He, the author, also exhibits awareness of the feelings and desires of the dead that is difficult to explain, as it can arise only from practice (Kafka, according to Sebald, “knew of the insatiable greed felt by the dead for those who are still alive”10). He gets preferential treatment in handling time, where he can swim as if in water, hauling out whole buckets full without fear of coming up short. Let’s add: complete absence of the will to choose and make a selection, a thirst to remember everything, and complete indifference to the consequences of what has been said—as if they can never affect us.
It’s as if Sebald is in possession of boundless leisure, a tsar’s store of time and soul laid by, which permit speech and memory to move from place to place, without hurrying and without getting distracted, to pass through walls and waste time on utter nonsense. His alter ego gets undressed, gets dressed, lies down with his hands behind his head, for endless hours, follows the changes of the light, forgets himself in writing or contemplation, lets the darkness flow over him—in such a way that the big event of the page (and of two days) turns out to be taking a bath. It’s an unimaginable tempo for contemporary prose; it would seem provocative if there weren’t so much meekness in it—and if what is happening wouldn’t make us hazily suspect that it can’t be otherwise: that sliding over the surface of forsaken (or revisited) things is all the narrator knows how to do. Moving them from their place would truly be an effort than he couldn’t bear.
Sliding, crowded out of everywhere by a gust of inner wind, not entering into the relationships of everyday life, speaking of everyone he meets with the tenderness of someone beyond Lethe—Sebald’s hero constantly moves along complicated trajectories that dreadfully resemble the posthumous wanderings of a soul who has nothing left but futile, fleshless understanding, of the kind Mikhail Kuzmin described in his diary shortly before his death: “sees everything as if through thick glass. Sees, let’s say, that a friend is on the brink of danger, but can’t hold him back, nor help, nor console, nor caress.” Sebald’s changes of place, it seems, imitate these wanderings (or, more accurately, attempt to rehearse them). In his case a consistent anticlericalism (practically normative for intellectuals of his generation) was reinforced, if not defined, by his own hands-on knowledge of what posthumous existence looks like and where it takes place.
For him the dead are poor relations of the living: crowded to the side of the road, deprived of rights, doomed to senseless wandering over a set of invisible routes. This movement, which never has either goal or consequences but invariably flowers in a series of reflections and discoveries, is, perhaps, Sebald’s only plot. All his books, no matter what they’re about, are written from the side and on the side of the dead. This kind of approach to reality has many consequences: one is that the earthly thirst to know (what comes after what, and then what, and most importantly: how it ended) loses its power at once when we approach Sebald’s prose. The fragile gratings of the basic construction barely withstand the invisible volume of what’s put inside—all the correspondences and signifieds that stand invisibly behind every turn of a sentence. Here the temporal, geographical, and other kinds of rhymes are something like direction signs. Or rather, like folds in a curtain: open it and you’ll see beneath them “the metaphysical underside of reality, its dark inner lining.”11 “And in the other world—everything rhymes,” Tsvetaeva wrote to Pasternak, when there was nothing more to hope for.
Sebald’s fondness for doublings and treblings, it seems, only gets stronger from understanding that in point of fact these rhymes, besides their statistical negligibility, are also fruitless: they don’t mean or lead to anything. Nothing happens in Sebald’s world, no revelation can become a turning point, the worst things all happened before the beginning, you can’t expect salvation. The ones who lived before are crushed by portents, the ones after—by the catastrophe itself. A cloud, unnamed and impermeable, hangs over the narrative, follows it on every path, as if behind the Jews in the desert.
Sebald finds a new manner of handling the horrible, in whose presence, as if by the light of a black lamp, his native world dear to him whiles away time. Written “as if through a veil of ash,”12 it (that-which-happened, you-know-very-well-what) is almost never named directly, doesn’t show itself, remains in the margins. And that is precisely the main presence in Sebald’s text, the center of gravity of any narration, the thick curtain of the indescribable, in front of which, hanging fire and holding still, the narrative unfolds. In order to be recognized, this horrible thing often takes on a familiar form (in Sebald’s case, for understandable reasons, it is most often the Catastrophe). But its scale exceeds all the examples and measures accessible to us; like a sheer wall of water, it stands in the face of everything living, and in some sense we’re all already displaced and crushed by that wall.
This is knowledge that is best kept close: it’s worth reading Sebald’s text as a manual, it pertains directly to the everyday practice of every one of us. The reality of The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo is entirely documentary: the street names are true to themselves, the information about what happened looks authentic and indeed does not lie. We know that made-up elements and microdistortions exist—but it’s impossible to ascertain their place, likewise their quantity. Sebald’s prose is a world with transparent partitions, where everything is penetrable and every wall can be walked through. But you can’t do anything with that gift. Suddenly you can see far off, the hidden mechanisms, the springs of the world’s set-up have revealed themselves, you can observe what makes its machines work in synchrony and how one thing connects with another and everything with everything, but it’s impossible to participate in the common work of time. Worse than that, any kind of participation would be a crime (“there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration,” says Sebald13). For him, a child of the war years, civilization and ruin lie side by side, like a wolf and a lamb, and they hardly differ from each other; for a long time he thought the pits and heaps of broken stone from bombed buildings were natural features of a big city, its modus vivendi.
The world is set up as a destroyer, crowding out, uprooting, grinding into powder (ash, of course, is one of Sebald’s main words); in a chain sequence where the new stamps out the old, there’s no escape for any of the links. This decides things. Plot interest—who will overthrow whom—is replaced by compassion, an extreme, respectful attention to everything doomed. There are no exceptions, and when you read the inventory of things taken from the sealed Prague apartment of a Jewish woman in Austerlitz (“the lamps and candelabra, the carpets and curtains, the books and musical scores, the clothes from the wardrobes and drawers, the bed linen, pillows, eiderdowns, blankets, china and kitchen utensils, the houseplants and umbrellas, even the bottled pears and cherries which had been standing forgotten in the cellar for years, and the remaining potatoes. They took everything, down to the very last spoon, off to one of the over fifty depots, where these abandoned objects were itemized separately with that thoroughness peculiar to the Germans, were valued, then washed, cleaned or mended as necessary, and finally stored, row upon row, on specially made shelves”14), it seems to concern something that is alive. But Sebald in his infinite compassion wouldn’t see any difference here.
3.
“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.