Inner Workings by J. M. Coetzee

Author:J. M. Coetzee [Coetzee, John Maxwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780099506140
Publisher: Vintage books
Published: 2006-12-31T21:00:00+00:00

Shortly before his death Sebald published a book of poems with images by the artist Tess jaray106. It is a work of no great ambition, suggesting that verse-writing was a mere hobby to him. Yet his first book of poetry, Nach der Natur (1988), translated as After Nature, is a work of considerable scope. Though its imagery is more challenging than anything in Sebald's prose works, the verse retains the Sebaldian virtues of rhetorical elegance and clarity, and sits well in English translation, as indeed does everything he wrote.107

After Nature is made up of three long poems. The first is about Mathias Grünewald, the sixteenth-century painter, whose life-story Sebald cobbles together from scanty historical sources and observations on his paintings. Chief among the paintings is the altarpiece Grünewald executed for the Antonine monastery of Isenheim in Alsace, in his time the home of a hospital for plagues of various kinds. In the darkest of the Isenheim paintings - the temptation of Saint Anthony, the crucifixion and deposition of Jesus - Sebald's Grünewald sees creation as a field of experiment for blind, amoral natural forces, one of nature's crazier productions being the human mind itself, capable not only of mimicking its creator and inventing ingenious methods of destruction, but of tormenting itself — as in the case of Grünewald — with visions of the insanity of life.

Equally bleak is Grünewald's Crucifixion in Basel, where the strange, murky lighting creates an effect of time rushing backward. Behind the painting, Sebald suggests, lie premonitions of apocalypse stemming from an eclipse of the sun in central Europe in 1502, a 'secret sickening away of the world, / in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk / in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit / poured through the vault of the sky.' (p. 30)

The darkness of Grünewald's vision is not just a matter of an idiosyncratically melancholy temperament. Via connections with the messianic prophet Thomas Münzer, Grünewald knew and responded to the horrors of the Thirty Years War, which included a widespread atrocity any artist would shudder at, the gouging out of eyes; furthermore, through his wife, a convert born in the Frankfurt ghetto, he had intimate experience of the persecution of Europe's Jews.

The coda of this first poem consists of a single image: the world overtaken by a new ice age, white and lifeless, which is all that the brain sees when the optic nerve is torn.

The second of the After Nature poems is again about vastness and blankness and iciness. Its hero, Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-1746), is a child of the Enlightenment, a young German intellectual who has abandoned theology to study natural science. In pursuit of his ambition of cataloguing the fauna and flora of the frozen north, Steller travels to St Petersburg, a city that looms like a phantom out of 'the future's resounding emptiness', where he joins the expedition led by Vitus Bering to map the sea passage from Russia's Arctic ports to the Pacific. (p. 48)

The expedition is successful.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.