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Review [published December 2001]
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz
Stephen Mitchelmore
(Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of
weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car
crash on 14th December, 2001).
In its official press release, the committee for the
Nobel Prize for Literature praised V.S. Naipaul, the
2001 recipient, for “works that compel us to see the
presence of suppressed histories”. Presumably this is
the committee’s mitigation of Naipaul’s notoriously
incorrect opinions. Whatever, the statement is curiously
ambiguous. On the one hand, it could mean –
and probably does mean in this case – the particular
stories of Indian and African characters previously
ignored in mainstream literature. But it could also
mean exactly as it says: “the presence of suppressed
histories”. Not the histories themselves, only their
remnant haunting the language of the victorious.
Suppression is part of the history, and Naipaul’s
restrained prose – more English than the English – is
paradoxically appropriate: ghosts haunt aged structures.
The conservative literary establishment admire
the style out of nostalgia, while younger writers like
Salman Rushdie reject it out of concern for the future.
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The latter’s champions will insist that Naipaul’s Nobel
elevation signals that we have passed the literary, if not
the political, affects of suppression. The only reason to
use the inert language of the past is to resist change.
Literature is now a pluralism, open to anyone to flood
the dark corners of experience with the bright lights of
an unfettered imagination. Today, the task of the writer
is to keep the shining the lights. Martin Amis calls it
“the war against cliché”.
On first impression, W.G. Sebald would seem to be
very much inside Naipaul’s encampment. In one long
sentence on page four of his new novel Austerlitz, the
narrator tries to “conjure up” an image but something
else “springs to mind”. Hardly the language of the
avant-garde. And like Naipaul’s recent novels, there
is a tendency toward autobiography and essay, as if
resisting the possibilities of the poetic imagination.
On page 18, the history of fortress-building around
17th-century Antwerp is summarised: the placenames,
the design theorists, the theories themselves
and the futility of the enterprise. We even get a plan
of one of the flower-like buildings. No matter how
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