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Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald's "Austerlitz"Author(s): Amir EshelSource: New German Critique, No. 88, Contemporary German Literature (Winter, 2003), pp.71-96Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3211159
Accessed: 05/07/2010 05:59
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Against
the Power
of
Time.
ThePoetics
of
Suspension
n
W G Sebald's
Austerlitz
AmirEshel
Time
is a riverwhich
sweeps
me
along,
but
I
am the river.
-
Jorge
Luis
Borges
On a cold day, not long before Christmas 1996, the narrator of W.
G.
Sebald's
Austerlitz
and
the
protagonist,
Jacques
Austerlitz,
arrive in
Greenwich,
England.
After
climbing up
through
Greenwich
Park,
they
reach the
Royal Observatory.
There,
while
viewing
different measur-
ing
devices,
regulators,
and
chronometers,
Jacques
Austerlitz
bursts
into one of the most
decisive
monologues
of the book
-
a
poetic
eruption,
I
would
argue,
crucial
to the
understanding
of
Sebald's
prose
as a whole:
Time ... was
by
far the most artificial of all our
inventions,
and in
being
bound
to the
planetturning
on its
own
axis
was no less
arbitrary
than would
be,
say,
a
calculation
based on the
growth
of trees or
the
duration
required
or
a
piece
of limestone
to
disintegrate,quite apart
from the fact thatthe
solar
day
which
we
take
as our
guideline
does
not
provide
us
any
precise
measurement,
o that
in order o reckon
ime we
have to devise an
imaginary,
verage
sun which has an invariable
peed
of
movement
and
does
not incline
toward
the
equator
n its orbit.
If
Newton
thought,
said
Austerlitz,
pointing
through
the window and
down to the curve of the
wateraround he Isle
of
Dogs glistering
n
the
last of the
daylight,
f
Newton
really
thought
hat
time was a river like
the
Thames,
then
where
is its source and into what
sea does
it
finally
flow?
Every
river,
as we
know,
must have banks on both
sides,
so
71
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72
W.G. Sebald's
Austerlitz
where,
seen in
those
terms,
where are
the banks
of time? What would
be this river's qualities, qualities perhapscorresponding o those of
water,
which
is
fluid,
rather
heavy
and
translucent?
n
what
way
do
objects
immersed
n
time
differ from those left untouched
by
it?
Why
do we show
the
hours
of
light
and
darkness
n the same
circle?
Why
does time standstill and
motionless
in
one
place,
and
rush
headlong
by
in
another?Could we
not claim ...
thattime itself
has
been nonconcur-
rent
[ungleichzeitig,
Ger.
147]
over
the
centuriesandthe millennia?
t
is
not so
long ago,
after
all,
that
it
began
spreading
out over
everything.
And is not human ife in
many
parts
of the earth
governed
to this
day
less
by
time than
by
the
weather,
and
thus
by
an
unquantifiable
imen-
sion which disregards inear regularity,does not progress constantly
forward
but moves
in
eddies,
is
marked
by episodes
of
congestion
and
irruption,
ecurs
in
ever-changing
orm,
and evolves
in no
one
knows
what
direction?1
At
this
point,
albeit without
changing
the
text
flow in
the
paragraph,
the
monologue
becomes
very personal:
In
fact...
I
have never owned
a clock of
any
kind,
a bedside alarmor a
pocketwatch, let alone a wristwatch.A clock has always struckme as
something
ridiculous,
a
thoroughly
mendacious
object
[etwas
Lach-
haftes,
Ger.
147-48],
perhaps
because I have
always
resisted
the
power
of time out of some
internal
compulsion
which
I
myself
have
never
understood,
keeping
myself
apart
rom so-called
current
vents
[Zeitge-
schehen,
Ger.
148]
in
the
hope,
as
I
now
think... that
time
will not
pass
away,
has not
passed
away,
that
I can
turn
back and
go
behind
it,
and
there
I
shall
find
everything
as it once
was,
or
more
precisely
I shall
find
that
all moments
of time have co-existed
simultaneously,
n which
case
none of what
history
tells us
would
be
true,
past
events
have not
yet occurredbut arewaitingto do so at the momentwhen we thinkof
them,
although
hat,
of
course,
opens
up
the bleak
prospect
of everlast-
ing misery
and
neverendinganguish.
101)
For
those
acquainted
with Sebald's
prose,
this
monologue
must
appear
somewhat
perplexing.
After
all,
since his
emergence
on the
German
and international
iterary
stage
in the late
1980s,
Sebald
was
celebrated
by
readers, critics,
and
scholars
alike for
giving
the
highest
poetic
attention to
the
minute
description
of naturaland human
reali-
ties in the vein of Adalbert Stifter and GottfriedKeller, albeit in a
1.
W. G.
Sebald,Austerlitz,
rans.AntheaBell
(New
York:Random
House,
2001),
100-01.
German
original:
Sebald,
Austerlitz
Munich:
Hanser,
001).
Hereafter ited
par-
enthetically
within the text.
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Amir
Eshel 73
postmodern
mode.2 Even in
its
manner
of
dealing
with
man-made
catastrophes,most notablywith the Holocaust andthe air raids of Ger-
man
cities
during
World War
II,
Sebald's
prose
seemed
to
have
con-
sciously
avoided
the
generalizing,
the
epic,
and the
quasi-
philosophical.
How,
then,
should one read
Austerlitz's
polemic
against
time,
and how can we
clarify
his resistance to
regarding
the
past
as
gone alongside
his
fear of
letting
it
dwell
eternally
in the
present?
What
is the nature of Austerlitz's
desire to
keep
a distance from Zeit-
geschehen
-
from
what occurs
in time?
And,
finally,
what
is
this
monologue'splace in the book's narrative ndin Sebald'spoetics?
Focusing
on Austerlitz's
monologue
in
Greenwich
and on
a
variety
of
key
elements of the
book,
I
will claim
that Austerlitz's
monologue,
like
Sebald's
prose
as a
whole,
decisively
exceeds the traditionof
aesthetic
modernist
melancholia,
which tended to confine itself
to
elegiac
mourning, symbolist escapism,
and
decadent
ennui.3 In
Austerlitz,
Sebald's
reflexive,
ratherthan
depressive,
melancholy,
as
this
is
mir-
rored
in his fascination with
clocks, diaries,
and
ruins,
results
in
a
unique interweaving
of
time and
narrative
n
three
varied, yet
inter-
twined
ways:
a
multifocal
evocation
of
the
recent
German
past,
an alle-
gorical-critical
account
of
modernity,
and,
finally,
a latent order
of
signification
in which
not the
historicalor
biographical,
but
the
effects
of
figuration
hemselves
constitute he referent.
This
essay
deals with all three of
these
modes
of
the
relationship
between
time and
narrative.Even
though
the novel's
poetic figurations
consistently
suspend
finite
identifications,
hus
preventing
a
pure
refer-
ential
reading,
Austerlitz,
ike the
entirety
of
Sebald's
oeuvre,
cannot be
abstracted rom its own place in time. In what follows, PartI analyzes
the
narrative's
engagement
with the immediate
historical
past.
As Part
II
shows,
beyond
the
poetic
figuration
of
historical
ime,
Austerlitzalle-
gorizes
and
critically
comments
on
modernity's
ime consciousness. It
is
only
after
considering
these
modes,
I
will conclude in Part
III,
that
the
significance
of the
marked effects of
figuration
in
Sebald's
prose
2.
See Susan
Sontag,
A
Mind in
Mourning,
Where he StressFalls
(New
York:
Farrar,
traussand
Giroux,
2001)
41-48,
especially
46.
On the
relationof Sebald's
prose
to
his workon Stifter,see EvaJuhl, Die WahrheitOber as Unglick: Zu W. G.Sebald Die
Ausgewanderten,
eisen im
Diskurs,
ed. Anne
Fuchs and Theo Harden
Heidelberg:
C.
Winter,
1995)
640-59,
especially
651-52.
3.
See
Der
melancholischeGeist der
Moderne,
ed.
Ludger
Heidbrink
Munich:
Hanser,
1997),
especially
Peter
Burger,
Der
Ursprung
er
asthetischenModeme
aus dem
ennui 101-19.
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74
W.
G. Sebald
s
Austerlitz
can be
fully grasped.
To
put
it
differently:
The
unique significance
of
Sebald'sprose lies in its formalcharacteristics, otjust in the scope of
its thematic and
semantic
domains.
Sebald's
work
stands
out not
only
because,
as is often
noted,
it
thematizes remembrance
nd
responsibil-
ity
vis-a-vis the German
past,4
but ratherbecause
of
its
poetics
of
sus-
pension:
a
poetics
that
suspends
notions
of
chronology,
succession,
comprehension,
and closure
-
a
poetics
that rather
han
depicting
and
commenting
on the historical event
in
time,
constitutes
an
event,
becomes
the
writing
of
a
different,
a
literary
ime.
I
In
the
hope
...
that
time will not
pass
away,
has not
passed
away:
Austerlitz's
polemic
against
the
ontology
of
a
separablepast, present,
and future reverberates
hroughout
he
book,
pointing
back
to
Sebald's
ongoing
interest
n
questions
of historicalremembrancen
postwar
Ger-
many
and to his interest n the
course of
the
modem
novel. Unlike
rep-
resentative
authors
of his own
generation
who dealt
with the
German
past
since
the 1960s
-
Peter Schneider
(1940-),
Uwe
Timm
(1940-),
Wolfgang Hilbig
(1941-),
Peter
Handke
(1942-),
F.
C.
Delius
(1943-),
Botho StrauB
1944-),
Eva Demski
(1944-),
Christoph
Hein
(1944-),
Bernhard
Schlink
(1944-),
Thomas
Brasch
(1945-2001),
or Rainer
WernerFassbinder
(1945-1985)
-
Sebald
began
his
literary
engage-
ment
with
the
marked
past
only
in the late
1980s.5 His late
develop-
ment as
a
writer,
however,
is not the
only aspect
separating
his
prose
from
that of
much of his
generation.6
t is instead
his
narratives'
ack
of
interest
in this
generation'sprevailing
topoi
-
the
anguishes
and
fragile sense perceptionof the I, the Germanstudents'revolt of the
late
1960s and
its
aftermath,
he
crumbling
socialist
utopia,
and
the
4.
A
summary
of this view is
presented
n
Arthur
Williams,
'Das
Korsakowsche
Syndrom':
Remembrance
nd
Responsibility
n W.
G
Sebald,
German
Culture
and the
Uncomfortable
ast,
ed. Helmut
Schmitz
Aldershot:
Ashgate,
2001)
65-86.
5.
By
Sebald's
generation,
mean
writers
who
were born
1942/44-1945/47,
shortly
before the end of the
war or
right
after,
hus
growing
up
in the
GDR,
the
Federal
Republic,
or
Austria.
On the
significance
of
generational ypology
in the
history
of
post-
war German
iterature ee
SigridWeigel,
'Generation'
s
a
Symbolic
Form:
On the
Gene-
alogical
Discourse
of
Memory
ince
1945,
The
Germanic
Review
77.4:
264-67.
6.
It
would be
impossible
o
give
here
a short
account
of the
literature
f Sebald's
generation.
I
would
like, nevertheless,
to
point
to
such
representative,
lbeit
different
works such as PeterSchneider'sLenz:Eine
Erzahlung
1973)
and Vati:
Erzahlung
1987),
Wolfgang
Hilbig's
Ich
(1993),
Peter Handke'sMein Jahr
in der Niemandsbucht:
Ein
Marchenaus
den
neuen
Zeiten
(1994),
and
Berhard
Schlink's
TheReader
(1995).
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Amir Eshel
75
analysis
of
the
parents'guilt.
Sebald'sprose is distinctive in its voice, in its uniquefocalization-
the
sensitivity through
which
we hear the narrative.This
voice reflects
a
singular
concentration,
f
not
a
fixation,
on what is
decisively
outside
the
I
-
the
experiences
of
others,
the
fear
thattheir
story
might
van-
ish
into oblivion.7
Following
the credos of
the
West
Germandocumen-
tary
literature
of the
1960s
and
1970s
-
especially
the work
of
Alexander
Kluge,
who offered
German
iterature the
only
intellectu-
ally legitimate
way
to confront
the
German
past 8
his
writing
col-
laged text and visual images and sought to blur the lines between
historiography, autobiography, biography,
and fiction. As
Sebald
emphatically
noted,
My
medium s
prose,
not
the
novel. 9
Addressing
Adorno's
response
to the
challenges
of modernist
prose
and to those of modem
history,
one can no
longer
tell,
whereas
the
novel's
form demands
telling, 'l
Sebald
contented
himself
with
the
role of
the
messenger. ll
He wanted
to set his
prose
in
opposition
to
what he called
fiction
-
that
is,
belles-lettres
n the nineteenth-
century tradition,prose
in
which the
anonymous
narratorknows and
controls
everything.
The certainties
pertinent
o the aesthetic
and his-
torical
circumstances
of the nineteenth
century,
Sebald
alleged,
have
7. To
be
sure,
Sebald
is not the
only
writer
of
his
generation
who
has dedicated
much
attention o
the
presence
and
consequences
of
the German
past.
One
could
point
to
some
of the
prose
by
Peter
Schneider,
o a
certain,
not-unproblematic
egree
o
the
work
of
Bernhard chlink
(1944-),
to the
poetry
of
Anne Duden
(1942-),
or
to
the
prose
of
Birgit
Pausch
1942-).
Yet in
none of these
cases do we
observe
he same
poetic
ntensity
n
regard
to
the
victims'
stories,
he
same
concentration n the fate of the survivors nd the
presence
of thepast.On Sebald's ingularitynthisrespect, ee alsoErestine Schlant,TheLanguage
of
Silence: WestGerman
Literature nd
the
Holocaust
New
York:
Routledge,
1999)
234.
8.
Mit
einem kleinen
Strandspaten
Abschied
von
Deutschland
nehmen,
nter-
view with
Uwe
Pralle,
Siddeutsche
Zeitung
22 Dec. 2001.
9.
Wildes
Denken,
ebald n an
interview
with
Sigrid
Liffler,
Profil
19
Apr.
1993.
On Sebald's
collapse
of
the differencebetween ictionaland
autobiographical
arrativesn
the contextof the dissolution f
subjectivity
n
modem
prose
see Oliver
Sill,
'Aus
dem
Jager
ist
ein
Schmetterlingeworden.'Textbeziehungen
wischenWerken on W.
G
Sebald,
Franz
Kafka,
und Vladimir
Nabokov,
Poetica 29.3-4
(1997):
596-623,
especially
596-97.
10.
TheodorW.
Adomo,
Standort es Erzahlersm
zeitgen6ssischen
Roman,
Gesa-
mmelte
Schriften
I,
Noten zur
Literatur,
d. Rolf Tiedemann
Frankfurt/Main:
uhrkamp
1974)41. On thefar-reachingonsequences f Adoro's analysisas voiced inthisessayand
in
Adorno's ater
Aesthetic
Theory,
ee Keith Bullivant
nd Klaus
Briegleb,
Die Krisedes
Erzahlens '1968'
und
danach,
Gegenwartsliteratur
eit
1968,
ed. Klaus
Briegleb
and
Sigrid
Weigel,
vol.
12,
Hanser
Sozialgeschichte
er
deutschenLiteratur om
16. Jahrhundert
bis
zur
Gegenwart,
d.
Rold
Grimminger
Munich:
Deutscher
Taschenbuch,
992)
302-39.
11.
Recovered
Memories,
nterview
with
Maya
Jaggi,
TheGuardian
2
Sept.
2001.
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76 W.G.Sebald's Austerlitz
been
taken
from us
by
the course
of
history.
. . .
[W]e
have
to
acknowledgeour own sense of ignoranceand of insufficiency ... and
write
accordingly. 12
Crucial
to
the
uncertainties
f the modem
age
and to the
insufficien-
cies
of
nineteenth-century
ealistic
prose
is the
relation
between fact
and fiction.
Keeping
the
tension between fact and
fiction
unresolved
is
important,
Sebald
insists,
because we
largely
delude
ourselves
with
the
knowledge
that
we
think
we
possess,
that we
make
up
as we
go
along,
that
we
make fit
our
desires and
anxieties and that
we
invent a
straight ine or a trail in orderto calm ourselves down. 13Narration n
a
manner
hat
conveys
reassurance
n
our
ability
to
depict accurately,
o
make sense
of and master
time,
to overcome the
postmodern, post-
Shoah
condition,
is
to be mirrored
n the uncertainties
f the narra-
tor. The oscillation between
a
narrator s the author
and as
a
fictive
fig-
ure
should
communicate tself to the
reader,
who will
or
ought
to
feel
a similar sense
of irritation bout
the tension
between
fact and
fic-
tion.
Realism,
Sebald
notes,
functions
only
if
it
goes
beyond
its own
boundaries.
.
.
. The realistic text is
occasionally
allowed
to risk
becoming allegorical. 14
ignificantly,
even
though
somewhat naive
in
his
understanding
f
the relation between fictional and
historiographic
narratives
of
history,
Sebald
locates
the
difference between his
prose
and
what he
regards
as
clear-cut
historiography
n
what
the
historical
monograph
cannot achieve:
a
metaphor
or
allegory
of a collective
his-
torical
process
....
Only
in
metaphorizing
an
we
gain
an
empathetic
insight
into
history. 15
The
continuous
tension
between fact and
fiction,
authorial
or auto-
biographicalnarrationand fictional narrative,between the mediation
of
data
and its
metaphorical figuration,
is
constitutive
to
all
of
Sebald's
works. Like
The
Emigrants,
in
which
the lives and
deaths
of
several
figures
who are
exiled from
Nazi
Germany
both evoke
National Socialism
and
metaphorize
he
experience
of
persecution
and
exile,
Austerlitz addresses
the fate of a Jew
who
struggles
to over-
come his own
forgetting
and thus to
metaphorize
he tension between
remembrance
and oblivion.
At
first
sight,
the book
follows
the
story
12.
Interview
with James
Wood
n Brick58
(Winter1998):
27.
13.
Interview
with JamesWood
25-26.
14.
Sven
Boedecker,
Menschen
auf der anderen
Seite,
interview with
W. G
Sebald,
Rheinische
Post
9
Oct. 1993.
15. Interview
with
Sigrid
Loffler.
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AmirEshel
77
of
its
sixty-plus-year-old
protagonist.16
Most of the novel's
some four
hundred
pages
(in the Germanedition)tell of the fictive Jew,
Jacques
Austerlitz,
born
in
1934,
who was
sent
as a
child
in
a
Kindertransport
from his
hometown,
Prague,
to
England.
Faithfulto his
semidocumen-
tary
aesthetics,
Sebald
collapsed together
in
Austerlitz's life several
authentic
biographies:
the life of a
colleague,
who,
like
Austerlitz,
taught
the
history
of
architecture,
hat
of
Susie
Bechhofer,
who
was
bor
into
a
Jewish
family
in
Munich
and
was sent
with her twin
sister
on
a
Kindertransport
o
Wales,
and
elements
of
other
biographies.17
Havingarrived n the smalltown of Bala,Wales,Austerlitz s adopted
by
a
Calvinist
priest
and his
wife,
who want to save
Austerlitz's
soul,
innocentas it was of the
Christian aith
138).
The
couple
forces him
to
give
up
all his
belongings,
thus
erasing
his entire
previous
existence.
Growing up
as
Dafydd
Elias,
the child
spends
hours
lying
in his
bed,
trying
to
conjureup
the faces of those who are left
behind,
through
his
own
fault,
as he fears. It will be not until
1949,
in the
private boarding
school
he
attends,
hatAusterlitzdiscovers
his true
name.
The
discovery
of his name does not
help,
at
first,
to
reveal
the lost
past.
Austerlitz's own amnesia
-
a
psychological
phenomenon
not
uncommon
among
survivors
of the
Holocaust
-
makes the
past
seem
forever
gone.
He moves on
to
develop
his interests
n a
manner
repres-
sive to all that
might
connect
to his
genesis:
As far as
I
was
con-
cerned the world
ended
in
the late
nineteenth
century
(139).
Repression
will
lead to neurotic
resurfacing
and
symptomatic
acting
out.
Collapse
follows. After a
ritual act
of
liberation
n
which he bur-
ies his
entire work
(124),
Austerlitz
comes
to
realize what he lost as
a
child and what he so
stubbornly
repressed
as an adult. Isolated and
alienated,
he
wonders
why
it never occurredto him to
search
for
his
true
origins
(125).
Before his final
mental
collapse
in
the
summerof
1992,
he
roams the
streets and the train
stations
of
London
in
insom-
niac
obsession,
only
to discover that
the dead
are
returning
rom
their
16.
The
term
story
here is used in its
narratological
ense:
story
s
the
sequence
of
events
involving
actors nd
actants.
heterm
Kindertransport
efers o the
transfer
of Jewish
children rom
Germany,
Austria,
and
Czechoslovakia o
GreatBritainand else-
where afterthe so-calledReichskristallnacht. rganizedby Jewishgroups, he first trans-
port
arrived
on
December
2,
1938,
in
the East
Anglian
port
of
Harwich
some
sixty
miles
away
from
Norwich,
where
Sebald
taught
at the
University
of East
Anglia.
The
Kindertransport peration
was
ended at the
beginning
of the
war
on
September
1,
1939.
Approximately
en
thousand
hildren
ame
to Great
Britain.
17.
See Ich
iirchte
as
Melodramatische,
nterview n Der
Spiegel
3 Dec. 2001 228.
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78 W.G. Sebald's
Austerlitz
exile,
filling
the
twilight
aroundhim
(132).
The cyclical temporalityof return18 the returnof the dead, the
return of
the
past,
which is a
central
trope
in
Sebald's
work,
domi-
nates
the
remaining pages:
Austerlitz's
Ulyssian
journey
back
to his
past.
His
Greenwich
dream of
getting
behind time
will
result
in his
seeking
to
regain
the lost time and create a narrativeof his
past.
It is
through
narrativization
hat Austerlitz
hopes
to find his
place
in
time;
it is
through
the narrative's
emporal
devices
-
telling
of times
past,
i.e.
childhood
in
Prague,
the
Kindertransport
tc.
-
that time is ren-
dered differently than the faceless entity Austerlitz rejects in his
monologue.
Austerlitz's
discovery
and narrativization
of his
very
own time
will
bring
him to
Prague,
where,
much like
Ulysses,
he
encounters
his childhood in
the
figure
of
his
nursemaid,
Vera
Rysanova.
It
will be
through
her,
in
periscopic
narration
a la
Thomas
Bernhard,19
hat the reader
will now find out what
happened
before
and after Austerlitz
was sent
to Wales. Vera
Rysanova
will tell him of
the
persecution
of
Prague's
Jews,
of his
mother's
deportation
o Ther-
esienstadt
and then to the
death
camps
in the
east.
Visiting
Theresienstadt,
Austerlitz
will have then arrived
where
he
had
set
off for in his Greenwich
monologue. Walking
through
the
streets of the Czech
fortress
city, visiting
the
ghetto
museum,
it seems
to
him now as
if
he has
entered
the timeless
kingdom
of
the
dead,
that
the time
of the dead had
never
passed.
He
senses,
even
though
only
for
a
while,
that
the
sixty
thousandJews who had been crammed
nto
the
walls
of
the
ghetto
had
never been taken
away
after all
... that
they
were
incessantly going
up
and
down the stairs
. . .
filling
the entire
spaceoccupied by the air 200).
Austerlitz's
epiphany,
his
experience
of simultaneous
temporality
beyond
the
ontology
of
past-present-future,
hough,
remains
short-lived.
18.
On the
returning
dead,
see
for
example
the narrator's omment
in
Dr.
Henry
Selwyn,
he first
story
of The
Emigrants:
Andso
they
are
ever
returning
o
us,
the dead.
At times
they
come back from
the ice more than
seven decades
laterand
are found
at
the
edge
of
the
moraine,
a few
polished
bones
and a
pair
of hobnailed
boots.
W.
G.
Sebald,
The
Emigrants,
rans. Michael Hulse
(New
York:
New
Directions,
1996)
23. See also
StephanieHarris, The Returnof the Dead:Memoryand Photographyn Sebald'sDie
Ausgewanderten,
heGerman
Quarterly
4.4: 379-91.
19.
According
o
Sebald,
he borrowed
his
technique
of
narrating
ia several
media
( um
ein,
zwei Ecken
herum )
rom Thomas Bernhard.See
Der
Spiegel
interview
233.
On
Sebald's
periscopic
narration,
ee
also
Juhl,
Die Wahrheituiber
das
Ungliick
640-
59,
especially
651.
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AmirEshel
79
In an ironic turn
aimed at
suspending
all
notions
of
arrivaland conclu-
sion, any projectionof metaphysicalmeaningonto the scene, Auster-
litz decides to
extend his recherche
du
temps perdu
to
finding
his
father,
who
managed
to
escape Pragueprior
to
the
German
occupation.
After
presenting
a
complicated,
seemingly
intersecting
web of facts and
observations
hat
would
finally explain
his
fate,
Austerlitz
suspends
the
closure
of his recherche
with the
following
gesture:
I
don't
know
...
what all
this
means and so I
am
going
to continue
looking
for
my
father
(my emphasis,
292).
Since
the narratordoes not
continue his
account of Austerlitz'ssearch, it now becomes apparent hat Auster-
litz's search
is not the
means,
but rather the
end itself. The
tension
between
his wish
to
uncover
the
past
and his
fear of its
eternally
dwell-
ing
in the
present
results in an
open-endedexploration
hat,
rather
han
reflecting
a
hope
to
clarify
or
to recover times
past, suggests
the simul-
taneity
of all times
in the
realm
of
memory
and
the
existential
inability
to mark he
past
as
gone.
Before
they part
for the last
time,
Austerlitz
will hand over
to the
narrator he
keys
of
his London house in
Alderey
Street.
I could
stay
there,
the narrator
eports
Austerlitz's last
sentences,
and
study
the
black
and
white
photographs
which,
one
day,
would be all that was left
of his
life
(293).
Since
the book is told
from
a
temporal
perspective
that succeeds this and
all
other
events,
the
symbolic
order of this
key
moment
suggests
a different
reading
of
the
plot altogether.
The black
and white
photographs
cattered
hroughout
he book
-
indistinguish-
able
from the
narrative tself
-
were
configured
with
the text
after
the
narratorreceived
the
keys
to
Austerlitz's
interior,
both
literally
and
metaphorically.20
ow it becomes clear that the
plot
is not
simply
the
result of Austerlitz's
narration,
ut in
addition,
f not
much more
so,
the
20.
In his interiewwith
Sigrid
Loffer,
Sebald
stated,
I
work
using
the
system
of
bricolage,
in
Ldvi-Strauss's
ense.
It
is
a form of
savage
work
[eine
Form
von wildem
Arbeiten],
of
prerational
hought,
in which
one nuzzles
in
findings
until
they
somehow
make sense.
In
The
Savage
Mind
(Chicago: Chicago
UP,
1966),
Ldvi-Straussdefines
mythical
thought
as
a
mode
of
bricolage
17).
The
French
verb
bricoler
denotes an
activity
of order
creation
hat s
not basedon
thorough hought,
but rather n
using
materi-
als and tools
that
happen
to be
around.
Whereas
he
engineer
or
scientist
surpasses
he
boundaries iven by society,the bricoleurcreatesstructures bymeansof events 22). In
the contextof Sebald's
poetics,
it
is
significant
hat
Levi-Strauss's ricoleur
provides
igns
denoting
he
world,
while the
engineer
suppliesconcepts:
One
way
in
which
signs
can be
opposed
to
concepts
is that
whereas
concepts
aim to be
wholly transparent
ith
respect
o
reality,
igns
allow and even
require
he
interposing
nd
incorporation
f a certainamount
of
humanculture
nto
reality
20).
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80 W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz
product
of the narrator's
emplotment
-
of his
bricolage,
in
Claude
Levi-Strauss's ense: the outcome of a prerational rocessduringwhich
the narrator
smuggles
in
photographs
and whatever information
he
excavates
until he turns
hese materials nto a
narrative.
Rereading
the
plot
from
the narrator's
perspective,
it
now
seems
obvious that the narrative is
a
postmoder
crypto-Bildungsroman
stretching
over some
thirty years.
It follows
the
story
of a
young
Ger-
man, who,
like
Sebald
himself,
decided to
live
in
Great
Britain,
a man
who,
like the
narratorof all Sebald's
prose,
travels
extensively
in
searchof the past, in search of an idiom thatwill addresswhat he con-
tinually
finds
along
his
way:
the stories of
victims,
survivors,
and ruins.
Sebald's narrator
n
Austerlitz ravels not
only
for
study,
but also for
reasons
which were never
entirely
clear to him
(3).
Like
Sebald,
he
began
his
studies
in
Germany,
where
he
learned
almost
nothing
from
his teachers
-
scholars
who
built their
careers
n the
1930s
and 1940s
and
still,
that is
after
the
war,
nurtured
delusions
of
power (32-
34).21
Just
as his
experiences
with
Jewish
emigres
were essential
for
Sebald,
Austerlitz
is
the
first
teacher o whom the narrator s
able
to
listen since his
days
in
primary
school
(33).
Furthermore,
he narra-
tor's scarce remarks reverberate
in
Austerlitz's
own words. While
describing
his visit to
the
fortressBreendonk n
1967,
the
narrator
on-
templates,
in
a
way
reminiscent
of
Austerlitz'sGreenwich
monologue,
how
everything
s
constantly lapsing
into oblivion
with
every
extin-
guished
life,
how the world is ...
draining
tself,
in
that the
history
of
countless
places
and
objects
which
themselves
have no
power
of
mem-
ory
is
never
heard,
never describedor
passed
on
(24).
It is not, however,that Austerlitz s subsumed n the narrator r that
the latter
should
be
equated
with the writer.22Rather han
stylizing
the
narrator s
a
German
attentive
to
the
story
of the
Jews,
Austerlitz the-
matizes
modem
uncertainties,
he difficulties
of
telling
the
past
reas-
suringly
in
an era
suspicious
of all
grand
narratives. Much
like
Sebald's
previous
prose,
Austerlitz
reflects a
poetic
stance that sus-
pends
all
object-subject
polarities.
It is a
prose
that is
intransitive
n
Roland
Barthes' classic sense. Its
subject
is
conceived
as
immediately
contemporarywith the writing, being effected and affected by it. 23
21.
See,
for
example,
Sebald'sremarks
n the interview
with JamesWood
29.
22.
See Sebald's
own
remarks
n
his Der
Spiegel
interview
233.
23.
See Roland
Barthes,
To Write:An IntransitiveVerb?
The
Rustle
of Language
(New
York:
Hill
and
Wang,
1986)
18-19.
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AmirEshel
81
Thematizing
ime's
artificiality,
ts
non-occurrence,
he
simultaneity
of
all its modalities,Sebald'sprose is not interiorbut anterior o the pro-
cess
of
writing: 24
All
its
subjects
are defined
by
the act
of
narrat-
ing,
the
act of
writing,
rather han
by
the
objects
they
address
or
events
they
evoke. Sebald's
subjects
ransgress
he border between
textual
and transtextual
ealities,
between the writer and the
written,
between
the events at stake
and their
presentation,
between
the time
of the
events
and the time of the
narration.
The result
is the
writing
of
life,
of
lives
-
not
only
the lives of the narratoror the
writer,
but also
the
attentive writing of those lost lives that Sebald so relentlessly
researched.
This
writing
of life
is
present
not
only
in
the semantic
and
thematic
figuration
of times
past,
but
also in Austerlitz's sense of the
natureof modem
time.
II
In
the
hope
. .. that
time will not
pass away,
has
not
passed
away:
To be
sure,
Austerlitz's
polemic against
time,
his
hope
o
halt
time's
maddeninggallop,
is
configured
o relate
to a traumatic hildhood and
an
oblivious,
neurotic
life as an adult. Austerlitz s
haunted,
he narra-
tive
suggests,
by
the
paralyzingpower
of
forgetting
and
by
his fear
that
oblivion
might
claim
victory
over
his
pain.
No careful
reading
of
Austerlitz's
polemic against
time could
overlook,
however,
the
scene's
marked
topography
and thus the
work's overall
allegorical
dimension.
Metonymically
read,
Greenwichdenotes the
rapid pace
of
technologi-
cal
and
industrial
progress
in
Europe
as
of
the
mid-nineteenth
entury
-
a
process
epitomized
by
the
transportation
evolutionand the
spread
of railwaytracksthroughout he continent.It was the need to regulate
railway transportation
hat
in
the 1840s
brought
about
the standardiza-
tion
of all local times
in
England.25
n
1884,
Greenwich ime
became
World
Time,
and the town
was
chosen as the
world's
Prime
Meridian
-
the
topographic
marker of
a
modem universe based on the
rapid
transportation
f
goods
andthe
unprecedented
movement
of
individuals.
Reflecting
on the
opening
of the
Paris-Rouen
and
the Paris-Orleans
railway
ines
in
1843,
Heinrich
Heine noted:
24.
Barthes
19.
25.
In November
1840,
the
director
of
England's
Great
Western
Railway
ordered
that London
time be set as the
standard ime
for all
purposes
of
railway transportation
across
the
country.
This was the
beginning
of the end
of local time.
See Derek
Howse,
Greenwich
Timeand the
Discovery
of
the Longitude
Oxford:
Oxford
UP,
1980)
87.
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82 W.G. Sebald 's Austerlitz
Let us
simply
say
that our
entire
experience
is
being
ripped up
and
hurledon new tracks; hat new relations,pleasures,and tormentsawait
us,
and the unknown exerts
its
ghastly
fascination,
rresistible
and,
at
the same
time,
fearful....
Even
the
elementary
concepts
of time and
space
have
become
shaky.
The
railways
have
killed
space,
and
only
time remains for us. If
only
we
had
enough money
to
respectfully
kill
time,
too.26
Writing
from the
perspective
of what
ReinhartKoselleck has illus-
trated as the
rupture
between
the
space
of
experience
and
the
hori-
zon of
expectation
that announced
modernity,
Heine's declaration
of
the
death of
space
reflected the
emergence
of a
new,
moder con-
sciousness
of
temporality
and
space.27 Space
will
no
longer
be a
sig-
nificant obstacle.
No
longer
will it
propel
the same
longings,
desires,
and
anxieties.
The death
of time that
Heine
envisioned
was
soon to
become
one
of the characteristics
of the moder era:
Time
and
space
died
yester-
day,
wrote
Marinetti
in
1909,
We
already
live
in
the
absolute,
because
we
have created
eternal,
omnipresent
peed. 28
Modernity,
as
reflectedin
literary
modernism,would be the first
epoch
to define itself
through
radical concentrationon the
present,
through
the Nietzschean
life
-
the desire
to unload the
weight
of the
preceding epochs,
to
curb
all
traditions,
query
metaphysical
constraints,
and delve
into
the
now and its
promise
of
unprecedented
movement
through
space.29
While Austerlitz
is
narrated rom the
perspective
of
this
modernist,
absolute
now,
the
protagonist's
polemic against
time
is
only
one
thread,
albeit a decisive
one,
in a web of
textual references
that
target
26.
Heinrich
Heine,
Lutezia.
Zweiter
Tell,
trans.
Todd
Samuel
Presner,
Schriften
uber
Frankreich,
ed.
Eberhard
Galley
(Frankfurt/Main:968)
509-10.
1
am
indebted o
Todd Samuel Presner
not
only
for his
splendid
ranslation
f Heine's
sentences,
but also
for his
inspiring
dissertation:
Todd
Samuel
Presner,
Tracking
Modernity,
Nationalizing
Mobility:
German/Jewish
ravelLiterature s
a
History
of
Possibility
Ph.D
diss.,
Stan-
ford
University,Department
f
Comparative
Literature,
001).
27.
Reinhart
Koselleck,
Futures
Past,
trans. Keith
Tribe
(Cambridge:
MIT,
1985)
231-66.
On
modernity's
distinctive
emporal
onsciousness,
see
Peter
Osborne,
The Poli-
tics
of
Time.
Modernity
nd Avant-Garde
London/New
York:Verso
1995)
5-29.
28. F. T.
Marinetti,
Let
s Murder
he Moonshine:Selected
Writings,
d. and
trans.
R.
W. Flint
(Los
Angeles:
Sun
and Moon
Classics,
1991)
49.
29. See
Paul
de
Man,
Literary
History
and
LiteraryModernity,
Blindness
and
Insight:
Essays
in
the
Rhetoric
of
Contemporary
riticism,
2nd
ed.,
revised
(Minneapolis:
U
of
Minnesota
P,
1983)
142-65,
and
Karl Heinz
Bohrer,
Das absolute
Prasens: Die
Semantikdsthetischer
Zeit
(Frankfurt/Main:uhrkamp
994)
143-83.
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AmirEshel 83
the modem
consciousness of
temporality
and
thus
modernity
and its
perilsas thosearesymbolizedby railway ransportation.
Railway
tracks
had
previously
served in a
similar manner
in
Sebald's
work.
In
Sebald's
first
major
prose
volume,
Vertigo
(1990),
the
narrator ravels
throughGermany
by
train. From this
symbolically
laden
perspective,
the
country
seems
to
him full of
objects
and devoid
of
humans:
it
was as
if
mankindhad
already
made
way
for another
species,
or had
fallen under a kind of curfew
(254).30
While his
jour-
ney through
the Rhine
region
is
told
in
a
manner reminiscent
of
Heine's Deutschland, ein Wintermarchen255), his arrival in the
Heidelberg
train
station is marked
by
angst.
The
crowd
strikes
him as
a
gathering
of
people
who are
fleeing
from
a
city
doomed
or
already
laid waste
(254).
In his
story
Paul
Bereyter,
n
The
Emigrants,
he
photo
of
railway
tracks at
the onset of
the
narration s
merely
the
first
sign
in a
crypto-
gram leading
to the
protagonist's
death
as he
lays
himself down
in
front of
a train. 31Like
the
life
of
Austerlitz,
Paul
Bereyter'spast,
the
story
of the
three-quarterAryan (50),
was
tragically shaped by
National Socialism.
Like
Austerlitz,
Bereyter
had
a
puzzling passion
for
railways,
a
symbolic
fervor
that had
led
his
Aryan
uncle
to
prophesy
that
the
young
Paul would
end
up
on
the
railways
(62).
Railway transportation
ominates
he
thoughts
and
life
of Max Aurach
(Max
Ferber n
the
English
translation),
he
protagonist
of another
story
in The
Emigrants.
Sent
by
his
parents
n
May
1939 to a safe haven in
England,
two and
a
half
years
before
they
were
to
be
murdered
by
Nazis near
Riga,
Ferbersees no
promise
of
freedom and movement
in
the imagea train,butonly infinitethreat: sitting n the train,the coun-
try
passing
by
.
. .
the looks
of fellow
passengers
-
all of
it
is torture
to
me
(169).
Austerlitz
further
expends
Sebald's
symbology
of
railway
transporta-
tion. The
first
scene,
also
the
first encounter
between the
protagonist
and the
narrator,
akes
place
in the
Antwerprailway
station. The
Cen-
tral
Station,
designed by
Louis Delacenserie and
opened
in
1905 with
the
Belgian
king present,
appears
o
Austerlitz's
excavating, Benjamin-
ian gaze as the incarnation f religiosityin the moder age: When we
step
into the
entrance
hall,
Austerlitz
remarks,
we are
seized
by
a
30.
Sebald,
Vertigo,
rans.
Michael
Hulse
(New
York:New
Directions,
1999)
254.
31.
Sebald,
The
Emigrants
27.
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84
W.
G. Sebald
s
Austerlitz
sense of
being beyond
the
profane,
in a
cathedralconsecrated
o inter-
nationaltrafficand trade 10). Inspiredby the Pantheon n Rome, this
modem constructioncelebratesthe
centrality
of
movement in
the
new
epoch's
horizon
of
expectation.
Set
even above the
royal
coat of
arms,
watching
over the
symbols
of
capital
accumulation,
nd
reigning supreme
n
the divine
arrange-
ment,
is
the
governor
of
a new
omnipotence,
ime,
as
symbolized
by
a clock.
Surveying
from its central
position
all movementsof its
subor-
dinates,
it
obliges
all to
adjust
their
activities to its demands.
Austerlitz
sees in this regimethe most decisive markof the modem era: Not until
the clocks were standardized round
he
middle of the nineteenthcen-
tury,
he
emphasizes,
did time
truly
reign supreme. Only
by
follow-
ing
the course that time
prescribes,
he
concludes,
can we hasten
throughgigantic
spaces separating
s fromeach other
12).
Significantly,
t
is
the narrator
who,
after Austerlitz's
peroration
t the
Antwerp
rain
station,
classifies the
protagonist's
bility
to
discover
the
marks
of
pain
which . . .
trace countless
fine
lines
through
history
14)
as a kind of historical
metaphysics 13).
The core of this
metaphysics
will
continue to
unfold
in
scenes
encircling
railway
transportation
nd
train
stations
-
spaces
of blissful
happiness
and
profound
misfor-
tune
(34)
that hold Austerlitz
in the
grip
of
dangerous
and
entirely
incomprehensible
urrents
of emotion
33-34)
and
cause him
thoughts
of the
agony
of
leave-taking
and the fear
of
foreign places
(14).
Train
stations
become
for Austerlitz
the
signifier
of his
personal
fixation on
loss
-
the momentof
leave-taking
romhis mother
n
Prague's
Wilson
station
in
1939.
They
markthe
post-Baudelaireian
oetic
consciousness
thatall that is present s alreadypast, already ost.
32
Austerlitz's
fixation
on
and
studies of
railway
stations are
guided
by
his conviction
that
railway transportation
olds the
key
to understand-
ing
the
moder
age,
that the
entire
railway system
embodies
the
idea
of a network
hat
is based
on what
Wittgenstein
called
family
resemblances, 33
y
which the
members of the
extension of a certain
32.
See Karl Heinz
Bohrer,
Der
Abschied:
Theorie der
Trauer
Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp,1996)
9-10,
15.
33.
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical
Investigations,
rans.
G E. M.
Anscombe,
revised
ranslation,
rd
edition
Oxford:
Blackwell,
2001)
27.
WhileSebald
specifically
and
in
an
unquestionable
eference
o
Wittgenstein
ses the
term Familienahnlichkeiten
see
Austerlitz
[German]
48),
the
English
translation,
family
likeness rather
han
family
resemblances
33)
misses
the
reference
o
Philosophical nvestigations.
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AmirEshel
85
concept-word
may
be united
in
a
system
of
similarities
33).
The
entry
to this system and to the work's allegoricaldimension is given in the
scenes
surrounding
he
Liverpool
Street
Station n London.
Covered
by
smoky
darknesscaused
by
diesel oil and locomotive
steam,
the Liver-
pool
Street
Station
lures and
appalls
both
narrator nd
protagonist.
In
their
descriptions,
this locus
emerges
as the
crypt
of the modem
age,
the
symbolic sight
of
rapid
industrial
progress
(36)
and thus as a
kind
of
entrance o the
underworld
127-28).
Like
Dante's
inferno,
this underworld
s
labyrinthine
and
layered.
Whatenables the movement from one section to another s Austerlitz's
excavating
gaze.
While
dwelling
in the station for
hours,
Austerlitz
penetrates
ts enclosed
past,
a
past
still
engraved
n its
image
even
after
the station
had
gone
through
renovation
at the end of the
1980s. The
grounds
of the station
served
in the
past
to house the
Orderof St.
Mary
of
Bethlehem
and
the Bedlam
hospital
for the
insane
and
other
desti-
tute
persons
129).
When
during
the
demolition
work
of 1984 at the site of the Broad
Street
Station,
the
skeletons
of over four
hundred
people
are found
underneath taxi
rank (130),
Austerlitz
s
drawn
to the
site
to
unearth
their
story.
It is
the
fate of
the
discardeddead that will now
point
to the
network
rganizing
his
marked
space.
The
modem
consciousness
of
temporality,
he
killing
of
space
and time as
symbolized
in
railway
transportation,
s seen
in
relation
to human life and
human
remains.
Before
work on the
construction
of the two
northeast erminals
began,
poverty-stricken
uarters
were
forcibly
cleared. Vast
quantities
of
soil mixed
with humanbones were removed from the site to
enable
the
placementof railwaylines, which on the engineers' plan looked like
muscles and
sinews in an anatomical
atlas. The
burialsite is now noth-
ing
more than a
gray-brown
morass,
a
no-man's land
where not a liv-
ing
soul
stirred,
nd
the
symbols
of
intact
nature the
little
river,
the
ditches and
ponds,
the elms
and
the
mulberry
ree
-
are all
gone
(132).
The shift in
the
symbolic
order,
in
the nature of the
system
of
Austerlitz's
direct and
implied
historical
metaphysics,
could
hardly
be
more
evident. Humans
and
human
remains are
removed from their
natural lace, and nature itself is crushedby the nonhuman, ndeed
inhuman
body
of
modernity
-
a
body
whose
threatening
muscle,
as
the
forceful
image
attachedto
the narrative
uggests
(133),
is
that of
railway
transportation.
What is left of
nature
s
only railway
tracks,
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86
W.G.
ebald'sAusterlitz
spaces
of
transitionon
which
trains
carrying
heir
material
and
human
loads are rushingback and forth. Time, standardizedime, and rail-
way
transportation
re two
elements of
the
nexus of
modernity
and
bar-
barism.
They
participate
n
and
perpetuate
he
cycle
of
ruthless,
narrow
rationalism
the
narrative's
ronical
presentation
of
Newton's
idea that
time
is
a river
like the
Thames
[100]),
ever-growing
demand for
more
production,
more
consumption,
and more
movement.
The
consequences
of this
cycle
are
unveiled
during
Austerlitz'svisit
to Theresienstadt.
There,
facing
the
material
remainsof
persecution
and
annihilation, he railwaylike system of modernityandthe cosmic sys-
tem that
relates the
star-shaped
ortification
architecture f
the
seven-
teenth
century(15),
the
octagonal
observation
room
of
Greenwich
98),
the
star-shaped
lower
at
the entranceof
his
childhoodhouse
(151),
and
the
star-shaped
orm of
Theresienstadts
fully
revealed:
Theresienstadt
is the
most
radical facet
of
the
economic,
political,
and
symbolic
order
of
post-Enlightenmentmodernity.
The
star-shaped
Theresienstadt is
the
model of a world made
by
reason and
regulated
n all
conceivable
respects
(199),
a
world that
was enabled
by
standardized
time,
by
the modem
temporal
onsciousnessreflected
n
railway
ransportation.
Austerlitz's
polemic
against
time
is
thus
crucially
related
to
his
study
of the
architectural
tyle
of the
capitalist
era
(34)
and to
his
analysis
of the
compulsive
sense
of
order
and
the
tendency
toward monumen-
talism evident in
law courts and
penal
institutions,
railway
stations and
stock
exchanges,
opera
houses
and
lunatic
asylums
and the
dwellings
built
to
rectangular
rid
patterns
or the
labor
force
(33)-
a sense
that
culminated
in Theresienstadt. t is
this
system,
this
model,
at
which the narrativeallegoricallyaims. It is not that for Austerlitz time
has no real
existence,
as J.
M.
Coetzee
remarks,
but rather that
he
questions
the
law of a certain
perception
of
time,
a
specific
mode
of
temporality.34Railway
transportation
nd
railway
stations are
decisive
elements of the
oppressive
universeruled
by
time,
he universe of the
Enlightenment
roject
as
viewed
by
the FrankfurtSchool and
in the
writings
of
Michel
Foucault.The
railway system
and its time
the
governor
f the
moder
era
-
signify
both
modernity'spromise
and
its perils, both humanity's seeming freedom from the boundariesof
nature
and the
all-encompassing,
unprecedented
lienation of
humans,
34. J. M.
Coetzee,
Heir
of
a Dark
History,
eview
of
W.
G.
Sebald's
After
Nature,
New
York
Review
of
Books49.16
(24
Oct.
2002):
225.
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Amir Eshel 87
leading
to theirtransformationnto
human
material
n
the
death
camps.
Although Sebald is careful not to identify either the narratoror the
protagonist
with
himself,
Austerlitz's
historical
metaphysics,
his cul-
ture-critical aments
echoing
the
rhetoric
of
Marx,
Adorno,
and
Fou-
cault,
unquestionably
esult
in a
dark
allegorical philosophy
of
history
in
the vein
of
the Frankfurt
School,
in
what Andreas
Huyssen
has
described
as
Sebald's
conceptual
ramework
writing
in
the
frame
of a natural
history
of
destruction,
metaphysics
of nature
-
writ-
ing
that
is indeed
too
closely
tied to
metaphysics
and to the
apocalyp-
tic philosophyof history so prominent n the Germantradition. 35To
be
sure,
Sebald
himself voiced
more than once
concerns
about
the
lib-
eral
dreams
of the nineteenth
century,
n
which
humanity
was to con-
sist
of
emancipated,
autonomous
individuals. 36
Humanity
however,
Sebald
countered,
is
instead
a mass
that,
once
brought
to
a
boil
throughpressure
from
outside,
becomes
fluid,
and then
gaslike
[gas-
formig].37
Although
mobility
may
have seemed
from an economical
standpoint
a
positive development,
in
Germany,
t
was nevertheless
the
subject
of a dialectics hat
led to
catastrophe.38
Sebald's
affinity
with
Benjaminian
kulturkritische
metaphysics,39
his
pessimistic
view of
modernity,
combines
laments over the
decline
of
nature,
of
educational
institutions,
and
of
culture
with discontent
over the fact that
many
in
his
sleepy
German
hometown now drive
BMWs: He is
convinced
that most
subjects
of
the
moder
culture
of
consumption
suffer under the conditions of the
present
and that the
35.
Andreas
Huyssen, Rewritings
nd New
Beginnings:
W.
G Sebald
and
the Lit-
eratureof the
Airwar,
PresentPasts
(Stanford:
Stanford
UP,
2003).
On
Sebald's
implied
philosophy
of
history,
see also Michael
Rutschky,
Das
geschenkte Vergessen:
W. G.
Sebald's Austerlitz und die
Epik
der
schwarzen
Geschichtsphilosophie,
rankfurter
Rundschau 1 Mar.2001.
36. See Wie
kriegen
die Deutschen
das auf die Reihe? W.
G. Sebald
in
interview
with
Wochenpost
7
June 1993.
37. Wie
kriegen
die
Deutschendas auf die Reihe?
38. Wie
kriegen
die
Deutschen
das
auf die Reihe?
39. On
Sebald's
Benjaminian
kulturkritische
etaphysics
ee his
telling
commen-
tary
on Walter
Benjamin's llegoricalangel
of
history
n
Luftkrieg
ndLiteratur
Munich:
Hanser,
1999)
79-80.
In
a
later nterviewwith
TheNew
Yorker ebald
noted:
I've
always
thought
it
very regrettable,and,
in a
sense,
also
foolish,
that the
philosophers
decided
somewhere
n the
nineteenth
entury
hat
metaphysics
wasn't
a
respectablediscipline
and
had
to
be
thrown
overboard,
nd
reduced hemselves o
becoming ogisticians
and
statisti-
cians.... So
metaphysics,
think,
shows a
legitimate
concern. Joe
Cuomo,
The Mean-
ing
of
Coincidence- An Interviewwith the
Writer
W.
G
Sebald,
The New
Yorker
Sept.
2001.
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88
W.
G. Sebald's
Austerlitz
mountains
of
painkillers
used
in
a
country
like
Germany
deliver
the
proofof collective mentalpains- painswhose causes lie ultimately n
the beliefs and
practices
of the
enlightened apitalist
world.40Nature
is the context
in
which humans
originally
belonged,
and out
of
which
they
are
being
driven
at a
rapid
pace.41
In
light
of the narrator's
ourney through
he
threatened,
partly
mori-
bund
natureof the
eastern coast of
England
n The
Rings
of
Saturn,
as
well
as the author'sown
scattered
remarks,
Sebald's
literary
archaeolo-
gies
amount to
chapters
in a universal
history
of
catastrophe.
They
seem to trace the aberration f the humanspecies42via an investiga-
tion
into the
genealogy
of
historical
phenomena:
how the
individual
psyche
is
determined
y family history,
how
family
history
in
Ger-
many
was determined
by
the
conditions
of
the
German
middle
class
in
the
1920s
and
1930s,
how these conditions
were determined
by
the his-
tory
of industrialization
n
Europe
and
in
end
by
the
natural
history
of
the human
species.43
Sebald's
tendency
to
draw
the
big picture,
at least
implicitly,
led
him to view the extinction
of certain
species
or the execution
of three
million
cows because
of
Mad
Cow Disease
in relation
to other
catas-
trophes
and to view
the German
atastrophe
s
a
European
atas-
trophe.
The
questionable
universalization
hrough
Europeanization
of
the
Holocaust
-
I
do not see
the
catastrophe
aused
by
Germans,
hor-
rible as
it
was,
as
unique....
It
developed
from
European
history,
from
the
dream,
at latest since
Napoleon,
to turn
this
very
'unorderly'
conti-
nent into
something
'orderly,
arranged,powerful '44
is not least
reflected
in
Austerlitz's
name.
Like his
pedantic
critique
of
the new
ParisBibliothequeNationale(275-86) and other elements of the book,
Sebald's
kulturkritische
otions
amount
at times to
a
questionable
ele-
ology
in
which
modernity
is
all too
clearly
configured
as
necessarily
leading
to Theresienstadt.
The
reader
is
expected
to
find inscribed
in Austerlitz's
name
the
40. Wie
kriegen
die Deutschen
das
auf
die Reihe?
41. Wie
kriegen
die Deutschen
das auf
die
Reihe?
42.
Interviewwith Uwe
Pralle.
43. Interview
with Uwe
Pralle.
44. Interviewwith
Uwe
Pralle.
On
Sebald's
view of ethnic
cleansing
in
conjunction
with
the
extinction
of certain
species
as
a
result of human
action,
see
Thomas
Kastura,
Geheimnisvolle
Fahigkeit
zur
Transmigration:
W. G Sebalds
interkulturelleWallfahrten
in die
Leere,
Arcadia31.1-2
(1996):
200.
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Amir
Eshel 89
modem,
Napoleonic
historical
paradigm, 45
he
idea
of
a
forcefully
unitedEuropeunder one economic, political,and symbolic hegemony.
It is
precisely
this
paradigm
f
organizing,
aggressive
rationality
as
the root of all evil that
is echoed
in
Austerlitz's
Greenwich
mono-
logue, especially
in
the
ironic
invocationof Newton's view of time
as
a
masterable,
definable
entity. Modernity's
deification
of
standardized,
controlled time
is
challenged
in
the
monologue by
the voice of a
fig-
ure
whose entire
appearance
ignifies
the
longing
for a
different,
unda-
mentally
romanticist
paradigm,
y
a
temporal
consciousness
that
can
apparentlystill be found in many partsof the earthgovernedto this
day
less
by
time than
by
the weather
101).
Read
in
this
light,
Auster-
litz's
polemic
is
not
only
the
poetic challenge
to
the
temporal
con-
sciousness of
the
modern
age,
to the
practices
of
accelerated
production,
consumption,
and movement.
It is also the somewhat
rushed, obsolete,
and
strangely
Heideggerian-sounding
ostulation
of
an
ultimate
ogic
of
modernity,
a
logic
that removes us
humans
from
the
natural,
true and authentic
and is reflected
in
mechanized
mass
agriculture
s
much
as in
inhuman, ndeed,
fascist
cataclysms.46
III
In
the
hope
...
that time
will
not
pass away,
has not
passed away:
Viewed from the
perspective
of its
allegorical
( kulturkritische )
dimension,
Austerlitz
s
hardly unique
in its
interweaving
of time and
narrative
n
the
larger
landscape
of
postwar
and
contemporary
German
literature.
Peter
Weiss,
Heiner
Miiller,
and Botho
Straul3,
o name
only
a
few,
emplotted
in
various
forms
aspects
of
National
Socialism
as
expressionsof modernity'scapitalist,annihilation-destinedhrust.What
distinguishes
the
book,
and
Sebald's
work as a
whole, however,
is
that
this
allegory,
at
times
all
too
implicated
in
the
Enlightenmentproject
that
it
criticizes,
is
relativized
n a
manner hat
dismisses,
indeed defers
finite
insights
or
conclusions. Even
if
the
narrative'sconcentrationon
45.
Sebald
uses the term
historisches
Paradigma
n
his
Der
Spiegel
interview.
46.
In
an
unpublished
manuscript
f
the 1949
lecture hat was
later o be known as
The
QuestionConcerningTechnology,Heidegger amouslystated hat Agricultures now
motorized
food
industry
in
essence the
same
as
the
manufacturing
f
corpses
in
gas
chambersand
extermination
amps,
the same as
blockading
and
starving
of
nations,
the
same as the
manufacture
f
hydrogen
bombs. This
remarkwas
dropped
rom
the final
version of
the
manuscript.
See
Richard
Bernstein,
The
New Constellation:The Ethical-
Political
Horizons
of
Modernity/Postmodernity
Cambridge:
MIT,
1992)
130.
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90 W.G. Sebald s
Austerlitz
the
catastrophic
eems
occasionally
to
be subsumed
by
all-encompass-
ing conceptualframes,one is still confrontedwith moments in which
this
tendency
is
ironically
inverted:
I
don't
know .
.
.
what all this
means.
.
.
(my
emphasis,
292).
From their
beginnings
in
After
Nature
through
Vertigo,
The
Rings of
Saturn,
and The
Emigrants,
Sebald's narrativesmaintained he tension
between
masterable
progression
and the
catastrophic,
he
moment in
which
mere succession is shattered
by
a
seemingly
meaning-generating
event
-
by
the
instant
n
which
chronos,
the
successive,
the
repetition
of the same, is succeededby kairos,the event of what FrankKermode
calls
intemporal significance. 47
Sebald's kairoi
however,
remain
remote from
any
form of
transcendence,
heir
meaning ndefinitely
deferred.
This
deference
is well
in
line with
Sebald's
overall
poetics
of
suspension
-
the mode in which this
emblematic
postmodernprose
follows and outdoes
what Fredric
Jameson
described as the
elegiac
mysteries
of duree
and
memory prevalent
n
high
modernism.48
To
put
it
differently:
Sebald's
prose
is
significant
not
simply
as a case
study
in
postmodern
historiographic
metafiction,
hat
is,
because
of
the
ways
it
thematizes
memory,
he
manner n which it
is
concerned
with histori-
cal
figures
and
events while
blurring
he
distinction
between
fiction and
history.49
Rather,
his work is remarkable
s
poetic
chronoschism,
hat
is,
because
of the
ways
in
which the narrative
organizes
and
recon-
ceives
temporality,
egardless
of its
references
o
history,
the
manner
n
which
it
manages
to
escape
altogether
he
danger
of leftist Weltschmerz
and
didactic
pedantry
n
its
suspension
of time
as
a
category
of
per-
ception
and
progression.50
Sebald's catastrophe is not epiphanic. Informed by Hans Blum-
berg's
notion
of
catastrophe
as
a
topos
of
the
human
imagination,51
47.
See Frank
Kermode,
The Sense
of
an
Ending:
Studies n the
Theory
of
Fiction
(Oxford:
Oxford
UP,
1967)
46-47.
48. Fredric
Jameson,
Postmodernism;
or;
the
Cultural
Logic
of
Late
Capitalism
(Durham:
Duke
UP,
1991)
16.
49. On
historiographic
metafiction,
ee
Linda
Hutcheon,
A
Poetics
of
Postmod-
ernism:
History,Theory,
Fiction
(New
York:
Routledge,
1988),
especially
chs.
6
and
7.
50. On chronoschism
s a
typological
device
in
addressingpostmoder
literature,
see Ursula
Heise,
Chronoschism:
Time,Narrative,
and Postmodernism
Cambridge:
Cam-
bridge
UP,
1997)
1-74.
51. See the interview with Andrea
K6hler,
Katastrophe
mit
Zuschauer,
Neue
Zurcher
Zeitung
22
Nov. 1997
Also,
Hans
Blumenberg,
hipweck
with
Spectator:
Para-
digm
of
a
Metaphorfor
Existence,
rans.Steven Rendall
Cambridge:
MIT,
1997).
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Amir
Eshel
91
his
catastrophe
s
no
longer
a
sign
of
the
eschatological,
of
divine
ful-
fillment. Sebald's interest is focused on modem, man-madecatastro-
phes
marked
by
their
paradigmatic
enselessness,
by
the fact that
any
attempt
to distill sense
from them would result in
questionable
mythological
narratives.52
The
appearance
of
mythological images
such
as those
of
burning
cities and Lot's wife
in The
Rings
of
Saturn
is
not the result
of a
mythicizing interpretative
ndeavor,
but rather
the
attempt
to
present
images
of
and in relation to
the
catastrophic
images
that
only
mirror
the
narrator's
nability
to deliver
a
cohesive,
meaning-generatingaccount of the radicalcontingency inherentin
the
catastrophic,
ndeed,
in
history.53
What
we
grapple
with,
Sebald's
narratives
seem to
suggest,
is not
only
the
catastrophic,
the
marked
historical
event,
the
kairos,
but also
their
distance,
their
presentness
n
the
form
of inheritedand
produced
images,
their senselessness.
Writ-
ing
is the
measuring
of this
distance,
and
photography
can
only
the-
matize
the absence
of the
real,
of the event as
such.
If clocks tell
time,
Sebald's
narratives
ell what
wanes,
what tran-
spires
in time.54
Just
as clocks
count time
-
in
English,
to count
denotes
to
tell,
to
account,
to reckon
[in
German
zahlen/
erzahlen]
-
his work does not
simply
count
off times
gone,
but cre-
ates
its own mode
of
counting,
of
accounting
for,
its
own
time. What
marks Sebald's
poetics
of
suspension
is the
ways
in which the effects
of
figuration
hemselves
constitute he
work's ultimate
referent,
hat
is,
its
unique
time
effects,
the
ways
in which the text forms time
and
conditions the
readingexperience.55
Let us consider
the
following pas-
sage
that describes Austerlitz's
ourney
from
Prague through
Pilsen
in
52. Das ist sicher eine Gefahr
in
der
Beschreibung
von
Katastrophen:
ass
die
Katastrophe
as
paradigmatisch
innlose
ist und
dass
deshalbdie
Versuchung
esonders
akut
ist,
irgendeinen
inn aus diesen
kataklysmischen reignissen
u
destilieren.Das halte
ich im
Prinzip
fir
illegitim,
sinnlos,
vergeblich
den Versuch
also,
das
in
mythische
Dimensionen
inzuordnen,
anz
gleich
welcher
Art. Interview
with
AndreaKohler.
53. Der Erzahler
n
meinen Texten
entschlagt
sich aber
eder Deutung.
Er
macht
sich die
Moglichkeit
der
Erklarung
er
Katstrophe
icht
zunutze,
er verweist
darauf,
dass
die
Leute friiher n
dieser
oder
jener
Weise daruber
nachgedacht
haben. Was
ihn
selber
betrifft,
glaube
ich
sagen
zu
k6nnen,
dass er keine Antwortaufdiese Formradikaler
Kon-
tingenz
hat. Interviewwith
AndreaKohler.
54.
1
am
indebted n this
very
short
discussion
of
the
etymology
of
counting
n
rela-
tion
to
both time and
narrative o Stuart
Sherman,
Telling
Time:
Clocks,
Diaries,
and
English
Diurnal
Form,
1660-1785
(Chicago:
Chicago
UP,
1996)
ix-xi.
55.
I am
borrowing
he
term timeeffects from Malcolm
Bowie's
study
of
Proust,
Proust
among
the
SStars
New
York:
Columbia
UP,
1998)
35.
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92 W.
G. Sebald
s
Austerlitz
western
Bohemia
to
the West:
All I remember f
Pilsen,
wherewe
stopped
or
some
time,
said Auster-
litz,
is that I went out
on
the
platform
o
photograph
he
capital
of
a
cast-ironcolumn which had touched
some
chord of
recognition
n
me.
Whatmade
me
uneasy
at the
sight
of
it,
however,
was not the
question
whether
the
complex
form of
the
capital,
now covered with a
puce-
tinged
encrustation,
had
really impressed
itself on
my
mind when
I
passed
through
Pilsen with the children's
transport
n the summer of
1939,
but the
idea,
ridiculous n
itself,
thatthis cast-iron
column,
which
with
its
scaly
surface
seemed almost
to
approach
he natureof a
living
being, might
rememberme andwas, if I
may
so
put
it, saidAusterlitz,a
witness to what
I
could no
longer
recollect
myself.
(221)
Like this
paragraph,56
much of
Sebald's work
is marked
by
poetic
verbosity, by
the
elasticity
of
the
syntax,
the avoidance of clear
para-
graph
structure,
by
the
slowness
it
practices
and
imposes
on the reader.
His
writing
demands a
wide-ranging
attention to
all
details,
to the
development
of
continuing
associative
chains,
and
obliges
the reader
o
follow
the careful movement of the
labyrinthine
plot.
Beyond
the the-
matic evocation
of
the traumatic
n
this
particular
xample,
beyond
the
presence
of the
all-encompassing metaphorics
of remembranceand
oblivion,
here,
as
in the entire
book,
the
syntax
and tense
pattern
con-
stitute
time
-
modes
of
temporal procession
and
temporal
experi-
ence.
The tense
structure maintains a constant oscillation
between
different
temporal
forms,
between I
remember
nd we
stopped,
I
went
out and that
had
touched,
What
made me and
might
remember,
between the
object's being
a witness and
the I
that
could no longer recollect. The result is an unstabletemporality hat
shifts
between
different
layers
of
the
past
and different
aspects
of the
present.
Diversions such as
ridiculous
n
itself,
seemed
almost
to,
and
if I
may
so
put
it
and
the muddled
rhythm
created
by
the narra-
tive's
gesture
of
quotation
the
repetitive
said Austerlitz
further
enhance he
sense of a
seemingly
endless
temporal
elasticity.
56. Andreas
Huyssen
notes on
Austerlitz: What
makes this
deeply
inconsolable
text such
a
pleasure
o read
is
that
processes
of
memory
and
experience
of
space
and time
are dissected
with consummate
poetic
skill and
imagination.
The narration
tself
puts
time
into slow
motion,
and it
stops
time
entirely
n momentsof
panic
and
horror
r,
alternately,
in the much less
frequent
moment
of a transcendent
ightness
of
being.
Andreas
Huyssen,
The
Grey
Zones of
Remembrance,
orthcoming
n The
New
Historyof
GermanLitera-
ture,
eds. David
Wellbery,
t al
(Cambridge:
Harvard
UP).
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AmirEshel 93
In The Sense
of
an
Ending,
FrankKermode
suggests
that
the clock's
tick-tock might be seen not only as a way to humanize a certain
device, but also
as the
projection
of
plot
onto what
is,
after
all,
tick-
tick.
In the
projection
of a fictional
differencebetween two sounds
-
tick
being
a word for the
beginning,
tock
a word for the
end,
it is
the
tock,
he
end,
that
confers
organization
nd form
on
the
temporal
structure
f
tick-tock,
ndeed of
all
plots.57
If the
projection
of tock
onto
the
clock's tick-tick
is
a model of a
plot,
as Kermode
suggests,
Sebald's
time effects model
a modem
postcatastrophic
emporal
con-
sciousness,one thatreflectsthe loss of a sense of successivity,chronol-
ogy,
and
coherence.
If
Kermode
s
right
that
the
purpose
of
plotting
s
to
resist
the threat of
empty
time,
to
defer the
tendency
of the interval
between
tick and
tock
to
empty
itself, 58
Sebald's
prose
extends the
gap
between
tick
and
tock
ad infinitum.Bewildered
by
the
catastrophe
of its
time,
it
echoes Walter
Benjamin's
notion that the
concept
of
progress
mustbe
grounded
n the
idea of
catastrophe,
ts slowness fol-
lowing
Benjamin's
outcry
That
hings
are
'status
quo'
is
catastrophe. 59
In its
temporal open-endedness,
Sebald's
prose suggests
an
open-
ended
reading
process:
the words
pile up,
the sentences and
paragraphs
seem
infinite. When the
narration
arrives at its
abrupt
end,
it
is clear
that the book has none.
The
elemental tick-tock
hat
suggests
the
existence of
an
end,
a
horizon,
a
telos,
is
replaced by
the
archetypal
postmoderist
stance:
Every
comma,
every
word and
sentence,
seems
geared
at
extending
the distance
between tick and
tock,
beginning
and end.
Austerlitz's
claim never to have
possessed
a
clock,
never to
have been
exposed
to the
sound
of
tick-tock,
his resistance to the
arbitrarinessof calculatingtime in relation to the movement of the
planets,
is
addressed
by
the
poetic
creation of
a
different time alto-
gether,by
poetic
devices
that
question
he
very
existence of
a
tock
by
avoiding
it
altogether.
Like
Proust's
Recherche,
Broch's The Death
of Virgil,
or
Claude
Simon's
La route des
Flandres,
Sebald's Austerlitz is marked
by
the
ways
in
which
chronological,
ndeed,
temporal
procession
is
poetically
suspended.
Reading
the
paragraphquoted
above involves a constant
returnto other partsof the plot, trying to reconstructwhat happened
57.
Kermode,
he
Sense
of
an
Ending
4-45.
58.
Kermode,
heSense
of
an
Ending
6.
59.
Walter
Benjamin,
The
Arcades
Project,
rans. HowardEiland
and Kevin
McLaughlin
Cambridge:elknap,
999)
73.
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94
W.G.
Sebald's
Austerlitz
before,
what is
it
that could
explain
Austerlitz'snotion that a cast-iron
column might rememberhim, indeed rememberat all. The placement
of a
visual
image
-
a
photo
of
a
steel and
glass
construction
aken
in a
train station
-
in
proximity
to
the scene
(220)
in a
way presumably
related
to
it,
defers
any
immediate
progression
n the
text:
The
atten-
tive reader
will
stop,
try
to decode the
image,
to
connect
it to
what
was
just
told,
to detect
its
details
and relate it to other
images
in
the book.
This
photograph,
ike all
others,
as Sebald
noted,
elicits
from
the
text
and takes the
spectators
into an unreal world unknown to them.60
Sebald'sphotographic magesare thushardlyan artfulornament o tex-
tual
images,
hardly
a
means
to enhance
aesthetic
pleasure,
but
rather
genuine
images
in
Walter
Benjamin's
sense,
devices that relate the
reader
o what is
and
will
remainabsent
-
the
events and the
protago-
nists
of
the
past.
Sebald's
photos
are indeed
Benjaminian mages,
dia-
lectics
at
a
standstill,
or,
in
Benjamin's
words: what comes
together
in the flash with the now to form a
constellation. 61
Sebald's
images
relate
the
spectator
o
temporality they
make
one
aware
of
both
the now that is frozen
in
the
image
and the
now of
spec-
tatorship,
of
the
reading
process.
His dramaticeffect
originates
from
visual
and
temporalpropositions
hat structure
nd mark ime. Once
the
book
has
caught
the
reader
n its
paragraph-long
entences,
in
the
nar-
rative's
tendency
to
dissolve
in
detours
and
distractions,
n the
myster-
ies
of
the never to be
fully
depicted
or understood
past,
the
time
of
reading
itself becomes
an element of the narrative's
emporal
fabric.
The
polemic
against
time becomes
poetic
deceleration,
he actual
rever-
sal
of time's
gallop,
and
the
production
of a different
temporality,
one
that suspends,at the metasemantic evel, the ontology of past, present,
and future.
The result
is a text that
in
its
nonsemantic
element
ques-
tions
the
reign
of
time
as this
was understood
n
the
mid-19th
century.
In their
introduction
to the
recently
published
volume
Time
and
the
Literary,
Karen
Newman,
Jay
Clayton,
and
Marianne
Hirsch
note
that
while
information
technology
is said
to have annihilated
both
time and the
literary,
the
literary
is still not
gone.
On
the
contrary,
t
structures
our
thinking
about
time.62
They argue
that
the
literary
60.
Aber
das
Geschriebene
st kein wahres
Dokument,
Christian
Scholz,
inter-
view
with
W. G.
Sebald,
Neue Zurcher
Zeitung
26 Feb.
2000.
61.
Benjamin,
TheArcades
Project
462.
62. Karen
Newman,
Jay Clayton,
and
Marianne
Hirsch,
eds.,
Timeand
the
Literary
(New
York:
Routledge,
2002)
1.
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AmirEshel 95
joins
immediacy
and the instantaneous
with their
opposite,
duration
andcritique, husmarking ense, period,and millennium.63While it is
not
certain
if
all
literature
achieves
this,
if
all
literature
prolongs
the
moment for reflection and enables a
rereading
of
the
present,
as
these
authors
uggest,
Sebald's
prose
certainly
does.
Lacking
many
of the certainties
pertinent
o the
aesthetic and histori-
cal
circumstances
of
the nineteenth
century,
Austerlitz's
polemic
against
time,
like
Sebald's
work as a
whole,
is
melancholic,
but not
in
that it
passively
bemoans the
dead
or lives from
them,
in
a
kind of
poetic necrophilia,as some critics have suggested.64The suspensionof
temporal
procession
and
succession,
the concentration
on
catastrophe
and the
dead,
is
merely
a
poetic
point
of
departure,
he
birthplace
f
writing,
to
quote
Helene Cixous's
formulation,
of
a
different
experi-
ence
of the world. We need
to lose the
world,
writes
Cixous,65
and
to discover that there
is more than one world and that the world isn't
what
we think
it
is.
Sebald's
work
is more
concerned with
reflecting
on life
after the
catastrophe,
with
living
in
the face
of
destruction,
than with death
itself. Like authors such
as
Ingeborg
Bachmann,
Thomas
Bernhard,
and Alexander
Kluge,
but also
like Claude
Simone,
if one
were
to
expand
the
view
into the
perspective
of
contemporary
European
itera-
ture,
Sebald's
significance
lies
precisely
in
the manner
in
which
his
work
continually
faces the dead
through
an
opening up
of the
literary
as
a
space
of
reflecting
the
present,
as a
space
for
reflection: Melan-
choly,
Sebald
noted,
is
something
different
from
depression.
While
depression
makes it
impossible
to
conceive or
to
mediate,
melancholy
-in itself not necessarily a pleasantcondition- allows one to be
reflective ... to
develop things
one
would never have
anticipated. 66
Sebald's
melancholy
is thus not sui
generis,
but rather an
integral
part
of the
labor of
mourning [Trauerarbeit],
as Ernestine Schlant
has noted.67
Melancholy,
Sebald
emphasized,
has
nothing
to do with
the will
to die
[Todessucht].
It is
rather
a
form of resistance
63.
Newman,
Clayton
nd
Hirsch,
Time nd
he
Literary.
64.
See
Thomas
Wirtz,
Schwarze
uckerwatte:
nmerkungenu
W.
G.Sebald,
Merkur.55
(June
001):
530-34.
65.
Helene
Cixous,
Three
teps
n
the
Ladder
f
Writing
New
York:
Columbia
P,
1993)
10.
66. Interviewn
Der
Spiegel.
67.
Schlant,
The
Languagef
Silence
33.
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96 W.
G.
Sebald's Austerlitz
[Wiederstand].68
The
function
of
melancholy
in
art
is
by
no means
reactive or reactionary: The depiction of calamity encompasses the
possibility
of its
overcoming. 69
The irritationcaused
by
the melan-
cholic
tone of
Sebald's
prose, by
its insistence
on
keeping
the
tension
between
the historicalevent and
its
poetic figuration
unresolved
and
by
its
unique
temporality,
broadens our sense of the
very
act
of
telling.
Sebald's
antiquarian
manner,
his
uncompromised,
onscious
slowness,
halt the
rapid pace
of
time and set limits to
modernity's
obliviousness,
even
if
only
in the
realm of the
text,
even if
only
for the brief
moment
of reading.
68. W. G
Sebald,
Die
Beschreibung
des
Unglucks:
Zur Osterreichischen
Literatur
von
Stifter
bis Handke
Salzburg:
Residenz,
1985)
12.
69.
Sebald,
Die
Beschreibung
des
Unglicks:
Zur
Osterreichischen
Literatur
von
Stifter
his
Handke.