Hooray! James Wood is back. He has an excellent piece in
this week’s issue. Titled “The Other Side of Silence,” it’s a consideration of
W. G. Sebald’s fiction. It focuses on an unlikely topic – Sebald’s comedy. As
Wood notes in his piece, comedy isn’t usually associated with Sebald. When I
think of Sebald’s novels, I think of death. But in “The Other Side of Silence,”
Wood suggests that Sebald’s fiction has “an eccentric playfulness.” He provides
several examples, including one from The
Emigrants involving a “teas-maid,” which Wood describes as “an ungainly
machine, popular at the time, that contained a clock and an electric kettle; it
could wake you up with morning tea.” Wood writes, “Sebald approaches this cozy
English object with mock-solemn gingerliness, as if he were an anthropologist
presenting one of his exhibits.” I’d completely forgotten about this scene. But
now that Wood has drawn my attention to it, I can see a mild, eccentric sort of
humor in it. The same applies to his other examples of Sebald’s comedy.
I like the way Wood segues from Sebald’s comedy to Sebald’s
use of photographs. He says, “The
playful side of Sebald’s originality made him a consumingly interesting and
unpredictable artificer.” This leads into a fascinating discussion of the way
Sebald uses photographs in his novels. Wood says,
Few writers have used photographs in quite the way Sebald
does, scattering them, without captions, throughout the text, so that the
reader can’t be sure, exactly, how the writing and the photographs relate to
each other, or, indeed, whether the photographs disclose what they purport to.
Brilliantly, Wood connects Sebald’s Austerlitz photos with what he says is Austerlitz’s central theme – retrieval. He writes that the effort
of retrieval can be felt “whenever we stare at one of Sebald’s dusky,
uncaptioned photographs, and it is not coincidental that photography plays the
largest role in the two Sebald books that deal centrally with the Holocaust, The Emigrants and Austerlitz.”
Referring to Austerlitz,
Wood writes,
What does it mean to stare at a photograph of a little boy
who is “supposed” to be Jacques Austerlitz, when “Jacques Austerlitz” is
nothing more than a fictional character invented by W. G. Sebald? Who is the
actual boy who stares at us from the cover of this novel? We will probably never
know. It is indeed an eerie photograph, and Sebald makes Austerlitz say of it:
I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare, level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it was. . . . I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.
The boy does seem to be demanding something from us, and I
imagine that this is why, when Sebald came across the photograph, he chose it.
Presumably, he found it in a box of old postcards and snapshots, in one of the
antique shops he enjoyed rummaging through. In 2011, while working on an
introduction to “Austerlitz,” I had a chance to examine the Sebald
archive—manuscripts, old photographs, letters, and the like—at the Deutsches
Literaturarchiv, in Marbach am Neckar, and there I found the postcard that
bears the boy’s image. Eager for a “clue,” I turned it over. On the reverse
side, there was nothing more than the name of an English town and a price,
written in ink: “Stockport: 30p.”
Amazing! The origin of Austerlitz
is sourced in the image on this found postcard. In the novel, Jacques
Austerlitz is rescued by the
Kindertransport; he averts the misfortune lying ahead of him. Of Sebald’s writing,
Wood says, “What animates his project is the task of saving the dead,
retrieving them through representation.” I value this observation immensely.
For me, it’s one of art’s raisons
d'être.
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