A Conversation with W. G. Sebald by Joseph Cuomo
JOSEPH CUOMO: On the surface at least, The Rings of Saturn is a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. But all sorts of allusions and observations come in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as he walks or looks out over a cliff or sits on his bed in a hotel room. And so we encounter with him any number of things, from the works of Sir Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad to Borges to Swinburne to the life of the Empress Dowager. This description of the book is accurate, but it doesn’t seem to describe what the novel actually does, what it accomplishes. And I think one of the difficulties we face in trying to describe the book is that in it you seem to have reinvented the narrative form. In fact, the narrative conceit of the novel seems virtually invisible, so much so that we are unaware of it as we read. There seems to be no artificial mechanism, no construct mediating between the reader and the experience of the page. A friend of mine, a very good writer, said to me that as soon as he had finished reading The Rings of Saturn he immediately started from the beginning again, because what had just happened to him — he couldn’t
Copyright © 2007 by Joseph Cuomo. From an interview conducted on March 13, 2001, as part of the Queens College Evening Readings in New York. The interview was subsequently broadcast on Metro TV’s The Unblinking Eye and published as “The Meaning of Coincidence: An Interview with Writer W. G. Sebald” in The New Yorker Online. A more complete version of the interview is published here for the first time.
figure out how it had happened. I was wondering how you approached this in the writing of it, the idea of narrative form. Was the structure a function largely of your unconscious associations during the writing process? Or was it something you plotted out in advance in a very deliberate way?
W. G. SEBALD: I can’t quite remember how it worked. I had this idea of writing a few short pieces for the feuilletons of the German papers in order to pay for this extravagance of a fortnight’s rambling tour. That was the plan. But then as you walk along, you find things. I think that’s the advantage of walking. It’s just one of the reasons why I do that a lot. You find things by the wayside or you buy a brochure written by a local historian, which is in a tiny little museum somewhere, which you would never find in London. And in that you find odd details which lead you somewhere else, and so it’s a form of unsystematic searching, which of course for an academic is far from orthodoxy, because we’re meant to do things systematically.
But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was always done in a random, haphazard fashion. And the more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way, i.e., in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he’s looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. [Audience laughter.] And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they’ll connect up. But they’ll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn’t, in terms of writing something new, very productive. So you have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before. That’s how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you. For instance, this whole business about this atrocious Chinese civil war in the nineteenth century, which we know so little about in the West — I knew nothing about it — I’d found that remark in a tiny little booklet written, I think, in 1948, which was still there for sale, that this little local train which ran around there [over the River Blyth in England] had been destined originally for the court of the emperor of China, which was a very bizarre, erratic fact. And then of course you wonder which emperor, and you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 and you rummage around there, and it goes on like this. Which is the most pleasurable part of the work, as you uncover these things and move from one astonishing thing to the other. The actual writing, of course, is a different story. That’s far from a pleasant occupation. [Audience laughter.]
JC: This discovery process — the dog running in the field — is any of that happening while you’re actually writing? You made a distinction between the two things, the searching and the reading. .
WGS: Occasionally. I think when you write or do anything of the sort, there are times when you almost know that you’re on the right track. You don’t quite believe it, but you feel more positive about what you’re doing than at other times, and I think this is confirmed when things come in from the wings, you know, as you sit there, trying to straighten out a page. And, as it comes right, then quotations or figures or things that you hadn’t thought of for eighteen years offer themselves all of a sudden. And I’ve always found that quite a good measure — that once things are going in a certain way that you can trust, then even in the writing process itself, things happen. For instance, the last part of this book [The Rings of Saturn] is all about silk, and that section, in turn, finishes with a number of pages on the culture of mourning. And on the very day when I finished these pages, I looked in, I think it was the Times, the daily circular, and there were all the events I needed. You know, the list of what had happened on a certain day 130 years ago or 220 years ago. And they all slotted into the text, as if I had been writing towards that point. It was quite amazing, but it does happen in that way occasionally — and that’s very gratifying when it does.
JC: That process itself seems to be one that you describe in the novels: something inexplicable occurs; we don’t really know what to make of it, but the fact that it does occur seems to carry enormous significance.
WGS: Yes, I think it’s this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it’s not obtrusive. But, you know, it certainly does come up in the first book, in Vertigo, a good deal. I don’t particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or with Jungian theories about the subject. I find it all rather tedious. But it seems to me simply an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. And so you meet somebody who has the same birthday — the odds are one to 365, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person, then immediately this takes on major significance. [Audience laughter.] And so we build. I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of creed, all our constructions, even the technological ones, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, which there isn’t, as we all know. [Audience laughter.]