Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  Beckett’s narrators are usually trying, not altogether successfully, to imagine themselves as dead. Brás Cubas has no such problem. But then Machado de Assis was trying to be, and is, funny. There is nothing morbid about the consciousness of his posthumous narrator; on the contrary, the perspective of maximum consciousness—which is what, wittily, a posthumous narrator can claim—is in itself a comic perspective. Where Brás Cubas is writing from is not a true afterlife (it has no geography), only another go at the idea of authorial detachment. The neo-Sternean narrative hijinks of these memoirs of a disappointed man do not issue from Sternean exuberance or even Sternean nervousness.

  They are a kind of antidote, a counterforce to the narrator’s despondency: a way of mastering dejection considerably more specialized than the “great cure, an anti-melancholy plaster, designed to relieve the despondency of mankind” that the narrator fantasizes about inventing. Life administers its hard lessons. But one can write as one pleases—a form of liberty.

  Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was only forty-one when he published these reminiscences of a man who has died—we learn at the opening of the book—at sixty-four. (Machado was born in 1839; he makes his creation Brás Cubas, the posthumous autobiographer, more than a generation older, born in 1805.) The novel as an exercise in the anticipating of old age is a venture to which writers of a melancholy temperament continue to be drawn. I was in my late twenties when I wrote my first novel, which purports to be the reminiscences of a man then in his early sixties, a rentier, dilettante, and fantasist, who announces at the beginning of the book that he has reached a harbor of serenity where, all experience finished, he can look back on his life. The few conscious literary references in my head were mostly French—above all Candide and Descartes’s Meditations; I thought I was writing a satire on optimism and on certain cherished (by me) ideas of the inner life and of a religiously nourished inwardness. (What was going on unconsciously, as I think about it now, is another story.) When I had the good fortune to have The Benefactor accepted by the first publisher to whom I submitted it, Farrar Straus, I had the further good luck of having assigned to me as my editor Cecil Hemley, who in 1952, in his previous incarnation as the head of Noonday Press (recently acquired by my new publisher), had brought out the translation of Machado’s novel that really launched the book’s career in English. (Under that title!) At our first meeting Hemley said to me: “I can see you have been influenced by Epitaph of a Small Winner.” Epitaph of a what? “By, you know, Machado de Assis.” Who? He lent me a copy and several days later I declared myself retroactively influenced.

  Although I have since read a good deal of Machado in translation, Memórias postumas de Brás Cubas—the first of five late novels (he lived twenty-eight years after writing it) generally thought the summit of his genius—remains my favorite. I am told it is the one that non-Brazilians often prefer, although critics usually pick Dom Casmurro (1899). I am astonished that a writer of such greatness does not yet occupy the place he deserves. Up to a point, the relative neglect of Machado outside Brazil may be no more mysterious than the neglect of another prolific writer of genius whom Eurocentric notions of world literature have marginalized: Natsume Sseki. Surely Machado would be better known if he hadn’t been Brazilian and hadn’t spent his whole life in Rio de Janeiro—if he were, say, Italian or Russian, or even Portuguese. But the impediment is not simply that Machado was not a European writer. Even more remarkable than his absence from the stage of world literature is that he has been very little known and read in the rest of Latin America—as if it were still hard to digest the fact that the greatest novelist that Latin America has produced wrote in the Portuguese, rather than the Spanish, language. Brazil may be the continent’s biggest country (and Rio in the nineteenth century its largest city), but it has always been the outsider country—regarded by the rest of South America, Hispanophone South America, with a good deal of condescension and often in racist terms. A writer from these countries is far likelier to know any of the European literatures or literature in English than to know the literature of Brazil, whereas Brazilian writers are acutely aware of Spanish-American literature. Borges, the other supremely great writer produced on that continent, seems never to have read Machado de Assis. Indeed, Machado is even less well known to Spanish-language readers than to those who read him in English. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas was finally translated into Spanish only in the 1960s, some eighty years after it was written and a decade after it was translated (twice) into English.

  With enough time, enough afterlife, a great book does find its rightful place. And perhaps some books need to be rediscovered again and again. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is probably one of those thrillingly original, radically skeptical books that will always impress readers with the force of a private discovery. It hardly seems much of a compliment to say that this novel, written more than a century ago, seems, well … modern. Isn’t every work that speaks to us with an originality and lucidity we’re capable of acknowledging one we want to conscript into what we understand as modernity? Our standards of modernity are a system of flattering illusions, which permit us selectively to colonize the past, as are our ideas of what is provincial, which permit some parts of the world to condescend to all the rest. Being dead may stand for a point of view that cannot be accused of being provincial. Surely The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is one of the most entertainingly unprovincial books ever written. And to love this book is to become a little less provincial about literature, about literature’s possibilities, oneself.

  [1990]

  A Mind in Mourning

  IS LITERARY GREATNESS still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now? One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.

  Vertigo, the third of Sebald’s books to be translated into English, is how he began. It appeared in German in 1990, when its author was forty-six; three years later came The Emigrants; and two years after that, The Rings of Saturn. When The Emigrants appeared in English in 1996, the acclaim bordered on awe. Here was a masterly writer, mature, autumnal even, in his persona and themes, who had delivered a book as exotic as it was irrefutable. The language was a wonder—delicate, dense, steeped in thinghood; but there were ample precedents for that in English. What seemed foreign as well as most persuasive was the preternatural authority of Sebald’s voice: its gravity, its sinuosity, its precision, its freedom from all-undermining or undignified self-consciousness or irony.

  In W. G. Sebald’s books, a narrator who, we are reminded occasionally, bears the name W. G. Sebald, travels about registering evidence of the mortality of nature, recoiling from the ravages of modernity, musing over the secrets of obscure lives. On some mission of investigation, triggered by a memory or news from a world irretrievably lost, he remembers, evokes, hallucinates, grieves.

  Is the narrator Sebald? Or a fictional character to whom the author has lent his name, and selected elements of his biography? Born in 1944, in a village in Germany he calls “W.” in his books (and the dust jacket identifies for us as Wertach im Allgäu), settled in England in his early twenties, and a career academic currently teaching modern German literature at the University of East Anglia, the author includes a scattering of allusions to these bare facts and a few others, as well as, among other self-referring documents reproduced in his books, a grainy picture of himself posed in front of a massive Lebanese cedar in The Rings of Saturn and the photo on his new passport in Vertigo.

  And yet these books ask, rightly, to be considered fiction. Fiction they are, not least because there is good reason to believe that much is invented or altered, just as, surely, some of what he relates really did happen—names, places, dates, and all. Fiction and factuality are, of course, not opposed. One of the founding claims for the novel in English is
that it is a true history. What makes a work fiction is not that the story is untrue—it may well be true, in part or in whole—but its use, or extension, of a variety of devices (including false or forged documents) which produce what literary theorists call “the effect of the real.” Sebald’s fictions—and their accompanying visual illustration—carry the effect of the real to a plangent extreme.

  This “real” narrator is an exemplary fictional construction: the promeneur solitaire of many generations of romantic literature. A solitary, even when a companion is mentioned (the Clara of the opening paragraph of The Emigrants), the narrator is ready to undertake journeys at whim, to follow some flare-up of curiosity about a life that has ended (as, in The Emigrants, in the story of Paul, a beloved primary-school teacher, which brings the narrator back for the first time to “the new Germany,” and of his Uncle Adelwarth, which brings the narrator to America). Another motive for traveling is proposed in Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, where it is clearer that the narrator is also a writer, with a writer’s restlessness and a writer’s taste for isolation. Often the narrator begins to travel in the wake of some crisis. And usually the journey is a quest, even if the nature of that quest is not immediately apparent.

  Here is the beginning of the second of the four narratives in Vertigo:

  In October 1980 I traveled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life. In Vienna, however, I found that the days proved inordinately long, now they were not taken up by my customary routine of writing and gardening tasks, and I literally did not know where to turn. Every morning I would set out and walk without aim or purpose through the streets of the inner city.

  This long section, entitled “All” estero” (Abroad), which takes the narrator from Vienna to various places in northern Italy, follows the opening chapter, a brilliant exercise in Brief-Life writing which recounts the biography of the much-traveled Stendhal, and is followed by a brief third chapter relating the Italian journey of another writer, “Dr. K,” to some of the sites of Sebald’s travels in Italy. The fourth, and last, chapter, as long as the second and complementary to it, is entitled “Il ritorno in patria” (The Return Home). The four narratives of Vertigo adumbrate all Sebald’s major themes: journeys; the lives of writers, who are also travelers; being haunted and being light. And always, there are visions of destruction. In the first narrative, Stendhal dreams, while recovering from an illness, of the great fire of Moscow; and the last narrative ends with Sebald falling asleep over his Pepys and dreaming of London destroyed by the Great Fire.

  The Emigrants uses this same four-part musical structure, in which the fourth narrative is longest and most powerful. Journeys of one kind or another are at the heart of all Sebald’s narratives: the narrator’s own peregrinations, and the lives, all in some way displaced, that the narrator evokes.

  Compare the first sentence of The Rings of Saturn:

  In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

  The whole of The Rings of Saturn is the account of this walking trip undertaken to dispel emptiness. For whereas the traditional tour brought one close to nature, here it measures degrees of devastation, and the opening of the book tells us that the narrator was so overcome by “the traces of destruction” he encountered that, a year to the day after beginning his tour, he was taken to a hospital in Norwich “in a state of almost total immobility.”

  Travels under the sign of Saturn, emblem of melancholy, are the subject of all three books Sebald wrote in the first half of the 1990s. Destruction is his master theme: of nature (the lament for the trees destroyed by Dutch elm disease and those destroyed in the hurricane of 1987 in the next-to-last section of The Rings of Saturn); of cities; of ways of life. The Emigrants tells of a trip to Deauville in 1991, in search perhaps of “some remnant of the past,” which confirms that “the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction.” And the return home, in the fourth narrative of Vertigo, to W., which the narrator says he had not revisited since his childhood, is an extended recherche du temps perdu.

  The climax of The Emigrants, four stories about people who have left their native lands, is the heartrending evocation—purportedly a memoir in manuscript—of an idyllic German-Jewish childhood. The narrator goes on to describe his decision to visit the town, Kissingen, where this life had been lived, to see what traces of it remained. Because it was The Emigrants that launched Sebald in English, and because the subject of the last narrative, a famous painter given the name Max Ferber, is a German Jew sent out of Nazi Germany as a child to safety in England—his mother, who perished in the camps with his father, being the author of the memoir—the book was routinely labeled by most of the reviewers (especially, but not only, in America) as an example of Holocaust literature. Ending a book of lament with the ultimate subject of lament, The Emigrants may have set up some of Sebald’s admirers for a disappointment with the work that followed it in translation, The Rings of Saturn. This book is not divided into distinct narratives but consists of a chain or progress of stories: one story leads to another. In The Rings of Saturn, the well-stocked mind speculates whether Sir Thomas Browne, visiting Holland, was present at an anatomy lesson depicted by Rembrandt; remembers a romantic interlude, during his English exile, in the life of Chateaubriand; recalls Roger Casement’s noble efforts to publicize the infamies of Leopold’s rule in the Congo; and retells the childhood in exile and early adventures at sea of Joseph Conrad—these stories, and many others. With its cavalcade of erudite and curious anecdotes, and its tender encounters with bookish people (two lecturers on French literature, one of them a Flaubert scholar; the translator and poet Michael Hamburger), The Rings of Saturn could seem—after the high excruciation of The Emigrants —merely “literary.”

  It would be a pity if the expectations about Sebald’s work created by The Emigrants also influenced the reception of Vertigo, which makes still clearer the nature of his morally accelerated travel narratives—history-minded in their obsessions; fictional in their reach. Travel frees the mind for the play of associations; for the afflictions (and erosions) of memory; for the savoring of solitude. The awareness of the solitary narrator is the true protagonist of Sebald’s books, even when it is doing one of the things it does best: recounting, summing up, the lives of others.

  Vertigo is the book in which the narrator’s English life is least in evidence. And, even more than the two succeeding books, this is a self-portrait of a mind: a restless, chronically dissatisfied mind; a harrowed mind; a mind prone to hallucinations. Walking in Vienna, he thinks he recognizes the poet Dante, banished from his hometown on pain of being burned at the stake. Sitting on the rear bench of a vaporetto in Venice, he sees Ludwig II of Bavaria; riding on a bus along the shore of Lake Garda toward Riva, he sees an adolescent boy who looks exactly like Kafka. This narrator, who defines himself as a foreigner—over hearing the babble of some German tourists in a hotel, he wishes he did not understand them; “that is, that he were the citizen of a better country, or of no country at all”—is also a mind in mourning. At one moment, the narrator says he does not know whether he is still in the land of the living or already somewhere else.

  In fact, he is both: both alive and, if his imagination is the guide, posthumous. A journey is often a revisiting. It is the return to a place for some unfinished business, to retrace a memory, to repeat (or complete) an experience; to offer oneself up—as in the fourth narrative of The Emigrants—to the final, most devastating revelations. These heroic acts of remembering and retracing bring with them a price. Part of the power of Ve
rtigo is that it dwells more on the cost of this effort. “Vertigo,” the word used to translate the playful German title, Schwindel. Gefühle (roughly: Giddiness. Feeling), hardly suggests all the kinds of panic and torpor and disorientation described in the book. In Vertigo, he relates how, after arriving in Vienna, he walked so far that, he discovered returning to the hotel, his shoes had fallen apart. In The Rings of Saturn and, above all, in The Emigrants, the mind is less focused on itself; the narrator is more elusive. More than the later books, Vertigo is about the narrator’s own afflicted consciousness. But the laconically evoked mental distress that edges the narrator’s calm, knowledgeable awareness is never solipsistic, as in the literature of lesser concerns.