The following comment made by Amir Eshel presents us with a good place to start in working out what it is that makes the prose of W. G. Sebald so peculiar:
Sebald’s work stands out not only because, as is often noted, it thematizes ‘remembrance and responsibility’ vis-à-vis the German past, but rather because of its poetics of suspension: a poetics that suspends notions of chronology, succession, comprehension, and closure—a poetics that rather than depicting and commenting on the historical event in time, constitutes an event, becomes the writing of a different, literary time. (Eshel, 2003: 74)
Although what constitutes this distinction between "depiction and commenting" and "poetics," and similarly, what Eshel might mean here by "literary time," presents us with difficult questions, we nonetheless have something of a focus; Sebald is a writer of history attentive to poetics and temporarily, and someone for whom the act of writing is decisive in the creation of a history. Eshel's quotation is made in relation to Sebald's final, and arguably most accomplished work of prose, Austerltiz, however, it is the contention of the present thesis that such a comment is appropriate to either of his three earlier works: Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn.
Russell Kilbounre, another eminent Sebald critic, also makes a remark that is helpful in locating one of the defining features of Sebald's prose: “Like a lens shifting in and out of focus, the narrative point of view in Sebald oscillates continuously between affective immersion or embededdness and distanced visual mastery.” (Kilbourne, 2007: 155) We might even think that the "literary time," or "poetics of suspension" that Eshel talks of is created through this oscillatory shifting. An extension of Kilbourne's remark might be to suggest that Sebald situates the clear and distinct perception, with which we associate vision, in the thickness of the body and its unseen amplification of the environment; a kind of perception where things are more difficult to differentiate, but nonetheless felt to be of great consequence.
There is an episode in the second chapter of Sebald's first prose work, Vertigo, that characterises the contrast Kilbourne names. The narrator of this chapter, who suffers bouts of vertigo throughout, is in a hotel in Limone, a town in northern Italy, engaged in the act of writerly composition: “I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order.” (Vertigo, 94) Whilst the narrator writes he is distracted by the presence of the hotel proprietress, Luciana Michelotti, with whom he exhanges suggestive glances: "Luciana, at work behind the bar, threw me repeated sideways glances," (94); "Often she would stand beside me for a while, making little conversation, her eyes wandering over the pages." (94);
More and more freuqently I felt impelled to look over towards her, and whenever our eyes met she laughed as if at some silly inadvertance. On the wall behind the bar, between the colourful, shiny rows of spirits bottles, there was a large mirror, so I was able to watch both Luciana and her reflection, which gave me a curious satisfaction. (95)
Here we have exemplified the "distanced visual mastery" as identified by Kilbourne. The surrounds in which the narrator sits to work on his story are defined by the distance between, and the frequency of glances and reflections. Rather than holding forth on the specifics of his attraction, the narrator merely mentions a "curious satisfaction"; he feels "impelled to look" yet the reason for looking concides with more looking. Two pages later, Luciana still lingers, the narrator continues to work on his story. The narrator thinks that he feels "her hand on (his) shoulder" (97) and remarks:
It occurred to me how few and far between in my life were the moments when I had been touched in this way by a woman with whom I was barely acquainted, and thinking back, it seemed to me that about such unwonted gestures there had always been something disembodied and ghoulish, something that went quite through me! (Vertigo, 97)
This hypersensitivity to touch, characterised by ghostly feelings, both "disembodied" and felt deep within the body (as the expression "went quite through me" suggests), is in contrast to the appreciative looking earlier in the episode, which, as I have already mentioned, is determined by the spatial arrangement in which the percipient is situated; the illuminated distance that vision can measure and entertain. As soon as he is reminded of the nearness of his body the narrator becomes bodily confused.
As is typical of Sebald, this episode is followed by another in which a synonymous experience is recounted. This time the narrator describes his visit to "the darkened consulting room of a Manchester optometrist" (97): “gazing through the lenses inserted into those strange eye-test frames at the letters in the illuminated box, which were clear in focus one moment, completely blurred the next.” (Vertigo, 97)
The narrator's vision, or more broadly, point of view, is once again defined by an alteration in focus from the distinct to the hazy. He notes the presence of the Chinese optician Susi Ahoi:
Time and time again she adjusted the heavy frame, and once touched my temples, which as so often were throbbing with pain, with her fingertips, for rather longer than was necessary, I thought, though it was probably only in order to position my head better. Luciana's hand, which surely rested on my shoulder unintentionally if it did so at all, as she leaned to take the espresso cup and the ashtray from the table, had a similar effect on me, and as on that distant occasion in Manchester I now suddenly saw everything out of focus, as if through lenses not made for my eyes. (97-8)
There seems a very deliberate emphasis here on the contrast between the narrator's optical capacity and the unseen "throbbing(s)" of the body. What's more, vision itself is both subject to the body's fluctuations, and situated outside the body, as implicated in various devices designed to determine its worth on fallibility/ accuracy scale. The "unwonted" touches of Luciana and Susi result in the narrator perceiving things more dimly, perceiving things, we might say, through the body's felt awareness, which isn't so apt to determine the distance between things as a matter of static space.
Such a contrast is maintained throughout Vertigo. The narrator, and the protagonists of chapters I and III (Beyle, and Dr K.), move between seeing things in detail, as spatially distinct, static scenes, and feeling things more dimly, and more intimately through their variously susceptible body's. The narrator even says at one point in chapter II: “It is many years now since the paintings of Pisanello instilled in me the desire to forfeit everything except my sense of vision.” (72-3) Despite this perverse desire the narrator is accompanied everywhere he goes by the physiological process that makes such vision possible.
In a reading of Vertigo that draws from both physiology and semiotics, Massimo Leone notes:
equilibrium, such as we would associate with the average human body, cannot and must not be perceived. This means that sensing one’s own equilibrium only ever happens negatively, as an absence, as a lost property of the body. (Leone, 2004: 92)
Leone goes on to suggest this has two significant consequences, firstly, that “what is called equilibrium is nothing but a zero degree awareness of the body in a given space.” (92) And secondly, vertigo might thereby be considered something actively sought, “an occasion (or voluntary strategy) through which the human body seeks to develop a full awareness of itself.” (92) Leone compares such a level of awareness to a state of trance (93). What I'd like to consider is what Leone's comments, with regards to seeking out an intensified and perhaps more vague awareness of one's self (although, is it really 'the self' we are trying to get at here?), have to do with the idea of "literary time" or "poetics of suspension" mentioned by Eshel at the beginning of this piece: How does Sebald's attentiveness to the periodic as dimly defined lead to an experience of reading that results in us comprehending his work in a manner that involves our bodies, or involves a kind of comprehension that tends to be forgotten in efforts to be comprehensible? Indeed, the comparison with a trance state is apt in this context, not only in that varieties fringe consciousness are referred to regularly throughout Sebald's four works of prose fiction, but more importantly, his work in some sense reproduces what it feels like to be in a trance. Take the following comment from Geoff Dyer for example: "Sebald’s hypnotic prose lulls you into tranced submission, a kind of stupor that is also a state of heightened attention." (Dyer, 2001: 18-21) When the narrator is referring to his trip to the optometrist in the above example, when he feels that strange sense of disembodied haunting at Luciana's touch -- disembodied not in the sense that he lacks a body, but in the sense that the boundaries between his body as 'belonging' and the surrounds as 'not belonging' are thrown into doubt -- we not only experience these events as themes at the level of story (as events referred to), we experience them as consistent with the poiesis Sebald develops over the course of his narratives as a whole; a poiesis, or literary event that, as Kilbourne suggests, is a matter of oscillatory shifts, or contrasts between different points of view. Importantly, this contrast is not evoked as an absolute division between say, embeddedness and distance (many synonyms could be used here), but instead as a continuum, and all the more inhabitable for it being so.
So in what exactly does this poetics consist? How does its relation to temporality bear out with the requirements of narrative, and of historical informativeness? I will now look more closely at chapter I of Vertigo for some examples. I am going to focus on the sentence as a unit, and on Sebald's ability to articulate the confused feeling of ceaselessly being part of an imperceptible flux, through his use of tense, syntax, and suggestive expressions to do with temporality and recurrence. I would also like to keep in mind what relation vision and the body, or the seen and the unseen, have with such sentences, specifically, the different kinds of perception they subtend with regards to our experience of time.
The first chapter of Vertigo, "Beyle, or Love Is a Madness Most Discreet," confronts questions to do with perception, memory, authorial perspective, and what relation all these things have to do with writing -- not simply writing in the literary sense either, but more generically as trace, as recurrence, as datum, as mark. Beyle, the chapter's protagonist, is Sebald's reanimation of H. M. B. Stendhal, author most famous for his novels, 'The Charterhouse of Parma,' and 'The Red and The Black'. Sebald, however, chooses not to focus on Stendhal's literary catalogue, and rather sticks to the more difficult to classify works, The Life of Henri Brulard, ostensibly a work of autobiographical non-fiction, accompanied with strange little maps and sketches setting out perspectives, and On Love, a metaphysical treatise on the topic of love, which remains a most unusual piece of writing. Sebald's characterisation of Stendhal as Beyle is also coloured by a profound ambivalence; without doubt Sebald in some sense reveres the author for his being ahead of his time in confronting issues to do with authorial authenticity: "The notes in which the 53-year old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection." (Vertigo, 5) And yet, "Beyle, or Love Is a Madness Most Discreet" is for the most part an evocation of Beyle's sexual exploits, and they are not portrayed in a flattering manner: "And once fully apparelled in the uniform of a dragoon, this seventeen-and-a-half-year-old went around for days on end with an erection, before he finally dared disburden himself of the virginity he had bought with him from Paris." (11) Sebald has very specific historico-theoretical reasons for making the condition of Beyle's libido a matter of visible concern. He wants, as is evident throughout the chapter, to show the way Beyle's body, more exactly his health, is the subject of a particular type of scrutiny affected by the discourses, products, and institutions of medical science, and more broadly of European Modernity then (during Stendhal's life-time) in full, revolutionary swing. (fn. Foucault and Long)
However, my interests at this point relate to Sebald's poetics and the way Beyle's perspective, constituted as it is by the past's inheritance in the present, is expressed as both 'nebulous' and 'vectorial'—two words to which I hope to give theoretical weight.
Beyle is introduced as a character agitated by his adolescence, a complex of departure and arrival, and is desperate to fill the mature figure he believes to wait in the future:
"Seventeen year old at the time, he could now see before him the end of his profoundly detested childhood and adolescence and, with some enthusiasm, was embarking on a career in the armed services which was to take him the length and breadth of Europe." (Vertigo, 4-5)
Whilst this expression might give the impression that Beyle is departing the period of transition with which adolescence is synonymous, instead he continues, over the course of the chapter, to be implicated in the same periodic confusion. In confrontation with this quote we might ask: How does the past manifest? How might we express our experience of it? Sebald seems to suggest one trajectory, and then have this fold back on itself until we're not sure which direction we're moving, or what direction is. Different temporal perspectives are rapidly accumulated and blurred together. “Seventeen years,” as Sebald describes it, is immediately complicated with other periods, always “at the time,” which is to say, constituted by another time that has already moved on. One might rightly wonder how a character would “see before” them, “the end” of something from which they are emerging? The primary mode of perception in which Beyle is engaged is this feeling of the present as having been elsewhere, and of the past as determining in part the “length and breadth” of what is to come.
Like the "ghoulish" feeling of disembodied embodiment that the narrator feels at the touch of Susi Ahoi and Luciana Michelotti in the second chapter, what we can presume Beyle to be sensing here is a ceaseless, largely impersonal feeling of things getting out of hand, the insistent presence of something we don't see, something imperceptible that surrounds us, something like the "specific gravity" (Vertigo, 157) of which the Old General speaks in chapter III.
In an article that interprets Sebald's work as continuing in the tradition of British Romanticism, James Chandler selects another similarly constructed sentence from the first chapter of Vertigo:
Later, thinking back to that September day on the field of Marengo, it often seemed to Beyle as if he had foreseen the years which lay ahead, all the campaigns and disasters, even the fall and exile of Napoleon, and as if he had realised then that he would not find his fortune in the army. At all events, it was in the autumn that he resolved to become the greatest writer of all time. (Sebald, cited in Chandler, 2003: 246)
Chandler remarks—and he is referring both to this specific quotation and to the chapter since its beginning:
In the space of a few pages Sebald has almost imperceptibly complicated the configuration of time and tense underlying that initial simple declaration about Napoleon's "historic" 1801 crossing of the Great St. Bernard pass. And as with the account of the visit to the Marengo battlefield, the effect of this complication is as much a matter of making the moment live as it is of rendering it ghostly. (Chandler, 2003: 246)
Chandler has hit on something crucial here with regards to the "poetics of suspension," or "literary time" identified by Eshel. He notes that the vertigo referred to in the book's title is both thematised in Beyle's various confrontations with the historically catastrophic (which I will refer to soon), and equally, is a "function of the narrative rhetoric" (Chandler, 2003: 245) that Sebald employs to construe such confrontations, and more generally to give the reader a feeling that time, rather than being experienced as a straight forward evolution or succession of moments, spreads and decays, consumes itself, and is subject to unforeseen obliteration, pockmarks and renewals.
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As I mentioned earlier, the past, present, and future, exist for Sebald in a 'vectorial' relationship of transference, this is explicated in both the tense structure of his sentences, as shown by Chandler, and in his literary project as a whole. We might say that Sebald's metaphysics argues for a past that doesn't go away, that can't be known simply as either alive or dead, that regularly overwhelms us, or compels us to lose sight of things. By way of an interlude I would like to appeal to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and what he has to say about the presence of the past in every occasion -- the urstoff, or primary constituent of all we experience is named by Whitehead as an "actual occasion," or "actual entity," which in his earlier philosophy is synonymous with an "event" (fn. Science and The Modern World). Whitehead's metaphysics, as it is outlined most extensively in Process and Reality is peculiar by modern standards in that it attempts to throw light on the general principles that underpin modern science, most specifically modern physics. Traditionally this is the task of the metaphysicist, which since the successes and rapid technological advancements of modern science on the one hand, and philosophy practiced as a kind of criticism on the other, has been regarded as particularly unfashionable, even archaic, preoccupation. As Whitehead spent much of his earlier academic career studying mathematics, physics, and logic, this was an endeavour for which he was suitably well-equipped. Keith Robinson, in his introduction to the recently published Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, draws attention to the Whitehead's somewhat anomalous, and poorly received efforts: