Doomed to repeat it nonetheless

Up modernism’s escalator rises James Joyce proclaiming, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Riding the escalator down, head averted, comes German writer W.G. Sebald. Gazing past all modernisms, plain or post, he whispers, merely: “History is a nightmare which I must go back to dream.”

The human course has always been mined with horrors, but Sebald, whose own course abruptly ended in a fatal 2001 car crash, evoked a dire vortex of deepening dehumanization, beginning with the Industrial Age and culminating in the Holocaust. In three great novel-meditations, and in a smaller but equally haunting early collection, Sebald stops time and forces it to run backward.

His characters -- the four Jews in “The Emigrants” who seemingly avoided the Holocaust (one lived and died decades before) only to have its death work within them; the architect in “Austerlitz” for whom grand buildings turn lethal; the narrator of “The Rings of Saturn,” who wanders the peaceable English countryside to find it sowed with the salt of historical calamity -- all are brought low by a malefic historical past. It is one, as in Faulkner, that is not only not dead but not even past, and it lies ahead waiting.

“Campo Santo” is a miscellany of uncollected pieces published by Sebald in the 20 years before his death. They include essays and reviews printed in various periodicals. Their interest is uneven, perhaps, although most bear a touch here and there of the peculiar quicksilver of the writer’s mind and style.

Particularly striking is an essay on Kafka’s travel notes. Sebald compares his memories of a similar journey, almost as if Kafka’s were more real to him than his own. There is another decrying a lack among German writers dealing with the Nazi times: They speak of guilt, shame, outrage at what was done to the victims; what they fail to do, Sebald suggests (inspired by a book on the subject), is to mourn.

Far outdoing even the best of these pieces are three set in Corsica. Perhaps intended as part of a new work of imagination, they compel a startled delight, and they compel painful regret -- outrage even -- that Sebald is gone and unable to continue. They have a characteristic form, beginning with a walk or an excursion and going on to exquisitely note objects, landscapes, the flight of sand martins, all seen in a late-afternoon internal light that touches them with the gold of the moment and the hint of night to come. From here the connections exfoliate, darkening into notes of personal and historical anguish. The tourist ends his day quietly: bed, an evening stroll.

In “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” Sebald visits the restored house of the Bonaparte family. The female attendant’s oval face seems to resemble Napoleon’s; open to history’s hauntings, the narrator finds a diminutive guard who looks like Marshal Ney. He cites Kafka’s account of a lecturer who, having once viewed Napoleon’s displayed corpse, declares that if the emperor’s call should sound, even in 1,000 years, his own dust motes would rally. He cites a Belgian who wrote that because Napoleon was colorblind, he mistook the red of spilled blood for Nature’s salvific green.

Buzzing with such blithe absurdities -- the ones in which history cloaks its violence -- our tourist decides against a movie and returns to his hotel. A bomb goes off in the distance -- Corsican separatists at work, history once more on its rounds.

In “The Alps in the Sea,” Sebald walks through Corsica’s mountains. He sees the forests below, notes their diminishment after the great 150-foot trees were cut down a century ago. His thoughts turn to hunting, also diminished. A woman complains about the humiliating spectacle of her husband being gone all day only to return with a single partridge. Can killing, itself, be dying? Not really. Sebald thinks back to his Bavarian childhood: the sight of bloody deer carcasses hanging in the butcher’s window, with tiny green plastic trees adorning them. (Colorblind Napoleon.)

He thinks of Flaubert’s story of St. Julian atoning for a lifelong orgy of hunting by embracing a leper. Then back to the hotel. In the bay, a white yacht emerges out of a fiery sunset, it anchors, and its windows light up; later, it moves slowly away into the darkness. Sebald has created another of his hauntings; nothing, not the grandest or the most innocent, is free of them.

The strongest of the three pieces, equal to anything he has written, is the “Campo Santo” of the collection’s title. Again he starts with an excursion: to the beach below Piana. He swims easily out; as he returns the horizon seems to tilt, and it is like swimming uphill. Depression -- his own share of history -- frequently afflicts Sebald or, interchangeably, Sebald as narrator.

He explores the town’s shabby cemetery, where the disorder of weeds seems infinitely better than the disciplined flower ranks in the Bavarian town where he grew up. (Sebald moved to England in his early 20s and taught there for 30 years. Germany was a knife to him.)

What follows is an account of old Corsican death traditions: houses painted black, a chorus of town keeners whose ritual wailing shows “both total collapse and the utmost self-control.” He writes of the old rural wariness of the dead: a community set balefully against the living and, a foot shorter than in life, wandering the countryside in nighttime bands. There was fear among the living but also a kind of dependence. There was more space and fewer people than today, he writes. “You could not do without anyone then even after death.”

He continues in a downward arc that distills the fundamental theme of all his writing: the mortal illnesses inflicted upon the present by its failure to confront, grieve and do penance for the horrors of the past.

Today, Sebald concludes, “leaving a present without memory, in the face of a future no individual mind can now envisage, in the end we shall ourselves relinquish life without feeling any need to linger at least for a while, nor shall we be impelled to pay return visits from time to time.” *