Visual Memory and Ekphrasis in w.g. Sebald's the Rings of Saturn

8/11/2019 Visual Memory and Ekphrasis in w.g. Sebald's the Rings of Saturn

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VISUAL MEMORY A N D

EKPHRASIS I N W . G . SEBALD S

THE RINGS OF S TURN

SiLK HORSTKOTT

W

^

G. Seba ld's

The RingsofSaturn

employs a strongly visual memory con-

struct ion

in

which theintermedial arrangement ofphotographic images

9 and verbal narrative plays a crucial role. The central activity oft h e an ony-

mous f i rst-person narrator islooking, and his intense and detai led interact ion with visual

objects seems at f irst to suggest a dialogic constructiono flooking subject and con templat-

ed objects, which is repeated in the author ial arrangeme nt of pho tographic images and ver-

bal narrative. Since the invention ofcentral perspec tive inthe Italian renaissanc e, image s

have been considered as passive objectsofour gaze, where as the spectatorofimagesis

convent ional ly regarded s nideal, stable and all-po werfu l sub ject pos it ion (Mirzoeff

38-51). However, scholars of visual culture have pointed out that the perspectival system

of

vision reduces the relat ionship between eye and object to a single exchange in space.The

spectator is situatedinperspect ive as having a view from one speci fic place (Sturken and

Cartwright 114), even though vision takes place over a periodoft ime,ishighly repet i t ive,

and usually occursina context in which the spectator may him-orherself be the o bjectof

another 's vision. James Elkins has i l lustrated the co mplexi ty

of

this si tuat ion throug h the

fo l lowing example:

Say you're in a museu m, looking at a paint ing that has a number

of

peoplein

i t .There may be up to ten different kindso flooking involved: (1) you , looking

at the painting, (2) f igures in the painting who look at one another, and (4) f ig-

uresinthe paint ing w ho lookatobjects

or

stareoffinto space

o r

have their

eyes closed. In addi t ion there is of ten (5) the m useum guard , wh o may be look-

ing at the back of your head, and (6) the other people in the gallery, who may

be looking at you or at the painting.There are imaginary observers, too: (7) the

artist, who was once looking at this painting, (8) the models for the figures in

the pa int ing, wh o may once have seen themselves the re, and (9) all the other

people who have seen the pa in t in g. . . . And f inal ly, there are also (10) people

have never seen the paint ing: they may knowi tonly f rom reproduct ions . . .or

f rom descr ipt ions. A comp lementary source of com plexi ty comes from the fact

that we never see only one image at a t im e. (Elkins 38f)

Psychoanalyt ic theo ry has descr ibed the si tuated and c omplex nature

o f

looking,inwhich

the spectator isalways simultaneou sly subject and object , through theconcept of the

English Language /Votes 44.2 Fall /Wi nte r 2006


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ENG LISH LANGUAGE NOTES 44.2 FAL L / WINTER OO6

gaze,

referring to a visual field which precedes individua l spectators and in which we are

ourselves always in the picture, a subject of representation (Silverman

133).

hilesome

scholars have used the ubiquity of the gaze in order to critique the power relations inherent

in the society ofthe panopticon (Foucault) and ofthe spectacle (Debord; cf. Mirzoeff), Kaja

Silverman has stressed the inherently ethical dimension o fthe visual field

(2),

which hinges

on the relative closeness or distance of our visual identification with an otherthe visual

object. Both the distanceless idealization of the other and its complete rejection lead to a

problematic self-image, whereas the middle road of

a

heteropathic identification respects

the difference of the other without rejecting itand thus enables a subjectivity which can

approach the other without usurping its position (Silverman 23).

The ethicsof the visual field proposed bySilverman may serve asa standard for the

Sebaldian narrator's relation to his material in The Rings of Saturn.Both the novel's numer-

ous photographic illustrations and the narrator's account are introduced as a form of wit-

ness,

resurrectingacatastrophic yet half-forgotten past: indeed, Mark Anderson has argued

that Sebald highlights the narrator's function to listen and bear witness in all of his oeu-

vre (106).Itis this testimonial dimensionof

The Rings

of

Saturn

which makes the ethical

relation between the narrator and his material such a pressing question. Many Holocaust

scholars agree that the trope of witnessing necessarily involves an ethical obligation of the

witness towa rd the object of his or her testimony (Felman and Laub; Hartman). In

Remnants

of

Auschwitz,Giorgio Agamben argues that every testimony centers on som ething that

can-

not be witnessed: the experience of those who died, the original witnesses in the Greek

sense of martys, martyr, or of Primo Levi's drow ned.

The Ringsof Saturn,

however, con-

stantly threatens the integrity

of

the orig inal tes timony because the narrator's gaze

is

revealed time and again as highly idiosyncratic and subjective. Despite the inclusion of sup-

posedly distinct visual material, the relationship between looking subject and visual objects

in

The Ringso fSaturn

turns out to be less dialogic than one-sided, with the text frequently

revealing the process by which the narrator willfu lly constructs his surroundings as visual

objects.The openly revealed unreliability ofthe narrator's acts of vision raises questions of

visibility, chiefly concerning the doubtful reference

of

photography: do the photographs

function as witnesses to the past, or are they representations of the narrator's subjective

mental images? Furthermore, due to the narrator's exaggerated empathy with the past, the

narrative exhibits

a

progressive suspension of subject-object boundaries, where everything

around the narrator is drawn into the self thus revealing looking and the gaze as ethically

problematic forms ofadistanceless, idiopathic appropriation (Silverman 23).

The narrator's ambiguous relationto his material is related to the problematic natureof

ekphrasis, which opens up a discrepancy between the visual and the verbal, sighting and

citing.

Tom Mitchell has described ekphrasis as an overcom ing

of

otherness (Picture

Theory^56),

yet by assigning a message to the supposedly mute visual object it describes,

ekphrasis might also reinforce a hierarchical o pposition o fth e visual and the verbal which

still prevails in Western culture (Wagner, Ekphrasis ). The ancient rhetorical model

of


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SILKE HORSTKOTTE

1 9

ekphrasis exists both in a wide and a narrow definition: ekphrasis can either mean

the ver-

bal representation of graphic representation

(Heffernan 299), oritcan in the more origi-

nal senserefer to

anyverba\

description of visual phenomena (cf Cluver; Krieger; Wagner,

Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality ). In myanalysis ofSebald's images, I am

employing the term in the latter sense since the images hover uneasily between fact and

fiction, between material document and immaterial perception.Their meaning and referen-

tlality can only be determined through recourse to verbal ekphrasis; however, the narrator's

attempts to supply a stable reference for the images merely reveal his inability to say with

any degree of certainty what he has seen. Ekphrasis,then,emerges as an attempt at verbal

dominance over the visual that constantly falls short of the ephemeral nature of vision and

ofthe polyvalent reference ofthe image.

The Rings

of

Saturn takes place inakind of dream state, in which the boundaries between

external vision and mental perception, between the visual and the verbal, and between the

narrator and his material are systematically obscured. Despite the inclusionofnumerous

photographic images and other scrapbooked material, the narrative portion ofthe novel

hardly ever refers to these visual insertions. Consequently, the images do not usually serve

as documentary sourcesBarthes's that-has-been but as materializations of the narra-

tor's perception. A good example of this is theblack-and-white photograph of the

Rembrandt anatomy painting

inThe Rings

of

Saturn

(14f), a smaller detail of which, repro-

duced on the following page (RS 16), represents the dissection of the offender's hand dis-

cussed by the narrator. The second Image thus shows that detai l

of

the painting which

interests the narrator and on which his gaze is centered.

It

is tempting

to

identify

it

as the

painting's

punctum,

according

to

Roland Barthes' famous

punctum/studium

binary:

th e

shock-like, deeply personal attraction that a photographic detail may possess for an Individ-

ual viewer (Barthes 27). However, the narrator's reading ofthe image

is

based

in

cultural

knowledge, and thus

in studium

(Barthes 25f),

not in an

affective personal relation.

Nevertheless, the detailed image can be said to represent the narrator's culturally pre-dis-

posed perception of the painting, to which his verbal ekphrasis corresponds. In this man-

ner, the narrative often describes

a

sight which the photographs then materialize for the

reader, such as the empty streets of Lowestoft, shown in a photograph and described by the

narrator as foll ows: Not a living soul was about in the long streets I went throug h, [p] and

the closer Icametothe town centre the more what Isaw disheartened me. (RS 41) The

notation [p] here marks the position ofthe photograph, which is thus placed in close corre-

spondence with the narrator's descriptionofhis visual perception.

Not only do the photographic and other images in The Rings

o f

Saturn thus hover uneasi-

ly between material document and mental perception, but the narrative part of the novelis

also notoriously difficult to classify generically, consisting of a mix of fact and fiction, para-

phrasesofliterary texts ando fseveral biographies, as well as a hosto freferences to his-

torical atrocities ranging from the Holocaust and the slaughter of 700,000 Serbs, Jews and

Bosnians by the Croatian Ustasha, to the mass suicide of theTaipingis in 1853, the Chinese


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O

ENG LISH LANGUAGE NOTES 44.2 FAL L / WINTER 2 6

famine of th e 1870s, and the Irish civil war (to name the most prominen t). These difficulties

of classification both echo the epistemological issues raised

by

the photographs and more

broadly suggest

a

problematic entanglement

of

the narrator's subjective standpoint with

the presentation

of his

material. Indeed,

th e

historical excursions

are

inextricably inter-

twined with the travelogue

of

the narrator's walking tour through

th e

largely desolate

an d

deserted coastal landscape

of

Suffolk, where

he is

confronted with

th e

traces

of

destruc-

t ion

reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place (RS3).The

narrator visits many relic[s ]

of

an earlier age (RS 90) and meets numerous refugees, dias-

poric and exilic characters. He also encounters many signs ofthe natural disasters that have

plagued th e region since time immemorialtowns swallowed by thesea, th e human

destruction of the environmentand comments on theensuing economic decline, which

prompts him

to

imagine himself amidst the remains

o f

our own civilization after its extinc-

tion

in

some future catastrophe

{RS

237).

His obsession with destruction and decline

is

mirrored

in

the novel's photographic illustra-

tions, which show a largely unpopulated landscape (e.g. RS 30, 44, 51, 69, 138) and empty

streets (RS

41

48), graves

{RS

196, 260) and ruined

o r

decaying buildings (RS

81

156f, 216,

236), and only rarely include portraits, usually

of

long-dead celebrities like Roger Casement

(RS 130) and Algernon Swinburne (RS 162). In these pictures, nobody looks back at the nar-

rator, challenging his view

of

the pastthe portraits are conspicuous

for

their lack

o f

direct

eye contact.The act

of

narration, too , takes place

in

outward and mental Isolation during the

narrator's hospitalization following

a

nervous breakdown (RS 3f). Only one portrayed

per-

son directly meets the observer's eye, and this is the photograph which evidently shows the

author,

W.

G. Sebald himself, standing in frontofan oak tree (RS 263)oneofseveral exam-

ples in Sebald's work which illustrates th e unbalanced narrative relationsh ip between

author, narrator, andprotagonist observed bymany Sebald scholars (Anderson 106)and

which further destabilizes the crucial boundaries between self and other, narrator and nar-

rated.

The highly eclectic verbal narrativeofThe Ringso fSaturn thus positions itself asareposi-

toryo fcultural memory, and the narrator asitslonely and eccentric curator. In the wordsof

Anne Fuchs, Sebald approaches history as

a

melancholic collector who organizes the

frag-

ments he finds into studies

of

destruction

{Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte

19).

The Rings

of Saturn

self-reflexively introduces the process

o f

preserving a threatened past

by

arrang-

ing

it in a

series

of

historical and biographical excurses when the narrator remarks about

a

log book

in

the so-called Sailor's Reading Room: Every time I decipher one

of

these entries

1

am

astounded that

a

trail that has long since vanished from

the air or

the water remains

visible here

on the

paper

{RS

93). John Beck

has

lucidly argued that

the

reading room

serves

as an

organizing metaphor

fo r

the amassed wealth

of

knowledge

inThe Ringsof

Saturn,

revealing the narrative as

a

mode

o f

metacommentary that produces order with

a

view

to

dismantling

it

from the inside (81). Like the old

log

book.

The Ringso fSaturn

pre-

serves the traces

o f

a long-vanished past

in

visible fo rm, and

it is

the estranged suitability


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ENG LISH LANGUAGE NOTES 44 2 FAL L / WINTER

OO6

tograph, but is

mediated

by

forms

of

knowledge originating outside

of it

Moreover,

Eduardo Cadava has pointed out that Although w hat the photograph photographs

is

no

longer present or living, its having-been-there now forms part ofthe referential structure of

our relationship to the photogra ph (11). Our perception

of

Holocaust and other atrocity

photographs in particular is mediated to a large degree by non-visual forms of knowledge,

especially by narrative frames relating the visual content of the photos to the later fate of

the depicted people. As Marianne Hirsch has argued, this anterior knowledge crucially

shapes the interaction

of

looking subject (the surviving

or

later-generation spectator) and

his or her perceived objects (the depicted Holocaust victims) : We know . . that they

willa//die(have all died), that their w orld wi ll be (has been) destroyed , and that the future's

(our) only access to it will be (is) through those pictures and through the stories they have

left beh ind (20).The Rings ofSaturn introduces the functionofretrospective knowledge

for thematerial, sensual and haptic qualities of memorial objects when the narrator handles

memorializing texts suchasthe log book in the Sailors' Reading Room and the photograph-

ic account of WWIhe also finds there

{RS

93ff). However, although the narrator initially

appears preoccupied with that tattered tome, itsoon becomes obvious that his fascina-

tion actually stems from the imaginary connections he is able to draw among the assassi-

nation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which caused the outbreak ofWWI; the deathof his

assassin,

the Serbian student Gavrilo Princip, in the casemates ofTheresienstadt; and the

atrocities committed by the Croatian Ustasha during the course ofW W II RS95-99).To this

series of associations might be added a photograph from the liberation ofBergen-Belsen

{RS

60f), which visually anticipates the newspaper imageofUstasha victims

{RS97).

Like

the photographs on which

it

is

based,

the narrator's account here fails to function as a wit-

ness to the past as

it

dissolves into a chain of constantly deferred references.

The ghostly quality of Weiss' photos, to whichIw ould like briefly to return, stems from our

knowledge that the photos are some of

the

last physical objects connected with the dead of

Auschwitz. However,

it

should now be obvious that the spectrality evoked by Holocaust

photographs is not inherent in the images themselves. Rather, the memorial quality of all

photographic images represents

a

cons truction in which image and viewer collude through

the myriad contexts they bring

to

bear. Concrete acts

of

looking

at

photographs and the

mental images evoked by the photographs themselves therefore constitute a third aspect

of visual memory w hich is inextricably intertwined both with the role of images as memo-

ry icons and with their historyasmaterial objects. Like material pic tures, mental images rely

on verbal frames, as our interpretationso f images tend to employaverbal,ratherthanvisu-

al,

idiom. Moreover, by their very nature, immaterial mental images can only be comm uni-

cated through aprocessof remediation which either involves some form ofekphrastic

description orthe translation into other visual forms, such as the useofphotographic

images as materializations of visual perception that we find in The Rings of Saturn. Ifwe

define ekphrasis, following

TamarYacobi,

as a meeting ground of two discrete,ifnot dis-

cordant, perspectival systems where the imported message isnecessarily assimilated


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ENGL ISH LANGUAGE NOTES 44 2 FALL / WINTER

OO6

Sebald's concept of cultural memory is based on the notion that the past is inextricably writ-

ten into the present and that it affects the present in numerous

ways.

As Mark Freeman has

pointed out in an article on trad ition and remembrance of the self and of culture, such a

presence ofthe past is notanobjective given buthasto be constantly actualized by perceiv-

ing subjects (32). One has torealizethe past in the present, in other words , and in order to

do so, one needs to have brought something from the past-some form of mem ory or his-

torical knowledgeinto the present.

Thus,

one must be historically prepared in order suc-

cessfully to perceive the past in the present. InThe Rings of Saturn,the narrator is one such

individual agent of m emory. That his perception of th e Suffolk landscape and its historyis

shaped by subjective and imaginative impressions suggests that there is no single or objec-

tive standard through which the recovery of the past should be accomplished, but rather

stresses the fallacious natureofsubjective perception innon-personal formsofcultural

memory.

The photographic images with which Sebald's narrator illustrates his account serve not as

traces of the past but as materializations of his present perception; due to the ephemeral

nature

of

their reference, they cannot, therefore, facilitate the

act of

bearing witness.

Moreover, individual objects of memory are arranged in a network of family resemblances

established by the narrator in which single events become subordinate to an all-encom-

passing logic of material destruction and cultural decline.Simon Wardhas pointed out that

Sebald often drives the narrator's problematic relationship to his material to the point of cri-

sis;this is particularly so in the final sceneofTheEmigrants,which Ward reads as testing

the ethical limits of seeing (Ward 68). Similarly, historical references in The Ringsof Saturn

are not only embedded in, but progressively mergedwith, the accountof the narrator's

walking tour.The narrative poses as a memorializing activity w ith the explicit goal of exca-

vating a half-forgotten cultural past, yetitsimultaneously serves as a therapeutic tool for

the narrator, who suffers from a form of burn-out after the completion ofaprevious novel

RS3).That the narrator's reflections on time and memory are frequently couched in terms

of looking, and that the archaeological fragments which he discovers in the Suffolk land-

scape depend on his visual sensibility, together point to the conclusion that his unspecified

nervous breakdown is inreality a crisisofvision, which isovercome when the narrator

began in my thoughts to w rite these pages

(RS3f).

Writingand narration serve as reasser-

tions

of

a subjectivity constantly threatened by overwhelming visual experiences. At the

same time, translating visual experience into ekphrastic description and narrative help the

narrator to regain mastery over a past that he feels sliding from his grip: I can remember

precisely how, upon being admitted tothat room on the eighth floor, Ibecame over-

whelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had

now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot (RS4).i

The bli nd , insensate spo t of which the narrator speaks is aptly illustrated by the photo-

graph ofa colourless patch of sky framed in the win dow in his hospital roomatthe begin-

ningofThe Rings ofSaturn {RS4).The photo shows a grilled window through which a


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SILKE HORSTKOTTE

125

rectangle of cloudy sky can be seen. In itself, the photo is fairly banal; its main effect seems

to be to estrange the familiarity of a hospital window. However, in the context of the narra-

tor's description of the past as a single,blind,insensate spot, the image takes on an uncan-

ny dimension. The indexical function commonly ascribed

to

photography now retreats

in

favor of symbolic and iconic meanings. Understood as indexical, the photo wo uld illustrate

the text: this

is

what the narrator saw through the hospital window. But such

a

conven-

tional understanding

of

photography falls short since

it

fails to relate the pho to to the men-

tal imageryof bli nd spots suggested by the narratorspots which clearly evoke a range

of literal as well as figurative resonances. We can, for Instance, symbolically link the empti-

ness of the sky to the narrator's interpretation of the past as a single,

blind,

insensate spot,

while the photograph itself evokes blankness-an absence that

is

invisible

to

the eye, and

has to be understood

in

relation to mental and verbal imagery, rather than as a trul y visua l

phenomena.The photo then functions as a symbol of invisibility. At the same time, through

its formal characteristics,

it

iconically resembles the shape of the book page.Thus,

it

draws

attention

to

the material aspect

of

as well as

to

the encoding systems used

fo r

memory

recording. Furthermore, the depicted window opens

up a

space behind and beyond the

printed textthe sky outside the hospital, but also the narrator's imaginative investment

in

this view.The photograph therefore clearly indicates the narrator's idiopathic appropriation

of an entire visual

f ie ld

where everything outside the self is reduced

to

a symptom

of

the

narrator's mental state.

Several passages in the narrative foreground the subjective specificity ofthe narrator's per-

ception by describing seemingly unremarkable scenes which are then willfully turned into

mythical and fantastic spectacles and overburdened with meaning. Particularly remarkable

in this respect is the narrator's encounter with a couple making love on the deserted beach.

His description transforms this rather ordinary sight into a shocking and uncanny prospect

that demonstrates the unbalanced tension between vision and narrative ekphrasis:

Misshapen, like some great mollusc washed ashore, they

lay

there,

to all

appearances a single being,amany-limbed, two-headed monster that had

drifted

in

from far out

at

sea, the last

of

a prodig ious species,

its

life ebbing

from

it

wit h each breath expired through its nostrils.

{RS

68)

In this description, the mollusc is clearly marked as a simile, and thus as poetic and unreal.

The passage also exposes the narrator's motivation for such an interpretation of sight: if the

mollusc is the last

o f

a prodigious species,

it

perfectly illustrates the narrator's argument

about a general state

of

decline, ruin and destruc tion

of

the envi ronment. Soon after this

observation, however, the narrator's idiosyncratic vision takes on such a force that he finds

himself unable to decide on the reality status of what he has

or

has not seen:

I

turned

to

look back down the deserted stretch

I

had come by, and could no longer have said whether

I had really seen the pale sea monster at the foot

of

the Covehithe cliffs or whether

I

had

imaginedi t {RS69).The narrator now talks about the sea monster not as a simile for what

he saw, but as a potentially real sight.The dreamy quality of this encounter is also a conse-


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ENG LISH LANGUAGE NOTES 44 2 FALL / WINTER OO6

quence of the narrator's loneliness: he is the sole observer in this visual field and there

is

thus no alternative viewpoint which either could support or deny the narrator's claims.The

photograph reproduced immediately follo wing his last remark, however, supports the first

interpretation of the narrator's v ision as an imaginary rather than a potentially real sight,

since it shows a completely desertedbe ch nolove couple, and certainly no sea monster,

is

visible. Thus,

the photograph reinforces our doubts that the monster was real and not a

figment

of

the narrator's imagination

or

a willful interpretation

of

his visual perception,

especially

if

we take into consideration that the photograph itself need not constitute an

objective claim about reality (since photographs in

The Rings ofSaturn

are frequently intro-

duced as materializations of the narrator's perception). Such uncertainty leads to growing

disillusionment in relation to our perception ofthe historical narratives the novel is commit-

ted to retelling.

The testimonial quality oft he narrative becomes itself doubtful when the narrator does not

distinguish between such historical atrocities as the Ustasha massacres and merely imag-

ined catastrophes. At the beginning

of

the third chapter, the narrator's observa tion

of

a

series of tent-like shelters strung out along the coastline south of Lowestoft indicates that

any visual sight may be used to support his interpretation of history as a series of catastro-

phes,

while simultaneously exposing his preference for an aesthetically stylized poetics of

the ruin (cf.

Ward):

It is as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there,

[p] at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation of the miracle longed for since time

immemorial, the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings.

{RS

51f)The photograph [p] inserted into the quoted passage shows a distant beach with a

number of tents stretching along the coastline. However, the narrator then reveals that his

metaphysical interpretation of this scene is nothing more than a flight of fancy: In reality,

however, these men camping out under the heavens have not traversed faraway lands and

deserts to reach this strand. Rather, they are from the immediate neighbourhood, and have

long been in the habit of fishing there .. . {RS52).The imaginative and fantastic nature of

the narrator's gaze thus shapes his construction of history by revealing that his representa-

tion and understanding o fthe historical is based in a negative messianism closely linked to

Walter Benjamin's (on Sebald and Benjamin,cfFuchs, 'Phantom spuren' ). In this essen-

tially metaphysical view ofhistory, the catastrophic past negatively indexes a constantly

deferred salvation; yet the weight of this Interpretation as well as the narrator's crucial role

as a historical witness become fallacious when history is based not on verifiable facts, but

on highly ephemeral acts of vision.

Especially in the context of atrocity memory, the suspension of subject-object boundaries

in the narrator's acts

of

looking, and the resulting shift from an external vision to interior,

mental and poetic imagery, can become highly contentious, because it threatens to obliter-

ate the crucial distinction between the experience of the original witnesses and the second-

order testimony of which Agamben spoke, which can only ever be witnessing-at-a-distance

and thus needs to be based in a heteropathic identification. In light of this shift, the numer-


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SILKE HORSTKOTTE

127

ous atrocities referred to in

The Rings of Saturn

appear to be construed as commemorated

not for their own sake, but for the sake

of

representing the narra tor's psychology

by

dis-

placement; in other words, these narratives can be read metonymically as references to the

melancholia which led to the narrator's commitment in the Norwich hospital, and the whole

travelogue can be understood as a story of vicarious vict imhood .

And yet, photographs and other visual objects can never be completely subordinated to the

subjective gaze and narrative voice oft he narrator because Sebald's bimedial form

of

rep-

resentation introduces a source

of

visuaiity that is directly accessible to readers, therefore

bypassing the problematic ekphrastic representation ofthe narrator's mental images.The

carefully planned arrangement

of

photographic images and verbal text

In The Rings

of

Saturn not only privileges spatiality over the temporal chronology commonly associated

with the relation

of

past and present,

it

also breaks up linear reading patterns, orienting the

reader's eye towards

a

more circular movement. Photography, unlike narrative, doesn't

contain any before or after, and the graphic reproduction

o f

photographic images therefore

necessarily interrupts the sequentiality both

of

the act

o f

narration, and

of

its reception

in

acts

of

reading.

It

has often been remarked that images are spatial, while verbal narrative

is

temporal in nature. However, ithas also been pointed out how often our reading of visual

images is temporal (and in some cases necessarily also narrative). As W. J.T. Mitche ll has

argued,

works

of

art, like all other objects

of

human experience, are structures

in

space-

time,

and

the interesting problem is

to

comprehend

a

particular spatial -temporal con-

struction,

not to label

it

as temporal or spatial

{Iconology

103). Especially when analyzing

an artifact that closely combines verbal and visual media, and whose semantic strategy

therefore depends on their co-presence,

it

is not possible cleanly to separate verbal/tempo-

ral and visual/spatial aspects. Instead, the text

of The RingsofSaturn

itself unfolds a kind

of spatio-temporal topography,

a

meaningfully organized space

in

which the reader

is

not

bound to a linear time scale, but can choose to follow different paths: reading the verbal nar-

rative, then regarding the visual images,

o r

vice versa indeed, this choice can be made

anew with each turn of the page.

The resulting relationship between photography and text is inherently ambivalent. On the

one

hand,

the narrator's ekphrastic descriptions

of

mental images and other visual objects

may be taken as clues to the images' meaning. In that case, the verbal nar rative would limi t

possible interpretations

of

the reproduced photographs and cunningly direct readers'

understanding

of

these images. On the other hand, the photos may evoke readers' own

mental images and thus set

in

motion

a

process similar

to

the narrator's acts

of

vision

described in the verbal narrative.This will result in a more dialogic structure between v isu

al and verbal discourse, in which the reader acts as a mediator. Such (potentially comple-

mentary) processes have consequences

for the

representation

an d

representability

of

memory and subjectivity, chiefly concerning the narrator's intertwining with his material,

since they open up an alternative viewpoint from which

it is

possible

t o

contextualize the

narrator's isolated vision. The narrator's generically ambiguous mix

of

historiography and


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1 2 8

ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 44.2 FALL / WINTER OO6

subjective fiction foregrounds the imaginative and subjective aspects Inherent in all acts of

memory. At the same time , the self-conscious presentation of the narrator's gaze can serve

as

a

model

for

the reading process

ofThe RingsofSaturn,in

which the topographic

arrangement

of

photography and verbal text opens

up an

imag inative space

for

the

reader/spectator's own subjective view ofhistory. herelation between the two encoding

systemsisfurther complicated by the dialectic of blindness and insight associated with both

text and images, but perhaps most urgently present in the latter.

In the last instance, however, the inherent instability ofthe narrator's relation to his materi-

al,

the elusive nature of the past, and the failure of photographic images to function as wit-

nesses all suggest that the narrator's acts of looking are to be understood as an ethically

problematic appropriation of that which lies outside the self just as the narrative merges a

host of events past and present with a formally and thematically idiosyncratic travelogue.

When history is narrated asatravelogue, the chronology of past events becomes reconfig-

ured intoatopography of spaces.The dissolution of subject-object binaries here leads to an

imaginative re-creation of the past with a progressive weakening of temporal boundaries,

indicating that there can be no truly dialogic structure when we are regarding the pain of

others, as Susan Sontag has it

{Regarding the Pain o f

Others).Consequently, the narrator's

gaze constitutes the precise opposite of what Kaja Silverman has termed a heteropa thic

reco llection (185), introducing the no t me into the narrator's memory reserve not by par-

ticipating in the other, but by turning the other into an original and integral part ofth e me

by making the other part ofahighly subjective fictional discourse.

Silke Horstkotte

University of Leipzig

NOTES

iThe description of the past as a bl ind spot is a recurrent theme in Sebald's work. In Au sterlitz in partic-

ular, recollective experience is frequently linkedto looking and visuai i ty, forgettingt obl indness. Thus,

the protag onist describes his mem orial activi ty in terms

of

images r ising and d isappea ring, as in af i lm ;

the inaccessible parts oft he past, on the other hand, resemble bl ind spots: Even today, Austerl i tz con-

t inued,

when Ithinko fmy Rhine journeys,. . .everything becomes confusedi nmy

head:

my

experi-

ences

of

that t ime, what

I

have read, memories surfacing

an d

then sinking

out of

s ight again,

consecutive images an ddistressing blank spo ts where nothin g at all is left. {Austerlitz 319)

Consequently, the visual presence

o f

photographs

in

Sebald's books marks b oth the visu al nature

of

mem ory and the past, and i ts bl indness and/or invisibi l i ty.

W O R K S C I T E D

Anderson,

Mark M. The EdgeofDarkness: OnW. G.

Sebald.

October 106 (2003):

103-21.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography.

NewYork: Hi l l and

Wang,

1981.

Beck,

John.

Reading

Room:

Erosion and SedimentationinSebald's Suffolk.

W. G. SebaldA Critical

Companion. Eds. Jonathan J. Long and AnneWhitehead.Seattle: U of Washingto n R2004.75-88.

Browne,

S i rThomas. Hydriotaphia, urne-buriall: or,Adiscourse ofthe sepulchrall urnes lately foundin


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Documents

Visual Memory and Ekphrasis in w.g. Sebald's the Rings of Saturn