APS TOGETHER
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
Hosted by Elisa Gabbert
Began on May 6, 2021
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W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants is a novel in four portraits, the stories of four men in exile: a doctor, a teacher, a painter, and Sebald’s Great-Uncle Adelwarth, the traveling companion of an American aviator. Written in Sebald’s signature indeterminate, essayistic style, intercut with photographs of people and places, The Emigrants explores post-war trauma and memory, guilt and displacement, and what it means to survive. Join us to read this book Larry Wolff called “an end-of-century meditation” on “the most delicate, most painful, most nervously repressed and carefully concealed lesions of the last hundred years."
Elisa Gabbert
is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays and The Word Pretty. She writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, A Public Space, the Nation, and many other venues. Her next book of poems, Normal Distance, will be out from Soft Skull next year. Read 6 Questions with Elisa Gabbert here.
Daily Reading
Day 1
Dr. Henry Selwyn
June 10, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
“And I recalled the château in the Charente that I had once visited from Angoulême.” A very Sebaldian sentence! For Sebald, seeing begets memory; his walks, travels, & reading are all ways of looking, thus ways of cultivating encounters with memory.
Day 2
Paul Bereyter (through "awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings.") p. 27-45
June 11, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
We start to see the importance of chance, coincidence and “miracles” in Sebald’s work. Leo Damrosch contrasts realism w/ verisimilitude, which doesn’t have to be realistic. Do Sebald’s stories have to, in their nebulous space between fiction & reality?
Day 3
Paul Bereyter (to end)
June 12, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
Mme Landau says that after years of silence and secrets people sometimes “really did forget” their past—memory is active work, and not to remember is to undo that history.
Day 4
Ambros Adelwarth (through "and life up in the dizzy heights came to an end")
June 13, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
Emigrants “tend to seek out their own kind.” (As we read in the previous section, Paul “belonged to the exiles.”) Emigrants are citizens of their own country, a nowhere that is not utopian.
Day 5
Ambros Adelwarth (through "remained indelibly in my memory ever since.")
June 14, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
Kasimir is a fascinating character, with his slow driving and macabre revelries (“This is the edge of darkness”… “I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where”)
Day 6
Ambros Adelwarth (through "the enormous cauliflower he held in his crooked left arm") p. 107-126
June 15, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
Dr. Abramsky’s comment about madness being “a question of perspective” makes me think of the famous paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places”
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/179/4070/250.long
Day 7
Ambros Adelwarth (to end) p. 126-145
June 16, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
From Ambros’s diary: “A day out of time.” And later: “Are we no longer part of time?” It’s time travel for Cosmos and Ambros, and for Sebald, reading the diary, and for us reading The Emigrants.
Day 8
Max Ferber ("a herd of deer headed for the night"), p. 149-169
June 17, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
Max Ferber’s aestheticization of dust! “The grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved”! Made me think of this Jeremy Gordon essay on dust as “metaphor for the futility of the human experience.”
https://theoutline.com/post/7692/im-upset-dusting-is-a-waste-of-time
Day 9
Max Ferber ("so much in the shade and dark in recent years"), p. 160-191
June 18, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
On p. 176 of the New Directions paperback, at least, there is no break between Max Ferber’s monologue (“what a true work of art looks like”) and the return to the narrator’s voice (“I had been in Manchester for the best part of three years”).
Day 10
Max Ferber ("who was then staying in Kissingen"), p. 191-213
June 19, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
Again someone gives Sebald (or the narrator) a document he has a kind of obligation to experience on their behalf, and again the document is wondrous, transporting, devastating.
Day 11
Max Ferber, to end
June 20, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
The figure of the butterfly man or boy, the lepidopterist and “messenger of joy” who appears in each section is curious, the kind of unlikely coincidence that makes our lives appear scripted, a show for the gods.