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Diluting the distinction between documentation and fiction, WG Sebald has introduced a stylistic adjective in his prose fiction, which he refused to be called ‘novels’. They are known as being Sebaldian. Carole Angier, an English biographer who laid out the story of the man always in search of memories through fragments of reality and fantasy, spoke with journalist Ananta Yusuf and Shamsuddoza Sajen, Editor of Commercial Supplements at The Daily Star , about Sebald, his life, and his works.
ANANTA YUSUF AND SHAMSUDDOZA SAJEN
In Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury, 2021), you write that the author’s British publisher, Christopher MacLehose, was in a dilemma to decide on Sebald’s genre of writing. After writing about his novel and his life for so long, how would you define Sebald’s genre?
Carol Angier (CA): [Sebald] said himself that he just wrote prose, or prose fiction. He rejected the term ’novel’ because he disliked the creaking apparatus (as he’d say) of plot and dialogue, of getting people in and out of rooms. He was right to reject the term, and if you expect a normal novel when you open a Sebald book, you’ll be disappointed. None follows a normal narrative arc or standard scenes of social interaction. Rather, they take the form of musing and remembering, with long passages of (apparent) digression, all expressed in striking and very beautiful prose. So I would say that they were just prose. And also, certainly, fiction, though they often don’t seem to be that. But that’s an important question we can perhaps come back to.
How did he achieve this balance between fiction and nonfiction?
CA: The fact that his stories are based on real ones, often closely—is unexceptional; all writers use elements from their own experience and that of people they know. It’s the insertion of photographs and documents that makes his characters feel so real. We don’t just imagine them as we read, we see them, we look into their eyes.
It wasn’t wholly original. Stendhal had used maps and drawings in his Vie de Henri Brulard , for instance, as Sebald shows in the second part of Vertigo . Other French writers like Georges Rodenbach and André Breton had done it, and German ones like Alexander Kluge and Klaus Theleweit, whose work Sebald knew well and admired. But he was the one who made it famous, who turned it into a known genre between fiction and nonfiction that we call, as you’ve said, Sebaldian, and that many new young writers have followed. Even not so new and young ones, like William Boyd, for instance, in his 2015 novel Sweet Caress.
Do you think the urge for freedom helped Max to develop his own style of writing? And how did he come up with this genre which is hard to define except calling it Sebaldian?
CA: That’s a good question! Yes, I’m sure that his need for freedom inspired most things in his life, both good and bad. Most importantly, it led to his critical thinking, and his inability to accept silence and the cover-up about the war and the Holocaust that dominated his early years. That was, to put it mildly, good. But you can’t be a maverick in just one part of life; you’re either a maverick or not. So for instance, he refused to obey academic rules too—if you rely on some of his footnotes, you’ll be in trouble. And indeed he didn’t obey literary ‘rules’ either, though there aren’t really any rules in literature.
He started his literary writing as the result of a mental crisis that began around the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. It led him to visit the schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck in Vienna, and from there to the journey across northern Italy to the village of his birth in the Bavarian Alps, which he describes in his first prose book, Vertigo . It also led him to the poems he incorporated and developed in After Nature , his first published work, and to a screenplay he wrote even before that, in 1979. In all of them, and in the books he wrote later, culminating in Austerlitz , he explored his own traumas and mental suffering as well as those of his subjects.
In fact he’d been writing since his schooldays, and had determined to be a writer at the age of 20. But this he never admitted; instead he made it sound as though he turned to writing for the first time in his 40s, in order to escape his academic routine.
Despite what I’ve just said, I think he must have known, at least sometimes and on some level, that it wasn’t true. He said it to protect himself and his privacy, which I’ve invaded in my book. My excuse is that the roots of a great writer’s work are of great interest and even importance; and that once someone is dead, they can no longer mind.
Ananta Yusuf is a journalist at The Daily Star.
Shamsuddoza Sajen is the Editor of Commercial Supplements at The Daily Star.
The fact that his stories are based on real ones, often closely—is unexceptional; all writers use elements from their own experience and that of people they know. It’s the insertion of photographs and documents that makes his characters feel so real.