Reading Style
Page 14
This excerpt shows how important the technique of collage is for Sebald—he incorporates others’ words, together with photographs and often topographical descriptions, into a sort of pastiche. The preoccupation with questions of scale is also highly characteristic of Sebald’s approach, here and elsewhere, as is the loving description of the large relief map in which one can see all of Germany in miniature, with those strange emblems the size of postage stamps.
Sebald frequently gestures to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles—most notably to Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, though with meanderings also reminiscent of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Montaigne’s Essays—but the book is patently less early modern than postmodern in its instabilities and uncertainties. The rambling walking tour the narrator embarks upon at the book’s outset is without a clear purpose other than to dispel the “emptiness” that takes hold of him after the completion of a long stint of work (3). The book itself is composed under the shadow of the deaths of several university colleagues, including a lecturer in Romance languages named Janine Dakyns:
Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways. Moreover, Janine said, he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable. Janine maintained that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head. It was (so supposedly he once said) as if one was sinking into sand. (7)
The narrator moves through an associative summary of Janine’s thoughts on sand in Flaubert into a vivid description of the setting for his and Janine’s regular conversations about Flaubert, an office so flooded with paper that “a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys” (8). This “amazing profusion of paper” is another replica, a scale model of some geological catastrophe, a thing of beauty as well as of terror: in this case the narrator moves on through an image of Janine amidst her papers resembling “the angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction” to Janine referring him to a surgeon who might know something about the whereabouts of the skull of Sir Thomas Browne. The prose runs continuously, with few paragraph breaks and punctuated only by the occasional photographic reproduction, touching down at one unexpected place after another and arriving at a description of Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson, a picture that casts doubt (so the narrator argues, at any rate—I have hotly disputed the question of the orientation of the hand with my own students!) on its own verisimilitude:
Contrary to normal practice, the anatomist shown here has not begun his dissection by opening the abdomen and removing the intestines, which are most prone to putrefaction, but has started (and this too may imply a punitive dimension to the act) by dissecting the offending hand. Now, this hand is most peculiar. It is not only grotesquely out of proportion compared with the hand closer to us, but it is also anatomically the wrong way round: the exposed tendons, which ought to be those of the left palm, given the position of the thumb, are in fact those of the back of the right hand. In other words, what we are faced with is a transposition taken from the anatomical atlas, evidently without further reflection, that turns this otherwise true-to-life painting (if one may so express it) into a crass misrepresentation at the exact centre point of its meaning, where the incisions are made. (16–17)
This sense of deep unreliability or instability in vision is all-pervasive in The Rings of Saturn. The narrator is obsessed with technologies of viewing, their powers and their limits, as when he sits down on a bench and looks out to sea:
I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre, and I should not have been surprised if a curtain had suddenly risen before me and on the proscenium I had beheld, say, the 28th of May 1672—that memorable day when the Dutch fleet appeared offshore from out of the drifting mists, with the bright morning light behind it, and opened fire on the English ships in Sole Bay. In all likelihood the people of Southwold hurried out of the town as soon as the first cannonades were fired to watch the rare spectacle from the beach. Shading their eyes with their hands against the dazzling sun, they would have watched the ships moving hither and thither, apparently at random, their sails billowing in a light northeast wind and then, as they manoeuvred ponderously, flapping once again. They would not have been able to make out human figures at that distance, not even the gentlemen of the Dutch and English admiralties on the bridges. As the battle continued, the powder magazines exploded, and some of the tarred hulls burned down to the waterline; the scene would have been shrouded in an acrid, yellowish-black smoke creeping across the entire bay and masking the combat from view. While most of the accounts of the battles fought on the so-called fields of honour have from time immemorial been unreliable, the pictorial representations of great naval engagements are without exception figments of the imagination. (76)
Sebald’s prose is difficult to excerpt; I have already strained the limits of readerly sympathy, I suspect, by quoting so extensively, and yet the passage continues for several pages longer, its juxtapositions and swerves inseparable from the content of what it treats. Several pages later, still looking out over the same scene, the narrator reflects upon a cloudbank that reminds him of a mountain range he once walked the length of (it seemed a thousand miles long) in a dream:
The jagged peaks of the mountains I had left behind rose in almost fearful silhouette against a turquoise sky in which two or three pink clouds drifted. It was a scene that felt familiar in an explicable way, and for weeks it was on my mind until at length I realized that, down to the last detail, it matched the Vallüla massif, which I had seen from the bus, through eyes drooping with tiredness, a day or so before I started school, as we returned home from an outing to the Montafon. I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright and actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience? (79–80)
The use of small elements to invoke the large is near-magical, the kind of sympathetic magic that works by metaphor and metonymy (the use of a puddle of water, a few twigs, a scrap of sailcloth and the human breath, for instance, to solicit beneficial winds for a ship at sea); the cumulative effect owes something to Proust, undoubtedly, but there is no such clear end goal here as in Proust’s recreation of the lost past.
Sebald’s narrator is preoccupied with impossible viewing points: the bird’s-eye view of the vantage point of Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields, the Waterloo Panorama. The latter is housed “in an immense domed rotunda, where from a raised platform in the middle one can view the battle—a favorite with panorama artists—in every direction”:
It is like being at the center of events. On a sort of landscaped proscenium, immediately below the wooden rail amidst tree-stumps and undergrowth in the blood-stained sand, lie lifesize horses, and cut-down infantrymen, hussars and chevaux-légers, eyes rolling in pain or already extinguished. Their faces are moulded from wax but the boots, the leather belts, the weapons, the cuirasses, and the splendidly coloured uniforms, probably stuffed with eelgrass, rags and the like, are to all appearances authentic. Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one’s gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine art
ist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circuslike structure. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position? Near Brighton, I was once told, not far from the coast, there are two copses that were planted after the Battle of Waterloo in remembrance of that memorable victory. One is in the shape of a Napoleonic three-cornered hat, the other in that of a Wellington boot. Naturally the outlines cannot be made out from the ground; they were intended as landmarks for latter-day balloonists. (124–25)
At one point the book gives us a little glimpse of Lear and the dead Cordelia, “both of them so tiny, as if on a stage a mile off” (174), words that highlight the similar effects of viewing technologies and theater itself, and the reader is repeatedly asked to attend to miniature things and models, not just the ones I have already mentioned but a host of others, including one of my favorites, which comes in a meditation on the intimacy between the history of art and the history of sugar. The connection is expressed in the fact that families trafficking in sugar lavished their profits on country residences and town houses full of art, and many important museums were endowed by sugar dynasties or connected in one way or another with the sugar trade, with trade money legimitized by this sort of patronage:
At times it seems to me, said [Cornelis] de Jong, as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar, like the model of the battle of Esztergorn created by a confectioner to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia, so it is said, devoured in one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy. (194)
The characters who populate the pages of Sebald’s book are themselves afflicted with all sorts of melancholy compulsions that speak to their being immured in a lost past: the poet Edward FitzGerald has an endless passion for the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, who is “far more real to him than even his friends who were still alive,” which prompts him to assemble a massive and never-to-be-completed dictionary “which would not only provide commentary on all her correspondents and all the persons and places referred to in their exchanges but would also offer a key of sorts to the way in which she had cultivated and developed the art of writing” (200); the secluded lives, on a remote Irish estate, of the Ashbury family, who live “like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up” and whose members occupy themselves with work that “always had about it something aimless and meaningless…not so much part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress” (a son working for fifteen years on a ten-yard fat-bellied boat, though he knows nothing about boat-building, or a mother collecting flower seeds in paper bags which hang under the library ceiling like clouds of paper [210–22]). One of the most memorable of these figures concerns the farmer Thomas Abrams, who has been toiling for twenty years on a perfect scale model of the Temple of Jerusalem, its completion endlessly deferred due “to the size of the model, which covers nearly ten square yards, and to the minuteness and precision of the individual pieces” (243), a project that seems (even to its creator) in equal parts meticulous and futile.
The icon for the book itself is Sir Thomas Browne’s figure of the quincunx, the netlike geometric pattern echoed in all sorts of other figures here, from the “invisible net” of the radar that protected British airspace during World War II (227) to the warp and weft of eighteenth-century domestic silk manufacture. Sebald’s net-like structure involves the stitching together of one bit to another so that the strands cannot really be disentangled. This loose and unorthodox patterning is somewhat akin to the kinds of unconventional ordering principle that attracted Perec, Barthes and others—alphabetical organization, other experimental ordering of one kind or another, the nonnarrative sequential ordering of Koestenbaum’s “My ’80s” and Sante’s “Commerce”—and it may be said that style, insofar as it foregrounds the unit of the sentence, has an affinity with the nonnarrative.
Many of the fiction writers whose sentences and undertakings are most interesting to me (Lydia Davis, David Markson, Thomas Bernhard) are working in a format that is significantly less oriented toward narrative than most other fiction. That is not to say that style is incompatible with narrative. On the contrary: novels by Austen, Flaubert and others represent the supple and dynamic knitting together of the sentence-oriented sharpness of the aphorism with a forward propulsion that depends on story, plot, mystery, fate in a fashion that is deeply embedded in chronological time and that relies on the development of plot and character and all of the other traditional components of the genre we call the novel. As Sebald represents in many ways a culmination of what can be done with the wayward wandering Proustian first-person voice, wandering in time and place, so Hollinghurst can be seen as at once a striking traditionalist and an extraordinary innovator in the line of descent that runs from Austen and Flaubert through to Henry James. Though his novels look much like the great works of nineteenth-century fiction, in other words, Hollinghurst’s style seems to me no less innovative than the more obviously estranging techniques practiced by Perec or Sebald, and this is not just because he includes the transgressive subject matter of men having sex with men and taking drugs: it has to do with the sentences he writes and what he believes they can do.
The Line of Beauty’s protagonist, Nick Guest, is writing his thesis on James and calls himself a Jamesian. James is present by allusion within the narrative, and present on almost every page in terms of the homage paid to his narrative voice and use of point of view. The Golden Bowl is particularly strong here as an influence, not just in the novel’s preoccupation with beautiful objects, their worth and their flaws but in the treatment of important questions about knowledge and perspective in a format that gives the power of filtering everything to the consciousness of an individual character. Hollinghurst hews even more closely and consistently to Nick’s point of view, though, than James does to those of the Prince and Maggie. I will quote the novel’s opening paragraph in full—the novel is broken into three sections, each with a title and a date: “The Love-Chord” (1983), “To Whom Do You Beautifully Belong?” (1986) and “The End of the Street” (1987):
Peter Crowther’s book on the election was already in the shops. It was called Landslide!, and the witty assistant at Dillon’s had arranged the window in a scaled-down version of that natural disaster. The pale-gilt image of the triumphant Prime Minister rushed towards the customer in a gleaming slippage. Nick stopped in the street, and then went in to look at a copy. He had met Peter Crowther once, and heard him described as a hack and also as a “mordant analyst”: his faint smile, as he flicked through the pages, concealed his uncertainty as to which account was nearer the truth. There was clearly something hacklike in the speed of publication, only two months after the event; and in the actual writing, of course. The book’s mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition. Nick looked carefully at the photographs, but only one of them had Gerald in it: a group picture of “The 101 New Tory MPs,” in which he’d been clever enough, or quick enough, to get into the front row. He sat there smiling and staring as if in his own mind it was already the front bench. The smile, the white collar worn with a dark shirt, the floppy breastpocket handkerchief would surely be famous when the chaps in the rows behind were mere forgotten grins and frowns. Even so, he was mentioned only twice in the text—as a “bon viveur,” and as one of the “dwindling minority” of Co
nservative MPs who had passed, “as Gerald Fedden, the new Member for Barwick, so obviously has,” through public school and Oxbridge. Nick left the shop with a shrug; but out in the street he felt delayed pride at this sighting of a person he knew in a published book. (3)
The third-person voice here is an immensely precise tool for registering degrees of knowledge and incomprehension. Nick is hypersensitive to social nuance but inexperienced enough to have only a precarious grasp on the meanings of what he sees; he is a class outsider in this world of privilege, which makes him at once acutely observant and uncertain in his judgments. Though the voice remains very close to Nick’s own point of view, in other words, the novelist is able to hint at things that Nick himself does not understand, including (in the title and the shop display) the hint that the election of Margaret Thatcher will indeed have been a natural disaster of sorts for many, though not for all of the characters whose lives this novel will chronicle. Nick has an ear for satire but as yet lacks the confidence in his own judgment to position himself as a satirist, though his emerging self-confidence can be heard in the aphorisms that puncture the description. The narrator notes Nick’s “faint smile” and the uncertainty it conceals, but the following sentence is sharper and more confident, and it seems to emerge from Nick’s consciousness rather than exclusively pertaining to the narrator’s voice: “The book’s mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition.” It is the sort of remark one might utter to get a laugh at a certain kind of dinner party: Nick has been studying the ways of the set he’s now moving among, and has begun to be able to capture a style of wit that will qualify him to socialize there even as he remains an outsider with only a temporary passport to belonging. Nick takes a childish pleasure in his proximity to the minor players of the Thatcher revolution as singled out by this ephemeral political chronicle, and the effect of the passage as a whole is to underline Nick’s failure to understand anything of the significance of the historical moment he’s living through.