Will Self: Sebald Lecture 2010

Will Self gave the 2010 Sebald Lecture, an annual talk on the subject of literature in translation (or a connected theme) organised by the British Centre for Literary Translation, and sponsored by us. He chose to talk about W.G.Sebald's writing, and in particular the question of whether or not there could ever be a literature by or about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and if so, what purpose it might serve - 'Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: W G Sebald and the Holocaust'

W.G. Sebald, or 'Max', to his friends, was a German academic and writer who left his native country in the 1960s to come to Britain, where he lived, and did most of his writing, over the next thirty five years. He's considered by many writers, and especially by many translators, to be one of the most significant and brilliant authors of the last twenty-five years. He's not as well known or widely-recognised as he should be, but his work, especially 'Austerlitz', 'The Rings of Saturn', 'The Emigrants', and 'A Natural History of Destruction' are among the foremost literary works about twentieth century history, power, and genocide I've read.

I've been to several of these Sebald lectures already, and they are mostly too obscure and specialised, or too vague and repetitive to be really interesting, so it was a pleasant surprise when Will Self delivered, in the course of an uninterrupted hour, one of the most brilliant and tightly-argued theses I've heard for a long time. Combining a forensic close reading of Sebald's work, his sources and analogues, with a wide ranging investigation of the literature of the holocaust, theories of time and metaphysics, it was a fascinating and original insight into these questions. It made me want to read the books all over again, and pay much closer attention to them.

The first time I read 'The Rings of Saturn' I felt that curious, hidden weight that is present in all of Sebald's writing, the languid sentences and the tone I took to be sentimental, elegaic, but I really missed its significance. It wasn't until I read the passages in 'Austerlitz' about the concentration camp at Theresienstadt that I began to understand what Max was really writing about. Self's theory, that Max disdained what he called 'action writing' - that is, the direct description of events in the Holocaust - because no description could ever convey their nature, and because, as Adorno famously noted, the possibility exists that a kind of pleasure could be derived from literary writing about these unspeakable events - 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric'- seemed very convincing. I began to see that Sebald's method was to write about the Holocaust without describing it directly. Its shadow hangs over every word, but it is never directly confronted. Instead he pursues apparently diversionary tangents: architectural styles, the Belgian exploitation of the Congo, Roger Casement, the Norfolk coastline, and so on...

A lot of the detail of the argument probably passed me by - it's difficult to get a grip on such subtle thoughts when you only hear them once, and can't read them over. Fortunately, the text is now available on the TLS website - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7003221.ece .

It was obviously a very personal topic for Self, who recounted stories about his own parents arguing about the Holocaust at home. His mother accusing his father, a conscientious objector ('Conshie' - my grandfather calls them, with a disgusted curl of his lip) of cowardice, of appeasement, and his father's terrible, racking guilt and regret about his decision to avoid joining the army. Sebald accused his own parents of collaboration with the Nazis. His father fought in Silesia, and it was when the young Max discovered details of his father's war record, and contrasted his own, carefree childhood in rural Bavaria with the persecution of the Jews that was going on all around him that he felt the stain of an irreparable guilt most strongly.

Self went on to argue, or so I thought, that Max's conception of historical time was not synoptic, not diachronic, but that the act of writing and recording history, much like the observation of an experiment in physics, actually distorted the thing being observed, and so we have to remain constantly aware of the distorting lens of history and historiography. No amount of cultural archaeology can reconstruct the 'lived experience' of history, so we must be careful in the way that we record what happened, and why it happened.

That question, 'why?' the epistemological question, he returned to throughout the lecture, and by the end seemed to argue that Max's writing betrayed a view of atrocity as a feature of the human condition, that genocide is inescapable somehow, and that it is constantly being carried out somewhere, by someone. For me, this seemed like an abrogation, at the end, or a hypothesis that simply raised further questions: why then, why there, why against the Jews? In other words, the question for me shifted and became one of what circumstances cause that feature of human nature, or that part of the human condition to surface, to flourish? Perhaps that very human instinct to understand, to over-determine, to classify, is what Max resisted. Will Self called his writing a 'great literature of atonement', and perhaps it is an atonement not just for the Holocaust itself but for the whole scope of human cruelty and brutality, enacted through colonialism, genocide, mass exterminations of animal populations, destruction of the environment, Allied war crimes, etc, etc...

Or perhaps I've just completely misunderstood the lecture, but it'll be interesting to read it again and see if I can follow it better in print. Whatever conclusions I draw from it, I do think it's a brilliant piece of sustained critical reading and a highly original and thorough piece of research, and if nothing else I'm sure it will make you want to read Sebald's books, for the first time if you haven't before, and all over again if you have.

Curiously, Max was never given as much acclaim or popularity in Germany as he was in England, and Self attributed this partly to our approbation for his guilt and shame about the Holocaust - the 'Good German' syndrome - and partly to the oddly complete assimilation Sebald seems to have made to England in his writing, his style, his love of typically English objects, characters, mannerisms, things like the Teas Maid, bicycle clips, tweed. When I asked a German woman after the lecture what she thought about this she just said, 'well, he was an English writer'. Interesting.

So that was pretty much that. And I felt vageuly proud because I've always maintained that Will Self was a brilliant writer and thinker, and defended him when people have accused him of pretentiousness, or flippancy, and I think this lecture was proof that I was right. Maybe.