Circling the Villa: Revelation as Process

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Susan Sontag once asked, “Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers still available to English-language readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.” She goes on to say: “Here was a masterly writer, mature, autumnal even, in his persona and themes, who had delivered a book [The Emigrants] as exotic as it was irrefutable. The language was a wonder—delicate, dense, steeped in thinghood. . . . What seemed foreign as well as most persuasive was the preternatural authority of Sebald’s voice; its gravity, its sinuosity, its precision, its freedom from all-undermining or undignified self-consciousness or irony.”

Sebald explores the political despair, social chaos, and individual guilt of post-World War II Germany, especially as individuals attempt to come to terms with loss and search to find explanations for the destruction of homelands. Like Kafka (one of his literary precursors), Sebald offers us portraits of outsiders living in exile continually trying to find their way into the castle or beyond the gates of the Law. Like Proust, Sebald explores the halls of memory but interrogates its facility to be a repository of truth and examines its power to distort. Like Stendhal, Sebald exploits autobiography and twists it into fictional narratives. Like Borges, Sebald playfully manipulates the borders between truth and imagination.

Anyone picking up one of W.G. Sebald’s novels for the first time might be at first perplexed. Are these really novels, or are they documentaries? Multiple shifts of point of view, the use of photographs that depict everything from family reunions to historical events, the lack of a specific plot, the use of real people as characters, and the mixture of fact and fiction creates a surrealistic world where expectations and events change from moment to moment. Like Kafka, Robert Walser, and Thomas Mann before him, Sebald records the lives of individuals who wander though their lives searching the past for some clues about their identity. These characters often drift through broken landscapes littered with the debris of shattered families, madness, and the shards of history as they try to remember how they came to their particular historical moment and discern ways to live within that moment. More than any other contemporary German novelist, Sebald explores the ways that individuals manage to carry—or cannot manage to bear—the unbearable weight of history in their lives. Much like the spiritual wanderers of Hermann Hesse’s novels and the pilgrim in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Sebald’s characters find themselves ever restless, always on a quest—either through their consciousness or through their journeys through cities such as Dresden—to reach that ever-receding horizon that promises revelation and knowledge.

All four of Sebald’s novels are extended meditations on the function of memory. In his first novel, Vertigo, for example, the narrator engages in a long process of reconstructing his identity through writing down—literally, since the novel itself functions as the preservation of his writing, and figuratively, as he writes a journal or a novel as the central part of the novel’s action—of the events of his life, the political affairs through which he has lived, and the women he has loved. As the narrator of this particular novel discovers, memory can be both unreliable and accurate. By the end of the novel, has he learned any more about himself that at the beginning? Have the readers learned any more about him? All of Sebald’s other novels involve similar exercises in which the narrators set out to recall, in whatever fashion they have at hand, the events that have led them to their present state, as well as to use those events to reveal to themselves something of the character of their lives. As Sebald’s characters discover, memory often unsettles them, forcing them to uncomfortable recognitions about themselves and others, or it lulls them momentarily into thinking that indeed they have found the key to their identity.

The narrators of Sebald’s books, who are often doubles of himself, find themselves wandering through various urban and rural landscapes in search of their identities. Often, though, they end up circling and circling, wending their way down torturous paths to self-identity. Outsiders, they circle through time and space in search of themselves and for some kind of home. As Austerlitz, the narrator of the novel of the same name, observes, “It seems to me then as if all moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last . . . we also have appointments to keep in the past . . . and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time.” In various ways, all of Sebald’s books explore the nature of identity and the function of memory.

Sebald’s books resemble most closely those of Kafka, and indeed in his essays Sebald writes often about Kafka’s influence on him and the ways that Kafka echoes Sebald’s interest in spirit presences in humans. Although Kafka’s writings do not evoke traditional theological themes, they are nonetheless theological, especially his letters, journals, and many of his parables. In much the same way, Sebald’s writings provide a distinct understanding of the nature of revelation; they illustrate revelation as process, an unfolding that discloses to individuals not only meaning about their worlds but also self-identity. Moreover, revelatory activity in Sebald’s novels, especially in The Rings of Saturn, is implicit in the act of writing, and the activity of writing unveils self-identity and discloses an individual’s relationship—however tangled—with the physical and natural world.

The Rings of Saturn opens in August 1992 with the dog days of summer drawing to an end. On that day the narrator sets off to walk the county of Suffolk in “hopes of dispelling the emptiness” that he feels after having just completed a writing project. As he ambles through the countryside, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, the narrator feels a joyous sense of freedom in Nature but also a sense of revulsion when he encounters destruction in Nature, primarily from the bombings of World War II. One year after he has begun his walking tour, he is taken into a hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. During his hospitalization, he recalls, he begins in his thoughts to write the pages that will eventually make up the novel. Although he doesn’t set pen to paper until one year after his discharge from the hospital, he has begun almost immediately to cast his reflections in terms of unveiling and sight. In fact, apart from the images associated with walking in the novel, the predominant images in the novel revolve around sight, seeing, gaze, lightness, and darkness. Although he can now see the world only from a small window in his hospital room, his desire to “assure himself of a reality he feared had vanished forever” causes him to pull himself over to the window and drag himself up to the sill in “the tortured posture of a creature that has raised himself erect for the first time” to look outside the window. These images of light and darkness, sight and blindness, point to the desire on the narrator’s part to participate in a process of revelation that will disclose to him new meanings about his relationship to the natural world.

Yet, it is in the act of writing that we see the narrator participate in revelatory activity. After his many solitary rambles and the fleeting character of his experiences, he mourns that memory continues to fail him. Out of this realization grows the knowledge that the written word captures for us and others the dynamic flow of all time and nature. In Southwold in the Sailors’ Reading Room, he ponders the “mysterious survival of the written word.” Like the surgeons in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, the writer also inscribes and etches on a body, hoping to reveal the innermost identity of his or her subject . The narrator recalls a conversation about writing with a colleague: “one of the chief difficulties of 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.” Then, as if describing his own writing of these pages, the narrator observes: “The chronicler, who was present at these events and is once more recalling what he witnessed, inscribes his experiences, in an act of self-mutilation, onto his own body. In writing, he becomes the martyred paradigm of the fate Providence has in store for us, and, though still alive, is already in the tomb that his memoirs represent.” Realizing the connection between nature and writing, the narrator recalls Chateaubriand and that writer’s lessons: “I feel a bond unites me with these trees; I write sonnets, elegies and odes to them; they are like children, I know them all by name, and my only desire is that I should end my days among them.” Even though the final page of The Rings of Saturn represents a kind of end, the narrator’s process of revelation continues even after these final pages as he leads us on a journey where mysteries about our world will continue to be unveiled.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Contact Henry.