The syntax of the twentieth century—its phrases that flash and phrases that pick locks, destined to grasp the moment, to reflect its tremor and fragmentation, to express the essence, to imitate time—would be entirely out of place for the task Sebald assigns himself. His sentences lack even a hint of nervous trembling; they lie down at your feet like steps, comfortably sloping periods that unfailingly lead the reader toward the designated point of observation. His syntax is usually traced to the German eighteenth or nineteenth century, and it would be easy to agree, if not for one circumstance. The era Sebald looks back at is only the territory of a literary utopia, a small, sharply delineated mini-paradise, visible through binoculars held backward. His language is not the language of a historical segment, but rather the speech of the old world, pieced together in spite of everything: speech that, in an ineffable way, “hovered in the air just above the parquet floor for much longer than the force of gravity allowed.”18 And each subordinate clause declares and affirms the speaker’s non-belonging to the world of today.
One of his books describes something the author calls pockets of time.19 These are getting to be fewer and fewer, but the narrator still managed to catch Alpine farms and Corsican villages where some years ago you could still enter the perfect, uncalendrical eighteenth century. Many people have seen these zones that conserve what has already passed, where time goes by differently, and the twenties or the fifties stand up to their knees in the present time and have no intention of dissipating completely. Sebald’s prose is itself something like that sort of pocket, where there are many residences and one group of the residents completely lacks the gift of speech. Austerlitz has more than a few such preserves of non-human, piercing beauty, where the colors and names of butterflies are counted out with all possible unhurriedness, while in the Antwerp Nocturama, as if in Purgatory, a raccoon is washing an innocent apple and still can’t wash it clean.
There’s something deeply comic—and very Sebaldian—in the fact that I’m holding forth here about a syntax I only know from the English translations, merely able to guess at their correspondence to the original. Having lived in England, written in German, taught in English, been translated into dozens of world languages, he and his manner of existence are something like a promise given in passing. His prose, this measureless sponge that takes in all that is vanished and castaway, is written as if over and above language, in an angelic tongue of general equality and unity. It’s no surprise that “everything written in these […] books has—as their author might himself have said—a tendency to vanish into thin air. The very passage which a moment before seemed so significant can suddenly appear quite unremarkable.”20 And one more citation to follow it: “Opposed to any hierarchy or subordination, they suggest to the reader in the most unobtrusive way that in the world created and administered by this narrator, everything has an equal right to coexist alongside everything else.”21
4.
That’s why everything is so important. The instinct to catalogue, which Sebald himself willingly calls bourgeois, turns out here to be a kind of salvation; the passion for listing becomes a good deed. Dates are important, the names of cafés are important; the names of places are important (and of plants, the ones who keep quiet in this world—Sebald feels a particular, respectful tenderness for them). The invisible shadows that stand behind every text are important; sometimes it’s impossible not to notice them—thus in The Emigrants there’s a flash of Nabokov with his butterfly net at every turn of the plot; sometimes you notice them only when a greeting from Sebald’s childhood ricochets off into you—thus I pause over every page where I see the name of Würzburg, a green Bavarian city with an old Jewish cemetery. The newspaper clippings are important, the restaurant tab and the ticket for admission to the Giardino Giusti in Verona are important. All the constant elements—there are almost more of them than the inconstant ones—are important, but in a different way.
Some motifs, phrases and words in Sebald’s prose are ineradicable, they float up here and there like life buoys, at every free exhalation. They include trains, and relocations, and women reading in trains; one of them has a book titled The Seas of Bohemia that is predictably missing from all the world’s amazon sites. (An American reviewer of Vertigo was surprised that the hero-narrator could contrive to watch two obviously attractive young women bent over their reading for hours without even trying to get acquainted with them.) Here I won’t deny myself the pleasure of quoting an excerpt from a brief essay published long before the author’s death.
During the journey she was reading Kafka’s travel diaries, and sometimes spent a long time looking out at the snowflakes driven past the window of the old-fashioned dining car, which with its ruffled curtains and little table lamp spreading reddish light reminded her of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel. All that she remembered from her reading was the passage where Kafka describes one of his fellow travelers cleaning his teeth with the corner of a visiting card, and she remembered that not because the description was particularly remarkable, but because no sooner had she turned a few pages than a strikingly stout man sitting at the table next to hers also, and not a little to her alarm, began probing between his own teeth with a visiting card, apparently without any inhibitions at all.22
That is how description works in Sebald. All that, along with the little mica window where, hugely diminished, Kafka can be made out in a train car as it moves into the distance, is visible just as if through binoculars held backward: with comical precision, in the cosmic ice of completedness, which preserves any accidental link forever.
It’s no sin to state an obvious thing about Sebald one more time: what he’s busy doing is called rescue of the drowning, of all things and all people excluded, crowded out and subject to crowding, of those losing their meaning, of all those displaced and forgotten persons of world history, of everything that disappears, from people and peoples to obsolete crafts and gas lamps. And it has significant consequences. In the realm of literature, Sebald steps up against the tyranny of the engaging—on behalf of everything uninteresting, which is invariably deprived of the right to a reader. Some people seem to have a preeminent right to our interest, and that right can’t be challenged—because they’re beautiful, and famous, and talented, and this or that happened to them—and because the accepted ethics allow us to be selective. This is most visible in reading biographies: we obediently and sympathetically flip through the first ten or so pages—where we learn about the hero’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers—until we get to the magnetic zone of real interest. What can you do? It’s a natural human trait: “interesting,” like “tasty,” can’t be faked—it can only be disregarded. What Sebald does is a kind of soft, almost speechless revolution: we see the floors collapse and the snowy dust pour down. He doesn’t try to persuade you that uninteresting is the new interesting. He doesn’t insist that you ought to feel bored, as his guild colleagues often will.