When something in his travels catches up with him, WG Sebald captures it with a camera with no big difference. The next painting was Xeroxed until the output was not black and white but blurred and unsightly. Only then could he explain the passage of his Nobel laureate. I think of the “solitary” bird, sent by the slave, which it encounters Saturn rings. Too weak the image, you just miss the fact that the creature has a cage-companion.
Dealing with the issue of indifference, as if through a fog: this is what it means to be Sebaldian. The long lines of silkworms and herbicides belong to the Holocaust and Allied flattening of German cities. A narrow train in East Anglia triggers opium wars. His “point”, if a very clever writer can be accused of a very serious matter, is that the risks are dealt with slowly and indirectly. Random disclosure is not as fun as artistic or healing as an aid. Consider the title of the book. Saturn rings revolve around something big and dangerous. They don’t go over it constantly. No wonder this German went to English.
Twenty years have passed since a heart attack in the car shortened Sebald’s life before he had time to crown Stockholm. I can add nothing Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s recent history of her, with the exception of: lost the argument. Whatever our culture is here, it is neither seductive nor elliptical. Belief in free will, both as natural and material, seems endless. It is there in the success of Karl Ove Knausgaard, prolix anti-Sebald. It is in the advice that the publisher gave to my friend about his stupidity: a lot of pain, please. The 1990s, which existed at the time because of their grief, now seemingly Victorian in their self-control.
Photo by WG Sebald from ‘Rings of Saturn’ © Vintage Classics
I have to give it up. The criminal beauty that comes with being on the wrong side of a zeitgeist is one of the fun of old age. And Sebald, who seems to have taken a real life without much care, is a troubled hero.
However, his thoughts kept him from saying that he was right. First, decorative points. Finding emotional support should be a daunting task. Sebald does so through an illustration. Mu Tokyo Story, director Yasujiro Ozu did this through a gradual ascent of ideas. Either way requires more skill than hiding the spirit. Taking these shortcuts to the heart is extremely stressful as it works for the audience. It shows that our generation, which boasts of intellectual capacity, cannot distinguish reality from opinion (“unknown emotion”, in Joyce’s definition).
This, of course, is a question of taste. And so to the second test. Does mental relaxation “work”? Is it as difficult as we maintain our mental health? If so, its occasional beauty may not be so important. If not, we can count it a few years later.
This week, after a change in art culture, Germany found its own Fourth Chancellor since 1983. With older people born in countries other than Britain or the US, it has had a much smaller population. Fittingly, this stability is being hailed as a result of the country’s ongoing exposure to its bad reputation. Wrongly, the process is sometimes thought to have begun as soon as the guns went silent in 1945. In fact, Sebald grew up in what he called a post-war “sea of silence”. As a teenager, she relied on “fantasy” about what happened. Germany had to move and crawl its way in its relationship with history. We can never know what frankness would be like in a weak, conquered culture.
People play at smaller levels than countries, but the problem is not very different. Bless the idea, and the risk is a major breakthrough one day that brings everything to its forefront. However, release them, and there may be side effects of some kind. There is something to be said in an elliptical way, and it goes beyond its high beauty on the page.
Janan’s email at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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