I was moved by the accuracy and poignancy of Sebald’s
observations on the frustrations of the writing life. Poking around online I found some of the recommendations
he gave to his final class of writing students and some thoughts on his use of
imagery, both of which I found interesting and helpful.
Below are selections from our reading that are true to my experience
of literary floundering. All of these come from Austerlitz.
I went through a difficult period
which dulled my sense of other people’s existence, and from which I only very
gradually emerged by turning back to the writing I had long neglected. (p. 32)
But the more I labored on this
project over several months the more pitiful did the results seem. I was
increasingly overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz, at
the mere thought of opening the bundles of papers and looking through the
endless reams I had written in the course of the years. (pp. 119-120)
But now I found writing such hard
going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no
sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written
it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy
of all the words I had employed. If at times some kind of self-deception
nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day’s work, then as soon as I glanced
at the page next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes,
inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper. However much or
little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally
flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. (p. 120)
Now and then a train of thought did
succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as
it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as
picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could
once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases.
There was not an expression in the sentence but it proved to be a miserable
crutch, not a word but it sounded false and hollow. And in this dreadful state
of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting
myself and gradually discovering the horror of finding that even the smallest
task or duty, for instance arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be
beyond one’s power. (pp. 120-121)
If someone had come then to lead me
away to a place of execution I would have gone meekly, without a word, without
so much as opening my eyes, just as people who suffer from violent seasickness,
if they are crossing the Caspian Sea on a steamer, for instance, will not offer the slightest
resistance should someone tell them that they are about to be thrown overboard.
(p. 121)
The entire structure of language,
the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and
finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in
impenetrable fog.(p. 122)
I could see no connections anymore, the sentences resolved themselves
into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the
letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaming
silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature,
and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame. (p. 122)
It is comforting at the very least to know that self-disillusionment,
horror, and shame are emotions that genius writers attribute to themselves as
well.
Also…
Here, for anyone who is interested, is
the route that Austerlitz walks in Greenwich, London on his way to the
Observatory.
…and so to the Foot Tunnel running
under the bend in the river. Over on the other side we climbed up through
Greenwich Park to the Royal Observatory, which had scarcely any visitors apart
from us on this cold day not long before Christmas. At least, I do not remember
meeting anyone during the hours we spent there, both of us separately studying
the ingenious observational instruments and measuring devices, quadrants and
sextants, chronometers and regulators, displayed in the glass
cases.
(p. 96).
(p. 96).
After crossing under the Thames via an underground foot
tunnel, he emerges here.
He then walks past this ship, the Cutty Sark, the last surviving tea clipper, which has such profound
historical and artistic significance for myself, before continuing on his way.
As I mentioned in class, it is interesting to me that
Sebald, that among everything else he sees on the walk, going so far as to note with with excruciating detail the history of the grounds spread out before
him, he would fail to mention this ship.
The leafless trees on the slopes of
the park were already deep in the shadows rising from the earth; before us, at
the foot of the hill, was the broad square of turf, black as night and crossed
diagonally by two pale sandy paths and the white façades and colonnades of the
National Maritime Museum, and on the Isle of Dogs on the far side of the river
the sparkling glass towers rose above the rapidly gathering darkness into the
last of the daylight. As we walked down to Greenwich, Austerlitz told me that a
number of artists had painted the park in past centuries.
We know that nautical history and industrialization were
topics of concern for Sebald, as evidenced in passages like these from The Emigrants:
The Manchester Ship Canal, Ferber
told me, was begun in 1887 and completed in 1894. The work was mainly done by a
continuously reinforced army of Irish navies, who shifted some sixty million
cubic metres of earth in that period and build the gigantic locks that would
make it possible to raise or lower ocean-going steamers up to 150 metres long
by five or six metres.
And later,
Ships of the Canada &
Newfoundland Steamship Company, the China Mutual Line, the Manchester Bombay
General Navigation Company, and many other shipping lines, plied the docks near
the city centre. The loading and unloading never stopped: wheat, nitre,
construction timber, cotton, rubber, jute, train oil, tobacco, tea, coffee, can
sugar, exotic fruits, copper and iron ore, steel, machinery, marble and mahogany—everything,
in fact, that could possibly be needed, processed or made in a manufacturing
metropolis of that order.
But alas, for whatever reason, he fails to mention the ship
standing directly in his line of sight. It is entirely possible that I am biased, however.
Here are a couple blog posts I’ve written about the Cutty Sark elsewhere:
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