Today marks the tenth anniversary of the death of one of contemporary literature’s most transformative figures. On December 14, 2001, the German writer W. G. Sebald suffered a heart attack while driving and was killed instantly in a head-on collision with a truck. He was fifty-seven years old, having lived and worked as a university lecturer in England since his mid-twenties, and had only in the previous five years come to be widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature. Earlier that year, his book “Austerlitz” (about a Jewish man sent to England as a child through the Kindertransporte in 1939, the memory of whose past has been lost) was published to universal acclaim, and the prospect of a Nobel prize was already beginning to seem inevitable.
The weight of the loss to literature with his early death—of all the books he might have gone on to write—is counterbalanced only by the enigmatic pressure of the work he left behind. His four prose fictions, “Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn,” and “Austerlitz” are utterly unique. They combine memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography in the crucible of his haunting prose style to create a strange new literary compound. Susan Sontag, in a 2000 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, asked whether “literary greatness [was] still possible.” She concluded that “one of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.”
The anniversary year has been marked by a number of commemorative events, mainly in Europe. A book of Sebald’s poetry, “Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001,” was published last month by Penguin in the U.K. (and will be out in the U.S. in April). The British filmmaker Grant Gee—best known as a director of music videos for Radiohead, Blur, the Kills, and Nick Cave—has made a documentary entitled “Patience: After Sebald.” The film is an oblique, impressionistic reflection on his work, in which Gee reënacts the walk around Suffolk at the heart of “The Rings of Saturn.” It opened a weekend celebration of Sebald last February in the fantastically named town of Snape Maltings. The weekend concluded with a performance by Patti Smith who, between songs, read from Sebald’s long prose poem “After Nature.”
Recently, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a series of five fifteen-minute audio essays from people who knew Sebald (or Max, as he preferred to be called—he hated his first name, Winfried, because he felt that it sounded too much like the woman’s name Winnifred). Contributors include his English translator Anthea Bell, the poet George Szirtes, and the academic and novelist Christopher Bigsby, a colleague of Sebald’s at the University of East Anglia.
Bigsby suggests that it was out of frustration with the strictures of academic publication that Sebald turned to creative writing (a vague and ungainly term that, by default, winds up being the most accurate generic description of his work). “He’d originally taught German literature,” says Bigsby, “and had published the kind of books that academics do. But he got increasingly frustrated, and began to write in what he called an ‘elliptical’ way, breaching the supposed boundaries between fact and fiction—not what you’re supposed to do as an academic.” Sebald himself sometimes described his work as “documentary fiction,” which goes some way toward capturing its integration of apparently irreconcilable elements.
It is probably too early to predict the extent of the influence Sebald’s hybrid books will exert on the shape of the novel, but it isn’t an exaggeration to say that he erased and redrew the boundaries of narrative fiction as radically as anyone since Borges. British writers like Will Self and, in particular, Geoff Dyer, have been inspired by Sebald’s figurative and literal rambling. Dyer’s work—part essay, part travelogue, part fiction—sometimes reads like a less melancholy, more comic (and more English) variant of Sebald’s peregrinatory prose. One of this year’s most impressive novels, Teju Cole’s debut “Open City,” owes a clear debt to Sebald. James Wood, in his enthusiastic review in the magazine, commented on the way in which Cole moves “in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work.” On a more superficial level, Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” adopted the trademark Sebaldian tactic of integrating photographs into its text.
Ten years after his death, however, Sebald’s work remains more or less entirely sui generis. Reading him is a wonderfully disorienting experience, not least because of the odd, invigorating uncertainty as to what it is, precisely, we are reading. His books occupy an unsettled, disputed territory on the border of fiction and fact, and this generic ambivalence is mirrored in the protean movements of his prose. Often what is on the page, the writing itself, gives the impression of being only the faint, flickering shadow of its actual referent. What Sebald seems to be writing about, in other words, is frequently not what he wants us to be thinking about. Take this passage, which comes at the very end of the oneiric history of sadness and futility that he presents in “The Rings of Saturn.” The topic under discussion is a film about the promotion of silk cultivation in Germany, for reasons of national self-sufficiency, in the early years of the Third Reich:
Quite apart from their indubitable utility value, silkworms afforded an almost ideal object lesson for the classroom. Any number could be had for virtually nothing, they were perfectly docile and needed neither cages nor compounds, and they were suitable for a variety of experiments (weighing, measuring and so forth) at every stage in their evolution. They could be used to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to preempt racial degeneration. In the film, we see a silk-worker receiving eggs dispatched by the Central Reich Institute of Sericulture in Celle, and depositing them in sterile trays. We see the hatching, the feeding of the ravenous caterpillars, the cleaning out of the frames, the spinning of the silken thread, and finally the killing, accomplished in this case not by putting the cocoons out in the sun or in a hot oven, as was often the practice in the past, but by suspending them over a boiling cauldron. The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is completed.
