"the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on" (24)
“The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
In Austerlitz, Sebald does not simply reconstruct a history. Crucially, he constructs a landscape, across which we are led on the railway lines and through the streets of Europe, plotting the various spaces and places and things which are a part of our present precisely because of their relationship with the remembered and the forgotten past.
We might consider the status of non-human things, then, not only as part of the space around us – in the alien ocean, the multiple body or the propensity of dispositions – but as fragments of history. Perhaps we need not only grant objects a life of their own, rather than only the life we give them, but also a contingent, changeable, often elusive and emergent historical status. “In what way”, Austerlitz asks, “do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?” (100).
As Austerlitz explores his past, he feels “more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like” (185). Relics in museums, photographs which have a “memory of their own” (182), star-shaped constructions recalling the badge of Jewish oppression; throughout the text, material things orient Austerlitz to his personal history, and the history of a people. He marvels at the “strange edifices we construct” (41); indeed he himself is an architectural historian, and the novel might in some sense be understood as an architectural history. Time, he comes to think, is the “most artificial of all our inventions”; his search is for the material existences that we live and which have been lived.
A sense of the materiality of the fragmented past recalls Walter Benjamin; indeed Benjamin’s Arcades Project is directly invoked in Austerlitz’s memories of Marie, with whom he walks through Paris and sits “for a long time under the arcades” (262). For Benjamin, a stroll through the streets of Paris was a walk through history; through “time filled by the presence of the now” (Theses on the Philosophy of History). The contours and indeed the ruins of material spaces evoke the immediacy of the present which is at once past: “the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical; it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent” (The Arcades Project). The photographic images set provocatively amongst Sebald’s text point to this critical materiality, the flashing up of the past, and are at once simply objects, with a history of their own.
Allan Young, an anthropologist working on PTSD, has commented that every theory of trauma contains a fully formed, if only implicit, theory of memory. Reading Austerlitz, I was in part concerned with trying to work out some of the tensions in what we could call Sebald’s theory of memory. Sebald has written a book that is densely materially populated. His meticulous descriptions (how much research he must have done!) of place is such that it becomes impossible to read the mise-en-scene as simply the stage upon which the action unfolds. Instead, the material world works its way into the dialogue, into the characters, into the plot, but not so much into memory. For all that it is an active participant, the world in which Austerlitz remembers seems at a remove from his remembering. The world triggers memories, the world, strangely, blocks memories, the world, despite itself, has created a black hole in Austerlitz’s and the 20th century’s memory. Yet the memories themselves have little to do with the world in which they are remembered – they are triggered, they emerge, but they do so whole and as if they’d been waiting in a well sealed archive – his Czech is strangely in tact. Allan Young is helpful. He insists that instead of focusing on memory, we turn our attention to remembering. In practice, memories have a much different ontological status, one that might have much more to do with the worlds Sebald has evoked to thoroughly than with the archive that is none-the-less present.
In (and through) Austerlitz, we move to (and through) entombments and labyrinths (cities, libraries, collection cases, zoos, moths, birds, archives, railroad tunnels, streets, cemeteries) that hold, create and recover memories and empty spaces—filling in people and places, traumas, histories of architectures and civilizations, collected.
Pasts, presents (and futures) and are given meaning in relation to these collections. Memories, histories, and beings are made in relation to their collection—animals, whether in a zoo, or in formaldehyde jars, gain different meanings and uses depending on their placement both in the story, and within an environment. We move through various states of being, in relation to time, travel, placement. Ideas move through places “places which have more of the past about them than the present” (257).
We see transformations, and new constructions that come out of and from the old—the train stations, and libraries, information, as Austerlitz discovers his family. These remains are very much a part of fabrics woven into a sense of being, as are the accidents, like the birds crashing into the glass of the Bibliotheque National, or Austerlitz’s breakdown. Meetings, encounters, discoveries, however violent, are not chance at all, but again constructed and gain meaning, in relation. Austerlitz (again, person and book) collects and constructs relations, in ways that are simultaneously emergent and excavational. “any type of project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability” (281). So, we are left with impressions, like the photographs, our senses are imprinted with sentiment, images, darkness, light, movement, sometimes blurry. They work on their own, as fragments, and they work in relation to the other fragments. At the end of the book we move on through someone else’s journey, and I can barely remember if the Nocturama is an experience conveyed by Austerlitz, or the narrator. There is an immanence that moves through objects and encounters, in a ways that are haunting, and ongoing, connected to an ongoingness of place, space, time.
"…as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives” (182-3)
It is difficult not to comment on the power of memory and act of remembering that Sebald so vividly conjures. Both his narrator and Austerlitz, “the only one who was not staring apathetically into space” on the day they "met", could easily be characterized as obsessive recollectors, disregarding of course Austerlitz’s tragic rupture with his own past. Indeed, it is precisely at the moment when Austerlitz can no longer recollect things for himself (221) that Sebald introduces a new element into the process of remembering. Even if places and objects don’t empirically have the power of memory as we know it, and even if the book’s narrative and plot is not strictly centered on how objects, pictures, spaces, and animals are entangled in our memories, thus helping us remember, it certainly hints toward how these inanimate (or rather not so inanimate?) entities are themselves witnesses and collectors of the passing of time. But is this fiction of inclusions of every detailed space and object more than nostalgic reflection? Or are we forgetting (or disregarding) something important about the property (should I call it propensity?) of the rest of things that allows us to think of ourselves as the only ones trapped in memory and nostalgia?
"… how it even seemed to me as if the silent facades of the buildings knew something ominous about me…" (216)
Austerlitz, the man, as we got to know him in the narrator’s second group of meetings (after 1996) becomes desolate, hopeless, and melancholic. We hear of his breakdown, his hysterical epilepsy. Indeed, we are reading a horror story. [I personally was struck hard by the emptiness in this man.] But this did not last. As readers, we reflect on what we have just read at the same time as we are reading, and something brilliant emerges. This is to say, Austerlitz (and us), even in our desolation, find in our memories, certain details that become the substance of our lives. Austerlitz is not desolate, because he is not without something; he is not without his memories. But the memory as a glob is not what is important; rather it is those details that seem to have an eternal characteristic. In our retrospection, the minutest of things come into a kind of brilliant focus for us (in a way as though we all have those uncanny eyes of Wittgenstein on page 5). Our focus becomes waiting rooms, stairs, pigeons, the curious older man who always sits beside us in the Bibliotheque Nationale, or the flight of a moth as our friends’ great-uncle shines a light to attract them. Sebald (and our memories) bring to us the fragility of these fleeting moments. Like Jacob, I could not get over the intensity in which Sebald, Austerlitz and the narrator attend to these details, not in a manner in which to deduce them to their minutest of parts or simply, as other writers do, to describe them with endless adjectives; but to simply acknowledge them as they are (and as they are when they (these things) are in our presence). Thus, a perfect example of this, is when discussing Sir Isaac Newton to the narrator, Austerlitz simply points to the glistening of the water around the Isle of Dogs (100). What in Austerlitz demanded that he brought this to the attention of the narrator? What memory was evoked in Austerlitz mind that became so overwhelmingly powerful, that he just had to share the glistening of the water with the narrator?
Austerlitz forces us to consider the significance of our memory in the worlds we form and the world we live in. We then must consider the intimacy of our relationship between us and things (in the immediate present) and our relationship with those same things (and us) as they exist in our memory.
Austerlitz begins with a meditation on fortification; this prepares the reader for two currents that run through the text. First, an intense engagement with space and place that both troubles conceptions of ‘context’ while it simultaneously rehearses them. Both narrator and Austerlitz are deeply aware of their surroundings, describing at length the structures, designs, and milieus in which they find themselves, and the effects of such constructions. Such description simultaneously invokes these inhabited spaces as external to the speakers, as that which is there to be seen, observed, remembered, or forgotten, while it also resists the temptation to enact such structures as stable or empty, relevant only in the background. “…I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on” (24). The environments of Austerlitz are pushed and pulled around time and space; questioned about their histories, their designers, their inhabitants; and engaged as nexuses of intentionality and unexpectedness, places deeply theorized by their makers and occupants, and also as sites that are mindlessly passed through, as architectural and strategic blunders repeated and valorized.
The second current initiated by this talk of fortification is an engagement with memory and time. Here, as with the first, the regularity and stable linearity of time is resisted at the same time that Sebald’s/Austerlitz’s notions of memory reinscribe those very notions. Austerlitz’s recovered memories seem to emerge intact – his vivid recollections of passing through certain places at the age of 4, his sudden memory of Czech upon his first conversation with Vera – and his life unravels as a series of refusals, losses, and blindnesses necessitated by the tragic disruption of his original happy life, participating fully in the homage to trauma that is the standard approach to all things Holocaust. Fortification thus foreshadows a lifetime of futile efforts to suppress memories; indeed, opening with a discussion of forts sets the tone for the arc of Austerlitz’s life. At the same time, linear time is invoked as produced: it is the achievement of capital, industry, and the calibration of train systems; time is still in some places, it races in others, while a variety of epochs exist contemporaneously in others; and death, history, and mourning sit alongside the banal regularities of the everyday present. “… Might it not be… that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?” (258). Sebald’s narrative thus pushes the modernist limits of time and space, freely immersing the reader in worlds that do not obey such neat laws, while he simultaneously upholds those limits, appealing to tropes of trauma and testimony as any proper engagement with Nazis, apparently, must.
I enjoyed the book, it got me really thinking about the relationship between memory, history, and the material consecration of time. I pulled a few quotes to maybe start critically engaging this interface, for its function (or at least our perception of) certainly has consequence in the general practice of historical representation, and maybe more so resonates in the uneasiness I often feel about the usage of history in analytical contexts (something like Nietzche’s ‘Uses and Abuses of History’). To begin:
1. The Fragile Archive: “...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and object which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never discussed or passed on.”
I thought the imagery of ‘draining’ was perfect- great word for the general/ inevitable/ natural/ ‘necessary’ undoing of particularized social organizations over time, and in affect, historical experiences in these epochs, human experiences in these idiosyncratic moments are lost through the shear limitations in the archive of the mind, or simply just the limit in the capacity of human function (i.e. memory); hemorrhaging bodies and ephemeral moments- leaving in their wake only the ostensible markers (architecture, buildings; systems of organization, transit systems) as our link to certain knowledge- knowledge in a temporally specified moment of life. Continuing:
A Reversal, or The Utilization of Limit: “...but it has become clear to me of late why an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions...”
Here, the limitation in human memory functions such that continuity for the ‘knower’ can exist, so the extent of memory (a diminishing capacity to remember: like the repression of latent trauma when one has a horrific accident, or the quasi-automated forgetting Auschwitz embodies when he denies the realities of his unknown history) is mobilized in becoming, to allow for the embedding and naturalization of events- but is this an inhered defensive posture or simple visceral reaction [alluding to ‘operation’ above]? At any rate, the limits of memory can be positive; loss of ‘knowledge/ of experience’ productive in a way. But can you loss knowledge, especially the knowledge A. possessed? Maybe then this is just scaffolding built over unforgettable truths. And finally:
3.”Our concern with history [as an archive that extends a limited memory], so Hillary’s thesis ran, is a concern with performed images already imprinted on our brains [representations], images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.”
And as we try to grapple with the hidden truths locked deeply within these material sites (historical practice), excavation and history draw us deeper [descent] into the past, preventing the knower from ever catching site of the present- meaning then that history, as an experience in a previous time, functions in turn with the limited archive of the mind as itself a limitation, much like the way histories of architecture captivated Aushcwitz’s attention in futile attempt to mask the questions of his own forgotten experiences.
Austerlitz can be read in many different ways. Personally, reading Austerlitz with Jullien’s notion of shi still in mind was both interesting and challenging. It was hard not to think about ‘the propensity of things’ (or the notion of disposition) in the detailed descriptions of buildings, landscape, and even photographs and the ways in which they became part of how things are remembered (both consciously and unconsciously).
Austerlitz also challenged me to think about past ‘events’ in terms of the present. For Austerlitz, his tracing of his past and how these revealed pasts are incorporated into who he is or how he has lived situate past events in a space where “all moments of time… [co-exist] simultaneously,” (p. 101). For him, they are never things that once happened, but always in the present, written into memories, buildings, relationships, photographs, rucksack, etc.
This then led me to questions about memory or remembering and to questions of writing about them. The way Austerlitz’s story is told is how I imagine memory or remembering would look like. The story is not organized into structured sections, chapters or paragraphs. If it has to be chronologically framed, it is in the order in which the story was (once again) recalled, remembered and retold. Thus time is linked with moments that certain memories were remembered and the actions and landscapes that accompanied them, rather than the memories themselves. Austerlitz, Sebald writes, said “memories were revealing themselves to me not by means of any mental effort but through my senses, so long numbed and now coming back to life,” (p. 150). It is interesting that Sebald writes about his lost of sight in one eye and his recollection of the eyes of nocturnal animals when Austerlitz’s senses, especially sight was what brought so many memories “back to life.” In Sebald’s textual construction of Austerlitz’s accounts, both the writer and the ‘subject’ are equally present. What seems to separate the story telling from the actual moments which Austerlitz remembered his past is that the story telling is actively ‘recalled’ while the moments are revealed. They are, however, both in conversation with the world in which these memories and stories were created, remembered and told.
In "Austertlitz" the confluence of memory, place, and objects, even animals or humans, represents the establishment of a reality of associative relationships. Austerlitz, the man (not the book), patterns his story through the sites and images encountered during his travels and conversations, effectually periodizing his memories. Sebald writes similarly to the associative method of his character, Austerlitz, incorporating photographs and blueprints into the text, itself divided contextually instead of through paragraphs. This style is often used in literary texts, especially from the early modernist traditions of Woolf, Joyce, and (some printings of) Proust, generally as a means of establishing a chain of significant associations as opposed to divided thought, catalogued like a library shelf through paragraphs. The style itself is of utmost importance to us, while reading the novel, mirroring the mode by which the narrator and Austerlitz converse and mark their memories. In my experience with Sebald, comparisons are often made to past European literary styles, which may be valid; however this particular novel stands out because the nostalgia of its associations are intended for the reader more so than the characters, and the associations are the way that Austerlitz recalls his experiences or organizes his knowledge. As an architect he charts his travels through buildings and their purposes, and the narrator involves the reader by juxtaposing animals and place descriptions with his observations, incorporating presence with form as both supplementary to and representing the narration. We could not understand Austerlitz without incorporating his mode of absorbing his surrounding, which, for the reader, embodies his being. In turn the narrator's own incorporation of surroundings and observations provides further insight into Austerlitz as a subject of interpretation. In effect, we are provided with a presentation of memories as marked by their multiplicities (to borrow from Mol, yet again) of location, actors (human and animal), encapsulated images (such as blueprints, or photographs/photo-memories; also similar to Jullien's discussion on drawings and calligraphy), manufactured and natural objects, etc. How does this fit into our other readings thus far? It seems that the best response (for me) is that "Austerlitz" does not present the story of a character encapsulated within himself, but instead the story of a character whose identity is a corporate part the novel as much as his past, and the past of those connected to him. We as readers probably could not understand the novel or the character Austerlitz without this incorporation as fragmentation of associations would possibly diminish the strength of Sebald's presentation. Instead the stylized associations of memories constructs a complete reality that we can only understand by making the same associations ourselves.
“No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.” (25)
There is a lot to talk about with this difficult text. But, as far as this course goes, a few questions. First, How does the protagonist relate to various places? I have a Jewish friend who related to me recently that her mother does not like Germany. According to my friend, her mother’s problem is not with the current state of Germany, but rather with what past it signifies. My friend did not share the same feelings as her mother. And it makes me wonder what exactly is going on here? What gives a place its trauma? This is not unrelated to the text. I bring this up because as the narrator suggests, the reason why Austerlitz did not respond to his letters, and their relationship was severed for twenty years, was because he did not want to send letters to Germany. With this in mind, I wonder, how exactly is the past, the “spectacles of history” (71), brought to life in the present?
Related to this last question, is the question of what exactly are the images (or mementos) in the text doing? As Andre Hillary says, “our concern with history is… a concern with performed images already imprinted in our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” (72) Where?
And lastly, what is the relationship between structure and feeling in the text? And I do not mean just what is being conveyed through content, but also through the form of the narration. For instance, as we read a passage, the lack of paragraph breaks seems to do something to the temporality of the narration that strings together various states so as to break down borders between subject and world (or so that is what I thought).
What, really, is this book about? One possibility is that it's about the ways in which we remember what we remember - with our senses; through our relations with people, animals, things, places, institutions, histories; and in the difficult excavation of the "the vortex of past time" (129). So it's a book about how and why memory (or its loss) matters in the present - for these two characters, in the context of historically embedded trauma, and also, I think, in an even more general sense. Along with this, Sebald is concerned with the place of humankind and "civilization" within the natural world. "Nature" and "culture" are, of course, not reified, distinct wholes here; Sebald's interest is precisely that these relationships are so complex, political, and, at times, ineffable. So it's also a book about the difficulties and the joys of seeing, representing, and appreciating the vast plane of shared existences of which we humans are but one part. But it's more about questioning epistemological limits than trying to necessarily understand the epistemologies of others. How to do justice to the differences between us and other beings? And upon what grounds can we assume a common understanding? Can and should we assume, for instance, that "a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks up at the moon by night" (94)? To what extent are these ethical questions for Sebald?
Sebald's style and narrative construction, too, offer interesting ways to think about how to express the ineffable. While fragmented over time and space and rather stream-of-consciousness in content, the story is still kept as a structural whole with very few breaks. Along with the interspersing of text and image, this construction suggests that existence is a kind of dynamic, rhizomatic assemblage.
Reading “Austerlitz,” I feel awash in a stream of loosely-linked details, which, when knotted together through stream-of-consciousness reverie—though often without a sense of exuberance, as, indeed, I would have liked to have found by such, at times, hallucinogenic meanderings into the extraordinary—and virtually paragraphless prose, imparts a sense of profound isolation, wanderlust, and ennui. It reminds me of a scene in the BBC's “Planet Earth” series, which, in it's high definitional clarity, showed a lone polar bear swimming aimlessly in the liquefying arctic, abandoned in what might well have been a spaceless expanse of cold ocean, yet was in fact occasionally dotted with floating stepping-stones of ice, which, I can consequently imagine, would whirl and pirouette should one have tried to grasp it for support—an unweighted buoy. Floundering and woebegone, our polar bear cum narrator similarly drifts at times aimlessly in a monochrome sea of places, objects, people, memories, suppositions, and observations, blurring the boundaries of each into a smeared, impressionistic portrait of a life in desperate search of origins. Thrust forward into this text, having missed a careful dose of set and setting, I found myself paled in what seemed like a terrible hallucinogenic trip, whose constant pacing refused to let me comfortably fill my lungs with air or momentarily reflect upon what I had just read. Instead, the cold ocean breach stung my oxygen-starved alveoli, and I thought, why? In composing this response, and especially remembering David Attenborough's despair, positioning myself within this emotional framing, I have come to understand the stylistic approach which so grated upon me all week in its ceaseless journeyings, starts and stops, reversals, and vitalistic swellings. It does much to capture and simulate a living, breathing world, populated with unprovoked associations—the ornithological systems of bird flight propelling into the feeling of weightlessness in an airborne craft, dwarfed beneath a sky of stars and interstellar gas, contracting into new cosmic beings, which in itself simulates the very cognitive workings of Gerald's thinking (which unfortunately is not an anagram of W.G. Sebald). Finally, I am made to reflect upon the similarities in style between Sebald's writing and the hallucinatory references made partially in jest earlier. Michael Taussig, in his book Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study of Terror and Healing, describes Yagé vision as follows: “The 'mystical insights' given by visions and tumbling fragments of memory pictures oscillating in a polyphonic discursive room full of leaping shadows and sensory pandemonium are not insights granted by depths mysterious and other. Rather, they are made, not granted, in the ability of montage to provoke sudden and infinite connections between dissimilars in an endless or almost endless process of connection-making and connection-breaking” (441). To cite myself, from a paper written on some productive effects of intoxication: “The hallucinatory montage creates a sense of time through the splicing of images and moments. Its fragmentary scenery combines to generate new connections and meanings—ones that were not thinkable before. Familiar experiences, memories, and images are jumbled together in an alien world, where there is no moment-to-moment stability, only stumbling across a fractured landscape. The thread of time is broken, but in a different respect than that of the hashish trance: time is produced by the fissions and fusions—baroque folds?—of spatiality. There are gaps between images, but they do not signal loss of information, but, rather, the generation of information. Each image’s surroundings alters our perceptions of its colorful content—hold me in a different light and I am other.”
"the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on" (24)
ReplyDelete“The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
In Austerlitz, Sebald does not simply reconstruct a history. Crucially, he constructs a landscape, across which we are led on the railway lines and through the streets of Europe, plotting the various spaces and places and things which are a part of our present precisely because of their relationship with the remembered and the forgotten past.
We might consider the status of non-human things, then, not only as part of the space around us – in the alien ocean, the multiple body or the propensity of dispositions – but as fragments of history. Perhaps we need not only grant objects a life of their own, rather than only the life we give them, but also a contingent, changeable, often elusive and emergent historical status. “In what way”, Austerlitz asks, “do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?” (100).
As Austerlitz explores his past, he feels “more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like” (185). Relics in museums, photographs which have a “memory of their own” (182), star-shaped constructions recalling the badge of Jewish oppression; throughout the text, material things orient Austerlitz to his personal history, and the history of a people. He marvels at the “strange edifices we construct” (41); indeed he himself is an architectural historian, and the novel might in some sense be understood as an architectural history. Time, he comes to think, is the “most artificial of all our inventions”; his search is for the material existences that we live and which have been lived.
A sense of the materiality of the fragmented past recalls Walter Benjamin; indeed Benjamin’s Arcades Project is directly invoked in Austerlitz’s memories of Marie, with whom he walks through Paris and sits “for a long time under the arcades” (262). For Benjamin, a stroll through the streets of Paris was a walk through history; through “time filled by the presence of the now” (Theses on the Philosophy of History). The contours and indeed the ruins of material spaces evoke the immediacy of the present which is at once past: “the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical; it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent” (The Arcades Project). The photographic images set provocatively amongst Sebald’s text point to this critical materiality, the flashing up of the past, and are at once simply objects, with a history of their own.
Allan Young, an anthropologist working on PTSD, has commented that every theory of trauma contains a fully formed, if only implicit, theory of memory. Reading Austerlitz, I was in part concerned with trying to work out some of the tensions in what we could call Sebald’s theory of memory. Sebald has written a book that is densely materially populated. His meticulous descriptions (how much research he must have done!) of place is such that it becomes impossible to read the mise-en-scene as simply the stage upon which the action unfolds. Instead, the material world works its way into the dialogue, into the characters, into the plot, but not so much into memory. For all that it is an active participant, the world in which Austerlitz remembers seems at a remove from his remembering. The world triggers memories, the world, strangely, blocks memories, the world, despite itself, has created a black hole in Austerlitz’s and the 20th century’s memory. Yet the memories themselves have little to do with the world in which they are remembered – they are triggered, they emerge, but they do so whole and as if they’d been waiting in a well sealed archive – his Czech is strangely in tact. Allan Young is helpful. He insists that instead of focusing on memory, we turn our attention to remembering. In practice, memories have a much different ontological status, one that might have much more to do with the worlds Sebald has evoked to thoroughly than with the archive that is none-the-less present.
ReplyDeleteNina Mehta
ReplyDeleteIn (and through) Austerlitz, we move to (and through) entombments and labyrinths (cities, libraries, collection cases, zoos, moths, birds, archives, railroad tunnels, streets, cemeteries) that hold, create and recover memories and empty spaces—filling in people and places, traumas, histories of architectures and civilizations, collected.
Pasts, presents (and futures) and are given meaning in relation to these collections. Memories, histories, and beings are made in relation to their collection—animals, whether in a zoo, or in formaldehyde jars, gain different meanings and uses depending on their placement both in the story, and within an environment. We move through various states of being, in relation to time, travel, placement. Ideas move through places “places which have more of the past about them than the present” (257).
We see transformations, and new constructions that come out of and from the old—the train stations, and libraries, information, as Austerlitz discovers his family. These remains are very much a part of fabrics woven into a sense of being, as are the accidents, like the birds crashing into the glass of the Bibliotheque National, or Austerlitz’s breakdown. Meetings, encounters, discoveries, however violent, are not chance at all, but again constructed and gain meaning, in relation. Austerlitz (again, person and book) collects and constructs relations, in ways that are simultaneously emergent and excavational.
“any type of project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability” (281). So, we are left with impressions, like the photographs, our senses are imprinted with sentiment, images, darkness, light, movement, sometimes blurry. They work on their own, as fragments, and they work in relation to the other fragments. At the end of the book we move on through someone else’s journey, and I can barely remember if the Nocturama is an experience conveyed by Austerlitz, or the narrator. There is an immanence that moves through objects and encounters, in a ways that are haunting, and ongoing, connected to an ongoingness of place, space, time.
"…as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives” (182-3)
ReplyDeleteIt is difficult not to comment on the power of memory and act of remembering that Sebald so vividly conjures. Both his narrator and Austerlitz, “the only one who was not staring apathetically into space” on the day they "met", could easily be characterized as obsessive recollectors, disregarding of course Austerlitz’s tragic rupture with his own past. Indeed, it is precisely at the moment when Austerlitz can no longer recollect things for himself (221) that Sebald introduces a new element into the process of remembering. Even if places and objects don’t empirically have the power of memory as we know it, and even if the book’s narrative and plot is not strictly centered on how objects, pictures, spaces, and animals are entangled in our memories, thus helping us remember, it certainly hints toward how these inanimate (or rather not so inanimate?) entities are themselves witnesses and collectors of the passing of time. But is this fiction of inclusions of every detailed space and object more than nostalgic reflection? Or are we forgetting (or disregarding) something important about the property (should I call it propensity?) of the rest of things that allows us to think of ourselves as the only ones trapped in memory and nostalgia?
"… how it even seemed to me as if the silent facades of the buildings knew something ominous about me…" (216)
Austerlitz, the man, as we got to know him in the narrator’s second group of meetings (after 1996) becomes desolate, hopeless, and melancholic. We hear of his breakdown, his hysterical epilepsy. Indeed, we are reading a horror story. [I personally was struck hard by the emptiness in this man.] But this did not last. As readers, we reflect on what we have just read at the same time as we are reading, and something brilliant emerges. This is to say, Austerlitz (and us), even in our desolation, find in our memories, certain details that become the substance of our lives. Austerlitz is not desolate, because he is not without something; he is not without his memories. But the memory as a glob is not what is important; rather it is those details that seem to have an eternal characteristic. In our retrospection, the minutest of things come into a kind of brilliant focus for us (in a way as though we all have those uncanny eyes of Wittgenstein on page 5). Our focus becomes waiting rooms, stairs, pigeons, the curious older man who always sits beside us in the Bibliotheque Nationale, or the flight of a moth as our friends’ great-uncle shines a light to attract them. Sebald (and our memories) bring to us the fragility of these fleeting moments. Like Jacob, I could not get over the intensity in which Sebald, Austerlitz and the narrator attend to these details, not in a manner in which to deduce them to their minutest of parts or simply, as other writers do, to describe them with endless adjectives; but to simply acknowledge them as they are (and as they are when they (these things) are in our presence). Thus, a perfect example of this, is when discussing Sir Isaac Newton to the narrator, Austerlitz simply points to the glistening of the water around the Isle of Dogs (100). What in Austerlitz demanded that he brought this to the attention of the narrator? What memory was evoked in Austerlitz mind that became so overwhelmingly powerful, that he just had to share the glistening of the water with the narrator?
ReplyDeleteAusterlitz forces us to consider the significance of our memory in the worlds we form and the world we live in. We then must consider the intimacy of our relationship between us and things (in the immediate present) and our relationship with those same things (and us) as they exist in our memory.
Austerlitz begins with a meditation on fortification; this prepares the reader for two currents that run through the text. First, an intense engagement with space and place that both troubles conceptions of ‘context’ while it simultaneously rehearses them. Both narrator and Austerlitz are deeply aware of their surroundings, describing at length the structures, designs, and milieus in which they find themselves, and the effects of such constructions. Such description simultaneously invokes these inhabited spaces as external to the speakers, as that which is there to be seen, observed, remembered, or forgotten, while it also resists the temptation to enact such structures as stable or empty, relevant only in the background. “…I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on” (24). The environments of Austerlitz are pushed and pulled around time and space; questioned about their histories, their designers, their inhabitants; and engaged as nexuses of intentionality and unexpectedness, places deeply theorized by their makers and occupants, and also as sites that are mindlessly passed through, as architectural and strategic blunders repeated and valorized.
ReplyDeleteThe second current initiated by this talk of fortification is an engagement with memory and time. Here, as with the first, the regularity and stable linearity of time is resisted at the same time that Sebald’s/Austerlitz’s notions of memory reinscribe those very notions. Austerlitz’s recovered memories seem to emerge intact – his vivid recollections of passing through certain places at the age of 4, his sudden memory of Czech upon his first conversation with Vera – and his life unravels as a series of refusals, losses, and blindnesses necessitated by the tragic disruption of his original happy life, participating fully in the homage to trauma that is the standard approach to all things Holocaust. Fortification thus foreshadows a lifetime of futile efforts to suppress memories; indeed, opening with a discussion of forts sets the tone for the arc of Austerlitz’s life. At the same time, linear time is invoked as produced: it is the achievement of capital, industry, and the calibration of train systems; time is still in some places, it races in others, while a variety of epochs exist contemporaneously in others; and death, history, and mourning sit alongside the banal regularities of the everyday present. “… Might it not be… that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?” (258). Sebald’s narrative thus pushes the modernist limits of time and space, freely immersing the reader in worlds that do not obey such neat laws, while he simultaneously upholds those limits, appealing to tropes of trauma and testimony as any proper engagement with Nazis, apparently, must.
I enjoyed the book, it got me really thinking about the relationship between memory, history, and the material consecration of time. I pulled a few quotes to maybe start critically engaging this interface, for its function (or at least our perception of) certainly has consequence in the general practice of historical representation, and maybe more so resonates in the uneasiness I often feel about the usage of history in analytical contexts (something like Nietzche’s ‘Uses and Abuses of History’). To begin:
ReplyDelete1. The Fragile Archive: “...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and object which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never discussed or passed on.”
I thought the imagery of ‘draining’ was perfect- great word for the general/ inevitable/ natural/ ‘necessary’ undoing of particularized social organizations over time, and in affect, historical experiences in these epochs, human experiences in these idiosyncratic moments are lost through the shear limitations in the archive of the mind, or simply just the limit in the capacity of human function (i.e. memory); hemorrhaging bodies and ephemeral moments- leaving in their wake only the ostensible markers (architecture, buildings; systems of organization, transit systems) as our link to certain knowledge- knowledge in a temporally specified moment of life. Continuing:
A Reversal, or The Utilization of Limit: “...but it has become clear to me of late why an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions...”
Here, the limitation in human memory functions such that continuity for the ‘knower’ can exist, so the extent of memory (a diminishing capacity to remember: like the repression of latent trauma when one has a horrific accident, or the quasi-automated forgetting Auschwitz embodies when he denies the realities of his unknown history) is mobilized in becoming, to allow for the embedding and naturalization of events- but is this an inhered defensive posture or simple visceral reaction [alluding to ‘operation’ above]? At any rate, the limits of memory can be positive; loss of ‘knowledge/ of experience’ productive in a way. But can you loss knowledge, especially the knowledge A. possessed? Maybe then this is just scaffolding built over unforgettable truths. And finally:
3.”Our concern with history [as an archive that extends a limited memory], so Hillary’s thesis ran, is a concern with performed images already imprinted on our brains [representations], images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.”
And as we try to grapple with the hidden truths locked deeply within these material sites (historical practice), excavation and history draw us deeper [descent] into the past, preventing the knower from ever catching site of the present- meaning then that history, as an experience in a previous time, functions in turn with the limited archive of the mind as itself a limitation, much like the way histories of architecture captivated Aushcwitz’s attention in futile attempt to mask the questions of his own forgotten experiences.
Austerlitz can be read in many different ways. Personally, reading Austerlitz with Jullien’s notion of shi still in mind was both interesting and challenging. It was hard not to think about ‘the propensity of things’ (or the notion of disposition) in the detailed descriptions of buildings, landscape, and even photographs and the ways in which they became part of how things are remembered (both consciously and unconsciously).
ReplyDeleteAusterlitz also challenged me to think about past ‘events’ in terms of the present. For Austerlitz, his tracing of his past and how these revealed pasts are incorporated into who he is or how he has lived situate past events in a space where “all moments of time… [co-exist] simultaneously,” (p. 101). For him, they are never things that once happened, but always in the present, written into memories, buildings, relationships, photographs, rucksack, etc.
This then led me to questions about memory or remembering and to questions of writing about them. The way Austerlitz’s story is told is how I imagine memory or remembering would look like. The story is not organized into structured sections, chapters or paragraphs. If it has to be chronologically framed, it is in the order in which the story was (once again) recalled, remembered and retold. Thus time is linked with moments that certain memories were remembered and the actions and landscapes that accompanied them, rather than the memories themselves. Austerlitz, Sebald writes, said “memories were revealing themselves to me not by means of any mental effort but through my senses, so long numbed and now coming back to life,” (p. 150). It is interesting that Sebald writes about his lost of sight in one eye and his recollection of the eyes of nocturnal animals when Austerlitz’s senses, especially sight was what brought so many memories “back to life.” In Sebald’s textual construction of Austerlitz’s accounts, both the writer and the ‘subject’ are equally present. What seems to separate the story telling from the actual moments which Austerlitz remembered his past is that the story telling is actively ‘recalled’ while the moments are revealed. They are, however, both in conversation with the world in which these memories and stories were created, remembered and told.
In "Austertlitz" the confluence of memory, place, and objects, even animals or humans, represents the establishment of a reality of associative relationships. Austerlitz, the man (not the book), patterns his story through the sites and images encountered during his travels and conversations, effectually periodizing his memories. Sebald writes similarly to the associative method of his character, Austerlitz, incorporating photographs and blueprints into the text, itself divided contextually instead of through paragraphs. This style is often used in literary texts, especially from the early modernist traditions of Woolf, Joyce, and (some printings of) Proust, generally as a means of establishing a chain of significant associations as opposed to divided thought, catalogued like a library shelf through paragraphs. The style itself is of utmost importance to us, while reading the novel, mirroring the mode by which the narrator and Austerlitz converse and mark their memories. In my experience with Sebald, comparisons are often made to past European literary styles, which may be valid; however this particular novel stands out because the nostalgia of its associations are intended for the reader more so than the characters, and the associations are the way that Austerlitz recalls his experiences or organizes his knowledge. As an architect he charts his travels through buildings and their purposes, and the narrator involves the reader by juxtaposing animals and place descriptions with his observations, incorporating presence with form as both supplementary to and representing the narration. We could not understand Austerlitz without incorporating his mode of absorbing his surrounding, which, for the reader, embodies his being. In turn the narrator's own incorporation of surroundings and observations provides further insight into Austerlitz as a subject of interpretation. In effect, we are provided with a presentation of memories as marked by their multiplicities (to borrow from Mol, yet again) of location, actors (human and animal), encapsulated images (such as blueprints, or photographs/photo-memories; also similar to Jullien's discussion on drawings and calligraphy), manufactured and natural objects, etc. How does this fit into our other readings thus far? It seems that the best response (for me) is that "Austerlitz" does not present the story of a character encapsulated within himself, but instead the story of a character whose identity is a corporate part the novel as much as his past, and the past of those connected to him. We as readers probably could not understand the novel or the character Austerlitz without this incorporation as fragmentation of associations would possibly diminish the strength of Sebald's presentation. Instead the stylized associations of memories constructs a complete reality that we can only understand by making the same associations ourselves.
ReplyDelete“No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.” (25)
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot to talk about with this difficult text. But, as far as this course goes, a few questions. First, How does the protagonist relate to various places? I have a Jewish friend who related to me recently that her mother does not like Germany. According to my friend, her mother’s problem is not with the current state of Germany, but rather with what past it signifies. My friend did not share the same feelings as her mother. And it makes me wonder what exactly is going on here? What gives a place its trauma? This is not unrelated to the text. I bring this up because as the narrator suggests, the reason why Austerlitz did not respond to his letters, and their relationship was severed for twenty years, was because he did not want to send letters to Germany. With this in mind, I wonder, how exactly is the past, the “spectacles of history” (71), brought to life in the present?
Related to this last question, is the question of what exactly are the images (or mementos) in the text doing? As Andre Hillary says, “our concern with history is… a concern with performed images already imprinted in our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” (72) Where?
And lastly, what is the relationship between structure and feeling in the text? And I do not mean just what is being conveyed through content, but also through the form of the narration. For instance, as we read a passage, the lack of paragraph breaks seems to do something to the temporality of the narration that strings together various states so as to break down borders between subject and world (or so that is what I thought).
What, really, is this book about? One possibility is that it's about the ways in which we remember what we remember - with our senses; through our relations with people, animals, things, places, institutions, histories; and in the difficult excavation of the "the vortex of past time" (129). So it's a book about how and why memory (or its loss) matters in the present - for these two characters, in the context of historically embedded trauma, and also, I think, in an even more general sense. Along with this, Sebald is concerned with the place of humankind and "civilization" within the natural world. "Nature" and "culture" are, of course, not reified, distinct wholes here; Sebald's interest is precisely that these relationships are so complex, political, and, at times, ineffable. So it's also a book about the difficulties and the joys of seeing, representing, and appreciating the vast plane of shared existences of which we humans are but one part. But it's more about questioning epistemological limits than trying to necessarily understand the epistemologies of others. How to do justice to the differences between us and other beings? And upon what grounds can we assume a common understanding? Can and should we assume, for instance, that "a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks up at the moon by night" (94)? To what extent are these ethical questions for Sebald?
ReplyDeleteSebald's style and narrative construction, too, offer interesting ways to think about how to express the ineffable. While fragmented over time and space and rather stream-of-consciousness in content, the story is still kept as a structural whole with very few breaks. Along with the interspersing of text and image, this construction suggests that existence is a kind of dynamic, rhizomatic assemblage.
Reading “Austerlitz,” I feel awash in a stream of loosely-linked details, which, when knotted together through stream-of-consciousness reverie—though often without a sense of exuberance, as, indeed, I would have liked to have found by such, at times, hallucinogenic meanderings into the extraordinary—and virtually paragraphless prose, imparts a sense of profound isolation, wanderlust, and ennui. It reminds me of a scene in the BBC's “Planet Earth” series, which, in it's high definitional clarity, showed a lone polar bear swimming aimlessly in the liquefying arctic, abandoned in what might well have been a spaceless expanse of cold ocean, yet was in fact occasionally dotted with floating stepping-stones of ice, which, I can consequently imagine, would whirl and pirouette should one have tried to grasp it for support—an unweighted buoy. Floundering and woebegone, our polar bear cum narrator similarly drifts at times aimlessly in a monochrome sea of places, objects, people, memories, suppositions, and observations, blurring the boundaries of each into a smeared, impressionistic portrait of a life in desperate search of origins. Thrust forward into this text, having missed a careful dose of set and setting, I found myself paled in what seemed like a terrible hallucinogenic trip, whose constant pacing refused to let me comfortably fill my lungs with air or momentarily reflect upon what I had just read. Instead, the cold ocean breach stung my oxygen-starved alveoli, and I thought, why? In composing this response, and especially remembering David Attenborough's despair, positioning myself within this emotional framing, I have come to understand the stylistic approach which so grated upon me all week in its ceaseless journeyings, starts and stops, reversals, and vitalistic swellings. It does much to capture and simulate a living, breathing world, populated with unprovoked associations—the ornithological systems of bird flight propelling into the feeling of weightlessness in an airborne craft, dwarfed beneath a sky of stars and interstellar gas, contracting into new cosmic beings, which in itself simulates the very cognitive workings of Gerald's thinking (which unfortunately is not an anagram of W.G. Sebald). Finally, I am made to reflect upon the similarities in style between Sebald's writing and the hallucinatory references made partially in jest earlier. Michael Taussig, in his book Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study of Terror and Healing, describes Yagé vision as follows: “The 'mystical insights' given by visions and tumbling fragments of memory pictures oscillating in a polyphonic discursive room full of leaping shadows and sensory pandemonium are not insights granted by depths mysterious and other. Rather, they are made, not granted, in the ability of montage to provoke sudden and infinite connections between dissimilars in an endless or almost endless process of connection-making and connection-breaking” (441). To cite myself, from a paper written on some productive effects of intoxication: “The hallucinatory montage creates a sense of time through the splicing of images and moments. Its fragmentary scenery combines to generate new connections and meanings—ones that were not thinkable before. Familiar experiences, memories, and images are jumbled together in an alien world, where there is no moment-to-moment stability, only stumbling across a fractured landscape. The thread of time is broken, but in a different respect than that of the hashish trance: time is produced by the fissions and fusions—baroque folds?—of spatiality. There are gaps between images, but they do not signal loss of information, but, rather, the generation of information. Each image’s surroundings alters our perceptions of its colorful content—hold me in a different light and I am other.”
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