WG Sebald

WG Sebald

For some time, I’ve been aware of the name, WG Sebald. I was aware that he is highly regarded as a writer (the word “cult” is sometimes used in reference to him, in various combinations: cult following, cult writer – but that gives me a bit of the creeps). 

One critic called him the “James Joyce of the 21^stCentury”, though Sebald did not last very far into it. His published writing career began late, and, after only a handful of books, all acclaimed, he died of a heart attack, in a car crash, in 2001, aged 57. His main career was as an academic, at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich.

I have recently read the one book of his that seemed to beckon most –The Rings of Saturn. This is on its surface a memoir of an East Anglian walking tour. But in its depths…something else entirely.

Before, or as, or after I read the book, I researched a few facts.

Sebald was German, from Bavaria. His family was untroubled by the Nazis. Indeed, his father was a professional soldier, who served in the Wehrmacht throughout WW2 (but Sebald is very, very troubled by the Nazis).

He came to England in the 1970s, initially to Manchester, and then settled in Norwich. He married an Austrian woman. He wrote his books in German – they have been excellently translated, under Sebald’s supervision.

There’s another, rather elusive thing about Sebald. The Rings of Saturn is a first person narrative of a tour (mainly through Suffolk). But Sebald called all his works “fictions”. This has puzzled me – for, clearly, he went on his tour; and opening scene, in a Norwich hospital, reveals him prostrated by real life back surgery (though some say mental breakdown).

However, the “fiction” label allows him two (at least) liberties. The more obvious is that he keeps his family out of his work. In Rings, his companion /wife is presented as “Clara”, not the name of his actual wife. And also, I surmise, it permits Sebald to write semi-mystical dream, or dreamlike, passages, which report his narrator’s experience but perhaps are indeed embellishments or fictions. (It may also allow him to invent or embellish characters met or allegedly met on the road.)

The Rings of Saturn is mainly an elegy about the Suffolk coast (economic and social decline and, in the case of the medieval town of Dunwich, literal disintegration as the sea gradually and completely claimed it), spliced with meditations on persons, and events, mainly disasters, and imaginings, set off by associations, some direct, others very tenuous, with the places the narrator visits.

The book is written in a direct, metaphorically rich, style, with great sensitivity to landscape, buildings and individuals.

Sebald combines minute and recondite learning with a profound awareness of human suffering – and cruelty. Thus, a visit to a run down Lowestoft (once a fashionable resort and a centre of herring fishing – occasioning a fascinating digression) leads him to Joseph Conrad, who stayed there in his early England days, and thence to horrors of the Belgian Congo, via Conrad’s memoirs and the novel Heart of Darkness. 

Then Sebald confronts us with horrific atrocities in late C19 China (via a local ornamental train once supposedly destined for a doomed emperor). Then we are taken, by a remembered newspaper article read in the town’s library, to the grisly and revolting atrocities of Fascist Croatian militia in the WW2.

Sebald did not have a sunny view of human nature. He was preoccupied all his life with fact that his parents and grandparents’ generations had allowed and sustained the Nazis into and in power. Humanity, he concluded, and showed evidence for, can, anywhere and anytime, stoop to bestial depths.

Nature too wreaks its slow destruction, or suffers degradation. There’s Dunwich; and Sebald is horrified by the ghastly impact of Dutch elm disease; of the burning of forests worldwide; and the catastrophic destruction of English trees by the Great Storm of 1987, which wrecks the natural surroundings of his Norwich house.

Yet amongst all this steady gazing at hellishness and decay and disaster is a profound feeling of connectedness, between places and people, to which Sebald gives an almost mystical prominence.

On Dunwich Heath, he claims to have lost his way for hours, wandering in a kind of psychic maze (which later returns in disturbing form in a dream).

At Orfordness, that strange, forbidding spit of land on the seaward side of the River Alde, he is overwhelmed by the sinister remains of the military/scientific structures once dedicated to secret weapons research, and is transported to some post apocalyptic era:

…I imagined myself amidst the ruins of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe…Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words.

Sebald visits the home of fellow German and author, and pre-war refugee from the Nazis, Michael Hamburger. Sebald tells us that he feels such a strong connection with the house, its individual rooms, even the piles of books, that in some strong sense he claims it as his own, recently inhabited by him.

Finally there is religion. Sebald is not keen on it, for example castigating the Roman Catholic Church for the support given to Croatian Fascism, both ideologically and, after WW2, in helping the passage of war criminals to South America. 

There also a short but striking passage about the New Testament miracle of the Gadarene Swine, when Jesus commanded devils possessing a man to leave him and infest a herd of pigs, which thereupon plunged into the sea and drowned:

Is this terrible story… the report of a credible witness? If so, does that not mean that…Our Lord committed a serious error of judgment? Or was this parable made up by the evangelist to explain the supposed uncleanliness of swine; which would imply that human reasoning, diseased a it is, needs to seize on some other kind that it take to be inferior and thus deserving of annihilation?

Not just other kind – other humans.

August 2018