Postmodern Antiques: Patience (After Sebald)

 

The first time I saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker – when it was broadcast by Channel 4 in the early 1980s – I was immediately reminded of the Suffolk landscapes where I had holidayed as a child. The overgrown pill boxes, the squat Martello towers, the rusting groynes which resembled gravestones: this all added up to a readymade science fiction scene. At one point in Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) (2011) – an essay film inspired by W G Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn – theatre director Katie Williams makes the same connection, drawing a comparison between the demilitarised expanses of the Suffolk coast and Tarkovsky’s Zone.

When I read Rings of Saturn, I was hoping that it would be an exploration of these eerily numinous spaces. Yet what I found was something rather different: a book that, it seemed to me at least, morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them; that offered a Mittel–brow miserabilism, a stock disdain, in which the human settlements are routinely dismissed as shabby and the inhuman spaces are oppressive. The landscape in The Rings of Saturn functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian’s listless daydream. Instead of engaging with previous literary encounters with the Suffolk – Henry James went on a walking tour of the county; his namesake MR James set two of his most atmospheric ghost stories there – Sebald tends to reach for the likes of Borges. My scepticism was fed by the solemn cult that settled around Sebald suspiciously quickly, and which seemed all-too-ready to admire those well-wrought sentences. Sebald offered a rather easy difficulty, an anachronistic, antiqued model of ‘good literature’ which acted as if many of the developments in 20th century experimental fiction and popular culture had never happened. It is not hard to see why a German writer would want to blank out the middle part of the 20th century; and many of the formal anachronisms of Sebald’s writing – its strange sense that this is the 21st century seen through the restrained yet ornate prose of an early 20th century essayist – perhaps arise from this desire, just as the novels themselves are about the various, ultimately failed, ruses – conscious and unconscious – that damaged psyches deploy to erase traumas and construct new identities. The writer Robert Macfarlane has called Sebald a ‘postmodern antiquarian’, and the indeterminate status of The Rings of Saturn – is it autobiography, a novel or a travelogue? – points to a certain playfulness, but this never emerges at the level of the book’s content. It was necessary for Sebald to remain po-faced in order for the ‘antiquing’ to be successful. Some of Gee’s images of Suffolk take their cue from the black and white photographs which illustrate The Rings Of Saturn. But the photographs were a contrivance: Sebald would photocopy them many times until they achieved the required graininess.

Gee’s film was premiered as part of a weekend of events superbly curated by Gareth Evans of Artevents under the rubric After Sebald: Place and Re-Enchantment at Snape Maltings, near Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. In the end, however, Sebald’s novels fits into any discussion of place and enchantment only very awkwardly: his work is more about displacement and disenchantment than their opposites. In Patience (After Sebald), the artist Tacita Dean observes that only children have a real sense of home. Adults are always aware of the precariousness and transitoriness of their dwelling place: none more so than Sebald, a German writer who spent most of his life in Norfolk.

Patience (After Sebald) follows Gee’s documentaries about Radiohead and Joy Division. The shift from rock to literature, Gee told Macfarlane, was one that came naturally to someone whose sensibilities were formed by the UK music culture of the 1970s. If Sebald had been writing in the 1970s, Gee claimed, he would surely have been mentioned in the NME alongside other luminaries of avant-garde literature. Gee started reading Sebald in 2004, after a recommendation from his friend, the novelist Jeff Noon. The film’s somewhat gnomic title was a relic of an earlier version of what the film would be. It now suggests the slowing of time that the Suffolk landscape imposes, a release from urban urgencies, but it is actually a reference to a passage in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz: ‘Austerlitz told me that he sometimes sat here for hours, laying out these photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if playing a game of patience, and that then one by one, he turned them over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pushing the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left but the grey tabletop, or he felt exhausted from the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had to rest on the ottoman.’

Gee had originally intended to make a film about the non-places in Sebald’s work: the hotel rooms or railway station waiting rooms in which characters ruminate, converse or break down (Austerlitz himself comes to a shattering revelation about his own identity in the waiting room at Liverpool Street station). In the end, however, Gee was drawn to the book which – osten-sibly at least – is most focused on a single landscape.

Gee filmed practically everything himself, using a converted 16 mm Bolex camera. He wanted something that would produce frames that were ‘tighter than normal’, he said, ‘as if a single character is looking’. Gee sees Patience (After Sebald) as an essay film, in the tradition of Chris Petit’s work and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy. But when I put it to him that Patience lacks the single voice that defines Petit or Keiller’s essay films, Gee responded self-deprecatingly. He had tried to insert himself into his own films, but he had always been dissatisfied with the results: his voice didn’t sound right; his acting didn’t convince; his writing wasn’t strong enough. In Patience, as in the Joy Division documentary, the story is therefore told by others: Macfarlane, Dean, Iain Sinclair, Petit, the literary critic Marina Warner and the artist Jeremy Millar. Millar provided one of the most uncanny images in Patience. When he lit a firework in tribute to Sebald, the smoke unexpectedly formed a shape which resembled Sebald’s face, something which Gee underlines in the film by animating a transition between Millar’s photograph and an image of the novelist.

More than one of the speakers at the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium acknowledged that they misremem-bered The Rings of Saturn. There’s something fitting about this, of course, given that the duplicity of memory might have been Sebald’s major theme; but my suspicion is that misremembering of a different kind contributes to the Rings of Saturn cult; that the book induces its readers to hallucinate a text that is not there, but which meets their desires – for a kind of modernist travelogue, a novel that would do justice to the Suffolk landscape – better than Sebald’s actually novel does. Patience (After Sebald) is itself a misremembering of The Rings of Saturn which could not help but reverse many of the novel’s priorities and emphases. In The Rings of Saturn, Suffolk frequently (and frustratingly) recedes from attention, as Sebald follows his own lines of association. By contrast, the main substance of the film consists of images of the Suffolk landscape – the heathland over which you can walk for miles without seeing a soul, the crumbling cliffs of the lost city of Dunwich, the enigma of Orford Ness, its inscrutable pagodas silently presiding over Cold War military experiments which remain secret. Sebald’s reflections, voiced in Patience by Jonathan Pryce, anchor these images far less securely than they do in the novel. At Snape, some of those who had re-created Sebald’s walk – including Gee himself – confessed that they had failed to attain the author’s lugubrious mood: the landscape turned out to be too energising, its sublime desolation proving to be fallow ground for gloomy psychological interiority. In a conversation with Robert Macfarlane after the screening of the film, Gee said that it was not really necessary that Sebald had taken the walk. He meant that it was not important whether or not Sebald actually did the walk exactly as The Rings of Saturn’s narrator described it, in one go: that the novel could have been based on a number of different walks which took place over a longer period of time. But I couldn’t help but hear Gee’s remark in a different way: that it was not necessary for Sebald to have taken the walk at all: that, far from being a close engagement with the Suffolk terrain, The Rings of Saturn could have been written had Sebald never set foot in Suffolk.

This was the view of Richard Mabey, cast in the role of doubting Thomas at the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium. Mabey – who has written and broadcast about nature for 40 years, and whose latest book Weeds has the glorious subtitle How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature – argued that Sebald was guilty of the pathetic fallacy. When he read The Rings Of Saturn, Mabey said, he felt as if a very close friend had been belittled; although he had walked the Suffolk coastland countless times, he couldn’t recognise it from Sebald’s descriptions. But perhaps the issue with Sebald is that he wasn’t guilty enough of the pathetic fallacy, that instead of staining the landscape with his passions, as Thomas Hardy did with Wessex, or the Brontes did with Yorkshire, or, more recently, as the musician Richard Skelton has done with the Lancashire moorland – Sebald used Suffolk as a kind of Rorschach blot, a trigger for associative processes that take flight from the landscape rather than take root in it. In any case, Mabey wanted a confrontation with nature in all its inhuman exteriority. He sounded like a Deleuzean philosopher when he expostulated about the ‘nested heterogeneity’ and ‘autonomous poetry’ of micro-ecosytems to be found in a cow’s hoof print; of how it was necessary to ‘think like a mountain’, and quoted approvingly Virginia Woolf’s evocation of a ‘philosophising and dreaming land’. I was struck by the parallels between Mabey’s account of nature and Patrick Keiller’s invocation of lichen as ‘a non-human intelligence’ in Robinson in Ruins. With its examination of the ‘undiscovered country of nearby’, Robert Macfarlane’s film for the BBC, The Wild Places of Essex, shown as part of the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium, was also close to Mabey’s vision of a nature thriving in the spaces abandoned by, or inhospitable to, humans. (Macfarlane’s film now seems like a counterpart to Julien Temple’s wonderful Oil City Confidential, which rooted Dr Feelgood’s febrile rhythm and blues in the lunar landscape of Essex’s Canvey Island.) Patience (After Sebald) could appeal to a Sebald sceptic like me because – in spite of Sebald – it reaches the wilds of Suffolk. At the same time, Gee’s quietly powerful film caused me to doubt my own scepticism, sending me back to Sebald’s novels, in search of what others had seen, but which had so far eluded me.

Ghosts Of My Life 

 Mark Fisher