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A master shrouded by mist

Ferdinand Mount

Saturday, 26th February 2005

But in the political and psychological reflections one cannot help feeling that Sebald is doing little more than recycling (with due acknowledgment) the earlier insights of others, without adding much of his own to, for example, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s theory of the ‘inability to mourn’ in post-war Germany. Indeed he readily acknowledges his debt to those writers such as Elias Canetti who have taught us that an unpretentious factual account of what happened is the best way to resist the human tendency to suppress painful or shameful memories in order to ‘get on with our lives’ or ‘move on’.

What Sebald says is not untrue or ignoble or unfelt or not worth repeating. It is just that it is hard to detect much originality or creative energy there. He does not have one of those minds which cannot tick over for five seconds without throwing off something fresh and sharp. There is not the effortless bubbling up you find in the prose of, to take a random bunch, Ruskin, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, John Berger, V. S. Pritchett or Philip Larkin.

What you have instead is a tone, a wistful, misty strangeness which covers the most familiar objects in an alluring fog, making them seem alien, unsettling and unsettled, pregnant with melancholy and memory. And it is part of Sebald’s enchantment that when we come to touch his conclusions they are so reassuringly familiar. Rather like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, we are delighted to discover that what we had always thought turns out to be literature. And so it is, I think, with Sebald himself. Through the mist one seems to see a prophetic figure engaged on some mysterious and significant mission. But when the mist clears one sees only an elderly gentleman with a moustache poking at the brambles with his walking stick.

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