On writing The Exquisite

There is no way to discuss composition of The Exquisite without talking about W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, that magisterial work in which themes of longstanding violence, falsification, and recurrence run elegantly rampant. The Exquisite began as a deliberate attempt to engage with those themes, which seem to sit at the center of so much of contemporary world circumstance.

The immediate issue, of course, was how to avoid doing a Sebald—ripping him off and looking bad in doing it. I can’t tell you how many image-truffled, melancholy ekphrastic texts I’ve seen since the popularization of Sebald’s books. I decided that the best way to go about it was to vigorously take on his work in my own while wearing completely different narrative clothing.  

 

Sebald writes about the forgotten and literally overlooked centerpiece of Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson’—the corpse, which belonged to a thief named Aris Kindt. I thought that this corpse would make a very interesting main character, a body charged with associations that had nevertheless been emptied of its own specificity—a site of considerable potential.

 
Sebald also comments that Rembrandt, usually so careful, so exacting, has falsified the depiction of the dissection—the interior of the corpse’s left arm that is being held up and discussed is actually a transposition of the right arm. The image has been falsified, as Sebald puts it, at the exact center point of its meaning. That notion, of fundamental falsification, in the context of mortality plus the character of Aris Kindt, was enough to set me to dreaming. Or perhaps I should say, scheming.