Bailey Trela

At the time my father was living in a barn. Granted, it was a nice barn, squat and rectangular, red with a gambrel roof, and to be perfectly honest he lived in an annex off the barn’s tail end. A cozy room, heated in the winter by an iron stove, it had a couch, a desk, a few makeshift bookshelves, even a small television set that he rarely watched. He slept there alone; I don’t know how he spent his mornings.



I tended to define my father’s relationship to the barn in terms of prohibitions: This was the barn, for example, from which he ran the vineyard that he didn’t own, which produced the subpar grapes that we couldn’t eat, which were turned into a subpar wine we couldn’t drink (and of which, today, there is not a single extant bottle). But more importantly, this was the barn where he’d lived since our parents had separated. (The divorce would come later, after he’d started renting a home on the other side of town.) No big drama, this separation. I would have been eight or so at the time, too young, in a general sense, to understand the vicissitudes of marriage, the mechanism of divorce, and too young again, in our particular case, to have ever witnessed a genuine motion of love between my parents.



My brother, Grady, and I—he would have been eleven or so—spent a lot of our time at the barn. He, responsibly, helped our father with various chores (weeding, lugging, pruning), while I fiddled about errantly, spray-painting rocks or hammering together discarded pieces of wood. I had free rein of the premises, a bountiful prospect, considering that in addition to the vineyard my father also ran a peony field. There was an industrial cooler inside the barn where we kept the freshly severed flowers in five-gallon buckets of water. I’d sometimes ask my father to lock me inside it; I would pummel the inside of the door, half-laughing, half-crying to be let out, and he, playing along, would refuse. I would settle back in faux resignation, allowing the chemically cooled air to envelop me like a wintry cocoon. Alone in the dark, I sensed in my chest a new, dull, nagging sensation, which I couldn’t have known, at the time, was dread.



To satisfy a different taste—it was a business, after all— we also dried the peonies. The entirety of the barn’s attic was devoted to this occupation; a constellation of muted blooms hung from their stems on a haphazard scheme of wires, string, and clothespins. The air up in the attic was dense, dusty, soporific. I can remember inhaling deeply, experimentally, and feeling the concoction settle in my lungs like warm syrup. When I got tired, too strongly steeped in the smell, as I considered it then, of antiquity, I would retreat to the cooler, to the coolness and damp below.



Looking back, I can see that it was around this time—post-separation—that my father started allowing us to flirt more and more openly with danger. He bought my brother a BB gun, whose pellets we loosed at pigeons and the barn’s shingled roof. For me he bought a small sword at a psychic fair. I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother about it. Likewise he allowed a senile neighbor to gift me a rusty machete with a whalebone handle that had, by the effusive geezer’s account, seen action in the Mexican-American War. I sanded the handle down to get some of its old glow back, and together my father and I sharpened the blade with a portable Dremel tool. I held one weapon in each hand and massacred the bushes in my father’s backyard.



One Christmas, he bought my brother and I bows and arrows, neat, springy, lacquered things with bungee strings and real—very real—metal-tipped arrows. We became warriors, little Robin Hoods bounding about and crouching and loosing our deadly darts at trees and bushes, fences and the small animals we occasionally glimpsed: rabbits, mostly, nervous puffballs that lanced spectrally away while our arrows struck nearby earth.



After a while, one week or two, we got bored. We started playing a daredevil game in which we fired arrows straight into the sky, so high that they disappeared against the gray, ghostly welkin. Then we ran about in wide circles with our eyes upflung, trying not to get impaled by the rapidly descending shafts. As we played with the bows we could sense their power weakening, the strings thrumming flabbily and failing to send the arrows any interesting distance at any interesting speed—for two weeks we had forgotten to unstring the bows, and now the wood was slack, recoilless, the string little more than a faintly elastic yard of cloth. A ruined gift.



***



One morning, our father drove us—that is, Grady and I—to the Rural King (a farm supply store) on North Saint Joseph Avenue. He’d often take us along with him on these periodic trips, business excursions, as it were, to gather bags of mulch or spare hoes or other farming supplies. While he wandered about, Grady and I would hurry to the store’s rear, where they kept the chicks and ducklings in corrugated steel tubs bestrewn with woodchips.



Somehow, I think by dint of continual begging, we’d convinced our father to buy us ducks. Giddily, our fingers folded over a tub’s rim, we pointed out the ducks we wanted, and our father directed a bored-looking, lank-haired teenage attendant.



Granted, the precise mechanism of extraction lies outside the purview of my memory, as does the series of actions that took us from the back of the Rural King to the cash register and out, in the parking lot, to our father’s truck. Regardless, I know for a fact that we left the store with six snowy-white ducklings contained in a cardboard box.



A small wonder, that box. Like a dollhouse come to life. There were half-moon holes in its sides through which the sour smell of duck shit wafted and the truncated piccolo of their quacks came to us, fleetingly, along with occasional flashes of pale yellow (a wing), toxic orange (a foot), and blister black (an eye). Phantasmal, these bursts of phenomena. I recall, even then, being under the dreamy impression that the box contained not six live ducklings but an obscure system of wires, tubes, and gears, capable of producing and then relaying these discrete images to my brother and I—like a television, or something more complex still.



Grady held the box on his lap as I plumbed its apertures with fear-hyped fingertips, my pulse stirred to drum-taps by a mixture of anxiety and hope. Beside this minor drama, our father sat driving the truck. His palms were pressed to the pleather of the wheel; he stared ahead at the inrushing pavement; he might have been mildly, comfortably proud of himself. Outside, the sky was grey, the landscape winter-ridden and muted to the point of non-existence—or at least that’s how I remember it: an extended tracking shot of frost-plated cornfields cut with telephone poles, unbearing trees, and uniform homes (low-gabled, white, with aluminum siding). If I tease my memory, the houses sprout chimneys; a cozy smoke chuckles forth, billowing out and bleeding into the sky.



In reality, though, it was springtime—funny the falsehoods that memory supplies. How to describe a Midwestern spring? To be short about it: abundant, terrible, suffocating. A classical scene of renascence, like a pastoral torn from its frame: sweet fields spangled with itinerant beasts, lowing and leaning and loafing, all of them dumbly expectant. The trees become swampy and depressed, over-burdened with foliage and invasive vines thick and corkscrewy as hawsers; smooth wire fences are bent to absurd angles by the crushing weight of waves of honeysuckle; a whole host of hidden insects scores a grand, ear-numbing, dimensionless buzz that radiates along the sinusoidal countryside like an electric knell for the magnificence of the decay to come. High flourishing now, sweet colors, the frilly bunting of rebirth. Only later the fall, decadent, into decay.



We drove to the barn. It had a small backyard enclosed by a black wooden fence. Beyond this fence spread an unworked field full of high grass that swished and fluted drily in the summer winds. It ended in a murky line of trees. In the corner of the fence, we built a chicken wire pale and placed the ducks inside: a temporary structure, slack-sided, held in place by a few slivers of pinewood traced through the wire’s latticework and driven, by a rubber mallet clumsily wielded, into the rich black ground.



That first day was a joy. We named the ducks, chased them about, held them aloft as their spatulate feet flapped wildly. They scuttled here and there, trailing one another about the yard in wide, sinuous arcs, spreading and testing the bright half- moons of their inchoate wings. They quacked without cease—brief, dry, firecracker pops—their beaks seesawing steadily in loosing these bursts, as though crank-turned, wholly mechanical. To me they seemed delicate, clockwork automatons sheathed in fine feather coats.



And while we watched the ducks, our father watched us, the sidelong rays of dying daylight tilting the cast of his ruddy complexion into something more closely resembling bronze. As a consequence of working outdoors nearly all his life, my father had, and still has, very red skin, sun-warped and interlarded with elegant webs of burst vasculature, like the pattern a drop of ink makes as it spreads through the crazed enamel of an ancient vase. Back then he wore coke bottle glasses with faux tortoise-shell frames. He was fifty years old, somewhat thin and tired-looking. He usually smelled, pleasantly, of sweat shed in the open air.



Beyond these details, most of my memories of him revolve around a general impression of senescence, of age overworked. I can’t say exactly where he was as we played with the ducks, how precisely he fit into the scene—in my memories he is mostly a presence: a disembodied voice, for instance—but it seems appropriate, in retrospect, to place him in a folding lawn chair, a beer in his hand (Foster’s) and, as I said before, the dying sun in his eyes. Watching his kids and adjusting his posture. Happy they were happy.



***



A few days after we purchased them, the ducks began to disappear—though ‘disappear’ isn’t really the right word. They left their mementoes: a severed wing, a tuft of bloodied feathers. We saw drops of blood pendent in the grass: rubies spilled by a harried thief.



Some creature, our father told us soberly, was creeping in from the adjacent field, at night, while we, and he, slept. Subtly parting the tall grass, it leapt the wooden fence and took its pick of the frightened ducklings. In the morning, we’d find the remaining ducks scattered about the backyard, huddled and hiding in various nooks and corners, their necks curled and bent fantastically, preposterously, so that their heads rested under their wings. The beast, whatever it was, coyote or fox or wild dog, had disassembled the chicken wire pale, carelessly compressing its walls, uprooting the pinewood stakes. We fixed it, straightened out the skein of wire, and placed the ducks back inside.



I don’t recall any speeches from my father, any half-hearted explications of the circle of life or food chains or any other anodyne ramblings. I do remember that he began to set traps, black wire rectangles with a trip inside, baited with uncooked hotdogs. Hipped on retribution, I recommended that he stay up all night on the barn’s roof with my brother’s BB gun, waiting for the beast to show up. A recommendation he didn’t take.



So things went, the ducks plucked in the night, one by one, until they were gone. My father continued to set his traps. I remember thinking they were dumb, dumb, dumb; he’d never catch anything that way. But I don’t think I told him this.



One day, in the midst of the killings, I climbed up to the attic, hoping, maybe, to gauge the potential efficacy of my BB gun plan. The big loading window was open, and its double doors, angled at the top like those of a chapel, were swung wide to accommodate the breeze: a dry, pure zephyr. Periodically, someone—most likely my father—would open these doors, hasp them into place, and allow the attic to ventilate over the course of a day, allow the stale, baked air to escape. The peonies, as I ducked beneath them, rattled drily on their clotheslines, like bones: a vast, morbid set of wind chimes.



I reached the window and gazed out for a long time at the field of high grass, undulant—waves in the crinkled summer light. The field gave out a grand sigh, disconnected in its intensity from the subtlety of the field’s movement. As if there were an ocean, broad and unarticulated, hidden just out of sight. Natural ventriloquy, I think now, but not then. Then all I could feel was a terrible foreboding, a fear of hidden venom. Somewhere in the thicket’s weave, I knew, our oppressor lurked, biding, poised. Where or what it was we couldn’t know, we would never know, and it struck me, forcefully, as an aspect of fate, that we wouldn’t know. So much so that I felt myself becoming resigned to the mystery.



Then my father caught something.



***



It’s strange to think what dimly stays with you, what reveals itself willingly, at the touch of thought, in all its banal detail. I think of my father’s barn, mapped onto my brain by near-constant traversing and exploration. Strange, too, to find what fades—beyond a few scenes of play and a handful of vivid images, I don’t really remember too much about our ducks. And yet it’s strangest to consider what remains most clear, colorful, and precise, what plays back ceaselessly, like a loop of film.



For instance, I have a distinct memory of my brother and I watching our father drown a raccoon.



The raccoon, a sleek, pursy thing, moon-eyed with fear, is locked in a cage that lies in the bottom of a disused concrete trough. A hose hangs over the trough’s lip. Sharply I spy on the hose’s head an inverted cupola of water, a bright droplet, dangling like snot. Slick and lethal. I watch it drip.



For sound, there is the mad snarling and clacking of raccoon-teeth on cage-wire. For motion, the neutered acrobatics of attempted escape. A punch of red tongue adds color; a gurgly, slaverous, small-dog growl undergirds the soundscape. My eyes, transfixed, refuse to leave this desperation. Somewhere, our father turns a faucet. I hear a dry creak. The hose tenses, hisses, and begins to pump the trough full of water.



The raccoon erupts, turning eel-like in the spreading water, its coat dense and opulent. Soon half the cage is submerged. A black snout pokes periscopically through the cage’s upper lattice-work, searching for air, but no such luck. Up, up, up the water goes, until the cage is completely flooded, and the raccoon disappears beneath a braided surface. There are small agitations in the watery glass, bubbles of air and wavelets, the only signs of submerged struggle. Eventually, all settles. My father turns off the faucet, and the memory ends.



I recently asked my brother about this memory. I was curious about certain details, and half-hoping, at the same time, to revel fondly, like a nostalgic lush, in the absurd antics of our childhood. He recalled the ducks, their various demises. He remembered the black wire traps. He even remembered being shown a raccoon in the bottom of the concrete trough. But the actual drowning, he insisted, was done out of sight. My father, with a bit of prodding, confirmed this version of events.



As sharp as the scene and its details are in my head, I have to admit they’re a complete fabrication. I can’t say exactly when this false memory first took root in my mind, or why it did, or what legitimate memories it might have shoved carelessly into oblivion in the process. All I can say is that, until very recently—until a few months ago, in fact—I had borne this confabulation around, cradling it like a relic, relating it to friends, turning it about in my mind. And not once had I questioned its veracity.



Strangely enough, when I felt the dislodged scene begin to fade from my mind, I didn’t experience the dim, dull, toothy ache of extraction you might expect, nor the clean sting of excision. Instead there was a certain ecstatic liberty about the disappearance—as when a weight or pressure applied to the skin is suddenly lifted and the hitherto depressed flesh bounces back, filling its natural bounds, and then, for just one moment, attempts to move beyond the corporeal, into unarticulated space.



***



One more memory, this one real: We’re zooming through the darkling vineyard in my father’s truck. He; me; Grady. It’s a Sunday night, probably. The windows are rolled down. Outside, the foreign smell of grapes dangles over everything like a lazy stitch in the atmosphere.



In the cab of the truck, my face lit only by the dim fluorescence of the dashboard clock, I feel incredibly small.



We’re driving to the fallow field that lies behind our father’s vineyard, hoping to startle and disperse the deer that congregate there in the night, sometimes inspiring one another, by sheer confidence of numbers, I suppose, to dart into the vineyard and nibble at our grapes.



We don’t do this all the time. It’s a treat. We’ve usually got to beg him, and he’ll say no, no, there’s really no point tonight as we’re driving along, and we’ll crumple into ourselves, portraits of disappointment, until he turns sharply at the last moment, a surprise, and we revive.



We reach the fallow field. My father turns his headlights on high to catch the deer’s eyes, which bloom madly in the outer dark like a constellation of diseased stars. He chooses one with our help, and we buck off in pursuit. We come closer and closer to the singled-out deer, following its balletic dives and jukes with a bloodhound’s determination, closing in so tightly that I can imagine the dashboard and windshield disappearing before the galloping hind-quarters, the intervening material dropping away like so much illusion.



It’s then, at the climactic moment, that my father presses his foot to the brake pedal, the truck’s cabin dips forward abruptly, tipping my unseatbuckled self forward, and the deer makes its getaway, prancing through the waist-high bunches of Johnson grass until it’s reached the edge of the headlights’ range, at which point it disappears, without even a backward glance.



I gasp and turn to my father, who is dimly feigning distress, turning and twisting his hands in the dark, as if to signal something like, I guess it got away.



 

It is a gauzy autumn morning when he stands aloft and declaims.



On a balcony above a square where soldiers stand in haphazard arrangement,  he poses in martial livery—brass buttons agleam down the green felt fetch of his coat—and calls for many things. To a soldier or two, they seem atavistic adjurations, though for now they keep these thoughts to themselves. The current constitution, imposed by foreign powers, should be annulled, the man says, and the emperor, long deposed, should be restored to his former glory.



Beneath the man’s uniform, his body is solid and imposing, evidently cultivated along the lines of a foreign aesthetic. His words are forceful, belted, believed, but the message they carry is too much, and so, of course, the soldiers below, having overcome their kneejerk obeisance to barked speeches, begin to laugh in waxing waves, which give way to jeering, to open ridicule.



Unfazed, the man on the balcony finishes his speech like a dutiful prophet (now we see that he has been reading from a script, no wonder his delivery had been so plumb), turns surely about, and walks with practiced elegance (elegance in spite of strength) back into the commandant’s office of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, where members of his private militia are waiting to assist his ritual suicide.



 



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            Published in 1968, just two years before the famed and much awarded Japanese author Yukio Mishima (a pen name adopted by Kimitake Hiraoka) committed seppuku after a failed coup attempt on November 25, 1970, *Sun and Steel** *(which, depending on the printing, bears or bears not the subtitular extension *Art, Action, and Ritual Death*), his memoir-cum-manifesto, would be expected by modern readers to offer an inimitable window into the maelstrom of passion and theory that produced Mishima’s spectacular end. But the text—vatic, dogmatic, lousy with logical abysses that one imagines Mishima leaping over, buoyed aloft by his fanaticism—provides no such insight, offering only a refinement of his particular madness. It reinforces the view that his call for a coup and military extremism were merely condign veils for the intensity of his real purpose, which sought to fructify an aesthetic-nihilistic worldview in an exhibitionistic end: Regardless of the outcome of his speech—and indeed, in the absurdity of its demands it nearly begged to be flouted—Mishima intended to commit suicide that day. The martial ornaments of the staging were merely the outward forms beneath which his madness could coalesce.



            Above all, *Sun and Steel*’s coiling argumentation and sense of obsession darkly-fed bolster a point that, though evasive and hardly satisfying as a characterological precis, has nevertheless been long accepted: Mishima is a winking void, beyond interpretation—or, we should add, *satisfactory** *interpretation, because in the years after his highly stylized and orchestrated death, a veritable industry of interpretation sprang up, a self-generating mechanism that chewed and spurted and coughed thick clouds of smoke and ended up describing his downfall as, variously, a purely political act, a grandstanding display of narcissistic romanticism, the final discharge of repressed psychosis, even a spectacular admission of his closeted though oft-rumored homosexuality. (A twenty-four year old follower of Mishima’s, long supposed to be his lover, was the only other individual in the commandant’s office to commit suicide that day.)



            Because the center is missing, little sticks, and everything is permissible, although we should point out that these were the hypotheses of Western commentators, and while that cadre of exoticizing pens was happy to flitter and fumble and fling their wanton analyses at the enigmatic obelisk of Mishima’s reputation, critical voices within Japan tended to avoid the subject—and the man, and the work—entirely. For many years after his suicide, Mishima’s final works, by latterday consensus among his best, went undiscussed by the Japanese critical establishment, although this lacuna, like Mishima’s final act, is difficult to account for. Was it an unwillingness to prod too maliciously at the image of an insane man? A desire not to honor his fringe fanaticism by admitting even tacitly that its output could bear aesthetic merit? Was Mishima’s ideological recidivism too much of a national embarrassment, with Japan poised to become a global power? Or, almost paradoxically, considering his final demands, was it the fact that in one of his last works he had criticized the emperor, and that institution was still too valued, the respect for it inculcated so deeply that besmirching it would warrant ostracism?



            Probably a little of that all.



 



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Mishima was a weak child. Slender, asthenic, sensitive, his own youthful habitus provided the model for those of his protagonists, themselves effete, long-lashed, porcelain-skinned delicates in which the twinned concepts of elegance and corruption are intractably twined. While inly Mishima cultivated his thoughts and allowed the world to filter into the dark chamber of his mind, his outer form, subject to preternatural phthisis, diminished, and utterly escaped his own notice.



Perhaps it’s only an instance of colorful *ex post facto* attribution, but, regardless, Mishima’s explanation for this withering in Sun and Steel is deeply felt, fully believed by the writer. “In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language,” Mishima writes. “In my case, words came first of all; then—belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts—came the flesh. It was already, as goes without saying, sadly wasted by words.” Wasted because words, for Mishima, are inherently corrosive; they eat away at reality, and in so doing, like the etchant on glass, are weakened themselves. Thus, as he attests, were he to successfully pursue his desire to write, it would be necessary to counteract this undesired function of language, “to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all.”



So Mishima, as a young man, set out to “cultivate” his physical form, taking as his primary implements in this endeavor the titular sun and steel—the sun being the sun in the sky, the steel being the heavy metal tools of weightlifting: dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells. The ideal body, as Mishima saw it, was defined by two traits: “taciturnity” and “beauty of form.” The “form” he pursued was the classical, sculptural ideal, of Greek statues and Renaissance paintings; the desire for “taciturnity” sprang from his setting “the wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposition to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty.” And from the very first, his pursuit of the ideal body was ineluctably tied up with death.



 “I cherished a romantic impulse towards death,” Mishima writes, “yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle.” Were death to come upon a flabby body, an ill-cultivated body, the death itself would become ignoble, shameful, a grand embarrassment. There was no honor to be found in a flabby decease.



            All of this is readily comprehensible, easily digestible; in death, we are reduced to bodies, and hence a beautiful death requires a beautiful body. The commingling of aesthetics and nihilism is nothing too radical. But within *Sun and Steel* Mishima quickly loses himself in a wild arborescence of themes and motifs. As a corollary of his desire for the ideal body, he longs to possess the the “pure sense of strength,” a discarnate sensation which requires no object on which to discharge itself. Whereas words can only exist relationally, by interacting with what we perceive as reality, this ideal of strength would allow Mishima to grasp ultimate reality. But what, in Mishima’s tilted cosmology, is ultimate reality?



An ardent practitioner of kendo and karate, Mishima longed to experience “that which lay at the end of the flashing fist, and beyond the bow of the bamboo sword…just a hairsbreadth beyond the reach of the senses,” for “there, above all, lay the essence of action and power.” Antagonistically minded, Mishima dubbed this higher sense of reality the “opponent.” Though arrived at by curlicues of argumentation, the “opponent” is not an “idea,” but a “thing,” an apparent entity that ever stares back at one. “Ultimately,” Mishima concludes, “the opponent—‘the reality that stares back at one’—is death.” 



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Mishima, not surprisingly, liked to pose. A prominent novelist from a very young age, he parlayed this early success into chary careers in modelling, acting, and singing. His work in film was simple, vulgar, unrefined, and, along with his singing, served only to gain him popular exposure; his starring role as a gangster in 1960’s *Tough Guy* was received by the Japanese press as unimpressive. By and large, this role objectifies a blunting of Mishima’s novelistic concerns: His character, clad in a leather jacket, moves about like a brute; there is fawning, camera-conscious chest-bearing; and, in the end, Mishima’s character dies in a hail of bullets. Intending to make the film a complete spectacle, Mishima insisted on singing its theme song.



His modelling, by nature static and “taciturn,” is more sensitive, more sincere. The early photos—traditional images, largely commercial, designed to capture pedestrian scenes of beauty—are for the most part uninteresting. But as the years advanced and Mishima slowly crept, knowingly or not, to his death, the images became more artistic, more private, more beautiful. They centered more and more around Mishima’s body, which was edging up against that terminal asymptote of perfection which would make his eventual suicide—at least in his eyes—noble.



With a dark line of trimmed conifers in the background, Mishima, clad only in a sparing white loincloth, kneels in a pristine blanket of February snow. Facing the camera, he gazes off to his right, where a katana extends from his right arm; it is difficult to say just where the focus of his eyes lies, whether he is staring at the minatory tip of the steel, or far beyond it, at a carnate enemy somewhere hedged black against the white, out of frame, or whether still his eyes fumble for some nebulous zone just beyond the edge of the blade: a pocket of air, a worming distortion. In a different image, captured by the same photographer, Mishima, in the same garb, stands in casual contrapposto before a shōji, his torso bedight with gems of sweat, a sheathed katana resting against his right hip. Ears akimbo, hair trimmed tight, he looks into the camera without an expression—there is only an impression of great force, of a terrible energy seething forth from the eyes.



These later photos edged constantly towards the violent, the martial, the morbid. In September of 1970, only a month before his suicide, Mishima arranged for a modelling session with the young photographer Kishin Shinoyama. Mishima had planned the images, the shots, the scenes—he intended to call the final series of photos “Death of a Man.” In the pictures, Mishima faces various grim demises: He wallows, expiring, in mud; a hatchet cleaves his skull and tickles his brain; he is crushed beneath the wheels of an industrial truck. Most interestingly, though least surprisingly, he poses as Saint Sebastian, hips girdled by a white cloth, wrists gambreled up by a thin rope, strung against a tree, his torso oiled and agleam, his gaze upflung and ruminative, divested of any expression of pain. Three arrows pierce his skin, at the hip, beneath the ribcage, and directly in the armpit.



In Confessions of a Mask, Mishima’s self-professedly autobiographical second novel published in 1949, the narrator admits to first masturbating to a reproduction of Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian, the sublime “beauty of form” of the martyr, and the pure ecstasy apparent in his visage contributing to the first instant of sincere arousal. Perhaps the most famous passage in Mishima’s oeuvre, it achieves a startling conflation of the sacred and the profane, the sensual and the terminal, of pain and pleasure. But this highly idiosyncratic and almost ungraspable melding of sensations, once experienced from the side of the desirer, evidently captivated Mishima enough to assume the other role, to become the object of this dark and obscure desire.



Perhaps Reni’s original is an image of torture and pain, of execution, yet Mishima’s reproduction, consciously crafted in opposition, shifts the power. Luxuriating in death, it becomes his own.  



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“According to my definition of tragedy,” Mishima writes in *Sun and Steel*, “the tragic *pathos* is born when the perfectly average sensibility momentarily takes unto itself a privileged nobility that keeps others at a distance, and not when a special type of sensibility vaunts its own special claims.”



            Mishima glorified the Greeks. In the early 1950s, as a reporter for the *Asahi Shinbun*, he spent several weeks in Greece, finding there exactly what he wanted to find—exactly what he *expected* to find, as John Nathan attests in *Mishima: A Biography*:



…the lesson he learned from what he beheld was the lesson he required, a liberating lesson; that “beauty and ethics were one and the same”; that “creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself were ethically identical.”



Mishima was well-acquainted with the entirety of Greek tragedy; he attempted to rewrite several of its sterling exemplars in his own plays. And yet no play strikes so much of a resonance with Mishima’s work as *Hecuba*, by Euripides.



In it, Troy has fallen, and Hecuba, erstwhile wife of King Priam, already savaged by sorrows, is informed that her daughter Polyxena will be sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles. Wailing is heard, pleas are made and then ignored, and eventually Polyxena bravely steps forward, avowing that she would rather die than live a slave. She is hauled away, hidden by a shroud, and in only a few minutes’ time we learn of her death from the chorus.



            They had not wanted her to die, she was so beautiful, and, as she was placed upon the tomb of Achilles, she cried for her sentinels, her captors, to loose her; freely, of her own will, she tore off her cloak, baring her youthful breasts. She gave her neck to the sword, and, if it hesitated in that precarious pressured moment, the steel rung up against the impermeable guard of doubt, she worked some magic, some mysterious lure upon its bearer: she invited the steel, and welcomed its kiss with a meretricious fluttering of her lashes, and when she fell, incruent angel in the dust of her conquered home, it was a graceful fall, a sensuous decease, composed and conscious, crumpling finally like a lurid lily, grasping itself as it dries upon the grass.



            Polyxena is destined to die—it is no longer her choice. And yet, somehow, she converts this death sentence, arrived at by supernatural decree, into a form of suicide, of willed death. Her instrument in this alchemical process is the aesthetic; the only way she has of controlling her life, of dictating the entirety of her existence, is by turning it into art. 



\_\_\_\_\_\_\_



 



            In 1985, fifteen years after Mishima’s death, the BBC produced *The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima* for its documentary series, Arena. An hour in length, the documentary features clips of interviews with Mishima himself, along with interviews with prominent Japanese intellectuals, who most frequently turn down their noses at Mishima and his death, explain why, in their opinions, the self-created ending to his story was a failure, artistic or otherwise.



            Nagisa Oshima, the lauded filmmaker whose movies, like Mishima’s fictions, scouted the precarious terrain between death and sensuality, considered his coeval’s death rash and tasteless melodrama. “He wanted to dramatise the end of his life in a beautiful way,” Oshima said. “But it was an over-elaborate gesture, which failed to satisfy our Japanese aesthetic."



            Most of the posthumous evaluations end with some sort of societal catch-all commentary like the above, but the testimony of Nobuko Lady Albery, a writer, while striking the same thematic notes—of the overextension of the gesture—refrains, delicately, from condemnation: “As a clown, as an actor, as an impostor, as a gangster, as an aristocrat—in every little thing he tried to be, he over-existed.”



It almost seems a shame to point out that after Mishima rammed a short sword into his left side and tore it across his abdomen, his presumptive lover twice failed to decapitate him. Finally the sword was handed off to an assistant, who finished the job with a third stroke—which didn’t exactly rectify the botching.

*Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks.* –Friedrich Holderlin



 



 



I



In the early morning hours of January 12, 1963, a coup took place on the island of Zanzibar. It was a small, relatively silent uprising; those over whom the hand of government had switched in the middle of the night awoke none the wiser. As day broke, insubstantial rumors began to trickle in. The sun climbed in the sky like a fiery balloon, and with it rose the tide of hearsay.



A name began to circulate. It hummed in the narrow, shaded streets, along the brilliant beaches and quays where bobbed the boats of ragged fishermen. It ran through the fields of corn and cassava, beneath the coconut palms and clove trees. Soon a message, freshly composed by the revolutionaries, quaked over the radio.



John Okello, a warrior, had apparently given Zanzibar, until so recently ruled by a minority population of Arabs, back to the Afri- cans. He cut a magnificent figure, the listeners were led to believe and until quite recently had been a high-ranking officer in Kenya. He could construct, with his own two hands, 500 guns in a single day, 100 grenades in an hour, and a bomb with a blast radius of three miles—and he had been planning the liberation of Zanzibar for months.



But very little of this, as it would later emerge, was true. Seizing the opportunity to reinvent himself, Okello had disseminated a stream of fictions so rich and vermiculate that it would be months in the disentangling. The madness, turmoil, and attendant void of information associated with the revolt provided an exceptionally fertile launch pad for this reformation.



The man who post-revolution would pompously deem himself “Field Marshal” of the military was, in reality, a semi-literate laborer—variously a bricklayer, a housepainter, a stonecutter—who had raised himself after being orphaned at ten. Furthermore, he was a spiritual man, in his own mind a prophet. God spoke to him of the righteousness of the revolution, whispered at his ear in the dark night hours. Sometimes he was so bowled over by these inspirations that he retreated to the forest to contemplate his dreams in silence.



He had had no hand in planning the revolution but had merely been the firebrand, the instigator. At first a rank-and-file rebel, it was during the actual fighting that he had distinguished himself, his singular confidence and viciousness exalting him to the position of military hero and, eventually, to figurehead of the revolution.



Immediately following the revolution, Okello held great sway in Zanzibar. What followed was a confusing period of about two months. Though he had no formal position in the new government, Okello was essentially running the country, while more legitimate leaders—those who had actually planned the revolution Okello had usurped—tried to mitigate his power.



Okello made daily radio broadcasts during this period, claiming, outrageously, that 11,995 people had died during the revolt. He made strange threats, such as:



“We, the army, have the strength of 99 million, 99 thousand...Should anyone be stubborn and disobey orders, then I will take very strong measures, 88 times stronger than at present.”



He would cut, drown, burn, and shoot dissidents. The foreign press was banned, and he began to make insane demands. Off the radio, he strutted about, gussied up and armed to the teeth with pistols, knives, and a Sten gun. He burst in on private meetings and proceeded to act the buffo. He posed for an endless number of photographs.



In short, he was an embarrassment. Fortunately for his opponents, Okello’s violent Christian rhetoric, combined with the ravenous looting his armada of ruffians undertook in regular waves, was beginning to alienate his less zealous supporters. On March 8, on returning from a trip to Uganda, Okello was met at the airport by a host of guards. Unfortunately, they explained, he would not be allowed back into Zanzibar.



He was set to wandering. He still felt the desire to liberate; he still retained his taste for grandeur. With only a handful of loyal men, he halfheartedly stomped around East Africa, dreamily plotting uprisings in Rhodesia, Mozambique, even South Africa.



In 1971, he dropped off the map entirely. Speculation has it he was assassinated by a president or warlord who felt vaguely threatened by his high volatility. Regardless, his misbegotten plans, his synthetic past, the tentative grandeur of his future all disappeared, swept briskly under the rug of history. The magnificence of his illusions dissipated, their energy spreading ineffectually across the whole geography of his wanderings. He burst forth like a flame and petered out, underfed



 



II



It was during his exile of the late 1960s—before his disappearance—that Okello began a correspondence with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, then a relatively unknown director. Okello wanted Herzog to translate a book he’d written on the Zanzibar Revolution into German, while Herzog simply wanted a chance to film Okello, whose grandiose antics he’d followed closely as they’d trickled into the western media. The two never managed to meet, however; Okello, having learned little from his ostracization and still inclined to boil over with vitriolic language, had landed himself in jail.



Even a cursory understanding of Herzog’s filmog- raphy would seem to justify his interest in Okello. As Dana Benelli notes in his essay “The Cosmos and its Discontents,” Herzog’s films, particularly the early efforts, tend to focus on “central characters out of synch with, if not in open rebellion against, the societies within which they live” (89). The “re- bellious response” subsumes the individual, and the revolt escalates, self-augmenting, until the characters are revolting against the universe itself: Stroszek in Signs of Life (1968) demands that the sun cease its constant rising; The President in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) runs into the desert and orders a branch to quit pointing at him.



These Herzogian protagonists tend to be characterized by their mythopoeic strivings, by the attempt at self-reinvention through a reckless and mad grab for power—elements found abundantly in Okello that no doubt attracted the director. Okello’s absurd and unsustainable demagoguery, marked by a penchant for flagrantly impossible threats, was in itself a bid for transcendence. As Herzog recalled in a 1971 interview:



Okello delivered these incredible speeches from an airplane. He circled around Zanzibar...and before he landed, he had the aircraft’s radio switched to the local radio station and delivered a short speech: “I, your Field Marshall, am about to land. Anyone who steals so much as a bar of soap will be thrown in prison for two hundred and sixteen years!”



The figure of John Okello—mad revolutionary, boastful weaver of absurd fictions—would come to influence not only Herzog’s style of filmmaking, but also the themes he undertook to excavate, most prominently in his 1972 feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film which includes a character named after Okello and which marked Herzog’s first collaboration with another mad, transcendent person- ality: Klaus Kinski.



The wonderfully strange, frequently violent, and wildly germinative relationship between Herzog and Kinski has become a bit of a commonplace in cinema history. Herzog himself has emerged as a weird wizard of cinema, with various anecdotes attesting to his eccentricity; Kinski, the blonde powder keg, has always remained a larger than life figure, renowned for the shortness of his temper, the force of his outbursts.



At the time of filming, Kinski, in his mid-forties, had a respectful though stunted career. He could act, all agreed, but his frequent and vociferous tantrums—which often bled into the physical realm— had garnered him a foreboding reputation. Many directors were afraid to touch him, but it was precisely this volatility that attracted Herzog. He was intent on making a film about revolt—who better than a revolting actor to play the lead?



The film, which follows a doomed expedition down a mid-16th century Amazon River to find the mythic golden city of El Dorado, was filmed in Peru. The jungle was hot, unbearably hot, and Herzog, hoping to draw real performances out of his actors, allegedly kept them hungry and thirsty for most of the shoot. It was nearly impossible to drag the large crew and cast through the often perilously thin mountain paths, through the webs of viridescent foliage that sprung from the soupy ground. Sickness and fever were a perennial threat; the nearest large city was often dangerously distant and only sometimes in communication.



Early in the filming, Kinski, per his wont, began to act up. “His behavior was impossible, and he raved like a lunatic at least once a day,” Herzog later recalled in an interview. “He also wanted to leave the set—he wanted to go home.” Accounts differ as to how Herzog confronted this last issue; the most frequently circulated rumor is that he forced Kinski to act at gunpoint. Herzog denies this, however. He claims, rather, to have simply threatened to kill Kinski, and then himself: “From then on, every- thing went very smoothly.”



As filming progressed, so, too, did Kinski’s antics. At one point, an extra, waiting off-screen in a hut constructed for the filming, spoke while Kinski was filming a scene. Kinski, who carried a functional Winchester rifle with him at all times, “got so worked up that he took his Winchester and shot a hole through the roof.” (Some accounts have Kinski taking off three of the extra’s fingers with his shot.) Herzog—operating on a hunch, a nugget of inspira- tion—encouraged these tantrums; he egged Kinski on, working him into a lather and watching as Kinski’s rage bled into his acting. All of which, it goes without saying, he captured on film. The environ- ment that Herzog fostered was essentially hostile: the actors should feel uncomfortable and Kinski himself should feel transgressed upon, singled out. This displacement—the alienation engendered by being treated cruelly in a foreign land—would ideally result in a purer, distilled form of acting.



Miraculously, the shoot wrapped up, and the film proved a massive success, catapulting Herzog into the spotlight of European art cinema while simultaneously reinvigorating Kinski’s career. Herzog and Kinski, battered by the process though pleased with its results, would go on to collaborate on several more critically acclaimed films, entangling themselves in a relationship that produced marvelous fictions while at the same time being, in a sense, another fiction.



In his 1988 autobiography, Kinski, who had most recently worked with Herzog in 1987’s Cobra Verde, viciously derided his partner, claiming that Herzog was an execrable, self-obsessed filmmaker—a dabbler, a dilettante. Herzog, for his part, later claimed that much of Kinski’s autobiography was pure fiction, crafted retroactively, and that he had even assisted Kinski in penning some of the more acerbic insults on his own person.



It seems fitting that Kinski’s last say on his relationship with Herzog should be undecipherable, an unresolvable entangling of the virile threads of rage and fiction.



III



Aguirre, the Wrath of God plays fast and loose with historical figures. It follows an expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro in late 1560 and early 1561, despite the fact that the historical Pizarro died in 1548. Herzog places the historical figures on expeditions they never attended, displacing them temporally. They are pawns in an aesthetic game, their very shifts and anachronistic arrangements contributing to the film’s sense of compositeness, of incompleteness.



Early in the film, the official expedition is stalled. A small party, led by Don Pedro Ursua with Don Lope de Aguirre (our hero, so to speak) as second-in-command, is sent down the river on a fleet of rickety skiffs to scout for food or help.



Throughout this developing drama, Kinski, who has donned the armor of his character, a shabby suit of leather with oversized pauldrons, is preoccupied with delivering the most menacing performance he can manage. He fully utilizes his diseased-looking habitus and the thick, Cro-Magnon ossature of his skull; Aguirre struts about vampirically, brooding and scowling and blaring with his wild, sunken eyes. Before long, his treachery is out in the open. Ursua is deposed, and Aguirre establishes the overweight and simpleminded Don Fernando de Guz- man as the expedition’s new leader—while he, of course, retains his position as second-in-command.



From then on, the film charts a general decline in sanity. The doomed party drifts down the river on a large raft that begins to resemble, with its various small additions and substructures, the barest bones of a theatrical stage. No minor significance to this, in fact. In a 1973 interview, Herzog discussed his understanding of the relation between history and theater:



[A]s a theme, this horde of imperialistic ad- venturers performing a great historical failure, this failure of imperialism, of the conquerors, the theme is really quite modern. The meth- od by which history was then made is actually one that can still be found today in many Latin American countries. History there is staged as theater, with theatrical coups.



To echo this sentiment, Aguirre claims in the film’s final moments that he “will stage history, like others stage plays.” And, of course, the platform on which he crafts his fictions is fundamentally destabilized, a portable stage that bucks and trips and in its disturbance agitates its occupants’ minds, their thoughts, and the fictions that trend from those thoughts.



Herzog indeed is interested in the essence of revolt, of rebellion, but he is even more interested in the relationship between revolution and the crafting of fictions. In his early work, he has limned a triumvirate of madness, associating these two propensities with his “out of synch” characters, snipped cleanly from their contexts, historical or other. As John Okello emerged from a dim personal past and found himself suddenly at the head of a revolution, Aguirre was transported into the tropical wilds of South America, torn from his comfortable lands in Spain—and it is no minor joke that Herzog like- wise tore Kinski, a stunningly German actor, out of Germany and thrust him into the unlikely role of a Spanish conquistador. While the other actors display the fine Spanish features so often associated with the conquistadors, Kinski stands out, his lanky blond hair and brutal features purposely inhibiting the authenticity of his role.



For Herzog, the displaced man’s propensity for revolt is irrevocably connected to his greater-than-av- erage ability (or opportunity) to remake himself— that is, his ability to craft fictions. Without a proper social context, the displaced man will expand indefinitely, revolting and creating fictions of grandeur, of power. The revolt begins to feed the fiction, while the fiction in turn feeds the revolt. It this recursive loop that becomes the madness that leads the displaced Herzog protagonist to “rebel against the universe.”



The last 15 minutes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God constitute a subtle phantasmagoria. The crew of the raft, merely a handful of tatterdemalion survivors struck with hunger, thirst, and fever, begin to hallucinate freely. They spot a complete boat—its sails billowing fluidly, dreamily—suspended in the uppermost branches of a tree and declare that it is merely an illusion. The line between fiction and reality, enervated by the crew’s physical weakness, begins to blur. Aguirre, for his part, claims the boat is real; he makes plans to retrieve the boat and use it to reach the Atlantic.



The slave Okello—so named because Herzog owed the revolutionary’s “craze, hysteria, [and] atrocious fantasies quite a bit for [the] film”—lies crumpled on the raft’s floor. With a skyward glance, he whispers, “That is no ship. That is no forest.” In a stunning moment, an arrow sinks quickly and forcefully into his thigh. He reacts calmly, continuing his delirious ruminations: “That is no arrow. We just imagine the arrows, because we fear them.” Meanwhile, Aguirre hurries about the raft as arrows and spears bombard the remnants of his crew; he fires off rifles and makes noise, insisting with supreme confidence that the arrows are real, that the danger exists.



It is then that Flores, Aguirre’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who has been carried preposterously in a sedan-chair through all these rough environs, is killed by an arrow. Aguirre cradles her, staring menacingly off into the jungle whence the missile came. We might expect reality to rush in now like a torrent, to bring Aguirre to his knees and cleanse his mind of any illusions. But, as it happens, Aguirre sets the corpse of his daughter down. He proclaims that he will marry her and in so doing found “the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen.” A procre- ative loop is established; the father will feed off the daughter, just as the fictions will feed off the revolt, the revolt the fictions.



The raft twirls and yaws down the river. It might be going to the sea. 

I. Destruction and Silence



 



*The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals.*



 



In a series of lectures delivered in Zurich in 1997 (and later published in essay form as “Air War and Literature”), the late German novelist W.G. Sebald decries the “curious blindness” to, and willed ignorance of, the truths of destruction that by any logical reckoning should have come to define life in the fractured wasteland of postwar Germany.



Early in the essay he describes a live report, produced by the BBC Home Service, of an air raid conducted, in the midst of the war, on Berlin. The Lancaster bombers take off, soar in broad arcs over the North Sea; the target is reached, and the lethal cargo is dropped. The report, Sebald concludes ironically, “is rather a disappointment to anyone expecting…insight into the event from some superior viewpoint.”



The perfectly German joke, of course, is that the report, given from the vantage of an aeroplane in the sky, issues by necessity from a “superior viewpoint.” Given the purpose of the raid—to raze and reduce centuries of careful stonework, to ignite beams and plaster, to boil streets and the unfortunate traipsers upon them—there could not be a more ideal viewpoint than an aerial one, from which the extinguishing of human lives is made so morally and practically simple.



But Sebald’s real point is that the assumption that the ideal viewpoint for destruction is also the ideal viewpoint for interpretation—a belief deriving from the fallacious assertion that we will see what the aggressors saw, feel what the aggressors felt—is foolish and naïve. It is an approach that ignores the ineffable alchemy wrought by the act of observation.



For many years after the end of World War II, German writers avoided the war, and the Holocaust, as a subject. Of necessity, their moral culpability was likewise elided. As a result, Sebald asserts, they abetted the collective amnesia that had settled like a pall over the German people. Eventually, however, the pendulum swung the other way. The past was viewed with furious condemnation, and an aggressive push was made to view the facts of the war, and the Holocaust, with complete objectivity—as one would view the ground from an airplane. But for Sebald, this was merely another false step, a flight into rhetoric that, in the final analysis, was merely another facet of aesthetic exploitation of destruction.



Yet Sebald is not entirely immune to the temptation of the aerial view. Much of his fiction can be seen as an attempt to salvage it as a metaphor, as an oblique way of discussing historiography—an attempt, in other words, to determine its true applicability. Hence it’s not without reason that readers of Sebald’s fictions often report experiencing a floating sensation, as though they’re hovering above the events and stories described. The first chapter of *The Rings of Saturn* is largely taken up by an essay on the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century English writer that Sebald both admired and emulated. Browne, according to Sebald, “sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator.” To achieve these “sublime heights,” Browne employed a “parlous loftiness” in his language. Though his sentences are occasionally gummed up by his vast erudition and baroque style, when Browne “does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiraling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air,” Sebald writes, “even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.”



For Browne, this aerial remove functions counter-intuitively: “the greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity.” When one is looking back at history—when the metaphor is horizontal—this functioning is a commonplace; historical hindsight, we believe, will eventually reveal the truth. But when one views the past aerially—when the metaphor assumes verticality—the paradox becomes clear. Sebald desires Browne’s preternatural magnification—which might constitute the “historical metaphysic” capable of “bringing remembered events back to life” that is sought after in all of his fiction—but it remains a pipe dream. The higher the viewpoint in Sebald’s fictions, the greater the sensation of nausea, of vertigo. All we see is flattened, and objects and structures are robbed of their discreteness: “Such is the dark backward and abysm of time,” Sebald writes. “Everything lies all jumbled up in it, and when you look down you feel dizzy and afraid.”



It is with this bevy of concerns that Sebald assumes the task of creating fictions, turning to the practice with a sigh of impotence. The impossibility of pure history, of the reconstitution of memory, is the dreadful and immanent nausea that suffuses his prose, that forces catalepsy upon his narrators and characters. And just as the constituents of time and history become jumbled together, so, too, do the elements of the work of fiction. In an essay on W.G. Sebald, James Wood writes that though “his deeply elegiac books are made out of the cinders of the real world, he makes facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms of their narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actual world.” The warp of fiction is braced by the weft of fact, and the resulting tapestry is a talisman aimed at teasing, from the welter of an obliterated past, a representative view of history.



 



***



 



Memory is a human construction. The world (that is, the natural world) is destined and indeed designed to forget itself, and in the struggle against this constant ablation, as Sebald sees it, we have only the bluntest of reconstitutive tools at our disposal: a language whose inner cohesiveness and epistemological efficacy are to be doubted, and a smattering of vague and half-focused photographs that may depict, but more often seem merely to adumbrate.



It may seem strange to discuss the doubting of language with regard to an author such as Sebald, who incorporates antiquarian syntax into the elegant scaffolding of his prose, but aphasia in Sebald is reserved for very specific themes: language may dance around certain subjects, but it may not spring from them. “The construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world,” he writes, “is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.” As other writers and theorists have asserted, there is a moral obligation not to derive aesthetic effect from supreme destruction. As an extension of this claim, Sebald asserts as an epistemological reality that it is impossible to derive aesthetic effect from oblivion.



Despite this weakness, within Sebald’s fiction, language is still the master of appearances, of surfaces, of phenomena. It may be employed, with sufficient effect, to describe spaces, buildings, landscapes, to painstakingly limn their physical relations to one another. Hence there is little doubt embedded in the narrator’s description, in *Austerlitz*, of the Centraal Station in Antwerp; the spires and turrets and domes are presented as faits accomplis, real and ineffaceable, undoubtable. Otherwise, if uncertainty were allowed to creep into and compromise language’s simplest functions, Sebald’s magisterial descriptions of architectural oddities would collapse beneath an equally grandiose anxiety.



Sebald’s great skill in precisely delineating surfaces, and the power that the framework of his fiction grants to language in this endeavor, sometimes obscures a great, though intentional, failure of his language: It is very nearly incapable of elaboration, of developing images external to the source material or which are not, to some degree, a meditation on ineffability. The black hole of oblivion ever reigns in Sebald’s writing, drawing the fiction into itself and preventing the construction of complex aesthetic effects.



If the typical sentence of Proust—the master of elaboration—is meant to ambulate, to rise and fall in synoptic waves, flirting ever with the achievement of liftoff and gesturing, in these pendent moments, at images outside of the text, outside of language itself, the typical Sebaldian sentence is meant to incorporate and contain—it remains a self-sufficient, closed system. The uncertain tempo of a Proustian elaboration stands in stark contrast to the steady and unrelenting tempo of Sebald’s writing; Sebald’s sentences roll on, devouring details and preserving them in the process, embedding facts (real or fictive) in their elegant, multiclausal construction.



When memory seems merely a cancerous stimulation of oblivion, and language reigns supreme only in the realm of detail, then the main concern of language is clearly dictated. From *Austerlitz*:



*[T]he darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.*



Sebald has set himself the impossible task of the metaphysical documentarian, to collect and preserve the entirety of history via the “places and objects” that bear it, and to lathe it all into some manageable form of representation.



There is a very famous sentence in *Austerlitz* that runs for nine pages and contains an unbearable amount of information about the Theresienstadt concentration camp. What’s remarkable about it is that despite its length, it remains a completely flat sentence, unfolding in segmented regimentation, like a spider testing its limbs. Without devolving into nonsense, and without becoming a mere catalogue, the sentence functions as a precise historical record containing no aesthetic elaborations. It is a beautiful record, but a record still, one that does not attempt to derive aesthetic affect from oblivion, but merely places the reagents of the past in close proximity to one another, in the hopes that, by some obscure process of relation, they will generate an image of the past. The sentence does not so much limn the past as perform the ritual necessary for its appearance (unsurprising, then, that Sebald’s prose is frequently described as “processional”). When a reader of Sebald admits to a feeling of levitation, it is not because he or she has been “borne aloft” by aspiring helices of prose. It is because Sebald has done his best to write flat sentences, which we look down upon in more ways than one, sensing patterns and signs immured within the text.



 



II. Buildings in Time



 



*The noblest claim of modern historiography nowadays is that it is a mirror; it rejects all teleology; it no longer wishes to ‘prove’ anything. All this is to a high degree ascetic; but at the same time it is to an even higher degree nihilistic.*



 



History, perforce, is a function of time, and so it is only natural that the characters in, and narrators of, Sebald’s fictions frequently expatiate upon the nature of time. Given the force of materiality in Sebald’s fictions, and the supernatural tendencies ascribed to the agent of time, it’s unsurprising that these discursions typically aim at the wholesale reification of time—a fortiori, they are characterized by the attempt to convert time into a spatial phenomenon.



“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all,” Austerlitz opines, “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.” Time is a wavering image shorn of one crucial dimension by the feeble reach of our minds; it is the projection into our reality of an ungraspable complex.



Thus Sebald’s abiding interest in architectural oddities, in structures that bear time—that manage, even, to function as time itself. Country homes and train stations and vast stone edifices (memorials, monuments, mausolea) abound in Sebald’s work. Oftentimes they are baroque and nearly illusionistic structures, full of sealed-off rooms and curlicue passages that defy our understanding. Always they have lapsed into desuetude: Windows are broken, and dust has settled in a gauzy integument on the inner districts of the home; hallways designed to channel crowds now abide in silence, bereft of the patter of crossing feet; creepers and liana crowd yards in vicious, encroaching skeins.



In a prosaic sense, as monuments, these structures are historical records, but in the Sebaldian sense, they function as structural allegories—they are physical manifestations of the abstruse calculus of time. In The Emigrants, the narrator inspects a country home designed so that “on every floor hidden passageways branched off, running behind walls in such a way that the servants…never had to cross the paths of their betters.” Like the eunomic reticulation of chambers and paths in a termite nest, these passageways go unnoticed by the average viewer. “Often,” the narrator continues, “I tried to imagine what went on inside the heads of people who led their lives knowing that, behind the walls of the rooms they were in, the shadows of the servants were perpetually flitting past.”



It is out of such “hidden passageways” and dim defiles that the past returns to us in Sebald. Conscious excavation is likely to yield no results because there is no precise point of oblivion around which to focus our work; there are no nodes or images that may be cajoled into revealing their essences. Rather, the return of the past functions by whimsy. It is like a door that swings open unexpectedly and beyond which lies a ramified series of hallways, through which images of the living and the dead flit, generating a wind that reaches outward past the threshold, and which alters our world in fey ways. Voluntary memory is incapable of revealing the past. It merely dredges up artifacts that, on their own, are speechless.



There are subtle instances of this phenomenon of whimsy to be found throughout Sebald’s work. In *The Emigrants*, the narrator reads a journal left by one of his deceased relatives that describes a journey to Jerusalem and the desolation he finds there; in *The Rings of Saturn*, the narrator describes an elaborate matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, a painstaking reconstruction of the vanished edifice. A quieter example: Austerlitz, who as an adult has studied the history of siegecraft, spies in a square “a peasant woman wearing several layers of coats, and waiting behind a makeshift stall for someone to think about buying one of the cabbages she had piled up into a mighty bulwark in front of her.”



Historical images, and those of our personal pasts, return to us, outsize or shrunken. To borrow Sebald’s description of Browne’s vision, “It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time.” It is to Sebald’s great credit that his fictions, and the sentences therein, function like architectural oddities, which, while not quite grasping the obscure infrastructure of time, manage to approximate it, and facilitate its functioning. Sebald’s sentences are themselves the blueprints of ramified hallways. Like intricate diagrams, they allow for the supernatural resonance of past and present, fact and fiction, memory and oblivion—a resonance that offers life, obliquely, to the misremembered shades of history.