The Voice Over

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.