The world of Sebald’s books is its own Nocturama, inhabited by creatures at home in the dark. Like the raccoon that he describes so plaintively, Sebald’s characters emerge with sudden clarity from the haze of their surroundings, obsessively repeating whatever action they have chosen, though it will not bring them the escape for which they so desperately yearn. They are destroyed souls, fractured under the burden of the pain that they bear. There is the tortured Kafka in Vertigo, sick and disoriented while traveling in Austria and Italy, tormented by dreams “in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner.” There is the painter Max Ferber in The Emigrants, a Jew sent to England as a child during the war, whose parents died in Dachau: “That tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years.” There is the Ashbury family in The Rings of Saturn, who embroider cloth all day and undo their work each night, and feel that “we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing incomprehensible blunder.” And there is Jacques Austerlitz, whose life journey is driven by a blind and unsatisfiable longing to recapture the childhood memories he has entirely, unwillingly suppressed.
The strangest thing about Sebald’s incomparably strange work is that upon first reading it gives us no reason to think that it is fiction. Though Austerlitz was largely taken as a novel, Sebald himself refused to designate it as such; in an interview he called it “a prose book of indefinite form.” Indeed, why must the passage above be anything other than notes from an idiosyncratic travel journal? The street names, improbable though they may be, are easily verified with a map of Antwerp, and the zoo, located near the central train station just as he says, does in fact have a Nocturama. But though the books are marked by an extraordinary profusion of facts — snippets from Kafka’s letters, notes on the mating practices of herrings, even reproductions of train tickets and restaurant receipts that appear to document the narrator’s journeys — fiction pulls at them with the force of gravity. The four stories that constitute The Emigrants are connected by a single image that flits through each of them: the figure of Nabokov with his butterfly net, sometimes a grown man, sometimes a boy. And the four sketches of Vertigo each contain a line from a story by Kafka, slightly rephrased on each repetition, describing a corpse lying beneath a cloth on a bier. The improbability of all four characters in The Emigrants crossing paths with Nabokov and the impossibility of a manifestation of Kafka’s image appearing in all four parts of Vertigo is but one signal of the turn into fiction. As one reads more deeply into Sebald’s work, its fictionality becomes utterly essential.
But while fiction tugs at one sleeve, reality tugs at the other with nearly equal force, most dramatically in the black-and-white photographs that Sebald has strewn about all his prose books. The photographs have neither captions nor credits to give a clue to their provenance; the text describes the taking of some of them, while others seem to be more generally illustrative, and still others entirely random. In the last chapter of Vertigo, for instance, the narrator, visiting his hometown after many years of absence, mentions a photo album that his father gave his mother as a Christmas present during the first year of the war.
In it are pictures of the Polish campaign, all neatly captioned in white ink. Some of these photographs show gypsies who had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out, smiling, from behind the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of the Slovakia where my father and his vehicle repairs unit had been stationed for several weeks before the outbreak of war.
We are then shown a photograph of a woman carrying a baby in a bundle, dressed in Gypsy-like clothes, behind a wire fence, with the caption “Zigeuner” (the German word for Gypsy) in white ink. But for every photograph such as this one, there is another that firmly denies any easy correspondence with the text. Several pages earlier Sebald mentions an iron memorial cross that stands in the town graveyard to commemorate four young soldiers who died in a “last skirmish” in April 1945, and he lists their names. When we turn the page there is the cross; but it looks as if there are five names on it, not four, and the photograph is too blurry to make out any names.
The conflict between fact and fiction reaches its epitome in the voice that narrates all these stories of loss. Sebald seems to encourage us to think of this persona as something like his own. His narrator (the books share a single voice) occasionally offers biographical details that are identical to Sebald’s own life: he is married, he lives in East Anglia, he was born toward the end of World War II in an Alpine German town, and came to England in the 1960s. Yet these details, like the photographs, obscure as much as they reveal. There are moments of startling intimacy, but even as Sebald’s narrator seems to bare his soul, he tells us nothing about himself. And he favors a particularly disorienting narrative device: most of Sebald’s characters tell their stories through direct encounters with the narrator, in monologues. At a crucial moment in some of the monologues, Sebald will switch from third person to first person, so that the narrator vanishes, leaving the character behind. Since he does not use quotation marks, the shift is seamless. This is not an “unreliable narrator,” it is an unreliable narrative.
But even as Sebald builds layer upon layer of disguise, his books stumble over their own sentences in their desire to explain themselves to the reader, as the crushing pile of symbols in the opening to Austerlitz illustrates. The books search for patterns in nature and in human life, and as they do so they obsessively repeat themselves. To take one instance: The Rings of Saturn begins with a quotation from an encyclopedia that describes the planet’s rings as “consist[ing] of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.” The circular motif is repeated throughout the book, in everything from the déjà vu the narrator experiences visiting a friend’s apartment to an extraordinary vision that is one of Sebald’s most beautiful and mystical moments: “At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light. . I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air.” The momentum created by the piling of image upon image, of figure upon figure, is so powerful that when one reaches the end of the book — I have experienced this with all of Sebald’s books, and others have mentioned it as well — one feels an irresistible compulsion to turn it over and begin again.
Yet there is something unsettling about the spell that Sebald’s books weave; and it is not only the disequilibrium that is constantly evoked by the differences between fact and fiction, art and life — a state in which Sebald’s narrator continually finds himself and that Sebald seeks to induce in the reader as well. It is a deeper paradox. In the first chapter of Vertigo, Sebald traces the adventures of the young Stendhal (then known as Marie Henri Beyle) in Napoleon’s army, and comments on the writer’s own difficulty in recollecting them: “Even when the images supplied by memory are true to life one can place little confidence in them.” Years later Beyle will discover that he had replaced his own mental image of Ivrea with that of an engraving of the town. “This being so,” Sebald concludes, “Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.”