W.G. Sebald : Austerlitz : Looking And Looking Away

Stephen Mitchelmore on the novels of W.G. Sebald

"Why has Sebald been hailed - by Susan Sontag among others - as a literary great? Well, Sontag points to the "passionate bleakness" of "a restless, chronically dissatisfied mind" that offers us "moral fervency and gifts of compassion". But this doesn’t tell us much really. She also says that the accompanying photographs provide "an exquisite index of the pastness of the past." Again, so how does that make Sebald great? Pastness is a great attraction to a culture that fetishises old objects. Indeed, Sebald's style is called "Antiquarianism" by Daniel Johnson in the TLS: deriving from, he says, "a peculiar synthesis of English eclecticism and German perfectionism" where "the past has a more powerful presence than the present". That presence is precisely its pastness, which is present only as an index of what's not actually there. A curious paradox - one that would probably leave the experts of Antiques Roadshow nonplussed. Like their punters, they would probably prefer just to accumulate more and more of it. Hence perhaps why much is made of the variety of subject matter in Sebald's novels, like a lumber room in a rundown mansion ready for an enthusiast's rummage.

It is also likely that the popularity of Sebald’s fiction is due to a nostalgia for works that deal seriously with the most serious of subjects - all four Sebald novels might be misconstrued as Holocaust Literature. Certainly, Sontag desires something to counter “the ascendancy of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects”. A nostalgia, too, perhaps, for black and white distinctions: Nazis evil, victims good. When we listen to the story of a Jewish refugee, such as Max Ferber in The Emigrants, who lost his parents in the camps, the obscure hurt has to be acknowledged even if it remains beyond us. In comparison to the moral confusion of the present, it is much easier for the reader to feel something. However, Sontag herself doesn’t see things as so clear cut. She ends her review of Vertigo with Sebald’s own curiosity with “the mysterious survival of the written word”; the dead, as it were, returning to us here too, again and again.

The question of whether this is a good thing is left, as it is in Sebald’s novels, unanswered."