Against Sebaldian Melancholy

coming to terms with a method, a mood, and a form-of-life

In the quarter-century since W.G. Sebald’s death, his books have risen from cult status in the Anglophone world to the highest ranks of our contemporary canon, and it would not be outrageous to claim that “the Sebaldian” has become the predominant mode in which “serious literary fiction” is written today. Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Geoff Dyer, Garth Greenwell, Benjamin Labatut and so many others are almost unthinkable without him. He’s never been a runaway best-seller like Franzen or Ferrante, but a glance at recent catalogues from the prestige imprints of the Big Five—not to mention the websites of the top indie presses—reminds us of what Brian Eno once said about the Velvet Underground: They didn’t sell many records, but all the kids who bought one went out and started a band. It seems like everyone who reads even a few paragraphs of Austerlitz or The Rings of Saturn writes a novel, or tries to.

Sebald’s “essayistic semi-fictions”—or so they were once called by his friend Michael Hamburger, and the label stuck—have served as a template for our most recent generation of writers just as the respective work of Balzac, Joyce, and Pynchon did for their own. But it would be difficult to identify any totally new literary invention in the four novels upon which his reputation stands. The inclusion of photographs, the use of obviously autobiographical material and author stand-ins, the associative digressions and ekphrases whose unfolding threatens to take over the text at every turn, the employment of coincidence as a primary motor of what passes for plot in the books: all of these have been features of the novel at least since modernism and were probably with us well before Tristram Shandy. Nonetheless, there remains something unmistakeable about Sebald’s texts when they are compared to those of his honored predecessors (Breton, Proust, Grass), his great contemporaries (Bernhard, Handke, Weiss), or his countless imitators and disciples.

All the above is, of course, common knowledge and well-tread ground. It seems like every essay on Sebald begins the same way, enumerating a precious few facts and terms that have not changed much since 2001, and then reflecting on their total inadequacy to account for the work itself or its effect on the reader. So this is our point of departure: a shared astonishment towards a small corpus, a nagging sense of our collective impotence to say precisely why it is that the work so moves us, and a need to explain how it is that these texts have continued to produce thousands of imitators in dozens of languages every year without yet being superseded.

I have nothing new or insightful to say about the Sebald’s novels, nor about the essays and poetry and fragments that have circulated in the wake of his passing. But I read contemporary literature, and sometimes I try to think and write coherently about it. One day, I’d like to put together a novel. I’m writing about Sebald because I think it is simply impossible to write fiction in English today and be indifferent to Sebald. One must have an account of Sebald and take up a position relative to him. One must see Sebald as a way forward or a dead end, as an ally or an enemy, or as some more complex combination thereof. What Flaubert and Mallarmé, Faulkner and Stevens have been for others, Sebald has been for us these past twenty years: a proper noun raised to the status of an adjective: the aforementioned Sebaldian. He is, after all, the “only novelist with a toehold in the twentieth-first century” to claim that honor, as Ryan Ruby has reminded us. This is my personal attempt to wrestle with the Sebaldian mode and its discontents, though I hope some of my contemporaries might see their own positions in proximity to my own.

Consider a representative Sebaldian scene: A man wanders the historical quarter of a European city in which he is a stranger, and stops at a shabby café. A clock chimes on the wall of that café, and it reminds him reminds him of a totally different clock in a totally different café in a totally different part of a different city. He recalls that in the other city, he had been neighbors with a man whose father was a professional clockmaker. This neighbor was not himself a professional clockmaker, but he had an amateur passion for horology and an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the clock-making industry back to the 15th century. The narrator recalls the apartment in which he spent hours drinking lukewarm coffee with this neighbor and talking, talking, talking about the mechanics and history of clocks. Then the narrator recalls, vividly, perhaps for the first time in many years, that one day this neighbor, the clockmaker’s son, disappeared, packed off for another city without saying goodbye. And then the narrator remembers the first meal he had after the neighbor’s disappearance, a tuna sandwich very much like the one he is eating right now, in this very café, where this clock is still chiming, chiming, chiming.

The above is not a scene one can find in any actual Sebald text, but that’s the point. The working of memory—the narrator’s own, that of others, both of particular others (the neighbor) and of whole groups (the clockmakers of Europe)—is simultaneously the content and form of the novel, and the method of its composition. Anyone who’s ever struggled to produce pages on a deadline can see the appeal of this écriture that is seemingly as contingent and abundant as life itself. If Sartre famously admired Husserlian phenomenology because it was a system of thought with which one “philosophize about an ashtray,” Sebald developed an aesthetic program that could in theory produce a whole novel or a whole series of novels about a spoon, or a particular variety of fig.

For us, writing in Sebald’s wake, perhaps the most appealing aspect of his method is that the writer need not even get all of his or her facts straight. So what if the man who invented the mercury pendulum (which helped clocks keep more accurate time in changing temperatures) was born in England and not Switzerland? That’s not the author’s mistake but the narrator’s, or maybe the neighbor’s, or the neighbor’s father’s. Maybe the very indeterminacy of who got it wrong in the first place is part of the point, or the point itself. Of course it is. One can get away with all sorts of things, and achieve all sorts of delightfully destabilizing effects, when writing a Sebaldian text. Described this way, it all starts to sound like a duller version of the self-referential Barthelmean irony that dominated American fiction in the 1980s and ‘90s. And so the mysterious force of the corpus slips from our hands again.

I have no doubt that many writers adopt this method unthinkingly at best and cynically at worst. I don’t blame them. Given the gigantic rate of literary production we’re witnessing today thanks to the proliferation and entrenchment of MFA programs in the cultural landscape, we shouldn’t be surprised that anything resembling a formal innovation—especially a formal innovation with market potential—is immediately picked up by the fifty-thousand twenty-four-year-olds currently toiling in the pages of unread lit mags, and is thereby rendered cliche before the ink is dry. But the sheer quantity and persistence of cheap imitations should tell us that there must be more to the historical fact of this form’s wide-spread adoption than the banally philosophical pseudo-alibi it offers for lazy “research.” (I wrote about all this a few months ago, in a response to Brandon Taylor’s review of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, on the topic of “discursive” or “Wikipedia Realism”).

Wittgenstein says that “a language is a form-of-life.” Cards on the table: I think that the visceral appeal of the Sebaldian mode lies not in the method of composition nor in the style of his novels, but in the form-of-life of which that style is a concrete expression. That form-of-life need not and perhaps could not have been Sebald’s own, biographically, but is rather that of an ideal and idealized Sebaldian subject. In short, the Sebaldian narrator models a mode of being-in-the-world, a way of relating to one’s own life and to the (inevitably tragic) fact of one’s historicity, a mode that is particularly attractive to a certain class of writers today.

I say “one’s historicity” and not “one’s historical situation,” because I want to make the heretical claim that the Sebaldian narrator is not and can never be a properly historical subject—and that this is the case for precise historical reasons that the novels are themselves constitutively incapable of interrogating.

In the first pages of any given Sebald text, while still groping around in the dark for characters and plot and other orienting novelistic features, the reader is immediately thrown into a particular mood. I’m speaking about “mood” here in the phenomenological sense of an attunement to the world in which the categories of subject and object blur into the indistinction of the middle-voice, a porous relationality the precedes both self and world. One might be tempted to define this attunement as a “frame” or a “lens” through which all the (non)events of the novel are filtered, but that would falsely emphasize the visual and intellectual over the more broadly affective and sensory, of which is visuality and intellection are but two modes among many, and not granted priority over, for example, the sonorous, the olfactory, the emotional.

Through his systematic refusal to hierarchize these modes of perception and relation, the Sebaldian narrator makes himself into a kind of machine for picking up the slightest of sensory alterations and memory-traces that stimulate his apparatus, thereby developing a capacity for synesthesia not seen since Proust, but deployed in a far more understated manner and towards different ends. Likewise, Proustian desire—the endless pursuit of the Ideal lover behind each of Her appearances, the humiliating cycle of obsession with, disregard for, and replacement of each beloved—which takes the form of Marcel’s incessant mourning for a primordially lost object (the Mother) and his attempts to regain it, is substituted in the Sebaldian text with an overwhelming, listless melancholy.

Freud describes mourning as a situation in which the subject is unable to detach his or her libido from a lost object, the paradigm case being a dead loved one. But whereas mourning is defined by the loss of an identifiable object, melancholy is defined by the lack of any object at all. Whereas the mourner can enumerate endlessly all the meals and kisses he will never again share with his dead wife—can tell himself a coherent story about what is missing from his life now that the has been cast out of the remembered Garden of his love (however imperfect that Eden may have been in fact)—the melancholic “knows who he has lost but not what he has lost in him.” Even the language here breaks down here into a morass of indeterminability. Has the melancholic “lost” some specific “what… in [the other],” or in “[him]self”? Of course, the answer is “both,” because the melancholic knows on some level that nothing has really been “lost” in the first place. In Lacan’s terms, the melancholic has come into contact with a zero-degree of ontological lack, a void lurking behind every possible satisfaction, something unspeakable at the heart of every narrative.

Melancholy sounds pretty damn unpleasant, but it occupies a privileged epistemological and ethical place in Sebald’s work. The melancholic knows something, and persists in that knowledge. He might suffer for what he knows, but at least he is not duped. This, I think, is how I and my contemporaries encounter Sebald—if not as a great pessimist, then at least as an honest skeptic, a writer who simply cannot accept the infantile compensations of narrative. And so his narrators move through these old European cities in a curiously disembodied way: they are described as hungry and thirsty, feverish and panicked, frantically paranoid or near-catatonic, but they never completely shedding their dignity even in the gutter, never retreat into the arms of a comforting illusion. There is a stillness deep inside each of them, what Virginia Woolf once called a “wedge shaped core of darkness” at the bottom of each self that is untouched by the world, that is the self, that is thereby somehow the condition of possibility for the extraordinary negative capability that these selves exhibit in their self-dissolving journeys through the winding gyre of Memory with a capital M.

Sebald thus offers something like a Hemingway Code for the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois creative classes of the twenty-first century; he fills a guru-niche for those of us who think we’re too old for Hemingway and too smart for gurus.

Sebald’s narrators are haunted by something, and critics have long identified this “something” with the Holocaust: a historical event that remains absolutely unrepresentable, unassimilable to any coherent historical narrative, even as it demands the practice of a kind of aesthetic negative theology, the constant attempt at representation that always fails and encodes its own failure within itself, of which the latest celebrated attempt is of course the astounding film Zone of Interest. According to this logic, still hegemonic nearly 80 years after Adorno declared it barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, the Holocaust becomes for the late-modernists the dialectical inverse of that other impossible object—History itself, conceived as a total dynamic process without Origin or Telos.

And so the world of the Sebaldian novel, shattered by the Great Trauma, appears as a massive open set of fragments without a whole (lost or otherwise), connected purely by coincidence and adjacency, by a Deleuzean logic of pure conjunction, of the “and.” The narrator is the agent of these connections, which come into their foggy pseudo-being only through his heroic memory, and his unflagging attention to the tiny details of urban European life are cast as a contemporary version of Tiresias drinking the blood and calling up the shades from Hades to say their lines and disappear again. An ontology of coincidence, and an ethics of bracketing, of bracketing the self and refusing to stake out any point of certainty about the Whole, to persist absolutely in melancholy.

What Sebald’s melancholic encounters among these fragments is not History, nor any particular properly historical situation, but mere historicity. He does not live in this time, this place, this life, this moment in medias res, but always in “a” time, “a” place, “a” life, “a” moment, as purely abstract singularities. The details recounted ultimately indicate nothing but the fact of their being “mere” details, reminders to always and exclusively speak of oneself and one’s own with the indefinite article—in effect, self-cancellations.

Finitude, singularity, limitation-as-such are the index of all the Sebaldian subject’s encounters, however infinitely precise his sensory apparatus and however infinitely obscure the facts are that these sensations dredge up in his memory. It was Sebald’s genius to develop from this ontology of finitude the infinite variety of this spiraling and self-reflexive text. The price he paid for that infinity was History itself, which he could only bear after having reduced it to a cabinet of curiosities, stinking of formaldehyde, inert and unredeemed.