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.
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.
2.
But where is the author himself, and where does he speak from? He can only tell other people’s stories: his own story refuses to take on external logic, presenting instead bubbly chains of coincidences and rhymes and an incomplete chronicle of convulsive traveling. He is intentionally absent in his own text (in that same article on Walser where everything or almost everything is about himself, he talks in passing about how the main thing gets intentionally crossed out in the process of writing). At times he is suddenly reflected in mirrors: never completely enough, always with the constrained sharpness of a fragment. “In Milan, where I had some strange adventures fifteen years ago,” he says during the story of someone else’s Italian travels, but the tail of his own story, after it poked out, will never be completely developed, “as we sometimes feel in dreams” where “the dead, the living and the still unborn come together on the same plane.”9