The Voice Over

From That Side

Notes on Sebald

W. G. Sebald’s book of essays A Place in the Country has come out in English for the first time. It’s hard to say why it wasn’t published sooner—given his present importance, one might assume that every page preserved would already be published (“every tiny curl!”—as Tsvetaeva said of her own posthumous legacy, knowing very well how it goes). But no. This may be because the book’s “German” frame (six essays about German writers you can’t exactly say have entered worldwide circulation) makes it something like a private album: a family conversation—closed to strangers—with his own language and cultural tradition. To me, though, it seems that in books and articles of this kind (written as if sideward, past oneself) the occasion allows one to express the main thing—and that an essay about Robert Walser, for example, may well be the central text among everything by Sebald, the one where he speaks about himself, his work, and his spiritual organization with tormenting, unbearable clarity and directness: the one where he says everything.

Sebald occupies a peculiar position in Russia: here he’s an underground classic, because he literally doesn’t exist on the surface; people refer to him as if he’s a buried treasure. It’s the grotesque flip side of his world fame, which quickly turned him into something like an institution, if not an industry. The words of Susan Sontag, who raised the issue of literary greatness in connection with Sebald’s name,¹ have come true with terrifying completeness: his work and fate, not at all suited to this, now become something of a new standard of calibration. It’s strange to look at his posthumous fate with a stranger’s eyes: how he’s hastily being turned into an object of general love (a common-place)—into an answering machine for ethical questions, a ready source of citations in dissertations and epigraphs in novels. But Sebald is untranslated in Russia, unfamiliar and undigested (of all his books only one has come out in Russian, and that was back in 2006).² He exists as secret knowledge: people don’t write about him, but they talk; they don’t discuss him—rather, they allude to him. This is even more bizarre because it’s precisely here that his manner of existing in literature ought to be as essential as it could possibly be.

Winfried Georg Sebald, born in Germany in 1944; he wrote his name, the German version of the Soviet Iosifs, Vladlens, and Oktyabrinas,³ with dots, as the initials W. G. At home they called him Max. The name he published under, like the language he wrote in, was part of a complex (and, for him, indubitably tormenting) system of promissory notes. The story of his life can be told in a few paragraphs—let’s see whether one paragraph is enough: the contour of an exile’s life (Mann, Canetti, Benjamin), but chosen by himself; years of work teaching, several published books written in German, gradually and then swiftly growing fame, with which he tried not to get too comfortable—giving precise, dry, very well-weighed interviews with (almost otherworldly) civility, not really taking part and not refusing. Then his sudden death in an automobile accident in early winter: December 14, 2001.

W. G. Sebald’s first and last book in Russian so far is none other than Austerlitz—his last major prose text (there were only four in all—and two, Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, are minimally related to his established reputation as a thematic author who wrote about the Holocaust). Austerlitz is the best known and most like a conventional novel, or what is usually considered a conventional novel. Everything written below is a kind of attempt to speak about Sebald as if he were already translated, published, read in Russian, as if his work were already a part of our circulatory system (as it ought to be)—and we could look at it not through the window of a tour bus, but with wide eyes of belonging.

1.

Sebald called his books documentary fiction: a strange generic hybrid, poised like an enormous dirigible on the border between it happened and it didn’t happen, where the reader’s sensitivity becomes especially aware of its vulnerability. A large part (the better part) of the polemics around his books unfolds in this zone. The unclear, flickering status of Sebald’s narrative seems to provoke the reader to subject the text to what we might call a sharpening of focus, to get the events straight, to bring details that are difficult to distinguish closer to one’s eyes. Their essential, uncourteous elusiveness, the ease with which they can be turned inside-out is perhaps the primary quality of Sebald’s prose, where the main things are always sewn deep in the text (and ready to explode, like mines—or to be found, like children’s hiding places). The true character of the text remains open to interpretation. What is it talking about, in fact? What precisely is it that we subject to reading: a made-up story, fortified (for persuasiveness or expressiveness) with real facts and details? Or do we observe the revival of a document, of the real past, which the author colors, like a black-and-white photograph, with an effort of imagination? What happened and what didn’t happen constantly move beyond their own edges—the way printer’s ink can spread outside the contours of an image. The disturbing core of Sebald’s prose is its double exposure: a deep persuasiveness/persuasion, characteristic of the exact sciences—and at the same time the strange phantom quality of every detail, each episode, as if they would dissolve into the air if touched. This “trembling, shimmering aura which makes their contours unrecognizable,” as Sebald says about several of Robert Walser’s phrases, surrounds the body of his own texts with a kind of cloud. The way Zeus wrapped Io in a dark cloud, so he could visit her unnoticed.

Prose that “has the tendency to dissolve upon reading”⁴ (again, Sebald on Walser) keeps the reader in uncertainty: in the final analysis we never know whether it is Dichtung or Wahrheit that is narrated and illustrated by the next unexpressive photograph (of a barn, a shop sign, or a pocket watch). The only thing we can trust here is the voice that speaks with us; it turns out something like a banister you can lean on. What happens resembles the old-fashioned stories of Masonic rituals: eyes blindfolded, corridors and crossings done blind; unexpected flashes of light, blindness, and clarity.

In these sunspots only the pictures are clearly visible, the invariable component of Sebald’s text, something along the lines of a signature or a seal, by which one should know the hand of the master. They are of various kinds, but most often these are photographs, old ones, from the archives. Some of them are blown up powerfully and crudely, so the grain pops outward, and almost all of them are somehow inexpressive and present for the most part the complete perplexity of all participants in the shot: people with their features blurred remain somewhere at the edge of the image, the huge background crowds them out still more, and all the faces seem more typical then individual, while at the same time the mustaches, collars and buttons speak more loudly than such things are supposed to. There are also new, “contemporary” photographs that have had time to age but are just as unprepared to cooperate—amateur shots of facades and interiors, architectural objects, and restaurant signs, all black and white and looking as if someone took the picture hurriedly with a cell phone. What else? A recipe for homemade schnapps that Sebald’s grandfather wrote down on a calendar page. Photocopies of visiting cards, tourism ads, train and garden-park tickets, postcards with views, and geographical maps. There are even more landscapes, mountains, forest roads, and hills, taken by an unsteady hand, with multiple blurs. There is a certain quantity of pictures and engravings, placed in the text in the same vein, as cursory quotations, black-and-white, flat tongue-twisters.

They lack two qualities. As a rule, they don’t grab you, whatever that means; with a few exceptions they have no hint of that special type of pollen, that seductive element, that makes a picture attractive, brings it closer to the viewer. Everything happening in them has a demonstratively everyday, workaday character. Moreover—and this too is important—it has absolutely no relationship to us. None of it exists any longer. This applies to everyone: to the city folk in summer on the porch of some house or other, the whole class of seven-year-old schoolchildren, looking into the lens, yet managing in a strange way to avoid meeting our gaze, to turn out wholly, completely bygone. All the photographs present a population of former people—who have passed on irretrievably, crowded clean out. And the fact that someone there might turn out to be a great-grandfather or a great-grandmother means nearly nothing. At the least, it doesn’t remove but rather heightens the degree of compassion. “One has the impression, she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sighs of despair, […] 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.”⁵

Strange as it may seem, in their meek reservedness the pictures (photographs, and in particular old ones) often provoke something like irritation in Sebald’s critics; for some reason the logic and meaning of their silent participation in the text stir up the reader. Sebald’s books are so popular that many people will want to elucidate completely what it is they are dealing with—a documentary or mockumentary—and the photographs could testify to either version. The numerous questions the author of The Emigrants was asked, along the lines of “Did that boy really exist?”⁶—and is that really your uncle Ambrose?—are one more attempt to establish precise boundaries between reality and make-believe in order, perhaps, to sketch the limits of permissible compassion for oneself. And indeed: you’d feel sorry enough to cry for a real uncle, but if it’s a matter of fiction—then, admittedly, we can let ourselves maintain a comfortable detachment.

But even the author interrupts himself with images, and more or less for the same purpose. The way Sebald treats pictures (it’s hard to find the right word here: he doesn’t use them, he doesn’t work with them; more than anything their presence in the book recalls signal lights that mark out the narration’s route from one turn to the next) is somehow connected with genuineness; they are indeed so much more real than the shifting brume in which the text is wrapped.

There’s an episode in Vertigo. The author-narrator is in a bus (he’s always traveling from place to place) driving along Lake Garda, following the route Kafka took a hundred years before. An Italian family is seated next to him, husband, wife, and twin boys who resemble the photograph of ten-year-old Kafka strikingly, absolutely—to such a degree that the author asks with inappropriate excitement for permission to photograph the children and, of course, is refused. None of his explanations help; the enraged parents threaten to call the police, the author has to withdraw—and his powerless shame becomes something like a substitute for a picture, the document that confirms the miraculous resemblance, the sign that says that this happened.

It’s clear that photographs here don’t exhibit even the slightest will for possession—they’re necessary the way a bench is, to sit down and catch one’s breath, or a watch, to look at in confusion. In a way this is like a type of diary writing that’s familiar to me: if your own existence doesn’t infuse you with particular confidence, if it seems blurred and unsteady, then you accompany your daily life text with markers of everydayness, lists of what you have seen and read, recitations of domestic tasks and kilometers covered. Sontag’s diaries are constructed this way, for example; and in the same way, it seems to me, the complex curve of Sebald’s narrative goes from souvenir to souvenir, from bookmark to bookmark, from one firm and warm point of coincidence to another. The presence of the visual in Sebald’s world boils down to this, strictly speaking. His illustrations don’t illustrate, don’t offer commentary, don’t prove or refute the genuineness of what is happening; on the whole they’re very subdued, and they stay on their own black-and-white side of the fence. It’s another thing entirely that they mean a great deal here, more than in other places. One could even say that the main participant in Sebald’s prose is not the text, but the picture it surrounds. Sometimes it seems as if all his books were written in order to preserve two or three family photographs (to leave them a place under the sun, to exhibit them under the glass of an extended daycare)—planting a verbal forest in order to hide a paper leaf.

The picture here serves as a tangible guarantee of intangible relationships, something like a keepsake with memento notes; and the reality they confirm relates indirectly to prose’s field of action.

That, by the way, is how this prose itself is arranged—from a certain angle it can also be described as a display window for all kinds of artifacts, readymades, installed there according to the laws of inner necessity and not always open to public observation. Among the various kinds of bookmarks, dates (which look just as if someone had gone back and underlined them with a fingernail), strange coincidences, and rhyming circumstances, every Sebald text contains a certain quantity of other people’s words in various stages of decomposition; they are there on the same sufferance as the photographs—no one knows whose they are, no one knows where they came from. One review of Austerlitz indignantly cites several passages from Kafka that are insidiously dissolved in the narration with no indication of the source. The review’s author is clearly proud of the breadth of his cultural range (not everyone is capable as I am of catching Kafka from a few notes, he suggests); he also feels something like the joy of a law-abiding citizen who has grabbed the hand of a pickpocket. The presence of someone else’s word supposedly compromises the prose and its author, reveals his inability to write independently: to be the composer of his stories, the keeper of speech, the master of the situation. None of this describes Sebald: you can’t call his relationship with reality masterly at all, and this applies to literature all the more.

“I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions,”⁷ he says. The chain of “password—response” that thunders down the centuries like artillery fire (“Again a skald will make a foreign song / And, as his own, he will pronounce it”⁸) is something like help the living provide to the dead in a pledge of mutual rescue. You might say that to repeat what Hebel or Stendhal said is much more important for Sebald than speaking up (sticking out) himself. And indeed: in order to revive the Lethean shades, one must smear their lips with hot blood. Extending someone else’s life with highly potent means of speech—speaking for the dead—is an old-fashioned recipe for overcoming death that’s available to a person who writes. Usually it is applied to other members of the profession, that’s how it works. Sebald is a surprising exception here, a model of natural democratism in his dealings with the dead; he is ready, it seems, to reproduce any voice from under the ground in whatever form possible. Everything comes in handy, a photograph, a newspaper clipping, an oral story, a train ticket: documentary fiction grants the departed something like an extension, a breathing spell before the final plunge into darkness.

2.

But where is the author himself, and where does he speak from? He can only tell other people’s stories: his own story refuses to take on external logic, presenting instead bubbly chains of coincidences and rhymes and an incomplete chronicle of convulsive traveling. He is intentionally absent in his own text (in that same article on Walser where everything or almost everything is about himself, he talks in passing about how the main thing gets intentionally crossed out in the process of writing). At times he is suddenly reflected in mirrors: never completely enough, always with the constrained sharpness of a fragment. “In Milan, where I had some strange adventures fifteen years ago,” he says during the story of someone else’s Italian travels, but the tail of his own story, after it poked out, will never be completely developed, “as we sometimes feel in dreams” where “the dead, the living and the still unborn come together on the same plane.”⁹

He, the author, also exhibits awareness of the feelings and desires of the dead that is difficult to explain, as it can arise only from practice (Kafka, according to Sebald, “knew of the insatiable greed felt by the dead for those who are still alive”¹⁰). He gets preferential treatment in handling time, where he can swim as if in water, hauling out whole buckets full without fear of coming up short. Let’s add: complete absence of the will to choose and make a selection, a thirst to remember everything, and complete indifference to the consequences of what has been said—as if they can never affect us.

It’s as if Sebald is in possession of boundless leisure, a tsar’s store of time and soul laid by, which permit speech and memory to move from place to place, without hurrying and without getting distracted, to pass through walls and waste time on utter nonsense. His alter ego gets undressed, gets dressed, lies down with his hands behind his head, for endless hours, follows the changes of the light, forgets himself in writing or contemplation, lets the darkness flow over him—in such a way that the big event of the page (and of two days) turns out to be taking a bath. It’s an unimaginable tempo for contemporary prose; it would seem provocative if there weren’t so much meekness in it—and if what is happening wouldn’t make us hazily suspect that it can’t be otherwise: that sliding over the surface of forsaken (or revisited) things is all the narrator knows how to do. Moving them from their place would truly be an effort than he couldn’t bear.

Sliding, crowded out of everywhere by a gust of inner wind, not entering into the relationships of everyday life, speaking of everyone he meets with the tenderness of someone beyond Lethe—Sebald’s hero constantly moves along complicated trajectories that dreadfully resemble the posthumous wanderings of a soul who has nothing left but futile, fleshless understanding, of the kind Mikhail Kuzmin described in his diary shortly before his death: “sees everything as if through thick glass. Sees, let’s say, that a friend is on the brink of danger, but can’t hold him back, nor help, nor console, nor caress.” Sebald’s changes of place, it seems, imitate these wanderings (or, more accurately, attempt to rehearse them). In his case a consistent anticlericalism (practically normative for intellectuals of his generation) was reinforced, if not defined, by his own hands-on knowledge of what posthumous existence looks like and where it takes place.

For him the dead are poor relations of the living: crowded to the side of the road, deprived of rights, doomed to senseless wandering over a set of invisible routes. This movement, which never has either goal or consequences but invariably flowers in a series of reflections and discoveries, is, perhaps, Sebald’s only plot. All his books, no matter what they’re about, are written from the side and on the side of the dead. This kind of approach to reality has many consequences: one is that the earthly thirst to know (what comes after what, and then what, and most importantly: how it ended) loses its power at once when we approach Sebald’s prose. The fragile gratings of the basic construction barely withstand the invisible volume of what’s put inside—all the correspondences and signifieds that stand invisibly behind every turn of a sentence. Here the temporal, geographical, and other kinds of rhymes are something like direction signs. Or rather, like folds in a curtain: open it and you’ll see beneath them “the metaphysical underside of reality, its dark inner lining.”¹¹ “And in the other world—everything rhymes,” Tsvetaeva wrote to Pasternak, when there was nothing more to hope for.

Sebald’s fondness for doublings and treblings, it seems, only gets stronger from understanding that in point of fact these rhymes, besides their statistical negligibility, are also fruitless: they don’t mean or lead to anything. Nothing happens in Sebald’s world, no revelation can become a turning point, the worst things all happened before the beginning, you can’t expect salvation. The ones who lived before are crushed by portents, the ones after—by the catastrophe itself. A cloud, unnamed and impermeable, hangs over the narrative, follows it on every path, as if behind the Jews in the desert.

Sebald finds a new manner of handling the horrible, in whose presence, as if by the light of a black lamp, his native world dear to him whiles away time. Written “as if through a veil of ash,”¹² it (that-which-happened, you-know-very-well-what) is almost never named directly, doesn’t show itself, remains in the margins. And that is precisely the main presence in Sebald’s text, the center of gravity of any narration, the thick curtain of the indescribable, in front of which, hanging fire and holding still, the narrative unfolds. In order to be recognized, this horrible thing often takes on a familiar form (in Sebald’s case, for understandable reasons, it is most often the Catastrophe). But its scale exceeds all the examples and measures accessible to us; like a sheer wall of water, it stands in the face of everything living, and in some sense we’re all already displaced and crushed by that wall.

This is knowledge that is best kept close: it’s worth reading Sebald’s text as a manual, it pertains directly to the everyday practice of every one of us. The reality of The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo is entirely documentary: the street names are true to themselves, the information about what happened looks authentic and indeed does not lie. We know that made-up elements and microdistortions exist—but it’s impossible to ascertain their place, likewise their quantity. Sebald’s prose is a world with transparent partitions, where everything is penetrable and every wall can be walked through. But you can’t do anything with that gift. Suddenly you can see far off, the hidden mechanisms, the springs of the world’s set-up have revealed themselves, you can observe what makes its machines work in synchrony and how one thing connects with another and everything with everything, but it’s impossible to participate in the common work of time. Worse than that, any kind of participation would be a crime (“there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration,” says Sebald¹³). For him, a child of the war years, civilization and ruin lie side by side, like a wolf and a lamb, and they hardly differ from each other; for a long time he thought the pits and heaps of broken stone from bombed buildings were natural features of a big city, its modus vivendi.

The world is set up as a destroyer, crowding out, uprooting, grinding into powder (ash, of course, is one of Sebald’s main words); in a chain sequence where the new stamps out the old, there’s no escape for any of the links. This decides things. Plot interest—who will overthrow whom—is replaced by compassion, an extreme, respectful attention to everything doomed. There are no exceptions, and when you read the inventory of things taken from the sealed Prague apartment of a Jewish woman in Austerlitz (“the lamps and candelabra, the carpets and curtains, the books and musical scores, the clothes from the wardrobes and drawers, the bed linen, pillows, eiderdowns, blankets, china and kitchen utensils, the houseplants and umbrellas, even the bottled pears and cherries which had been standing forgotten in the cellar for years, and the remaining potatoes. They took everything, down to the very last spoon, off to one of the over fifty depots, where these abandoned objects were itemized separately with that thoroughness peculiar to the Germans, were valued, then washed, cleaned or mended as necessary, and finally stored, row upon row, on specially made shelves”¹⁴), it seems to concern something that is alive. But Sebald in his infinite compassion wouldn’t see any difference here.

3.

“It must be terribly impertinent, talking to the reader about the present in that tone of absolute courtesy we, for some reason, have yielded to the memoirists,”¹⁵ Mandelstam writes in A Journey to Armenia, and this is the most precise description of Sebald’s prose that I know. An absolute, old-fashioned courtesy, which makes itself felt in every construction, seems exaggerated, sometimes it reaches the borderline of stylization. Here, as everywhere, a trait comes through that is obviously dear to the author: an extreme unobtrusiveness of the text, its optionality (the way a well-bred interlocutor in a train car conversation is always ready to turn away and look out the window). The books begin in the old-fashioned way: “At the end of September 1970 …”¹⁶; “In the second half of the 1960s, I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons that were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks …”¹⁷—and they develop in the same old-fashioned way and spread out transparent layers of parables. Here the incredibly detailed discourse, which in a different light might testify to mere mental comfort, is something like a hygienic ritual upon encountering the unbearable—like an effort that allows a blurring consciousness to preserve its balance on the edge of a breakdown. Balance is the key word here; this is how the victim of a catastrophe goes back over the circumstances, entering into the smallest particulars, coming up with explanations, looking over details—solely in order not to start wailing aloud. Things seem to be set up that way here, too.

The syntax of the twentieth century—its phrases that flash and phrases that pick locks, destined to grasp the moment, to reflect its tremor and fragmentation, to express the essence, to imitate time—would be entirely out of place for the task Sebald assigns himself. His sentences lack even a hint of nervous trembling; they lie down at your feet like steps, comfortably sloping periods that unfailingly lead the reader toward the designated point of observation. His syntax is usually traced to the German eighteenth or nineteenth century, and it would be easy to agree, if not for one circumstance. The era Sebald looks back at is only the territory of a literary utopia, a small, sharply delineated mini-paradise, visible through binoculars held backward. His language is not the language of a historical segment, but rather the speech of the old world, pieced together in spite of everything: speech that, in an ineffable way, “hovered in the air just above the parquet floor for much longer than the force of gravity allowed.”¹⁸ And each subordinate clause declares and affirms the speaker’s non-belonging to the world of today.

One of his books describes something the author calls pockets of time.¹⁹ These are getting to be fewer and fewer, but the narrator still managed to catch Alpine farms and Corsican villages where some years ago you could still enter the perfect, uncalendrical eighteenth century. Many people have seen these zones that conserve what has already passed, where time goes by differently, and the twenties or the fifties stand up to their knees in the present time and have no intention of dissipating completely. Sebald’s prose is itself something like that sort of pocket, where there are many residences and one group of the residents completely lacks the gift of speech. Austerlitz has more than a few such preserves of non-human, piercing beauty, where the colors and names of butterflies are counted out with all possible unhurriedness, while in the Antwerp Nocturama, as if in Purgatory, a raccoon is washing an innocent apple and still can’t wash it clean.

There’s something deeply comic—and very Sebaldian—in the fact that I’m holding forth here about a syntax I only know from the English translations, merely able to guess at their correspondence to the original. Having lived in England, written in German, taught in English, been translated into dozens of world languages, he and his manner of existence are something like a promise given in passing. His prose, this measureless sponge that takes in all that is vanished and castaway, is written as if over and above language, in an angelic tongue of general equality and unity. It’s no surprise that “everything written in these […] books has—as their author might himself have said—a tendency to vanish into thin air. The very passage which a moment before seemed so significant can suddenly appear quite unremarkable.”²⁰ And one more citation to follow it: “Opposed to any hierarchy or subordination, they suggest to the reader in the most unobtrusive way that in the world created and administered by this narrator, everything has an equal right to coexist alongside everything else.”²¹

4.

That’s why everything is so important. The instinct to catalogue, which Sebald himself willingly calls bourgeois, turns out here to be a kind of salvation; the passion for listing becomes a good deed. Dates are important, the names of cafés are important; the names of places are important (and of plants, the ones who keep quiet in this world—Sebald feels a particular, respectful tenderness for them). The invisible shadows that stand behind every text are important; sometimes it’s impossible not to notice them—thus in The Emigrants there’s a flash of Nabokov with his butterfly net at every turn of the plot; sometimes you notice them only when a greeting from Sebald’s childhood ricochets off into you—thus I pause over every page where I see the name of Würzburg, a green Bavarian city with an old Jewish cemetery. The newspaper clippings are important, the restaurant tab and the ticket for admission to the Giardino Giusti in Verona are important. All the constant elements—there are almost more of them than the inconstant ones—are important, but in a different way.

Some motifs, phrases and words in Sebald’s prose are ineradicable, they float up here and there like life buoys, at every free exhalation. They include trains, and relocations, and women reading in trains; one of them has a book titled The Seas of Bohemia that is predictably missing from all the world’s amazon sites. (An American reviewer of Vertigo was surprised that the hero-narrator could contrive to watch two obviously attractive young women bent over their reading for hours without even trying to get acquainted with them.) Here I won’t deny myself the pleasure of quoting an excerpt from a brief essay published long before the author’s death.

During the journey she was reading Kafka’s travel diaries, and sometimes spent a long time looking out at the snowflakes driven past the window of the old-fashioned dining car, which with its ruffled curtains and little table lamp spreading reddish light reminded her of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel. All that she remembered from her reading was the passage where Kafka describes one of his fellow travelers cleaning his teeth with the corner of a visiting card, and she remembered that not because the description was particularly remarkable, but because no sooner had she turned a few pages than a strikingly stout man sitting at the table next to hers also, and not a little to her alarm, began probing between his own teeth with a visiting card, apparently without any inhibitions at all.²²

That is how description works in Sebald. All that, along with the little mica window where, hugely diminished, Kafka can be made out in a train car as it moves into the distance, is visible just as if through binoculars held backward: with comical precision, in the cosmic ice of completedness, which preserves any accidental link forever.

It’s no sin to state an obvious thing about Sebald one more time: what he’s busy doing is called rescue of the drowning, of all things and all people excluded, crowded out and subject to crowding, of those losing their meaning, of all those displaced and forgotten persons of world history, of everything that disappears, from people and peoples to obsolete crafts and gas lamps. And it has significant consequences. In the realm of literature, Sebald steps up against the tyranny of the engaging—on behalf of everything uninteresting, which is invariably deprived of the right to a reader. Some people seem to have a preeminent right to our interest, and that right can’t be challenged—because they’re beautiful, and famous, and talented, and this or that happened to them—and because the accepted ethics allow us to be selective. This is most visible in reading biographies: we obediently and sympathetically flip through the first ten or so pages—where we learn about the hero’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers—until we get to the magnetic zone of real interest. What can you do? It’s a natural human trait: “interesting,” like “tasty,” can’t be faked—it can only be disregarded. What Sebald does is a kind of soft, almost speechless revolution: we see the floors collapse and the snowy dust pour down. He doesn’t try to persuade you that uninteresting is the new interesting. He doesn’t insist that you ought to feel bored, as his guild colleagues often will.

Sebald simply removes the “boring/not-boring” gauge from the dashboard and honestly recollects everyone he is capable of reaching—in the mode of a common cause. His grief and his passion reside in the fact that all the component parts of the created world deserve recollection and re-understanding—and he works himself off his feet, attempting to utter a word (a picture, a quote, a hint) for each one of those who have lived. In its inner essence the problem he has taken on, and even the means he has chosen for resolving it, is very much like the commemoration of the departed at the Proskomedia—and here I’ll permit myself just once to cite a text that has no connection with literature: “In practice it turns out that a tremendous number of names is usually collected, and the priest appeals for help in reading from other clergy and assistants. […] Given this kind of overload the reading of names, unfortunately, is often carried out mechanically. It is especially difficult for a priest who is serving alone, without a deacon or a second priest, when notes are brought up with names during the liturgy itself (up to the Cherubic Hymn), and the priest has to read them out between the litany and the secret prayers. How can one concentrate under such conditions?”

Sebald’s prose is occupied with the same thing, but in a world utterly deprived of any hope of resurrection. The chosen method of standing up against non-being lends his books a particular status, like nothing else—it locates them in a no-man’s-land, between great literature (one can hardly describe it differently) and, if one can express it this way, metaphysical activism. I myself don’t know which they’re closer to. But these texts, which from the moment they were written have been hovering between literature and fact, invention and document, are already accustomed to this situation. All that we can rely on here—and even lean on, like the arm of a friend, in the pitch-dark night of a decline and fall—is our unaccountable confidence in the author. In the voice that continues to speak, as if respect, compassion, goodness have not lost their meaning, while all that has been written is written—to cite Sebald—“so to speak, from the other side.”²³ From that side: more populous than this one.

2013

Translated by Sibelan Forrester