The Voice Over

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.

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