Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick Read Free Book Online

naked eye. It is, in fact, a verbal rendering of an old photograph—a slide shown by a projector on a screen.
    An obsession with old photographs is what separates Sebald from traces of Mann, from Turner’s hallucinatory mists, from the winding reflections of Proust (to whom, in his freely searching musings and paragraphs wheeling cumulatively over pages, Sebald has been rightly and repeatedly compared), and even from the elusively reappearing shade of Nabokov. The four narrativesrecounted in
The Emigrants
are each accompanied by superannuated poses captured by obsolete cameras; in their fierce time-bound isolations they suggest nothing so much as Diane Arbus. Wittingly or not, Sebald evokes Henry James besides, partly for his theme of expatriation, and partly on account of the mysterious stillness inherent in photography’s icy precision. In the 1909 New York Edition of his work, James eschewed illustration, that nineteenth-century standby, and turned instead to the unsentimental fixity of photography’s Time and Place, or Place-in-Time. In Sebald’s choosing to incorporate so many photos (I count eighty-six in 237 pages of text)—houses, streets, cars, headstones, cobblestones, motionless schoolchildren, mountain crevasses, country roads, posters, roofs, steeples, hotel postcards, bridges, tenements, grand and simple rooms, overgrown gardens—he, like James with his 1909 frontispieces, is acknowledging the uncanny ache that cries out from the silence of solid things. These odd old pictures attach to Sebald’s voice like an echo that cannot be heard, no matter how hard one strains; they lie in the crevices of print with a terrible helplessness—deaf-mutes without the capacity to sign.
    The heard language of these four stories—memories personal, borrowed, invented—is, as I noted earlier, sublime; and I wish it were not—or, if that is not altogether true, I admit to being disconcerted by a grieving that has been made beautiful. Grief, absence, loss, longing, wandering, exile, homesickness—these have been made millennially, sadly beautiful since the
Odyssey
, since the
Aeneid
, since Dante (“You shall come to know how salt is the taste of another’s bread”); and, more venerably still, since the Psalmist’s song by the waters of Babylon. Nostalgia is itself a lovely and piercing word, and even more so is the German
Heimweh
, “home-ache.” It is art’s sacred ancient trick to beautify pain, to romanticize the shadows of the irretrievable. “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come backagain”—Thomas Wolfe, too much scorned for boyishness, tolls that bell as mournfully as anyone; but it is an American tolling, not a German one. Sebald’s mourning bell is German, unmistakably German; when it tolls the hour, it is almost always 1944. And if I regret the bittersweet sublime Turner-like wash of Beauty that shimmers over the whole of this volume, it is because sublime grieving is a category of yearning, fit for that which is irretrievable. But 1944 is always, always retrievable. There stands Mengele on the ramp, forever lifting his gloved hand; and there, sent off to the left and the right, are the Jews, going to the left and the right forever. Nor is this any intimation of Keats’s urn—there are human ashes in it. The posthumous sublime is discordant; an oxymoron. Adorno told us this long ago: after Auschwitz, no more poetry. We resist such a dictum; the Psalmist by the waters of Babylon resisted it; the poet Paul Célan resisted it; Sebald resists it. It is perhaps natural to resist it.
    So, in language sublime, Sebald is haunted by Jewish ghosts—Europe’s phantoms: the absent Jews, the deported, the gassed, the suffering, the hidden, the fled. There is a not-to-be-overlooked irony (a fossilized irony, my professor-critic might call it) in Sebald’s having been awarded the Berlin Literature Prize—Berlin, the native city of Gershom (né Gerhardt) Scholem, who wrote definitively about the