The Voice Over

It’s clear that photographs here don’t exhibit even the slightest will for possession—they’re necessary the way a bench is, to sit down and catch one’s breath, or a watch, to look at in confusion. In a way this is like a type of diary writing that’s familiar to me: if your own existence doesn’t infuse you with particular confidence, if it seems blurred and unsteady, then you accompany your daily life text with markers of everydayness, lists of what you have seen and read, recitations of domestic tasks and kilometers covered. Sontag’s diaries are constructed this way, for example; and in the same way, it seems to me, the complex curve of Sebald’s narrative goes from souvenir to souvenir, from bookmark to bookmark, from one firm and warm point of coincidence to another. The presence of the visual in Sebald’s world boils down to this, strictly speaking. His illustrations don’t illustrate, don’t offer commentary, don’t prove or refute the genuineness of what is happening; on the whole they’re very subdued, and they stay on their own black-and-white side of the fence. It’s another thing entirely that they mean a great deal here, more than in other places. One could even say that the main participant in Sebald’s prose is not the text, but the picture it surrounds. Sometimes it seems as if all his books were written in order to preserve two or three family photographs (to leave them a place under the sun, to exhibit them under the glass of an extended daycare)—planting a verbal forest in order to hide a paper leaf.

The picture here serves as a tangible guarantee of intangible relationships, something like a keepsake with memento notes; and the reality they confirm relates indirectly to prose’s field of action.

That, by the way, is how this prose itself is arranged—from a certain angle it can also be described as a display window for all kinds of artifacts, readymades, installed there according to the laws of inner necessity and not always open to public observation. Among the various kinds of bookmarks, dates (which look just as if someone had gone back and underlined them with a fingernail), strange coincidences, and rhyming circumstances, every Sebald text contains a certain quantity of other people’s words in various stages of decomposition; they are there on the same sufferance as the photographs—no one knows whose they are, no one knows where they came from. One review of Austerlitz indignantly cites several passages from Kafka that are insidiously dissolved in the narration with no indication of the source. The review’s author is clearly proud of the breadth of his cultural range (not everyone is capable as I am of catching Kafka from a few notes, he suggests); he also feels something like the joy of a law-abiding citizen who has grabbed the hand of a pickpocket. The presence of someone else’s word supposedly compromises the prose and its author, reveals his inability to write independently: to be the composer of his stories, the keeper of speech, the master of the situation. None of this describes Sebald: you can’t call his relationship with reality masterly at all, and this applies to literature all the more.

“I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions,”⁷ he says. The chain of “password—response” that thunders down the centuries like artillery fire (“Again a skald will make a foreign song / And, as his own, he will pronounce it”⁸) is something like help the living provide to the dead in a pledge of mutual rescue. You might say that to repeat what Hebel or Stendhal said is much more important for Sebald than speaking up (sticking out) himself. And indeed: in order to revive the Lethean shades, one must smear their lips with hot blood. Extending someone else’s life with highly potent means of speech—speaking for the dead—is an old-fashioned recipe for overcoming death that’s available to a person who writes. Usually it is applied to other members of the profession, that’s how it works. Sebald is a surprising exception here, a model of natural democratism in his dealings with the dead; he is ready, it seems, to reproduce any voice from under the ground in whatever form possible. Everything comes in handy, a photograph, a newspaper clipping, an oral story, a train ticket: documentary fiction grants the departed something like an extension, a breathing spell before the final plunge into darkness.

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