The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald

by W. G. Sebald

  EW: Since you mention Vladimir Nabokov, there are references in The Emigrants to a man with a butterfly net, the boy with the butterfly net, Nabokov himself. Why does he hover over this book?

  WGS: I think the idea came to me when I was thinking of writing the story of that painter. This particular story, as you know, contains among other things, as a secondary narrative, as it were, the childhood memoirs of the painter’s mother. These are to quite a substantial extent authentic, based on authentic materials. I had the disjointed notes which that lady had written in the years between her son’s emigration to England and her own deportation; she had about eighteen months to write these notes. As you know from the text, this family had lived in a small village in northern Bavaria, upper Franconia, called Steinach, then around 1900 moved to the nearest town, the spa town of Bad Kissingen. And if you read Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, his autobiography, which to my mind is a wonderful book, there is an episode in it where he says that his family went to Bad Kissingen several times in exactly those years. So the temptation was very great to let these two exiles meet unbeknownst to each other in the story. And I also knew—and this is based on fact, it’s not something that I artificially adjusted later on—that my great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth had interned himself in an asylum in Ithaca, which is where Nabokov taught for many years. And where, as one knows from his writings, he was always in his spare time going out with his butterfly net. So it seemed a very, very strange coincidence that two locations in the stories that I would have to write about were also Nabokov locations. Of course I also knew extremely well, from my time in the French part of Switzerland, the area around Lac Le Mans and Montreux and Vevey and Basel-Stadt and Lausanne. I knew all these places quite intimately. I didn’t know of Nabokov, of course, when I was a student there; I hadn’t got quite that far. I didn’t know he lived there, and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have dared to call on him, as you can imagine. But I knew the whole territory and I knew these lifts going up into the mountains that he talks about. And so it seemed an obvious thing to do and, again, an opportunity to create something which has a kind of haunting, spectral quality to it, something that appears, forms of apparitions of virtual presence that have, vanishing though they are, a certain intensity which can otherwise be not very easily achieved.

  EW: I think one critic sees it as a sign of joy and another as foretelling death.

  WGS: It’s both, of course. People always want what seem to them to be symbolic elements in a text to have single meanings. But of course that isn’t how symbols work. If they are any good at all they are usually multivalent. They are simply there to give you a sense that there must be something of significance here at that point, but what it is and what the significance is, is entirely a different matter.

  I think that it was a question of trying to find, in a text of this kind, ways of expressing heightened sensations, as it were, in the form of symbols which are perhaps not obvious. But certainly the railway business, for instance. The railway played a very, very prominent part, as one knows, in the whole process of deportation. If you look at Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah film, which to my mind is one of the most impressive documents of this whole fraught business, there are trains all the time, between each episode. They run along the tracks, you see the wagons, and you see the signals and you see railway lines in Poland and in the Czech Republic and in Austria and in Italy and in Belgium. The whole logistics of deportation was based on the logistics of the railway system. And I do pick that up at one point when I talk about my primary schoolteacher’s obsession with the railways. So it seemed a fairly obvious thing to do. It always depends of course on how you put this into practice. The more obvious you make a symbol in a text, the less genuine, as it were, it becomes, so you have to try and do it very obliquely, so that the reader might read over it without really noticing it. You just try and set up certain reverberations in a text and the whole acquires significance that it might not otherwise have. And that is the same with other images in the text: the track, certainly, the smoke, and certainly the dust.

  EW: Memory seems harder to escape the older that your subjects get. And most of them succumb, in a sense, through withdrawal or suicide. Why is memory so ineluctable and so destructive?

  WGS: It’s a question of specific weight, I think. The older you get, in a sense, the more you forget. That is certainly true. Vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density, a very high degree of specific weight. And of course once you are weighed down with these kinds of weight, it’s not unlikely that they will sink you. Memories of that sort do have a tendency to encumber you emotionally.

  EW: I’m thinking of your uncle Ambros, who suffered so acutely from his memories that he voluntarily submitted himself to shock treatment. And his psychiatrist describes how he wanted “an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.” Why so extreme?

  WGS: It’s in many senses quite an extreme tale. What is hinted at in this story is that there was, between this Ambros Adelwarth and his employer’s son, Cosmo Solomon, a relationship which went beyond the strictly professional, that they were to each other, to say the least, like brothers, possibly even like lovers. And that particular story and the way in which it unfolded in the grand years before the First World War went against the grain of history, across the fissures of history and contained within it at least something like a semblance of salvation. And you are permitted as a reader to imagine—the text never tells you to and never really makes it explicit—but you are permitted as a reader to imagine that these two young men, when they were together in Istanbul and down by the Dead Sea, lived through what for them were very blissful times. And it is the weight of that which brings him down, I think, in the end. You know, it’s the old Dante notion that nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

  EW: So many of your characters take such extreme action against memory. Is there any alternative? Is there any way to live with a memory? One of your characters, Max Ferber, says that while physical pain has a limit because eventually you’ll lose consciousness, mental pain is without end.

  WGS: Well, it is. There is a great deal of mental anguish in the world, and some of it we see and some of it we try to deal with. And it is increasing. I think the physical and the mental pain in a sense is increasing. If you imagine the amount of painkillers that are consumed, say, in the city of New York every year, you might be able to make a mountain out of it on which you could go skiing—you know, all the aspirin, powders. Of course we do see some of it, but people usually suffer in silence or in privacy. And certainly when it’s a question of mental anguish, not all of it, only very little of it is ever revealed. We live, as it were, unaware; those of us who are spared this live unaware of the fact that there are these huge mental asylums everywhere and that there is a fluctuating part of the population which is forever wandering through them. It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn’t what it should be. And we’re out of our depth all the time. We’re living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we’re driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our physical and emotional makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub against each other is where the sources of pain are. Memory is one of those phenomena. It’s what qualifies us as emotional creatures, psychozootica or however one might describe them. And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. The only thing that you can do, and that most people seem to be able to do very successfully, is to subdue it. And if you can do that by, I don’t know, playing baseball or watching football on television, then that’s possibly a good thing, I don’t know.

  EW: Wh
at do you do?

  WGS: I walk with the dog. But that doesn’t really get me off the hook. And I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook. I think we have to try to stay upright through all that, if it’s at all possible.

  EW: Even as a young man, your uncle Ambros—you quote from his journal—says that memory seems to him like “a kind of dumbness,” that it makes his head “heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height.” How does that work?

  WGS: It’s that sensation, if you turn the opera glass around . . . I think all children, when they’re first given a field glass to look through, will try this experiment. You look through it the right way around, and you see magnified in front of you whatever you were looking at, and then you turn it round, and curiously, although it’s further removed, the image seems much more precise. It’s like looking down a well shaft. Looking in the past has always given me that vertiginous sense. It’s the desire, almost, or the temptation that you might throw yourself into it, as it were, over the parapets and down. There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I’m hardly interested in the future. I don’t think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions.

  EW: What are your illusions?

  WGS: You do tend to think that the people who lived in New England in the late eighteenth century must have had a more agreeable life than nowadays. But then if you think about women having eight children and having to do all their washing in a bowl in the kitchen with a fire of sticks of wood, it’s perhaps not quite as idyllic as one tends to imagine. So there is of course a degree of self-deception at work when you’re looking at the past, even if you redesign it in terms of tragedy, because tragedy is still a pattern of order and an attempt to give meaning to something, to a life or to a series of lives. It’s still, as it were, a positive way of looking at things. Whereas, in fact, it might just have been one damn thing after another with no sense to it at all.

  EW: In The Emigrants, the painter in Manchester whom you call Max Ferber thinks he’s found his destiny when he sees sooty Manchester with all its smokestacks, and he feels he’s come there to “serve under the chimney.” Why is he so drawn to dust? What does that mean for him?

  WGS: We know the biblical phrase, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, so the allegorical significance of dust is clear. The other thing is that dust is a sign of silence somehow. And there are various references in other stories in the book to dusting and cleanliness. That of course has been in a sense a German and Jewish obsession, you know, keeping things kosher and clean. This is one of the things that those two in many ways quite closely allied nations shared. And there is the episode in the story of Adelwarth where the narrator goes through Deauville and a woman’s hand appears through one of those closed shutters, scarcely open shutters, on the first floor and shakes out a duster.

  There are some people who feel a sense of discomfort in tidy, well-kept, constantly looked-after houses. And I belong to those people. I’ve always felt it to be difficult to be in a house where this sort of cold order is maintained, the cold order which was typical of the middle-class salon which would only be opened once or twice a year for certain days like Christmas, perhaps, or an anniversary of one kind or another, and where the grand piano would stand in dead silence throughout the year and the furniture possibly be covered with dust sheets and so on. By contrast, if I get into a house where the dust has been allowed to settle, I do find that comforting somehow. I remember distinctly that around about the time when I wrote the particular passage that you are referring to, I visited a publisher in London. He lived in Kensington. He had still some business to attend to when I arrived, and his wife took me up to a sort of library room at the very top of this very tall, very large, terraced house. And the room was all full of books, and there was one chair. And there was dust everywhere; it had settled over many years on all those books, on the carpet, on the windowsill, and only from the door to the chair where you would sit down to read, there was a path, like a path through snow, as it were, you know, worn, where you could see that there wasn’t any dust because occasionally somebody would walk up to that chair and sit down and read a book. And I have never spent a more peaceful quarter of an hour than sitting in that particular chair. It was that experience that brought home to me that dust has something very, very peaceful about it.

  EW: One of the painter Max Ferber’s techniques to achieve his goal of creating dust is to put on layers of paint and then scrape it off and then rub it out and put it on and scrape it off. And there’s a point when you describe your own writing of this book where you seem to be adopting, almost, or finding yourself in the same position of writing and erasing and even questioning the whole, as you say, questionable business of writing.

  WGS: Yes, it is a questionable business because it’s intrusive. You do intrude into other people’s lives, as I had to when I was trying to find out about these stories, and you don’t know whether you’re doing a good or a bad thing. It’s a received wisdom that it’s good to talk about traumas, but it’s not always true. Especially if you are the instigator of making people remember, talk about their pasts and so on, you are not certain whether your intrusion into someone’s life may not cause a degree of collateral damage which that person might otherwise have been spared. So there’s an ethical problem there. And then the whole business of writing of course—you make things up, you smooth certain contradictory elements that you come across. The whole thing is fraught with vanity, with motives that you really don’t understand yourself.

  This form of creative writing, as it were, doesn’t date back very far with me, but I have always been scribbling in one way or another. So it’s a habitual thing. It’s very closely linked, as far as I can tell, to neurotic disorders, that you have to do it for certain periods of time and then you don’t do it for other periods of time, and then you have to do it again and you do it in an obsessive manner. It is a behavioral problem in one way. Of course it has other more positive aspects, but those are well known. What is less well known are these darker sides of it.

  EW: I think at one point that someone says, referring to another text, that the book was heartbreaking but necessary work. It felt to me like that’s what you were doing here, that this was heartbreaking but necessary work.

  WGS: Well, I’m glad to hear that some people think that. I find that reassuring up to a point, but it’s not going to allay all the misgivings that I have about it. And one of the most acute problems after a while is, of course, contending with the culture business that invariably then surrounds you, and you have to deal with it. Because when you do begin to write seriously, then it is very much like an escape route—you find yourself in some kind of compound, your professional life, and you start doing something about which nobody knows. You go into your potting shed . . . For me, when I wrote my first texts, it was a very, very private affair. I didn’t read them to anybody, I have no writer friends and so on. So the privacy which that ensured for me was something that I treasured a great deal, and it isn’t so now. So my instinct is now to abandon it all again until people have forgotten about it, and then perhaps I can regain that position where I can work again in my potting shed, undisturbed.

  Who Is W. G. Sebald?

  by Carole Angier

  Who is W. G. Sebald? I had just read a book called The Emigrants , and that’s all I wanted to know. The Emigrants contains four stories of exile from Germany. Each is longer and fuller than the last but still as coldly, heart-stoppingly clear, like a lake that keeps getting deeper and darker, but you can still see right down to the bottom. The first and last of the emigrants—the narrator learns slowly and painfully over many years—are Jews; the second is one-quarter Jewish. The third doesn’t seem to be Jewish at all, yet his history is deeply interwoven with that of Jewish émigrés; in fact, in his story, the Jewish themes are strongest of all. The Emigrants is about
many universal issues: time, memory, art, loss. But its main subject is the tragedy of the Jews and Germany.

  It is one of the most hermetically sealed, yet one of the most open-ended works of art I have ever encountered. The four stories reflect each other like a hall of mirrors. Certain dates, like the summer of 1913, obsessively recur. There are beheadings in two stories and hermits in three. Most striking of all, Vladimir Nabokov appears in all four: sometimes as man, sometimes as boy, harbinger now of death and now of joy, but always carrying his butterfly net and evoking the great pursuit of hisOriginally appeared in The Jewish Quarterly, Winter 1996-97.

  autobiography, Speak, Memory. At the same time The Emigrants is fully, firmly grounded in reality. All four stories are illustrated with photographs from their subjects’ albums. And large parts of the last two stories are taken up with extracts from people’s diaries—which nonetheless contain some of the book’s most beautiful writing and one of Nabokov’s appearances.

  What is going on? This is the opposite of a tricky, self-conscious, postmodern novel. It is exquisitely written; but it is modest and quiet and does not draw attention to itself at all. And yet this book raises the question of its own status more vividly, more directly, than any frivolous literary game. It doesn’t matter historically. Only crazy people doubt the Holocaust happened, and puzzles about two or three survivors’ stories cannot alter that. But if I have no historical questions about The Emigrants, I do have literary ones and personal ones. Is it fact or fiction? How did Vladimir Nabokov get into all the stories, even into Max Ferber’s mother’s diary? And who is W. G. Sebald?