If I’m telling the truth, The Emigrants was my least favourite of the four at the time, but I nonetheless proceeded to read several of Sebald’s other books in the years that followed—Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, After Nature—and then took a lengthy hiatus until now with Austerlitz. Somewhat recently, I read Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, which essentially pans The Rings of Saturn as inauthentic, but with the more time that has passed the more certain I am that Austerlitz is a masterpiece and that Sebald is a genius.
Austerlitz—and all of Sebald’s novels—are about time and memory and civilization and trauma and it’s told in an oblique style. Each of his novels are narratives that blur the line of fiction, non-fiction, history, psychology, art, and so on. Each of his novels also have black and white photographs embedded within or placed adjacent to the text itself. I remember discussing with my prof that this was a point of contention: apparently Sebald was notoriously difficult to work with and would insist on particular placements for images.
I also began watching After Sebald, a documentary that discusses the elliptical nature of Sebald’s writing, the intuitive parallels between text and images. One such example I’ve located in Austerlitz is that Sebald describes an obelisk-like monument to dead Jewish citizens. Sebald the describes the asparagus fern inside the mausoleum. Beside the text is an image of asparagus-like obelisk; the parallel shows how horror infiltrates the everyday. The terror of the past resurfaces in various forms, both natural and manmade, throughout the novel.
While the book is about three hundred pages, the plot can be summarized fairly simply: the narrator meets a man named Austerlitz. The two of them bond by talking about esoteric interests like architecture and history. Austerlitz recounts the story of discovering he was a child of the Holocaust. He tries to retrace his history and track down his parents.
To call the book beautiful would be insensitive to its context, but the thoughtful resonances between elements of the text are hard to deny their perfection. Towards the end of the novel, Austerlitz is studying at the Bibliotheque Nationale of France (Richelieu). He recounts, “[I was] losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then i the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications” (260). In my view, that is precisely Sebald’s approach to literature. Minute details in a photograph are explored in full, leading to more and more tangents, more and more webs of meaning, the “ramifications” of which are often alluded to with a knowing nod. Meanwhile, the plot is both essential to the book and not; most of the book orbits around a central premise but there are lengthy tangents that analyze historical phenomena.
For instance, the start of the book offers some wonderful passages about the design of cities. I would like to quote from the passage, but (as would happen in my students’ nightmares), the discussion goes on for at least five pages. The narrator, looking at his notes from February 1971, recalls a conversation with Austerlitz four years earlier where they spoke about a fire at Lucerne station. (Quick aside: he talks about witnessing the fire and then how it gave him “an uneasy, anxious feeling which crystallized into [him] the idea that [he] had been to blame, or at least one of those to blame, for the Lucerne fire” (10-11). The fire haunts him, imagining the flames jumping from the dome to the snow-covered Alps. He then provides an encyclopaedic (travel guide-ic?) description of beautiful buildings that are simultaneously a statement on capitalist horror, “symbolizing the principle of capital accumulation” (12). He continues, “And Time [...] represented by the hands and dial of the clock, reigns supreme among these emblems. The clock is placed above the only baroque element in the entire ensemble, the cruciform stairway which leads from the foyer to the platforms, just where the image of the emperor stood in the Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Endrach maakt macht” (12). The already oppressive quality of the clock looking over everyone like an emperor is then elaborated on, forming a discussion of panoptic surveillance of the travellers that move along to the timetables that were synchronized by clocks. The historical background is illuminated with touches of philosophical history, as well: “not until they [clocks] were all standardized around the middle of the nineteenth century did time truly reign supreme [...] to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in travelling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad” (12).
I have succumb to one of Austerlitz / Sebald / Sebald’s Narrator’s tangents. What I had really intended to talk about is the way that trauma and pain appears in all of civilization. Sebald’s narrator notes that “Austerlitz spoke at length about the marks of pain which [...] trace countless fine lines through history” (14). The following three pages are a discussion of railway architecture—lines through history indeed! All the more haunting knowing the role of trains in facilitating the Holocaust. Austerlitz then describes how “it is often our mightiest projects that most obvious betray the degree of our insecurity” (14). For the three pages that follow, he discusses the construction of fortifications where people need to continually surround themselves with added layers of defences. He then refers to any number of cities that followed this approach, with ever-expanding outward rings. He notes that “No one today [...] has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications, of the fantastic nature of the geometric, trigonometric, and logistical calculations they record, of the inflated excesses of the professional vocabulary of fortification and siegecraft, no one now understands its simplest terms [...] yet even from our present standpoint we can see that towards the end of the seventeenth century the star-shaped dodecagon behind trenches has finally crystallized, out of the various available systems, as the preferred ground plan” (15). Notice first how long that clause is; notice next that that sentence does not end there. It continues onward, and on that I shall have more to say later. Austerlitz then elaborates on how the largest star-shaped fortresses “will naturally attract the largest enemy forces and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive, so that in the end you might find yourself in a place fortified in every possible way, watching helplessly while the enemy troops, moving on to their own choice of terrain elsewhere, simply ignored tier adversaries’ fortresses, which had become positive arsenals of weaponry, bristling with cannon and overcrowded with men ”(16). The historical analysis is persuasive and also recalls Franz Kafka’s story “The Burrow”. The paranoia that characterizes civilization is such an excellent place for this novel to begin, and Austerlitz notes that “you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that as architectural plans for fortifications became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with it the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments” (16). The analysis is given a list of historical precedents for such an approach and the likely outcomes and it’s nothing short of persuasive. The informative quality is then given a poetic conclusion where Austerlitz notes that “unlike birds, for instance, who keep building the same nest over thousands of years, we tend to forge ahead with our projects far beyond any reasonable bounds” (18). The contrast between the natural world and the supposed accomplishments of human civilization are put in bas relief to wonderful effect.
Following these pages are, let’s say, 250 pages. Towards the end of the book, though, W. G. Sebald offers an incredible tour de force that comes full circle and is the epitome of his resonant approach. In discussing the inhumanity of the Bibliotheque Nationale (you have to go up before descending back down into the earth to sit in seats where you have to crunch your legs up and are essentially punished for reading), he then delves into the background of it. He references old markets where goods stolen from Nazis were stolen and the implication is that the library (and civilization, for what is a better representation of civilization than its libraries?) were build upon horror and exploitation. All of that learning occurs on the grounds of inhumanity (if that line seems reminiscent of colonialism in Canada, well, perhaps I’m intimating my own resonant histories). The discussion of the library is immediately followed by a discussion of the horror of a train station where Austerlitz’ father was once seen. There’s a uneasy terror associated with the Holocaust and being deported into ghettos or concentration camps. The novel then comes full circle by discussing disused mines where poor people still live. There is a discussion of the chasms and infinite abyss at the core of the mines. The implication is that under the train stations, under the libraries, there is a dark void that remains—”to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The novel finally returns to the beginning and discusses once more the fortifications of cities. It’s a glorious cyclical approach that feels like a number of separate motifs are joining one another again as a final fractal image.
These historical references are a vehicle for observations about time and memory. There is a repeated motif throughout the text that time both passes and does not. I often found myself reminded of Nabokov’s line, “I confess I do not believe in time.” The narrator of Austerlitz notes that “during the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of that hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s heart almost stopped” (8-9). The reference to the Sword of Damocles is a nice reference here that speaks to the esoteric learning of the both Sebald and his narrators, but it also reflects time as a kind of violence enacted upon us.
Elsewhere, time is given a less ominous quality but is nonetheless described as “by far the most artificial of all our inventions” (100). Austerlitz discusses how a measurement of time might as well be based “on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit” (100). He reflects on Newton’s suggestion that time was a river like the Thames, then we must question its source and its destination. The flux of time cannot be accounted for in its various speeds. Shortly thereafter, Austerlitz says that he has never understood time and that he now things “that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish” (101). “What,” Austerlitz wonders, “are twelve or thirteen such years, if not a single moment of unalterable pain?” (260).
I think the reflections on time are contiguous with the style of the novel. You’ve likely noticed the style in the passages I’ve presented as being long winded, with clause after clause and a thread weaving back into the past. It seems to me that these sentences mimic that simultaneity of past and present; you’re hypnotized into the past while being drawn forward. What’s even more interesting to me is the presentation of subjecthood in a novel such as this one. The layers of narration are complex. We first have the narrator, who is seemingly a stand-in for W. G. Sebald, then we have Austerlitz telling the narrator his story, and then within that story there are characters telling Austerlitz details of his past. It’s interesting because the narrator seems to be Sebald, but the photographs throughout the text are presented as the work of Austerlitz, who also seems to stand in for Sebald. There are moments of genuine surprise where you’re forced into a position of uncertainty with respect to who is narrating. For instance, Austerlitz recounts what someone told him in the first person, and the narrator reminds the audience that Austerlitz is narrating in first person while himself narrating in first person. In effect, you might have sentences like, “I heard about the fire, said Austerlitz’ interlocutor, he related me.” The layers of subjectivity, then, proliferate while collapsing. There is a chain of subjectivity and yet the reader comes to occupy the space as well. At times, Sebald uses the general second person (“you are aware of this…”) and implants the reader alongside these other figures.
(I offer here a brief aside that if there are central flaws to the novel, they are that the actual workings of memory seem inconsistent—Austerlitz has an encyclopaedic memory of all sorts of detail and yet did not remember that he was raised under a false name after his parents were sent to ghettos. The other flaw is that every character seems to have an eidetic memory, so what they bring to the narrative is essentially completion. It made me realize how much of our identities are bound up with the things we recall and the bugbears of memory. As such, when characters can remember everything they feel less like people and more like the mouthpiece of history itself).
Anyway, the collapse of time and the collapse of subjectivity seems to lead to an ethical dimension that is an underlying impulse of the novel. If the past has not yet fully happened, then do we not have an ethical obligation to it? The past makes demands of us, as does the future, when moments are perpetually unfinished, perpetually anticipated. In Austerlitz’ view, “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).
I’ve already alluded to Sebald’s self-reflective commentary on his work (via Austerlitz’ love of exploring footnotes), but there seems to me an exact metafictional commentary on the work when Austerlitz is working on a book of his own: “The various ideas I entertained at different times of this book I was to write ranged from the concept of a systematically descriptive work in several volumes to a series of essays on such subjects as hygiene and sanitation, the architecture of the penal system, secular temples, hydrotherapy, zoological gardens, departure and arrival, light and shade, steam and gas, and so forth” (121). I’m going to pause for a moment here to highlight that what he’s describing is, essentially, Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Benjamin was another central figure to the post-Holocaust literature in my literary theory course and The Arcades Project is one of the most massive books I’ve ever read—and certainly the most massive book that has no narrative; it’s a collection of aphorisms and quotations and short passages that address some of the very topics Austerlitz outlines. Austerlitz then realizes that his sketches “now seemed misguided, distorted, and of little use. I began to assemble and recast anything that still passed muster in order to re-create before my own eyes, as if in the pages of an album, the picture of the landscape, now almost immersed in oblivion, through which my journey had taken me” (121). It seems. To me, that this is almost essentially Sebald’s project—in fact, his entire narrative career. He writes a series of travelogues of sorts; if I recall correctly, The Rings of Saturn is an entire novel dedicated to one walk in the English countryside. It is the obsession that I find so alluring.
In many novels, I would say obsession is destructive (I have to maintain this view because my thesis was essentially paranoia → obsession → destruction of thought). Here, though, Sebald’s obsessions seem reparative. He is more in line with an ethics of reparative reading (as outlined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) than paranoid reading (associated with Michel Foucault, etc.). The book’s attention to detail is an incredible, cerebral feat of imagination and care. Sebald seems to model an ethics of care towards the past, not allowing it to remain forgotten or isolated of its context. Part of that entails a disruption of standard narratives: “All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us [...] our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered” (71-72). The idea of not allowing the readymade history to govern us is an ethical impulse that Sebald promotes through every thread of the story, whether it’s his attention to detail in narration or in the literal images that disrupt the ‘flow’ of our understanding. Sometimes there are full-page photographs that interrupt the middle of a sentence.
There is a profound moment in the text that produced an uncanny effect. There are two pages side-by-side: one is an intensely pixelated image, so pixelated that it is unrecognizable. The picture beside it is somewhat less pixelated photograph where you can recognizes faces, but just. Shortly after, there is a smaller photograph that is somewhat more clear: a photograph of a still image from a propaganda film about the ghetto where Austerlitz’ mother was forced to stay. It’s a stunning moment to me because it appears alongside Austerlitz’ investigation to find his mother; the images become less pixelated as he gets closer to the truth, but it’s a terrible bittersweet moment. When he finds his mother in a propaganda film, the time stamp is across her forehead — uncannily, horrifically, like a numbered tattoo. The revelation of her is mediated and marred; despite being less pixelated, she is not given much more due as a human figure. It’s a tragic few ‘seconds’ on film.
Another moment that I adored was just an innocuous reflection on a billiards room that ad been untouched for years. An ancestor of one of the characters had played billiards against himself and nobody had picked up a cue since: “this place had always remained so secluded from th rest of the house that for a century and a half scarcely so much as a gossamer-thin layer of dust had been able to settle on the cornices, the black and white square stone flags of the floor, and the green baize cloth stretched over the table, which seemed like a self-contained universe” (105-108). The lush description of something so innocuous is beautiful, but if you notice the page count on the previous citation, you’ll wonder why such a (relatively) short description spans several pages. It’s because interrupting the narrative mid-sentence (even mid-word) is a double-page spread of two billiard balls: a black and a white on separate pages. The black and white composition of the photograph essentially erases the green of the billiards table and, as a result, the black and white balls look like planets drifting in space—universes unto themselves. Austerlitz uses these as an entry point to meditation: “It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that when we were standing in the billiards room of iver Grove with Ashman, Hilary remarked o the curious confusion of emotions affecting even a historian in a room like this, sealed away so long from the flow of the hours and days and the succession of the generations” (108). I love the way Sebald can stretch an image into the metaphysical, as if every strange angle, every item looked at closely enough, becomes an entry point to a new world.
This ethics of observation, the collapse of time, and the collapse of subjectivity bend towards a central empathy to others in the world and a sense of connection. It highlights both the destructive nature of civilization while redeeming its discontents and its victims. I’ll slowly creep towards a conclusion by referring to two other key passages. In one, Austerlitz points out that we gaze “in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins” (19). The architecture of civilization projects itself both forward and backward—forward into a future ruin (again: Walter Benjamin and his Angel of History seem to be influences here). There’s a sort of fatalism to it that is maybe uncomfortable to grapple with, but I think its more observation than prophecy.
Later, Austerlitz says we do not “understand the laws governing the return of the past, but [he] feel[s] 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, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all” (185). The idea that we are essentially inverted ghosts to forces beyond ourselves is an engaging premise. Ghosts as a site of metaphor feels like old hat at this point, but Sebald’s articulation gives it a dimension that’s hard to resist. It connects to an ethics of reconciliation with the past: if we are drifting into the past, or if we appear in our traces elsewhere, it forces us to reconsider our position in the world and imbues the current moment with broader significance: we need to both redeem our present moment towards the past and project a future that resists the dehumanizing effect of mass society.
How we do that appears to be through careful observation and consideration of the deep interconnectedness of history, subjectivity, agency, and so on. Everything is in a state of interaction and becoming.
And that, my friends, is probably what I should have written about for my literary theory essay in 3rd year of University—I could have called it “When Asparagus Becomes Architecture: The Ethics of Resonance in W. G. Sebald’s Novels” (though my essay on emptiness in The Book of Questions was really engaging, too). Over the years, I’ve had some more time to reflect on Sebald’s work and, while not exactly memorable in its particulars, as an artist, Sebald’s vision is pretty difficult to forget. It’s one that I’ll likely return to again and again, always striving to notice some forgotten thread from the past.
Remain vigilant in the particulars and happy in your reading!
