S.Blackwell politely reminded me
that Russell Kilbourn presented a paper on "VN and Sebald"
in Oxford, in 2007 and there are various references to
Nabokov by Sebald in the Nab-L archives* Nevertheless,
from what I read in the List registers, no one seems to question
if the picture with a man holding a net in Sebald's "The Emigrants" is
actually Nabokov.
The reproduced image is not very clear and, far far back, we seem to be
looking at the Swiss snowy rocks. There seems to be no reason to doubt
that it represents Nabokov!
However, in Sebald's text, the narrator is watching a slide-projection
with travel images taken in Crete, during spring and, once in a
while, "dr.Selwyn, wearing bermuda-shorts, with a backpack and a butterfly
net" could be seen in them."
He adds: "One of the pictures was identical, even to its details,
to a photograph of Nabokov taken in the Swiss mountains, close to Gstaad"
**.
I recovered a few images of Nabokov and butterfly net to compare them. The
Nabokov image in question was a cutting from a Swiss newspaper. The one
from the slide-show shows the Lasithi altiplane, with the Spathi mountain
rising like a mirage, for it was taken at midday with the
sun staring right into the camera lenses.
Why do I dare to imagine that the model, printed in "The
Emigrants," is not Nabokov? But I do ... (there's something about the
large nose, prognatic chin, big feet... as if I had ever met or
visited Nabokov, the Swiss Alps, Crete...)
Any thoughts?
...................................................................................................................
* - I selected a few from the Nab-L Archives:
1.October 1996,#
54: "In the Sunday L.A.Times _Book Review_, (p.2) Richard Eder reviews THE
EMIGRANTS by W.G. Sebald, a German novelist & scholar who teaches at the
University of East Anglia in Norwich. The novel is four narratives about German
Jews who escape the Holocaust "yet gradually succumb to it years later, in
old...age." According to the reviewer, Sebald "weaves recurring images through
these [separate] stories. The Swiss Alps appear in three of them, with their
lofty inhuman view of the world below and their country's cold isolation from
the horrors around it. All four contain fleeting glimpses of Vladimir Nabokov
with his butterfly net: in the Alps, on a meadow near Cornell,... and as a
little boy at a German spa."...."Why Nabokov? I am not sure. Some of the images
in Sebald's brilliant and somber book work inexplicably. This one is arbitrary
on the face of it, but it doesn't feel that way. Its playfulness both lightens
and illuminates. Nabokov, whose liberal father was assassinated by Russian
emigre extremist, steps out of another dark history, portly and pursuing
butterflies. Sebald has fashioned a net of his own."
2.Christopher Berg (Nab-L Archives, Jan. 2002, #46)wrote: "I want to open
up the discussion of VN's very interesting and enigmatic appearances in the late
W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants." While it is possible that VN's appearances
function as little more than an homage to a great writer, in no interview with
Sebald that I have read or heard has he mentioned Nabokov as an influence. I
would propose that VN's appearance suggest that Sebald's book -- which
chronicles four lives grim to the point of hopelessness -- may be intended as a
riposte to Nabokov's belief in the Other World; that each time VN appears he
seems to be a harbinger of new possibilities, of knowledge to be gained,
even of joy -- and each time such hopes are dashed....
3. R. Kilbourn( Nab-L, April 2004, #36): "Kafka, Nabokov? Sebald:
Intertextuality and Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants" A New York
Times online review singled out for censure one feature of The Emigrants: "the
man with the butterfly net, a Nabokovian figure, who keeps appearing and
disappearing. I found him blatantly symbolic and literary" (Jefferson 3). This
rather unreflective response nevertheless raises interesting questions about
just what such a blatantly 'Nabokovian figure' is doing in the novel, and why it
appears when it does. Further, assuming that this figure is blatantly symbolic,
what might it 'symbolize,' given its literal provenance not in one of Vladimir
Nabokov's novels but rather in Speak, Memory (1967), where his autobiographical
self (whose photo is reproduced in Emigrants) assumes this role? Curiously,
perhaps, the same review fails to accuse Vertigo of the analogous sin of blatant
literariness, in its even heavier reliance upon the central motif of Franz
Kafka's narrative fragment "The Hunter Gracchus" (1917). It is no mystery
that Kafka and Nabokov are two of Sebald's primary literary antecedents. What is
less clear is, first, how these diverse intertextual elements signify within
each novel, and, second, what relation, if any, they bear to each other.
4. In April 2004, also at the Nab-L Archives we find J.Wilkenfeld's
information: "Russell Kilbourn of McMaster University delivered an
interesting paper on "Kafka, Nabokov and Sebald: Intertextuality and
Redemption" at the first Sebald Symposium at Davidson College in March
2003. As far as I know, the papers from the conference are to be published
in book form sometime in the near future. However, I emailed Kilbourn, who was
kind enough to forward me a copy of his paper.
There is an abstract of his paper, with his contact info, at the Sebald
Symposium website:
5. In March, 2005 #29, Sandy Klein sends:
http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article10603.php[2] WG
Sebald and Expatriate Writing
Fabula, France - " Other writers, as
different as NABOKOV and Casanova, frequently make appearances in his work, as
fictional or “real”, historical personae, or in the form ..."
6. In the Nab-L Archives (February 2011,#9) JM mentions that "Sebald
pointedly refers to Nabokov's "Speak,Memory" in his novel "Austerlitz" by
recollecting an old lady who woke up under a blanket of snow, nevertheless, when
he describes how a bird smashes against a glassy surface, he seems to be
directing his experience to reflect on a very different line of thought. Where
John Shade encounters hope ("and I flew on in the reflected sky"), Austerlitz
equates conceptual perfection, in practice, to relentless dysfunction. Nabokov's
joy adds a special glitter in the contours of his watermark and, perhaps, his
"ecstatic" writing is that which turns style into
matter.
** - the
re-translation is mine, from the Portuguese 2009 version from the German
original. "Die Ausgewanderten - Vier lange Erzählungen" by José Marcos
Macedo.