Ben Lerner's "The Storyteller"

W. G. Sebald (portrait by Yann Kebbi)

What to make of Ben Lerner’s “The Storyteller” (The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2021)? Well, for one thing, it’s one of the best reviews of W. G. Sebald’s work I’ve ever read, right up there with James Wood’s “Sent East” (London Review of Books, October 6, 2011) and Anthony Lane’s “Higher Ground” (The New Yorker, May 29, 2000). For another, it’s an eloquent defence of the novelist’s right to repurpose facts. Lerner says,

How do you acknowledge—not just in an acknowledgments page but in the structure of the work itself—that you have models and that you’ve departed from them? Here Sebald’s purposeful destabilization of fact and fiction, and his dramatic alteration of the facts in question, within his four great books of prose fiction is a moral and aesthetic necessity, not some sort of failing: it foregrounds artifice, constructedness; it proclaims that Sebald is experimenting with making sense, making pattern, that he is weaving out of disparate materials an artwork that will not live or die according to fact-checkers.

I love that last line. I just want to emphasize that it’s also possible to make literary artworks purely from facts. Fiction isn’t an essential ingredient of literary art. I wish Sebald’s brilliant The Rings of Saturn were factual. It’s so good at creating the illusion of a real account of an actual journey that I have to keep reminding myself that not one word of it is reliable. 

I read Sebald for his exquisite melancholy. This, for example:

As usual when I go down to London on my own, a kind of dull despair stirred within me on that December morning. I looked out a the flat, almost treeless landscape, the vast brown expanse of ploughed fields, the railway stations where I would never get out, the flock of gulls which makes a habit of gathering on the football pitch on the outskirts of Ipswich, the allotments, the crippled bushes overgrown with dead traveller’s joy on the embankments, the quicksilver mudflats and channels at Manningtree, the boats capsized on their sides, the Colchester water-tower, the Marconi factory in Chelmsford, the empty greyhound track at Romsford, the ugly backs of the terraced houses past which the railway line runs in the suburbs of the metropolis, the Manor Park cemetery and the tower blocks of flats in Hackney, sights which are always the same and flit past me whenever I go to London, yet remain alien and incomprehensible in spite of all the years that have passed since my arrival in England. I always feel particularly apprehensive on the last stretch of the journey, where just before turning into Liverpool Street station the train must wind its way over several sets of points through a narrow defile, and where the brick walls rising above both sides of the track with their round arches, columns and niches, blackened with soot and diesel oil, put me in mind once again that morning of an underground columbarium. [Austerlitz]

As Lerner says, Sebald sees death everywhere. On Sebald's obsession with ruins, Lerner writes,

More generally, if history is one long catastrophe returning in new guises, the work of historical reckoning can pass into a transhistorical fatalism. This is why I can lose patience with Sebald’s narrators’ tendency to see only ruins, which is a way of not seeing forms of life and meaning-making that have sprung and might spring up in their midst. It’s not that it’s depressing; it’s that it’s leveling.

This is a good point. We need artists like Sebald to remind us of life’s transience. But we also need artists with a more balanced vision, who remind us that even in the midst of death there’s life – “the green weed breaking through the stone” (Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson, 2020).