Walking With Sebald

When I read Carole Angier's recent biography of W.G. Sebald, Speak, Silence, which, while much-feted, is really quite a pointless tome, the one thing that I kept coming back to is the degree to which Sebald the writer is absent from Sebald's novels, despite the fact that, “he,” W.G. Sebald is the main character of all of them, morosely wandering through Antwerp and the East Anglian marshes. We don't get much of Sebald – sure, we get a few biographical descriptions, but even when he talks about himself, he never talks about himself as he is now, but about his childhood on the southern fringe of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and the sense of dislocation from that particular time and place. Really, it's the time and the place that take center stage.

Perhaps this seems a heresy in which an age in which, given the relative anonymity and disconnectedness of digital interactions, one's existence boils down to one's identity markers. How many comments have you seen prefaced with “As a...” online? Despite the fact that all of Sebald's novels are ostensibly rooted in personal experience, he refuses to categorize himself, and lets the absences do the talking – absence of family and close friends, absence of nation, absences of language, memory, sight, thought.

It seemed inevitable, given my trajectory through Borges and Calvino, that I would inevitably arrive at Sebald, but it was only when I was 20 or so that a copy of The Rings of Saturn was lent to me by the woman who had once been the girl down the block.

The plot, such as it is, is impossibly simple – Sebald attempts to walk the length of Suffolk. As he explores landscape, he meditates on the many ways in which his experience is coded in geography, biology, anthropology, and history, particularly the history of the many violences that constitute the story of human civilization.

Which made perfect sense for a grumpypuss like me. And so as I expanded my own horizons, Sebald's ghost became more apparent.

Consider:

Late last year I was walking outside the old Bohemian town of Aussig (Usti nad Lobem since 1945), in one of those anonymous stretches of European semi-countryside, with steel I-beams littering the marginal ways and 1960s panelak apartments abutting the rye fields, an occasional beer sign referencing the peasant idyll, a soft autumn rain falling along the Elbe.

And yet as I approached the star fortress at the end of the road, I felt a sudden spasm in my right leg, as if the very ground beneath me was bound to give out, and despite the pain, I persisted forward through the vacant streets of the garrison, its sides lined with brick ramparts, the homes once occupied by Jews in their last ghetto before deportation to points north and east now occupied by Czechs with dented Volkswagen hatchbacks, waves of pain radiating through my shin muscles as I traced the brick-lined tunnels of the fortress.

I stumbled back into the town square, my leg in agony, to find a little shop with the word “coffee” written out in little red light bulbs, to get a desultory brown Americano and some little pastries spread with jam made from aronia berries, a small and peculiar berry with a deep and astringent taste reminiscent of ruby port, native to the Eastern woodlands of North America and yet transplanted and more popular here in the Slavic forests, yet recently introduced into commercial agriculture in the boggy lands of Northern Iowa, the vicinity in which Antonin Dvorak, himself a son of the nearby Melnik District, composed his New World Symphony – another of the many ways in which the route of the Cedar River mirrors that of the Moldau.

This would be a Sebaldian moment regardless. What I had forogtten was that Sebald's Jacques Austerlitz had walked this same path, on his way to the garrison town of Theriesenstadt, built by Empress Maria Theresa in the 18^th Century around a star fortress, a specialty of Austerlitz's, and he had walked this road twice, first as a child and then as a man retracing his own paths. And yet I had somehow forgotten the location of this critical journey, despite my having remembered the character of Jacques Austerlitz as an expert in the history of the star fortress, his childhood during the ghettoization processes, and his visit to the spa town of Marienbad, his ice cream stiffened with potato starch remaining unmelted. The reason for this lapse in memory remained uncertain – I didn't even think about it until later that night in my hotel room in Prague.

And that moment, the sudden spasms of agony in my leg. It seemed remarkable to me that Sebald's other novels are marked by moments of intense physical distress, the hospital stay in The Rings of Saturn, the sudden attack of blindness in Vertigo. Is it Sebald's ghost? Or is it some unspoken universal pattern of physical pain and psychic gloom, the transformation of oneself into a lens?

So what can I say about the artist who called me the other day from the cliffsides of Nice, asking me what I knew about star fortresses?