The Voice Over

Sebald called his books documentary fiction: a strange generic hybrid, poised like an enormous dirigible on the border between it happened and it didn’t happen, where the reader’s sensitivity becomes especially aware of its vulnerability. A large part (the better part) of the polemics around his books unfolds in this zone. The unclear, flickering status of Sebald’s narrative seems to provoke the reader to subject the text to what we might call a sharpening of focus, to get the events straight, to bring details that are difficult to distinguish closer to one’s eyes. Their essential, uncourteous elusiveness, the ease with which they can be turned inside-out is perhaps the primary quality of Sebald’s prose, where the main things are always sewn deep in the text (and ready to explode, like mines—or to be found, like children’s hiding places). The true character of the text remains open to interpretation. What is it talking about, in fact? What precisely is it that we subject to reading: a made-up story, fortified (for persuasiveness or expressiveness) with real facts and details? Or do we observe the revival of a document, of the real past, which the author colors, like a black-and-white photograph, with an effort of imagination? What happened and what didn’t happen constantly move beyond their own edges—the way printer’s ink can spread outside the contours of an image. The disturbing core of Sebald’s prose is its double exposure: a deep persuasiveness/persuasion, characteristic of the exact sciences—and at the same time the strange phantom quality of every detail, each episode, as if they would dissolve into the air if touched. This “trembling, shimmering aura which makes their contours unrecognizable,” as Sebald says about several of Robert Walser’s phrases, surrounds the body of his own texts with a kind of cloud. The way Zeus wrapped Io in a dark cloud, so he could visit her unnoticed.

Prose that “has the tendency to dissolve upon reading”⁴ (again, Sebald on Walser) keeps the reader in uncertainty: in the final analysis we never know whether it is Dichtung or Wahrheit that is narrated and illustrated by the next unexpressive photograph (of a barn, a shop sign, or a pocket watch). The only thing we can trust here is the voice that speaks with us; it turns out something like a banister you can lean on. What happens resembles the old-fashioned stories of Masonic rituals: eyes blindfolded, corridors and crossings done blind; unexpected flashes of light, blindness, and clarity.

In these sunspots only the pictures are clearly visible, the invariable component of Sebald’s text, something along the lines of a signature or a seal, by which one should know the hand of the master. They are of various kinds, but most often these are photographs, old ones, from the archives. Some of them are blown up powerfully and crudely, so the grain pops outward, and almost all of them are somehow inexpressive and present for the most part the complete perplexity of all participants in the shot: people with their features blurred remain somewhere at the edge of the image, the huge background crowds them out still more, and all the faces seem more typical then individual, while at the same time the mustaches, collars and buttons speak more loudly than such things are supposed to. There are also new, “contemporary” photographs that have had time to age but are just as unprepared to cooperate—amateur shots of facades and interiors, architectural objects, and restaurant signs, all black and white and looking as if someone took the picture hurriedly with a cell phone. What else? A recipe for homemade schnapps that Sebald’s grandfather wrote down on a calendar page. Photocopies of visiting cards, tourism ads, train and garden-park tickets, postcards with views, and geographical maps. There are even more landscapes, mountains, forest roads, and hills, taken by an unsteady hand, with multiple blurs. There is a certain quantity of pictures and engravings, placed in the text in the same vein, as cursory quotations, black-and-white, flat tongue-twisters.