a very similar sentiment succinctly in his famous passage from his study of Baudelaire: “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”[16] It is this “look” that oversteps reason and bounds, and is thereby invested with the ability to look at us in return. This intriguing idea was explored in 1956 by Julio Cortázar in his short story Axolotl where a man observes an axolotl - a gelatinous, prehistoric animal - in an aquarium with such intensity that it becomes obsessive. To his horror one day he suddenly sees himself in his mind’s eye through the thick glass of the aquarium – from the point-of-view of the axolotl - his face quizzical and curious, and this image haunts him to the point that he thinks he might be going mad. Sebald elaborates on this aspect of photography: “While looking we sense how things are looking at us, and we understand that we are not here in order to pervade the universe, but to be pervaded by it.”[17]

In The Rings of Saturn the ambiguous first person narrator informs us that he once took a holiday to Waterloo where “there were no visitors about on that leaden-grey day shortly before Christmas, but as if they had come to people this deserted state, a squad of characters in Napoleonic costume suddenly appeared tramping up and down the few streets, beating drums and blowing fifes; and bringing up the rear was a slatternly, garishly made-up woman pulling a curious hand-cart with a goose shut up in a cage.”[18] Once again we see Sebald’s familiar and comical juxtapositions of grand “History” with quotidian life that seem to be irreconcilable realities – but are they? What the first person narrator in The Rings of Saturn is describing is the reenactment, performed every year, of the battle between the combined British and Russian forces against the French at Waterloo in 1815. It is an event that is meant to be both entertaining and instructive. Nevertheless Sebald makes us feel the seemingly limitless density of time between that event and the actors in costume in the late 20th century. If we follow Sebald’s thought we find ourselves thinking about time in a different way. History under normal conditions can easily appear as vast stretches of time with a few famous but emotionally distant names and dates to act as markers. Sebald first makes us aware of these gaps – these stretches of time in which thousands of people lived and died. He proceeds to show the various ways the main character has failed in the attempt to reach out to the past, in this case the battle of Waterloo, and fails to emotionally connect with it or comprehend it in any way whatsoever, despite the sincere efforts of the state that mediates such efforts via regular recreations in costume. 

He goes further and shows the process by which the character himself comes to the realization of his own failure to grasp that reality. The narrator, after his experience with the staged battle, walks into the Waterloo Panorama “housed in an immense domed rotunda, where from a raised platform in the middle one can view the battle – a favorite subject with panorama artists - in every direction – it is like being at the center of events.”[19] Sebald here has some fun with realist artists. He has them use their rendering skills in perspective to present a false perspective – that is, one in which we can see “everything” - in effect becoming gods – by using multiple vanishing points across a surface that is larger than the field of vision covering a full 360 degree rotunda. This is an established (and establishment) form of rendering that is the backbone of realist art, tableau photography, and commercial cinema.

The narrator elaborates on his emotional response to this so called realism and he comes to some unusual, startling conclusions: “Across this horrific three dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled one’s gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circus-like structure.”[20] One can’t let slip Sebald’s subtle references to the “circus-like structure” that suggests that the attempt to re-create history in this instance is more a circus act than any kind of documentary; and secondly that the artist painted it in 1912 – that is, on the eve of World War I – a catastrophic war that would far surpass Waterloo in savagery, technological brutality, and numbers of people killed. The narrator sums up: “This then, I thought, as I looked around about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?”[21] These are the central questions at the heart of Sebald’s writing and the crux of his central argument. The past is fundamentally closed to us, except perhaps through imaginative intervention, that is, through fictions of one sort or another. That palpable sense of moral disgust with regard to the traditional realist approach - the Panorama - is Sebald’s epithet to a failed, insipid and facile art that never understood the complex, horrifying realities lying, in this case quite literally, under the artist’s feet.

 In Austerlitz the character significantly recalls a dream that clarifies his relationship to the past: “I dreamed of returning to the flat in Prague after a long absence. All the furniture is in its proper place. I know that my parents will soon be back from their holiday, and there is something important I must give them. I am not aware that they have been dead for years. I simply think that they must be very old, around ninety or a hundred, as indeed they would be if they were still alive. But when at last they come through the door they are in their mid-thirties at most.”[22] The link to Bergman’s Wild Strawberries is most acute in this scene.

In the following page Sebald sums up his reflections on photography and the past this way: “It seems to me Austerlitz added, that we do not understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between the living and the dead…”[23] Stereometry is the measurement of volumes, such as a sphere or a cylinder, using geometry. Austerlitz is still searching for a coherent system (is there a more rational one than geometry?) that will answer the riddle of time. That he went searching for answers in a photograph is logical, since photography does, in a literal sense, combine geometry and time. But what he found was that, as with the Cortázar story, the person in the picture looked back at him across an abyss. In the symbolic dream with his parents Austerlitz had something important to give them, surely that thing was himself – his love - and the photograph is a trace of the need for that crucial exchange which in reality probably never occurred; however, it does happen within the sphere of his creative imagination, or what is sometimes called art.

The detritus of everyday life that we see throughout Sebald’s work: discarded railway tickets, hotel invoices, newspaper photos, and most conspicuously snapshots, take on a powerful role in the narratives as evidence of a life that once was and is no more. As in Tolstoy, personal histories parallel the larger historical parts of the narrative, but unlike the Russian master, never in a one to one relationship. There is always some attenuation, some digression, some non-sequitur from left field, that links up with other facts that make each situation unique, eccentric and ultimately unknowable. Strict meaning in Sebald always makes a brief appearance before realizing that there is no room on stage - and then it tiptoes into the wings, never to return.

Every moment of the present in Sebald is singularly banal and mysterious. An intersection of possibilities in which thousands of years of planned and chance encounters have come down to a certain moment in time/space. This makes each of these moments – what we mere mortals call now - a window of opportunity and a stage on which accident and fate play their parts. This is why coincidence played such an important part in Sebald’s life and work - coincidence suggests some form of underlying structure to life, some hidden meaning, some fundamental relationship that was, until the moment the coincidence occurred, invisible. This evanescent “now” then vanishes into the past along with everything else irredeemably lost to us. But unlike the Viennese iconoclast Thomas Bernhard - a strong influence on Sebald’s writing – for whom this state of affairs was an intolerable black comedy, Sebald takes a more balanced approach that looks beyond the horror of time as merely a short road to oblivion. Sebald, like James Joyce - another influence - gets the nuances, the treasures to be found in the small moments such as the lifting of a pint in a pub after work. He is then able to connect this small, quotidian gesture (that could easily be forgotten in a minute) with larger realities such as History or the eternal. Such a sensibility cannot help but see comedy and tragedy, pivotal historical moments and everyday life, as an organic whole. In a sense this viewpoint makes every moment precious since it is preordained that it must pass into oblivion or into some cosmological sense of time that we can perhaps never understand - we can only infer and see glimpses, or write novels. Sebald was an artist fascinated by the complex, organic minutiae of the quotidian, at the expense of any theory that might explain reality by fitting it into an organized system of knowledge.

Sebald’s work described the present better than anyone at the end of a century that saw more people die violently or go into exile than any before it. Considering human history, in even a perfunctory way, this is a considerable record. For him, the only way to convey the seriousness of these themes was with the full weight of history felt in every page. Only then could he achieve the overall effect that his work produces; that is, we sense that what we thought of as the past was merely the tip of the iceberg - when we peer into the dark waters we see the past to be the size of the globe itself. The glimpse into this “vortex of time,” as he called it, is dizzying when we intuit what might be under that tip. The author describes coexistent multiplicities perceived by a consciousness that is able to – if only for a moment – see itself in relation to its own interlocking pasts: personal, historical, anthropological, geological, and cosmological. He admitted in several interviews toward the end of his life that he was most interested in metaphysics. Carole Angier:  “Metaphysics is the inquiry into the true nature of reality which lies beyond physics, beyond this world, ‘beyond one’s ken.’ And that, I believe is his underlying subject – unlike any other literary writer of our time, indeed of all recent times, until we go back to the seventeenth century and writers like Thomas Browne, the hero of Sebald’s most metaphysical book, The Rings of Saturn.”(24)

This vast multifaceted world of Sebald’s intersecting narratives acts like an assortment of atoms of various densities in a controlled experiment whose final aim seems to be the elucidation of a soul pressed upon by history. Yet for Sebald in a sense there was no History or Humanity in the conventional sense. There were only specific individuals caught in certain places and times rushing headlong down a road they didn’t create, improvising as best they could, catch-as-catch-can. “History” and “Humanity” are only concepts, marble statues that resemble us in some tidy, generic form but lack all depth, all awkwardness, all humor - they are frozen versions of ourselves. Sebald in his novels returns this living, mongrel reality to us in fragments, contingent and unresolved, broken to bits and filtered through various conventions because that is how we find it - piecemeal, mediated, and incomplete - that’s us. In his work, the voices we hear and the fragments of lives that we read, many of the dead who never found their way into History finally find a voice, and, not surprisingly, they have much to tell us.

[1] The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G. Sebald, Sharon Lynne Schwartz, Seven Stories Press, 2007

[2] Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019, James Wood, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

[3] Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald, Carole Angier, Bloomsbury, 2021

[4] Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald

[5] Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, Picador, 2002

[6] The Immigrants, W.G. Sebald, New Directions, 1997

[7] The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald, New Directions, 1999

[8] Austerllitz, W.G. Sebald, Random House, 2001

[9] Austerllitz

[10] Austerllitz

[11] Austerllitz

[12] Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Hill and Wang, 1981

[13] On Photography, Susan Sontag, McGraw Hill, 1973

[14] Austerllitz

[15] Austerllitz

[16] On Some Motifs In Baudelaire, from The Writer of Modern Life, Walter Benjamin, Belknap Harvard University Press, 2006

[17] Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald

[18] The Rings of Saturn

[19] The Rings of Saturn

[20] The Rings of Saturn

[21] The Rings of Saturn

[22] Austerllitz

[23] Austerllitz

 [24] Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald