HUSSEHulcRRrnN Socmry FoR THE Sruoy op ENcLtsH / Mecyan ANcLlszlral TÁns,q,sÁc

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Proceedings of the l l'h Conferenceof the Hungarian Societyfor the Study of English

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HUssE 2al j

Building Visual Archives of Space

W. G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair

Eszter Szép

The histoty of culture is in parl the story- of a protracíed stntggle Jtlrdominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming Jbr itsellcertainproprietaty rights on a "naíure" to which on$, i1 has access. At sonte

moments this sttuggle seems to seítle into a relationship of free exchange

along open borders; at other times (as in Lessing 's Laocoörr] the borders are

closed and a separate peace is declared. Among the most interesting and

complex versions of this struggle is what might be called the relaíionship ofsubversion, in which language or imagery looks into its own heart and findslurking there its opposite number. (Mitchell, "What is an Image?" 529)

Both Winfried Georg Sebald and Iain Sinclair frequently incorporate visual elements

in their books. ln The Rings of Saturn Sebald incorporates in the body of his text

photographs of photographs or of paintings, and of various documents, such as adiary, a newspaper cut, a map, or a catalogue of silk samples. In the short story

collection Slow Chocolate Autopsy, a collaboration between Sinclair and the visualarlist Dave McKean, we find three "graphic stories" delivered in a format

experimenting with the comics layout,As it will be shown, in both books digressive and associative narrative

techniquesareused(Long l37,Bán ll5),andtheybothfeaturethetopicofwalking,They are both tempted to create an archive of knowledge,l and both face the

impossibility of col|ecting knowledge with archival techniques, such as "unification,

identification, classification and gathering" (Long l2). The goal of this paper is toargue that the visual inserts juxtapose to the narrative layer, by the l}equent

appearance of the strucfure of the grid, the symbol of rationalization. Word and image

are of equal importance in these works (Mitchell, Wat Do Pictures Want? 47), and

they together create what Mitchell calls "imagetexts" (Picture Theory 89). These

imagetexts reveal the complexity of the questions these books ask about coming to

terms with our past and representing both our cultural heritage and the process ofcoming to terms with it.

Visua] elements have power: they foreground the physical aspects of the

printed text. When a picture, as it very often happens with Sebald, interrupts the

sentence we are reading, or is inserted between two syllables of a word, we start to

regard not only the content, but also the appearance ofthe text. In effect, the photo

II use the word 'archive' as defined by Michel Foucault: "the idea of accumulating everlthing

desire to contain a]l times, all ages, all forms, all tastes in one place" (Long l | ).

ln

36

HUSSE 201)

"opens up the eye of the text" (Louvel 40): typography, text layout, the rhythm of

lines, the position of page numbers, paper quality-all the features that contribute to

the physical appearance of the text become noticed.

However, pictures have traditionally been considered essential|y different and

even alien to words, and often subordinate to them (Mitchell, "What is an Image?"

527). Mitchell warns us to avoid comparing text and image, as they can have a "Whole

ensemble of relations" apart from similarity or difference (Picture TheorY 89). He

adds: "the medium of writing deconstructs the possibility of a pure image or Pure text,

along with the opposition between the'literal' (letters) and the 'figurative' (pictures)

on which itdepends. Writing tis] . , . the'imagetext'incarnate" (Picture TheorY95).

Sebald,s works and Sinclair/McKean's unconventional graphic story do not make

word and image distinctions possible. Each page of the graphic stories in Slow

Chocolate Autopsy illustrates this impossibility, while some obvious examPles from

The Rings of Saturn arethose instances when the boundary between textand image is

not distinct, but they melt into each other.

The real question to ask when confronted with these kinds of image-text

relations is not "what is the difference (or similarity) between the words

and the images?" but "what differences do the differences (and

similarities) make?"-that is, why does it matter how words and images

are juxtaposed, blended, or separated? (Mitchell, Picture Theory 9I)

My answer to the above question is that in these two books taking the

juxtaposition of word with image into consideration adds an extra interpretative laYer

to the narratives. Sebald and Sinclair have been linked on account of sharing common

topics and a similar perspective, but not on account of the similar logic of their (very

different) visual inserts and imagetexts. They both express concern about the

representability of the past, they question the established cultural canon. Aimless

walking is one of their important common motifs, related to which they both express

deep concern about "the catastrophic outcome of the dreams of modemity" (Davies

250). Zsőfia Bán shows that walking can be linked to the wandern motif of German

literature (l l5), while in Image, Archive, Modernity, J. J. Long states that walking is a

form of resisting modernity, its rationalist logic and practical devices of transpott

(l33, l45).

Introducing The Rings of Saturn and Slow Chocolale Autopsy

Sebald's The Rings of Saturn tells the story of the narator's joumey in East Anglia.

Walking along the Suffolk coastline or across fields, and visiting the towns of the area

serves as a method of approaching and a method of writing about past moments ofcultural decline (Bán ll5). The story of the walk can be considered as a frame in

which the narrator inserts his intricately structured micro-narratives about earlier

travels (to the same towns, of to Belgium, for example), people he researched (for

instance, Sir Thomas Browne) or books he read (Borges's Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,

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HUSSE 2013

or Browne's Museum Clausum, among others). The photographs that intenupt the

narrative in what seems to be a random fashion are rarely referred to in the text.

The majority of Sinclair's works, for example Lights out for the Territory(1997) or London Orbital (2002), belong to the psychogeography movement, and

their aim is to record all layers of culture of a chosen area, a "local community"(Bond l4). The first psychogeographers in France in the l950s and l960s wanted to

study the city, their urban environment, with a combination of objective and

subjective methodo|ogies: "On the one hand it [the movement] recognized that the

self cannot be divorced from the urban environment; on the other hand, it had to

pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the

collective thinking of the ciíy" (Sadler 77). Sad|er is critical about the

psychogeographical practice: to him it "offered a sense of violent emotive possession

over the streets" (8l), However, Guy Debord, the founding father of the movement

clearly intended it to be an objective science: "Psychogeogíaphy sets for itself the

study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,

whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals"(Introduction n.p.).

According to Debord, the three key features of psychogeographical method are

deriye, détournement, and spectacle. Derive refers to the spontaneity that is essential

in the mapping of the city. Instead of a plan, an openness to impulses should govern

the psychogeographer on his/her route. Détournement refers to the

psychogeographical montage practice: elements (of the city) are taken out of context,

and assigned new meanings, "The walker in derive, who is therefore not orientated by

convention, can playfu|ly and artfully 'see' the juxtaposition of the elements that

make up the city in new and revea|ing re|ationships" (Jenks l55). Finally,psychogeographers are critical about ready-made visual relationships: "all of lifepresents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles" (Debord, Sociely of the

Specíacle n,p.). Commodities, 'see-worthy' spectacles are challenged by

psychogeography, which for Debord was also a political stand. Ford quotes Debord:

"Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition,

clashing head-on with a|l social and legal conventions, it cannot faiI to be a powerful

cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle" (36),

Sinclair and McKean's Slow Chocolate Autopsy-Incidents from the NoíoriousCareer of Norton, Prisoner of London is a collection of shoft stories with a

psychogeographic interest. The character called Norton appears in all of them, but the

stories do not allow for a coherent interpretation of Norton's character: he is as

changeable as the city he lives in. Instead of a person, it is rather the city that can be

considered the protagonist. Three of the chapters are labeled "graphic story": in these

Sinclair's dark world and drifting narrative style is matched by McKean's often

disturbing and very intricate montages. These chapters use and abuse the toolkit ofcomic books, they are ba|ancing on the boundary ofcoherence and incoherence. Pane|

connections are loose and e|liptical, while panel boundaries are f|equently and

deliberately blurry and uncertain. As a rule, individual panels or pages risk

information overload-or loss of information into the irrelevance of noise, "The page

38

HUsSE 201)

manages to simultaneously look and not look like a comic, , , ,The visual/textual clash

presents a writhing vision on which the various distinctions that tyPicallY distinguish

the comics page collapse into each other", writes Venezia (n.p.), who also argues that

in the case of these unique montages the traditional text-image distinction does not

hold.

In this paper I examine only the first graphic story, The Grffin,s Eg{ in detail,

and mention the other two, The Double Death of the Falconer, and Scrip, Scribe,

Scripl on|y briefly. In all three of these stories the characters are ÍiequentlY shown to

be walking, and the narrator of The Rings of saturn is also a keen walker. The pace of

walking allows for noticing and brooding over one,s environment, walking can also

be interrupted by stops. As mentioned earlier, walking can be interpreted as a revolt

against modern means of transport (Long 6). De Certeau compares the act of walking

to the enunciative function of speech acts (97-99), and emphasizes its spontaneity:

Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, reSpects, etc., the

trajectories it "speaks". Al1 the modalities sing a part in this chorus,

changingfromsteptostep,stepprnginthroughproportions,Sequences,and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the

walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity, They

therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail, (99)

The scepticism about maps expressed here ("cannot be reduced to their graphic trail")

is a central topic of both Sebald and Sinclair/McKean, and is going to be examined in

detail. But first I am going to explore the significance of the act of walking and its

relationship to photography in Slow Chocolaíe Autopsy and in The Rings of Saturn,

Photograph, text, walking in Slow Chocolute Autopsy

For the psychogeographer walking is the key to deciphering the city,

[The] act of walking is an urban affair and, in cities that are increasinglY

hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion.

[T]he streetJevel gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the

official representation of the city by cutting across established routes and

exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the

city's inhabitants. (Coverley l2)

Walking is just as evident for Sinclair's characters.In The Grffin's Egg, the ex-studio

photographer Turner is walking in the city, quite uncertainly, as he does not know

what to focus on. Norton hired and dismissed him in quick succession: "What am I

supposed to do? Norton has the entire city on file-but he's left me with no

instructions." (85) Their project would have been "providing pictorial evidence to

support research undertaken by a man named Norton. To gain access to-&photograph-the riverside penthouse apartment of millionaire Political fixer, &

39

HU'SE 20l3

blockbuster novelist, Lord Kawn," (85) Tumer, instead of spying on Kawn, walks and

takes snapshots of a church. He does not organize the pictures he takes (87). He does

not edit or interpret the city the way Norton would have demanded when he was

hired,

Norton's and Tumer's distrust of the other's medium constitutes the body ofthe story. Turner was hired as an interpreter, but for him photos need no explanation:

"Who needs a writer?"(88) He does not accept the primacy of language: "Fucking

writers. Think there's no memory without language" (90), while Norton calls the

camera "an unreliable instrument of fiction, cursed with memory" (86). As variousfont types are used in the graphic story, their diversity is significant. I propose

considering them imagetexts and assigning each font type to a character. The majority

of the story is narrated in Axel Turner's font, WhateverNorton is saying orthinking is

in capitalized Century Gothic (84,86, 88,9l). The way Norton's sentences are

remembered by Turner is printed with a font type imitating handwriting (87). LordKawn's voice hovers bodiless above the story, like the mechanical voice in The

Double Death of the Falconer, whlch in tum imitates J. L. Godard's Alphaville froml965. Lord Kawn's sentences are given Lucida Console font (9l ,92,93).

Although Norton and Turner stand for two contradictory sides in the debate

between word and image, their arguments are represented by McKean with the same

logic. Regardless of the content of the text, we are offered complex panels where

there is no point in separating word and image. Ironically, Turner's (verbal) opinion

to "Pin down the true images and words are redundant. Stick any two postcards to a

wall and you've got a narrative. IINEDITED" (88) coexists and forms a frame with

the photograph of a Secret lntelligence Service building at Lambeth. His argument for

natural, picture-motivated narratives is juxtaposed by a picture of an enigmatic

narrati ve-producing in stituti on.

Another enigmatic imagetext is Norton's advertisement "WANTED:INTERPRETER. UNEDITED CITY" (84). However much Norton detests

photography, his sentence is printed over a cityscape montage, where the great

number of spires highlights the amount of information to edit. An example for page

level imagetext is page 9l, where Nofton's sentence "Surveillance is the art form ofthe millennium" is seemingly not par1 of panel structure: it is not part of any panels.

However, as images, Norton's words do contribute to the layout of the page. They are

printed in the bottom right corner, their line gives balance to a page that is operating,

from top to bottom, with lighter and lighter colours. This sentence also reorganizespage semantics: reading it sheds new light on the security camera images, or that

Tumer is following a person, possibly Norton. The extract of metanarrative provided

as part of the montage also centres around surveillance: "Page given over tosurveillance imagery-as narrative now moves deeper into Secret State tenitory,Panel l, On surveillance camera" (91).

40

H(],1.1E 201)

Can tou ia a búlqr1iithalt ntt;líí

, Y."}

Nlttapj

l-b esílmps:)

r].*-\l

sURVEli-LANcE l§ THE AR,t FORM oF THt Mlt

Figure 1: Slolu Chocolate Aulopsy 9l.

Photograph, text, wa|king in The Rings of Salurn

The narrator's Suffolk walk in The Rings of Saturn offers the excitement ofexploration and the pleasure of revisiting familiar places. The narrator compares hjs

previous experience to what he sees, and finding that the routine of life is the same as

it used to be reinforces him. He uses expressions like "as I have often found" (51), "I

sought the familiarity of the streets" (92), and "I have never encountered" (225). The

familiarity of places motivates repetitive actions, as illustrated by the quote below:

41

HUSSE 207 3

Whenever I am in Southwold, the Sailor's Reading Room is by far myfavourite haunt. . . . So on this occasion too I entered the Reading Room to

see whether anlhing had changed and to make notes on things that had

occurred to me during the day. At first, as on some of my earlier visits, I

leafed through the log of the Southwold, a patrol ship that was anchored

off the pier from autumn of '1914. (93)

The narrator's meditations over the past are rooted in the confirmation of the

unchanged present. Finding what he expected, experiencing a certain timelessness

create the proper atmosphere for the narrator's associative broodings. The narrator

connects the present of the Suffolk countryside to analogous distant p|aces or

atmospheres of the past, known to him via reading. On the one hand, the narrator

particularly enjoys moments of arrested time:

I sat alone till tea time in the bar restaurant of the crown Hote|. The rattle

of crockery in the kitchen had long since subsided; in the grandfather

clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night, the

cogwheels gripped, the pendulum swrrng from side to side, and the bighand, bit by bit, in tiny jerks, went its round. For some time I had been

feeling a sense ofeternal peace. (96)

On the other hand, whenever the narrator encounters evidence of change or something

unexpected during his walk, a sense of panic and weakness overwhelms him. When,contrary to his expectations, he finds the seaside resort of Lowestoft even more

deserted and "run down" than fifteen years before, he writes: "[a]lthough I knew a|l ofthis, I was unprepared for the feeling of wretchedness that instantly seized ho|d of me

in Lowestoft" (42).Similarly, when at the Covehithe cliffs he comes upon a couple

making love below him at the coast, he is "overcome by a sudden panic" (68) and

physical weakness: "[í]illed with consternation, I stood up once more, shaking as if itwere the first time in my life that I had got to my feet, and left the place, whichseemed fearsome to me now" (68).

Later he is overcome by panic when he gets lost: "I stuck to the sandy path

until to my astonishment, not to say horror, l found myself back again at the same

tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before, or, as it now seemed

to me, in some distant past" (l71). Parallel to losing orientation in space, he loses his

orientation in time. "I cannot say how long I walked about in that state of mind."(l72)

The view the narrator absorbs must be unaffected by time so that it can serve

as the background for his broodings about various instances from the past that support

his concern about human civilization. "The narrative is .. . .one of melancholy despair:

the universe is grinding down and humanity is bent on acce|erating our eventua|

demise" (Beck 82). Twenty-one photos of the book illustrate directly the places the

narrator visits, the remaining fifty-one support his broodings. The photographs that

show stops in the narrator's wanderings are deliberately "amateurish". We are offered

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HUSSE 2013

five pictures of empty beaches (44,51,69,155,225), where the universal greyness ofthe sky andthe sea is matched by an unnecessarily detailed view of sand -they could

be schoolbook examp|es oftonelessness and noise. Sebald speaks about grayish tones

in an interview: "I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray

zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located

between death and life" (Scholz l08). Amateurishness is turned into a tool: Sebald

uses the toneless quality of his pictures to support both the message and the tone of

his micronarratives on decay.

The pictures of the walk also seem to be composed in an ad hoc manner. Some

examples: the photograph that he offers of a canal (138) resists all attempts at

composition, while the photo of the bridge at Orfordness military base shows a tiny

structure in the centre, too small to open up an interesting perspective (235). The

orfordness buildings are tiny dots in the distance, between a section of sky and a

section of dust (236).Interestingly, the two photographs about the home of Michael

Hamburger, friend and writer, represent a sharp contrast to the other photographic

documents of the narrator's journey:they offer an intricate geometry and are carefully

composed (l83, l84).Taking photographs during walking has several functions in the narrative.

Firstly, photographs serve as visual aids for remembering. They are not meant to

possess aesthetic value, they are meant to enhance memories. As Sebald explains:

I use the camera as a kind of shorthand, or aide mémoire. I don't tie this to

any artistic ambitions at all. Most of the time my camera is something

cheap. But I've taken to carrying it in my pocket at all times if possible,

And I don't care either what kind of film finds its way into the camera,

(Scholz 106)

Sebald also talks about the tles of the photograph to reality:

Strange things happen when you aimlessly wander through the world,

when you go somewhere and then just want to see what happens next.

Then things happen that no one is going to believe later. And what comes

next is very important: it is necessary to somehow capture and document

these things, Of course you can do this through writing, but the written

world is not a true document after all. The photograph is the true

document par excellence. People let themselves be convinced by a

photograph. (Scholz l05-6)

Natural|y, using photographs as documents is very problematic (Snyder and Allenl51-152), and Sebald's books benefit a lot flom the uncertainty around the medium.

As Louvel says, the photograph "triggers more fiction" (46). It is not only that

photographs can be manipulated, but their very existence is the result of manipulation

of paper with chemicals, The bad quality of the photos also frequently reduces their

documentary status. These photos are inserted "to be read as fictional e|ements"

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HUSSE 2013

(Horstkotte 60), and not as transparent documents: "Sebald constantly unsettles

readers' assumptions about the photograph as document and evidence of the real"(Horstkotte 72).

The third function of the photographs taken during walking is to support the

narrator's need to focus on the unchanged in order to be able to think about "history

as a story of universal decomposition" (Beck 76).He never takes photos of people: he

takes photos of the background. There are no people at the Lowestoft Central Railway

Station (48), only their abandoned cars, The towns seem deserted (4l), photos ofnature show traces of humans, man-made canals or tents of fishermen, but never

people.

The Fldneur and the Tourist

As we have seen, walking and taking photographs are central motifs in both books. In

this section I would like to contrast the two typical characters for whom these two

elements are central: the tourist and the fldneur. My aim is not only to shed light on

their opposing attitudes towards walking and the city, but, most importantly, to

contrast their different attitudes to photography.

Tourism and Jldneurie are modern inventions, made possib|e by a forlunate

combination of routine, Ieisure time, and income. lnterestingly, while the flóneur is

generally praised, the tourist is described in secondary literature as a shallow figure,

almost as a cultural enemy. For example, MacCannel explains that tourists engage in

a |ot of activities during their holidays because they feel guilty for not spending their

time with work(23-37). Sontag's view thatthe compulsion of tourists to take photos

has "a work-driven feel about not working" (l0) expresses a similar idea. In contrast,

the figure of the fldneur is interpreted as an "attitude towards knowledge," or as ametaphor for accessing modern urban cuIture (Jenks |46, 148). Historica||y, the

solitary Jláneur appeared in nineteenth-century Paris (Coverley 10), and acted as a

disinterested observer. The character has changed a lot, and became more politicallyand socially engaged (Ford 36). In this study I use the word fláneur for sensitive

walkers who stroll aimlessly in non-touristic areas, and record what they encounter

while constantly questioning the "spectacles" they are offered. In Slow ChocolateAutopsy it is only Norton who can be labeled a typical Jláneur. He chooses to walkand record, while Turner does so on|y because he starts to work for Norton.

Interestingly, walking with a photographer was the method that Sinclair himselffollowed in Lights outíor the Territory.

Theflóneur has a notebook in hand and takes notes ofwhat (s)he has seen and

further things to check, while the tourist has sights on his checklist. The flóneurcollects information and creates an archive by reorganizingit: he seeks minor details

and insertsthem in an associative context, Both of them take photos to document, to

take possession of a place (Sontag 9), but these are very different photos. For the

tourist "[p]hotographs wil| offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the

program was carried out, that fun was had" (Sontag 9). The tourist puts his/her camera

between him/herself and the world, sees the world through the screen of a digital

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camera. In contrast, the fláneilr uses the photograph to administer, after close

observation, the place itself. The tourist puts the photos in albums (or more recently,

does not even have them printed), while the fláneur works with the photos, organizes

and reorganizes them.

When the tourist goes sightseeing, (s)he takes part in a ritual: "[t]he ritual

attitude of the tourist originates in the act of travel itself and culminates when he

arrives in the presence of the sight" (MacCannell43). By visiting places prescribed to

him/her, sights that cannot be missed, the tourist tries to "overcome the discontinuitY

of modernity" (MacCannell l3), the fragmented nature of the modernized world (s)he

suffers fiom day by day. The guidebook and the map are his/her facilitating objects:

they offer a matrix of sights and curiosities that can be filled in.

Sebald's narrator refuses to visit the must-see British cities, or sights

highlighted by guidebooks and tourist offices. It is a gesture of revolt to choose

Suffolk over more touristic destinations, such as "The Top l0 Natura| Wonders of

Britain," as listed by VisitBritain. Moreover, once in Suffolk, the narrator avoids

sights: he walks across agricultura| fields, spends his time in pubs, stays at hotel

lobbies, or just walks the streets aimlessly. In the meantime he thinks back, in waYs

that eliminate the possibility of him ever being a commodity tourist, on earlier travels

that included visiting more touristic places, such as museums, galleries, or churches.

At the collection of Mauritshuis he offers a deep understanding and reinterpretation of

Rembrandt' s The Anatomy Lesson, at Nuremberg he establishes a personal connection

between him and St Sebolt, calling him "my patron saint" (86).

In accordance with the German subtitle, Eine englische Wallfahrt (An English

Pitgrimage), the narrator is a pilgrim of former touristic resorts and forgotten

transport hubs. Although there is no mention of it, he may be visiting places

recommended by his early-20'h-century guidebook. He inspects what has become ofthe fashionable towns of earlier times, and finds what he expects: decay on a

historica| scale. He visits Dunwich, a flourishing centre of international trade in the

Midd|e Ages, or celebrated tourism sites of the Victorian period. He describes the

Victorian splendour of the Suffolk coast: "Under the patronage of their [the

Hohenzollern's] imperial majesties, the North Sea coast might become one great

health resort for the upper classes, equipped with the amenities of modern life.

Everywhere, hotels mushroomed from the barren land. Promenades and bathing

facilities were established, and piers grew out into the sea" (224-5). By now,

however, these places are empty ghost-towns. The photograph inserted in the middle

of the sentence quoted above shows an abandoned coastline with not even the traces

of the described piers or promenades.

Maps and Digressions

The biggest help for the tourist is the greatest enemy of the fláneur: the map. NeitherSebald's narrator, nor Sinclair/McKean's Turner or Norton use it. They can be

described as improvisational walkers who disregard the offered routes of the map, and

whose "[d]estinations emerge as a contingent by-product of walking, not its telos"

45

HUSSE 2013

(Long 136). One's route can be traced on maps, however, as de Certeau states, by

transforming the activity of walking into dots and lines on the map the "[s]urveys oíroutes miss what was: the act itself of passing by" (97).

For Sebald's narrator and Sinclair/McKean's characters the map is an artificialstructure imposed upon space, they are "intentional structures that embody social

values and power relationships" (Long l30). As Long explains, maps are linked to the

colonial enterprise and railway expansion, and offer the "practical rationalization ofspace" (13l): in them space is reorganized into homogenous and equa| parts of the

grid, so that it can be ruled, rationalized, and used (77-86). The map, and not onlythose early ones with large white unknown territories of which Sebald also writes in

chapter V., offer the illusion of empty space. Space that is not controlled or edited yet.

The edited place of maps could beNorton's dream, but instead this kind of edition is

his nightmare.

Touristic maps offer the homogenizing grid and an intricate hierarchy at the

same time: the editors highlight some sights over others, emphasize the beaten track

(Long l32). Labels and small pictures of sights are frequently inserted, by which

streets or their names are often eliminated. Psychogeographers also work with and

frequently create maps; however, these are very different: they record the processes ofhow space is used and experienced, and not how established routes offer it for usage.

The movement of people frequently overwrites the rationalized structures offered by

maps. Recording these constitutes a different representation of space. Debord says:

The production of psychogeographical maps, or even the introduction ofalterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two

different regions, can contribute to clari!ing certain wanderings that

express not subordination to randomness but toíal insubordination to

habitual influences (influences generalIy categorized as tourism, that

popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit).

("Introduction" n.p,)

A distrust of maps is present in The Rings of Saturn where the map of East

Anglia demonstrates how space is edited: Orfordness secret military base is not

shown. This map also feafures the established routes one is supposed to follow, the

contacts these routes allow for, and white territories regarded uninteresting and

empty,

Thefláneurs of the two examined books have various techniques to avoid the

power of the map. The first is simply disregarding what is shown. Sebald's narrator

frequently abandons paths and walks through fields, even if it is physically more

difficult to do so. As a more radical form of revolt, the map of London is cut up into

small pieces in ,S/ow Chocolate Autopsy. The Double Death of the Falconer begins

with the images of two maps, an earlier one of the City of London, evoking the

irregularities of a hand-drawn tradition and the style of early prints; and a modern and

scientifically more accurate map of Battersea Park. Compared to the intricate forms ofthe first map, the map of the park is rather simple: it offers a simpli§lingly clear view

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HUS'E 2013

of mostly grey space, In an attempt to rehumanize the map, trees and figures are

drawn on its surface.

The map of the park is cut up into what at first sight seems to be four pieces.

There is empty white cross-shaped space between them. A closer look reveals that the

four map_pieces do not complete but mirror and repeat each other. Certain elements

are even shown twice, This reorganized layout refuses established structures and

offers the map as an object with aesthetic value rather than an object to be used as a

guide.

"Thc tytchlcy._ dcAo lít t n.

They all becn(r§ R§,

itkssnlpsholr."

.!Y:]-.

ü

Figure 2: Slow Chocolate Aulopsy l31 .

The same cut up map appears at the end of the story (131), where it is

juxtaposed with a photo of the actual park. We can see the branches of the bare trees

that are rendered by the map as uniformly grey park terrain. The photographic image

is also an answer to the drawn trees: the stereotypically rich drawn canopies are

contrasted to the intricate structures of leafless branches. However, at a closer Iook it

turns out that the photograph is the result of manipulation: it consists of two minoring

parts, though the axis is not so easyto see. The photograph's claimsto realityturn out

to be just another convention, contrasting the conventional structure of the map with

the photograph is "dead in the water," as one of the drawn figures says about the short

story itself.

In the case of both Sebald and Sinclair/McKean, not fol|owing the map is

matched by the narrative strategy of not establishing and fo|lowing one clear

storyline: we are offered a mu|titude of micronarratives. We can easily feel buried and

lost in narrative threads. As Long says about Sebald, the reader becomes uncertain

about which stories are important and should be remembered in detail, and which

needn't (l43). This is absolutely true about Sinclair's psychogeographical works,

while the graphic stories of Slow Chocolate Autopsy offer elliptically structured

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HUSSE 2013

narratives with unconventional visual support. Long ca|ls this narrative technique "the

poetics of digression" (l37). In Sebald's and Sinclair's decentered narratives "each

digression is soon abandoned in favour of another digression," (Long l37-142). Thistechnique is contradictory to the efficiency of the map. Sebald's strategy of one story

leading to the next, and Sinclair/T\{cKean's devotion to details result in an

accumulation of narratives and information: we get archives of know|edge.

Archival Logic and the Grid

The Foucauldian perception of the archive as the collection of knowledge is very

much present in the works of Sinclair and Sebald. In his psychogeographical works

sinclair collects all accessible information about a location. In slow chocolate

Autopsy, the characters attempt to build archives of knowledge: Norton and Tumer

file and edit the city, or Frankie's assignment in The Double Deaíh of the Falconer is

to find and tag Norton, The visual representations highlight the validity of such an

interpretation: repetition of the same or slightly different visual information is a key

aesthetic principle of McKean's comics. (See, for examp|e the sequence of CCTVimages in Figure l.) In McKean's montages pictoria| accumulation frequently results

in catalogues of faces, situations, or settings.

One of the settings of The Double Death of the Falconer is the National

Portrait Gal|ery, where Alex Tumer's photographs are exhibited. Museums and

collections are typical embodiments of archival logic, they embody the modernist idea

thata totalizing order of things can be achieved and showed adequately, Like maps,

museums are very much indebted to the colonial enterprise. Both Sinclair/McKeanand Sebald are very sceptical about the ways museums and archives reorganize

knowledge. In the digressive, drifting structures of their narratives these authors revoltagainst the clearcut, classificatory logic of the archive. Beck emphasizes the

rebel|ious nature of Sebald's text against the archival logic of modernism: "The book

is about the erosion of confidence in the power of representation to record a knowable

world adequately and thereby control it" (75), However disillusioned Sebald may be

about modernist ways of representation, what he offers on the pages of The Rings ofSaturn is a collection of photographs. These photos occasionally illustrate the function

and malfunction of archival logic. A picture of catalogued butterflies (274) and the

Norwich silk merchants' sample cata|ogue (2834) represent the functioning archive,

while the two photographs of victims of mass murder (60-1, 97), and the messy piles

of documents in Hamburger's house (l 84) represent the breakdown of archival logic.

Whatever the texts may claim, however sceptical they may be about devices oforder, such as coherent narratives, archival structures and maps; the visual inserts and

representations frequently undermine that scepticism. The result is not a simple

opposition, but text and pictures together illustrate and explore the complex prob|ems

of thinking in archival terms, creating archives, or rebelling against their logic. The

visual worlds of both books reveal a deep and self-reflexive understanding ofarchival-rationalizing logic, or rather, of anarchival-rationalizing gaze. It is no

coincidence that the structure of the grid is frequently featured in the visual inserts of

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HUS'E 201j

Figure 3: The Rings of Saturn 4

both books. The significance of this motif can on|y be understood if we examine, with

Mitchell, "what happens if we question pictures about their desires instead of looking

at them as vehicles of meaning or instruments of power" (Wat do Pictures Want?

36). The grid, the symbol of normalization and rationalization, appears more

frequently than any other motif. It is an ever-present sign: it showsthat in spite of the

digressive narrative technique and the frequent criticism of archival structures the

authors, narrator, and characters are aware of the presence of an artificia| structure.

They are aware that they are constantly imposing this arlificial and rationalizing grid

upon whatever they are looking at. This is the point where the visua| ceases to be a

mere illustration of the text: the grid that the inserts highlight is a visual expression ofscepticism central to both examined texts.

The very first picture of The Rings of Saturn is emblematic in this regard: it

shows the view from the window of the hospitalized narrator (4). However, what we

actually see is not the view, but the safety grid in front of the window. A similar grid

stops us íiom naively looking at the outside world in Hamburger's study (l83). The

map of Suffolk has already been mentioned: here, too, the grid that divides space can

be made out more easily than the routes the map shows (232). The grid that SirThomas Browne created is a historical example of the ever-presence of the grid

structure (20). Its description is the on|y textual mention of the grid:

Browne records the patterns which recur in the seemingly infinite diversityof forms; in The Garden of Cyrus, for instance, he draws the quincunx,

which is composed by using the corners of a regular quadrilateral and the

point at which its diagonals intersect. Browne identifies this structure

49

HU'SE 201J

everywhere, in animate and inanimate matter. . . Examples might be mu|-tiplied without end. (19-21)

For Browne the quincunx is the basic structure of nature. In contrast to this organicview, the grid appears in the two books as an artificial structure, which is created byuS.

In three photos Sebald shows how he perceives the re|ationship of the grid and

nature. By human interference, name|y agricu|ture, a grid is imposed upon nature: the

fields watched from above reveal a grid structure (230). Early on in the book we can

see a picture of a bird in a cage: the bird is seen and photographed via a square of thegrid, but the photograph also reveals the prison of the cage (37). Sebald also shows a

picture of trees after the 1987 hunicane (228). This photo is so bad in quality that we

can hardly see anything apart from thick dark lines of pixels and visual noise, and

possibly the structure of the paperthe picture was printed on. As it happens, what gets

our attention in the picture is not the trees, but the grid.

In Sinclair/McKean's The Grffin's Egg the breakdown of archiva| knowledgebecomes significant with the mysterious death of Turner: in my reading he discoveredthat Norton and Kawnare the same person, that the archive of the city that they were

editing is arbitrary and self-serving. To silence him, he mysteriously gets entrapped in

the griffin's egg, an ornament at Kawn's windowsill. Before the discovery we see

Turner climbing a skyscraper (92), the grid-like structure of which has appeared inmany panels. This grid helps him revea| the loophole of the archive, and in return the

last page of the story, his death, is rendered in a grid form: the two columns of fourpanels are units of a thick black grid. In The Double Death of the Falconer the gridstructure of maps and medica| records are returning motifs. At one point the smallpictures of McKean's montage take on the form of frames of photographic negativesorganised in a film negative album - constituting a grid (1 18).

As Louvel explains, in Sebald's works there is a certain "recognition effect"when the reader or viewer identifies a picture with its textual description or reference.

At the very same moment the element of doubt also appears, as we do not knowwhere - from which archive - the picture comes from, or whether it really shows whatthe text describes (46), In this way the method by which the pictures are insefted in

the texts illustrates the very doubt the text has about archival structures. The samerecognition effect applies for Sinclair/T\'[cKean's work: its elliptic structure and visualhints are presented as riddles to the reader. Yet finding a possible coherentinterpretation, establishing an order in the graphic story never offers satisfaction: the

montages do not offer the illusion of having grasped everything.The motif of the gridthat is present in the representations of both books shows attempts at arriving at acomprehensive structure, The grids appearing in the photographs and montagesjuxtapose the expressions of doubt about maps, institutions, archives, organizedknowledge. Visual and textual representations together show both the difficulty and

the necessity to create such structures.

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