The Voice Over

W. G. Sebald’s essay “Campo Santo” was published posthumously in a book in which three or four essays sketch the deliberately incomplete outline of a journey through Corsica. These essays leave a strange impression, as if the author were approaching the light at the end of that tunnel we’ve heard so much about from popular literature. The narrator and the narration thin out over the course of their movement, they are dissolved in quick flames; the very language and its objects—Napoleon’s uniform, the school fence, the village burial rituals—are in equal measure blinding and transparent. The author crosses over, the letters stay behind. It’s not surprising that the central text in this book is about a cemetery.

There, Sebald laments the fact that there are no ghosts to be found in Corsica anymore. The way he describes them (short, with blurry features, always at a slant from reality, petulant like children, and vengeful like jackdaws), there isn’t much to lament. But the fact that the local dead were no longer left offerings of food and drink (on doorways and windowsills), that they stopped frightening their fellow villagers on late night roads, that they stopped visiting relatives and strangers, saddens him more than you would expect. His strange compassion for these unpleasant creatures, his visible displeasure that they have to lie in the narrow communal cemetery instead of on their own land, or the fact that the living and dead no longer exist on equal terms, seems suspiciously personal—as though the author had a vested interest here, as though this were his very own sorrow. And that is in fact true: this essay was written from—and on—the side of the dead. The uneasy urgency that Sebald’s own end, a senseless death in a car crash, gives this text forces us to read it all in italics, like an urgent missive from the end of the world, from the borderlands between here and there. The trouble is that, if we are to believe its message, there is no difference between here and there.

The dead mean less and less to us, Sebald says. We clear them from the road with the utmost speed and great zeal. They take up less and less of our time, they take up less space: cremations, urns, little cells in a concrete wall. “And who has remembered them, who remembers them at all?”³ He describes cemeteries as if they were prisons or reservations (designed to isolate, edge out, weigh down with granite and marble, to deprive the dead of their own, to surround them with strangers). He mourns the things that knew how to live on for decades (we remember what those were like: a father’s coat, worn for years by his son, a grandmother’s thimble, a grandfather’s geometry box, a memory of mother—a ring or an armchair) and suddenly found themselves replaceable. The absence of the will to preserve, which has gotten a hold of all of us, can also be described in another way, as a military operation or social reform: its task is an abolition of memory.

Indeed, the past is so broad that, it seems, we want to hem it in a little, to reduce all of it into less: just the important stuff, just the good parts. The idea that history (and culture) has a short and a long program, a top five or ten (the way only the church bells of the sunken city of Kitezh rise out of the lake) is not new. What’s new is how strangely weary we are of everything that preceded us. The new currents—theories in the vein of Fomenko,⁴ which compress time and space into a single point, educational reforms, with their inevitable cuts to the humanities—are all driven by the simple-minded desire to make things more simple. So that the well is a little less deep, so that there is less homework to assign, so that the buzzing mass of lived experience can be rolled up into a compact, taut ball (or rolled out into a transparent thin crepe). To use Sebald’s own words, “We have to keep throwing ballast overboard, forgetting everything that we might otherwise remember.”⁵ Under our feet, there’s either the raft of the Medusa or a rock “no larger than the head of a seal jutting out of the water” from the old fairy tale. On it, the present is living out its time: washed by the sea of the dead, half-drowned in the past, half a step away from death and oblivion, eyes tightly shut.