Arabesques of Journeys

Vertigo. By W. G. Sebald. Translated by Michael Hulse. New Directions. $23.95.

Who is W. G. Sebald? Who is the enigmatic German writer who first appeared in English in 1996 with the publication of his elegiac quartet, The Emigrants, who reappeared in 1998 with The Rings of Saturn, and who now visits us once more with Vertigo (his first novel, which, in German, preceded the other two)? Scattered throughout all three books are grainy photographs, and occasionally we glimpse Sebald peering out from behind his weeping-willow mustache. But these snapshots have the odd effect of making him seem not more familiar but more otherworldly, as elusive as the eccentric figures from history who haunt his pages. Sebald guides us through time across Europe. But he is always moving, always just ahead of us, already speaking to us from the shadowy realm of the beyond.

Even the books themselves are evasive: "novel" is an impoverished word to describe Sebald’s peculiar alloy of travelogue, fiction, memoir, scholarly essay, and historical investigation. Each derives its meandering form from a journey, or a series of journeys, that Sebald undertakes from England, his adopted country of thirty years. Often the itinerary traces the travels of someone else whom he follows with the tenacity of a detective and the melancholy of an abandoned lover. One journey branches into the recollection of another taken long ago, either by Sebald or one of the phantoms he tracks. The books quickly become arabesques of journeys inside of journeys, lines of motion restlessly crossing and converging in the beautiful terra incognita of Sebald’s mind. As we follow him as if he were a Pied Piper, mesmerized by his heartbreakingly beautiful prose, what results is a case of vertigo. The compass points of past and present, reality and memory, absence and presence, truth and fiction, begin to blur and become indistinct.

Webster’s definition of "vertigo" is: "(1) a disturbance which is associated with various known diseases or due to unknown causes and in which the external world seems to revolve around the individual or the individual seems to revolve in space; (2) dizziness." The English word is a fair translation of the title of this most recently translated of Sebald’s books, called Schwindel Gefühle (his variation of the word Schwindelgefühle). In fact, one could do worse than describe his as a literature of vertigo: the word captures the sense, central to Sebald, of uneasiness brought on by certain types of motion, a discomfort at once physical and mental, impeding further movement. The word "vertigo," with its allusions to a known or unknown illness, also suggests a pervading sense of an ever-encroaching madness. "While it might have been rare for a man to be driven insane, little was required to tip the balance," Sebald writes. In the ramblings of all three books, he follows the story of someone gone mad, though it’s usually the gentle madness that comes from retreating into one’s own mind.

Sebald is greatly empathic towards those whose lives he trails, and seems to have a particular compassion for those not quite made for life. He himself has a delicate constitution: he suffers from headaches, is easily unsettled, and is at once fascinated and repelled by people, most often strangers with whom he has awkward interactions that usually leave him feeling apprehensive if not gripped by terror. When a waitress brushes his shoulder he recalls "how few and far between" are the moments in his life that he has been touched thus by a woman with whom he was barely acquainted, remarking that "about such unwonted gestures there had always been something disembodied and ghoulish, something that went right through me!" In The Rings of Saturn, while observing the nesting holes of some sand martins, he accidentally spies a couple having sex on the beach and they seem to him "a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species." To enter into one of Sebald’s books is to experience the almost impossibly peculiar, quite vertiginous, sense of inhabiting another’s extreme solitude.

Space, always folding back over itself in these travels, is further distorted by these alienating chasms that open between Sebald and those he encounters. Space both fascinates and terrorizes him, at once beckoning to him and disturbing him. "In August 1992," he writes, "when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the country of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work." But he becomes preoccupied with both an "unaccustomed sense of freedom" and a "paralyzing horror" and ends up, a year to the day that he started the tour, in a hospital in Norwich "in a state of almost total immobility." In Sebald’s world, the side effects of motion, of traveling through space and time, are not to be taken lightly. Perhaps the most haunting image in The Emigrants–the closest to perfect of the three books, which traces the stories of four twentieth-century Germans of Jewish descent who left their country–is the suicide of Paul Bereyter on the railway tracks. "Railways had always meant a great deal to him," explains the woman with whom Bereyter fell in love at the end of his life, "perhaps he felt they were headed for death." We are reminded of the trains that carried so many other Jews to their deaths. These four emigrants are as inextricably bound to those dead as they are to each other by the disturbing state of freedom and regret their own journeys have brought them. The message Sebald repeatedly impresses upon us is: go, but do not expect to go with impunity.

The fourth story in The Emigrants is that of Max Ferber, for whom even the shortest train ride is torture. After remaining in Manchester for more than twenty years, he finally brings himself to take a trip to Switzerland, during which he severely injures his back in the act of standing up. In the midst of the crippling pain–"related, in the most precise manner conceivable, to the inner constitution I had acquired over the years"–Ferber begins to remember his youth. One understands then that to remain still–actually petrified–all those years had been a way of staying the onslaught of memory. Sebald himself is susceptible to bouts of paralysis, both physical and mental, often following the disorientation that arises when memory is confronted by reality or when the past becomes an interloper in the present, as when he thinks he recognizes Dante in the streets of Vienna. At these times, he writes, "when obliged to lean against a wall or seek refuge in the doorway of a building, I feared that mental paralysis was beginning to take hold of me, I could think of no way of resisting it but to walk until late into the night, till I was utterly worn out." Traveling is both the cause and cure of the malady–nostalgia, melancholy, vertigo, and even madness–that threatens Sebald and those he shadows. Motion confuses and upsets, but it also fixes things in sharp relief: fleeing one Italian city, he writes, "Not until I am on the train to Milan do I become visible again to my mind’s eye."

For Sebald, whose scholarly mind is a log of the ruins of history, the past is always forcing itself upon the present. Vertigo, divided like The Emigrants into four parts, recounts a journey to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to Sebald’s childhood town in the mountains of southern Germany. The journey progresses, doubles back, and repeats itself, while echoing the travels of Stendhal and Kafka, pausing on the imprisonment of Casanova in Venice, and crossing the paths of countless others. Not only does Sebald spot Dante walking down the street, but also King Ludwig II on a vaporetto; Elizabeth, daughter of James I, boarding a train at Heidelberg Station ("whom I recognized instantly, without a shadow of a doubt"); and–in one of the many humorous moments in the book–twin boys who are the spitting image of Kafka, whose picture he tries in vain to take until he is suspected of pederasty. This indulgence in confusing the identities of strangers with figures of history nods to another kind of madness such as Multiple Personality Disorder. And even if Sebald is not quite delusional about his own identity, at the first hotel that allows him to check in without a passport, he signs the guest log as Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, historian, of Landeck Tyrol. At another hotel his passport is mistakenly given to someone else. Although Sebald never really tries to pass himself off as another, he is constantly stepping in and out of other people’s shoes. At times he seems to inhabit others more easily than himself. The transitions between his own thoughts and others’ are seamless, and one gets the feeling that the W. G. Sebald that appears in his books is only another of the writer’s half-real, half-invented characters.

And invention is important. In the original title, Sebald inserts a deliberate break in the word Schwindelgefühle (dizzy feeling), so that the word Schwindel, which means lie, fraud, swindle, stands alone. The significance of this sly pun should not be lost in translation. Sebald may seem as earnest and unmeddling as a recording angel, but like someone who keeps offering "irrefutable evidence" when one has not expressed disbelief, he invites, even courts, suspicion. He insists, for example, that a certain train ride left no trace on his memory, and then recounts it in almost comically extravagant detail. In the section of the book that follows Stendhal (whom Sebald calls by his real name, Marie Henri Beyle), Sebald drops another hint: "There is reason to suspect that Mme Gherardi, whose life could easily furnish a whole novel, as Beyle writes at one point, never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence." He further adds that it is unclear when Beyle took his journey to Lake Garda, "always supposing that he made it at all." The unfocused and deliberately amateurish photographs shroud the events in mystery. The copies of documents, such as passport pictures or official papers, are sometimes inked out in crucial places. He refers to the town he grew up in only by the initial W, and are we really to believe that when he returns for the first time to the house of his childhood and discovers, in what must be one of the finest examples of the unheimlich, that it has been turned into an inn, that he, without blinking an eye, checks in? But though Sebald invites us to cast doubt, to continually wonder what is truth or fiction, his narratives are so tightly wrought and confirmed by so many echoes that they are impossible to unravel. Try to locate some palpable truth and you will discover that when you reach for it it turns to dust, like the sleeve of the uniform of an Austrian chasseur when Sebald touches it. But if he confuses the boundaries between truth and fiction, past and present, memory and reality, it is not to suggest that boundaries don’t exist: they do, only not where you might expect them. On the very last pages of Vertigo, he casually wonders why no one is ever unnerved by the ominous warning message in the London Underground, that could well be inscribed under Sebald’s literary crest: "Mind the gap."

The visual element is a hallmark of his novels, but the sound of Sebald is just as distinctive, finely rendered by the translator, Michael Hulse. To read Sebald is to feel you are inside a place with unusual acoustic effects: now like a seashell, now an antiechoic chamber. In this resonant silence, Sebald himself is like a radio, a crystal set, picking up voices from the past that soon fade into the static. Yet it would be wrong to imply that Sebald is only a medium. Whoever W. G. Sebald may be, he is above all a master of storytelling, an art that requires a degree of charlatanism, the talent of keeping a straight face, and finally, a growing belief in one’s own tales until one might even swear by their truth. If Sebald tells us he is obsessed with coincidences, convergences, and echoes, and with "drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order," it is because he is constantly honing his alibi. If he experiences vertigo, it may be because he no longer knows where he, W. G. Sebald, ends and his doppelgänger, W. G. Sebald, begins.

So who is W. G. Sebald, this peculiar writer who resurrects figures from the past only to follow them like an undertaker to their deaths; this connoisseur of eccentrics and madmen, of the detritus of history; this poet and swindler who, according to all accounts, doubles as a professor of languages somewhere in the east of England? Whoever he may be, all we can say for sure is that he is restless, and we can only wait until he briefly appears to us again, like one of those phantom creatures rarely sighted, mythical, and easily frightened away.

Nicole Krauss