CROSSING BORDERS
Whoever opens After Nature (Nach der Natur) might well be lost. The epigraph to the first of its three poems invokes a guide, but what reader would thereby be given hope?
“Now go, for a single will is in us both:
Thou guide, thou lord, thou master,”
So I said to him; and when he had set forth
I entered on the steep wild-wooded way.1
Dante, led into the Inferno by Virgil, is taken on a wooded way (which will eventually find echoes in Sebald’s poem) and follows his guide with blind abandon. That we are on the way to hell in Sebald’s first major literary publication, in the first of the three poems that comprise that work, is not immediately evident. But we might be struck from the outset by its title, which cites, not the opening phrase of the poem, the customary gesture for titling a text, but, rather, its closing words: “like the snow on the Alps” (After Nature, 37E, 33G).2 The poem, devoted to the sixteenth-century painter Matthaeus Grünewald, thus anticipates its own end, makes it foregone. With the phrase “like the snow on the Alps” it might also seem to celebrate nature, or at the very least its own capacity to paint therefrom (Nach der Natur). We will see.
Like its title, the beginning of the poem asks us to think the relation of opening and closure. It is a question of how we have access to a work of art, what kind of art that is, and how it relates to those outside it.3
Whoever closes the wings
of the altar in the Lindenhardt
parish church and locks up
the carved figures in their casing
on the left hand panel
will be met by St. George.4
(After Nature 5E)5
To be met by the work of Matthaeus Grünewald, perhaps that of Sebald as well, one must perform a certain task. We must close the door on, withdraw from sight, certain kinds of figures. Carved and three-dimensional, to them belongs a casing or housing that guarantees fixed place. We must lock these away, with their attempts at rounded replication, and give ourselves over, rather, to what comes to meet us. We are called to an encounter—if not yet to account.
Foremost at the picture’s edge he stands
above the world by a hand’s breadth
and is about to step over the frame’s
threshold. Georgius Miles. . . .
(After Nature 5E)6
Floating just slightly above the earth, nothing fixes St. George in place—much less grounds or closes him in. Poised on the border of image and world, he is about to cross the threshold between painting and beholder. This permeability of the work of art, this crossing of borders—an interchangeability of spaces, of figures, of times—will have a crucial role to play across the parts of After Nature as well as in each of the four works to follow, in The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz.
On the facing panel, another wanderer: the older man, St. Dionysius, is Matthaeus Grünewald’s chosen protector:
at the centre of
the Lindenhardt altar’s right wing,
that troubled gaze upon the youth
on the other side, of the older man
whom, years ago now, on a grey
January morning I myself once
encountered in the railway station
in Bamberg. It is St. Dionysius,
his cut-off head under one arm.
(After Nature 6–7E)7
If St. George is poised to enter our space, Dionysius had already done so—jumped the frame and made it to the other side. Doubly. First with his eyes, directed toward the youth on the facing panel—but, also, crossing out of the painted surface, out of the sixteenth to the twentieth century—to the Bamberg train station where the narrator had seen him years before.8
St. George is about to step over the threshold to us, leaving his dragon yet to be slain. St. Dionysius has already, without our knowing, entered our world. “In the midst of life [Dionysius] carries his death with him” (After Nature 7E, 8G) in the form of his own severed head. Perhaps it is this one face too many (the dead one with the closed eyes) of the saint that allows him to wander out of the work of art and into the everyday life of the author. Closed eyes, a death of sorts, may be the ticket to Sebald’s many railway stations.
Saints George and Dionysius may wander among us. Access to Grünewald is another matter. “The face of the unknown / Grünewald emerges again and again in his work” (After Nature 5E, 7G) in St. George to begin with, as well as in the work of Holbein and others. In a barely disguised instance of resemblance, how can one fail to recognize also Sebald’s eyes, sliding sideways in so many photos as though burdened with grief and loneliness?
gentleness, the same burden of grief,
the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled
and sliding sideways down into loneliness.
. . .
These were strangely disguised
instances of resemblance, wrote Fraenger
whose books were burned by the fascists.
Indeed it seemed as though in such works of art
men had revered each other like brothers, and
often made monuments in each other’s
image where their paths had crossed.
(After Nature 6)9
The staged coincidences, connections, similarities, the rupture from the image world to its apparent other, the temporal volt over a threshold of centuries that seems to divide the past from the present and death from life,10 the haunting by a Holocaust never quite absent: throughout the works of Sebald, these are defining gestures—also the irregularity of eyes that cannot be ruled.
DEPICTIONS
If his face is to be found in various forms, depicted by various hands, still: “Little is known of the life of / Matthaeus Grünewald of Aschaffenburg” (After Nature 9E, 10G). If not the life, then might we know the works? They come to us at first indirectly, if at all (in section II of the poem) by way of “The first account of the painter / in Joachim von Sandrart’s German Academy / of the year 1675” (After Nature 9E, 10G). There we read of one work, lost since the nineteenth century, and of another, looted and lost in a shipwreck, and of other paintings that Sandrart also never got to see. Nevertheless, we are asked to trust the report of Sandrart, since an image of him in the Würzburger Museum shows him at eighty-two “wide awake and with eyes uncommonly clear” (After Nature 9E, 10G). The clarity of the critic’s eyes alongside the irregularity of the painter’s: what are we to make of this?
Might we speak of the clarity of the critic’s eye in the narrative of After Nature? There are many verbal depictions of Grünewald’s images, pages on pages of them: the Lindenhardt Altar with its St. George and St. Dionysius, the fourteen auxiliary saints, Cyriax and Diocletian’s epileptic daughter, the self-portrait in the Erlangen library, the trans-figuration of Christ on Mount Tabor, the blind, murdered hermit on the Mainz cathedral altar panels, the self-portrait of Nithart in the Chicago Art Institute, the Sebastian panel, the Isenheim altar, the Basel Crucifixion of 1505, the temptation of St. Anthony in all its excruciating detail, all these are laid out before the mind’s eye. Take the following passage, a scene from the temptation of St. Anthony, but, surely, also, the fulfilled premonition of hell announced in the epigraph.
Low down in the bottom-left corner
cowers the body, covered with
syphilitic chancres, of an inmate
of the Isenheim hospital. Above it
rises a two-headed and many-
armed androgynous creature
about to finish off the saint
with a brandished jaw-bone.
On the right, a stilt-legged bird-like beast
which, with human arms,
holds a cudgel raised up. Behind
and beside this, towards the picture’s centre . . .
(After Nature 25–26)11
In lines set to read as poetry, a prose of belabored description keeps the words from taking flight. Is it this exaggerated clarity of eye (After Nature 9E, 10G) that calls for trust?
For as Sebald recounts what little is known of the life of Matthaeus Grünewald, something is profoundly amiss in the relation between the language he uses and what it is said to represent. Interspersed in the biographical narrative, and despite the occasional reassuring phrases one sees and you see (“sieht man” and “siehst du”; After Nature 26 & 33G), line after line struggles to reproduce the paintings of Matthaeus Grünewald and others, the spatial relations of their figures, the unimaginable colors, the emotional force.12 We are dazzled if not blindsided by passage after passage overpacked with details, recounting the unrecountable. The irregularity of Sebald’s eyes “veiled / and sliding sideways down into loneliness” (After Nature 6E, 7–8G), so unlike the uncommon clarity of Sandrart’s vision, might have told us that. Sebald’s project is not—not in any literal or conventional sense—to make us see.
And thus we do not see. In lines that would share a visual object, we sense the awkward prose gropings of someone whose vision falls short. For the textual descriptions, more often than not, rather than reproducing Grünewald’s paintings and passing them on to the reader, create a sense of lack in our capacity to visualize and a no doubt naive desire to have before us what we find we are unable to properly, precisely, imagine. We inevitably turn elsewhere for these images to fill in an absence.13 Perhaps, paradoxically, this makes After Nature of a piece with the prose fiction work to come. For there, too, though in very different and complex ways that are specific to each moment, image and text are no easy matter.
Still, blindness has an unpredictable role to play: at once the threat to human well-being, and also an out. It defines the force that creates our hell on earth but also, though no comfortable road to tread, the entangled path of artistic creation. For, on the one hand, Sebald writes this of nature:
The panic-stricken
kink in the neck to be seen
in all of Grünewald’s subjects,
exposing the throat and often turning
the face towards a blinding light,
is the extreme response of our bodies
to the absence of balance in nature
which blindly makes one experiment after another
undoes the thing it has only just achieved.
(After Nature 27)14
The senseless handicraft of a mad and oblivious tinkerer; we are the botched and transient experiments of blind nature. Is this the nature of After Nature?
THE BLINDNESS OF ART
For there is a nature, perhaps equally blinding, to which Grünewald apprenticed himself at an early age. It is the eclipse of 1502, and the painter is no merely passive creation of nature’s violence. He paints “after [this] nature,” recording the catastrophic madness of the last bits of light before the moon blots out the sun.
Most probably Grünewald painted
and recalled the catastrophic incursion
of darkness, the last trace of light
flickering from beyond, after nature,
for in the year 1502
. . .
on the first of October the moon’s shadow
slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg
over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,
and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch
with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,
will have travelled to see this event of the century,
awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,
so will have become a witness to
the secret sickening away of the world,
in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk
in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit
poured through the vault of the sky,
while over the banks of mist and the cold
a fiery red arose, and colours
such as his eyes had not known
radiantly wandered about, never again to be
driven out of the painter’s memory.
(After Nature 30)15
Nature, even as it wastes the world away and threatens with mental blackout, creates for the Aschaffenburg artist a palette never before, perhaps never since, seen by the human eye, thus making possible painting from nature (Nach der Natur).
In the figures of blind Homer, Tiresias, or even Milton, the Western tradition celebrates an inner sight that has triumphed over and replaced an inferior, external gaze. In Sebald’s literature the wound to sight never ceases to be linked to suffering and creation. However, it is a way of being in the world, not of rising above it. For Grünewald too: “pain had entered into the pictures” (After Nature 7E, 8G). We see this not only as an aesthetic motif but also as an ethical gesture of compassion in section VII of “Like the snow on the Alps.” It is spring of 1525. Grünewald has returned from Windsheim and from conversations with old and dear friends, now fugitives of the law. “I know that the old coat is tearing,” he says, “and I am afraid / of the ending of time” (After Nature 34E, 30–31G). An apocalyptic foreboding, this Reißen, soon to be echoed in the poem’s closing lines. The last battle of the German Peasants’ War approaches.
In mid-May, when Grünewald
with his carved altarpiece had
returned to Frankfurt, the grain
whitening at harvest-time,
the whetted sickle passed
through the life of an army of five thousand
in the curious battle of Frankenhausen
. . .
When Grünewald got news of this
on the 18th of May
Yet he could hear the gouging out
of eyes that long continued
between Lake Constance and
the Thuringian Forest.
For weeks at that time he wore
a dark bandage over his face.
(After Nature 34–35)16
That the painter got news of this on the birthday of W. G. Sebald is and is not a coincidence.17 Just one of the many barely disguised instances of resemblance that the mirroring between “Like the snow on the Alps” and “Dark Night Sallies Forth” (the final poem of the volume, devoted to Sebald himself) touches on. Like those other sixteenth-century counterfeiters of Grünewald, Sebald makes a monument to him as something of a brother. No doubt, therefore, that this interpenetration of lifetimes, already there in the opening lines, might explain that the writer as well, if only metaphorically, always wore a dark bandage over his face.
NAMING
But then again, there are also sidesteps. They are not an escape from pain, but, rather, a parallel world to the thematization of literal harm to the organ of sight. These, too, comment on both the painterly and ethical worlds. Sections III and VIII, which we have yet to touch upon, practice modes of naming and description where the silent transformations of language bring about eradication and blurriness of another order: uncertainty of the identity assured by physical sight performed in acts of language.
Section IV offers an oblique version of these concerns. It is a commonplace of Grünewald scholarship that the cloudy identity of Mathys (After Nature 13E, 13G), the painter of Aschaffenburg, and the signed name of the artist are a vexed issue. (It is a commonplace in reading Sebald that in his works, too, dubious identity and the ambiguities of name, Sebald, say, or Austerlitz, are at play.)18 The varied signatures of “M.N,” and “M.G. and N.” testify to this. Following the work of W. K. Zülch, Sebald begins by suggesting that Mathis Nithart and Grünewald might have been one and the same.
The reason for the signature “M.N.”
above the window-frame must be
that the painter Mathis Nithart,
discovered in archives but otherwise
not identified by any works of his own,
hid behind the name of Grünewald.
Hence the initials M.G. and N. on the Snow
Altar at Aschaffenburg. . . .
. . .
And indeed the person of Mathis Nithart
in documents of the time so flows into
the person of Grünewald that one
seems to have been the life,
then the death, too, of the other.
(After Nature 18)19
Still, the ambiguity of signature is not so much the confused namings of a single person as a tale (a moving one, as Sebald tells it) “of a male friendship” (After Nature 19E, 18G).
And yet he also tells of another kind of devotion or love and another complexity of name. If very little is known of the life of Matthaeus of Aschaffenburg, his marriage, nevertheless, has a privileged place. The Jewess Enchin gives up her name to be christened in the name of St. Anna. In this way she might now be betrothed to the painter and become “die Grünewald Anna” (Nach der Natur 15). But the painter, we learn, “had more of an eye for men, / whose faces and entire physique / he executed with endless devotion” (After Nature 15–16E, 15G). Perhaps, the poem suggests, this explains why she grew quarrelsome; perhaps this is why, mad at last, she became prisoner in a hospital where she was forced to endure it all.
Still, the section begins with others, centuries earlier, with the long tradition of persecuting Jews in Frankfurt, with the massacres of two centuries, the yellow rings and gray circles they were forced to wear on their clothing to signal the danger of carnal relations with Christians, long before the incompatibility of Anna’s body with that of Mathys could be sensed. The 1938 book by Zülch on Grünewald, produced in honor of Hitler’s birthday, Sebald writes, bringing us to the twentieth century, could not record such a strange union.
What colors that marriage of the sixteenth century, Anna’s life in Frankfurt, and section III of “Like the snow on the Alps” is the color green. Perhaps more precisely—the letters of its name, Grüne, Grune, which, now as a color in the spectrum, now as a part of the painter’s name, appear nine times in four short pages.
By Grünewald’s time . . .
. . .
Each night—on Sundays at four in the
afternoon—they were locked up, and
might not walk into any place
where a green tree grew,
not on the Scheidewall
nor in the Ross, nor on the Römerberg
or in the Avenue. In this ghetto
the Jewess Enchin had been raised
before, not many months preceding
her marriage to Mathys Grune
the painter, she was christened
in the name of St. Anne.
(After Nature, 13–14)20
Raised in a space where no tree meets the eye, locked up in her early years (as she would be later on), Enchin is deprived of the green of trees. Her baptism as Anna, her change of name, will free her from the ghetto, and her marriage to Mathys will bring her the Grune so brutally denied her. Isn’t this what we are to understand in the lines to follow?
But there is no evidence that it was he who induced
this Anna, betrothed to him a year later,
to change her religious faith.
Rather it seems that she herself
had facilitated this step
attesting great strength of will,
or desperation, by looking the painter
straight in the eyes; perhaps
at first merely in love with
his green-colored name . . .
(After Nature 14)21
It is a phrase, this last one, that takes one’s breath away (or is it one’s sight?), one that questions whether we have read correctly. That Enchin becomes Anna, the reader can take in. But the author writes here that Anna, perhaps, first fell in love with his “green-colored name.” As she looks Mathys in the eye, and this more than once, she falls in love, not with the green of his eyes, nor with his eyes as those of the master artist, not with their powers of seeing, with Grünewald, inventor of hues (After Nature 21E, 19G). Nor is the love of Enchin/Anna for the green of the trees she has been denied that haunt the poem throughout, nor even for the green of his name. Hers is not a green open to sight, not grün as that which names an attribute of foliage outside language, but Grune/Grüne that creates green-as-name and that makes green possible. Thus Anna’s sense of a green-colored-name is the counterweight to those long and loyal descriptions of the hell of St. Anthony’s temptation, a language of simple denomination. Her love is a liberation of sorts, and not only from the ghetto. If this is madness, and no doubt it is, it explains, perhaps, Anna’s sad captivity at the end by a society that tends to lock up such challenges to its norms of thinking, speaking, writing, being different. Perhaps this strangeness of mind is shared now and then, and at critical junctures, by “Like the snow on the Alps.” To be in love with the green-colored name is to take the sensual green out of green, to think, alongside its meaning, the materiality of language—and this is neither the first nor last such instance in “Like the snow on the Alps.”
We do not know much of Grünewald’s life. We do know the scramble of letters and names on which a life story might be hung, the M., the N., the G., Nithart and Grünewald, that last with its promise of green woods, were one to forget that it is a proper name. We do not know much of Grünewald’s death. It is a very beautiful path, this last one (After Nature 32G), the path of the painter and son. And when painter and son come together in this manner, the name of Anna, left by the wayside in section III, is invoked one last time, perhaps also thereby her love for a green-colored name: “a nine-year old child, / his own, as he ponders in disbelief, / conceived in his marriage to Anna” (After Nature 36E, 32G). As that tale comes to an end, in this the briefest of the poem’s sections, it echoes with Grün and Wald, not only with the name of the painter, Grünewald, but also its fragments. They lie here and there like the leaves of a tree scattered by the wind. They are difficult to see. We are losing the green of the trees:22 “The air stirs the light / between the leafage of trees” (After Nature 36E, 32G). The breeze moves not the leaves themselves but the light between them, for they have lost the presence that might have seemed to define them. Slowly, as the shadows come, it is to us that the poem is shifting. It is we who are driven by the wind and neither the leaves nor the light. “The wind drives us into flight / like starlings at the hour when / the shadows fall.” (After Nature 36E, 32G).
With the eclipse of light, father and son then ride together toward the workplace of art: the son as apprentice, the father to the altar at “Erbach im Odenwald.”23 “What remains to the last / is the work under taken.” (After Nature 36E, 32G). They journey for art and they move toward a death surrounded by incomprehension.
and
always between the eye’s glance
and the raising of his brush
Grünewald now covers a long journey,
much more often than he used to
interrupts the execution of his art
for the apprenticing of his child
both in the workplace and outside in the green country.
What he himself learned from this is nowhere reported,
only that the child at the age of fourteen
for no known reason suddenly died
and that the painter did not outlive him
for any great length of time.
(After Nature 37)24
Grünewald ponders the conception of this young life with astonishment (Verwunderung, After Nature 36E, 32G) and likely parts from it yet again with no understanding. The death of the child lies between the green/grün of “grünen Gelände” (green country) and the “Wald” that appears seven lines later. The disintegrating name of the painter, by way of a material practice of language, accompanies the deformation of life.
PEERING SHARPLY AHEAD
If the artist is no more, what remains to the last is the text undertaken, and also yet to come, for Sebald’s poem is not yet at an end. That end, let us remember, is also its striking beginning, the title of the poem—all of which suggests that “like the snow on the Alps” is, simply, what this poem is most crucially about.
The border is crossed once again. It is we who are now called to account, commanded to see: this too is a sight without knowing.
Peer ahead sharply,
there you see in the greying of nightfall
the distant windmills turn.
The forest [Wald] recedes, truly,
so far that one cannot tell
where it once lay . . .
(After Nature 37)25
The evening becomes gray. We are losing the light. The wind that stirred the light between leaves and then drove us into flight like starlings, although we cannot see it, causes the windmills to turn. The painter who, three years before, wore a dark blindfold, even as he heard the gouging out of eyes (After Nature 35E, 31G), is no more. A trace of his name, Wald, with its previous promise of green remains, though not that noun’s object. In this poem, which opened with Dante’s “steep wild-wooded way” (After Nature, epigraph), “the forest recedes” (“Der Wald weicht zurück”). This loss of Wald is the only avowed truth we are offered: “truly,” the woods (Wald) recede so distantly that we lose the possibility of knowing where they once lay.26 Like the painter at the end of his days whose son died of unknown cause, we must accept that the Wald, like its namesake, is beyond our capacity to know: “Little is known of / the life of Matthaeus Grünewald of Aschaffenburg” (After Nature 9E, 10G).
Dante, whose words open After Nature, returns. Not only the woods of the epigraph (canto II) but also the icy scene of the last canto (XXXIV) in which the poet must look upon Dis or Lucifer.27 It is a question in Dante as in Sebald, of looking ahead sharply. Perhaps Sebald guides us as Virgil had Dante. “The distant windmills” that turn in Sebald’s lines make an appearance in The Inferno as well. The earlier poet mistakes Lucifer for just such a structure driven by the wind. The error in vision is accompanied by (dare one say, turns on) “Just as” (“Come” in the Italian).
“and therefore keep your eyes ahead,”
my master said, “to see if you can spy him.”
Just as, when night falls on our hemisphere
or when a heavy fog is blowing thick,
a windmill seems to wheel when seen far off,
so then I seemed to see that sort of structure.
And next, because the wind was strong, I shrank
behind my guide; there was no other shelter.
(Dante, Inferno, XXXIV, 2–9)
There is another hell that returns as well, from “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” this time of Grünewald’s and Sebald’s making, in the figure of an “Eishaus.”28
and the ice-house
opens, and rime, into the field, traces
a colourless image of Earth.
So it becomes, when the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air
white like the snow
on the Alps.
(After Nature 37)29
We have lost the power of knowing where the Wald lay, the last fragment of Grünewald’s name (“The forest [Wald] recedes . . . / so far that one cannot tell / where it once lay” After Nature 37E, 33G): other fragments of text return instead, from Sebald, from Dante, and they speak of hell. Long gone are the colors born as the moon passes before the sun in 1502. Apprenticing oneself to nature, while also painting “after nature” (After Nature 30E, 26G), one must be prepared to lose the object of sight. But this is an eclipse of another order. We are left in a realm devoid of sound and sight, “in the still space of the air.” We who have been asked to look ahead must come to terms with an optic nerve severed. Perhaps the attempt to see sharply has had something to do with that. Perhaps it is the oversharpness of sight that severs us into a new kind of art. It has lost all color, this art: a colorless image of earth (“farbloses Bild der Erde”) drawn into the field by the frost.30 Perhaps this is how nature mimics itself, making an image according to nature, creating yet another (this time faceless) of those strangely disguised “instances of resemblance” (After Nature 6E, 8G).
Does the close of the poem abandon our capacity to take in the drawing/Zeichnen of these previous lines? Are we no longer able to see—even the image of the Earth made as the rime gouges its drawing into the field? Do the last four lines shift abruptly to place us in a state of utter blindness: as when the optic nerve tears and all turns white? If Sebald’s project has never been to make us see in any conventional sense, what happens when the optic nerve tears? Everything pivots on the word So, and also on the term wie (like) two lines later. “Might we not read So as an adverb suggesting “in this way”: in the way rime produces its hueless image, so things become white, like the snow on the Alps? Does So mark a connection and comparison to the radical creation of image that came before (the rime tracing a colorless image of Earth into the field), or does it announce a rupture from it, away from all delineation? If it is a connection, then what we read tells us that nature’s colorless double of itself produces a white like that we find elsewhere. It gives us the sense, however faint, of a previous image and it suggests—this is the critical issue—that any textual passage might shift what it has to say by relating to yet another. Another version, perhaps, of the crossings of borders with which the poem opened.
“Like the snow on the Alps” would not dead end, then, simply in whiteness. Sebald’s threat to a vision-of-the-senses would not then exclude the possibility of signification, practiced as retrospective, and also deferred connection. A connection of pause, of distance, rather than fixed meaning, because significance of this kind, for Sebald, is free of certainty. “People always want what seem to them to be symbolic elements in a text to have single meanings. But, of course, that isn’t how symbols work. If they are any good at all they are usually multivalent. They are simply there to give you a sense that there must be something of significance here at that point, but what it is and what the significance is, is entirely a different matter.”31
“When the optic nerve / tears” (After Nature 37E, 33G) it is not “the promis’d end” (After Nature 110E, 95G), it is not the end of sight, nor is the end in sight. For one might still be compelled not only to look back at what came before, the tracing of the colorless image of the Earth, but also to look ahead, once again, as we had been commanded to do (“Späh scharf voran”). To read is to look and hear elsewhere. To write, as well. The inaugural point of Sebald’s literary writing lies here.32
All becomes white, after all, like the snow on the Alps, and neither snow nor Alps is without resonance elsewhere in After Nature. The second poem, “And if I remained by the outermost Sea” (“Und blieb ich am äussersten Meer”), is a rather flat biographical tale of the late life of Georg Wilhelm Steller, a matter-of-fact narrative that, unlike the object of its narration, shows no remarkable energy to explore new (in this case linguistic) territory.33 It closes with his dead body in the snow: “until . . . someone . . . / left him to lie in the snow / like a fox beaten to death” (After Nature 78E, 68G). At the moment of death, and in the snow, Steller becomes like something else. The only other instance of simile in this, the second poem of the volume, is in the earlier phrase, “like the pasture slopes of the Alps” (“wie die Triften der Alpen”; After Nature 70E, 61G), that also echoes “like the snow on the Alps.”34
Steller was an explorer of Alaska: the last lines of the third and final poem of After Nature, a literary version of Sebald’s life, will bring us, rather, to another, quite different continent, this one unexplored. Here, too, we end in snow:35 The snow and ice mountains that tower up as the light disappears echo not only the snow but also the loss of sight and the ice house (Eishaus) that rises up at the end of the first poem.36
and, still farther in the distance,
towering up in dwindling light,
the mountain ranges,
snow-covered and ice-bound,
of the strange, unexplored,
African continent.
(After Nature 116)37
The threefold image of snow in the closing lines of each part of After Nature: can we call this coincidence? And, if so, how are we to understand coincidence? Sebald had this to say of coincidence in a 1992 interview: “When disturbing coincidences arise one always has the feeling that they must mean something. But one doesn’t know what” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 74).38 However we proceed to think the answer to the question of the place of snow in each, the context of the language that variously surrounds it brings us back to the question of representation at play in our reading so far. The second and third instances of snow lie in modes of narration quite different from the closing lines of the first poem, “Like the snow on the Alps,” which might seem resigned to announce a parting from the visual world.
The third of the three, “Dark night sallies forth” (“Die dunckle Nacht fahrt aus”), offers in its last lines an ekphrasis of a painting by Altdorfer.39 Here at the close of the closing poem, the narrator tells his dream to God—that he had flown to Munich to see the battle of Alexander. The goal of his destination becomes “the vision / [not of Sebald but] of Altdorfer” (After Nature 114E, 97G). The description of the artist’s 1528–29 painting, titled The Battle of Alexander, fills the final pages. Sebald’s dream takes up the vision of another of his brothers in art, a citation of sorts, and ends with snow, an echo of what happens when the optical nerve tears.
No doubt the last lines of “Like the snow on the Alps” are the panels one must open to shed light on the other two poems. Or is it the other way around? Impossible to say. Do the endings of the second and third derive at least some of their meaning as repetitions of the first? Do we understand the broader theoretical implications of the first poem only on seeing its images recapitulated in the poems to come? The precise relation between the ten lines that command us to “Look sharply ahead” and the two poems to follow will have to remain “unexplored”/“unerforscht” (After Nature 116E, 99G), if erforscht (explored, researched) were to imply a closure and completion of meaning that never takes place here. The relation between those ten lines of “Like the snow on the Alps” and their later echoes in the “snow” and “Alps” suggests that there is more to tell than mere retelling either of human events or art.40 Perhaps the relation between the passages is like the rime and the earth it draws into. Perhaps the end of “Like the snow on the Alps” marks a sketch of signification into the open fields of the texts to come.
More clearly, the elaborate, ten-line, colorless passage that is generated (precisely because of its later echoes) acts, retrospectively, less as a scene of utter blindness than as a productive potential for making sense. It doesn’t, at least not simply, become white, when the optic nerve tears. When the optic nerve tears, something else takes place, the connection to what came before in the preceding lines and the connection to what comes after in the closing lines of the poems that follow. And this, through the power of the So and the like. The gap between the endings of the three parts energizes the work into something of a theoretical windmill. Because snow and the Alps come back to haunt, they set the earliest, long passage on blindness in motion as a theorization about how significance is generated. The image of blindness makes it possible for us to see through a net of interconnections. Or is it all coincidence? Sebald, in an interview of 2001, had this to say of coincidence:
Yes, I think it’s this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it’s not obtrusive. . . . But it seems to me simply an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. And so you meet somebody who has the same birthday—the odds are one to 365, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person, then immediately this takes on major significance. [Audience laughter.] And so we build. I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of creed, all our constructions, even the technological ones, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, which there isn’t, as we all know. [Audience laughter.]41
Once one sees that snow has its place at the end of all three poems, it is difficult to shake the sense that something significant is at stake, even if one cannot say, with smug academic certainty, and given Sebald’s somewhat unexpected irony on the subject, precisely what. Still, the call to look carefully ahead and its aftermath in the severed optic nerve, the So, the wie (like), the snow and the Alps compel us to rethink the concept of blindness and vision. Perhaps the one does not shut the other out. The “need to make sense” of such interconnections, though, truly, it might forever escape us, is the practice of this writer and the obligation of his reader. This is so even if the audience is inevitably bound to laugh or to despair. Perhaps that is what Sebald had in mind when he said of writing “you make something out of nothing.”42 Or maybe it isn’t.