Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.
So Milan Kundera wrote in Immortality, which remains after more than a decade my favorite novel. Kundera’s allergy to histrionics, phony sentimentality, and the falsification of memory show in his novels, which are probably the least emotive works I know which remain powerfully resonant. The dispassionate rigor with which he treats his narratives is as much a part of Kundera’s aesthetic as Hemmingway’s diction was of his, and does not diminish the power of his stories.
There are other avenues to existential fidelity, however, and upon completing W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants I was struck both by how much it shares with Kundera’s novels and how different it is, principally in the devastating melancholy which pervades the works’ most innocuous passages, haunting even simple descriptive sentences, so that the whole becomes an utterly effortless elegy. Despair seeps out of it, so that without any overt justification one is soon as lost as the characters, numbly stumbling through time, marking moments, without a sense of where or what the end will be.
Sebald, like Kundera, is preoccupied with memory in the face of history, with individual experience as it is subsumed by political machines and geography and tragedy; man collides with history and is destroyed, if not immediately then gradually, his death coming as a series of dislocations: first disorientation, then emigration, then exile, then death.
I often wanted to ask Sebald’s characters when they first realized they’d died, which reminded me of Stegner’s Angle of Repose, one of the narrative theses of which is that human life is simply a settling out, a sifting of debris, until we find our angle of repose; from then on, we simply exist, then don’t.
In Stegner’s book, this process yields a narrative which weighs the youth and early married life of a couple heavily; after a series of tragedies and disappointments, bitterness provides the coefficient of friction required to establish stasis, and the narrative abruptly concludes. In Sebald, the fictive documentarian persists in surveying the empty motions of the arrested emigrants as they seem to become ghosts of themselves, of their destroyed people.
Kundera talks about the dial of life: its revolutions don’t map precisely to our lifespan, and one day we find ourselves outside the dial of life; as he puts it, time doesn’t stop, but nothing else will change in us, for us, by us. The themes of our lives draw to a close, and we persist merely in a metabolic sense.
Of the many beautiful and brilliant qualities of Sebald’s writing, this stands out: he writes about the time outside of the dial, life outside of the world of futurity and action and purpose. His characters exist is a fog of memory, and he brings us into it, showing us history’s real cost.
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