WG Sebald was a German writer who died at the beginning of the century in Norfolk (United Kingdom), in a traffic accident at the age of 57, after suffering a heart attack. He stood out for altering reality without it being noticed, that is, for constructing fictions and with them achieving what is called the reality effect.
To do this, Sebald used photographs to illustrate his texts. In one of his books, entitled The EmigrantsThe writer draws on his own memories to reconstruct four biographies, four lives of people who one day had to emigrate and leave their roots in search of other branches.
One of the chapters is dedicated to the writer’s great-uncle, a peculiar man who spent his life serving in luxury hotels and ended up as a butler and companion to the son of a wealthy banker. At one point in the story, Sebald tells us that his great-uncle told stories so unbelievable that it seemed as if he suffered from Korsakoff’s syndrome. And it is here that the story begins to take a scientific turn, since the aforementioned syndrome is a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder that is related to a severe deficiency of vitamin B1 or thiamine, and which in most cases is associated with alcohol consumption.
The main symptom of this syndrome is a marked loss of memory; amnesia in its two basic types, that is, anterograde amnesia or the inability to form new memories and retrograde amnesia or the inability to remember events that occurred before the onset of the disorder in question, although childhood memories are usually preserved. To this must be added confabulations, especially in the first stage of the disease. Hence, fiction suddenly jumps into the patient’s daily life. This is a symptom that is directly linked to the unconscious; the workshop – let’s call it that – of the storytellers.
In The Emigrantsthe author goes through the last days of his great-uncle’s life. At this point, we no longer know if he really existed or if it is another of his healthy conspiracies, as when he tells us about his admission to the psychiatric hospital and the electroshock treatment that his great-uncle attended punctually and stoically.
Dr. Abramsky, who was in charge of administering the therapy, described to Sebald how his patient received the shocks without complaint, with the electrodes on his forehead, a rubber wedge in his mouth, clenched between his teeth, and strapped to the table “like a corpse about to be thrown into the sea.” The reality of all this is that electroshock is a practice in which most patients have memory problems after its application, which leads us to think that Sebald’s literature is made of the stuff of which memory is invented when memory has no other choice but to falsify the facts.
In his literary game, Sebald leads us through a hall of mirrors where autobiography mixes with travel and scientific knowledge. The descriptions of nature are so meticulous, they delve so deeply into detail, that they become a poetics of the quantum world. They suggest to us that beneath the layers of our reality lies a whole universe of latent phenomena.
The stone axe It is a section where Montero Glezwith a prose-like will, exercises its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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