Before I start it
would be good to repeat something that Eric L. Santer has said about W.G.
Sebald:
‘Surely one of the
things that make it so difficult to write about Sebald, to say anything
genuinely new or revelatory about his work, is that he has done so much himself
to frame the discourse of his own reception, to provide in advance the terms
for critical engagement with the work; his fiction already practices a rather
efficient sort of authoexegensis that leaves the critic feeling a certain
irrelevance (the posture of awestruck adoration that one finds in so much of
the critical literature is, I think, one of the guises such irrelevance
assumes).’
There may not be
anything new or ‘revelatory’ in this paper but this is more about comunicated
some of Sebalds ideas and techniques to those who may be unfamiliar with his
writing though calling myself a irrelevance would be a step I am not willing to
take. This is a work in progress.
I am aware that Sebald’s books might be
more accurately described as multi-genred instead of genreless. My definition of the genreless is that
of a book that cannot be classifyed into one particular genre easily and so
becomes something almost outside of genre but I will look at this more closely
later on in the paper.
W.G.Sebald is
often considered as one of the greatest writers in the twentith centuary and he
managed to achieve this within the space of ten years and four books. If not for his death in 2001 he may
even be a Nobel Prize in Literature achiever. His books are technically novels but Sebald and others refer
to his work as simply prose, enlarging its possible interpretation to a greater
degree. They are
technically novels, particulary in his later work, because they do invovle
characters who work within a plot but these are never the main feature of his
writing. His work occupies a grey
space. He writes about history but
never entirely in a historical manner, he writes on literary critcism and
biography but never as the sole focus of the books and he writes about himself
though who exactly he is is never truly reveled.
‘For Sebald, a critical question is the
genre itself. What kind of books
are these melancholy journeys told by a narrator whose name is revealed only in
passing and illustrated with grainy black and white photographs? A New York Times Book Review reviewer asks, “What does one call them? Meditations, elegies, mutations grown from memoir, history,
literary biography and prose poetry”[1]. This gives you an idea of how difficult
and problematic describing his work is.
The most interesting classification I have read about Sebald says that
Sebald is a writer of quest romances, such as stories of King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table.
Knowing how adverse he is about writing narratives with plots I find
this most hilarous. One person has
written of him that he is one ‘who not only continually crosses frontiers, but
also blurs them and allows them to dissolve into one another’[2]. One of the central motifs of his work
is the permeability of borders- between memory and forgetting, between art and
reality, between the living and the dead[3].
Is the problem of genre in Sebald even
a problem, I would like to ask, is it necessary to find a genre for him to fit
in?
That is an intersting question but it
is not the one I would like to investigate in this paper. I am interested in why Sebald chose to
write such fiction, if you choose to call it that, what are the advantages that
a genreless text could have as opposed to a book that full well knows exactly
how it can be defined. By this I
mean that the awareness of a book’s own genre tropes help create that genre and
by equal measure a book that is aware that it is meddling with different genre
will help to expand the boundaries of those genres.
One reason for Sebald to write in the
way he does is to do with his increasing disatisfaction with the writing of
academic articles. It could not
offer him enough scope to operate in and so he decided to write in a mode that
could. He says that in academic
jounals other scholars would pick apart the articles he wrote, trying to find a
wrong fact in it, but by writing prose fiction the factual nature of a work
does not matter as much. I know
from experience that it can be sometimes tempting to change the facts to fit
with your argument and Sebald only encourages me to do so.
Apparently when Sebald was asked by his
English publisher Christopher MacLehose what catagorey he wanted his books to
be under and he had said that he wanted all the catagoreies thinking that if he
did that he would get a copy of one of his books in each of the shelves in the
bookstore. Of course that did not
happen.
Is there something about the
condintions of modern life that make narrative redundant? Or is it down to personal taste? One could reframe the question as:
could Austerlitz or The Rings of Saturn be written at any other time in history? Living in a media culture we are subject to many images throughout
the day. Television, advertising,
magazines and newspapers give us images for us to interpret and be influenced
by. Sebald’s books reflect this
world and he gives us images to digest complimenting the words accessing
another part of our brains. His
work are multi-media projects showing just how visual our world has
become. But the apparent fact of a
photograph does not necessarily dictate a truth. The photo on the cover of Austerlitz is supposed to be a young Austerlitz wearing a cape and holding a
hat but we are told by James Woods that this cannot be because Austerlitz, we
know, is a fictional character, and so whoever it is on that cover it cannot be
who Sebald wants us to think it is.
It is the same with adverts that want us to beileve in one thing when
the reality is something different.
In the world of Wikipedia is it possible to beileve all that we are
told.
One feels that some skeptisim is needed
when dealing with what we know to be fiction and what we think to be fact. Sebald may be saying an eternal truth
by paradoxically saying that no truth is final, everything is subject to the
smudges of memory and the inaccuracy of human feeling. In a world where there is political
propaganda causing people to do regrettable things truth is subject to biases
and prejudice and though we have to live with some frail concept of truth we
know by experience that this cannot always be possible.
Writing in a genreless fashion means
that even if you do find yourself going off topic you do not necessarily have
to edit yourself too much, instead you encompass the loosely related subject
into a wider perspective than that you orginally intended. The genreless text allows you to go
from arcutecture, to Situationlist philosophy to an anecdote about the time you
had tea with your granny back to buildings with little fuss. The true art of a genreless text is how
semelessly all the dispirit elements can be brought together and for a
masterclass in it look no further than Sebald.
In The Rings of Saturn Sebald interwines Elizabethan author Thomas Browne, a Jorge Luis
Borges short story, the Empress Dowage, the herring fishing industry, the
Vicotrian poet Swinburne and silkworms, which are a motif throughout the
book. At the end he masterfully
combines the motif of silkworms with the beginning through Thomas Browne noting
that his parents were in the silk trade.
For much of its dispirt elements there is a fundamental unity that comes
across powerfully. It is
digressive but he circles his subjects often coming back to them in obscure
ways.
His portrait on Swinburne is simple
biography, not a short story, not an extract of something larger, but a small
glimpse into that writer’s tender life.
There are many passages that seem to have no place in the work of a
novel but Sebald puts them there and creates importance out of them. Often what one finds in the works of
Sebald is how punishingly well read he is, perhaps more so than other
contemporary writers and he, a biblophile of renown, as he writes about Browne
‘deploying a vast repertorie of quotations and the names of authorities who
have gone before’. Reading rooms
are featured in both The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz and have a certain importance for Sebald not just as places of
information but as places of coincidence.
Reading rooms offer a defiance agaisnt modern ways of knowledge
gathering being sequested with comfortable chairs to aid deep slow reading
without hyperlinks or recommendations, just a book in a room of books. For a well-read man the genreless text
would have had appeal for the reason that he could bring in all that he has
read without fear of stepping outside boundaries. The significance
that this has on literary studies is that the more knowledge you have of writers and their work the
more rewarding reading a writer like Sebald will be. Classifiying difficult books is a intecutally stimulating
task that challenges what we know to be a certain type of genre and redefines
our understanding of those particular genres.
One of Sebald’s many themes, and maybe
methods, is one of wandering from place to place from idea to idea and the
genreless text allows him full scope to wander wherever he likes. He was interdiscinplanary and was
interested in more than German literature and I beileve he was of a type given
to the need of going from subject to subject.
A genreless text does not need to be
destablisising if treated right.
Many a modernist project grew by incorporated unrelated sentences within
their texts in order to disturb the reader but with Sebald the approach is
different. He views things as an
encylopedist would, in a calm orderly manner. This could be down to his German, nineteenth centuary frame
of mind. He is like Nabokov, who
appears in The Emigrants, who is a collector of
little delicate butterfly things that flutter before the page. His neutral tone is one who amasses
knowledge without reason or even meaning but just so happens to do so and he
does so succintly, in carefully polished long paragraphs, sometimes going on
for pages. ‘Fantsties of
compreshensive knowledge, argues Thomas Richards, was one of the pillars
supporting the archival epistemonlogy of the nineteenth century. Knowledge was deemed to be ‘singular
and not plural, complete and not partial, global and not local, that all
knowledges would ultimately turn out to be concordant in one great system of
knowledge”’.There is a certain horror to his work but it is a hidden horror
veiled behind metaphor and allusion, which is dense and complex. He leads you on a journey where you
know not what you may find and he does this in between the spaces, bridging
them into a uniform whole.
One could
say with some justification that he was adverse to new technology and yet how
like the Internet his mind was, continually linking different countries and
cultures to each other. He seems
to exist well with websites. There
is a project where someone has, by using Google Earth, mapped The Rings of
Saturn and plotted not only his journey around
Suffolk but every reference he makes in that book. Not one for looking into the future Sebald may have had a
good idea of what it may be like due to his knowledge of the past and could
well have anticipated the digitisation process that is currently going on in
libraries but with mixed, if not hostile, feelings.
Yet though he lived in the fast paced
modern world he was like a man from another
time where slow
travel and deep thought were considered as virtures. He is a antidote to modern life and offers us an alternative
to constant connection to the present by helping us develop our memories and
savouring on the details that are present to us in life. By linking one person or subject to
another he suggests a way of improving our memory by building a network of
knowledge that like a net is tied all together.
Whether be factual or fictional
Sebald’s ‘books present themselves as deliberately ambigous facsimiles of
reality, and they should be understood as such’[4].
Perhaps that he writes the way he does
because he views life with a holistic view where all subjects merge into each
other and the domain of one may incorperate others in a way diffcult to
divide. He once said in an
interview: “If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses
a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for.” Is this a way of radomally connection
parts of living to different parts of living he offers us? Can this change the nature of how
various instutions are run? The
genreless text as Sebald has employed offers a world that is interlinked
implying that the consequence of actions ripples out into ways we cannot
foresee. I would argue that it is
possible to say that a writer’s vision can shape the way we live and though it
may not give any spectacular changes it can improve life.
[1] ‘Adventure, Imprisonment, and Melancholy’ by Margaret Bruzelius in The
Undiscover’d Country ed. by Markus Zisselsberger (Camden House: Suffolk), p248
[2] ‘Sebald as a University Teacher’ by Florian Radvan in Saturn’s
Moons ed. by Jo Catling and Richard Hibbet (Maney
Publishing: London, 2011) p156
[3] ‘The Effect of the Real: W.G. Sebald’ by Ruth Franklin in A
Thousand Darknesses
[4] ibid, Ruth Franklin, p187
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