Consider, by way of analogy, the idea of a swimming machine; in particular, consider the bluefish tuna.
The tuna is paradoxically talented. Physical examination suggests it should not be able to achieve the
aquatic feats of which it is demonstrably capable. It is physically too weak (by about a factor of 7) to
swim as fast as it does, to turn as compactly as it does, or to move off with the acceleration it does. The
explanation (according to the fluid dynamicists Michael and George Triantafyllou) is that these fish
actively create and exploit additional sources of propulsion and control in their watery environments.
For example, the tuna use naturally occurring eddies and vortices to gain speed, and they flap their tails
so as actively to create additional vortices and pressure gradients that they then exploit for quick
takeoffs and similar feats. The real swimming machine, I suggest, is thus the fish in its proper context:
the fish plus the surrounding structures and vortices that it actively creates and then maximally
exploits. The cognitive machine, in the human case, looks similarly extended. (38) We actively create
and exploit multiple linguistic media, yielding a variety of contentful structures and manipulative
opportunities whose reliable presence is then factored deep into our problem-solving strategies. (Clark,
1998: 271-74)
The silk on paper used for calligraphy has an absorbent quality: the lightest touch of the brush, the
slightest drop of ink, registers at once—irretrievably and indelibly. The brush acts like seismograph of
the mind, answering every pressure, every turn of the wrist. Like painting, Chinese calligraphy
addresses the eye and is an art of space; like music it unfolds in time; like dance, it develops in a
dynamic sequence of movements pulsating in rhythm.” (Leys, cited in Wilson, 1998: 118)
For those of you unacquainted with Sebald’s prose fiction I should offer an abridged
characterisation of what takes place in his books, of which there are four in total
Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. Each book shares
strikingly similar formal features: each is narrated in the first person from the
perspective of a character suggestive of Sebald, who was born in provincial Germany
in 1944, and moved to England to teach German literature in 1966, after he found the
rigid hierarchies operative in German Universities impossible to bear, in addition to
the conspiracy of silence which coincided with the German efforts to forget the
atrocities of WWII; all the books feature graphics, ranging from runic scribbles,
tickets stubs, and newspaper clippings, to grainy black and white photographs; the
narrator tends to suffer from vague psychophysical disturbances, which result in
perceptual impairment; each of the books evince a high degree of self-reflexivity, but
not the kind with which we might be familiar in most works of postmodern fiction,
Sebald’s self reflexivity, I would argue, is to do with positively putting to use
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necessary abstractions and limitations in the generation of new meaning, rather than
inflicting an existential self-critique, or deliberately confusing the reader; relatedly,
Sebald’s focus on the medium in which he operates, on the potentials of the graphic
and the letter to elicit new forms of order, seems as much a tendency of modernist as
postmodernist writing, a perspective shared by eminent Sebald critic J. J. Long (Long,
2007: 172). Thematically and narratologically Sebald’s books take as their focus
questions to do with the efforts of writers in particular to remember, and with memory
as something which exists as a determining force in not only the lives of humans, but
also in the non-human world, as though things themselves were possessed of an
invisible agency, pointed to by their historical survival, and which compels us to
speak of them. Also, the historical traumas which characterise the period prior to
Sebald’s birth, lead to a conception of memory that doesn’t prioritise the individual at
the expense of the collective; cultures too remember and forget through the artefacts
they do and don’t create, through transmission of meaning from generation to
generation.
Some critics (Kilbourne, 2007; Wood, 1999) have contrasted Sebald’s
memory work with that of Proust’s due to the fact that the past of Sebald’s narrator
doesn’t exist as an abundant, private repository, to which he can return and delight in
at his leisure. Instead, Sebald’s conception of memory is at once more bleak and more
inclusive, allied as it is to forgetting, which is conceived not only as the destruction of
clearly perceivable memory, but also as an active force, coextensive with the of
imperceptible influence of the past in the present as a primary condition of our
experience. To this I would add that there seems curiously little distinction, or at least
privilege given, in Sebald’s prose to episodic memory (Proust’s domain) over sematic
memory, and this is feature his works shares with dreams.
As far as my interpretation of his work goes, I’m concerned with the contrast
deployed in Sebald’s prose between, on the one hand, feelings that are vague,
nebulous, and physically overwhelming, with, on the other hand, the clear and distinct
capture of aspects we associate with visual perception, and which are at a remove
from our physical functioning—whether or not that light in the distance moves is of
little consequence to the continuation of my physical being, in contrast to my
breathing or my blood flow, which is altogether a different kind of perceptual activity,
but, crucially, a kind of perception nonetheless. There is, of course, an element of
physical withness in vision, but that element is recessive in comparison with the
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discrimination of sense data in the panoramas our eyes make available. We tend only
to detect the withness of vision when we suffer a perceptual impairment, as the
narrator of Austerlitz does on an expedition to the fortress of Breendonk in Belgium,
which was used for interrogations during WWII: “Black striations began to quiver
before my eyes, and I had to rest my forehead against the wall, which was gritty,
covered with bluish spots, and seemed to me to be perspiring with cold beads of
sweat.” (Austerltiz, 33) Such moments of physical overcoming in confrontation with
the way past persists in historical sites are regular in Sebald’s fiction. We might also
note in passing that this episode of physical overcoming coincides with the attribution
of physiological properties to a physical structure, pointing to the difficulty one
experiences in determining the boarders of their being as they experience what Alfred
North Whitehead calls perception in the mode of causal efficacy, on which I will have
more to say later.
For theoretical purposes I have been served well by Whitehead’s philosophy, a
mathematician, physicist, philosopher, probably most famous for his work with
Bertrand Russel on the Principia Mathematica, but who, in the twilight stages of his
career, after losing his son in WWI and moving from England to teach philosophy at
Harvard, experienced something of a phase change and began writing an expansive
brand of philosophical speculation, attempting weave together the findings of modern
physics, including the theory of relativity, with a more general account of how
perception worked. As he wrote in a letter to his son North: “to evolve one way of
speaking that applies equally to physics, physiology, and to our aesthetic
experiences.” (Whitehead, cited in Meyer, 2001: 188) This later stage of Whitehead’s
philosophy is perhaps best known by the name “philosophy of organism,” and it
outlines an alternate trajectory to the disciplinary exclusivity that has characterised the
way nature has been investigated in modernity, with science and poetry having grown
increasingly distant in their ways of taking account of the environments in which we
live and of which we are composed.
After some time in the shadows, Whitehead’s work is now emerging as a point
of interest for those in the fields of science studies and literature alike. People such as
Steven Meyer for example, whose primary preoccupation is with the poetry of
Gertrude Stein, are reconsidering what writing can be as a form of scientific-poetic
experimentation into how consciousness works, and Whitehead’s philosophy is key in
mapping out and providing theoretical substance to this alternative way of thinking
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about writing, that is, writing as “organic mechanism”. Meyer provocatively ponders
at the conclusion of his book Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and The
Correlations of Writing and Science, in response to the question posed by Nobel prize
winning neurophysiologist Gerald Edelman, as to whether “it is possible to construct
a conscious artifact?” (Meyer, 2001: 325), that “Stein beat him to the punch,
providing an alternative manner of visualizing the brain’s reentrant signalling with the
vibrating lines and portmanteau sentences of her equally ‘impossible’ project.” (325)
This idea of writers creating conscious artefacts is one that has stuck with me in my
analysis of Sebald’s text, because there is this sense in reading Sebald’s work, that in
addition to the first person narrative we are presented with, there is another
accompanying perspective, something like a picture of what Meyer calls “the
invisible brain,” (Meyer, 2005: 24) or “first person acquaintance with third-person
brain function (‘it thinks’)” (Meyer, 2005: 24, fn. 76)—this, I would argue, is
synonymous with the way point of view works in dreams.
In his essay on Nabokov, “Dream Textures,” Sebald makes note of a
technique used regularly by Nabokov to “introduce, through barely perceptible
nuances and shifts of perspective an invisible observer—an observer that seems to
have a better view not only than the characters in the narrative but than the narrator
and author who guides the narrator’s pen” (Campo Santo, 150). Sebald’s interests in
ghosts and the unconscious are perhaps synonymous with this notion of an invisible
observer, what I, with Meyer, am calling “the invisible brain”. Indeed in his
“Introduction” to the recent Configurations issue on “Whitehead Now,” Meyer,
referring to artist and architect Herb Greene’s book on Whitehead, states his
preference for thinking of the brains creative source not as the unconscious, but an
“unconscious-liminal-conscious gradient,” or “a subconscious-conscious continuum”
(Greene, cited in Myer, 2005: 30, fn. 88).
In addition to the “nuances and shifts of perspective” Sebald attributes to
Nabokov, techniques which he deploys regularly in the fabric of his work, Sebald
makes abundant use of the power of suggestion, through the intricate arrangement of
discrete but resonant details. In an interview with Sebald, Michael Silverblatt
compares his prose style to the English essayist Thomas de Quincey, and offers a very
helpful observation in this context when he comments on “the need, in a sense, to
almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one center of attention to another, and a
feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts.”
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(Silverblatt, cited in Sharon Schwartz, 2007: 78) Silverblatt remarks on how at the
beginning of Austerltiz the concentration camp plays the role of an “invisible
referent,” towards which the narrative continuously gestures as it moves from “the
zoo to the train station, from the train station to the fortress, from the fortress to the
jail, to the insane asylum” (79). Revealingly, the title of Silverblatt’s interview is “A
Poem of an Invisible Subject,” and although Silverblatt might mean something
different to what I am suggesting by invisibility here, what he locates as a feeling that
one as “hallucinated the connection between the parts” is exactly what I getting at by
following Meyer in his analysis of Stein, and reading Sebald’s work as the record of
what the brain does if left to its own, creative, devices; the conscious awareness,
albeit a peculiar kind of awareness, of the activation and synthesis of thoughts,
feelings and images (Stickgold, 2011: 91).
In my abstract I mentioned the work of neurophysiologist Robert Stickgold,
specifically his article “Memory in Sleep and Dreams: The Construction of Meaning”
(Stickgold, 2011). I was drawn to Stickgold’s work due to his research into the role
sleep and especially dreaming play in memory recall, which he posits, rather than
unconscious, as an alternative state of mind. It is from this perspective, that is, the
perspective of altered consciousness, that the proximity of dreaming and writing
becomes apparent. As Stickgold, a writer of two science fiction novels himself,
remarks,
The invocation of the muses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts is an ancient tradition.
Perhaps a more modern version would be the invocation of ‘whiskey for the first draft and coffee for
the rewrite.’ What these share is the concept that writing occurs preferentially in an altered state of
consciousness, whether brought about by the muses or the modern pharmacopoeia. Yet the most
common route to altered states is simply sleep. (Stickgold 2011: 77-8)
Perhaps here we might recall Silverblatt’s comment that in reading Sebald we are
required to “somnambulate from one centre of attention to another,” or equally
Meyer’s comparison of Stein’s writing with a kind of sleeping sickness, known in
medical terms as encephalitis lethargica:
Stein’s compositional procedures in the dissociative writing she produced between 1912 and 1932
involved a form of meditation that, although it certainly did not result in sleep, and was voluntary
rather than involuntary, induced a form of rest or withdrawal from the anxieties of daily living that
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might readily be confused with such neurasthenic symptoms of encephalitis lethargica as “apathy,
double vision, and extreme muscular weakness”. (Meyer, 2001: 54)
In Sebald’s case, sleepwalking is at once thematised in the narrator’s propensity to
wander continuously and without apparent purpose and incorporated in the
meandering digressions that are one of the most identifiable stylistic traits of his
work. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, when after days of
distressed wandering through Vienna, the narrator, undressing in his hotel, recalls a
scene from earlier in the day:
The windows of the Jewish community centre, on the first floor of the building which also houses the
synagogue and a kosher restaurant, were wide open, it being an unusually fine, indeed summery
autumn day, and there were children within singing, unaccountably, “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night”
in English. The voices of the singing children, and now in front of me my tattered and, as it seemed,
ownerless shoes. Heaps of shoes and snow piled high—with these words in my head I lay down.
(Vertigo, 37)
Here it is expected that the meaning will dawn upon us due to the weightiness of such
historical detail. Sebald prefers to gather and arrange detail in what verges on a listlike fashion: Jewish building, Christian hymns, children, heaps of shoes. There is a
certain lack of self-reflexivity here that is perhaps familiar to us in dreams. What the
narrator perceives or remembers he can’t quite come to grips with, but no doubt
Sebald has deliberately arranged things in such a way so as to make the experience a
more memorable one for the reader. Whilst in this instance, and in the beginning of
Austerltiz to which Silverblatt draws our attention, it is the manifest unspeakability of
history’s catastrophes that perhaps provokes the tangential approaches, elsewhere
Sebald makes a like use of suggestion to give us if not the full picture, then at least to
capture, or index, the minds effort to grasp the object or event with which it is
preoccupied.
Returning to Stickgold’s article, one of the curious assertions he makes is “that
narrative construction is the default mode of the brain.” (Stickgold, 2011: 90) That is
to say, when the brain is left to its own devices, or when, in Meyer’s words, one
practices a “withdrawal from the anxieties of daily living,” the compulsion is to
construct a scene that moves through space and time. In his essay on Nabokov, Sebald
likens the communion between writing and this going on of thought to “a tiny
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spiritual movement which releases the ideas that are shut inside our heads and always
going around in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good sentence,
there is a place for everything and everything is in its place.” (Campo Santo, 152)
According to the above assumption our brains have evolved to perceive and
compose narratives, narrative is to some extent part of what our thinking consists in.
The trick is then, for a writer to obtain a perspective on this subconscious composition
which leaves it to some extent undisturbed, something that can only be done
consciously, by employing the minds creative energies and considering the ways
these energies translate into, and are translated by, the medium with which they are
engaged. I want to stress here that I am not recommending a kind of free association,
nor, as Stein emphasised of her own work, an automatic writing, but rather an
attentiveness to the medium as message in the process of communicating feeling, as
coextensive with the energies used to set it in motion. In The Rings of Saturn we find
a helpful exemplification of such attentiveness. The narrator, whilst visiting the house
of friend, fellow expatriate, and one time translator of Sebald’s work, Michael
Hamburger, recounts a scene during which he is watching a mutual acquaintance,
Stanley Kerry, practice writing Japanese script. The following insight is offered by
Kerry: “that one of the chief difficulties in writing consisted in thinking with the tip of
the pen, solely of the word to be written, whilst banishing from one’s mind the reality
of what one intends to describe.” (186) Typically this aside is relatively
inconsequential, with the narrator moving on quickly to discuss the uncanny
correspondences between his life and Hamburger’s. But at a deeper level I take
Sebald to be offering us an insight into his theory of writing. What I’d like to
recommend is that, and here I’m paraphrasing something Belgian philosopher of
science Isabelle Stengers says of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, Sebald is less the
author of the narratives he composes, than he is obliged by the suggestiveness of the
thought forms he encounters (Stengers, cited in Meyer, 2008: 103); in some sense his
intention, as in the above quotation, is banished, or replaced by, a different kind of
agency, what Bruno Latour, borrowing an expression from sinologist and philosopher
Francois Jullien, whose work he compares to Whitehead’s, describes as “allowing
(oneself) to be carried along by the ‘propensity of things’.” (Latour, 1996: 81) In this
case the propensity of the written form to elicit the ways in which differing things
participate in each other’s nature.
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A more substantial example of the kind of aesthetic and practice I have in
mind here comes in the final chapter of The Emigrants, and is often favoured by
Sebald critics when attempting to characterise the crux of the writer’s concerns.
Having moved to Manchester in the autumn of 1966, the narrator, typically wandering
the streets alone, follows a sign that reads “TO THE STUDIOS” (The Emigrants,
160), which leads him to the artist Max Ferber. Ferber, whose chosen medium is
charcoal, works away in ever increasing piles of dust, which he describes as loving
“more than anything else in the world.” (161) Ferber’s application of the charcoal is
defined by the requirement of great physical effort and the product, a kind of
portraiture as writing, is continuous with an aesthetic that becomes not only the artist
but the space around him:
He drew with vigorous abandon, frequently going through half a dozen of his willow-wood charcoal
sticks in the shortest of time; and that process of drawing and shading on the thick, leathery paper, as
well as the concomitant business of erasing what he had drawn with a woollen rag already heavy with
charcoal, really amounted to nothing but the steady production of dust, which never ceased except at
night. (161-2)
Ferber’s repeatedly aborted drawings, which the narrator describes not as finishing
due to any artistic notion of completion, but rather “through sheer physical
exhaustion,” (162) represent a kind of visual language that sits at the boarder between
script and image, much like the repeated rows of the letter “A” which appear at the
beginning of Austerlitz, and are attributed, similarly to a painter, this time on Gastone
Novelli. On this occasion the painting come writing is described as composed of
“scarcely legible ciphers crowding closely together and one above another, always the
same and yet never repeating themselves, rising and falling like a long-drawn-out
scream.” (Austerlitz, 36) Instanced here, and with almost systematic regularity
throughout Sebald’s prose, is variety of writerly ekphrasis, that is, writing being
deployed to at once include other mediums, and describe its own activity, its capture
of the movement of thought as expression. This is why things such as dreams and
lists, and other writerly ur-forms, play such a significant role in his fiction. A dream is
the writing of the brain as bodily withness. The brain describing its own activity. And
it is perhaps for this reason that dreams are such essential quasi-objects for those like
Stickgold and Allan J. Hobson, who are attempting to locate the brain mechanisms at
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work in consciousness; a dream is consciousness beside itself. A dream has all the
characteristics of consciousness (we are, indeed, said to be conscious whilst
dreaming), whilst not exactly being consciousness. Dreams are put to a contrasting
use in Sebald’s prose, and yet in a similar sense they are appreciated as visionary
interpretive tools, without which we would understand so much less, not simply less
of our repressed psychological motivations, but less about how mind and matter go
together.
9
Clark, Andy. “Where Brain, Body, and World Collide.” Daedalus 127, no. 2 (Spring
1998): 257-80.
Kilbourn, Russell A. “ ‘Catastrophe with Spectator’: Subjectivity, Intertextuality and
the Representation of History in Die Ringe des Saturn.” W. G. Sebald and the Writing
of History. Eds. J. J. Long and Anne Fuchs. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2007. 139-162. Print.
Latour, Bruno. “Do Scientific Objects Have a History? Pasteur and Whitehead in a
Bath of Lactic Acid.” Common Knowledge 5, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 76-91.
Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007. Print.
Meyer, Steven. Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and The Correlations of Writing
and Science. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 2001. Print.
---. “Introduction: Whitehead Now.” Configurations, 13.1 (winter 2005): 1-33. Print.
---. “Systematising Emerson, Supplementing Whitehead: Reading Whitehead with
Stengers.” Journal of Process Studies. 37.2 (1998).
Sebald, W. G. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1999.
Print.
---. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998.
Print.
---. The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998. Print.
---. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2002. Print.
---. Campo Santo. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2005. Print.
Silverblatt, Michael. Interview “A Poem of an Invisible Subject.” The Emergence of
Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Ed. New York:
Seven Stories Press, 2007. Print.
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Stickgold, Robert. “Memory in Sleep and Dreams.” The Memory Process:
Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspecitves. Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Mathews,
and James L. McClelland. Eds. The MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass. 2011. 73-95. Print.
Wilson, Edward O. Consilience. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Print.
Wood, James. “W. G. Sebald’s Uncertainty.” The Broken Estate. London: Pimlico,
2000. 273-284. Print.
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