The Voice Over

They lack two qualities. As a rule, they don’t grab you, whatever that means; with a few exceptions they have no hint of that special type of pollen, that seductive element, that makes a picture attractive, brings it closer to the viewer. Everything happening in them has a demonstratively everyday, workaday character. Moreover—and this too is important—it has absolutely no relationship to us. None of it exists any longer. This applies to everyone: to the city folk in summer on the porch of some house or other, the whole class of seven-year-old schoolchildren, looking into the lens, yet managing in a strange way to avoid meeting our gaze, to turn out wholly, completely bygone. All the photographs present a population of former people—who have passed on irretrievably, crowded clean out. And the fact that someone there might turn out to be a great-grandfather or a great-grandmother means nearly nothing. At the least, it doesn’t remove but rather heightens the degree of compassion. “One has the impression, she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sighs of despair, […] as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives.”⁵

Strange as it may seem, in their meek reservedness the pictures (photographs, and in particular old ones) often provoke something like irritation in Sebald’s critics; for some reason the logic and meaning of their silent participation in the text stir up the reader. Sebald’s books are so popular that many people will want to elucidate completely what it is they are dealing with—a documentary or mockumentary—and the photographs could testify to either version. The numerous questions the author of The Emigrants was asked, along the lines of “Did that boy really exist?”⁶—and is that really your uncle Ambrose?—are one more attempt to establish precise boundaries between reality and make-believe in order, perhaps, to sketch the limits of permissible compassion for oneself. And indeed: you’d feel sorry enough to cry for a real uncle, but if it’s a matter of fiction—then, admittedly, we can let ourselves maintain a comfortable detachment.

But even the author interrupts himself with images, and more or less for the same purpose. The way Sebald treats pictures (it’s hard to find the right word here: he doesn’t use them, he doesn’t work with them; more than anything their presence in the book recalls signal lights that mark out the narration’s route from one turn to the next) is somehow connected with genuineness; they are indeed so much more real than the shifting brume in which the text is wrapped.

There’s an episode in Vertigo. The author-narrator is in a bus (he’s always traveling from place to place) driving along Lake Garda, following the route Kafka took a hundred years before. An Italian family is seated next to him, husband, wife, and twin boys who resemble the photograph of ten-year-old Kafka strikingly, absolutely—to such a degree that the author asks with inappropriate excitement for permission to photograph the children and, of course, is refused. None of his explanations help; the enraged parents threaten to call the police, the author has to withdraw—and his powerless shame becomes something like a substitute for a picture, the document that confirms the miraculous resemblance, the sign that says that this happened.