To the uninitiated, the late Bavarian author WG Sebald can seem like a miserabilist. Dour and elegiac, his acclaimed autofictional novels Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001) marshal topics including suicide, natural disaster, disease, madness and – contentiously for a German author – the Holocaust. Indeed, even his admirers have their reservations. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the Jewish American author Ben Lerner suggested Sebald’s oeuvre offered “stylised, general despair”.
At first glance, Silent Catastrophes does little to change the perception that Sebald revelled in sadness. Drawn from two early collections of essays on Austrian literature, the book overflows with black bile. For Sebald, who died, aged 57, in England in 2001, Austrian letters are defined by Unglück – unhappiness and misfortune. But is this glass really half empty? “Melancholy,” the author insists, is not simply a “desire for death” but a “form of resistance” that invites “the possibility of its overcoming”.
In the book’s first half, Sebald demonstrates this through psychology and theology. Writing on Adalbert Stifter, who killed himself in 1868, Sebald suggests that the “profound seriousness” of his Romantic literature “was a consequence” of Stifter’s inability to conform. Reading Kafka’s enigmatic Castle (1926), written in Prague shortly after the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he finds messianism mixed with the Jewish author’s scepticism “of transcending the human predicament”. And with Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles (1967), he discovers a bleak Swiftian satire conceived to “seek redemption” in laughter.
The most compelling essay in the second half, which addresses notions of “home”, is on Peter Handke’s Repetition (1986). The story of an Austrian man searching for his brother in Yugoslavia, the novel is, for Sebald, an apocalyptic allegory in which salvation is only possible via the “unbearable trauma” of exile. While today, the concept of home may be indistinguishable from nationhood, he concludes that Repetition’s metaphysical outlook suggests “something of our natural homeland” – an earthly heaven, perhaps – may yet still be grasped.
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It’s a persuasive argument. Yet what of its presentation? It’s a bit depressing. Written with scholarly intent, Silent Catastrophes suffers from prolixity. Handke’s narratives, he observes, are developed via a “symptomology of estrangement” concerned with “the sensory experience of an existence deprived of social contact”. Miserable bastard or not, Sebald here had not yet developed the masterly style that won him fame.
