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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: New German Critique
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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 artificialof all our
inventions,
and in
being
bound
to
the
planetturning
on
its own
axis was
no
less
arbitrary
than
would
be,
say,
a
calculationbased
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 n 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, qualitiesperhapscorresponding 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 n one
place,
and rush
headlong
by
in
another?Could
we
not claim
...
that
time itself
has
been
nonconcur-
rent
[ungleichzeitig,
Ger.
147]
over
the centuriesand the millennia?
t
is
not
so
long ago,
after
all,
that
it
began
spreading
out over
everything.
And is not human life 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 progressconstantly
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
neverending
anguish.
101)
For
those
acquainted
with Sebald's
prose,
this
monologue
must
appear
somewhat
perplexing.
After
all,
since
his
emergence
on the
German
and international
literary
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 natural and
human reali-
ties in the vein of Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller, 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 raidsof 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
natureof 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,
rather
than
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, Part I 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
n
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 work on Stifter,see EvaJuhl, Die WahrheitOber as Ungllick:Zu W. G.Sebald Die
Ausgewanderten,
Reisen 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
Birger,
Der
Ursprung
er
aisthetischen
Moderneaus
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-i-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
Werner
Fassbinder
(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. HelmutSchmitz
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,
thus
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,
TheGermanic
Review77.4: 264-67.
6.
It
would be
impossible
o
give
here
a shortaccount
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's
Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht:
Ein
Marchen
aus
den
neuen
Zeiten
(1994),
and Bernhard
chlink's TheReader
(1995).
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AmirEshel
75
analysis
of the
parents'guilt.
Sebald'sprose is distinctivein 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 that their
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, l0
Sebald
contented himself
with
the
role of the
messenger.
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
writerof his
generation
who
has dedicated
much
attention o the
presence
and
consequences
f
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
noneof these
cases do we
observe
he
same
poetic
intensity
n
regard
to
the
victims'
stories,
he same
concentration n the fate of the
survivors
and the
presence
of thepast.OnSebald's ingularityn thisrespect, eealso Ernestine chlant,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,
Siiddeutsche
Zeitung
22
Dec.
2001.
9.
Wildes
Denken,
ebald
n
an interview
with
Sigrid
LOffler,
rofil
19
Apr.
1993.
On
Sebald's
collapse
of
the differencebetween ictionaland
autobiographical
arratives
n
the contextof the
dissolution
f
subjectivity
n
modem
prose
ee Oliver
Sill,
'Aus
dem
Ja*ger
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
Erzdihlers
m
zeitgen6ssischen
Roman,
Gesa-
mmelte
Schriften
I,
Noten zur
Literatur,
d.
Rolf
Tiedemann
Frankfurt/Main:
uhrkamp
1974)41.On thefar-reachingonsequences f Adomo'sanalysisas voicedinthisessayand
in
Adomo's
laterAesthetic
Theory,
ee
KeithBullivant nd Klaus
Briegleb,
Die
Krise
des
Erziihlens
'1968'
und
danach,
Gegenwartsliteratur
eit
1968,
ed. Klaus
Briegleb
and
Sigrid
Weigel,
vol.
12,
Hanser
Sozialgeschichte
er
deutschen
Literatur
om
16.
Jahrhundert
bis
zur
Gegenwart,
d.
Rold
Grimminger
Munich:
Deutscher
Taschenbuch,
992)
302-39.
I1.
Recovered
Memories,
nterviewwith
Maya
Jaggi,
The
Guardian 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 order to calm ourselvesdown. 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
authorand 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. l14
ignificantly,
even
though
somewhat naive
in
his
understanding
f the relation between fictional and
historiographic
narrativesof
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
can
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 James
Wood25-26.
14. Sven
Boedecker,
Menschen auf der
anderen
Seite,
interview
with W.
G.
Sebald,
Rheinische
Post
9
Oct.
1993.
15.
Interviewwith
Sigrid
L6ffler.
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Amir
Eshel 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
born 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
conjure
up
the
faces
of those who
are left
behind,
through
his
own
fault,
as he fears.
It will
be
not until
1949,
in the
privateboarding
school
he
attends,
hat
Austerlitzdiscovershis 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),
Austerlitzcomes
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
occurred
to him to
search
for
his
true
origins
(125).
Before his final
mental
collapse
in
the
summer
of
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. he term
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
arrivedon
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
hildrencame
to GreatBritain.
17.
See
Ich
tiirchte
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 return of 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
Rysanovi.
It will
be
through
her,
in
periscopic
narration
ia
la
Thomas
Bernhard,19
hat the reader
will now find out what
happened
before
and after
Austerlitz was sent
to Wales. Vera
Rysanovai
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
enteredthe 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,
remainsshort-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
to
Sebald,
he borrowedhis
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 Wahrheit
tiber
das
Ungliick
640-
59,
especially
651.
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AmirEshel 79
In an ironic turn
aimed
at
suspending
all
notions
of arrival
and 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
Prague
prior
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 narrator
does 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 uncoverthe
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
Alderney
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 clearthat 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
L6ffler,
Sebald
stated,
I
work
using
the
system
of
bricolage,
in
Levi-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),
Levi-Strauss
defines
mythical
thought
as a mode
of
bricolage
17).
The
French verb bricoler
denotes an
activity
of
order
creation hat s not based
on
thorough hought,
but rather n
using
materi-
als and tools
that
happen
o be
around.
Whereas
he
engineer
or scientist
surpasses
he
boundaries iven by society,the bricoleur reatesstructures bymeansof events 22). In
the contextof Sebald's
poetics,
it
is
significant
hat
Levi-Strauss's ricoleur
provides
signs
denoting
he
world,
while
the
engineer
supplies
concepts:
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 certain
amount
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 rocess duringwhich
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
postmodern
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 idiomthatwill addresswhathe 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 learnedalmost
nothing
from
his teachers
scholars
who
built their careers
n the
1930s
and
1940s
and
still,
that
is
after
the
war,
nurtureddelusions of
power (32-
34).21
Just
as his
experiences
with
Jewish
6migres
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's
Greenwich
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 Austerlitzis subsumed n the narrator r that
the
latter
should
be
equated
with the
writer.22
Rather 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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Amir
Eshel
81
Thematizing
ime's
artificiality,
ts
non-occurrence,
he
simultaneity
of
all its modalities,Sebald'sproseis notinteriorbut 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 narrator
or
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
nature
of
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
evolution
and the
spread
of railwaytracksthroughouthe 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
and the
unprecedented
movementof
individuals.
Reflecting
on the
opening
of
the
Paris-Rouenand the
Paris-Orleans
railway
ines in
1843,
Heinrich
Heine noted:
24. Barthes19.
25. In
November
1840,
the directorof
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
Time
and the
Discovery
of
the
Longitude
Oxford:
Oxford
UP,
1980)
87.
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82 W.G.Sebald's
Austerlitz
Let
us
simplysay
thatour entire
experience
s
being
rippedup
and
hurled nnewtracks;hatnewrelations,leasures,nd orments wait
us,
and
the unknown xerts ts
ghastly
ascination,
rresistible
nd,
at
the
same
ime,
fearful.
.
. Even
he
elementary
oncepts
f time and
space
have become
shaky.
The
railways
have
killed
space,
and
only
timeremains
or us. If
only
we
had
enoughmoney
o
respectfully
ill
time,
oo.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 declarationof
the
death of
space
reflected the
emergence
of a
new,
modem
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
f the
modem era:
Time and
space
died
yester-
day,
wrote
Marinetti
in
1909,
We
already
live
in
the
absolute,
because we
have created
eternal,
omnipresent peed. 28Modernity,
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
from 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
Teil,
trans. Todd
Samuel
Presner,
Schriften
iiber
Frankreich,
ed. Eberhard
Galley
(Frankfurt/Main:968)
509-10.
1 am indebted
o
Todd Samuel
Presnernot
only
for his
splendid
ranslation
f Heine's
sentences,
but
also
for his
inspiring
dissertation:
Todd
Samuel
Presner,
TrackingModernity,
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,
ThePoli-
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,
LiteraryHistory
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
Prdsens: Die
Semantik
sthetischerZeit
(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
through
Germanyby
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. 31
Like the life of
Austerlitz,
Paul
Bereyter's past,
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,
Ferber
sees 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
encounterbetween
the
protagonist
and
the
narrator,
akes
place
in the
Antwerp
railway
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 religiosity in the modem 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,
n a
cathedralconsecrated
o inter-
nationaltraffic and trade 10). Inspiredby the Pantheon n Rome, this
modem
construction
celebrates
the
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 modernera: 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 from
each
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 moment of
leave-taking
rom
his
mother n
Prague's
Wilson
station
in
1939.
They
markthe
post-Baudelaireian
oetic
consciousness
thatall thatis 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
modern
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,
rdedition
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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Amir
Eshel
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
renovationat 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 o
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 constructionof 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
railwaytransportation.
What
is
left of
nature s
only railway
tracks,
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86
W.
G.
Sebald'sAusterlitz
spaces
of
transition
on
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,
nd
more
movement.
The
consequences
of this
cycle
are
unveiled
during
Austerlitz's
visit
to Theresienstadt.
There,
facing
the
materialremainsof
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
observationroom of
Greenwich
(98),
the
star-shaped
lower at the
entranceof
his childhood
house
(151),
and
the
star-shaped
orm of
Theresienstadt
s
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
consciousnessreflected
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
Frankfurt
School
and in the
writings
of Michel Foucault.
The
railway
system
and its
time
the
governor
f
the
modem
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
YorkReview
of
Books
49.16
(24
Oct.
2002):
225.
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AmirEshel
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 historyso prominent n the Germantradition. 35 o
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
modern culture
of
consumption
suffer
under the
conditions
of
the
present
and that the
35. Andreas
Huyssen, Rewritings
nd
New
Beginnings:
W.
G.
Sebaldand
the
Lit-
erature
of
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
Deutschendas auf
die Reihe?
39.
On
Sebald's
Benjaminian
kulturkritische
etaphysics
ee his
telling
commen-
tary
on Walter
Benjamin'sallegorical
angel
of
history
n
Luftkrieg
ndLiteratur
Munich:
Hanser,
1999)
79-80.
In
a
later nterview
with 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
Interview
with
the WriterW.
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
proof of 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
rapidpace.41
In
light
of
the narrator's
ourney through
he
threatened,
partly
mori-
bund nature
of 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
Germanmiddle class
in
the 1920s and
1930s,
how
these conditionswere 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
Europeanhistory,
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 otherelementsof 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.
Interviewwith 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
FRhigkeit
ur
Transmigration:
W.
G.
Sebalds
interkulturelleWallfahrten
in
die
Leere,
Arcadia
31.1-2
(1996):
200.
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Amir
Eshel 89
modemrn,
apoleonic
historical
paradigm, 45
he
idea
of
a
forcefully
unitedEuropeunderone 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
invocation
of 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 modem
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 andscape
of
postwar
and
contemporary
German
literature.Peter
Weiss,
Heiner
Miller,
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 laterto
be known as
The
QuestionConcerningTechnology,Heidegger amouslystated hat Agricultures now
motorizedfood
industry
in
essence the same
as the
manufacturing
f
corpses
in
gas
chambers
and
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
postmodern
prose
follows
and outdoes what
Fredric
Jameson described
as the
elegiac
mysteries
of duree and
memory
prevalent
n
high
modernism.48To
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,
he
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
addressingpostmodern
iterature,
see Ursula
Heise,
Chronoschism:
Time,Narrative,
and Postmodernism
Cambridge:
Cam-
bridge
UP,
1997)
1-74.
51.
See the interview
with
Andrea
Ko6hler,
Katastrophe
mit
Zuschauer,
Neue
Ziurcher
eitung
22 Nov.
1997
Also,
Hans
Blumenberg,
hipweck
with
Spectator:
Para-
digm
of
a
Metaphoror
Existence,
rans.
Steven Rendall
Cambridge:
MIT,
1997).
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AmirEshel
91
his
catastrophe
s
no
longer
a
sign
of
the
eschatological,
of
divine
ful-
fillment. Sebald's interest is focused on modem, man-made catastro-
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/
erzihlen]
-
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
deshalb
die
Versuchung
esonders
akut
st,
irgendeinen
inn
aus
diesen
kataklysmischen reignissen
u destilieren.Das halte
ich im
Prinzip
f'ir
illegitim,
sinnlos,
vergeblich
den Versuch
also,
das in
mythische
Dimensionen
inzuordnen,
anz gleich
welcher
Art. Interview
with
Andrea
K6hler.
53. Der
Erzaihler
n meinen Texten
entschlaigt
ich
aber
eder Deutung.
Er
macht
sich die
M6glichkeit
der
Erklkrung
er
Katstrophe
icht
zunutze,
er
verweist
darauf,
dass
die Leute
friiher
n
dieser oder
jener
Weise
daruiber
achgedacht
haben. Was
ihn
selber
betrifft,
glaube
ich
sagen
zu
k6nnen,
dass
er keine
Antwort
aufdiese
Formradikaler
Kon-
tingenz
hat. Interviewwith Andrea
K6hler.
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. 1 am
borrowing
he
term timeeffects from
MalcolmBowie's
study
of
Proust,
Proust
among
the
Stars
(New
York:
Columbia
UP,
1998)
35.
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92
W.G.Sebald's Austerlitz
western
Bohemiato the West:
All I
remember
f
Pilsen,
wherewe
stopped
or
some
ime,
aidAuster-
litz,
is thatI went out on the
platform
o
photograph
he
capital
of
a
cast-iron olumnwhichhad ouched omechordof
recognition
n
me.
Whatmade
me
uneasy
at the
sight
of
it,
however,
was not the
question
whether he
complex
ormof the
capital,
now
coveredwith
a
puce-
tinged
encrustation,
ad
really mpressed
tself on
my
mind
when
I
passed
hrough
Pilsenwith the children's
ransport
n
the
summer
f
1939,
but he
dea,
ridiculousn
itself,
hat hiscast-iron
olumn,
which
with
ts
scaly
surface eemed lmost
o
approach
he nature f
a
living
being,might emember e andwas, f Imaysoput t,saidAusterlitz,
witness o what couldno
longer
ecollect
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
labyrinthineplot.
Beyond
the
the-
matic
evocation
of
the traumatic
n this
particular xample,
beyond
the
presence
of the
all-encompassing metaphorics
of remembrance
and
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 narrationtself
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
History
of
German
Litera-
ture,
eds.
David
Wellbery,
t al
(Cambridge:
Harvard
UP).
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AmirEshel 93
In The Sense
of
an
Ending,
Frank
Kermode
suggests
that
the clock's
tick-tock might be seen not only as a way to humanizea certain
device,
but also as
the
projection
of
plot
onto what
is,
after
all,
tick-
tick.
In the
projection
of
a
fictional difference
between 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
narrationarrives 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
postmodernist
tance:
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
the
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,
The
Sense
of
an
Ending
44-45.
58.
Kermode,
TheSense
of
an
Ending
46.
59.
Walter
Benjamin,
The Arcades
Project,
trans.
Howard
Eiland
and
Kevin
McLaughlin
Cambridge:Belknap,
1999)
473.
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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'sphotographicmagesare 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
remain
absent
-
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 Zircher
Zeitung
26 Feb.
2000.
61.
Benjamin,
TheArcades
Project
462.
62. Karen
Newman,
Jay Clayton,
and Marianne
Hirsch,
eds.,
Time
and the
Literary
(New
York:
Routledge,
2002)
1.
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AmirEshel
95
joins
immediacy
and
the
instantaneous
with
their
opposite,
duration
andcritique, hus marking ense, period,andmillennium.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 criticshave suggested.64The suspensionof
temporal
procession
and
succession,
the concentrationon
catastrophe
and
the
dead,
is
merely
a
poetic
point
of
departure,
he
birthplace
f
writing,
to
quote
H6lne
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 concernedwith
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
and
Hirsch,
Timeand
the
Literary.
64.
See Thomas
Wirtz,
Schwarze
Zuckerwatte:
Anmerkungen
u W.
G. Sebald,
Merkur
.55
(June
2001):
530-34.
65.
HWlkne
ixous,
Three
Steps
on
the Ladder
of
Writing
New
York:Columbia
UP,
1993)
10.
66.
Interview
n
Der
Spiegel.
67.
Schlant,
The
Language
of
Silence 233.
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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
Unglicks:
Zur Osterreichischen
Literatur
von
Stifter
bis Handke
Salzburg:
Residenz,
1985)
12.
69.
Sebald,
Die
Beschreibung
des
Ungliicks:
Zur OsterreichischenLiteratur
von
Stifter
bis
Handke.