SOURCE: Wood, James. “The Right Thread.” New Republic 219, no. 1 (6 July 1998): 38-42.

[In the following review, Wood discusses what he considers Sebald's pessimistic aesthetic and preoccupation with death in The Rings of Saturn.]

Anxious, daring, extreme, muted—only an annulling wash of contradictory adjectives can approach the agitated density of W. G. Sebald's writing. For this German who has lived in England for over thirty years is one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. When his book The Emigrants appeared two years ago, one immediately recalled Walter Benjamin's remark in his essay on Proust that all great works found a new genre or dissolve an old one. Here was the first contemporary writer since Beckett to have found a way to protest the good government of the conventional novel-form and to harass realism into a state of self-examination.

And here, in The Rings of Saturn, is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants. In it, a man who might be Sebald walks around the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. The book is curlingly set in the present, but this man is something of an old-fashioned journeyman, a turnpike-pounder, as if from a nineteenth-century tale. Sebald's book is divided into ten bending and opaque chapters. In these chapters, the narrator alights upon certain natural and man-made features: a town here, a village there, a strange piece of the coast, a church, and several country houses. He reflects on all kinds of things: on the decline of the country house in England, on Belgian colonialism, on Conrad, Swinburne, and Edward Fitzgerald, on the history of the silkworm industry. The book proceeds in great, withholding arcs, never quite delivering the information it seems to cherish so. Like The Emigrants, the book is amphibiously slippery, neither quite fiction nor travelogue, and yet always absolutely artistic.

In The Emigrants, Sebald told the stories of four men, each of whom had been menaced by twentieth-century history. The book was not really about the Holocaust, as many reviewers claimed, and it was most certainly not about Nazism. Sebald's subjects were victims of slightly different kinds of upheaval or catastrophe: two were casualties of Nazism and two of exile, and all, very much like nineteenth-century fictional characters, had their lives eaten at by sadness, by a kind of internal wasting sickness that Sebald superbly evoked.

The two exiles furnished, perhaps, the most mysterious tales. Dr. Henry Selwyn was a Lithuanian Jew who arrived in England as a child at the turn of the century. When Sebald met him in the 1970s, Selwyn was at the end of his life, and was quietly demented. He had retreated from his country house to live in his garden, in a stone folly of his own making; and he shot himself dead a few years after telling Sebald his story. The other exile, Sebald's great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth, left Germany in the early years of the century, and worked for a long time as a butler for a Long Island family called the Solomons. Ambros went mad, and died in an Ithaca asylum in the early 1960s.

Three of these characters actually existed, and the other was partly based on the British painter Frank Auerbach. Yet The Emigrants reads like fiction. It is fiction, because of the care and the patterning of Sebald's narration, because of its anguished interiority, and because Sebald so mixes established fact with unstable invention that the two categories copulate and produce a kind of truth which lies just beyond verification: that is, fictional truth.

On its own, this would not be extraordinary. What is remarkable about The Emigrants and about The Rings of Saturn is the reticent artificiality of Sebald's narration, whereby fact is taken from the real world and made fictional. This is the opposite of the trivial “factional” breeziness of writers such as Julian Barnes or Umberto Eco, who take facts and superficially destabilize them within fiction, who make facts quiver a little, but whose entire work is actually in homage to the superstition of fact. Such writers do not believe deeply enough in the fictional to abandon the actual world. They toy with accuracy; they are obsessed with questions of accuracy and inaccuracy, for even inaccurate facts, to such writers, have a kind of empirical electricity, since they connect us to a larger informational zealousness. This informational neurosis makes their fiction buzzingly unaffecting. Facts are a sport for such writers, a semiotic superfluity, ultimately quite readable.

For Sebald, however, facts are indecipherable, and therefore tragic. He works in exactly the opposite way to Barnes or Eco. Though his deeply elegiac books are made out of the cinders of the real world, he makes facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms of his narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actual world, and seem only to have found their proper life within Sebald's prose. This, of course, is the movement of any powerful fiction, however realistic, this is the definition of fiction-making: the real world gains a harsher, stronger life within a fiction because it receives a concentrated patterning that actual life does not exert. It is not that facts merely seem fictive in Sebald's work; it is that they actually become fictive, even though they remain true and real. (It is true, for instance, that Sebald's great-uncle left Germany in the early years of the century.) They become fictive not in the sense that they become untrue or are distorted, but in the sense that they become newly real, in a way parasitical of, yet rivalrous to, the real world.

In addition to the delicacy of his patterning, Sebald invests his narrations with a scrupulous uncertainty. Again, although he wants us to reflect on this uncertainty, Sebald's self-reflexive procedures differ from much postmodernism in important respects. Sebald's reticence is more than teasing; it is the sound of anguish. Sebald's narrators, in The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, are somewhat proximate to Sebald: they are German men who live in England, and who teach. Yet they are also voices in pain, and their pain is that they do not seem to know themselves, and cannot be known by the reader because they are apparently incapable of fully revealing themselves. (This is also true about Sebald's human subjects, such as the four emigrants.)

In The Rings of Saturn, for instance, the narrator appears to be half-mad, wandering around the English countryside collecting stray information. An uneasy comedy is never far away. When this narrator stops in Southwold, he tells us: “Whenever I am in Southwold, the Sailors' Reading Room is by far my favourite haunt.” Beckett is the most obvious influence here, and in both writers uncertainty is always raised to a metaphysical power. Self-reflexiveness in such writers is the text pinching itself to see if it actually exists.

Consider Sebald's use of photographs, which, in different hands, might easily degenerate into a glib game of spot-the-truth. In both these books, uncaptioned photographs are included, most of which seem to relate to a place or an incident in the text, but some of which do not. It seems likely that Sebald borrowed this idea from Stendhal's autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, throughout which Stendhal litters his own often unreliable drawings and diagrams. But Sebald uses his photographs solemnly, elegiacally, and rarely jauntily.

If one passage can suggest the frail beauties, the dreamy suggestiveness, and the soft pain of this use of text and photograph, it might be a passage from The Emigrants, in which Sebald is walking on the beach in New Jersey with his Uncle Kasimir. He has come here to gather information on the strange and sad life of his great-uncle. Uncle Kasimir looks at the sea:

I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where. Then he took a camera out of his large-check jacket and took this picture, a print of which he sent me two years later, probably when he had finally shot the whole film, together with his pocket watch.

Under this paragraph, Sebald prints a photograph of a man who looks a little like the author, standing on a beach. Yet the photograph is so murky that it is impossible to identify its subject. We are encouraged to look at the photograph, which then turns us away from itself, converting the passage, very movingly, into a meditation on visibility. The book's deep theme, after all, is visibility: how we see the past, and how it sees us. Sebald has arrived in New Jersey partly to look at old photographs of his great-uncle. His Uncle Kasimir has been standing on the beach “gazing out at the ocean,” trying to see something he cannot articulate—the past, perhaps. And then come these two sentences, whose literary care is immense: the blurred photograph reminds us that we cannot read this narrator; the tiny, pregnant detail about how it took Uncle Kasimir two years to shoot the rest of the film suggests a life without photographs, a life without much sense of its own visibility. And the detail of the pocket watch closes the scene like a still life, like a skull in a Renaissance painting, suggesting Time vainly controlled (by the writer who has assembled these constituents) and also lost (by these characters).

In both books, Sebald's language is an extraordinary, almost antiquarian edifice, full of the daintiest lusters. He is helped in this by Michael Hulse, an English poet, who renders his German into English. Sebald, who teaches German at the University of East Anglia, then powerfully treads his own English into Hulse's, sometimes rewriting entire passages. One of the oddest effects of this prose is a quality of melodrama and extremism running alongside a soft mutedness.

Sebald's melodramatic side, one suspects, comes from the mid-nineteenth-century German tale, such as was written by Adalbert Stifter. Often, in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald's narrator finds himself on a desolate heath, or caught in a storm, like the narrator of Stifter's tale “Limestone.” (Sebald's English prose is sometimes almost indistinguishable in diction from Stifter's in English translation.) There is a quality of the Gothic about Sebald, written up in dementedly patient locutions: “I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before. …” Speaking of Belgium, Sebald's narrator notes that that country seems physically scarred by the memory of its vicious colonialism in the Congo; and he allows himself a rant, which sounds deliberately antiquarian:

And indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the population, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere. At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year.

One notes again the desperate comedy, and the strongly artificial, even dumbfounding, prose. A phrase such as “the macabre atmosphere of certain salons” exists in its own register of rhetorical excess; it does not really refer to anything outside language. For what salons is Sebald talking about? Indeed, for all the apparent quietness of Sebald's prose, exaggeration is its principle, an exaggeration that he has undoubtedly learned in part from Thomas Bernhard. Sebald's pessimism is Bernhard-like, too; as the narrator puts it here: “In reality of course, whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner.”

Bernhard exaggerates the grotesque, but Sebald exaggerates the elegiac. Where Bernhard uses a Nietzschean hammer, Sebald's exaggeration is squeezed through a dream-like reticence. This effect does not resemble any other writer. The narrator of The Rings of Saturn tells us often that the world is dwindling, that nothing is as it used to be: there are fewer herring in the sea; all the elms that used to sway in England's woods and gardens have died, victims of the terrible Dutch elm disease; all the country houses Sebald visits in East Anglia were once thriving and are now either defunct, or are popular museums. Yet the narrator donates this information narrowly, slipping it to us by way of the dreamiest indirections.

Early in the book, for example, the narrator reaches a beach:

I reached Benacre Broad, a lake of brackish water beyond a bank of shingle halfway between Lowestoft and Southwold. The lake is encircled by deciduous woodland that is now dying, owing to the steady erosion of the coastline by the sea. Doubtless it is only a matter of time before one stormy night the shingle bank is broken, and the appearance of the entire area changes.

The coastline of East Anglia is subject to severe erosion, and this causes the narrator to recall a tale of human erosion, the story of one Major George Wyndham Le Strange, whose obituary he has recently read in a local newspaper. This Le Strange was one of the British soldiers who liberated the death camp at Belsen in April 1945. As with so many of Sebald's subjects, this event appears to have frayed his normality. The narrator tells us that Le Strange retreated from life, letting his large house and grounds fall into ruin, and sharing his life only with a cook, to whom he left the estate when he died. And then the narrator moves away from this story, and says:

As these things were going through my mind I was watching the sand martins darting to and fro over the sea. Ceaselessly emitting their tiny cries they sped along their flight-paths faster than my eyes could follow them. At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days, I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air.

This is very beautiful, and its strangeness is what is beautiful. We know nothing about this narrator. He has so far revealed little about his childhood, about its location; we merely assume it to be roughly contiguous with Sebald's. (That is, with Germany in the 1950s; Sebald was born in 1944.) But suddenly this man who has told us nothing about himself delivers this: “At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley. …” He speaks of these “earlier times” as if they were already familiar to us, as if we had dreamed them. And then follows this mysterious, utterly unfounded lament: “as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days. …” But why would the swallows have disappeared? Why would they have been more abundant “in earlier times,” whenever exactly those times were?

Slowly the reader gathers the beautiful complexity of Sebald's elegy. This narrator mourns not only for what is lost (the swallows), but for what he has had to leave out of his own narrative. All that has disappeared from his life is what has also disappeared from his narrative. This is why neither we nor he can make sense of these backward glances. Reticence becomes the very stutter of mourning. This resembles a careful attenuation, almost a reversal, of Proustian retrospect: in Sebald, we are defined by the terrible abundance of our lacunae. And so the narrator who tells us that as a child he believed that the world was held together by the courses the birds took through the air, is now simply holding his life together by the strange courses his sentences take.

It is a film, more than any other book, that most resembles Sebald's lovely combination of opacity and extremity. That film is Werner Herzog's Caspar Hauser, to which Sebald silently alludes in The Emigrants. (His work is saturated in reference.) In that film, Caspar is asked by his mentor why nothing has been going right since he escaped from the prison in which he was kept for the early years of his life. “I have the feeling,” says Caspar—dreamily, modestly, but also somewhat grandiloquently—“that my life since that moment has been a great fall.” All of Sebald's characters have experienced some kind of “great fall,” beginning with the narrators of his books.

Like Caspar Hauser, the narrator of The Rings of Saturn dreams of the desert, and is something of a brilliant child, wandering around a landscape both real and imagined, at a finely bemused angle to all knowledge. As he tramps through East Anglia, he communicates with the dead, and ponders the strangest information, with which he is insanely profligate: the destruction of trees, the habits of the silkworm.

And he communicates to the reader in a language of exceptional beauty. Its diction is also imprisoned, as if only just escaped from the nineteenth century. “The day was dull and oppressive, and there was so little breeze that not even the ears of the delicate quaking grass were nodding.” Or: “The water in the gutter gurgled like a mountain stream.” Always, an alienated dreaminess pervades everything. The narrator visits a family called the Ashburys in Ireland, who live in a crumbling mansion: “The curtains had gone and the paper had been stripped off the walls, which had traces of whitewash with bluish streaks like the skin of a dying body, and reminded me of one of those maps of the far north on which next to nothing is marked.”

He is attracted again and again to all that is dwindling and passing. At Somerleyton Hall, he sees nothing but grasses and weeds where once was a thriving estate: “It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes.” It is just the same at Sudbourne Hall, where the flamboyant Sir Cuthbert Quilter once held sway. At Dunwich, on the coast, Sebald tells us that one of the most important ports in Europe during the Middle Ages now lies underwater: “All of it has gone under, quite literally, and is now below the sea. …”

Sebald tells the stories of eccentrics and fantasists, many of whom resemble the first subject of The Emigrants, Dr. Henry Selwyn, the Lithuanian who reinvented himself as the perfect Englishman but ended his days in a stone folly eating only his own garden vegetables. We encounter the memory of Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of the Rubaiyat, who retired at an early age to a “tiny two-roomed cottage on the perimeter of the estate, and there he spent the next fifteen years, from 1837 till 1853, leading a bachelor life.” There Fitzgerald read and wrote, becoming increasingly eccentric.

For decades he had eaten a diet of vegetables, offended as he was by the consumption of large quantities of rare meat which his contemporaries considered necessary to keep one's strength up, and now he altogether dispensed with the chore of cooking, which struck him as absurd, and took little but bread, butter and tea. On fine days he sat in the garden surrounded by doves, and at other times he spent long periods at the window. …

Swinburne the poet is also of interest to Sebald's unhappy narrator, for Swinburne, like Fitzgerald, essentially retreated from life, and lived quietly in Putney. He “reminded a visitor,” writes Sebald, of a “silkworm”; and it is entirely characteristic of Sebald's writing that this last fact might be invented, and that the “visitor” might be Sebald himself.

Sebald narrates Fitzgerald's abrupt death superbly; and it is a sign of his nineteenth-centuriness that his narrated lives so often end with fully-told, full-blown deaths. The true subject of The Rings of Saturn is death. In the first section of the book, Sebald writes about (and incorporates passages from) Sir Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial, which is about the complicated artifacts that human beings surround themselves with in death. The country houses which Sebald describes again and again in this book are like the Pyramids and pagan graves that Browne described: they are mausolea.

Yet Sebald is always deeply self-examining, and he feels the need to include his own book among these mausolea. The silkworm is his emblem for this, and it appears throughout the book. The artist is like the silkworm, suggests Sebald, killing himself as he produces his fine thread of silk.

The book ends with a moving passage, in which Sebald compares the worker at a loom to the writer or the scholar. Both, he writes, are manacled to their work. An old loom, he writes, resembles a cage, and reminds us that “we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we have invented.” Writers and scholars, like weavers, tend to suffer from “melancholy and all the evils associated with it.” And this is understandable, writes Sebald, “given the nature of their work, which force[s] them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.”

In this sense, we are all artists, or death-artists. In a plane from Amsterdam to Norwich, the narrator looks down and notes that one never sees people on the ground, only buildings, cars, objects: “it is as if there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.” Sebald is hiding in this book, of course. All of us create edifices in which to hide; these then become our mausolea; every third thought shall be my grave.

Elegy, in England, is easy to buy, especially of the country-house kind. But what distinguishes Sebald from most English elegists is the deep unease of his elegy—its melancholy, Germanic insistence. Sebald does not just see a Romantic-political decline in England, as Larkin did; he sees a decline of which we are not just the inheritors but also the creators. This is, I think, because Sebald believes in a kind of eternal recurrence. He does not say exactly this; but his book suggests that in every historical moment we have already been here. Standing in a camera obscura on the fields of Waterloo, he looks down on the old battlefield and remarks that history is always falsely seen: “We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” Now, “survivors” is an odd word. How can we be the survivors of Waterloo? We were not there. Typically opaque, Sebald proceeds in mournfully shuffled sentences touched with comedy, never underlining anything. But I take him to be suggesting that we are always the survivors of a history that we attended in a previous incarnation.

Sebald's subjects, in this book and in The Emigrants, can escape nothing; they are always “survivors,” even of events which they never directly experienced. The virus of history infects even the inoculated. This is why the two exiles in The Emigrants suffer in similar ways to the two direct victims of Nazism. They are all survivors of a kind. This might explain why so many of Sebald's characters feel like Mrs. Ashbury and her daughters, the eccentric Anglo-Irish family who have escaped from life, who live in their rotting mansion and who consider breeding silkworms. About them, Sebald writes that they “lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up.” Mrs. Ashbury, sounding just like Caspar Hauser, tells the narrator: “It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”

Sebald's pessimism, though touched by the wing of the idea of eternal recurrence, is not really metaphysical or theological. It is aesthetic. In the same way that Sebald's facts appear to exist only in the fictional form that Sebald gives them, so Sebald's pessimism is a mood that can only express itself in the forms of his own books. That is to say, in patterned fragments, haltingly, uncertainly. This mood is a kind of nineteenth-century melancholia, a tendency rather than a system. Outside Sebald's books, in bald précis, this melancholia would amount to little. Inside these pages, it lives vividly; and so each book by Sebald becomes a test-case of itself, and of the artistic, for each book is indescribable except in its own terms.

Sebald's quality of elegy is quietistic. Life is a “blunder” partly because it also seems a dream, and it seems a dream because it is dreaming us, not the other way around. The special beauty of Sebald's peroration on how the weaver and the writer are both haunted by the idea that they have got hold of the wrong thread is that Sebald admits into his own books the condition of being beautifully mistaken. Sebald and his characters are haunted by the incomprehensible, the indecipherable, the wrong turn. And Sebald includes his own thread, his own course, in this category. These intensely patterned books might, after all, be in search of the wrong pattern. They are themselves silken errors. But how will we know?