Quarrel & Quandary (5 page)

A British academic, A. D. Nuttall, offers a psychiatric solution: Raskolnikov is in a state of self-hypnotic schizophrenia. Walter Kaufmann invokes existentialism, drawing Dostoyevsky into Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s web. Freud speculates that Dostoyevsky expresses “sympathy by identification” with criminals as a result of an Oedipal revolt against his father. Harold Bloom, sailing over Raskolnikov’s inconsistencies, sees in him an apocalyptic figure, “a powerful representative of the will demonized by its own strength.” “The best of all murder stories,” says Bloom, “
Crime and Punishment
seems to me beyond praise and beyond affection.” For Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, the novel is beyond contempt; he knew even in his teens that it was
“long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written.” Dostoyevsky is “mediocre,” and his “gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics.” As for Dostoyevsky’s religion, it is a “special lurid brand of the Christian faith.” “I am very eager to debunk Dostoyevsky,” Nabokov assures us.

Is this a case of the blind men and the elephant? Or the novel as Rorschach test? There is something indeterminate in all these tumbling alternatives—in Raskolnikov’s changing theories, in the critics’ clashing responses. Still, all of them taken together make plain what it is that Dostoyevsky’s novel turns out not to be. It is not, after all, a singlemindedly polemical tract fulminating against every nineteenth-century radical movement in sight—though parts may pass for that. It is not a detective thriller, despite its introduction of Porfiry, a crafty, nimble-tongued, penetratingly intuitive police investigator. It is not a social protest novel, even if it retains clear vestiges of an abandoned earlier work on alcoholism and poverty in the forlorn Marmeladovs, whom Raskolnikov befriends: drunken husband, unbalanced tubercular wife, daughter driven to prostitution.

And it is not even much of what it has often been praised for being: a “psychological” novel—notwithstanding a startling stab, now and then, into the marrow of a mind. George Eliot is what we mean, in literature, by psychological; among the moderns, Proust, Joyce, James. Dostoyevsky is not psychological in the sense of understanding and portraying familiar human nature.
Crime and Punishment
is in exile from human nature—like the deeply eccentric
Notes from Underground
, which precedes it by a year. The underground man, Raskolnikov’s indispensable foreshadower, his very embryo, revels in the corrupt will to seek out extreme and horrible acts, which gladden him with their “shameful accursed sweetness.” But Raskolnikov will in time feel suffocated by the mental anguish that dogs
his crime. Suspicions close in on him; a room in a police station seems no bigger than a cupboard. And soon suffering criminality will put on the radiant robes of transcendence. Led by the saintly Sonya Marmeladova, who has turned harlot to support her destitute family, Raskolnikov looks at last to God. The nihilist, the insolent Napoleon, is all at once redeemed—implausibly, abruptly—by a single recitation from the Gospels, and goes off, docile and remorseful, to serve out his sentence in Siberia.

Nabokov gleefully derides Dostoyevsky’s sentimental conventions: “I do not like this trick his characters have of ‘sinning their way to Jesus.’ ” Ridiculing Raskolnikov’s impetuous “spiritual regeneration,” Nabokov concedes that “the love of a noble prostitute … did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 … as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically.” Yet the doctrine of redemption through suffering came to be the bulwark of Dostoyevsky’s credo. He believed in spiritual salvation. He had been intimate with thieves and cutthroats; he had lived among criminals. He had himself been punished as a criminal. Even as he was writing
Crime and Punishment
, he was under the continuing surveillance of the secret police.

The secret police, however, are not this novel’s secret. Neither are the ukases and explosives of that Czarist twilight. Murder and degradation; perversity, distortion, paralysis, abnormal excitation, lightning conversion; dive after dive into fits of madness (Raskolnikov, his mother, Svidrigailov, Katerina Marmeladova); a great imperial city wintry in tone, huddled, frozen in place, closeted, all in the heart of summertime—these are not the usual characteristics of a work dedicated to political repudiations.
Crime and Punishment
is something else, something beyond what Dostoyevsky may have plotted and what the scholars habitually attend to. Its strangeness is that of a galloping centaur
pulling a droshky crowded with groaning souls; or else it is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria, confined, churning, stuttering. St. Petersburg itself has the enclosed yet chaotic quality of a perpetual dusk, a town of riverbank and sky, taverns, tiny apartments cut up into rented cabins and cells, mazy alleys, narrow stairways, drunks, beggars, peddlers, bedraggled students, street musicians, whores—all darkened and smudged, as if the whole of the city were buried in a cellar, or in hell.

This irresistible deformation of commonly predictable experience is what fires Dostoyevsky’s genius. Nabokov dislikes that genius (I dislike it too) because its language is a wilderness and there are woeful pockets of obscurantist venom at its center. But in the end
Crime and Punishment
is anything but a manifesto. Citizenly rebuttal is far from its delirious art. In the fever of his imagining, it is not the radicals Dostoyevsky finally rebukes, but the Devil himself, the master of sin, an unconquerable principality pitted against God.

There is almost no clarifying publisher’s apparatus surrounding
The Emigrants
, W. G. Sebald’s restless, melancholy, and (I am almost sorry to say) sublime narrative quartet. One is compelled—ludicrously, clumsily—to settle for that hapless term (what
is
a “narrative quartet”?) because the very identity of this work remains murky. Which parts of it are memoir, which fiction—and ought it to matter? As for external facticity, we learn from the copyright page that the original German publication date is 1993, and that the initials W.G. represent Winfried Georg. A meager paragraph supplies a handful of biographical notes: the author was born in Wartach im Allgäu, Germany; he studied German literature in Freiburg (where, one recalls, Heidegger’s influence extended well into the nineteen-seventies), and later in Francophone Switzerland and in Manchester, England, where he began a career in British university teaching. Two dates stand out: Sebald’s birth in 1944, an appalling year for all of Europe, and for European Jews a death’s-head year; and 1970, when, at the age of twenty-six, Sebald left his native Germany and moved permanently to England.

It cannot be inappropriate to speculate why. One can imagine that in 1966, during the high period of Germany’s “economic miracle,” when Sebald was (as that meagerly informative paragraph tells us) a very young assistant lecturer at the University
of Manchester—a city then mostly impoverished and in decline—he may have encountered a romantic attachment that finally lured him back to Britain; or else he came to the explicit determination, with or without any romantic attachment (yet he may, in fact, have fallen in love with the pathos of soot-blackened Manchester), that he would anyhow avoid the life of a contemporary German. “The life of a contemporary German”: I observe, though from a non-visitor’s distance, and at so great a remove now from those twelve years of intoxicated popular zeal for Nazism, that such a life is somehow still touched with a smudge, or taint, of the old shameful history; and that the smudge, or taint—or call it, rather, the little tic of self-consciousness—is there all the same, whether it is regretted or repudiated, examined or ignored, forgotten or relegated to a principled indifference. Even the youngest Germans traveling abroad—especially in New York—know what it is to be made to face, willy-nilly, a history of national crime, however long receded and repented.

For a German citizen to live with 1944 as a birth date is reminder enough. Mengele stood that year on the ramp at Auschwitz, lifting the omnipotent gloved hand that dissolved Jewish families: mothers, babies, and the old to the chimneys, the rest to the slave labor that temporarily forestalled death. —Ah, and it is sentences like this last one that present-day Germans, thriving in a democratic Western polity, resent and decry. A German professor of comparative literature accused me not long ago—because of a sentence like that—of owning a fossilized mind, of being unable to recognize that a nation “develops and moves on.” Max Ferber, the painter-protagonist of the final tale in Sebald’s quartet, might also earn that professor’s fury. “To me, you see,” Sebald quotes Ferber, “Germany is a country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterritorial place.” It is just this extraterritorialism—this ineradicable, inescapable,
ever-recurring, hideously retrievable 1944—that Sebald investigates, though veiled and at a slant, in
The Emigrants
. And it was, I suspect, not the democratic Germany of the economic miracle from which Sebald emigrated in 1970; it may have been, after all, the horribly frozen year of his birth that he meant to leave behind.

That he did not relinquish his native language or its literature goes without saying; and we are indebted to Michael Hulse, Sebald’s translator (himself a poet), for allowing us to see, through the stained glass of his consummate Englishing, what must surely be the most delicately powerful German prose since Thomas Mann. Or, on second thought, perhaps not Mann really, despite a common attraction to the history-soaked. Mann on occasion can be as heavily ornate as those carved mahogany sideboards and wardrobes—vestiges of proper German domesticity abandoned by the fleeing Jews—which are currently reported to add a certain glamorous middle-thirties tone to today’s fashionable Berlin apartments. Sebald is more translucent than Mann; he writes as Turner paints: “To the south, lofty Mount Spathi, two thousand meters high, towered above the plateau, like a mirage above the flood of light. The fields of potatoes and vegetables across the broad valley floor, the orchards and clumps of other trees, and the untilled land, were awash with green upon green, studded with the hundreds of white sails of wind pumps.” Notably, this is not a landscape viewed by a fresh and 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 narratives
recounted 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 back
again”—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 one-sided infatuation of Jews in love with high German culture and with the
Vaterland
itself. The Jewish passion for Germany was never reciprocated—until now. Sebald returns that Jewish attachment, although tragically: he is too late for reciprocity. The Jews he searches for are either stricken escapees or smoke. Like all ghosts, they need to be conjured.