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For all the actual, physical journeying that occurs in the works of W. G. Sebald, plot and character development are largely absent (McCrum "Characters" 17). What development does occur happens in the minds of the characters and reaches the reader in the form of reported speech from Sebald's narrators. Readers who pick up a book by Sebald and find his style appealing are compelled to read on, but not by the promise of action or resolution. Paradoxically, the narration moves forward, proceeds, yet remains static.
Many critics have tried to pinpoint the defining characteristics of the technique Sebald employs to attain the remarkably original effects of his prose. (1) "It is the trembling," writes Geoff Dyer, "the hovering on the edge of infinitely tedious regress [...] that generate the peculiar suspense--the sense, more exactly, of suspended narration--that makes Sebald's writing so compelling" (18). With Dyer's insight we have already crossed into the realm of characteristically Sebaldian paradox; it is precisely the inaction described by the author that holds the reader's attention. One is "reeled in." to use Andre Aciman's expression, by the "labored flatness" of Sebald's prose (62). Sebald's writing is often described as a "hypnotizing" weave (or related metaphor, e.g., fabric, braid) of Wanderschaft, digression, hallucination, and chance encounter: "Sebald's hypnotic prose lulls you into tranced submission, a kind of stupor that is also a state of heightened attention" (Dyer 18). Out of the apparent aimlessness of the narrative emerges a cumulative sense of purposefulness suggesting intricate, barely concealed patterns of order. The British critic Robert McCrum, who also speaks of the "hypnotic" power of Sebald's prose, likens his technique to a kaleidoscope: "brightly coloured subjects blur and merge and reform, blend and reshape and re-emerge ("On W. G. Sebald" 16).
But the hidden patterns of order remain--another paradox--inexplicit and unexpressed in Sebald's work. We perceive only their "kaleidoscopic" results. This suggestion of structure inside what Dyer calls a "yawning chasm" of infinite regress contributes to the impression, arising again and again throughout Sebald's prose, that characters and things--indeed, the readers themselves--are "on the verge," or "on the brink" of something. But on the verge of what? An experience? A discovery? Ultimately, and fatalistically, the answer is that things are on the brink of destruction and living beings are on the verge death. But such an answer is far too easy in view of Sebald's literary craftsmanship. The paradox of torpor made teleological and stupor rendered suspenseful is the central one in Sebald's writing, a primary hallmark of his style. I shall attempt in the following pages to identify the salient (and not-so-salient) features of what one might call Sebald's "stylistics of stasis."
1
As I have suggested elsewhere, Sebald's prose can be accurately characterized as "monistic," in the sense that his narratives weave a holistic amalgam of literary, historical, and cultural allusions, in which conventional borders--both of form and content--are penetrable and shifting (McCulloh 22, 49). Fact merges with fiction, the past intrudes on the present, mundane experience streams imperceptibly into the imaginary world of literature or dream, and individual identities threaten to flow into one another. Because of Sebald's blending of fields, concepts, and formal elements, he has often been credited with creating a "new genre." (2)
Arthur Williams has identified a pedagogical bent as one of the two keys to Sebald's "holistic" aesthetics (and ethics), the second being "his interest in and exploitation of the techniques and theories of the visual arts" (99). In any case, it is the continuum of literature and learning that resides at the heart of Sebald's "holism," according to Williams, and I would suggest a confirming parallel in the writings of another writer committedly scornful of plot, Laurence Sterne. A passage from Tristram Shandy is especially pertinent here:
My way is ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of
investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I
tell,--not with a pedantic Fescue,--or in the decisive Manner
of Tacitus, who outwits himself and his reader;--but with the
officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely
of the inquisitive;--to them I write,--and by them I shall
be read,--if any such reading as this could be supposed to
hold out so long, to the very end of the world. (66)
Likewise Sebald writes as a scholarly pursuer of "investigations" for the curious and inquisitive like himself. He is a collector--foremost a collector of pictures, as his texts attest--and he composes with notes and an array of images at hand; the world that emerges is of a piece, evoking the impression of a vast verbal-visual unity.
Essential to this monism is the premise that everything has its rightful place and is worthy of attention, especially those things or beings that are neglected, forgotten, or nearly lost. This democratization of the phenomenal world is clearest in passages such as the digression on the hunted herring in The Rings of Saturn in which their secret life and unfamiliar physical beauty are described. All things and beings are justified in their existence, much like the subjects in a painting by Pisanello. As Sebald's narrator explains in Vertigo:
Nicht allein die fur die damalige Zeit ungeheuer hoch entwickelte
Realismuskunst Pisanellos ist es, die mich anzieht, sondern die Art,
wie es ihm gelingt, diese Kunst in einer mit der realistischen
Malweise eigentlich unvereinbaren Flache aufgehen zu lassen,
in der allem, den Hauptdarstellern und den Komparsen, den Vogeln
am Himmel, dem grun bewegten Wald und jedem einzelnen Blan dieselbe,
durch nichts geschmalerte Daseinsberechtigung zugesprochen wird.
(88) (3)
[What appealed to me was not only the highly developed realism
of his art, extraordinary for the time, but also the way in which
he succeeded in creating the effect of the real, without
suggesting a depth dimension, upon an essentially flat surface,
in which every feature, the principals and the extras alike, the
birds in the sky, the green forest and every single leaf of it,
are all granted an equal and undiminished right to exist. (73)]
Thus, according to the logic of democratized empathy, even the traumatization of a mere moth or butterfly (as suggested explicitly in the Andromeda Lodge scenes in the novel Austerlitz) is to be regarded as true suffering. (4) This idea has been formulated elsewhere before. "No living creature can be exchided from redemption or deleted from eternity," Claudio Magris's narrator in Danube insists--a funeral prayer should be said "for the butterfly that dies or the leaf that falls" (113). Sebald's literary mentor Robert Walser believes such egalitarian consideration is the solemn responsibility of the "solitary walker":
Hochst liebevoll und aufmerksam muss der, der spaziert, jades
kleinste lebendige Ding, set es ein Kind, ein Hund, eine Mucke,
ein Schmetterling, ein Spatz, ein Wurm, eine Blume, ein Mann,
ein Haus, ein Baum, eine Hecke, eine Schnecke, eine Maus, eine
Wolke, ein Berg, ein Blatt oder auch nur ein armes, weggeworfenes
Fetzchen Schreibpapier, auf das vielleicht ein liebes, gutes
Schulkind seine ersten ungeftigen Buchstaben geschrieben hat.
studieren und betlachlen.Die hochsten und niedrigsten, die
ernstesten und lustigsten Dinge sind ihm gleicherweise lieb
und schon und wert. (312-13)
[The walker must be most caring and observant when he walks,
treating every thing, even the smallest, as if it were a child,
a dog, a midge, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower,
a man, a house, a tree, a hedgerow, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a
mountain, a leaf, or just a poor discarded scrap of paper on which
a good, dear schoolchild has written his or her first
awkward letters. Every thing must be studied and observed on its
own terms. The highest and the lowliest, the most earnest and the
most amusing things are equally dear and lovely and precious to the
walker. (Translation mine)]
Homo viator gives everything its due, for everything is part of the same monism, the same unified interplay of subject and object, physical and spiritual, dream and reality, the named and the unnamed, the natural and the manmade. Even the borders between the realms of the dead and the living are porous. In a characteristically Sebaldian inversion, it is the dead for whom the living seem unreal, wandering as they do among the "nach einer hoheren Stereometrie ineinander verschachtelte Raume," [various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher order] that constitute ultimate, timeless reality (Austerlitz 265, 185). The narrative manifestations of this atemporality come in at least two episodic forms, namely visits to the sick and bouts of depression or nervous collapse affecting not only Sebald's characters but his narrators themselves. In one instance it is acute back pain that immobilizes a character, Max Ferber, in his studio in the last section of The Emigrants. Indeed, The Rings of Saturn begins with an episode of collapse and hospitalization. Examples of visits to the sick include the narrator's walk with the mental patient Ernst Herbeck in Vertigo and, in a more bizarre instance, Jacques Austerlitz's experience in the household of his friend Gerald Fitzpatrick, whose uncle Evelyn shuffles about the perimeter of his room constantly, day after day, month after month, year after year, attempting to fend off the debilitating effects of an arthritic condition known in Europe as Bechterev's disease (ankylosing spondylitis). In an even more extreme example of atemporal immobilization, Sebald in Vertigo alludes to, then recapitulates Kafka's story "The Hunter Gracchus," in which the main character has lost his way and, in another paradox of immense proportions, cannot "complete" the act of dying: he is stranded in the world of the living and cannot, in spite of his wanderings, reach the world of the dead.
On a more expository level, the eponymous protagonist in Austerlitz suggests a postulate concerning the atemporality of illness and misfortune:
Die Toten seien ja auger der Zeit. die Sterbenden und die vielen
bet sich zu Hause oder in den Spitalern liegenden Kranken, und
nicht nut diese allein, genuge doch schon ein Quantum
personlichen Unglucks, um uns abzuschneiden von jeder Vergangenheit
und jeder Zukunft. (147)
[The dead are outside of time. the dying and all the sick at home
or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain
degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past
and the future. (101)]
And though Sebald describes in all of his books also physical places, buildings in particular, where time seems to stand still (hospitals, country houses, fortresses, archives, etc.), the most trenchant effects of separation from the temporal are of course exhibited in human lives, in the immobilization endured by the physically and mentally ill, not to mention the peripheral presence of the returning dead.
At the heart of Sebald's prose style is a fastidious care in describing--some call it a "staidness"--that on the surface belies the sophistication of his compositional designs. Though the grammatical structures of the German original are, as one might expect, more hypotactical than the English renderings of the novels by Michael Hulse and Anthca Bell, the impression of meticulousness and precision is sustained in both languages. In this respect the influence of Kafka's prose style is keenly felt. An almost cautious diction and a keen discrimination in selection of detail seem best suited for the paradoxical effects Sebald seeks to achieve. The critic Lisa Cohen writes: "At once unassuming and lyrical, reportorial and mysterious, compressed and diffuse, the eerie precision of his prose is deceptively simple, as unusual and unsettling as the stories he tells" (44).
To be sure, it is not just Sebald's straightforward descriptive style that reflects the influence of Kafka--the "unsettling" mood of Sebald's stories also smacks of the Kafkaesque. Narrative simplicity serves to intensify the uncanniness of Sebald's tales. The strangeness of events and people in turn compels the reader to go on. Unease is not the only mood (Cohen notes the lyrical), but it is the prevalent one. The description of the narrator's experiences with shadowy figures in Italy (see ch. II ["All'estero"] in Vertigo) is perhaps the best example of Sebald's use of mysterious goings-on on the periphery of the mundane to unsettle the reader. However, a more subtle atmosphere of unease is found in the strange Ashbury household described in The Rings of Saturn. The ongoing decline of their great country house is disturbing, to be sure, but not as distressing as their apparent failure to comprehend just how desperate they really are, much less to do anything sensible about ii. In a sense they resemble the Max Ferber character of The Emigrants. He paints all day every day without regard for the future (or the present, for that matter), just as the Ashburys go about their respective business, day in and day out. All are indifferent to the outside world. The difference is that the Ashburys produce no positive results such as Ferber's art. It is emblematic of the family that the daughters undo their sewing at the end of the day and that the son, who has no nautical experience and no intention to sail, is building a large boat. The futility of it all is overwhelming, yet not powerful enough to succeed in drawing the narrator in. Sebald's narrator is sorely tempted, but hesitates, declining to accept the Ashburys' "unspoken invitation" to join in their "innocent" stasis, returning to his travels. In an aside to the reader, he explains with a sort of double irony: "Dass ich das nicht getan habe, dieses--Versagen zieht mir heute noch manchmal wie ein Schatten tiber die Seele" [That I didn't [accept their invitation] was a [...j failure that still sometimes seems like a shadow crossing my soul] (263, 220). "Failure" hardly seems the word most people would use for abandoning a sinking ship, nor would most thinking people choose a life of impoverished aimlessness. This Sebaldian paradox turns the world on its head, and not the least of the social conventions it challenges is the work ethic, especially the German work ethic Sebald grew up with.
3
Sebald uses three main techniques to create the effect of "suspenseful stasis" that characterizes so much of his fiction. (1.) He chooses antiquated, capacious, sometimes byzantine structures for his characters to explore as well as mazes. (2.) He employs the device of repetition to draw out the moment in which one is "on the brink." (3.) He creates virtually imperceptible transitions into essayistic digressions. Since these techniques occur with considerable frequency in Sebald, only a few examples need be noted for the sake of demonstration. As for the first technique, consider the yew maze at Somerlyton the narrator dreams about in The Rings of Saturn (206, 173) and the ziggurat-like interior hallucinated by the narrator while in the Ladies' Waiting Room at Liverpool Street Station (Austerlitz 193-95, 132-37). In Vertigo there is an explicit image of a maze, and indeed, the entire chapter "All'estero" reads as if the narrator is trapped in a maze that encompasses Vienna, Venice, Verona, and Milan. Examples of repetition involve motifs such as the multisided star shapes in Austerlitz, the fourfold appearance and reappearance of Vladimir Nabokov in The Emigrants, or the recurring pallbearers in Vertigo, as well as actual physical encounters, e.g., when in Rings Sebald's narrator becomes disoriented on Dunwich Heath, returning again and again to the same thicket, despite seeing quite clearly a vivid landmark from several angles as he continually traverses the same circuitous path (204-05, 171-72). Finally, a good example of the almost imperceptible transitions to new narrative territory would be the introduction of the recounting of a recent dream by Anne Hamburger in Rings (the occasion is her phone call to a taxi service [226, 189]) or the retelling of the story of Elizabeth the Winter Queen in Vertigo (289-91,254-55), a digression prompted by a chance meeting on a train.
The conceptual legacy reflected in Sebald's writing can be traced to the aesthetics of inaction found in Beckett and other innovative writers of the twentieth century, but a more explicitly critical influence on Sebald's thinking, judging from his own frequent references in professional writings and interviews, is Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's term "Dialektik im Stillstand" (dialectic at a standstill) may well be the best descriptor for the paradoxical dynamic behind Sebald's particular brand of stasis. Although it concerns drama rather than prose, Benjamin's article "Was ist das epische Theater?" contains several ideas germane to the subject of narrative inactivity, notably the notion that Bertolt Brecht sought not to develop plot, but rather to interrupt plot, and in so doing, reveal and expose conditions ("Zustande" [520]). In Brecht's Epic Theater the goal is not action, but the retardation of that action, and in this state of things, the gesture takes on profound significance. In fact, we find in Sebald any number of enigmatic gestures, from Dr. Abramsky's waving of a goose wing in lieu of a farewell at Ithaca in The Emigrants (171, 116) to Max Ferber's gift of his mother's memoir in the final section of the same book, to the strange musical routine of the circus band in Austerlitz (384-87, 273-75), and so on.
An equally important formative influence for Sebald's aesthetic of stasis, however, is more practical than theoretical, namely his reading of nineteenth-century German prose by writers such as Theodore Fontane, Gottfried Keller, and Adalbert Stifter. Stifter's placid style in particular serves as a stylistic model for Sebald, and many have noted similarities in diction? Sebald himself acknowledged the importance of the discursive prose style of the nineteenth century for his own work. In a radio interview in America shortly before his death, he spoke specifically of Keller and Stifter, noting the relative lack of significance of plot in their work, the meticulousness of composition, and the "intensity of description" making their prose "akin to poetry" (Silverblatt). The affinities and parallels between Stifter and Sebald are numerous. First, writing for both is in large measure an act of recovering, through memory and the citing of others' memories, the seemingly intact world of the past. Second, they are both collectors by nature who focus on description in their works, not on plot. In terms of biography, both spent much of their adult lives in a kind of exile, Sebald teaching in England and Stifter apart from Viennese society as an inspector of schools in Upper Austria. In both there is, beside the depiction of exquisite beauty and the promise of transcendence, a certain unease, a pessimism of cosmic proportions; in Sebald's words, Stifter's writing "hat [...] seinen eigentlichen Schwerpunkt in einem profunden Agnostizismus und bis ins Kosmische ausgeweiteten Pessimismus" [has its center of gravity in a profound agnosticism bordering on a pessimism of cosmic proportions] (Beschreibung 17). The very "scrupulousness" of Stifter's descriptive cataloging of things highlights the melancholy skepticism that Sebald' s writing seems to share in its effort to memorialize and thereby retain as much as possible of the past. Both writers list the contents of rooms and houses in numerous passages throughout their respective ceuvres. Sebald has the following to say about the function of static description in Stifter:
Die Hauser, das Mobiliar, die Geratschaften, die Kleider, die
vergilbten Briefe, all diese beschreibenen Dinge, die aus der
kompakten Monotonie der Erzahlungen Stifters herausragen,
bezeugen zuletzt nichts als ihr eigenes Dasein. (18)
[The houses, the furnishings, the utensils, the clothing, the
yellowed letter, all these described items, which stand out in
the compact monotony of Stifter's stories, bear witness, in the
end, to nothing but their own existence in time and space.]
(All translations from Sebald's scholarly work are mine)
The static world accounted for so carefully is also, however, "on the verge," to repeat a phrase used earlier, i.e., on the verge of being no more. Citing Stifter's story "Das alte Siegel" [The Old Seal], Sebald recalls, at times quoting from the story, how the protagonist one day visits the house of the woman he is in love with, only to find all the rooms emptied out and the walls bare:
Die Allegorie der ausgeraumten Innenwelt, die nichts ubrig lasst als
die Bitterkeit der Enttauschung, ist die abgewandte Seite des
Stifterischen Materialsmus, der in der prosaischen Beschreibung
der sichtbaren Wirklichkeit ... lasst ... die Angst mitschwingen,
es konne schon morgen alles verloren sein--nicht nur die Liebe zu
einem anderen Menschen, sondern auch das, was wir um uns hergestellt
haben, ja selbst die grune Natur und die Berge "in ihrer alten
Pracht und Herrlichkeit" und "vielleicht auch die schOne freundliche
Erde, die uns jetzt so lest gegrtindet und far Ewigkeiten gebaut
scheint." (19)
[The [obvious] allegory of an inner world emptied of its contents,
leaving nothing but the bitterness of disappointment, is the other
side of Stifter's materialism, which strikes a note of fear with
its prosaic description of the visible world, a note of fear that
tomorrow everything, indeed everything, could be lost--not only the
love of another person, but also that which we have made for
ourselves, or even the natural world and its mountains "in all their
splendor and glory" as well as "perhaps also the beautiful, friendly
earth, on which we were so firmly grounded, and which seemed
constructed for eternity."]
Stasis, again, is only stasis "on the verge" of destruction or loss, loss on the individual or microcosmic level, destruction on the macrocosmic, natural level as well as microcosmic. This notion is echoed by the Benjaminian metaphysics that pervades The Rings of Saturn, but which can be found elsewhere in Sebald. Yet there is something paradoxically reassuring about acknowledging in one's writing our dismal plight, i.e., that we are mortals and our world itself is doomed to destruction. Commenting on the complete disappearance of the German Ocean Mansions, not to mention all manner of cooperative connections between the German and British Empires, the narrator of that book remarks "[dass] es ja immer, wenn man gerade die sch6nste Zukunft sich ausmalt, bereits auf die nachste Katastrophe zugeht" [whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner] (270, 226). History as a list of calamities can be the subject of irony after all, though we might presume that Stifter's Biedermeier sensibility would probably not concur. However, a similarly ironic remark, this one about the lability of certain forms of architecture, appears in Austerlitz:
irgendwo wussten wir naturlich, dass die ins Uberdimensionale
hinausgewachsenen Bauwerke schon den Schatten ihrer Zerstorung
vorauswerfen und konzipiert sind von Anfang an im Hinblick auf
ihr nachmaliges Dasein als Ruinen. (28)
[somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow
of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the
first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. (19)]
Even at the point of conception, monumental buildings are incipient ruins; the future destruction of such buildings is implicit.
Another feature of Stifter's writing of interest to Sebald is the suspension of time, which produces a spatialization of the temporal, he calls "eine windstille Raumlichkeit" (Beschreibung 22). Everything and every character seem (and Sebald is speaking specifically of the novel Nachsommer here) to be predestined to serve a particular function in this "orbis pictus." What Stifler creates in Nachsommer is a verbal still life, and we find shades of Stifter's placid approach especially in Sebald's landscape descriptions, notably the scenes of Lake Geneva from above that appear at least once in each of his novels. But what is perhaps of greater interest and import is the notion of spatialized, suspended time, which is developed in some detail in Austerlitz. The metaphor of time as a river is called into question, and, according to Austerlitz, time does not even have the appearance of existing, i.e., flowing, for some. As referred to earlier, the dead, the dying, the gravely ill; they are "outside of time" (147). Time, as noted before, is architectural, a dimensional set of rooms, one inside the other--in the German version, Austerlitz uses the word "Stereometrie," the reader will recall. Ultimately time is static in the sense that, from some final cosmic perspective somewhere, everything has already occurred, and "samtliche Zeitmomente" [all moments of time] exist and have coexisted "gleichzeitig nebeneinander" [simultaneously side by side] (148, 101). With this concept of temporality (or more precisely, the absence of temporality), Sebald's stasis is complete.
But Stifter must by necessity select specific moments to describe in what Sebald terms his "attempt at an eternalization of beauty," his "Bemuhen um eine Verewigung der Schonheit" (Beschreibung 24). These are often landscape scenes such as the one described in the dialogue between the grandfather and grandson in the 1853 story "Granit." This "eternalization" of beautiful scenery has an overtly visual element, as does Stifter's writing in general (26). By the same token it is the eye that takes possession of the moment and the scene, internalizing as well as "eternalizing" [Besitzergreifung und Einverleibung], according to Sebald. When one considers not only Sebald's own visual emphasis in his writing, but his use of photographic and other pictorial images in the text, the affinity with Stifter is striking indeed. Moreover, one might ask, what is more static, more "eternalized" (at least for the time being!) than the still image of a photograph, a visual moment frozen in time? It is, by contrast, the moments and events leading up to the image as well as the moments and events afterwards that constitute conventional linear narrative possibilities.
Just as the painter Max Ferber represents the "purposeful aimlessness" of the artist in his compulsive, repetitive work, so too art itself has an ultimately static nature. Apparent innovations often turn out to have numerous precursors, and in any case soon generate their own predictable conventions. (6) Tim Parks remarks on the absence of progress in surveying the history of film, for example:
Within a couple of decades of its invention the motion picture
had achieved heights it would never surpass. Less remarkable
conceptually than the word, the sequence of silent images in a
darkened room nevertheless very rapidly reproduced the antique
combination of narrative content within a rhythmic frame. Those
who have seen Murnau's Sunrise or Dreyer's Joan of Arc, as [sic]
those who have read the Iliad, will be aware that there is no
progress in art.
Like the "rhythmic scenes" that correspond visually to the verbal structures-strophes--of Homer's classical poem, the peripatetic episodes experienced by Sebald's narrators, though strikingly original in their manner of incorporating allusions, meditations, and digressions of various kinds, are without progress in the sense that Parks attributes to film. Stasis is not merely a feature of Sebald's recursive narrative technique, ever "on the verge," but it is the status of art as such.
I will close with one particular image that strikes me as emblematic of stasis in Sebald. By no coincidence it is the sarcophagus of St. Sebold (the author-narrator's patron saint) described in chapter IV of The Rings of Saturn. In Amsterdam, sensing (incorrectly, no doubt) that his journey is almost at an end, the narrator recalls the "stations of [his] journey" and the narrative merges with a biographical account of the life of Saint Sebold, whose remains lie in Regensburg. The sculpted figures and shapes of the sarcophagus (pictured on pp. 108 and 87 of the German and English versions respectively) are frozen in time, as it were, yet they anticipate a future reward of transcendence and redemption, represented by Jerusalem:
... zuoberst die dreigipflige Himmelstadt mit ihren ungezahlten
Wohnungen, Jerusalem die sehnlich erwartete Braut, die Hutte Gottes
under den Menschen, das Bild eines anderen, neu gewordenen Lebens.
(109)
[... crowning all [comes] the celestial city with its three
pinnacles and many mansions, Jerusalem, the fervently longed-for
bride, God's tabernacle amongst mankind, the image of an other,
renewed life. (88)]
The age of "an other, renewed life" of course has not yet come, and can only be dreamed of, but can be represented in art as the destination of a life's pilgrimage. Heaven beckons as a place and in "einer Zeit, in welcher uns die Tranen abgewischt werden von den Augen und in der weder Leid sein wird noch Schmerz oder Geschrei" [in a time when the tears will be wiped from our eyes and there will be no more grief, or pain, or weeping and wailing] (109, 88). Paradise, as it is traditionally envisioned, is--paradoxically, given the human thirst for novelty and diversion--a place where nothing really happens, the final destination, the ultimate form of stasis.
Notes
(1) Among them, Michael Rutschky is perhaps one of the most creative. Writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau in 2001, he coined the phrase "der Sebald-Sound" and described Sebald's writing as "Prosamusik."
(2) See, for instance, Gabriele Amman's review of The Emigrants. Another cogent review, this one covering all of Sebald's career, is John Banville's.
(3) In this paper I quote first from the German original, then from the English translation. Where the source in question is obvious, I give only the page numbers in parenthesis, likewise with the German reference coming first. While Sebald lived most of his adult life in England, he composed his novels in his native tongue.
(4) Austerlitz points out that dogs, mice, and moles dream in their sleep and therefore seem to have an imaginative and emotive inner life. Who is to say that moths or lettuces don't dream? (Austerlitz 137-38, 94). Moths that one finds clinging to curtains and walls are the victims of their own terror at not being able to find their way out of the house--they remain in one place until death overtakes them (see 136, 94).
(5) Commonly remarked on by reviewers and critics in Europe, James Wood was one of the first among English-speaking critics to point out the similarity (in The New Republic in 1998).
(6) Concerning the lasting influence of Laurence Sterne on modern literature, John Bayley writes, "Modernism too comes with time to have its conventions; a modernist like Italo Calvino can justly claim Sterne as the free spirit who nonetheless fathered the predictable orthodoxies of the modern avant-garde novel. Sterne, who vowed not to put himself under 'any man's rules who ever lived' would have been entertained by this paradox [...]."
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Amman, Gabriele. "Ghosts." New York Review of Books 25 Sept. 1997: 29-30.
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Mark R. McCulloh
Davidson College
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