Look away, look away, look away

Yesterday’s brief allusion to the 2006 air war over Lebanon brought to mind a completely different topic, one to which I have devoted significant time over several years – the role of literature, especially amid chaos, destruction, and calamity.

My interest in the topic was sparked again recently upon reading W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, a short collection of essays exploring postwar German literature, although the bulk of the volume is composed of “Air War and Literature,” a reworking of Sebald’s 1997 Zurich lectures. This longer essay – clearly the central piece of the collection – explores the literature growing out of the German war experience, especially from 1943 onwards, when major German cities were utterly ruined by Allied air raids.

Sebald notes time and again, as he summarized in his Foreword, that

“we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and tradition. We do not feel any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilization, of the kind universally perceptible, for instance, in the culture of the British Isles. And when we turn to take a retrospective view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.”

Via “Air War and Literature,” Sebald cites examples, both real and literary, of how the German people and their literature failed to give adequate expression to the horrors that befell them, or as he stated it,

“People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. The population decided – out of sheer panic at first – to carry on as if nothing had happened.”

Hence family matriarchs airing their bedding on porches with no houses; cinema hostesses sweeping the aisles of rubble for matinees no one would attend; coffee and tea hours kept while armies of rats gnawed away at the corpses of the city.
Shock, and then repression, is easily enough diagnosed in this setting, but Sebald saves his real analysis for the literature that developed from this experience. Before launching into an extended discussion of German novelists (whom I have not read) – Heinrich Böll, Hermann Kasack, Hans Erick Nossack, and Peter de Mendelssohn – Sebald wrote tellingly,

“In Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann wrote a comprehensive historical criticism of an art that was increasingly inclined to take an apocalyptic view of the world, at the same time confessing his own involvement. It is likely that few of the readers for whom this novel was originally intended understood him; the lava barely cold under their feet, they were too preoccupied with the reaffirmation of their higher ideals, too anxious to free themselves of any taint. They did not go deeply into the complex question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics that tormented Thomas Mann. Yet that question would have been of central importance, as the paucity of literary accounts of the destruction of the German cities suggests.”

This passage identifies for the reader Sebald’s central concern: the nexus of art and ethics. As he moves from writer to writer, Sebald weaves together an analysis that takes issue with the “transcendent,” the “metaphysical,” such that he reserves a rare stroke of (qualified) praise for Nossack, writing,

“…in spite of his unfortunate tendency to indulge in philosophical exaggeration and false notions of transcendence, he was the only writer of the time to try recording what he actually saw as plainly as possible…on the whole he is primarily concerned with plain facts: the season of the year, the weather, the observer’s viewpoint, the drone of the approaching squadrons, the red firelight on the horizon, the physical and mental condition of refugees from the cities, the burnt-out scenery, chimneys that curiously remain standing, washing put out to dry on a rack outside a kitchen window, a torn net curtain blowing from an empty veranda, a living room sofa with a crochet cover, countless other objects lost forever, the rubble burying them and the dreadful new life moving beneath it, people’s sudden craving for perfume.”

For Sebald, what is authentic is what is measurable, observable. The cheap and the false is, on the contrary, writing of a philosophical or metaphysical bent that looks over or away from the death and destruction, or that recasts that destruction as having some meaning beyond what plain, unadorned language can signify, or as he states later,

“The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity, at least over long passages, proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction. Conversely, the construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.”

This is so confidently asserted, and sounds so reasonable, one might nod in assent, particularly if notably bad writing is marshaled as an exhibit of what to avoid. Not having read Herr Mendelssohn or the others, I cannot dispute the raw materials that Sebald gathers in his essay, and after all, who doesn’t like the “ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity”?

But who also believes that all we can muster in the face of such destruction is a news report? Is this literature’s destiny?

I would like to pursue this further at another time, but will end today with an observation. First, consider that the Germans as a people and Germany as a state probably suffered a kind of destruction never before seen in history. Technology is surely one reason; it was never before possible to firebomb a city. But the German people are unique – almost wholly – in that they and their state survived a destruction of unparalleled severity. When Sebald faults them for not producing a literature that captured “the ideal of truth” growing out of the war experience, I am led to think of other peoples and other literatures that were confronted by a similar circumstance. It’s hard to think of any that survived such an onslaught, except, perhaps, the Jews, and that is the irony of National Socialism: rather than eradicating the Jews, the Germans merely joined them in the historical gallery of broken people.

Would Sebald consider the Book of Lamentations, too, a recourse to “fraudulent metaphysics” in the face of disaster?