Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond The Nation

W. G. SEBALD’S novels gather disparate stories of migration and globalization, but he does not mix up so much as assemble, display, and loosely hold together. While his narratives wander globally, through England and much of continental Europe, Ireland, the United States, China, Peru, the Congo, and Palestine, they concentrate episodically on individual journeys, conversations with friends, small regions such as Suffolk, and the transnational itinerary of commodities such as silk and herring. Sebald’s revival of modernist strategies is most obvious in his emphasis on perception, but it is also present in his emphasis on renaming (think of Joyce) and diversion (think of Woolf), and especially in his emphasis on reputation and patterns of recognition (think of Conrad, whom Sebald discusses explicitly). His method generates new histories of thinking and acting beyond the nation, and it asks us to compare the different interests that transnational thought and action have served. But it also generates the failure to historicize and the failure to compare: analogies, metaphors, and accidents create elements of disorder and irrelevance within narratives of causality and accountability. Sebald imposes a sense of vertigo by forestalling common knowledge about places, catastrophes, commodities, literary and political celebrities, and works of art. Through strategic gestures of adding and withholding information, Sebald construes less conclusive and more limited postures of cosmopolitanism.

One of the earliest and most influential appreciations of Sebald’s work comes from Susan Sontag, who attributes the difference between Sebald’s reputation in the United States and his reputation in Germany to the circumstances of his novels’ translation.¹ In English, Sontag observes, Sebald’s career began with The Emigrants, a novel that tells of Jewish emigrants whose families were murdered by the Nazis and who themselves escaped this end by moving to England or the United States.² Whereas English readers received Sebald as a chronicler of the Holocaust, Sontag explains, his career began in German with Vertigo, a novel that gives most of its attention to the narrator’s post-Holocaust travels in Austria, Italy, and Germany, and to the lives of much earlier writers and travelers such as Stendhal and Kafka.³ Sontag observes that readers’ expectations about a book can trump or even determine its perceived quality, and she speculates that U.S. readers may be disappointed by Vertigo, whose publication in English occasioned her essay. But Sontag does not acknowledge, at least not here, that desire may inform disappointment.⁴“Americans,” Sontag explains in a subsequent essay, “prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States—a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history—is exempt.”⁵ Not only do U.S. readers expect Sebald’s novels to focus on the Holocaust, Sontag’s later comment implies, they have a decided preference for the topic because it distracts them from the more proximate evil of U.S. slavery. Among many English-language readers, the Holocaust precludes irony or political ambiguity, and indeed Sontag, who made a career out of arguing that critical writing should abstain from interpretation and especially from metaphor, celebrates, in her earlier essay, Sebald’s freedom “from all-undermining or undiginified self-consciousness” (“A Mind,” 41).⁶ In the United States, and to some extent in Britain, a book about the Holocaust can seem “noble,” a term Sontag uses twice to describe Sebald’s work (“A Mind,” 41, 47). In Germany, it is difficult to imagine this response; in fact, the question of whether Sebald’s books are marred by a lack of self-consciousness or irony has been a source of some debate among scholars of German literature.⁷

Sebald’s novels are interested in these contextual differences: they remind us often that they are written, and need to be read, within and across several political histories, even while they complicate and often unsettle what those political histories are. To be certain, this is one kind of self-consciousness in which Sebald’s novels are, indeed, engaged. Among German readers, novels that discuss the murder and deportation of Jews alongside Belgian or British imperialism, or alongside the Allied firebombing of German cities, may resemble too closely the efforts of Holocaust deniers or apologists who have tried to diminish the Nazi genocide by comparing it to other, implicitly worse crimes.⁸ Among British and U.S. readers, however, novels that discuss, along with the Holocaust, European imperialism and the Allied air war can serve to correct an uncritical self-righteousness about German violence and British or U.S. liberalism. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg have observed that “the assertion of the Holocaust’s uniqueness has a different resonance in the land of the perpetrators, Germany, than it does in the United States, a nation that has its own, frequently disavowed, violent origins and history.”⁹ For his part, Sebald aggressively rejects the denial or minimization of Nazi genocide,¹⁰ but he does pursue both panoramic and microscopic views of that genocide: the panoramic view involves historicism and comparison, while the microscopic view involves speculation and idiosyncratic observation. Sebald is eager to avoid or undo what Roland Barthes calls “myth”: the ossification of the past into repeated but unanalyzed stories, and the assumption that underwrites ossification, that these stories need no analysis.¹¹ Myth, Barthes explains, is “the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying” (11); it presents “a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves” (143). Sebald suggests that irrational perception—the disruption both of bliss and of clarity—is necessary for and often prompts the analysis of naturalized histories. It does this by introducing not yet relevant details and by retracting details that are too well known.

In an essay on the air war, published in English after his death, Sebald objects to “vague generalizations,” those numerical abstractions and potted histories that allow people to come to terms with the past (“AW” 4). He objects, that is, not only to a kind of knowledge (“generalizations”) but also to an attitude of knowing. Some fifteen years earlier, in an article on which the later essay seems to have been modeled, Sebald suggests that those who write about twentieth-century Germany should aim to convey an uncomforting style: “a sense of reality that appears foreign.”¹² For this, Sebald recommends “the attitude of an agency that simply presents a report” (“BH” 77), which he will contrast with a narrative style that involves “bringing order to the discrepancies in the wide field of reality” (85). Sebald wants his stories to seem unfinished, so that readers will have to attempt their own order, or reckon with disorder. He proposes that a materialist history of European culture, a history attentive to the economic conditions and political contestation of values and norms, requires not only the first-person stories of natives and visitors but also the panoramic stories of economic relations and the researched or imagined stories of microscopic details. Adding panoramic and microscopic accounts (what he calls “synoptic and artificial” views [“AW” 25–26]) to eyewitness testimony, he argues, creates more authenticity because less coherence. Sebald thus combines the immigrant archives and aerial vision of the late twentieth century—what we know now that we could not know before—with the critical protocols and speculative postures of early-twentieth-century modernism.

Sebald’s combination of panoramic and microscopic views produces a relentless vertigo: whereas the panoramic view gathers context and locates agency, the microscopic view introduces details that resist any one context and often seem to point to a context that eludes specification. The panoramic view displays historical processes, and it expands transnationally the analysis of local events such as exploitation in the Congo or the production of silk in Milan. Eva Hoffman, a memoirist who was born in Poland and now lives between Boston and London, likewise values the panoramic view because it displays the transnational conditions and consequences of the Holocaust.¹³ A daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman distinguishes between “writers” and “carriers”: a “writer” is someone who makes a narrative of “what happened,” whereas a “carrier” transports “the cargo of awesome knowledge … carefully, with all the iterated accounts literally intact” (After Such Knowledge, 14–15). She explains:

It was not that the mythical vision of the world I had put together from scraps of story and imagery was untrue. The mythology, after all, derived from reality. It was just that I knew it as mythology and had no way of grasping it as actuality. It would take me a long time to discover and put its real-world components together. But as I was growing up, I had no comprehension of the background to the war or its course, of the circumstances visited upon Poland during the cataclysm, or the contemporaneous situation within which our lives unfolded in postwar Cracow.

Sebald worries, however, that panoramic views can promise too much and offer too few distinctions. Narrative and visual panoramas may convey the familiarity and omniscience of the realist novel, which Sebald aims to avoid, rather than the foreignness and uncertainty of the report (“BH” 77). A museum diorama of the Battle of Waterloo, for example, gives the false impression that everything can be seen:

We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and moral remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?

Preferring a more transient vision, Sebald suggests that aerial and documentary views need to be supplemented by speculative descriptions.¹⁴ Writing of the firebombing of Dresden, Sebald values subjunctive observation: what someone might have seen if someone could have seen it. He will imagine the destruction not only of buildings, trees, and inhabitants but also of “domestic pets” and “fixtures and fittings of every kind” (“AW” 25). The destruction of objects at once numerous and absurdly various must have led to “paralysis of the capacity to think and feel,” Sebald conjectures. By including these objects in his narrative, Sebald hopes to rectify that paralysis (by asking readers to think and feel about loss, including the loss of rationality) and also to imitate it (by asking readers to learn about details whose significance cannot be rationalized). And as he asks his readers to think of pets and fixtures when Dresden burned to the ground, so he focuses in his stories of Jewish emigration and Nazi occupation on the loss of everyday practices, like driving on the left, and of personal possessions, like “Grandfather’s pair of budgerigars,” whose impoundment by customs officials at Dover conveyed, for one family, “the whole monstrosity of changing countries under such inauspicious circumstances.”¹⁵ With these details, Sebald aims both to narrate and to describe, and thus to produce an unsettling, ironic cosmopolitanism.¹⁶

Amitava Kumar, an Indian expatriate and a U.S. theorist of immigration whose multigenre, artificial memoirs resemble Sebald’s, has proposed that the mixing of journalism and literature, analysis and speculation provides a necessary alternative to “the language of government agencies.”¹⁷ Kumar calls his first book a “forged passport” because it “will help you enter only the zones of a particular imagination” (ix). Instead of a government passport, which “chooses to tell its story about you,” Kumar produces his own “passport,” choosing the story he wants to tell. His amalgam of snapshots, anecdotes, and political analysis is meant to add, he writes, “a stubborn density, a life to what we encounter in newspaper columns as abstract, often faceless, figures without histories” (xi; emphasis in text). Details are “stubborn,” Kumar suggests, when they resist abstraction and enumeration. While panoramic views offer the kinds of analysis that can inform social policy and claims of political responsibility, artificial views emphasize idiosyncrasy and fantasy. In his recent anthology of writing by those he calls Indian expatriates, Kumar includes stories of “imaginary journeys” and portable objects alongside stories about Indians who have traveled abroad.¹⁸ He includes these additional writings, he explains, in order to represent several realities: the reality of journeys from one place to another that people actually take; the reality of places transformed by the journey of transnational capital (for example, the arrival of Tropicana orange juice to a small town in northern India); and the reality of imagined journeys to places memorized but never touched.¹⁹

Sebald’s modulation among different realities points to an ambivalence that pervades his work: he is committed to a materialist analysis of the present, which means insisting on causality and human agency; at the same time, he is suspicious of systemization, integration, and order, which means insisting on those accidental phenomena that escape intention and understanding. On the side of materialist analysis, Amir Eshel and others have identified Sebald’s “Benjaminian gaze,” and Sebald himself invokes Benjamin’s image of the “angel of history” in one of his late essays.²⁰ The Benjaminian imprint is visible in Sebald’s effort to display the acts of barbarism and exploitation that underwrite monuments of European civilization.²¹ It is also visible in the resemblance between his narrators’ meanderings and the practice of flânerie, and in his way of approaching the present through the irruption of details from the past.²² There is also what I will call his “Horkheimian gaze”: Sebald’s insistence on comparison and distinction among various acts of international violence. This means he will describe specific acts and actors, expanding the Benjaminian gaze from continental Europe to Britain, South America, and Africa, extending his research synchronically as well as diachronically.²³ Both of these “gazes” establish Sebald’s connection to the philosophical tradition of German critical theory and to a critical cosmopolitanism, influenced by that theory, that considers the political histories of national boundaries and international contacts. Sebald may focus his novels on the lives of individuals, but he attributes the suffering of those individuals to social and political systems: institutions such as trading companies, governments, and customs offices, and traditions of knowledge such as geography, political science, and military history. This version of critical cosmopolitanism assumes that demystification and enlightenment are possible, and also desirable.

But in Sebald’s novels, the Benjaminian gaze is prompted by episodes of intellectual and physical collapse—that is, by the failure to think critically. Sebald’s narrators, who share many of their author’s biographical details—sometimes his name—often express a sense of uneasiness, discomfort, and even panic that Sebald calls “vertigo.” In the novel of that title, the narrator is distressed by the “vague apprehension” of famous historical figures, Dante and Kafka, whom he thinks he has seen, though he knows it is impossible, in the streets of Vienna and on a bus traveling from Verona (V 35, 88–89). The most literal account of vertiginous thinking comes from Great-Uncle Adelwarth, who reports in The Emigrants that “memory … makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds” (E 145). A narrator who is literally paralyzed “when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past,” echoes this sentiment in Sebald’s subsequent novel, The Rings of Saturn (R 3). And in Austerlitz, the novel that Sebald published before his death in 2001, vertigo is caused by the recovery of “forgotten things” (A 151) and by the hint of things that cannot be recovered, such as a family’s vanished life (A 297).

For characters, episodes of collapse create time to speculate and research and the occasion for accidental encounters. In this way, vertigo motivates thought rather than simply preventing it: the experience of anxiety and the process of recuperation lead to impractical, unplanned adventures. This is especially true in Austerlitz, whose story is inaugurated and on the whole structured by a fortuitous encounter between the narrator and his eponymous friend. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator recalls a trip he made from England to Belgium in the mid-1960s. On his arrival at Antwerp Centraal Station, feeling uneasy for reasons he cannot explain, he decides to visit a zoo that is adjacent to the terminal (A 3). Walking through the rooms of a Nocturama, a darkened space designed for nocturnal animals, the narrator regains his composure but changes the way he sees: adjusting his eyes to the dim interior, he takes notice of the “sombrous lives behind the glass” (A 4). When the narrator returns to the train station, he observes shadowy details that he had missed on his initial visit: the imperialist façade, with its “verdigris-covered Negro,” and the various travelers, who “wore the same sorrowful expression as the creatures in the zoo” (A 6–7). Newly attentive, the narrator notices Austerlitz, whom he meets for the first time on that day and who, he learns, is writing a book about “the architectural style of the capitalist era,” in particular “the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident in law courts and penal institutions, railway stations and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums” (A 33). Austerlitz recounts the shadowed history of Antwerp station, whose patron, King Leopold II, used the profits of colonial enterprise abroad to erect magnificent public buildings at home (A 9). The narrator’s vertigo leads him to the unintended juxtaposition of zoo and railway station and to the subject (Austerlitz) of the novel; it reorients his attention from practical matters to ornaments and objects; and it extends the range of his analysis by introducing thoughts of captivity and exploitation in Africa to experiences of travel and modern architecture in Europe.

Of course, new information is not always enabling. It can create uncertainty about knowledge and about the political meanings of knowledge, and it may induce in the reader a kind of critical breakdown. Sebald produces this effect not only by adding details but also, as I’ve suggested, by withholding them. Amir Eshel has shown that the proliferation of details in Sebald’s narratives leads to a “suspension” or slowing down of time.²⁴ But by withholding some (well-known) details and providing others (that are less well known), Sebald is not only delaying and diverting the progress of knowledge but also drawing our attention to those processes of editing, contracting, and encoding that limit what we can see. In Sebald’s novels, adding and withholding involve a formal device I call “unassimilation,” which refers to the literal de-Anglicization of proper nouns and also to the less-literal disaggregation of collective experiences. Unassimilation does not return names to an original state of propriety: rather, it displays the history of translation, it uncontracts that history, by situating individuals, places, and even novels within several national, subnational, or transnational traditions. Unassimilation in some ways contributes to Benjaminian and Horkheimian endeavors because it expands the reader’s knowledge of places, people, and events. But in other ways it resists these endeavors by establishing less definitive classifications. When he speaks of “the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt” (“AW” 71), for example, Sebald will list where those people came from, not to emphasize the universality of suffering so much as to emphasize the variety: “people from Berlin and Frankfurt, from Wuppertal and Vienna, from Würtzburg and Kissingen, from Hilversum and The Hague, Naumur and Thionville, Lyon and Bordeaux, Kraków and Łódź, Szeged and Sarajevo, Salonika and Rhodes, Ferrara and Venice—there was scarcely a place in Europe from which no on had been deported in those years” (“AW” 72–73). Lists of this sort, and there are many in Sebald’s writings, are striking because they enumerate (there are many places), they overwhelm (there are so many places), and they create new, smaller lists (some of these places are metropolitan cities; some are provincial centers).

Sebald extends unassimilation not simply to the characters and events within his novels but to the geographies, cultures, and languages that allow us to place his novels within specific national traditions. Sebald asks us to consider how the political meanings and ethical consequences of his work are shaped by its multiple contexts of production, circulation, interpretation, and translation. The Rings of Saturn conveys this multiplicity most directly by reminding us, several times, that there are two different names for the body of water that the narrator sees along the beaches of Suffolk (R 46, 67, 78, 225). Sometimes, the narrator will speak of the North Sea and sometimes of the German Ocean. When he speaks of the North Sea, he identifies the eastern boundary of the British Isles. When he speaks of the German Ocean, a name seldom used after the nineteenth century, he registers a perspective: a view from the past and from the continent. Sebald’s narrator does not seem to be conscious of this oscillation, but it allows Sebald to show that reputations influence even the facts of geography. Sebald suggests that national borders are no more evident or unchanging than national identities.²⁵ Introducing obsolete, uncommon, or foreign names, Sebald makes his readers see transiently. He makes them learn about the German resorts that once flourished along now-decrepit English beaches, consider the Allied bombing of civilians in German cities as well as the German massacre of Jews in concentration camps, and recognize England as an east as well as a west, in some ways distinct from and in some ways continuous with Europe.

Sebald changes the names of historical figures whose stories have come to represent, sometimes automatically, a collective past that is known rather than analyzed. By withholding familiar details, Sebald moves celebrities from the world of myth into the world of fiction; he makes them writable, rather than merely recognizable.²⁶ This transformation has three principal aims: to make readers perceive familiar stories analytically rather than automatically; to reverse and thereby display the processes of translation, immigration, and assimilation in which past experiences are often lost; and to introduce political contexts for which celebrated figures are not yet known. Sebald’s novels present characters whose change of name reflects the desire to avoid or to retain anonymity.²⁷ Sometimes Sebald restores anonymity to well-known figures, as in Vertigo, which begins with an anecdote about “Marie Henri Beyle,” a young officer in Napolean’s army and later a great novelist, whose nom de plume—Stendhal—Sebald will never invoke (V 4); or as in Rings, which describes a “young French nobleman,” a “vicomte,” who has fled to England during the French Revolution and who is only later identified as the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, the French author and diplomat (R 250). In one case, Sebald frustrates anonymity by reproducing it: in Rings, he alludes to “a young Viennese officer” who helped to round up Bosnians, Jews, and Serbs during the Second World War and later became Secretary General of the United Nations, but the words “Kurt Waldheim” will never appear in the text (R 97–99). Emphasizing or imposing anonymity, Sebald transforms concrete monuments into dynamic anecdotes that can be seen and interpreted in the context of other anecdotes.

Introducing details that are not yet or no longer known, Sebald both extends and disorients the modern experience of place. On the one hand, he wants to create a more expansive sense of the past by describing “forgotten things” and “almost unperceived” events;²⁸ on the other hand, he wants to suspend or delay the acquisition of knowledge by introducing objects and experiences that seem to thwart classification. The difference between these projects, the effort to establish more inclusive, more accurate strategies of description and the effort to unfix, even disable social categories, is regularly understood as the difference between modernism and postmodernism.²⁹ I have been arguing in this book, however, that the two efforts coexist, if uncomfortably, at both the beginning and the end of the twentieth century: the tension between them is a hallmark of critical cosmopolitanism.

Since Sebald lived in England as a German citizen, composed his novels in German, criticized other Germans for remaining silent about the air war and about the Holocaust, and often seemed to be responding to the writing of German predecessors, it makes sense that scholars and reviewers have thought about his work in the context of German literature. Martin Swales has shown that Sebald’s prose reflects a German narrative tradition that is concerned with “the complex and ceaseless interplay of materiality and mentality.”³⁰ One can see this tradition in Sebald’s efforts both to describe everyday details and, at the same time, to attribute to those details “signification beyond common perception” (“Theoretical Reflections,” 26). Amir Eshel has shown that Sebald’s suspicion of ordering and his insistence on the value of metaphor follows “the credos of the West German documentary literature of the 1960s and 1970s,” and that there are several German precedents for situating a critique of Nazi ideology within a broader critique of European modernity. And Andreas Huyssen has argued that Sebald’s work identifies with and tries “to compensate for an undeniable German deficit of memory and experience.”³¹

In the remainder of this chapter, I will be speculating about the Britishness of Sebald’s novels. I do this neither to ignore the place of those novels in German literary history nor to suggest they have failed to achieve a fully “German” sensibility.³² Rather, I want to consider how Sebald animates problems of national classification in general and the problem of his own classification in particular. In the context of British literary history, Sebald’s analysis of imperialism appears not simply as an analogue for fascism but as an investigation of liberalism and other ideologies that have claimed to oppose tyranny. An emphasis on Britain, where Sebald’s narrators live as tourists and residents, foregrounds Sebald’s preoccupation with social and ethical marginality and with the geographical margins of Europe. Sebald discusses these issues most explicitly in The Rings of Saturn, where the eastern edges of Britain, he suggests, include Bombay and Hong Kong as well as Lowestoft and Norwich. Walking through Suffolk, the narrator of Rings describes the many voyages between periphery (Lowestoft) and periphery (Hong Kong) that defined the region in the past, and he suggests that Britain’s coast may have many peripheries within it: peripheral communities like crumbling seaside towns; peripheral citizens like homosexuals and invalids; and peripheral experiences like the loss of pet birds in the customs hall at Dover. Whereas Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and other immigrants to Britain wrote in the 1980s about Orientalism and colonialism, about the sites of U.S. and European imperialism, and about the immigration of Japanese, Pakistanis, and Chinese after the Second World War, Sebald wrote in the 1990s about the relationship between colonial exploitation and European architecture, about the small coastal towns of England, and about the prewar immigration of Poles, Germans, and Czechs, many of whom were Jews. Sebald brings the British novel back to Europe, one might say, but he does so by way of Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa: his novels extend the strategies of postcolonial critique, the analysis of “the East” as an imagined geography and cultural stereotype, to the analysis of “the West,” its national histories, mythologies, and borders.

The Caribbean-born, British-raised novelist and critic Caryl Phillips, who lives in New York, could have included Sebald among his anthology of “extravagant strangers,” those writers (he includes William Thackery and George Orwell as well as T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, David Dabydeen, and Ben Okri) who were not born in Britain but whose work “contains a formal response to Britain’s perception of herself.”³³ Sebald is not a native of Britain, but he resembles the group of British-born contemporary writers who, as Phillips tells it, “explore primary historical ruptions in British society—both past and present—around issues of gender, class and sexuality” and who produce “post-consensus fictions” (“Extravagant Strangers,” 294). Sebald’s project shares in recent efforts to “provincialize Europe,”³⁴ to raise “questions about the coherence, presumed originality, and boundednesss of the modern, Western, Euro-American nation as a historical form,”³⁵ and to consider the “mostly unacknowledged traffic” between Europe and the non-European world.³⁶ A German native who lived in England for the last thirty years of his life, Sebald emphasizes the foreign entanglements both of his own endeavor and of those past endeavors, such as Joseph Conrad’s, whose example he follows and reimagines.

The Rings of Saturn is Sebald’s most British novel in setting and in subject, and in its effort to consider what passes for British today. One object that passes, Sebald suggests in an important episode, is Heart of Darkness; he will present the novel as a product not simply of Britain but of Poland, Belgium, and the Congo. Another is that trope of little England, the country house, whose “bygone paraphernalia,” Sebald writes of one example, seems to have been gathered on “a tour of duty to Nigeria or Singapore” (R 35). Visiting Somerleyton Hall, with its stuffed polar bear in the entrance, “one is not quite sure,” the narrator reports, “whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent” (R 36). Sebald oscillates between peculiar detail (a stuffed polar bear, a camphorwood chest) and panoramic history: he reports the account of a Dutch acquaintance, who remarks that English country houses are more impressive than those in other European nations because the profits of colonialism were used in England to build rural estates, whereas in Holland they financed great buildings in the cities (R 193); the Dutchman adds that important art museums in both nations, the Tate Gallery in London and the Mauritshuis in The Hague, whose buildings contain and also constitute national treasures, “were originally endowed by the sugar dynasties or were in some other way connected with the sugar trade” (R 194).

Sebald uses the panoramic view to make two related points about British national monuments: they are built from the materials of other cultures, objects gathered abroad that serve as art or ornament at home; and they are built with the capital accrued from the exploitation of those cultures, the profits of sugar and slavery. The panoramic view allows Sebald to show, in the Benjaminian fashion I have discussed above, that the accomplishments of English civilization—the novel, the country house, and the art museum—were nourished by acts of exploitation and violence. The panoramic view also makes a point about geography: the monuments that define what seems to be a specific and exceptional nation owe many of their characteristics to the cultures that nation has conquered, destroyed, or excluded; for this reason, so-called national monuments must be seen as international artifacts, products of many cultures and of the sometimes violent contact among those cultures. The microscopic view, while it provides the details that allow Sebald to make these arguments, introduces residual uncertainties and a jolt of obliviousness about exploitation: the narrator will ponder the question of an object’s origins without resolving it (“Nigeria or Singapore”?), and he will suggest that the country house, whatever its provenance, retains aesthetic or allegorical value, at least to him (“how fine a place the house seemed to me,” the narrator relates, “now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion” [36]).

Yet another object that passes for British, Sebald suggests, is his narrator, who takes after the author and whose Englishness is recognized in Vertigo by an Italian waiter quoted in my epigraph: “Un inglese, he said, and looked across at me with what I took to be a touch of contempt” (V 79). It is important to observe, of passing in general and of this incident in particular, that the waiter’s recognition is not simply false: in Sebald’s novels, national identities change over time and across contexts; the narrator is not quite an Englishman—he carries a German passport—but he speaks English, lives in England, and perhaps sounds English to an Italian. On a visit to a German town, later in the same novel, the narrator is taken for an “English foreign correspondent,” and the epithet seems to fit (V 192). Of course, when we speak of people or objects that pass, we usually mean that they do not belong to the ethnicity or race or nation whose characteristics they appear to share: Sebald’s novels only pass because they are not, in fact, British.³⁷ Yet Sebald seems to be working with rules of belonging that are somewhat more fluid, or at least more ambivalent than this view of passing would suggest: what is passing to some—being a resident but not a native of Britain, for example—is belonging to others; it depends which attributes (language, custom, citizenship, residency) are necessary and which merely incidental. Sebald proposes that immigration confers new, often provisional identities; that immigrants do not move between homogeneous and wholly distinct national cultures; and that the national or regional identity of an author and even of a novel depends not simply on the language of initial production but on the conditions of translation, circulation, and sympathy.

The Rings of Saturn is full of people who visualize Germany while residing in England and whose views create less unanimous, less official geographies. Sebald tells of Michael Hamburger, who left Berlin in 1933, at the age of nine, and whose “hallucinations and dreams … often take place in a setting reminiscent partly of the metropolis of Berlin and partly of rural Suffolk” (R 179). “For instance,” Hamburger explains, “I may be standing at a window on the upper floor of our house, but what I see is not the familiar marshes and the willows thrashing as they always do, but rather, from several hundred yards up, acres and acres of allotment gardens bisected by a road, straight as an arrow, down which black taxis speed out of the city in the direction of the Wannsee” (R 179–80). In its Englishness and in its fantasy of aerial perspective, Hamburger’s view of Berlin is similar to the one imagined by William Hazel, an English gardener who learned the terrain of Germany, he explains, by memorizing a military relief map. Looking at the map, the narrator reports, Hazel thought of the bombing raids that were “launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940” (R 38). Every evening, Hazel remembers, “I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting in the ruins” (R 38). The Germany that Hazel imagines is not equivalent to the map; rather, the map allows Hazel to envision an itinerary of destruction, a relationship between English airfields and German ruins. Hazel’s story, focused on the Allied destruction of German cities, offers a counterpoint to Hamburger’s story, about the Nazi destruction of Jewish life in Berlin. These are different points of view, ethically and historically, and they allow Sebald to suggest that various instances of travel, from England to Germany and from Germany to England, have transformed the geography of Europe, supplementing government maps and empirical measurements with snapshots, anecdotes, and informal affiliations. Falling asleep, dreaming, hallucinating: in these semiconscious states, Michael Hamburger and William Hazel are able to think globally and locally at the same time.

In Rings, Sebald introduces this mixing of perspectives (local and global) and genres (empirical and imagined) with three epigraphs that he places at the beginning of the German edition.³⁸ Printed in different languages (English, French, and German) and taken from disparate sources (a seventeenth-century treatise, a nineteenth-century letter, and a twentieth-century scientific essay), the epigraphs reflect variously on the failure to see morally, empirically, or sympathetically. In each case, failure seems to be unavoidable and in some way valuable. The second epigraph, about the entanglement of good and evil, comes from Areopagitica, John Milton’s treatise against literary censorship; the third, about the orbiting ruins that create the appearance of Saturn’s rings, comes from an article in a German encyclopedia.³⁹ And the first epigraph, the one in French, comes from a letter written by the young Joseph Conrad to his aunt Marguerite Poradowska. Conrad’s words, like those in the other epigraphs, prepare and even seem to rehearse the concerns of Sebald’s novel: we learn right away of the need to pardon or excuse “ces âmes malheureuses qui … regardent sans comprendre l’horreur de la lutte, la joie de vaincre ni le profond désespoire des vaincus.”⁴⁰

While I don’t think that Sebald agrees with Conrad, that one must above all excuse those who fail to understand, he shares Conrad’s interest in the causes and opportunities of blindness. Not only in his epigraphs but also in an important chapter of Rings, Sebald will cite Conrad’s words, as well as his works, strategies, and personal history. In obvious ways, Sebald resembles Conrad, in his experience of immigration, in his late career as a novelist in Britain, in his analysis of European colonialism, and in his consistent generosity toward those who fail to see. But Sebald will display an analytic difference between Conrad’s narratives and his own, adding perspectives that Conrad was unable or unwilling to offer and introducing political choices that helped to determine, in the early days of modernism, what could be looked at and what could be understood. Sebald articulates these differences by telling a story of Conrad’s life alongside a story about Conrad’s acquaintance, the Anglo-Irish statesman Roger Casement, a colonial administrator and critic of colonialism who was executed for high treason in 1916.

Moving almost invisibly among several genres—letters, anecdotes, statistics, novels, government reports, and photographs—Sebald’s story of Conrad and Casement brings together entries from Conrad’s diary, passages from Heart of Darkness, an economic analysis of Belgian colonialism, a story about the narrator’s trip to Brussels in December 1964, Casement’s detailed version of Belgian labor policies in the Congo, pages from Casement’s “black diary” in which he recorded his sexual encounters with men, and a panoramic account of European colonialism that connects events in the Congo to those closer to home. The structure of the novel’s ten chapters is suggestive about the structure of this single chapter. The parts are held together by the narrator’s “pilgrimage”—he is walking along the coast of Suffolk, from one town to another—and by the reappearance of physical materials, such as silk. However, these materials have both empirical and metaphorical trajectories: describing the production and circulation of silk, Sebald considers the economic history of European smuggling and global trade, on the one hand, and analytic paradigms of mourning, prophecy, and transformation, on the other.⁴¹ The persistence of metaphor means that the reader must assemble the novel’s pieces, but the pieces create an unfinished work. Late in his novel, Sebald offers a metaphor for this metaphor in his description of “a bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of silk embroidered with silken thread” (R 212). The gown, produced by three sisters who live on a neglected family estate in Ireland, is made up of “remnant fabrics,” pieces of other garments, which, like Sebald’s narratives, have been stitched together and then elaborated (“embroidered”) with new, intricate designs. The gown bears the traces of its composition, though Sebald suggests that the mixing of colors and fabrics and the superimposed stitching makes the new garment all the more original. The story of the gown and the three sisters reminds us that Sebald is inventing as well as assembling, and that we are meant to invent, too.

In his account of Conrad and Casement, Sebald’s method involves both more sewing and more embroidering than the narrator at first acknowledges. Most of the chapter presents the narrator’s efforts to “reconstruct” a television documentary about Casement’s life. But since the narrator has not in fact seen the documentary—he fell asleep while watching—the so-called reconstruction is the product not of memory but of research and speculation. Sebald’s conceit allows him begin his story with Conrad and to approach Britain from the marginal perspectives of Poland, the Congo, and Ireland. He speaks first of Conrad’s experience of Russian imperialism, in part to emphasize, by the later contrast with Casement, the versions of imperialism that Conrad does not consider and in part to draw connections among various forms of “tyranny,” Russian, Belgian, and British (R 104).

Like many other characters in Sebald’s text, the author of Heart of Darkness goes by more than one name: initially, he is called by his English pen name, Joseph Conrad, but more often he is called by one of his Polish names, Konrad Korzeniowski. There are stylistic affinities between Sebald’s novel and Conrad’s—for example, Sebald’s unassimilation of Conrad’s name echoes Conrad’s strategy “delayed decoding,” and Sebald’s use of embedded narrators evokes Conrad’s similar conceit in Heart of Darkness.⁴² In Sebald’s text, Conrad becomes the object of his own celebrated techniques. Withholding what readers conventionally know about Conrad, Sebald focuses attention on Korzeniowski’s movement among several national cultures and on the production of his British self. By reminding readers that Conrad began his life among those who were “suffering the humiliation of foreign rule” (R 105), as Conrad seems to put it, Sebald will have us connect the occupation of Poland by Russia to the occupations of the Congo by Belgium and of Ireland by Britain; and he will have us connect Korzeniowski’s early experience of border crossing, living in Polish Russia, with his later experiences as a French seaman and a British novelist.

Sebald uses Conrad’s critique of Belgium in Heart of Darkness to establish an expansive critique of Britain in his own novel. If Conrad is critical of liberal nationalism, as Pericles Lewis has shown, Sebald goes further in describing the illiberal actions that liberal nationalism has helped to obscure.⁴³ He does this by integrating language from Conrad’s fiction with a report on Conrad’s experience, so that it is Korzeniowski as much as Conrad’s fictional narrator Marlow who observes “black shadows,” worked nearly to death, building the Congolese railroad (R 120). Sebald attributes to Korzeniowski the observation that the “bombastic” architecture of Brussels, where he went to visit his aunt, seemed like “a sepulchral monument erected over the hecatomb of black bodies” (R 122). Conrad speaks of “black shadows,” but it is Sebald, not Conrad, who will mention bodies and who will introduce Belgian architecture to the story of African colonies; moreover, it is Roger Casement who will speak explicitly about Belgian atrocities and who will draw connections between Belgian colonialism in the Congo and British colonialism in Ireland. Sebald turns to Casement to supplement Conrad’s account because Casement “could tell things that he, Korzeniowski, had long been trying to forget” (R 127). Some of the things that Casement could tell about the Congo include “an exact account of the utterly merciless exploitation of the blacks” (R 127). But Casement does not stop there: he also describes British exploits in “the jungle areas of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil that resembled those in the Congo in many respects”; and British culpability in Ireland, where “in recent times more than a million Irish had died of starvation” (R 128–29).

It is significant that Sebald is adding concrete details. However, it is also significant that Sebald does not correct Conrad’s silences by offering non-European voices, such as those that might belong to those “black bodies” that the British and the Belgians exploited. And he does not correct Casement, who expressed racist stereotypes in private even while he opposed exploitation in public.⁴⁴ Instead, he will focus on “liberal” forms of tyranny: he will describe Britain’s treatment of Casement, whose execution for treason during the First World War, after a failed attempt to enlist German support for the Irish uprising, was hastened by evidence of his homosexuality. Sebald notices that those who might have sympathized with Casement, for his willingness to criticize European exploitation and for his defense of Ireland, were unwilling to support him once his private diaries had been circulated by British officials.

At the start of The Rings of Saturn, one is tempted to see Conrad as Sebald’s double, and in some ways he is. But in other ways, Casement is the closer relation. Whereas Conrad carefully manages proximity and detachment, Casement fails to balance or withhold his passions. Allied at one time or another with Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Ireland, Casement is a perpetrator who is also a victim: he helped to administer colonial governments in the Congo and South America, and yet his public criticism of those governments helped to prompt international outrage against economic and environmental exploitation; he offered military support to Germany during the First World War but did so to help the cause of Irish independence from Britain. In this political history, Sebald sides with the anti-imperialist, homosexual traitor, noting that Casement’s inability to separate what Cynthia Enloe has called “the personal and the international” was both his downfall and his greatest resource; it was Casement’s personal experience of marginality, Sebald proposes, that made him attentive to international suffering.⁴⁵ Because he had to reflect on his own embodiment, Sebald suggests, Casement was better able to notice and less eager to ignore the bodies of others.

In Sebald’s texts, the experience of marginality generates a kind of vertigo that is politically useful in two ways: it makes people more aware of their own materiality (their physical bodies but also the particularity of their views); and it makes people question the comforts of inclusiveness. Massimo Leone has observed that, medically speaking, vertigo involves the negative perception of one’s own equilibrium. This means, he proposes, that vertigo “could be an occasion (or a voluntary strategy) through which the human body seeks to develop a full awareness of itself.”⁴⁶ That is, it could be an occasion to reflect not only on disequilibrium but also on those states of being that go unperceived. Vertigo is in this sense a process or a strategy of estrangement. As an ethical paradigm, vertigo can inspire what Michael Rothberg has called “puzzlement”: not the comprehension or reconciliation of multiple views, but “the apprehension of the simultaneously global and local dimension of intersecting histories.”⁴⁷ Writing of W. E. B. Du Bois’s effort to think simultaneously about Nazi terror and U.S. racism, Rothberg suggests that puzzlement can acknowledge “the perils of transcultural movement” while valuing “the idea that only by passing through such perils can the traveler gain insight into the world.”

There are at least three models of cosmopolitanism that one should see in Sebald’s work. One is the effort to consider how the lives of people in one place rely on, exploit, or benefit the lives of people elsewhere. This is an old model of cosmopolitanism: it emphasizes the value of recognizing and feeling attachments across national divides. This effort is “critical,” in the sense of demystifying, because it displays economic patterns, systems of exploitation, and political responsibilities that were not previously visible. Yet Sebald combines the traditional model with two others: first, there is the effort to compare, distinguish, and judge among different versions of thinking beyond the nation—among, say, Conrad’s, Casement’s, the version that animates British imperialism, the version that animates anti-imperialist nationalisms, and so on. And, second, there is the effort to generate, instead of judgment and order, an ethos of embodied uncertainty that is sometimes at odds with political action and the affects of critical theory. By refusing to praise Conrad or to bury him, by reproducing Conrad’s strategies of display but also adding to them, by speculating as well as documenting, by placing the conflict between personal freedoms and collective actions at the heart both of modernism and of cosmopolitanism, Sebald asks us to consider that a critical cosmopolitanism will have to reflect not only on social uses and political interests but also on intellectual protocols and analytic styles.

Peter Craven has attributed to Sebald the conviction that no memory is “so trivial or intolerable that it cannot become the subject of art.”⁴⁸ I would offer something stronger: triviality and intolerability, because they test the formal and ethical limits of inclusion, are the conditions of Sebald’s art. Bringing the margins of British history to the center of his narratives, Sebald enhances and disables the place of national fiction; its constituency and its borders, he affirms, are vertiginous at best.