THE FOLLOWING article of mine was published in the ‘review’ section of The Weekend Australian in June 2018.
Twenty years ago this month (June 1998) The Harvill Press in London published an English translation of a German novel that shredded the conventions of creative writing. Among many scholars and critics, its English explosion was something like a literary Big Bang.
W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn lacked plot and character development. Its narrator meandered physically and intellectually, retelling unconnected and often forgotten stories, several from the distant past. Yet Rings drew superlatives.
For novelist and travel writer Jonathan Raban it was ‘the finest book of long-distance mental travel that I’ve read’. Britain’s Independent on Sunday said the book reached ‘the heights of epiphanic beauty only encountered normally in the likes of Proust’. For The Sunday Telegraph it was ‘highly original’, being part fiction, part memoir, part meditation and ‘finally an essay for the dispossessed’.
Dispossession was Sebald’s obsession. From his 20s, Winfried Georg Sebald — ‘Max’ to his friends — had exiled himself in England. Born in 1944 in a small town in the Bavarian Alps, he had abhorred Nazi crimes — especially the Holocaust — as well as his compatriots’ inability to confront them. In a series of lectures he delivered in 1997, he accused Germans of ‘always looking and looking away at the same time’. He was occasionally homesick, but as soon as he stepped on to German soil and heard his native language spoken he wanted to return home to England.
A graduate in German literature from Switzerland’s University of Fribourg, he taught at the University of Manchester then the University of East Anglia, where he lectured until his death in a car crash near Norwich in December 2001. He was the UEA’s professor of modern German literature, and he founded the British Centre for Literary Translation.
Of a melancholic disposition, he doubtlessly brooded throughout his life over Germans’ behaviour. (I believe that he suffered from an unconscious guilt over Nazi war crimes and his compatriots’ selective forgetting.) His obsession and frustration with — and growing aversion to — the academic style of writing he was required to produce in learned papers led him to pen the first of what he called his ‘prose fictions’. He wrote four, and they were published in the language in which he wrote — German — between 1990 and 2001.
The Emigrants, the second, was the first to appear in English (1996). Susan Sontag said it was nothing like she had ever read. It was a book of ‘excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation […]’. Nicholas Shakespeare called it a ‘spellbinding account of four Jewish exiles […]’. For Michael Ondaatje ‘[this] deeply moving book shames most writers with its nerve and tact and wonder’.
Although it was the third of his prose fictions, Rings was next to appear in English translation. (Vertigo, Sebald’s first prose fiction, was not published in English until 1999.) The British-born literary critic and Harvard professor James Wood summarised his reaction to Rings in six words: ‘A great strange and moving work’. And after Austerlitz — a more conventional work — appeared in 2001, scholars and critics hurried to outdo each other in their appreciation of Sebald’s unique contribution to literature.
Many tried to explain the writer’s peculiar style. English writer and academic Geoff Dyer said that Sebald’s ‘hypnotic prose lulls you into tranced submission, a kind of stupor that is also a state of heightened attention’. American journalist Arthur Lubow said Sebald readers felt the ‘excitement of exploring a strange new landscape’. The writer’s tone was ‘elegiac’, sentences ‘serpentine’. Susan Sontag called Sebald’s writing ‘recklessly literary and inspired by a thrilling variety of models’. And, six years after the German’s untimely death, a former secretary of the Swedish Academy said Sebald would have been a worthy Nobel laureate.
Reading the critiques and commentaries, one often gets the feeling that they’re grappling to describe the ineffable. Their unstated question is simple: How did he do it?
On the surface, Rings is a hike through the east-coastal county of Suffolk, where Sebald lived. Broken into 10 parts, its paragraphs run for pages, the only interruptions grainy black-and-white photographs that often seem afterthoughts.
That Rings is a ‘walk’ is deceptive. It rambles — from a meditation on the 17th-century little-known English polymath Thomas Browne to the decline of the herring industry. From a Borges short story to wartime Ustaše atrocities. From a link between Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, the end of Chinese emperor Hsien-feng, and the life of the poet Swinburne to Thomas Abrams, who was building from matchsticks a replica of the Temple of Jerusalem. The topics lack logical connection, and Sebald’s sentences are long and hypotactic, even if they swing through 300 pages with the grace and beauty of spider monkeys.
Death, decay, exile and melancholy unify the total. And you wonder why such sad and wordy material — written in such an old-fashioned style — has been able to trap scores of thousands of readers worldwide in a kind of literary quicksand.
As a Sebald tragic since the first translations appeared, I wanted to try to find out.
A special feature of Sebald’s storytelling stood out; his use of the uncanny and nostalgia. Moreover, these affects had mostly been overlooked by Sebald scholars. My investigations showed that the phenomena are two sides of the one coin. They share certain attributes: they may arise involuntarily from the unconscious; they can be both pleasurable and frightening; they can create melancholic moods; they often involve regret and rely on, in many cases, what might be called intellectual uncertainty, a description German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch applied to the uncanny 13 years before Freud wrote a long and much-quoted essay on the subject that, however, lacks the kind of intellectual rigour he applied to other studies.
Sebald used prolifically certain literary devices that catalyse the uncanny and nostalgia. Most prominent among them are ambiguity, repetition, coincidence, paradox and exaggeration. Secondary attributes of the uncanny that Freud nominated — death, revenants, ghosts, the strange and weird — are also rife in Sebald’s texts.
But the more I shopping-listed the writer’s use of the devices, the more I realised that he used the uncanny and nostalgia in tandem, potentiating their separate strengths. Take the following short passage from Rings. The narrator is reporting on a story Swinburne told a visitor that, in turn, the poet’s Aunt Ashburnham had told him. It’s about her returning home in girlhood with her mother after her first grand ball.
After the ball they drove many miles homeward on a crisp, cold, snow-bright winter night, when suddenly the carriage stopped by a group of dark figures who, it transpired, were burying a suicide at a crossroads. In writing down this memory that goes back a century and a half into the past, noted the visitor, himself long deceased, he beheld perfectly clearly the dreadful Hogarthian nocturne as Swinburne painted it, and the little boy too, with his big head and fiery hair standing on end, wringing his hands and beseeching: Tell me more, Aunt Ashburnham, tell me more.
The passage relates a fond recollection. Sebald ensures that Swinburne is shown to be enthusiastically nostalgic, even if the anecdote comes to us third-hand — poet, visitor, narrator. It appears to arrive unbidden from the unconscious, a story that demonstrates the paradoxical binary of being both homely – in the poet’s obvious fondness for his aunt and the story itself – and unhomely in the shock provoked by the ‘dark figures’ and the burial. Freud thought that the homely-unhomely pairing was the key attribute of the uncanny. In nostalgia, it is what I call the homesickness-sick-of-homeness phenomenon. We’ve all experienced it.
Swinburne remembered details. The ball was ‘grand’, and ‘many miles’ were driven on a ‘crisp, cold snow-bright winter night’. Such a fictive backdrop is often the site of strange and Gothic tales – definitively uncanny stories. An emphasis on ‘many miles’ and a crisp, cold and snow-bright environment evoke the nostalgic’s exaggerated longing for experiences that can’t be repeated.
That the carriage was stopped by a ‘group of dark figures’ burying a suicide at a crossroads and not by a fallen tree or a snowdrift or any other incident that the reader might reasonably have expected loads the episode with weirdness. That the story is framed within fiction reminds us not to test it for absolute truth; our intellectual uncertainty is allowed full rein, and although we might surmise that Swinburne’s aunt knew about the custom of burying suicides at crossroads we’re unsure. It merely ‘transpired’ that a suicide was being buried. Did she find out somehow? Did someone tell her? We aren’t told.
The narrator — or the visitor or Swinburne himself: we aren’t sure — chooses his words for rhetorical effect. That he ‘beheld’ rather than ‘saw’ promotes an epic scale (as do the ‘many miles’, snow and darkness), magnifying an uncanny link to Swinburne himself, who wrote about – and commented on – unconventional topics such as sado-masochism, lesbianism and anthropology. That it was a ‘dreadful Hogarthian nocturne’ – (‘nocturne’, not ‘incident’) after Hogarth, who etched the low life of 18th-century London – through its exaggeration adds another degree of uncanniness. Swinburne wrings his hands and beseeches, ornaments that denote the story’s value for its tellers and their keenness to have others appropriate it.
Sebald watched over his translators’ shoulders and approved their work. The results are sublime. And as long as people read creative writing, Rings will be devoured. It deserves admission to American academic Harold Bloom’s canon, joining works penned in strangely foreign tongues that, somehow or other, we understand.