
A few more.
Reading. Music practice. A few long walks. And, if the bike shop calls back soon, a ride out to the conservation area.
While in Ann Arbor, I visited two bookstores: a favorite, Literati Bookstore, and someplace new, Schuler Books. My haul is pictured above.
My birthday usually brings a number of new books to my house;
I think one or two more boxes are due.
Today after our walk to the lake, we readied the bikes for the first ride of the season — maybe tomorrow? Apart from that, my day comprised the remaining weekly chores, a terrific meal, and reading.
It’s late, but I’m about to begin a short practice session with a focus on my current étude, the allegro on page 13 of Robert Cavally’s Melodious and Progressive Studies from Andersen, Gariboldi, Koehler, and Terschak for Flute, Book 2. Since January, I’ve worked on a number of short solo pieces by French composers, including the delightful “March of the Jolly Fellows” (Henri Gagnebin). I “retreated” to (somewhat) less challenging solo selections because this semester’s duet work was demanding, as were the selections for band. But my teacher has announced that after Fauré’s “Après un rêve” and Debussy’s “Arabesque No. 1,” I will begin preparing a (*gulp*) concerto. Tonight it’s the Fauré, though, and continuing work on the Mozart duet.
In the readerly restlessness that has followed the conclusion of Don Quixote, I finished All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me (Patrick Bringley; 2023) and Project Hail Mary (Andrew Weir; 2021). While visiting my daughters last week, I started reading Lessons in Chemistry (Bonnie Garmus; 2022), but I haven’t touched it since returning home. Nothing is “sticking” right now, which is fine. The weather has finally turned, so garden and yard work await me; I’ve already mowed and trimmed several times. May and September are generally the months I schedule healthcare appointments. And the spring semester is concluding, so I’m finishing up some pieces in my music lessons and choosing projects for the summer months, as well as preparing to play two graduation concerts with the community band.
While walking, I have been listening to the bird chorus and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a Open Yale Courses program comprising twenty-four lectures delivered by Professor Roberto González Echevarría.
If Don Quixote truly regains his sanity (as opposed to, say, capitulating to the machinations of those around him), has it anything to do with the fact that in succumbing to his exhaustion and illness, he finally sleeps? Yes, this is fiction, but if we are still, quixotically, seeking the reason for his madness, perhaps the chief clue appears on page 21: “In short our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up causing him to lose his mind” (emphasis added). Over the course of the novel, Don Quixote continues to spend little time sleeping. Even when he is abed nursing wounds, he frets, he dwells, he thinks and rethinks. An obsession with chivalric romances may not be healthy, but contemporary readers know that the perils of sleep-deficiency include deleterious physical, psychological, and neurological effects. Perhaps Cervantes knew, too. In this week’s reading, at the beginning of Chapter LXX, Sancho knows his sleep will be disturbed if he shares a room with his agitated master. Sure enough, once they have retired, the knight plies him with questions about “the strangest and most remarkable event to befall Don Quixote in the entire course of this great history” (p. 907). Before that, Chapter LXVIII opens with the observation that Don Quixote’s first sleep never yields to his second, “unlike Sancho, who never had a second sleep because his sleep lasted from nightfall until morning, proving he had a strong constitution and few cares” (p. 902). Later Sancho says:
“I only understand that while I’m sleeping I have no fear, or hope, or trouble, or glory; blessed be whoever invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thought, the food that satisfies hunger, the water that quenches thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that cools down ardor, and, finally, the general coin with which all things are bought, the scale and balance that make the shepherd equal to the king, and the simple man equal to the wise. There is only one defect in sleep, or so I’ve heard, and it is that it resembles death, for there is very little difference between a man who is sleeping and a man who is dead” (p. 903; emphasis added).
As the novel hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion, the melancholic, low-spirited knight returns to his village and home and finally sleeps “more than six hours at a stretch, as they say, so long that his housekeeper and his niece thought he would never open his eyes again” (p. 935). When he awakens, his “judgment is restored, free and clear of the dark shadows of ignorance imposed on it by [his] grievous and constant reading of detestable books of chivalry” (p. 935).
At the beginning of Part II, we are presented with “a Don Quixote who is, at the end, dead and buried, so that no one will dare tell more tales about him, for the ones told in the past are enough” (p. 458), so passages such as, “‘There is a remedy for everything but death,’ responded Don Quixote” (p. 884), and the verses the knight sings “to the sound of his own sighs” (p. 905) do not foreshadow so much as remind us – emphatically –that we already know how this will end.* Restored to himself by sleep, Alonso Quixano the Good renounces his obsession and calls his friends and family to his side. And in the end, the hasty and heavily foreshadowed death leaves this reader dissatisfied. I’m with Sancho: “[T]he greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him or any other hands ending his life except those of melancholy” (p. 937).
Marginalia
On page 876: “Sancho’s wingless flight” mirrors the ignominy of the blanket-bouncing incident. Had time permitted, I would have recorded more of the symmetries and similarities that the structures of the novel’s two parts share.
On page 889: “‘Oh, Señor,’ said Don Antonio, ‘may God forgive you for the harm you have done to the entire world in wishing to restore the sanity of the most amusing madman in it! Don’t you see, Señor, that the benefit caused by the insanity of Don Quixote cannot be as great as the pleasure produced by his madness?’” I would add, restoration of his sanity apparently means death.
On the same page I couldn’t help but mark “this true history.” Over the course of these fourteen weeks, I have not resolved what, precisely, we are to make of the repetition of “true” and “truth.”
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* Because I read the work in translation, I am uncertain if the brilliant pun that concludes the song is intentional: “Mine is a novel state: I go on living, and constantly die.” Just. Brilliant.
An introduction of sorts
If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you know I am drawn to Anselm Kiefer’s extraordinary painting Midgard. Last year, when I read The Emigrants for the first time, I connected the ways in which W.G. Sebald’s prose moved me to the ways in which Midgard acts on my imagination; both works are now housed in the same room in my imagination.
Not one to be content with simply sensing the artistic pairing, though, I poked around a bit. Plenty on this topic can be found in academic article databases, but here’s something succinct from The Nation (August 2016):
“The link between artistic creation and failure is intimate in the best of cases, but nowhere is this sense of inadequacy more acute than in literature or art about the Holocaust, which erects, by its own lights, a series of failed monuments to an event that is fundamentally illegible. To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. In this way, acts of aestheticization are exercises in misrepresentation, requiring us to arrange neutral resources into artificially beautiful or meaningful configurations. But can we misrepresent without also misleading, mangling? These questions rightfully obsess a generation of postwar German-language writers and artists, most notably the author W.G. Sebald, who was born in 1944 in Bavaria and died in the UK in 2001, and the visual artist Anselm Kiefer, born one year later in the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg, and since 1992 a resident of France.” [Emphasis added]
Naturally, I then spent more time with Kiefer’s work. If you’re interested in how artistic expressions can intersect, give Anselm Kiefer a google. Does his work evoke in you the same unease Sebald’s prose does?
Speaking of unease, in many of the reading groups in which I have participated in the last few years, we have been exhorted to focus exclusively on the text we share. I hear that, but as a former teacher and as an engaged reader, I can also see numerous shortcomings in such a reading, not the least of which would be the disadvantages of a lack of context. If I were in the middle of a deserted island and The Emigrants fell from the sky and thwocked me in the head, presuming I knew enough of the world, I could glean a great deal from the text alone. But wouldn’t a bit of a frame enrich the reading? For example, doesn’t the information from The Nation article quoted above provide helpful context?
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It has been suggested that what writers and artists say about their own work — in interviews, for example, or autobiographies – is largely unreliable, primarily because much of their “interpretation” is simply storytelling (or, in the case of, say, Ernest Hemingway, mythologizing) or reinterpreting past work to dovetail current efforts. In her biography of Sebald (Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald, 2022), Carol Angier dismantles many of the lies Sebald perpetrated stories Sebald told not only about his own life but about the sources of his work — and the latter in particular is kind of a big deal. Authors are invariably asked some version of, “Where do you get your ideas?” Sebald was (beyond) slippery in his answers, and simply skimming a few articles (here, here, and here) provides some clues as to why. Were these stories his to tell?
Context has its merits.
What follows next are a few questions that may prove helpful in a discussion of The Emigrants. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
What do we make of the epigraphs? They’re unattributed and enigmatic.
DR HENRY SELWYN: “And the last remnants memory destroys” (Doesn’t memory preserve?)
PAUL BEREYTER: “There is a mist that no eye can dispel” (Blindness, memory, trauma?)
AMBROS ADELWARTH: “My field of corn is but a crop of tears” (Trauma?)
MAX FERBER: “They come when night falls to search for life” (Ghosts? Memories? Dreams?)
What is the purpose of the photographs? Typically, we consider photographs “evidence” or “fact.” (Apparently, a line of philosophical inquiry disputes this, which is cool, but I am talking about our general experience of physical photographs. After all, when someone shares a school photo of her granddaughter, we don’t ordinarily enter into a discussion about the truth-value of representational photography.) The inclusion of photos in works of non-fiction tends to lend credibility and truth to the work because photos are customarily the fruits of research: They are “proof.”
But The Emigrants is a work of fiction. So what’s with the photographs? More, what is with their quality? Yes, quality. Many are fuzzy, hard to see. A publisher would make every effort to improve or enhance the reproducibility of images in a text, so the lack of clarity is certainly by design. Look at the images on pp. 7, 27, and 49, or on pp. 158, 159, and 168, for example. You need to work hard to discern the subject. More, the images are uncaptioned. Grab a few books from your shelves and look at the photos and images. If you find one that fails to caption (and credit) those photos and images, either directly on that page or in a section collecting that information, let me know.
Many readers simply ignore photos, but the photos’ inclusion alone would still inform such readers’ experience of the text. Why? As I said above, we consider photographs to be evidence, fact, truth.
So, what is the point of the photos in The Emigrants? And if the point is to lend a fictional narrative a sense of truth, how do we reconcile the fact that this is clearly a work about the Holocaust? And consider all of this while rereading the section in Max Ferber in which Uncle Leo asserts that the photo of the book burning on the Residenzplatz in Würzburg is a forgery (p. 1830: “In other words, the photographic document in the paper was a fake. And just as that document was a fake, said Uncle, as if his discovery were the one vital proof, so too everything else has been a fake, from the very start.” If we use photos to signal truth, don’t faked or forged photos deny truth?
Finally, note that The Emigrants concludes with an extended meditation on pictures from an exhibition the narrator of the Ferber section saw in Frankfurt (pp. 235-237): “color photographs, tinted with a greenish-blue or reddish-brown.”
Who is the narrator of The Emigrants? Is it the same person in all four sections? Is the narrator a stand-in for Sebald, or is something more complicated occurring? In the margin of p. 75, I wrote, “Oral histories,” which made me think of singers in the Iliad and the Odyssey and the way in which stories are passed in an oral tradition. Passages to consider:
From Bereyter, p. 29: “And so, belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was life….” Why? The writer’s instinct? This whole page is sort of depressing, right? It’s as if the narrator is colluding in Paul’s destruction. He (the narrator) is moved to empathy and connection “belatedly” and with the object of parlaying it into a story, his story. His medium is others’ pain, trauma.
Also on that page: “It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.” And with that we are introduced to a narrator who thinks there is a “rightful” trespass of someone else’s story.
And on p. 224, this: “[A]nd now as I write these lines, it feels as if I had lost her, and as if I could not get over the loss.” So. Let’s revisit the question from the piece I linked above: Can one misrepresent without also misleading, mangling?
What is this work saying about nature? From Selwyn, p. 7: “Nature itself was groaning and collapsing beneath the burden we placed upon it.” It seems as if this is one of Sebald’s chief themes – nature brutalized by man (e.g., Manchester and industrialization in Max Ferber); nature reasserting itself amid the ruins of man’s architecture (the hospital in Ambros Adelwarth); nature as largely inscrutable. Passages to consider:
From Bereyter, p. 45: “… [O]n this occasion, Paul, in a conjecture she felt to be most daring, had linked the bourgeois concept of Utopia and order, as expressed in the designs and buildings of Nicolas Ledoux, with the progressive destruction of natural life.”
From Adelwarth, p. 110: “… I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective.” Dr Abramsky lives on the decaying site of the hospital; nature is reclaiming the horror man built. (Side note: Why might the narrator know that these things are merely a question of perspective?)
p. 137: “Decay, nothing but decay, marasmus, and emptiness. Not a sign of any business of industry.”
p. 140: “Cosmo says repeatedly that he is horrified by the city.”
From Max Ferber, p. 150: “… a city spread across a thousand square kilometres, built of countless bricks and inhabited by millions of souls, dead and alive.”
p. 151: “One might have supposed that the city had long since been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum.”
p. 156: “On those wanderings, when winter light flooded the deserted streets and squares for the few hours of real daylight, I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see.” Perhaps this will interest no one but me, but does the “its” in that perfect if bleak sentence refer to the city or industrialization? How well it works as either!
Similarly, what is this work saying about trauma and despair? Passages to consider:
From Selwyn, p. 21 (Selwyn is speaking): “But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul.” __ and __ “The years of the second war, and the decades after, were a blinding bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to.”
From Selwyn, p. 23 (the narrator is speaking): “But certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.” __ and __ “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found on the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”
From Bereyter, p. 42: Describing Paul as “… desolation itself.”
p. 44: “… Paul, who was almost consumed by the loneliness within him….”
p. 55: “… and doubtless saw more than any heart or eye can bear.”
p. 58: “Paul copied out hundreds of pages, mostly in Gabelsberg shorthand because otherwise he would not have been able to write fast enough, and time and again one comes across stories of suicide. It seemed to me, said Mme Landau, handing me the black oilcloth books, as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S.”
p. 61: “It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.”
From Adelwarth, p. 99: “At that time he had no interest in talking about the past at all.” (This section opens with depiction upon depiction of sorrow and loss in his extended family.)
p. 102: “At any rate, the more Uncle Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became.”
p. 111: Dr Abramsky describes Adelwarth: “Nonetheless, even when he was simply standing at the window looking out he always gave the impression of being filled with some appalling grief. I do not think, said Dr Abramsky, that I have ever met a more melancholy person than your great-uncle; every casual utterance, every gesture, his entire deportment (he held himself erect until the end), was tantamount to a constant pleading for leave of absence.”
p. 113: Dr. Abramsky on Adelwarth: “… [T]hat docility, as I was already beginning to suspect, was in fact due simply to your great-uncle’s longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.”
From Max Ferber, p. 161: “There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.”
p. 170: Max Ferber is speaking: “… I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced – consciousness – and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next.”
p. 191: “Naturally, I took steps, consciously or unconsciously, to keep at bay thoughts of my parents’ sufferings and of my own misfortune, and no doubt I succeeded sometimes in maintaining a certain equability by my self-imposed seclusion; but the fact is that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years.”
What is Sebald saying about memory (which is, of course, inextricably linked to any discussion of trauma and despair)? Passages to consider:
From Selwyn, p. 17: “Kaspar, to the delight of his mentor, was distinguishing for the first time between dream and reality, beginning his account with the words: I was in a dream, and in my dream I saw the Caucasus.”
From Bereyter, p. 50: “Do you know, she said on one of my visits to Yverdon, the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget, is nothing more than the other side of the perfidious way in which Schöferle, who ran a coffee house in S, informed Paul’s mother Thekla, who had been on stage for some time in Nuremberg, that the presence of a lady who was married to a half Jew might be embarrassing to his respectable clientele….”
p. 51: “He said that he could see things with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within in him.”
p. 63: “The disquiet I experienced because of that momentary failure to see what was meant – I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death – lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight.”
From Adelwarth, p. 100: “… Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.”
p. 145: “Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the crowds.” (Consider this powerful observation in light of the work Uncle Kasimir did (p. 85). “Have you got a head for heights?”)
From Max Ferber, p. 181: “Ferber commented that, purely in terms of time, I was now as far removed from Germany as he had been in 1966; but time, he went on, is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul. There is neither a past nor a future. At least, not for me. The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. When I think of Germany, it feels as if there were some kind of insanity lodged in my head. Probably the reason why I have never been to Germany again is that I am afraid to find that this insanity really exists.”
p. 207: In Luisa’s memoir: “Only when you hold your own breath do they return from death to life, only then does time begin to pass again. Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay’s feather in her hand?”
p. 225: “…I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves.”
What did you make of the work’s editorial style and the appearance of the pages? Did you notice the length of the paragraphs? Their arbitrary divisions or lack thereof (e.g., the bottom of p. 176)? The unusual punctuation breaks (e.g., the em dashes on pp. 38 and 220, which could have simply been paragraph breaks)? I wonder if the appearance or form of the pages – the lengthy paragraphs, the enigmatic punctuation “pauses,” the uncaptioned, blurry images – is meant to convey the shape of memory and/or dream, which would not be as, for lack of better words, rigid or strictly shaped as a lived event. Did you also notice that nothing is quoted? Long passages of people telling the narrator stories occur sans quotation marks. Why? What effect does that produce?
Did you notice the nods to Nabakov? See. pp. 16, 43, 104. It is possible that most of the references to men and butterflies regard Nabakov (e.g., pp. 115, 174, 214).
Other notes and questions
After a week of sun and temperatures in the seventies and eighties, we were reminded afresh of the fickle nature of spring on the prairie when we awoke to an inch of snow and sidewalks slippery enough to end our morning walk before it began. That’s all right. Tomorrow night I will lead a book discussion on W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, so I spent the time editing my notes and then shaping them into an entry I could post here.