W. G. Sebald: Where Essay Meets Fiction

Patrick Madden

Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Volume 10, Number2, Fall 2008, pp. 169-175 (Review)

Published by Michigan State University Press

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This column invites readers to share their favorite nonfiction books in print. Memoirs,travel writing, nature writing, essay collections, biography, and true adventure are allwelcome in these capsule reviews—both of new books and of old favorites still avail-able. Our aim is to keep the best nonfiction alive in a reader-to-reader kind of way.If you have books that you’d like to recommend in this column, contact MimiSchwartz at Mimi.Schwartz@att.net.

PATRICK MADDEN

W. G. Sebald:Where Essay Meets Fiction

During a relatively short period in the 1990s, W. G. Sebald published hisfour major literary-prose books, first in German, then in English and otherlanguages. His English publishers called the books novels, though Sebaldhimself was uncomfortable with the term. So were his reviewers, even asthey praised him as a genius, an innovator, a strange and mystical word-magician.

Susan Sontag wrote: “The Emigrants is the most extraordinary, thrillingnew book I’ve read [in] several years. It is like nothing I’ve ever read . . . anunclassifiable book, at once autobiography and fiction and historical chron-icle. A roman d’essai?” Margo Jefferson of the New York Times wondered:“What does one call them? Meditations, elegies, mutations grown frommemoir, history, literary biography and prose poetry?” W. S. Merwin saidthat Sebald’s writing

conjures from the details and sequences of daily life, and their circum-stances and encounters, from apparent chance and its unsounded calculus,

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Reader-to-Reader:Capsule ReviewsBook

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[a] dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time. . . . He evokes atonce the minutiae and the vastness of individual existence, the incon-solable sorrow of history and the scintillating beauty of the moment andits ground of memory.

Apart from obvious adulation, doesn’t it sound like these reviewers aredescribing essays?

They are, I would argue. Although the essay is an inherently and tradi-tionally nonfictional form, there is nothing preventing an author fromwriting a fictional essay. With Sebald, you can read his books and neverthink for once that he is lying or dishonest. Sure, you might doubt that heactually saw Dante sauntering across the piazza in Gonzagagasse, but he’snot trying to make you believe it. Instead, it illustrates his state of mind.And what matters is not the extratextual facticity of Sebald’s accounts, butthe form in which he writes. That form is essay. Consider what he told aNew Yorker interviewer:

I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research wasdone systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The moreI got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in thatway—in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you lookat a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in acompletely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is look-ing for. . . . One thing takes you to another, and you make something outof these haphazardly assembled materials. And . . . you have to strain yourimagination in order to create a connection between . . . things. . . . Youhave to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to dosomething that it hasn’t done before.

He’s talking about essaying. Let me tell you about his four major books.

Vertigo, by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse. New Directions,1999. 263 pages, paper, $15.95.

Sebald’s first literary work, Vertigo, comes to us in four associated sectionsthat follow the journeys of Henri Stendhal, Ernst Herbeck, Franz Kafka,and W. G. Sebald following the journeys of Kafka. As with all of his books,Vertigo is filled with strange black and white images, often out-of-focus

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photographs, sometimes pencil drawings, receipts, pages from a day plan-ner, newspaper clippings, his passport. These serve to give the book a doc-umentary feel, certainly, but they also inform and interrogate the text asSebald travels through Europe and through his own thoughts. Thosethoughts center on widely varied people, places, and events: Napoleon’snearly impossible crossing of St. Bernard’s Pass, Stendhal’s amorous misad-ventures, Jewish children singing Christmas carols, a strange unsolved mur-der, the production of Aida, the complex interdependencies that turn thecourse of history, the despair of the lost past: “They were soundless andweightless, these images and words of times gone by, flaring up briefly andinstantly going out, each of them its own empty enigma.” Chief amongSebald’s meditative subjects is the slippery nature of memory itself, the waysin which it can be distorted or deluded, or in which vivid images canreplace ostensibly “more correct” memories.

The effect of such layering of disparate histories and observations is akind of soporific spell. A reader is carried gently along the current ofSebald’s uncanny thoughts.

Again and again Sebald writes about his writing, essentially detailing hisprocess as essaying. One day—August 2nd—he says, “I sat at a table nearthe open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, draw-ing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to meto be of the same order.” A barmaid asks him whether he is a journalist ora writer. “When I said that neither the one nor the other was quite right,she asked what it is that I was working on, to which I replied that I did notknow for certain myself.”

The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse. New Directions,1996. 237 pages, paper, $15.95.

In The Emigrants, Sebald continues his role of slightly distanced observerand thinker, reflecting on the lives of four people who escaped internmentin Nazi concentration camps, but who nevertheless were greatly affected bythe Holocaust. There is the husband of Sebald’s landlady, who left Lithuaniaas a young man, disembarking in London thinking it was New York. Thereis Sebald’s elementary-school teacher, removed from his post when theThird Reich discovered that he was one-quarter Jewish. There is Sebald’sgreat uncle, world traveler and eccentric (possibly homosexual) who laterin life volunteered for shock therapy to exorcise his demons. And there is

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Max Ferber, a painter who left Munich for Manchester just before his par-ents were killed. Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, andMax Ferber may be pseudonyms or even invented characters, but becauseSebald does not tell their stories in any dramatic way, because he picks upfrom the writerly present and reflects upon them, it seems not to matter.Charles Lamb’s “Dream Children” weren’t real, either, yet that didn’t pre-vent him from using them to essay the sadness of late bachelorhood. In anycase, these people are kindred souls—with each other and with Sebald—melancholic, dreamy, haunted by their pasts, as much by what they sufferedas by what they escaped while others suffered. They, as Selwyn explains,give their attention “to thoughts which on the one hand grow vaguer dayby day, and, on the other, grow more precise and unambiguous,” or, likeAdelwarth, live “longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possi-ble of [their] capacity to think and remember.” Sebald is their muse.

But he isn’t seeking revenge or retribution. His tone is measured, calm,never angry, distanced in that way that allows even thinking. The horrorsof the past exist as shadows, peripheral phantasms that pull at the narratorand his characters, hinting at but not naming the causes, only their effects.He is seeking connections and repercussions.

Perhaps memory itself is Sebald’s great subject in The Emigrants, insofaras memory mingles with imagination, distorts, revises, lapses, becomes asclear as dreams. And maybe that’s why I am willing to believe that the bookis nonfiction, or that it essays its subjects expertly whether it invents or not.After all, it offers me as much documentary “proof” as any other so-callednonfiction book, and probably much more, what with its images on nearlyevery page. If words on a page can lead us to question their extratextualfacticity, can’t memories also be doubted? As Ambrose Adelwarth says in hislast journal entry:“Memory . . . often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. Itmakes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back downthe receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a greatheight, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.”

The Rings of Saturn, by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse. NewDirections, 1998. 296 pages, paper, $14.95.

The plot of The Rings of Saturn is about the author taking a series of longwalks in the countryside of southeastern England. Not much really hap-pens to invite drama or excite our sense of the exotic, but this book is not

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about plot, it’s about keen observation, happenstance, research, and medi-tation. One need only turn to the book’s table of contents to get a sense ofthe breadth and depth of the subjects it mulls. Take, for instance, chapter 3:“Fishermen on the beach–The natural history of the herring–GeorgeWyndham Le Strange–A great herd of swine–The reduplication ofman–Orbis Tertius.” If you’re not licking your mental chops, anxious todive right into such a beautiful hodge-podge, then this book is probablynot for you.

But it most certainly is for me. I read The Rings of Saturn as I was tryingto write my own travel essays, as I was living for a year in Uruguay, ridingthe buses downtown each morning, finding books in the National Libraryand the used-book shops, interviewing former revolutionaries about theirpasts. I found in Sebald a tempered, beautiful prose that swept me up in itsrhythms and convolutions, that seemed to perfectly reproduce the author’smind processing the accidental sights and insights that crossed his path.Along for the journey with Sebald are Thomas Browne, Rembrandt, JorgeLuis Borges, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi. Underlying the meandering (on land and in mind) are considerationsof the strange geometric form called a quincunx, the intrigue behind thecoming of silk worms to the West, the strange resonances between Sebald’slife and the life of one Michael Hamburger, the unstoppable decline anddecay of cities and lives and all that man may hope to build up, the shadowcast by death.

Yet the book is more than a catalog or encyclopedia of strange subjects.It is the meditations of Sebald, the dreamy connections he weaves betweenthe lives he encounters on his way. Not a single item listed in the contentswas inherently interesting to me before I read the book. Now every singleone is.

One of my favorite passages, one that made me laugh out loud, is this:Sebald is very tired after a day of traipsing about, so he falls asleep in anarmchair watching a BBC documentary about Roger Casement. He is leftwith only vague, ethereal notions of what he had heard as he drifted off tosleep, but he’s interested enough to want to write about him. He says, “Ihave since tried to reconstruct from the sources, as far as I have been able,the story I slept through that night in Southwold.” Then he goes on to tellthe story of Casement at great length.

Here is a Sebaldian moment for you: As I reviewed the section of thebook in which Sebald parallels his life with Michael Hamburger’s, I couldnot find the name Hamburger, only Michael. I thought I remembered

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Hamburger in any case, so I did what any self-respecting twenty-first-cen-tury academic would do. I googled “Michael Hamburger.” The top resultswere all obituaries. I clicked on the one from the Guardian. Sure enough,this was the man I was looking for. He had just died this very week.

Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell. The Modern Library,2001. 298 pages, paper, $13.95.

Austerlitz is the only one of Sebald’s four major works that I am willing tobelieve is fiction. This because although W. G. Sebald is its narrator, its maincharacter is one “Jacques Austerlitz,” who as a child was whisked away fromhis mother in Prague on the Kindertransport, then landed in Wales wherehe was raised by a minister and his wife. I can’t know if Sebald really didhave a series of uncanny encounters and conversations with such a person,or if he has invented him completely. But this also might be said of any ofthe works we typically call “nonfiction,” and indeed, small and large-scaleinventions in memoirs have gotten their authors into varying degrees oftrouble lately. Either way, what Sebald does with the character of Austerlitz,by allowing him to speak and recount the story of his quest to find hismother in his later years, performs the actions of an essay as much as JorgeLuis Borges’s invented books and situations allowed him to essay within his“ficciones.”

What’s important here is that Austerlitz is as spellbinding as Sebald’s ear-lier books, and both its primary narrator, its secondary narrator (Austerlitz),and even tertiary characters recounting their experiences all narrate in ser-vice of ideas. Consider Sebald’s first impression of Austerlitz:“From the firstI was astonished by the way Austerlitz put his ideas together as he talked,forming perfectly balanced sentences out of whatever occurred to him, soto speak, and the way in which, in his mind, the passing on of his knowl-edge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical meta-physic, bringing remembered events back to life.” Is this not a descriptionof the essay form? There is a kind of plot to Austerlitz—the broken life ofJacques and his search for his origins—but this is almost secondary to theruminations the book performs, on architecture, memory, time, history,decay, loss, destruction, monuments, the Holocaust.

After a visit to the Nocturama in Antwerp, Sebald notes the strikinglylarge eyes of certain animals, and muses on the “fixed, inquiring gaze foundin certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness

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which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.” This, believeme, is what Sebald does.

SARAH WERTHAN BUTTENWIESER

Feminism Lite: Backwards and Forwards

Here are some fun feminist offerings about how two teenage magazines ofthe 1980s and 1990s—Sassy and Bitch—shaped the generation of womenwho read them. Plus, a postscript about where to look to see what is shap-ing young women’s thinking today.

How Sassy Changed My Life:A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of AllTime, by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer. New York: Faber and Faber,2007. 193 pages, paper, $18.00.

In the canon of teen magazines, Seventeen is the mother ship; Sassy magazinewas a short-lived renegade rocket (Sassy ran from 1988–1994). Whether youwere a devoted Sassy reader or have never heard of it before, reading jour-nalists Jesella and Meltzer’s book How Sassy Changed My Life:A Love Letterto the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, about the rise and fall, influence andattitude of this short-lived phenomenon, is very engaging. What Sassy hadgoing for it: a hip, ironic, cool, offhand, and decidedly feminist voice duringa time of feminist backlash, and a trend-setting take on “indie” culture. Partnarrative history, part meditation upon the times the story took place, andpart reflection about the magazine and its place in publishing, teen girls’lives, and feminism’s “third wave,” Jesella and Meltzer’s book offers a snap-shot in time. Sassy’s story represents an important slice of relatively recentfeminist history and also provides insight about the tug of war between cor-porate power and journalistic freedom, especially during the late 1980s andearly 1990s (these issues seem to have intensified).

Readers harboring no previous idolatry toward Sassy may fear that self-definition: love letter. Indeed, Sassy was revered by many teens (also,twenty-something gay men, feminists of many ages, and revelers in a par-ticular slice of pop culture). The writers do describe enough about themagazine’s content to fill in the blanks for nonreaders (and probably makeyou want to dredge up some back issues).

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