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Writing with Images
W.G. Sebald

Marcel van Eeden, artist and draughtsman, known for his drawn reconstruction of the world of his parents, has mentioned his admiration for the author W.G. Sebald several times in his weblog. METROPOLIS M invited Van Eeden to comment, in Sebald’s own manner, on the historically inspired oeuvre of that author.An attachment to memory, to history, is a very human characteristic. This observation is nothing new, of course. Whole nations turn to memory and history for their identity, and both these play an important part in the personal sphere too. Text and images, perhaps equally, are the stuff of which history is made. And although images are just as easy to falsify as textual information, pictures – especially photographs – have a greater aura of authenticity. Images convey the impression of a more convincing evidence.On the internet, pornographic photos are more popular than pornographic texts. Pictures are real – or so it seems. Perhaps that is why W.G. Sebald intersperses his stories with authentic-looking images. This is unusual for a novelist. Sebald is known to have learned his own parental history only from pictures. His father never told him anything about his experiences in the Second World War, and Sebald discovered most of what he knew from photo albums after his father’s death. Histories and pictures grew to become a dual fascination for him, as is clear from all his novels.The importance of memory to an author was a subject he referred to in an interview for The Guardian, shortly before his death:‘The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have a much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered – not from yesterday but from a long time ago.’(The Guardian, 21 December 2001)Reading Sebald’s work, you understand why it was that the Greek goddess Mnemosyne gave memory as a gift to poets for their use. It is no coincidence, either, that Aby Warburg, the art historian and pioneer of iconology at the beginning of the last century, named his great picture-pasting project the Mnemosyne Atlas. In an obsessive charting of the world as we know it, Warburg’s enterprise bears some resemblance to Sebald’s work. W.G. Sebald was born in the German village of Wertach in 1944. After studying literature he moved to England in 1966 as a lecturer and later, professor. His first novel, Schwindel. Gefühle (translated into English as Vertigo) appeared in 1990. He died in a car crash in 2001.Sebald’s books seem at first glance like realistic, autobiographical narratives, but he attached great importance to their status as novel. More than once he pointed out that the first-person narrator does not always speak with the author’s own voice. The stories consists of an accumulation of facts, often situated around a journey that the narrator has supposedly undertaken. Sebald’s denial that the events described in his novels actually took place clashes strangely with his continual supplying of evidence in the form of images. Now and then it gives the stories something ghostly, for it leaves us wondering what is true and what is not. Sometimes Sebald goes into profound depth about a seemingly futile subject. At others, he offers merely a few, general facts. This is, as said, mingled with pictures (photos, diagrams, street maps, tickets, bills, etc.), and reminiscent of a classic travel scrapbook. The journey is a recurrent theme in Sebald’s writing. In his final novel, Austerlitz, for example, railway stations appear with notable frequency. Even the name of the protagonist refers to a train station, and the narrator meets this character for the first time in the railway station of Antwerp. Stations figure frequently in his earlier novels, too.‘The train switched tracks. The low beams of the setting sun shone through the carriage. The girl with the colourful jacket put a bookmarker in her novel, and the Franciscan nun too laid a green ribbon between the pages of her breviary. Both now leant back in their seats amid the golden evening light, one with what I supposed was short-trimmed hair beneath her white coif and the other with a glorious mane of curls. We were already rolling into the darkness of the station and everything was transformed into shadow. As the train moved slowly forwards, louder and louder grew the scream of the brakes, becoming unbearable until having reached its climax it suddenly stopped to be instantly replaced by complete silence, which after a few seconds was refilled in turn by the waves of noise flowing under the steel vault. Hopelessly lost, as it seemed to me, I stood on the platform. The girl with the multicoloured jacket and the Franciscan nun had long vanished. What connection could there be, I recall wondering and wonder still, between these two beautiful readers and the gigantic construction of this station roof, built in 1932 and then still surpassing all else in Europe, between the so-called stone witnesses of history and that which spreads over and populates our minds like a vague longing – the dusty plains and flooded fields of the future. With my bag slung over my shoulder, I walked as the last passenger off the platform and bought a map of the city.’ 1Sebald was a keen amateur photographer. He was apparently a frequent user of the university copy shop, where he would enlarge and reduce countless photos and other visual material, presumably with the intention of pasting the images into his manuscripts. In his early novels, he often used images with a coarse, typically photocopied appearance.Even though it is not always clear which aspects of the narratives have a basis in truth and which are fabricated, there is an essential difference in the way Sebald treats different types of history. There are facts from what for convenience I might call ‘world history’ or the collective memory, and stories from his personal life and background, the petit histoire. When travelling, Sebald would visit small bookshops in search of illustrated books and small publications on local matters. He was evidently in search of forgotten histories, which he could then suffuse with new life. Sometimes he would make up a story by combining events that were not strictly true with components from the real world. Chance played a very important part in this. In an interview, he explained how chance worked for him. He described how he once read a book by Konrad Beyer, an avant-garde Austrian writer, and noticed a footnote referring to Georg Wilhelm Steiner, whose initials happen to be the same as his own. Steiner, it appeared, was born in the same small town where Sebald’s pregnant mother had lodged in 1943 as a refugee from the bombardment of Neurenberg. This detail brought him back to his primary interest, the Second World War. His method is to stack fact upon fact without any obvious logical connection, but in such a way that in the end everything seems interrelated and by chance it all seems to work – with the stress on ‘seems’, for Sebald is also one to undermine the structure he has just erected.‘That process itself seems to be one that you described in the novel: 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.’ ‘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 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 Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you, the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more …and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn’t, as we all know.’(From Joe Cuomo, ‘The Meaning of Coincidence. An interview with the writer W. G. Sebald’, The New Yorker, 3 September 2001) The protagonist of his last major novel, Austerlitz, is composed of several different people. Sebald happened to see the life story of one of these characters on TV, while another is one of his colleagues – an architectural historian, like Austerlitz in the novel. The latter is also the child portrayed on the cover. I have never owned a clock, Austerlitz said, not a wall clock, nor an alarm clock, nor a pocket watch and certainly not a wristwatch. To me a timepiece always has something a little ridiculous about it, something fundamentally mendacious. Perhaps it’s because, due to some inner urge that I have myself never understood, I have always resisted the power of time and have placed myself outside the so-called phenomenon of time, in the hope, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass, that it does not become past, that I can go back behind it and find everything the way it was, or, perhaps better put, that all moments of time exist alongside one another, or, even better, that nothing history tells us is true but that which has happened never in fact happened but is happening only now, at the moment we think of it; which naturally opens up the grim prospect of everlasting misery and unceasing pain.It was nearly half past four in the afternoon and evening was falling when I left the observatory together with Austerlitz.2 1. Translated from Melancholische dwaalwegen, Amsterdam, 1992, p. 87 . Dutch translation of Schwindel. Gefühle. 2. From Austerlitz, Amsterdam, 2003, p. 117. Translated from the Dutch edition.

Marcel van Eeden

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