W. G. Sebald | Vertigo / 2000

at odds

by Douglas Messerli

 

W. G. Sebald Vertigo, translated from the German by Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 2000)

 

The death by a car accident on December 14 of this year of W. G. Sebald led me to read his first fiction, Vertigo, a book, along with his The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn many of my friends have long championed.

 

   In many respects Sebald might remind one of his younger contemporary, Javier Marias. Like Marias, Sebald does not so much tell a single story than observe and seek out a series of coincidental events, historical and personal, which he weaves together through photographs and linguistic images from literature, history, his travels and his own past. All of these aspects, superficially similar to Marias' narratives, exist in Vertigo, as the narrator moves from Marie Henri Beyle's (better known as Stendhal) terrifying memories of crossing St. Bernard pass with Napoleon's army to the Sebald's own journeys from Venice to Verona, from the journey of Kafka to Riva, near Desenzano, to a recounting of Sebald's youth in the German village of W.

     Through the numerous events in each of the book's four parts, Sebald explores amazing coincidences: for example, a fellow traveler reads Leonardo Sciascia's book 1912 + 1 soon after a friend reminds Sebald that on the journey Kafka took to Riva in 1913, where he may have witnessed that year's Verona opera festival's first production, Aïda. Later, in the town of W, Sebald sees the numbers 1913 over a doorway, and the book ends with a passage from the 1913 version of Samuel Pepys's diary, found in the attic of a building in which he had lived as a child.

      Again and again, there is an eerie connection between unrelated things, seeming to present a puzzle for which there is no solution. The various gaps between these events or pieces of information create a sense of dislocation and confusion, as remembered scenes are revealed as false, and what appear as dreams become reality. There is, in short, a sense of dizzying vertigo throughout Sebald's book, as if places, objects, and events have a reality separate from the people who are involved with them.

      It is just this sense of vertiginous reality that separates Sebald's literary world from Marias's. Where Sebald actively attempts to connect or at least to understand these "coincidences," Marias often seems just as happy to simply witness and point them out. And there is, accordingly, numerous moments of stupor, of a sickening sense of irreality, in Sebald's work that is fortunately lacking in Marias's writings. One might simply chalk it up to the radically different sensibilities of the Germans and the Spaniards, but there seems to be something else that lies behind the differences which also subtracts from the personal joy I might have expected from reading just such a text.

      Perhaps it emanates from the much more academic interest Sebald takes in these strange occurrences. Unlike Marias, who declares that he is often a passive observer of the unusual facts and texts he discovers, at several instances Sebald actively researches the past, visiting libraries and friends with special information with whom he attempts to make sense of these puzzles. The fact that no coherent truth is ever possible, however, appears to take on disorienting aspects, almost haunting his life. Marias is far more like a kind of amateur sleuth, who will gladly take on his adventures, but is more often just has happy to find no apparent answer.

       In short, there is a sense of angst to Sebald's world, and the writers he features, Stendhal and Kafka, share his feelings of displacement. It is as if Sebald were a high modernist who has discovered himself in a postmodern world, and he is not at all happy about that fact. He often seems to be working at odds to his own tales, as if all the disconnections, accidental photographs, and odd peregrinations he recounts were an expression of his failure to create a more coherent whole.

     Yet, there is another perspective about this; for at several points, particularly in recounting his childhood, we know or at least suppose a coherent reality to explain away the strangeness. But he cannot or will not speak out to those around him or even attempt to explain the story to himself. One of the best examples of this is his witnessing the beautiful barmaid at the Alderwirt, Romona, having sex in the back of the building with a isolate former hunter, Schlag. The next morning he discovers the bar's owner has utterly destroyed everything in the place, and later in the day, Schlag's body is found at foot of an icy cliff, where, so it is believed, he inexplicably (he is a seasoned walker in this territory) has fallen to his death. Sebald recounts these events just as if they were as oddly coincidental as all the others he relates. But we suppose, at least, that here there is a connection, that somehow that the Alderwirt landlord, Sallaba, also discovered the sexual act, reacting with rage against the old sinner. In this and other cases, accordingly, it feels as if the author was purposely withholding information, refusing to reveal any logic in a world where he has painfully determined to be utterly mystifying.

    It is this desperate search for coherence under conditions where memory and significance are so vague, I believe, that draw so many readers to Sebald's books. Like Sebald, they feel utterly ill-at-ease, even sickly, when they face the inexplicably dangerous terrain standing before them. I simply do not share the great dis-ease, and somewhat irritated for having to endure it.

     

Los Angeles, July 15, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (July 2009).

Per Olov Enquist | Livläkarens besök (The Royal Physician's Visit) / 1999, 2001

the black flame: lies in a world of truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Per Olov Enquist Livläkarens besök (Stockholm: Norstedts Förlag, 1999), translated from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally as The Royal Physician's Visit (New York: The Overlook Press, 2001)

 

The web-based encyclopedia entries on Christian VII of Denmark each restate that the young king, who came to power at the age of 17 in 1766, "had a winning personality and considerable talent," but was "badly educated," terrorized by his governor, Detlev Reventlow and "debauched by corrupt pages." He suffered, so the entries tell us, possibly from schizophrenia. After his marriage to Princess Caroline Matilda (Queen Caroline Mathilde), he "abandoned himself to the worst excesses, especially debauchery," giving himself up to the courtesan Støviete-Cathrine, declaring he could not love Caroline because it was "unfashionable to love one's wife." Thereafter he "sank into a condition of mental stupor" with the symptoms of paranoia, self-mutilation and hallucinations.

     The entries concur that he "became submissive to upstart (italics my own) Johann Friedrich Struensee, who rose to power in the late 1760s." The neglected Caroline "drifted into an affair with Struensee. Without explaining the palace coup, the encyclopedias report that the king's marriage to Caroline Mathilde was dissolved. Struensee was arrested and executed, Caroline sent, without her children, Frederick VI and Princess Louise Augusta (possibly Struensee's daughter), into exile in Celle. The government continued to be run by Christian "under the pressure" of his grandmother, Juliana Maria of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and the "Danish politician" Ove Høegh-Guldberg until Frederick took over in 1784.

    I don't know of the veracity of these recountings (repeated, word for word, on several online encyclopedias, including Wikipedia), but it sounds suspiciously like some official whitewash of events. Nowhere, for example, is there any report of changes in law accomplished by "the upstart" Struensee; indeed, one report claims no changes were affected. Nothing is said at all about Struensee's own links to, nor the young King's involvement with Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and Diderot.

    Thank heaven for Swedish writer Per Olav Enquist's new fiction, The Royal Physician's Visit, which, whether it is a true story or not (although the historical research Enquist has put into this writing is quite apparent), reads as a far more truthful and, quite frankly, believable and fascinating history than that touted by supposedly learnèd sources. If the account I outlined in the first two paragraphs is historically correct, give me Enquist's fictional version of reality; I can better live with that.

    For Enquist the tutor Reverdil was a loving and enlightened young teacher dealing with an already mad boy-pupil, who through the tyrannies of King's father and court ministers, had come to believe that his whole world was, as Shakespeare put it, "a stage," upon which clearly he had not yet properly learned his part. Most of Christian's time, accordingly, was spent in trying to discover how to "play his role." It is clear that this child had no other understanding of "play," and cowered away from the men whom were suddenly thrust upon him as his subjects.

     Enquist begins his historical fiction by providing us with the report of British Ambassador Robert Murray, written four years after Struensee's death, of attending a dinner where the childlike "mad" King Christian "began wandering around the audience, muttering, his face twitching oddly," under the watchful eye of Guldberg, whose role, according to Murray, seemed to be that of a father with a sick child. Despite the strange behavior of the King, the court basically ignored him, even when he began to grow loud and disruptive. In the middle of a play by the French writer Gresset, Christian "suddenly got up from his seat.., staggered up onto the stage, and began behaving as if he were one of the actors. ...It was clear that the King was strongly engaged in the play and believed himself to be one of the actors, but Guldberg calmly went up on stage and kindly took the King by the hand. The monarch fell silent at once and allowed himself to be led back to his seat."

     The "Danish politician," in Enquist's telling, was a minor court figure who through quiet stealth and insinuation, with the help of the Dowager Queen, negotiated the uprising four years earlier against Struensee, not so much for their own gain as for their hatred of Struensee's Enlightenment policies; part of the old guard, they preferred the religious restrictions which had so long controlled the populace, forcing them into lives of poverty and misery.

     Into this mad world had stepped a young doctor from Altona, Johann Friederich Struensee, whom court advisors, terrified by the young King's behavior, sought out as a kind of mentor-protector for Christian. A quiet man, happy to work as a local doctor equally treating the rich and the poor alike, Struensee, at first, wanted no part of government involvement, and refused Count Rantzau's entreaties, but gradually was convinced.

     As early as Reverdil's tutelage, Christian, in moments of sanity, had read major Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, and had once written him, to which Voltaire magnanimously had responded. Before Struensee's entry into court, Guldberg and others had exiled a young courtesan, Bottine Caterine, who given Christian's inability to sexually engage his young Queen (in Enquist's telling the two engaged in sexual activity, if you can describe it as that, only once), had provided the King with a kind of maternal love. In secret search of that woman, who the mad King described as the "Sovereign of the Universe," Christian, with court members, undertook a European journey during which he met with several Enlightenment figures, Diderot taking Struensee aside to share with him Voltaire's message:

 

                           "My friend Voltaire is in the habit of saying that sometimes by chance,

                      history opens up a unique...aperture to the future."

                           "Is that so?"

                           "And then one should step through."

 

     In the years following, Struensee, against his own doubts and fears for what he recognized was the "dark flame" of the King, took that momentous step, ordering, with the King's signature, that all court declarations pass through him. Within the short period of his powerful rule, Struensee made hundreds of enlightened changes to Danish law, changes that significantly altered the freedoms of Denmark's masses. The problem is that these uneducated masses had no comprehension of what the changes meant, and Struensee, in turn, had no deep comprehension of the "common folk" for which he was fighting. Agitators such as Guldberg and other court lackeys found it easy, through pamphlets and other methods, to bring suspicion upon most of Struensee's important changes of law.

     The young British-born Queen, understandably, was lonely and without sexual satisfaction, and Struensee, at least in Enquist's version, was encouraged by the King to take her off his hands. Perhaps the greatest of Struensee's failures was his inability to perceive how an affair with the Queen might end in his downfall. Yet, the couple, who soon fell in love, were stupidly open about their affair, even after Mathilde became pregnant with Struensee's child. That affair, above everything else he did, doomed him in a world were Medieval concepts still held sway over the minds of individuals both outside and within the court.

     After a near perfect summer at the King's castle at Hirschholm—a castle, that in the people's retribution for Struensee's and Mathilde's relationship would soon be completely destroyed, brick by brick—Struensee and the Queen were arrested. Although the German had long feared just such an end, it was nearly incomprehensible to him, after his "step through the aperture," that the good he was attempting to accomplish, such a determined and often difficult search of the truth, should end in such hatred. What had he done wrong, he queried of himself again and again.

     Enquist does not provide an easy answer. Love and truth were simply not what the populace wanted at that very moment. Yet the huge crowds that gathered for his execution left it not as a mob, but, in Enquist's fable, as a citizenry disgusted by what they had just seen. Despite Guldberg's and the Dowager Queen's evil machinations, despite even the "dark flame" that Christian's mind had spread over the kingdom, reason did, ultimately prevail. Men and women had recognized in "the Struensee era" what was possible, and with the reign of Christian's son came many of the changes that Guldberg had worked to abolish. In Enquist's engaging retelling of the tale, history could not entirely be silenced, a "truth" I would prefer to believe.

                         

Los Angeles, December 14, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2009).