DEAD MAN WALKING
The classic travel writer takes us on a quest, even if he doesn’t know exactly what he’s after; with the haunted German wanderer W. G. Sebald, the dominant impression is always that of flight. A flight from the past, and from all that he has suffered there; but also—agonizingly—a flight into the past, since everywhere he goes, whatever he sees, and whomever he meets reflect back to him precisely the world he’s trying to put behind him. There’s no escape. With the classic traveler we generally feel that we’re being taken by the hand and led out into the world; with Sebald (so uneasy he can’t even acknowledge to us that his journeys are a fact, nonfiction), we are always looking back even as we move forward, like cursed figures from an ancient myth.
You get a sense of this predicament—flight not as liberation, but as compulsion—as soon as you pick up the latest of his books to be translated into English. The dust jacket of
Vertigo,
at least in the British edition, tells you, not very helpfully, that it belongs to the genre of “Fiction/Travel/History.” The table of contents, even in translation, offers two sections, out of four, with Italian titles. The author refuses to give us his first name, in the style that now seems archaic, and his alter-ego narrator will check into a hotel room under a name not his own. Sebald has lived in England for more than thirty years—teaching literature, no less—and yet he chooses to write still in his native German.
Clearly, you gather, his sense of identity is slippery and his theme, at some level, is all the things he cannot speak about (he was born, the book’s cover tells you, in Germany, in 1944). And as soon as you open the cover and fall into his restless nightmare of a journey, you find you are moving with no hope of orientation or forward motion. There is no sense of home around you in his world, no sense of family, or community, no sense, even, of a settled reality. By page 4 you are being introduced to weird drawings of “horses that plunged off the track in a frenzy of fear” during Napoleon’s Italian campaign in 1800; by page 5 you are moving into a “light that is already fading.” The thrust of the opening section is that nothing is what it seems: most of what the “perennial traveler” Stendhal remembered about the Napoleonic campaign he accompanied never happened.
Then the curtain rises on the second section of the book, and the never-changing Sebald narrator, the author’s double in a sense, comes out from the wings and takes us into the voice, the theme—the world—that are fast coming to seem Sebaldian: “In October 1980 I traveled from England, where I had been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county that was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.”
Though
Vertigo
is the third of Sebald’s books to be translated into English, it is the first of them to have been written, and so lays out the foundations for what increasingly seems to be one long, lifetime’s work that could be called
À la Fuite de Temps
Perdu.
In all these works, a narrator, in all ways indistinguishable from the author, takes off on long, unsettled wanderings, in pursuit of some riddle that will not leave him alone. He mixes up his travels with portraits of other enigmatic wanderers and misfits, and the text is broken up at regular, irregular intervals with cryptic photographs, copies of receipts from trains or restaurants, maps taken from old books. Uncaptioned, and bearing only the most oblique relation to the text around them, the scraps serve only to intensify the sense of placelessness and silence.
There are few other beings in this desolate, black-and-white world, and those we meet are as disconnected as the narrator: solitary eccentrics lost in their own obsessions, sad outcasts set aside as mad. We see coffins, hear tolling bells, pass down streets that always seem deserted. The long sunless paragraphs, often going on for three pages or more, come to us in an English so antique that it seems a foreign tongue: words like “contagion” and “perdition” recur, we are introduced to “boatmen” and “watchmen.” Our first impression may be of Nabokov lost inside a haunted house.
Yet part of what possesses one about these passages is that Sebald gives us nothing to hold on to, no background or cause and effect: nothing except the seraphic scraps that seem to belong to the album of a person now departed. His journeys are never undertaken in a spirit of adventure or delight—they often take place in areas or on trains that have unexplained “unpleasant associations” for him—and they never come to any discernible end. Often, unsettlingly, they pass between this world and the next, dreams and a kind of waking. As he wanders around Italy in the second section of
Vertigo,
the narrator spots Dante, then King Ludwig II of Bavaria; more often, though, he looks at the people around him and sees “a circle of severed heads” or (in Venice, of all places) “a moving cortege.” Everything comes to him from very far away, with some dimension missing: people are seen moving in slow motion and there is a soundlessness, a stillness, to everything, as if it were being seen through several panes of glass. The narrator himself hardly knows whether he is in the “land of the living or already in another place.”
Sebald has only to open an old book, in fact, to see, inside the front cover, the name of a person no longer alive. The only attachment he confesses to in the three works is one Clara, but both times she appears, it is in the context of a death. An inn-keeper has merely to touch him, indeed, and the narrator starts, with a sense of something “ghoulish or disembodied.” Though it’s customary to refer to a writer of such impeccable prose as writing like an angel, in the case of Sebald, sitting alone on a bench at twilight and presenting us with nothing but his back, it might be truer to say that he writes like a wraith.
And the theme of all his books is, at some level, nothing more than the effects they pass on to us: of restlessness, of panic, of being caught up in a lightless labyrinth (the shadow of Kafka is everywhere in these stories). The titles themselves announce their subjects as vertigo, the fact of being saturnine (
The Rings of
Saturn
), and a compulsion to wander (
The Emigrants
). In some ways Sebald is working, with his hypnotic, spellbound prose, to put us into the very state he inhabits, unmoored, at a loss, in the dark. Lacking all explanations, offering no sense of before and after, his journeys come to us a little as the Ancient Mariner’s come to Coleridge’s wedding guest.
The only things that do fit together here, moreover, are coincidences, which impart a sense of being caught up in some script written by Fates we can’t imagine to be benign (a believer, in most religions, holds that nothing is an accident—all is mandated by God; Sebald gives us the shadow side of that condition). Thus at one point the narrator leads a madman to the St. Agnes home, and we notice from the date given a little later that it is close to Saint Agnes’ Eve. He tells us the story of Casanova, and we recall, a little unsettlingly, that Stendhal, in the first movement of the book, died on the street now known as rue Danielle-Casanova. The archetypal Sebald moment, you could say, comes when he walks into a pizza parlor in Verona (a pizza parlor!), and sees that the owner’s name is Carlo Cadavero (lest this detail seem too Sebaldian to be true, he offers us a photograph of his bill from the restaurant). Later, returning to the place, he finds it all boarded up, blinds drawn on the apartment above, and the photographer next door so silent that we can only assume that the poor Cadavero has attained the state of his name. The odd keepsakes pasted into the text—here we see a picture of the shuttered restaurant—have the almost desperate air of pieces of evidence in a trial, aimed to show us (or the narrator himself) that all this really happened and he is not, in fact, mad.
Just as I was writing this sentence, I should here note, my partner came into the room, looking pale, and told me that, on a routine trip to the office just now, she had come upon a dead body laid out on the station platform. A long white sheet, she said, and a woman’s shoes protruding from under it. I went into the next room—this is in Japan—to the desk I share with her teenage daughter, and saw on it a sample English-language sentence: “Last night there was a fire in our neighborhood, and an old woman burned to death.” Clearly, the spell was working.
Sebald is always scrupulous with dates and street names and places—as if, again, to try to convince himself and us that all he is recording is not just the product of a deranged imagination— and if you read
Vertigo
on the factual level, its first section is an account of the life of Stendhal, and his trials in love and war. He became fascinated, we are told, with a woman of “great melancholy beauty,” and, soon thereafter, we are shown a picture of some hands (the woman’s?), another photo, of a pair of eyes (Stendhal’s?), then a drawing of an ulcer. The writer’s one inescapable theme, we read, before his death from syphilis, was “What is it that undoes a writer?”
The second section of the book follows the Sebald-seeming narrator’s journey through Vienna, Venice, and Verona in 1980, in search, he only suggests, of details about the life of Kafka and clues about a series of grisly cult murders. The third movement tells us the story of Dr. K., another man tortured in life and love (and at this point the sharp-eyed reader may notice that some of the images, the cadences, even the details and events of
Vertigo
come from Kafka’s terrifying story of a dead man’s tale, “The Hunter Graccus”). And in the closing section of the book, the narrator returns to his hometown in Germany, which he can only bear to call “W.” (though the dust jacket matter-of-factly identifies it as Wertach im Allgäu).
Across the four narratives images recur and echo like footsteps in a labyrinth, and with each recurrence their air of portent or meaning (albeit a meaning we can’t guess, or perhaps don’t want to know) intensifies. We see, again and again, in different contexts, people waving as on a distant ship, as if about to voyage off (as Sebald might put it) to the other shore. We revert frequently to a man (now the narrator, now Dr. K.) lying in a small hotel room, arms crossed behind his head, as the sounds of life come to him from the street outside. We see glimpses of “dust-blown expanses and tidal plains” that are, we are told, the landscape of the future. The force of these recurrences—even a sign above the narrator, when arriving in Milan, says LA PROSSIMA COINCIDENZA—is to make us feel as if we’re simply sleepwalking through some diabolical plot that we can’t follow. More than once, the narrator notices, in Italy, two men, always walking together, watching him from afar; later we learn that two men, always walking together, have been arrested in connection with the ritual murders.
It doesn’t matter whether these are the same two men; what is important is that the narrator thinks they are: irrational fear and a sense of being hunted are the only home Sebald knows. He is like someone who has fallen through a trapdoor into some parallel world in which correspondences and patterns impress themselves more forcibly than does the real stuff of life. Thus the action proceeds (in his mind) almost like an allegory (and those two men come to seem agents of Charon, waiting to carry the narrator away); certain obvious things have no meaning, and certain covert things have too much. At one point, in an inn, another visitor (German, of course) makes off, by mistake, with the narrator’s passport, and we feel that his very identity has been stolen. He buys a map in Milan, to guide him through the city, and on the cover is a labyrinth.
The reader who declines to succumb to the spell will say that Sebald is seeking out—to some extent creating—a world that will mirror his own brokenheartedness and dread; it is nearly always twilight in his stories, and the season he keeps returning to is autumn (especially November, “the month of the dead,” as he characteristically calls it). The year with which he is fascinated in
Vertigo
is 1913, a time when everything, to us now, seems shadowed by what came soon thereafter, making even the tiniest detail (an inscription in a book, dated 1913) seem haunted. To some extent Sebald is almost addicted to the dark, and when he makes for an “unprepossessing, ill-omened hotel” on arrival in Milan, it’s no surprise that the “wizen-faced creature” who receives him there resembles all the other dwarves and misshapen beings we’ve met.
Sebald would reply that this is precisely his point: to one born with his legacy, all life is a
memento mori.
He is running from a world in his head from which there can be no release but death. And the figures on the far-off ship, so hushed from afar, give the impression they are heading to a place from which they will never return; the outline of a lone man, in a small dark room, begins to seem a metaphor for the narrator’s life, alone in a temporary habitation, laid out as in his resting place, the sounds of real life coming to him at a distance. To a dead man, Sebald might be saying, all the world’s a funeral.
Such grim and comfortless sensations would doubtless make for very painful reading indeed were it not for the “great melancholy beauty” of the prose, which even in translation (by the poet Michael Hulse, but surely with more than a little help from the English-fluent Sebald) rises to a pitch of antique sonorousness and majesty that makes everything else one comes across seem small. The spirits hovering over it—or behind it—are Robert Burton, author of
The Anatomy of Melancholy,
and Sebald’s fellow East Anglian, Sir Thomas Browne, who once wrote that if you watch sleeping bodies from on high, and pass across the globe, following the setting sun, you can imagine the whole world to be a city of the dead (the image is so dear to Sebald that he uses it twice). Though Sebald’s flights are seldom flights in the modern aeronautic sense—he usually travels by foot, or on a boat or train—they do offer the prospect of the world as seen from a very great height (as in the light of Eternity, or death). Their psychological key might be said to be the word
“unheimlich”
—or “uncanny”—a Freudian term that has to do with “obsessive paths of action,” a “repetition compulsion,” and what one scholar calls “a flood of repressed memories that fill the subject with both dread and pleasure.” (Two years after writing this sentence, I might add, I found that one of Sebald’s untranslated critical works was actually called
Unheimliche Heimat,
or “Unhomelike Home.”)