WG Sebald has now been dead for twice as long as he was known to be around, to the extent that he was ever exactly around in the half-decade which started in 1996 with the publication, by Harvill, of Michael Hulse's fluent translation of The Emigrants and ended with an aneurysm on the Norwich ring road, just months after he had published – with a new translator, Anthea Bell – his longest work of "prose fiction", Austerlitz.
During those years, Sebald ceased to be what he had been for 30 years, a specialist in European literature, and became, with possible exceptions (Kundera, Saramago, Goytisolo, Miłosz, Mulisch, Grass), the most celebrated of European writers, as well as the rare subject of both an encomium from Susan Sontag and a parody by Craig Brown ("Above me, a seagull swooped, its wings stretched fully out, as though an unseen torturer were pulling them to breaking point").
In the years since his death, the Sontag position has won out, and efforts to co-ordinate a wave of dissent – or to win even partial acceptance for the view, expressed by Alan Bennett, Michael Hofmann and Adam Thirlwell, that his work is pompous or banal – have faltered. Just as Phantom of the Opera is being performed somewhere in the world at any given moment, so the name of WG Sebald, or its spin-off adjective "Sebaldian", is being invoked to characterise the new school of sullen flanerie, to substantiate non-fiction's claims to creativity, or to help dispatch the kind of novel Sebald himself summarised as "relationship problems in Kensington in the late-1990s" to the dustbin of literary history.
But a writer's afterlife is determined less by what is said in his favour than by what is attached to his name, and Sebald has been lucky in his executors – or lucky that he left a backlog of published but not yet translated material. Even the scrappy-looking collection of "extended marginal notes and glosses" on his literary precursors (and a contemporary painter, Jan Peter Tripp) that has now emerged as A Place in the Country appeared, in 1998, under Sebald's own auspices. Translated, with a heavier touch than that of Hulse or Bell, by Sebald's former colleague Jo Catling, the book is itself a contribution to the study of posthumous reputation.
In the course of discussing a writer, Sebald often acknowledges an intermediary, a Brod or Boswell type who played a role in keeping the flame or spreading the word. In the essay on Johann Peter Hebel, a lyric poet and author of almanac stories, this figure is Walter Benjamin, whom Sebald credits with initiating the attack on the "primitive Heideggerrian thesis of Hebel's rootedness in the native soil of the Heimat". In the essay on Robert Walser, it is Walser's friend Carl Seelig who preserved the Swiss writer's Nachlass (literary remains), and without whom, Sebald argues, his rehabilitation "could never have taken place".
A short preface Sebald wrote for the German edition explains that when he travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed books by Walser, Hebel and Keller which, 30 years on, would still find a place in his luggage. But A Place in the Country, though idiosyncratic, turns out to be less introvert than Sebald's fictions, less insistent on a "Sebald" figure who serves as the origin of its impressions and arguments. As it turns out, Sebald is less involved with what the writers mean to him than with what they might be shown to symbolise or represent. The result, written in his customary and not always helpful long paragraphs, and illustrated with plates, photographs and photocopies, is a passionate and provoking attempt to sketch an alternative tradition of Alpine literature starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau – described as "the inventor of modern autobiography" and "inventor of the bourgeois cult of romantic sensibility" – and culminating, perhaps, in Sebald's own variant of Romantic autobiography.
The opening chapter, on Hebel, is the most forceful, a piece of historical criticism conducted entirely from the armchair (not a seagull in sight). Sebald makes it clear why Heidegger and Nazi writers such as the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber thought they had found a kindred spirit in a writer who used a local dialect (Alemannic) to tell stories about the pleasures and comforts of rural life. But he argues that they had to commit a lot of wilful narrow reading to make the interpretation stick. Hebel's Yiddish word order is incompatible with conventional German grammar; even at the time – the turn of the 19th century – the recourse to dialect would have been seen as more a "distancing effect" than "a badge of tribal affiliation".
As this essay demonstrates, Sebald is incapable of hiving off the literary and linguistic from the political, or the literary-critical off from the sociological and ethnographic. The method developed in his second prose fiction, The Rings of Saturn, in which history is traced through its public manifestations, is adapted here for the purposes of critical discussion. Sebald looks at the ways in which German historical dynamics make themselves felt in writers' work. While it is a thrill to watch close reading being performed by someone with so strong a taste for looking up from the page – the Cambridge School meets the Frankfurt School – for Sebald it was a product of constriction. Growing up in Germany in the 1950s, he found it difficult to treat literature as simply a source of aesthetic delight, in the way that English and American critics have been able to. Instead, in reading the literature of the two centuries leading up to the second world war, he treated every sentence as a shot fired in the battle between cosmopolitanism and moderate regionalism on the one hand, "narrow-minded provincialism" and militaristic nationalism on the other.
Sebald shows the ways in which writers are forced to take positions and sides – the chapter on Rousseau follows him in his years as an exile – but of all the predicaments in which a writer may find himself, the perennial state of just being a writer emerges as the toughest, or at least the most widespread; the "awful tenacity", the sense that a calling has become a compulsion, afflicts even those who, like Robert Walser, are "connected to the world in the most fleeting of ways".
Sebald's work is driven by associative thinking – coincidences, connections – but his chief aim was to evoke and capture, and his images, rich in mystery, or resonant with pathos, are what linger. A corpse released by a glacier. An office spilling with paper. A pair of writers undone by their calling: Walser, in an asylum, "scrubbing vegetables in the kitchen, sorting scraps of tinfoil, reading a novel by Friedrick Gerstacker or Jules Verne, and sometimes … just standing stiffly in the corner", and the German Romantic Lutheran poet Eduard Mörike, who, after accepting that he was unable to give up writing in the way he could his clerical duties, took nervous notes on pieces of paper, then tore them into tiny pieces, which he dropped into the pockets of his dressing-gown.
