W.G. Sebald plays highly erudite hopscotch with the human capacity for memory in his 1990 novel/memoir Vertigo. (Michael Hulse’s translation from the German was copyrighted in 1999.) Consisting of travels by a first person narrator born in the closing days of the Second World War, this book succeeds as a patchwork of recollections carried along by a restless author who combines erudition with a tone that skirts the edges of fatalism.
He opens the novel with the recollections of a foot soldier crossing a treacherous pass in the Alps in Napoleon’s army in 1800. This march is part of a daring and successful bid to defeat Austrian forces at the battle of Marengo. He identifies the foot soldier as 17 year-old Marie Henri Beyle, who would go on to renown as Stendhal, the pioneering French novelist of realism.
The discussion about this soldier’s sketchy recollections of the well-known military event lead directly into a treatment of the unreliability of memory. The vicissitudes start right away and never stop: the 53 year-old Stendhal returns to the scenes of triumph to try to retrace his steps and those of the army with whom he fought. His memory is a blank for much of the period and the things that seem crystal clear to him he learns are utterly false. Thus do we encounter Sebald’s theme.
He carries this theme in his travels, which take us, among many other places, to the village where the narrator grew up. Much has changed at the house which was his boyhood home: it has become a wayside inn and public event space. He stops in to see an acquaintance from his youth. The narrator relates a visit to this man’s attic to illustrate the tricks memory plays on us; Sebald includes the following passage (p. 223-224—see ISBN 9780811214858 (alk paper) for page references) in which the first person narrator finds
tokens of the slow disintegration of all material forms in the complete silence of this attic. And yet the silence was not to be trusted. Out of trunks, chests, and wardrobes, some of their lids, drawers, and doors half open, all conceivable kinds of utensils and garments bursting forth. It was easy to imagine that this entire assemblage of the most diverse objects had been moving, in some sort of secret evolution, until the moment we entered, and it was only because of our presence that these things now held their breath as if nothing had happened.
Such are the author’s speculations and asides on the subject. I’m struck by the thought that the unreliability of memory, this explosion of our attempts at recollection into splinters and obscurity, has something to do with the collective German memory of World War II. As a particular exhibit supporting this thesis, I’m offering this passage from the same visit the narrator has with his boyhood neighbor (p. 212):
He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.
Read Vertigo for its striking journey through consciousness, particularly as it mulls over the past. Read it for the stunning honesty of the narrator’s worries and confusion. Read it because it’s a grand gift to the discerning reader, anyone who wishes to experience modern literary fiction and a singular example a groundbreaking achievement.
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