At Snape Maltings last weekend Artevent's The Re-Enchantment programme reached a rich and perplexing stage in its sober exploration of people and place, landscape and memory. After Sebald: Place and Re-Enchantment took the work of W. G. Sebald as a departure point for reflecting on these themes in East Anglia, the very landscape represented in his most widely known text The Rings of Saturn. Those gathered for the weekend seemed to be there in some sort of pilgrimage, or as the original German subtitle of The Rings of Saturn has it, Eine Englische Wollfahrt, an English pilgrimage. As with all pilgrimages, the wayfarer treads its weary way in the spectral presence of a revered figure, and so it was that we assembled to think about Sebald, his work, and the canon of writing that preceded or was influenced by him. But behind the title of After Sebald lies a peculiar form of retrospection, as if any thinking about people and place was always Sebaldian. The Re-Enchantment is mindful of the sense in which Sebald's work has changed the way we think about ourselves and our surroundings.
Troubled footsteps
The weekend began on Friday evening with the world premiere of Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald). I am new to Gee's work; he has made films about David Bowie's time in Berlin (another icon, a different landscape) and Joy Division (another depressive melancholic). The film about Sebald echoed the structural and tonal qualities of his work, exploring Sebald through interviews with those who knew or write about him. Its focus was The Rings of Saturn, and so inevitably the film's structure traced the walking tour of this text. But in no way was it literal or slavishly mimetic, one of its most fascinating - and perhaps Sebaldian - qualities being its questioning of the possibility of retracing footsteps. It appears the film was guided under the premise that no journey can be repeated, that all who retrace the footsteps of others are grasping for authenticity where empirically it cannot exist. The unstoppably eloquent Robert Macfarlane put this honestly and beautifully in the film when he spoke of his own attempts to repeat the narrator's East Anglian walks. Arriving in one seaside town he found the weather to be anti-Sebaldian: it was bright and sunny and the children were bathing in the fountains and pools. Macfarlane was surrounded by joy. It was difficult and curmudgeonly to shake it off, and so he concluded that it was impossible to make his own walk conform to the idea of the walk. Authenticity is what it is as it happens. Gee's film shows literal footsteps as a box within the film's frame, as if to say this is as close we can ever get to the narrator's own journey: a pair of boots and a stretch of tarmac. That this is tarmac in East Anglia is verification enough.
Gee's film closes the gap between his own work and that of his subject's by optimising his own cinematic aesthetic. Sebald's multi-layered phototextuality is realised by Gee in a film that has the look of a palimpsest, with dissolves between background and foreground, juxtapositions of original footage and Sebald's text in relentless focus, and instances of often ironic misfit between the interviewee and the images on screen. Dan Gretton's comments on the section from The Rings of Saturn which refers to the massacres perpetrated by the Croatian Ustasha are followed by a lingering close-up of the disturbing image from page 97 of "Serbs, Jews and Bosnians, once rounded up, [were] hanged in rows like crows or magpies". Gee focuses on the image until it blurs into an undifferentiated mass of black and white. Given earlier commentary about Sebald's photographic procedures, this moment to me constituted the kind of ethical trespass that Sebald avoided in his own work. What does it mean to render images in this way, to deny the photographic subject its prior particularity? It doubly reinforces the tautology of all images in that having died once, the subject dies again and once more through a further act of representation. Perhaps this wasn't a moment of insensitive trespass, though, for with this cinematic technique Gee could be making a point about photography and oblivion, much in the same way Sebald attempted to do with the photographic images that he made hazy on his department's photocopier at the University of East Anglia.
It would be wrong to concentrate on this moment against the otherwise substantial and thoughtful homage to Sebald's work that the film pays. And the film is certainly full of details that seasoned readers will find tantalising, such as insights into Sebald's relationship with his publishers and the unerringly wry manner of his response to the demands of modern publishing. One delightful moment is his publisher's anecdote of asking Sebald into which category he would like his genre-defying books to reside. Sebald mentions three categories, his publisher quipping that there would have to be a copy in each of those sections in the bookstore. We also learn of recent scholarship from Barbara Hui, whose doctoral work has expanded into 'litmapping', The Rings of Saturn forming Hui's first attempt to use online resources to visually and digitally connect texts with geography. Gee shows Hui's Sebald litmap in action, suggesting a metaphor for the film's habit of forging connections between differing media and references as a critical and poetic homage.
The discussion between Macfarlane and Gee after the film was a constructive feed into the following day's symposium, exploring as it did questions of authenticity and the journey. Some of these questions were practical in that both Gee's and Macfarlane's attempts to retrace the narrator's footsteps in East Anglia foundered on the possibility of making the journey that the text outlines. Did the narrator thread seamlessly through Norfolk and Suffolk or did he make a number of journeys which the text implies as a fluid trajectory? In fact were the journeys made at all or were they, as Macfarlane suggested, journeys thought into existence?
Footsteps in thought only
We emerged into the darkness of Snape after the film to return in daylight the following day for the symposium. And much light was shed on the themes in hand. Still, a number of problematic moments threatened to steer the event off course, but not, unlike in Sebald, in a good way. After a heartfelt introduction from Sebald's friend Stephen Watt, there followed three main presentations by Rachel Lichtenstein, Richard Maybe, and Alexandra Harris, ending with a short and inspirational burst from Dan Gretton. In between Robert Macfarlane introduced and presented his extraordinary BBC film on the wildness of Essex, based on the sections on that county from his book The Wild Places.
Stephen Watts' poem in homage to his friend 'Max' followed a short introduction in which he spoke about their plans to walk from Watts' ancestral home in Switzerland to Sebald's in Wertach. I expect a number of people sighed internally at the unhappy thought of this unmade journey, and the book which would have resulted from it, now not possible. Watts reticently mentioned that since Sebald's death, he has not attempted the journey on his own.
The East End: a multi-lingual palimpsest
Rachel Lichtenstein gave a tour of her most recent books and a taster of two books forthcoming in her series on three London thoroughfares for Hamish Hamilton (Brick Lane was published two years ago, with Portobello Road and Hatton Garden remaining). It considered sense of place through a seamless blend of images from her work, autobiographical reflections, and encounters with people in their places (including Stephen Watts and Professor Bill Fishman, expert on the Jewish East End). It was a melancholy pleasure indeed to learn again (the lesson never resides) of the disappearance and displacement of the Jewish East End with its famous Yiddish theatres and legendary poets of the 'University of the Ghetto'. Lichtenstein's own personal exploration of the East End, inspired as it was by her family history, emphasised how landscapes exist in the spectral presence of other, more geographically distant landscapes. The immigrant's melancholic yearning for home in the context of their adopted home place translates the latter in the image of the former. The Jewish East End became indistinguishable from the East European shtetl from whence the immigrant came, a blurring of geography through the mental landscapes of cultural belonging.
Lichtenstein's range extends beyond her Jewish roots to engage with other communities, a truly cosmopolitan attitude that speaks deeply and movingly of a common humanity against a background of cultural difference. For Lichtenstein, Spitalfields' rich history of immigration is embodied by the constantly shifting use of one building on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street: the eighteenth century building currently housing the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid was previously a synagogue, and prior to that a protestant chapel for the Huguenots who fled Catholic France. Common humanity is discerned in the image she evoked of Muslim men and Orthodox Jews emerging in different eras out of the same portals, dressed in similar white robes on holy days.
On not reading the text
Richard Mabey has written over thirty books on landscape and nature, writes columns for the BBC's Wildlife magazine, and lives in Suffolk. Mabey had much to contribute on the weekend's theme of exploring our relationships to place, but his defensive opening gambit, in which he announced that he would be some sort of devil's advocate, resulted in a myopic and confused argument. In rigidly prescriptive terms Mabey argued - demanded, actually - that writing about landscape should adopt a scientific mode and language. He attacked Sebald for obsessively practicing pathetic fallacy, a literary technique that, as Mabey contended, threatens the very landscape it seeks to describe by sublating nature and placing the human as both its subject and object. Nineteenth-century sentimentality was disastrous in that landscape ceased to exist independently of the human gaze. The specious anthropomorphism of pathetic fallacy cut short rigorous scientific analysis, causing a solipsistic imbalance towards the human. Thus, the historical and ecological inaccuracies of the Dunwich Heath passage from the The Rings of Saturn prove that Sebald and his ilk fail to write with any level of adequacy about nature and landscape.
Mabey's draconian tirade against Sebald and pathetic fallacy was a perfect example of not reading the text. His mistake was double: he elided the author and the narrator, and the text's literariness with an assumed ecological register. Highly selective quotations from the text committed the further critical error of failing to account for context, which can only be be expected from one who refuses to accept that text's literary operations. Sebald's more astute readers will be amused that Mabey glossed over The Rings of Saturn's breathtakingly fugal opening chapter, in which references to Jorge Luis Borges and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen jostle with the genre-defying seventeenth-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne to suggest the text's shape-shifting unreliability. But perhaps even more notable in this regard is the absolutely crucial passage in which the narrator critiques the scientific values of the Enlightenment through the perspectival distortions of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. Such passages combined offer an allegory of reading, alerting the reader to the text's premise of unreliability amidst unwavering empathy. On top of all this, Sebald's avowed interests in metaphysics and phenomenology clearly direct his readers away from expectations of empirical veracity. In an interview with Michael Silverblatt, Sebald cited the fog in Bleak House and Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth' to suggest ways in which time and space coalesce in literary constructs. And so what we come to realise is that Sebald's metaphysical predisposition and immanent critique of Enlightenment values question empiricism overall. Mabey would have done well to contextualise Sebald in this way, both to save the audience from unwanted critical solecism but also to level with Sebald as a writer who never professed to writing works of ecology.
Modernism, but not as you know it
Alexandra Harris recently won the Guardian First Book Award for Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, parts of which she presented for her talk last weekend. Harris revises the avant-garde narrative of modernism in order to foreground the residual romantic relationship to landscape in artists like John Piper and writers like Woolf. In his art Piper moved away from forms of modernist abstraction and sought to give expression for his irrepressible love of the English landscape, which he did in a subtly readjusted modernism that accommodates figurative depiction. It is arguable whether the constant threat of mechanised warfare and advancing modernity renewed the desire for an intimate relationship with landscape, something which is considered to affirm eternal values in a rapidly changing word. Anticipating loss, the terms of engagement resulted in a blend of romanticism and modernism, from paintings and sculpture through to new editions of guidebooks that acted as paeans for the creators to the English countryside. They also sought to revise interest in that landscape within the varying, ephemeral demands of modern desire. This frame of reference from the inter-war years extends to the twenty-first century. Harris recalled her visit to one of the sites in her book, asking us to consider what significance important historical sites such as decommissioned churches can have for future generations.
It would have been fascinating if Harris had opened up her analysis to Sebald, who as we know acknowledged the influence of Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth'. Woolf's narrator minutely details the moth's expiration, and in Sebald's mind this acts as a metaphor for the catastrophe to come. History is present in everything and everywhere. A natural historical specimen takes on world-historical resonance; we alight from one spatio-temporal realm into another.
Future footsteps
For Dan Gretton, Suffolk has always been uncanny. At the beginning of his brief and breathless presentation, he drew an outline of the part of Suffolk around the mouth of the River Ore. As a child he perceived something significant about this landscape, divining its historicity before he possessed the facts to explain his mysterious preoccupation with the place. He exonerated Sebald as much as Mabey decried him. Sebald's ability to penetrate the secret histories of objects and place realised their relation to each as much as their participation in the vast matrix of human relations. Like Gee, Gretton is captivated by the passage from The Rings of Saturn about the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Croatian Ustasha. In archivist mode he visits the Bosanske Krajine Archive in Banja Luka, where, as Sebald's narrator relates, fifty thousand documents are kept detailing the massacres. Gretton finds not one single document. He steers clear of decrying the text's unreliability and views it revelatory of a kind of moral truth that installs a unique methodology for understanding the past. The text that results from ruminations such as this, to be published next year by Granta, seeks to comprehend the phenomenon of the 'desk killer', the figure familiar from the Nazi period whose complicity in genocide was neither direct nor declarative. Like Sebald, Gretton is activated by the thought of previously undetected connections between space and time, attempting to lend coherence in the now to the labyrinthine events of the past.
*
No symposium which takes the work of W. G. Sebald as its focus could end in a truly conclusive way. He did not do conclusions in any conventional sense. Throughout his work the threat of untied ends overshadows his author-narrators to the point of paralysis. If there is such a thing as a Sebaldian ending, it is characterised by the dissipation of the text into the reader's consciousness, passing on to that reader the anxieties attached to inconclusiveness.
Whilst Professor Jon Cook chaired the discussion as amiably and constructively as possible, the panel had the unfortunate task of navigating Richard Mabey's hostility generally to the premise of the event and overwhelmingly to the work of W. G. Sebald. He opined that he was unable to see any quality in The Rings of Saturn that would sway him from his unshakable belief in the evils of pathetic fallacy. He can't be knocked for consistency, but ultimately it is silly and pointless to claim the text lacks any commendable qualities. Mabey waded in on what he thought was the pretentious practice of embedded photography in contemporary fiction. Referring to his Jewish roots, he made the extraordinary claim that even he would not have the temerity to seek to write his family history and the Holocaust, which begs the question of how Holocaust representation is possible if no interlocutor, Jewish or not, is permitted to approach history. All of this threatened the need for civility and respect towards fellow panel members, and given her presentation earlier in the day, clearly if not actually was an implied attack on Rachel Lichtenstein's work.
Robert Macfarlane cleared up what my friend and I had been thinking the whole day, namely that you muddy the critical waters if you elide the author and the narrator, and also that Sebald never intended to write as a naturalist and so cannot be blamed for crimes against that writing tradition. This is blindingly obvious if you actually read the text but matters little if you approach things dogmatically on your own terms. Macfarlane also warned of the inherent dangers of 're-enchantment', reminding us that for a rigorously orchestrated campaign of re-enchantment you need look no further than National Socialism. Perhaps this explains Sebald's ecological unreliability, for if we approach landscape only from the naturalist's perspective, you may end up dehistoricising it. Solipsism lies there, and not in Sebald's work.
