I love #APSTogether, so I couldn’t resist reading W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (translated by Michael Hulse) along with Elisha Gabbert this month, and because it helps to keep my thoughts in one place, I’m doing so here. You can still join or dive in…

“Dr. Henry Selwyn”

Dr. Henry Selwyn is "a kind of ornamental hermit" to the garden of the house owned by his estranged wife, Mrs. Selwyn, also known as Elli, a sharp businesswoman. The ruined tennis courts, the things "fallen into disrepair" for lack of use or context, pick up the theme in Sebald's work. One sees the things fallen into disrepair as an extension of their marriage, which has long been uninhabitable. 

A mystery: what Sebald calls an "annihilating verdict" on our lifestyles follows Elli's simple remark that the bathroom "reminded her of a freshly painted dovecote." 

The servant, Elaine, is the house's only full-time resident, since Mr. Selwyn lives in his hermit house and Elli is often away on business. Elaine is alienated from the outset; Sebald compares her short hair to that of inmates in asylums, bringing both carceral systems and madness into the room. Although no food comes out of the kitchen, Elaine seems to always been there, doing kitchen work, being invisible.  The "shadows of servants" roam behind the walls, and Sebald senses them, saying the employers should fear "those ghostly creatures who, for scant wages, dealt with the tedious tasks that had to be performed daily." 

*

A fragment from “Dr. Henry Selwyn” puzzled me to distraction: it felt significant. In this fragment, Sebald describes a chateau he had visited where “two crazy brothers had built a replica of the facade of Versailles”, which Sebald described as “an utterly pointless counterfeit.”

What does it mean for a facade to be counterfeit, given that a facade is, by definition, not an original, and therefore counterfeit? I wondered if this was a question of translation, although it felt like a reflective space, a Sebaldian tourniquet that contains others.

In 1939, Benjamin Péret published the essay, "Ruins: Ruins of Ruins" in a small surrealist journal. It is hard not to imagine that Sebald read this essay at some point, hard not to find a similar surface when Péret speaks of ruins as serial - "One ruin drives away another, the one that preceded it, killing it." 

A few paragraphs later, Péret adds: 

Revolting Versailles, incapable of producing a ruin because it is bereft of ghosts it couldn't give rise to, is as opposed to the ruin of the Middle Ages as the waterfall is to the electricity station. Enemies to the death because the first is killed by the second which springs up from it.

Doesn’t this evoke the counterfeit ruin of the Versailles facade built by the two crazy brothers? Peret moves towards articulating an aesthetic of ruins which feels kindred to themes in Sebald’s own work, and “Dr. Henry Selwyn” seems to be in conversation with this essay, or with Péret’s discrimination between ruins, which he takes the medieval ruins as “fresh” while Versailles is “degenerate”, suggesting that one ruin has some form of life in it while the other remains uninhabitable.

Unlike the Goths or Romantics, Péret doesn't read sublimity into the ruins so much as decay and wreck. Since leaving the womb, man seeks a castle, a cave which his image can haunt. The death gesture is "another castle, a ridiculous bogey....built to the scales of the worms that gnaw him."  As for man, he is "a ghost for himself and the castle visited by his own ghost." I hear Elaine in the kitchen, and wonder what Elli’s name was short for— and whether it was Elaine, shortened to Elli to distinguish and set the two women apart?

Again, the empty house and servant ghosts come to mind when Péret describes the silence of the oyster or snail as something which man covets and envies. Man covets the safe shell straight into the "hideous suburban villa" of the "pathetic petit-bourgeois". (*I'll be darned if Bachelard isn't implicated in this.) To quote Peret again:

The dog born of a dog barely recognizes the wolf's ruins, but those of the tiger are for him no more than a trace in the sand, this sand whose ruins he has forgotten, derisory images of those he fails to recognize.

Haunted by "the phantoms of his childhood", man seeks answers from excavated origins. "There is nothing in that childhood to disown, except by someone who has become unworthy of it," Péret suggests. Sebald's characters are somehow unworthy of those childhoods, aren't they? Or that is how they see themselves-- as Germans who are unworthy by association, by affiliation, in relation to the origin they have claimed?

Thus "Stalin tries to make Lenin a dead ruin, the better to betray him." And Peret suggests that poets throughout history have fed on the execution, on the sepulchral death mask of a ruined man, on the corpse who can no longer speak. But in the museum - and in literature - "One ruin drives away another, the one that preceded it, killing it."

Going back to the “freshly painted dovecote” that replaces the hothouse: is Sebald taking this as a counterfeit Versailles facade? Is that why it’s an "annihilating verdict”?

"I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul," Henry confesses to Sebald, without expanding on this Faustian bargain.  We are left with Henry’s suicide, in the small house he called his “folly”, in the garden of the wife and nice life from which he remained estranged.

Cape Varvara

Sebald alludes to it on page 129 (“into the wings of Cape Varvara with its dark green forests, over which hangs the thin sickle of the crescent moon”). The closest thing I could find was Varvara Village on the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea, which seems distant from the boat trajectory in the text, and yet, it has it’s own ghosts. On the south side of the beach, there are rocks known as the Dardanelles, beloved by divers. Currently, the village has 250 residents. More from wikipedia:

In the middle of the 19th century, the site of the modern village was uninhabited, except for the small monastery or chapel of Saint Barbara with holy springs, after which the village was named. An older settlement may well have existed, as indicated by the marking of the name Vardarah on Max Šimek's 1748 and Christian Ludwig's 1788 map in that area. Until the Balkan Wars, Varvara was a small Ottoman village of ethnic Turkish refugees from northern Bulgaria who settled there following the Liberation of Bulgaria in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. After 1913, the Turks moved out and were replaced by Bulgarian refugees from Eastern Thrace

The village is best known for its intellectual community of artists and writers. Many young artists came to Varvara in the 1970s and 1980s and populated a small camp called The Sea Club which the Academy of Arts in Sofia had purchased for them. Over the years a larger group of artists established themselves in Varvara and started to buy real estate and build a small community.

Kissingen

The narrator strolls the grounds of Kissingen looking for answers about Ferber and Luisa Lanzberg. He sits to read the local newspaper, and finds:

The quote of the day, in the so-called Calendar column, was from Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and read: Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds. It was the 25th of June. According to the paper, there was a crescent moon and the anniversary of the birth of Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian poet, and of the English writer George Orwell.

Again, time is told by the moon—the crescent—which reminds me of how critical theorists have spoken of the end of the village, and how Sebald haunts those spaces, inhabits the ghosts, and so telling time by the moon, or using it as a form of location, is antiquated. It feels out of time. Even as it establishes time and temporality.