As we stroll back across the grass, I reflect that it could hardly be otherwise. If he didn’t put his writing first, The Emigrants wouldn’t be the great work of art it is. Curiously, the final proof of this for me is not a photograph, but the absence of one. The book ends with a description of three young women sitting at a carpet loom in the Lodz ghetto in 1940, weaving literally (but as we know, in vain) to save their lives. I am convinced that I have seen their photograph on the last page; I remember the loom, their hands, their faces. But it isn’t there.
A Poem of an Invisible Subject by Michael Silverblatt
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I’m honored to have as my guest W. G. Sebald, the author of some of the most important prose writing of the century, including the novels Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and now, Austerlitz. The prose has the breaths and cadences of poetry, and I wanted to begin by asking, were you influenced by German poetry?
W. G. SEBALD: No, not at all by German poetry. The influence came, if from anywhere, from nineteenth-century German prose writing, which also has prosodic rhythms that are very pronounced, where prose is more important than, say, social background or plot in any manifest sense. And this nineteenth-century German prose writing even at the time was very provincial. It never was received outside Germany to any extent worth mentioning. But it’s always been very close to me, not least because the writers all hailed from the periphery of the German-speaking lands, where I also come from. Adelbert Stifter in Austria. Gottfried Keller in Switzerland. They are both absolutely wonderful writers who achieved a very, very high intensity in their prose. One can see that for them it’s never a question of getting to the next
Bookworm interview, KCRW, Santa Monica, CA, December 6, 2001.
phase of the plot, but that they devote a great deal of care and attention to each individual page, very much the way a poet has to do.
What they all have in common is this precedence of the carefully composed page of prose over the mechanisms of the novel such as dominated fiction writing elsewhere, in France and in England, notably, at that time.
MS: When I started reading The Emigrants I was thrilled to encounter a kind of sentence that I had thought people had stopped being able to write, and I felt great relief at its gravity, its melancholy, but also its playfulness, its generosity. How did you find the way to reinvent such a sentence? It’s not of this time.
WGS: It’s not of this time. There are hypotactical syntax forms in these sentences which have been abandoned by practically all the writers now for reasons of convenience. Also because simply they are no longer accustomed to it. But if you dip into any form of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century discursive prose — the English essayists, for instance — these forms exist in previous ages of literature and they simply have fallen into disrepair.
MS: The wandering that the prose does, both syntactically and in terms of subjects, reminds me a bit of my favorite of the English essayists, de Quincey: the need, in a sense, to almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one center of attention to another, and a feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts. This I think is among the loveliest qualities, especially in the new book, Austerlitz.
WGS: Well, certainly, moving from one subject, from one theme, from one concern to another always requires some kind of sleight of hand.
MS: I was struck in the opening of Austerlitz by the way in which the narrator moves from a zoo, from the. . what is it called?
WGS: The Nocturama.
MS: The Nocturama. It’s a structure for animals that are awake only at night. And before long, the train station to which he returns becomes the double for the zoo. The eyes of certain thinkers become the doubles for the intense eyes of the nocturnal animals. Then the train station recalls a fortress, and there’s a gradual opening out, an unfolding of structures and interpositions. The speaker might well be the person spoken to, by virtue of this logic. And it extends with, it seems to me, an invisible referent — that as we go from the zoo to the train station, from the train station to the fortress, from the fortress to the jail, to the insane asylum, that the missing term is the concentration camp. .
WGS: Yes.
MS: And that always circling is this silent presence being left out but always gestured toward. Is that correct?
WGS: Yes. I mean, your description corresponds very much to my intentions. I’ve always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of vilification of minorities, the attempt, well-nigh achieved, to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it’s practically impossible to do this; to write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible. So you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something on your mind but that you do not necessarily roll out, you know, on every other page. The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience, that he is and has been perhaps for a long time engaged with these questions. And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly addressed. I think it is sufficient to remind people, because we’ve all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things. And also paralyze, as it were, our moral capacity. So the only way in which one can approach these things, in my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.
MS: It seems to me, though, that in addition, it is the invisible subject as one reads the book and one watches moths dying or many of the images. It’s almost as if this has become a poem of an invisible subject, all of whose images refer back to it, a metaphor that has no statement of its ground, only of its vehicle, as they used to say.
WGS: Yes, precisely. You know, there is in Virginia Woolf this — probably known better to you than to me — wonderful example of her description of a moth coming to its end on a window-pane somewhere in Sussex. This is a passage of some two pages only, I think, and it’s written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. There’s no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls, the souls of those who got away, and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern.
MS: I notice in the work, in particular in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, the tradition of the walker. I’m thinking of Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and thinking, too, that it was once beautifully common for a prose writer to write what he sees on his walk. In fact, the naturalist Louis Agassiz said that Thoreau sometimes used to bring things to him in the laboratory at Harvard, and that the things Thoreau picked up by accident were never less than unique. It was necessary for a writer to develop an eye. And it seems to my ear that the rhythms here have to do a great deal with the writing of entomologists and naturalists.