The Voice Over

“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

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