The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald

A Conversation with W. G. Sebald by Joseph Cuomo

JOSEPH CUOMO: On the surface at least, The Rings of Saturn is a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. But all sorts of allusions and observations come in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as he walks or looks out over a cliff or sits on his bed in a hotel room. And so we encounter with him any number of things, from the works of Sir Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad to Borges to Swinburne to the life of the Empress Dowager. This description of the book is accurate, but it doesn’t seem to describe what the novel actually does, what it accomplishes. And I think one of the difficulties we face in trying to describe the book is that in it you seem to have reinvented the narrative form. In fact, the narrative conceit of the novel seems virtually invisible, so much so that we are unaware of it as we read. There seems to be no artificial mechanism, no construct mediating between the reader and the experience of the page. A friend of mine, a very good writer, said to me that as soon as he had finished reading The Rings of Saturn he immediately started from the beginning again, because what had just happened to him — he couldn’t

Copyright © 2007 by Joseph Cuomo. From an interview conducted on March 13, 2001, as part of the Queens College Evening Readings in New York. The interview was subsequently broadcast on Metro TV’s The Unblinking Eye and published as “The Meaning of Coincidence: An Interview with Writer W. G. Sebald” in The New Yorker Online. A more complete version of the interview is published here for the first time.

figure out how it had happened. I was wondering how you approached this in the writing of it, the idea of narrative form. Was the structure a function largely of your unconscious associations during the writing process? Or was it something you plotted out in advance in a very deliberate way?

W. G. SEBALD: I can’t quite remember how it worked. I had this idea of writing a few short pieces for the feuilletons of the German papers in order to pay for this extravagance of a fortnight’s rambling tour. That was the plan. But then as you walk along, you find things. I think that’s the advantage of walking. It’s just one of the reasons why I do that a lot. You find things by the wayside or you buy a brochure written by a local historian, which is in a tiny little museum somewhere, which you would never find in London. And in that you find odd details which lead you somewhere else, and so it’s a form of unsystematic searching, which of course for an academic is far from orthodoxy, because we’re meant to do things systematically.

But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was always done in a random, haphazard fashion. And the more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way, i.e., in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. 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’s looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. [Audience laughter.] And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they’ll connect up. But they’ll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn’t, in terms of writing something new, very productive. So you have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before. That’s how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you. For instance, this whole business about this atrocious Chinese civil war in the nineteenth century, which we know so little about in the West — I knew nothing about it — I’d found that remark in a tiny little booklet written, I think, in 1948, which was still there for sale, that this little local train which ran around there [over the River Blyth in England] had been destined originally for the court of the emperor of China, which was a very bizarre, erratic fact. And then of course you wonder which emperor, and you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 and you rummage around there, and it goes on like this. Which is the most pleasurable part of the work, as you uncover these things and move from one astonishing thing to the other. The actual writing, of course, is a different story. That’s far from a pleasant occupation. [Audience laughter.]

JC: This discovery process — the dog running in the field — is any of that happening while you’re actually writing? You made a distinction between the two things, the searching and the reading. .

WGS: Occasionally. I think when you write or do anything of the sort, there are times when you almost know that you’re on the right track. You don’t quite believe it, but you feel more positive about what you’re doing than at other times, and I think this is confirmed when things come in from the wings, you know, as you sit there, trying to straighten out a page. And, as it comes right, then quotations or figures or things that you hadn’t thought of for eighteen years offer themselves all of a sudden. And I’ve always found that quite a good measure — that once things are going in a certain way that you can trust, then even in the writing process itself, things happen. For instance, the last part of this book [The Rings of Saturn] is all about silk, and that section, in turn, finishes with a number of pages on the culture of mourning. And on the very day when I finished these pages, I looked in, I think it was the Times, the daily circular, and there were all the events I needed. You know, the list of what had happened on a certain day 130 years ago or 220 years ago. And they all slotted into the text, as if I had been writing towards that point. It was quite amazing, but it does happen in that way occasionally — and that’s very gratifying when it does.

JC: That process itself seems to be one that you describe in the novels: something inexplicable occurs; we don’t really know what to make of it, but the fact that it does occur seems to carry enormous significance.

WGS: Yes, I think it’s this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it’s not obtrusive. But, you know, it certainly does come up in the first book, in Vertigo, a good deal. I don’t particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or with Jungian theories about the subject. I find it all rather tedious. But it seems to me simply an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. And so you meet somebody who has the same birthday — the odds are one to 365, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person, then immediately this takes on major significance. [Audience laughter.] And so we build. I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of creed, all our constructions, even the technological ones, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, which there isn’t, as we all know. [Audience laughter.]

JC: One of the things that’s so remarkable about the books is that you never try to use these coincidences toward some end, which is, I think, the point you’re making: that we don’t feel that we’re being manipulated to see the world — I mean, in a lot of these pop-psychology novels there’s a realization that, “Oh, because our birthdays are on the same day it means we should stay married.” Or something like that. There’s a tendency to reduce the world to some theme that this then becomes the proof of. And it’s amazing to me that you resist that urge in novel after novel.

WGS: Well, it would trivialize it. Nevertheless, it has significance. The first section of Vertigo is about Stendhal, and this rather short piece finishes with Stendhal’s death in a certain street in Paris, which is now called the Rue Danielle Casanova. I didn’t know who Danielle Casanova was, except that Casanova meant something for me in the same context of that book, but not Danielle Casanova. The following summer I went to Corsica, walking through the mountains in Corsica, and I came to the coastal village of Piana, and there was a little house with a plaque on it, and it was a memorial plaque for Danielle Casanova, who had been murdered by my compatriots in Auschwitz. She’d been a dentist and a communist and was in the French Resistance. And I went past the house three or four times and it always seemed closed. Then on one occasion I went round the back and there was her sister. And then, you know, I talked to her for a week. [Audience laughter.] These things do happen. I have all her papers now, and I don’t know what I shall do with them, but. . it’s that sort of connection. And if that sort of thing happens to us, then we think, perhaps, that not everything is quite futile. It gives one a sort of passing sense of consolation, occasionally.

JC: We were talking backstage about your first book in German, After Nature, which is still in manuscript in English, about how that book came about. You’ve been quoted as saying that it was [the sixteenth-century painter Matthias] Grünewald who brought you into it, but then you were telling me that it was [Georg Wilhelm] Steller, who is in the second section, and that that came out of a footnote.

WGS: Yes. It may be of interest because you don’t know how I got into this strange business of writing books of this kind. I mean, I had never had any ambitions of becoming or being a writer. But what I felt towards the middle point of my life was that I was being hemmed in increasingly by the demands of my job at the university, by the demands of various other things that one has in one’s life, and that I needed some way out. And that coincided at the time — I just happened to be going down to London and reading a book by a rather obscure German writer called Konrad Bayer, who was one of the young surrealists, as it were, postwar surrealists who’d been kept down by the famous Gruppe 47, and who subsequently took his own life. He’d only written a number of very slender little things, among them a book called The Head of Vitus Bering, and that had in it a footnote reference to an eighteenth-century German botanist and zoologist called Georg Wilhelm Steller, who happens to have the same initials that I have [audience laughter], and happened to have been born in a place which my mother visited when she was pregnant in 1943, when she was going from Bamberg, which is in the north of Bavaria, down to the Alps, where her parents were, because the bombers were coming in increasingly. She couldn’t go through Nuremberg, which is the normal route, because Nuremberg had just been attacked that night and was all in flames. So she had to go around it. And she stayed in Windsheim, as that place is called, where a friend of hers had a house.

JC: Which is in the book.

WGS: Which is mentioned. This preoccupation with making something out of nothing, which is, after all, what writing is about, took me at that point. And what I liked about it was that if you just changed, as it were, the nature of your writing from academic monographs to something indefinable, then you had complete liberty; whereas, as you well know, as an academic, people constantly say, “Well, it’s not correct, what you put there. It’s not right.” Now, it doesn’t matter.

JC: There’s a theme in your work that seems to be present from After Nature on. You’ve said,

We’re living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we’re driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our physical and emotional makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub against each other is where the sources of pain are. . And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. . I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook.

It seems that even in After Nature, particularly in Grünewald’s painting The Crucifixion, that this theme is perceived:

. . the panic-stricken

kink in the neck to be seen

in all of Grünewald’s subjects

exposing the throat and often turning

the face towards a blinding light

is the extreme response of our bodies

to the absence of balance in nature

which blindly makes one experiment after another

and like a senseless botcher undoes

the thing it has only just achieved.

Was that idea, that theme, something that came to you in the writing of After Nature?

WGS: No, it’s something that’s preoccupied me for a long time. And I don’t quite know why. But I think if you have grown up as I have done, in a village in the postwar years of the Alps where there weren’t any cars or indeed any other machines worth speaking of, then you still know what silence is, you live in a house where the sounds are made by the house itself as it expands or contracts in the heat or the cold. You’re not listening to the fridge going on and off all the time or the television in the other room or the central heating doing its thing. If you took a kind of closed-circuit camera film of, I don’t know, a house here in Queens, you might well be excused if you got the idea that the people in it are only there to service the machines. [Audience laughter.] In terms of evolution, they are of the higher order, there’s no doubt about it. Whether they are intelligent or not is neither here nor there, but they are of the higher order. They come after us. It is encapsulated in that wonderful image of the dog listening to the gramophone. There is that nagging sense that we’re being kept, as it were, on sufferance. And I find the idea that perhaps one day a very severely decimated number of us might be kept like the dogs are now kept in New York not very appealing.

There was, as it were, a décalage or discontinuity in time so that in a sense in the late forties and early fifties in the Alps, you lived in the eighteenth century, for a few years. It’s changed very rapidly. There was this unevenness of time. It’s now very difficult to find any spaces where the twenty-first century isn’t as yet. Certainly Germany has all been leveled out. Even in the 1960s, the frontier tracks in the east towards Czechoslovakia were, way back in time, underdeveloped, predeveloped. And that has all changed. So I think we move out of our earlier forms of existence or arrangements with nature at a price, always. There is always something we have to give up.

JC: Yes, I was feeling that today. I was typing up some of the notes here, and the computer program I was using was changing the letters. I would type a lowercase “a” because it was at the left margin of the poem, and the computer would change it to a capital. [Audience laughter.] I would go to the next line, and it would do the same thing.

WGS: Yes, my translator in the book that’s coming out in the autumn [Austerlitz] has some Czech bits in it, which I found quite hard to write. At any rate, I haven’t got a machine but the translator had a machine, and whenever she put those Czech bits in, the computer then put a one-and-a-half space for the next line, without explanation, without rhyme or reason. He’s not answerable. This is the strange thing, that there’s the same gap of incomprehension between us and these machines as there is between us and the animals we look at in the zoo. [Audience laughter.] There is a gap of incomprehension. We guess at what they might think about us, but we’re not entirely sure.

JC: The fault line in your work seems to be the conflict between nature and civilization, and for you the fear is that nature is going to be destroyed. .

WGS: Well, in one sense, organic nature is going to vanish. We see it vanishing by the yard. It’s not very difficult — I mean, you can hear the grass creak. Once you have an eye for it, if you go to the Mediterranean you can see that there used to be forests all along the Dalmatian coast. The whole of the Iberian Peninsula was wooded; you could walk from the Atlas Mountains to Cairo in the shade at the time of Scipio. It’s been going on for a long time, it’s not just now. There are pockets, Corsica, for instance, where you can see what these forests looked like. The trees were much taller. They were like the American trees, straight up, some sixty yards. But there are only pockets of it left. And you can see that it’s a process of attrition that’s gone on for a long time and that organic nature is being replaced through the agency of the psychozootic power, whatever one might call them, i.e., us — it’s being replaced by something else, by chemistry, dust, and stones, which function in some form or other. And we don’t know what it’s going to be. On the whole, the thing evolves under its own steam. There’s very little we can do to steer it.

JC: Of the four books which I know in English, The Emigrants seems to be the one that’s least like the others in structure. There are four sections about four individuals, all of whom are more or less drawn from life. You’ve used the term “documentary fiction” to describe The Emigrants. I was wondering if that same description fits the other three novels at all.

WGS: Not really. They’re all different. I think this one [Austerlitz] is much more in the form of an elegy, really, a long prose elegy. The first one, Vertigo, has very strong autobiographical elements, i.e., it looks at a period of disturbance in the narrator’s life and tries to intimate how that might have come about. And it is also in the nature of crime fiction, in the sense that there are unresolved crimes. Which really happened — these gruesome murders in Italy which are described in that book — I mean, these are authentic elements.

JC: And the death of Schlag the hunter at the end of Vertigo?

WGS: That is also how it happened to me as I grew up in that village. But the image of the hunter is projected backward in the text in an illicit sort of way. So there are a few instances, certainly in the Stendhal and in the Kafka story, where some kind of legerdemain arranges things in a way suitable for the text.

JC: There is the effect in Vertigo when we read the last section — the narrator returning to his home town, W., which is also first the initial of your hometown — where we suddenly see what we’ve read before in a new light, and this turns around our perception of the earlier chapters. Was that something that came to you when you got to the last chapter?

WGS: No, that happens. For instance, as in psychoanalysis, when the narrative is finished, its beginnings show up in a new light. And in fact it happens with all forms of tales and stories, that the end really provides. . I mean, after the tock comes the tick again.

JC: Was The Emigrants, then, very different from the other books, in the writing of it?

WGS: Different in the sense that Vertigo was very much a thing I did by myself, but with The Emigrants I had interlocutors, i.e., people whom I had known and was talking to, as it were, after their death, remembering who they were. Or people who, as in the case of the last story, were still alive. The last story is based on two figures, on a well-known contemporary painter and on a landlord I had in Manchester who was an émigré and came to Manchester in 1933; all the details about the childhood of his mother are from his mother. And this was for me quite a momentous experience, this whole Manchester business, because growing up in Germany you do perhaps learn the odd thing or did at the time. . I mean, one didn’t really talk about the Holocaust, as it is called, in the 1960s in schools, nor did your parents ever mention it, God forbid, and they didn’t talk about it amongst themselves either. So this was a huge taboo zone. But then pressure eventually saw to it that in schools the subject would be raised. It was usually done in the form of documentary films which were shown to us without comment. So, you know, it was a sunny June afternoon, and you would see one of those liberation of Dachau or Belsen films, and then you would go and play football because you didn’t really know what you should do with it.

Then later on when I started at the university in 1964, ’65, for the first time these issues became public, in the sense that newspapers wrote about it a great deal. There was the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, which went on for a long period of time, well over a year, and where there were daily full-page reports about these things. And I remember reading those reports every day and being absolutely astonished at the details that came out of them. Nevertheless, despite my interest, unavoidable interest in these questions, I couldn’t really imagine it at all; it was some form of abstraction; there were large numbers and you didn’t know who these people really were. Because it is inconceivable of course in this country somehow that there is in the heart of Europe a country where there aren’t any Jewish people. Or scarcely. There are some now, small growing communities again. In the 1960s you grew up there for twenty years and you never bumped into a Jewish person, so you didn’t know who they were. Just some kind of phantom image of them. And so I go to Manchester. I didn’t know anything about England nor about Manchester nor about its history or anything at all. And there they were all around me, because Manchester has a very large Jewish community, and very concentrated in certain suburbs, and the place where I lived was full of Jewish people. And my landlord was Jewish. I didn’t talk to him about that nor did he talk to me about it either. We all avoided the subject. Until his wife, who was a good Englishwoman, once told me, well, do you know, Peter is actually from Munich? And I didn’t know what I should do with this piece of information. But eventually, twenty years later, I went back and talked to him about it. And this is when all these things came out. And it turns out that as a small boy he was skiing in the same places where I went skiing. That somehow then sets you thinking. It’s the reality of it. That he left traces in the snow on the same hills. These are different kinds of history lessons. They’re not in the history books.

JC: When you were at university, I think you said somewhere that it was a very disturbing experience because most of the professors had gotten their jobs during the brown-shirt era, so there was a conspiracy of silence even there.

WGS: It’s certainly true. I went to university in ’63 from this place where I had grown up, which I had really never left before. I didn’t really know Germany. At any rate, I went to Freiburg, which was pretty much the nearest place where you could study. And I had a sense of discomfort there all the time, but I didn’t quite know why. It was simply that conditions for studying weren’t very good, so I decided to go to Switzerland, where it was much easier to get into libraries and the numbers of students were smaller and so on. I really left Germany for practical reasons in the first instance. It’s in retrospect that I seem to think — and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s true— that I did have a sense of discomfort about the whole thing. The humanities were particularly compromised. The law profession as well, practically all. . But certainly these people had all got their stars, as it were, in the thirties and forties. And if you then, as I have done subsequently, looked at what their Ph.D.’s were about, your hair stood on end. It really was a very unpleasant spectacle. Nobody mentioned it, but there was a very deeply ingrained authoritarianism, and as I have, I think, somewhere an anarchist streak in me, I couldn’t really put up with that.

JC: Do you think that’s why you didn’t go back once you left?

WGS: There were a number of reasons, but that certainly was one of them. Because obviously once you had been in England for a number of years you could see a difference in attitude. Ideology didn’t matter in England. You had colleagues who were extreme trade unionists and others who were Church of England all day long, and they all worked together and tolerated each other. But in Germany after the students’ rebellion in the late sixties, early seventies, well, if you had leftish tendencies you could do a Ph.D. only in Frankfurt, Berlin, or Bremen. If you had liberal tendencies, you could do it pretty much anywhere. But this was it. You had to choose the train you wanted to be on.

JC: I want to talk about another subject that’s in your writing, which is the moral difficulty of the writing process itself. In The Rings of Saturn, the narrator says,

Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways.

It reminds me of something the narrator says about writing the account of Max Ferber in The Emigrants:

Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralyzing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing.

WGS: Well, yes, writing, as I said before. . you make something out of nothing. It is a con trick.

JC: But there seems to be quite a preoccupation with making what is written true.

WGS: That’s the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That’s the challenge. Whether it always works of course is quite another matter. And it’s because of this paradoxical consolation that these scruples arise, I imagine, and that the self-paralysis, writer’s block, all these kinds of things can set in. I had rather an awful time with this book that’s going to come out [Austerlitz]. I don’t know how many months I couldn’t get. . Normally on a good day I can do three pages handwritten, just about. But this, I never even got to the bottom of the first page. I started at seven in the morning till five in the evening. And you look at it. One day you think it’s all right; you look at it the next day, it’s awful. I had to resort to writing only on every other line so as to get to the bottom of one page. [Audience laughter.] I found that a very humiliating experience, but it did the trick in the end. But that’s how it is. And it’s very, very hard, I think, as most writers know; doubts set in, to keep one’s nerve is difficult. Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau’s letters, for instance, they’re beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they’re all balanced, they’re all beautiful prose. Flaubert’s letters are already quite haphazard; they’re no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they’re very funny. But he was one of the first to realize that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it’s getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

Flaubert said at one point something like, “L’art est un luxe. Il faut des mains calmes et blanches.” And then he went on to say something like, “On fait d’abord une concession et puis deux et puis on sent fou completèment.” [Audience laughter.] And that’s very true: you make one concession, you make another one, and in the end, nothing matters anymore.

JC: I was wondering if what the narrator in The Emigrants says in the Paul Bereyter section had some bearing when you were writing Austerlitz:

I imagined him, stretched out on the track [where he committed suicide]. . Such endeavors to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seem presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.

He was a teacher of yours.

WGS: Yes, a primary-school teacher.

JC: And Austerlitz is dealing with a similar subject as in The Emigrants: a man, Jacques Austerlitz, left Czechoslovakia in 1939 as a young boy, and then he doesn’t remember most of what had happened until he’s at a more advanced age. First of all, was this someone that you did know, as in The Emigrants?

WGS: The Austerlitz character has two models and bits from other lives also. There was a colleague of mine, a distant colleague in London — London is a hundred miles from Norwich, but I had some contacts there — and I had bumped into this man a number of times fortuitously, in Belgium of all places, in the late 1960s, in unlikely places. He was an architectural historian, somewhat older than me, about ten, twelve years older, a born, very gifted teacher. And whenever we met I just listened to him. Before I came to England I hadn’t had any teachers apart from this primary schoolteacher who I wanted to listen to. And this chap was interested in the architecture of the capitalist era — opera houses, railway stations, that sort of thing — and he could go on endlessly about the most fascinating details. Then I lost sight of him for a while, and in the 1990s we made contact again. So this is one foil of the story.

But there is another foil, which is the life story of a woman, and that story I came across, as one does sometimes, on television. You know how ephemeral these appearances are on television — you see a film or you don’t see it, and then it vanishes forever and you can’t get a copy of it despite your best efforts. But there was this story of a woman who together with her twin sister had also come to Britain on one of these Kindertransporte, as they were called, trains with very young children leaving Germany or Czechoslovakia or Austria just before the outbreak of war. And those two girls were, I think, two-and-a-half to three years old. They came out of a Jewish Munich orphanage and they were fostered by a Welsh fundamentalist childless couple who then went on to erase their identity. And both foster parents ended tragically, as one might say, the father in a lunatic asylum, the mother through an early death. And so the children never really knew who they were. This is just one strand, as it were, of the story which I then put together with that other life history.

JC: I was wondering if that fear of presumption is what was so inhibiting in the writing of Austerlitz.

WGS: Well, it’s always there. I think certainly for a German gentile to write about Jewish lives is not unproblematic. There are examples of that, writers attempting this in Germany in the 1960s and 70s, and many of these attempts are — one can’t say it really otherwise — shameful. In the sense that they usurp the lives of these people. Perhaps not consciously so; they might be done with the best of intentions, but in the making it comes so that it isn’t right, morally not right. That is, something is spun out of the lives of these victims which is gratifying for the author or for the author’s audience. It’s very, very difficult terrain. I don’t know whether I succeed in this, but I was certainly conscious from the beginning that even in talking to the people who you perhaps might want to portray, there are thresholds which you cannot cross, where you have to keep your distance. It’s difficult and every case is different. Yet at the same time, of course, the likes of us ought to try to say how they receive these stories. But there isn’t a self-evident way of going about it. It’s a more acute variation of a problem that all writers have. So one has to be very careful.

JC: You’ve said that After Nature was very freeing because you could do it more or less by yourself. Were Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn also free writing experiences?

WGS: Certainly with Vertigo I had hardly any trouble at all. The last section of it, I wrote in very agreeable surroundings without consulting anything particularly, just wrote it down. But as I go along it seems to get more difficult. And pretty much in the same measure. The Emigrants was more difficult than this, and the last one I could hardly do, so I dread to think what the next one will be like. [Audience laughter.] I’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not like being a solicitor or a surgeon, you know: if you have taken out 125 appendixes, then the 126th one you can do in your sleep. With writing it’s the other way around.

JC: One thing we’ve discussed a couple of times, which is in The Rings of Saturn, is the degree to which the writing process is self-contained or illusionary for the writer as well as for the audience. Michael Hamburger and the narrator — Michael Hamburger also happens to be the translator for After Nature and he’s in The Rings of Saturn as a character — Michael Hamburger and the narrator are discussing the writing process. From the novel:

For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

This seems to be a theme that’s all over your work, which is that the part of the world that we know is minuscule. And the part of the world that we don’t know is enormous. Yet within the part that we do know — there’s such a great deal of agonizing in your work over getting that part right and getting the voice true. And yet, it may be that we’re trying to do this just to convince ourselves that we do know something about the world after all.

WGS: I think that’s pretty much how it is. You can’t always see, I think, the reality of what we’re doing in the pathological variant, because all modes of behavior have pathological variants. And writing and creating something is about elaboration. You have a few elements. You build something. You elaborate until you have something that looks like something. And elaboration is, of course, the vice of paranoia. If you read texts written by paranoiacs, they’re syntactically correct, the orthography is all right, but the content is insane, because they start from a series of axioms which are out of synch. But the degree of elaboration is absolutely fantastical. It goes on and on and on and on. You can see from that that the degree of elaboration is not the measure of truth. And that is exactly the same problem because, certainly in prose fiction, you have to elaborate. You have one image and you have to make something of it — half a page, or three-quarters, or one-and-a-half — and it only works through linguistic or imaginative elaboration. Of course you might well think, as you do this, that you are directing some form of sham reality.

JC: Two more things I want to get into before we close. One is — and this is that same theme again — in The Rings of Saturn:

The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond. . And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence.

There’s something in that quote which reminds me of a passage from The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima saying,

Many things on earth are hidden from us. . and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say that it is impossible to comprehend the essential nature of things on earth. . what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. .

One other connection would be to the work of Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski, and Joseph Brodsky. Do you see yourself as writing in a similar vein, thematically?

WGS: Well, what I think some of these people have in common is an interest in metaphysics. Certainly in Dostoyevsky this is evident. I think the best sections in Dostoyevsky’s writings are those which are metaphysical rather than religious. And metaphysics is something that’s always interested me, in the sense that one wants to speculate about these areas that are beyond one’s ken, as it were. I’ve always thought it very regrettable and, in a sense, also foolish, that the philosophers decided somewhere in the nineteenth century that metaphysics wasn’t a respectable discipline and had to be thrown overboard, and reduced themselves to becoming logicians and statisticians. It seemed a very poor diet, somehow, to me.

So metaphysics, I think, is a legitimate concern. Writers like Kafka, for instance, are interested in metaphysics. If you read a story like “The Investigations of a Dog,” it has a subject whose epistemological horizon is very low. He doesn’t realize anything above the height of one foot. He makes incantations so that the bread comes down from the dinner table. How it comes down, he doesn’t know. But he knows that if he performs certain rites, then certain events will follow. And then he goes, this dog, through the most extravagant speculations about reality, which we know is quite different. As he, the dog, has this limited capacity of understanding, so do we. And so it’s quite legitimate to ask — and of course it can become a parlor game, as it did in Bloomsbury — these philosophers said, “Are we sure that we’re really sitting here at this table?”

JC: I haven’t asked you about the photographs in the books. Two things occur to me. In The Emigrants, you’ve said, I think, that 90 percent of the photographs are authentic. But there’s a passage in Vertigo, speaking of Kafka, where the narrator is on a bus and he encounters two twin boys who look exactly like Franz Kafka did at that age. He’s traveling to a place where Kafka had spent some time, and he wants to get a photograph of these two boys. He asks the parents of the boys to send him a photograph, without giving their names, just because he needs to have this photograph. Of course the parents think that he’s a pederast and don’t want to have anything to do with him. But then the passage ends, “I remained motionless on that bus seat from then on, embarrassed to the utmost degree and consumed with an impotent rage at the fact that I would now have no evidence whatsoever to document this most improbable coincidence.” I was wondering if this was another form of documentation — for the photographs in the books to document coincidence itself.

WGS: Well, that particular episode actually happened as it is described, and it was from that time onwards that I always have one of those small cameras in my pocket. [Audience laughter.] It was a completely unnerving afternoon. It was really terrible. But, you know, it does happen. Doubles do exist. The irony is, of course, that Kafka’s prose fiction is full of twins or triplets. And that it should happen in real life seemed to me quite implausible. I mean, sometimes one asks oneself later on whether one’s made it up or not. And it’s not always quite clear.

JC: The last question is, again, about coincidence. I was wondering, going back to the theme that we discussed earlier on, the fault line between nature and civilization, if you feel sometimes that coincidence or duplication is a way in which nature is breaking through the surface of our civilized lives. We may not know what it means, but we have a sense that something beyond us is taking place.

WGS: Well, I don’t think I could speculate about this, but one sometimes does have a sense that there is a double floor someplace, or that events are outside your control. This notion of the autonomous individual who is in charge of his or her fate is one that I couldn’t really subscribe to. Certainly my own life experience is that always when I thought I had things sorted out and I was in control, the next day something happened which completely undid everything I had wanted to do. And so it goes on. The illusion that I had some control over my life goes up to about my thirty-fifth birthday and then it stopped. [Audience laughter.] Now I’m out of control.