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Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald's "Austerlitz"Author(s): Amir EshelSource: New German Critique, No. 88, Contemporary German Literature (Winter, 2003), pp.71-96Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3211159

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Against

the Power

of

Time.

ThePoetics

of

Suspension

n

W G Sebald's

Austerlitz

AmirEshel

Time

is a riverwhich

sweeps

me

along,

but

I

am the river.

-

Jorge

Luis

Borges

On a cold day, not long before Christmas 1996, the narrator of W.

G.

Sebald's

Austerlitz

and

the

protagonist,

Jacques

Austerlitz,

arrive in

Greenwich,

England.

After

climbing up

through

Greenwich

Park,

they

reach the

Royal Observatory.

There,

while

viewing

different measur-

ing

devices,

regulators,

and

chronometers,

Jacques

Austerlitz

bursts

into one of the most

decisive

monologues

of the book

-

a

poetic

eruption,

I

would

argue,

crucial

to the

understanding

of

Sebald's

prose

as a whole:

Time ... was

by

far the most artificial of all our

inventions,

and in

being

bound

to the

planetturning

on its

own

axis

was no less

arbitrary

than would

be,

say,

a

calculation

based on the

growth

of trees or

the

duration

required

or

a

piece

of limestone

to

disintegrate,quite apart

from the fact thatthe

solar

day

which

we

take

as our

guideline

does

not

provide

us

any

precise

measurement,

o that

in order o reckon

ime we

have to devise an

imaginary,

verage

sun which has an invariable

peed

of

movement

and

does

not incline

toward

the

equator

n its orbit.

If

Newton

thought,

said

Austerlitz,

pointing

through

the window and

down to the curve of the

wateraround he Isle

of

Dogs glistering

n

the

last of the

daylight,

f

Newton

really

thought

hat

time was a river like

the

Thames,

then

where

is its source and into what

sea does

it

finally

flow?

Every

river,

as we

know,

must have banks on both

sides,

so

71



72

W.G. Sebald's

Austerlitz

where,

seen in

those

terms,

where are

the banks

of time? What would

be this river's qualities, qualities perhapscorresponding o those of

water,

which

is

fluid,

rather

heavy

and

translucent?

n

what

way

do

objects

immersed

n

time

differ from those left untouched

by

it?

Why

do we show

the

hours

of

light

and

darkness

n the same

circle?

Why

does time standstill and

motionless

in

one

place,

and

rush

headlong

by

in

another?Could we

not claim ...

thattime itself

has

been nonconcur-

rent

[ungleichzeitig,

Ger.

147]

over

the

centuriesandthe millennia?

t

is

not so

long ago,

after

all,

that

it

began

spreading

out over

everything.

And is not human ife in

many

parts

of the earth

governed

to this

day

less

by

time than

by

the

weather,

and

thus

by

an

unquantifiable

imen-

sion which disregards inear regularity,does not progress constantly

forward

but moves

in

eddies,

is

marked

by episodes

of

congestion

and

irruption,

ecurs

in

ever-changing

orm,

and evolves

in no

one

knows

what

direction?1

At

this

point,

albeit without

changing

the

text

flow in

the

paragraph,

the

monologue

becomes

very personal:

In

fact...

I

have never owned

a clock of

any

kind,

a bedside alarmor a

pocketwatch, let alone a wristwatch.A clock has always struckme as

something

ridiculous,

a

thoroughly

mendacious

object

[etwas

Lach-

haftes,

Ger.

147-48],

perhaps

because I have

always

resisted

the

power

of time out of some

internal

compulsion

which

I

myself

have

never

understood,

keeping

myself

apart

rom so-called

current

vents

[Zeitge-

schehen,

Ger.

148]

in

the

hope,

as

I

now

think... that

time

will not

pass

away,

has not

passed

away,

that

I can

turn

back and

go

behind

it,

and

there

I

shall

find

everything

as it once

was,

or

more

precisely

I shall

find

that

all moments

of time have co-existed

simultaneously,

n which

case

none of what

history

tells us

would

be

true,

past

events

have not

yet occurredbut arewaitingto do so at the momentwhen we thinkof

them,

although

hat,

of

course,

opens

up

the bleak

prospect

of everlast-

ing misery

and

neverendinganguish.

101)

For

those

acquainted

with Sebald's

prose,

this

monologue

must

appear

somewhat

perplexing.

After

all,

since his

emergence

on the

German

and international

iterary

stage

in the late

1980s,

Sebald

was

celebrated

by

readers, critics,

and

scholars

alike for

giving

the

highest

poetic

attention to

the

minute

description

of naturaland human

reali-

ties in the vein of Adalbert Stifter and GottfriedKeller, albeit in a

1.

W. G.

Sebald,Austerlitz,

rans.AntheaBell

(New

York:Random

House,

2001),

100-01.

German

original:

Sebald,

Austerlitz

Munich:

Hanser,

001).

Hereafter ited

par-

enthetically

within the text.



Amir

Eshel 73

postmodern

mode.2 Even in

its

manner

of

dealing

with

man-made

catastrophes,most notablywith the Holocaust andthe air raids of Ger-

man

cities

during

World War

II,

Sebald's

prose

seemed

to

have

con-

sciously

avoided

the

generalizing,

the

epic,

and the

quasi-

philosophical.

How,

then,

should one read

Austerlitz's

polemic

against

time,

and how can we

clarify

his resistance to

regarding

the

past

as

gone alongside

his

fear of

letting

it

dwell

eternally

in the

present?

What

is the nature of Austerlitz's

desire to

keep

a distance from Zeit-

geschehen

-

from

what occurs

in time?

And,

finally,

what

is

this

monologue'splace in the book's narrative ndin Sebald'spoetics?

Focusing

on Austerlitz's

monologue

in

Greenwich

and on

a

variety

of

key

elements of the

book,

I

will claim

that Austerlitz's

monologue,

like

Sebald's

prose

as a

whole,

decisively

exceeds the traditionof

aesthetic

modernist

melancholia,

which tended to confine itself

to

elegiac

mourning, symbolist escapism,

and

decadent

ennui.3 In

Austerlitz,

Sebald's

reflexive,

ratherthan

depressive,

melancholy,

as

this

is

mir-

rored

in his fascination with

clocks, diaries,

and

ruins,

results

in

a

unique interweaving

of

time and

narrative

n

three

varied, yet

inter-

twined

ways:

a

multifocal

evocation

of

the

recent

German

past,

an alle-

gorical-critical

account

of

modernity,

and,

finally,

a latent order

of

signification

in which

not the

historicalor

biographical,

but

the

effects

of

figuration

hemselves

constitute he referent.

This

essay

deals with all three of

these

modes

of

the

relationship

between

time and

narrative.Even

though

the novel's

poetic figurations

consistently

suspend

finite

identifications,

hus

preventing

a

pure

refer-

ential

reading,

Austerlitz,

ike the

entirety

of

Sebald's

oeuvre,

cannot be

abstracted rom its own place in time. In what follows, PartI analyzes

the

narrative's

engagement

with the immediate

historical

past.

As Part

II

shows,

beyond

the

poetic

figuration

of

historical

ime,

Austerlitzalle-

gorizes

and

critically

comments

on

modernity's

ime consciousness. It

is

only

after

considering

these

modes,

I

will conclude in Part

III,

that

the

significance

of the

marked effects of

figuration

in

Sebald's

prose

2.

See Susan

Sontag,

A

Mind in

Mourning,

Where he StressFalls

(New

York:

Farrar,

traussand

Giroux,

2001)

41-48,

especially

46.

On the

relationof Sebald's

prose

to

his workon Stifter,see EvaJuhl, Die WahrheitOber as Unglick: Zu W. G.Sebald Die

Ausgewanderten,

eisen im

Diskurs,

ed. Anne

Fuchs and Theo Harden

Heidelberg:

C.

Winter,

1995)

640-59,

especially

651-52.

3.

See

Der

melancholischeGeist der

Moderne,

ed.

Ludger

Heidbrink

Munich:

Hanser,

1997),

especially

Peter

Burger,

Der

Ursprung

er

asthetischenModeme

aus dem

ennui 101-19.



74

W.

G. Sebald

s

Austerlitz

can be

fully grasped.

To

put

it

differently:

The

unique significance

of

Sebald'sprose lies in its formalcharacteristics, otjust in the scope of

its thematic and

semantic

domains.

Sebald's

work

stands

out not

only

because,

as is often

noted,

it

thematizes remembrance

nd

responsibil-

ity

vis-a-vis the German

past,4

but ratherbecause

of

its

poetics

of

sus-

pension:

a

poetics

that

suspends

notions

of

chronology,

succession,

comprehension,

and closure

-

a

poetics

that rather

han

depicting

and

commenting

on the historical event

in

time,

constitutes

an

event,

becomes

the

writing

of

a

different,

a

literary

ime.

I

In

the

hope

...

that

time will not

pass

away,

has not

passed

away:

Austerlitz's

polemic

against

the

ontology

of

a

separablepast, present,

and future reverberates

hroughout

he

book,

pointing

back

to

Sebald's

ongoing

interest

n

questions

of historicalremembrancen

postwar

Ger-

many

and to his interest n the

course of

the

modem

novel. Unlike

rep-

resentative

authors

of his own

generation

who dealt

with the

German

past

since

the 1960s

-

Peter Schneider

(1940-),

Uwe

Timm

(1940-),

Wolfgang Hilbig

(1941-),

Peter

Handke

(1942-),

F.

C.

Delius

(1943-),

Botho StrauB

1944-),

Eva Demski

(1944-),

Christoph

Hein

(1944-),

Bernhard

Schlink

(1944-),

Thomas

Brasch

(1945-2001),

or Rainer

WernerFassbinder

(1945-1985)

-

Sebald

began

his

literary

engage-

ment

with

the

marked

past

only

in the late

1980s.5 His late

develop-

ment as

a

writer,

however,

is not the

only aspect

separating

his

prose

from

that of

much of his

generation.6

t is instead

his

narratives'

ack

of

interest

in this

generation'sprevailing

topoi

-

the

anguishes

and

fragile sense perceptionof the I, the Germanstudents'revolt of the

late

1960s and

its

aftermath,

he

crumbling

socialist

utopia,

and

the

4.

A

summary

of this view is

presented

n

Arthur

Williams,

'Das

Korsakowsche

Syndrom':

Remembrance

nd

Responsibility

n W.

G

Sebald,

German

Culture

and the

Uncomfortable

ast,

ed. Helmut

Schmitz

Aldershot:

Ashgate,

2001)

65-86.

5.

By

Sebald's

generation,

mean

writers

who

were born

1942/44-1945/47,

shortly

before the end of the

war or

right

after,

hus

growing

up

in the

GDR,

the

Federal

Republic,

or

Austria.

On the

significance

of

generational ypology

in the

history

of

post-

war German

iterature ee

SigridWeigel,

'Generation'

s

a

Symbolic

Form:

On the

Gene-

alogical

Discourse

of

Memory

ince

1945,

The

Germanic

Review

77.4:

264-67.

6.

It

would be

impossible

o

give

here

a short

account

of the

literature

f Sebald's

generation.

I

would

like, nevertheless,

to

point

to

such

representative,

lbeit

different

works such as PeterSchneider'sLenz:Eine

Erzahlung

1973)

and Vati:

Erzahlung

1987),

Wolfgang

Hilbig's

Ich

(1993),

Peter Handke'sMein Jahr

in der Niemandsbucht:

Ein

Marchenaus

den

neuen

Zeiten

(1994),

and

Berhard

Schlink's

TheReader

(1995).



Amir Eshel

75

analysis

of

the

parents'guilt.

Sebald'sprose is distinctive in its voice, in its uniquefocalization-

the

sensitivity through

which

we hear the narrative.This

voice reflects

a

singular

concentration,

f

not

a

fixation,

on what is

decisively

outside

the

I

-

the

experiences

of

others,

the

fear

thattheir

story

might

van-

ish

into oblivion.7

Following

the credos of

the

West

Germandocumen-

tary

literature

of the

1960s

and

1970s

-

especially

the work

of

Alexander

Kluge,

who offered

German

iterature the

only

intellectu-

ally legitimate

way

to confront

the

German

past 8

his

writing

col-

laged text and visual images and sought to blur the lines between

historiography, autobiography, biography,

and fiction. As

Sebald

emphatically

noted,

My

medium s

prose,

not

the

novel. 9

Addressing

Adorno's

response

to the

challenges

of modernist

prose

and to those of modem

history,

one can no

longer

tell,

whereas

the

novel's

form demands

telling, 'l

Sebald

contented

himself

with

the

role of

the

messenger. ll

He wanted

to set his

prose

in

opposition

to

what he called

fiction

-

that

is,

belles-lettres

n the nineteenth-

century tradition,prose

in

which the

anonymous

narratorknows and

controls

everything.

The certainties

pertinent

o the aesthetic

and his-

torical

circumstances

of the nineteenth

century,

Sebald

alleged,

have

7. To

be

sure,

Sebald

is not the

only

writer

of

his

generation

who

has dedicated

much

attention o

the

presence

and

consequences

of

the German

past.

One

could

point

to

some

of the

prose

by

Peter

Schneider,

o a

certain,

not-unproblematic

egree

o

the

work

of

Bernhard chlink

(1944-),

to the

poetry

of

Anne Duden

(1942-),

or

to

the

prose

of

Birgit

Pausch

1942-).

Yet in

none of these

cases do we

observe

he same

poetic

ntensity

n

regard

to

the

victims'

stories,

he

same

concentration n the fate of the survivors nd the

presence

of thepast.On Sebald's ingularitynthisrespect, ee alsoErestine Schlant,TheLanguage

of

Silence: WestGerman

Literature nd

the

Holocaust

New

York:

Routledge,

1999)

234.

8.

Mit

einem kleinen

Strandspaten

Abschied

von

Deutschland

nehmen,

nter-

view with

Uwe

Pralle,

Siddeutsche

Zeitung

22 Dec. 2001.

9.

Wildes

Denken,

ebald n an

interview

with

Sigrid

Liffler,

Profil

19

Apr.

1993.

On Sebald's

collapse

of

the differencebetween ictionaland

autobiographical

arrativesn

the contextof the dissolution f

subjectivity

n

modem

prose

see Oliver

Sill,

'Aus

dem

Jager

ist

ein

Schmetterlingeworden.'Textbeziehungen

wischenWerken on W.

G

Sebald,

Franz

Kafka,

und Vladimir

Nabokov,

Poetica 29.3-4

(1997):

596-623,

especially

596-97.

10.

TheodorW.

Adomo,

Standort es Erzahlersm

zeitgen6ssischen

Roman,

Gesa-

mmelte

Schriften

I,

Noten zur

Literatur,

d. Rolf Tiedemann

Frankfurt/Main:

uhrkamp

1974)41. On thefar-reachingonsequences f Adoro's analysisas voiced inthisessayand

in

Adorno's ater

Aesthetic

Theory,

ee Keith Bullivant

nd Klaus

Briegleb,

Die Krisedes

Erzahlens '1968'

und

danach,

Gegenwartsliteratur

eit

1968,

ed. Klaus

Briegleb

and

Sigrid

Weigel,

vol.

12,

Hanser

Sozialgeschichte

er

deutschenLiteratur om

16. Jahrhundert

bis

zur

Gegenwart,

d.

Rold

Grimminger

Munich:

Deutscher

Taschenbuch,

992)

302-39.

11.

Recovered

Memories,

nterview

with

Maya

Jaggi,

TheGuardian

2

Sept.

2001.



76 W.G.Sebald's Austerlitz

been

taken

from us

by

the course

of

history.

. . .

[W]e

have

to

acknowledgeour own sense of ignoranceand of insufficiency ... and

write

accordingly. 12

Crucial

to

the

uncertainties

f the modem

age

and to the

insufficien-

cies

of

nineteenth-century

ealistic

prose

is the

relation

between fact

and fiction.

Keeping

the

tension between fact and

fiction

unresolved

is

important,

Sebald

insists,

because we

largely

delude

ourselves

with

the

knowledge

that

we

think

we

possess,

that we

make

up

as we

go

along,

that

we

make fit

our

desires and

anxieties and that

we

invent a

straight ine or a trail in orderto calm ourselves down. 13Narration n

a

manner

hat

conveys

reassurance

n

our

ability

to

depict accurately,

o

make sense

of and master

time,

to overcome the

postmodern, post-

Shoah

condition,

is

to be mirrored

n the uncertainties

f the narra-

tor. The oscillation between

a

narrator s the author

and as

a

fictive

fig-

ure

should

communicate tself to the

reader,

who will

or

ought

to

feel

a similar sense

of irritation bout

the tension

between

fact and

fic-

tion.

Realism,

Sebald

notes,

functions

only

if

it

goes

beyond

its own

boundaries.

.

.

. The realistic text is

occasionally

allowed

to risk

becoming allegorical. 14

ignificantly,

even

though

somewhat naive

in

his

understanding

f

the relation between fictional and

historiographic

narratives

of

history,

Sebald

locates

the

difference between his

prose

and

what he

regards

as

clear-cut

historiography

n

what

the

historical

monograph

cannot achieve:

a

metaphor

or

allegory

of a collective

his-

torical

process

....

Only

in

metaphorizing

an

we

gain

an

empathetic

insight

into

history. 15

The

continuous

tension

between fact and

fiction,

authorial

or auto-

biographicalnarrationand fictional narrative,between the mediation

of

data

and its

metaphorical figuration,

is

constitutive

to

all

of

Sebald's

works. Like

The

Emigrants,

in

which

the lives and

deaths

of

several

figures

who are

exiled from

Nazi

Germany

both evoke

National Socialism

and

metaphorize

he

experience

of

persecution

and

exile,

Austerlitz addresses

the fate of a Jew

who

struggles

to over-

come his own

forgetting

and thus to

metaphorize

he tension between

remembrance

and oblivion.

At

first

sight,

the book

follows

the

story

12.

Interview

with James

Wood

n Brick58

(Winter1998):

27.

13.

Interview

with JamesWood

25-26.

14.

Sven

Boedecker,

Menschen

auf der anderen

Seite,

interview with

W. G

Sebald,

Rheinische

Post

9

Oct. 1993.

15. Interview

with

Sigrid

Loffler.



AmirEshel

77

of

its

sixty-plus-year-old

protagonist.16

Most of the novel's

some four

hundred

pages

(in the Germanedition)tell of the fictive Jew,

Jacques

Austerlitz,

born

in

1934,

who was

sent

as a

child

in

a

Kindertransport

from his

hometown,

Prague,

to

England.

Faithfulto his

semidocumen-

tary

aesthetics,

Sebald

collapsed together

in

Austerlitz's life several

authentic

biographies:

the life of a

colleague,

who,

like

Austerlitz,

taught

the

history

of

architecture,

hat

of

Susie

Bechhofer,

who

was

bor

into

a

Jewish

family

in

Munich

and

was sent

with her twin

sister

on

a

Kindertransport

o

Wales,

and

elements

of

other

biographies.17

Havingarrived n the smalltown of Bala,Wales,Austerlitz s adopted

by

a

Calvinist

priest

and his

wife,

who want to save

Austerlitz's

soul,

innocentas it was of the

Christian aith

138).

The

couple

forces him

to

give

up

all his

belongings,

thus

erasing

his entire

previous

existence.

Growing up

as

Dafydd

Elias,

the child

spends

hours

lying

in his

bed,

trying

to

conjureup

the faces of those who are left

behind,

through

his

own

fault,

as he fears. It will be not until

1949,

in the

private boarding

school

he

attends,

hatAusterlitzdiscovers

his true

name.

The

discovery

of his name does not

help,

at

first,

to

reveal

the lost

past.

Austerlitz's own amnesia

-

a

psychological

phenomenon

not

uncommon

among

survivors

of the

Holocaust

-

makes the

past

seem

forever

gone.

He moves on

to

develop

his interests

n a

manner

repres-

sive to all that

might

connect

to his

genesis:

As far as

I

was

con-

cerned the world

ended

in

the late

nineteenth

century

(139).

Repression

will

lead to neurotic

resurfacing

and

symptomatic

acting

out.

Collapse

follows. After a

ritual act

of

liberation

n

which he bur-

ies his

entire work

(124),

Austerlitz

comes

to

realize what he lost as

a

child and what he so

stubbornly

repressed

as an adult. Isolated and

alienated,

he

wonders

why

it never occurredto him to

search

for

his

true

origins

(125).

Before his final

mental

collapse

in

the

summerof

1992,

he

roams the

streets and the train

stations

of

London

in

insom-

niac

obsession,

only

to discover that

the dead

are

returning

rom

their

16.

The

term

story

here is used in its

narratological

ense:

story

s

the

sequence

of

events

involving

actors nd

actants.

heterm

Kindertransport

efers o the

transfer

of Jewish

children rom

Germany,

Austria,

and

Czechoslovakia o

GreatBritainand else-

where afterthe so-calledReichskristallnacht. rganizedby Jewishgroups, he first trans-

port

arrived

on

December

2,

1938,

in

the East

Anglian

port

of

Harwich

some

sixty

miles

away

from

Norwich,

where

Sebald

taught

at the

University

of East

Anglia.

The

Kindertransport peration

was

ended at the

beginning

of the

war

on

September

1,

1939.

Approximately

en

thousand

hildren

ame

to Great

Britain.

17.

See Ich

iirchte

as

Melodramatische,

nterview n Der

Spiegel

3 Dec. 2001 228.



78 W.G. Sebald's

Austerlitz

exile,

filling

the

twilight

aroundhim

(132).

The cyclical temporalityof return18 the returnof the dead, the

return of

the

past,

which is a

central

trope

in

Sebald's

work,

domi-

nates

the

remaining pages:

Austerlitz's

Ulyssian

journey

back

to his

past.

His

Greenwich

dream of

getting

behind time

will

result

in his

seeking

to

regain

the lost time and create a narrativeof his

past.

It is

through

narrativization

hat Austerlitz

hopes

to find his

place

in

time;

it is

through

the narrative's

emporal

devices

-

telling

of times

past,

i.e.

childhood

in

Prague,

the

Kindertransport

tc.

-

that time is ren-

dered differently than the faceless entity Austerlitz rejects in his

monologue.

Austerlitz's

discovery

and narrativization

of his

very

own time

will

bring

him to

Prague,

where,

much like

Ulysses,

he

encounters

his childhood in

the

figure

of

his

nursemaid,

Vera

Rysanova.

It

will be

through

her,

in

periscopic

narration

a la

Thomas

Bernhard,19

hat the reader

will now find out what

happened

before

and after Austerlitz

was sent

to Wales. Vera

Rysanova

will tell him of

the

persecution

of

Prague's

Jews,

of his

mother's

deportation

o Ther-

esienstadt

and then to the

death

camps

in the

east.

Visiting

Theresienstadt,

Austerlitz

will have then arrived

where

he

had

set

off for in his Greenwich

monologue. Walking

through

the

streets of the Czech

fortress

city, visiting

the

ghetto

museum,

it seems

to

him now as

if

he has

entered

the timeless

kingdom

of

the

dead,

that

the time

of the dead had

never

passed.

He

senses,

even

though

only

for

a

while,

that

the

sixty

thousandJews who had been crammed

nto

the

walls

of

the

ghetto

had

never been taken

away

after all

... that

they

were

incessantly going

up

and

down the stairs

. . .

filling

the entire

spaceoccupied by the air 200).

Austerlitz's

epiphany,

his

experience

of simultaneous

temporality

beyond

the

ontology

of

past-present-future,

hough,

remains

short-lived.

18.

On the

returning

dead,

see

for

example

the narrator's omment

in

Dr.

Henry

Selwyn,

he first

story

of The

Emigrants:

Andso

they

are

ever

returning

o

us,

the dead.

At times

they

come back from

the ice more than

seven decades

laterand

are found

at

the

edge

of

the

moraine,

a few

polished

bones

and a

pair

of hobnailed

boots.

W.

G.

Sebald,

The

Emigrants,

rans. Michael Hulse

(New

York:

New

Directions,

1996)

23. See also

StephanieHarris, The Returnof the Dead:Memoryand Photographyn Sebald'sDie

Ausgewanderten,

heGerman

Quarterly

4.4: 379-91.

19.

According

o

Sebald,

he borrowed

his

technique

of

narrating

ia several

media

( um

ein,

zwei Ecken

herum )

rom Thomas Bernhard.See

Der

Spiegel

interview

233.

On

Sebald's

periscopic

narration,

ee

also

Juhl,

Die Wahrheituiber

das

Ungliick

640-

59,

especially

651.



AmirEshel

79

In an ironic turn

aimed at

suspending

all

notions

of

arrivaland conclu-

sion, any projectionof metaphysicalmeaningonto the scene, Auster-

litz decides to

extend his recherche

du

temps perdu

to

finding

his

father,

who

managed

to

escape Pragueprior

to

the

German

occupation.

After

presenting

a

complicated,

seemingly

intersecting

web of facts and

observations

hat

would

finally explain

his

fate,

Austerlitz

suspends

the

closure

of his recherche

with the

following

gesture:

I

don't

know

...

what all

this

means and so I

am

going

to continue

looking

for

my

father

(my emphasis,

292).

Since

the narratordoes not

continue his

account of Austerlitz'ssearch, it now becomes apparent hat Auster-

litz's search

is not the

means,

but rather the

end itself. The

tension

between

his wish

to

uncover

the

past

and his

fear of its

eternally

dwell-

ing

in the

present

results in an

open-endedexploration

hat,

rather

han

reflecting

a

hope

to

clarify

or

to recover times

past, suggests

the simul-

taneity

of all times

in the

realm

of

memory

and

the

existential

inability

to mark he

past

as

gone.

Before

they part

for the last

time,

Austerlitz

will hand over

to the

narrator he

keys

of

his London house in

Alderey

Street.

I could

stay

there,

the narrator

eports

Austerlitz's last

sentences,

and

study

the

black

and

white

photographs

which,

one

day,

would be all that was left

of his

life

(293).

Since

the book is told

from

a

temporal

perspective

that succeeds this and

all

other

events,

the

symbolic

order of this

key

moment

suggests

a different

reading

of

the

plot altogether.

The black

and white

photographs

cattered

hroughout

he book

-

indistinguish-

able

from the

narrative tself

-

were

configured

with

the text

after

the

narratorreceived

the

keys

to

Austerlitz's

interior,

both

literally

and

metaphorically.20

ow it becomes clear that the

plot

is not

simply

the

result of Austerlitz's

narration,

ut in

addition,

f not

much more

so,

the

20.

In his interiewwith

Sigrid

Loffer,

Sebald

stated,

I

work

using

the

system

of

bricolage,

in

Ldvi-Strauss's

ense.

It

is

a form of

savage

work

[eine

Form

von wildem

Arbeiten],

of

prerational

hought,

in which

one nuzzles

in

findings

until

they

somehow

make sense.

In

The

Savage

Mind

(Chicago: Chicago

UP,

1966),

Ldvi-Straussdefines

mythical

thought

as

a

mode

of

bricolage

17).

The

French

verb

bricoler

denotes an

activity

of order

creation

hat s

not basedon

thorough hought,

but rather n

using

materi-

als and tools

that

happen

to be

around.

Whereas

he

engineer

or

scientist

surpasses

he

boundaries iven by society,the bricoleurcreatesstructures bymeansof events 22). In

the contextof Sebald's

poetics,

it

is

significant

hat

Levi-Strauss's ricoleur

provides

igns

denoting

he

world,

while the

engineer

suppliesconcepts:

One

way

in

which

signs

can be

opposed

to

concepts

is that

whereas

concepts

aim to be

wholly transparent

ith

respect

o

reality,

igns

allow and even

require

he

interposing

nd

incorporation

f a certainamount

of

humanculture

nto

reality

20).



80 W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz

product

of the narrator's

emplotment

-

of his

bricolage,

in

Claude

Levi-Strauss's ense: the outcome of a prerational rocessduringwhich

the narrator

smuggles

in

photographs

and whatever information

he

excavates

until he turns

hese materials nto a

narrative.

Rereading

the

plot

from

the narrator's

perspective,

it

now

seems

obvious that the narrative is

a

postmoder

crypto-Bildungsroman

stretching

over some

thirty years.

It follows

the

story

of a

young

Ger-

man, who,

like

Sebald

himself,

decided to

live

in

Great

Britain,

a man

who,

like the

narratorof all Sebald's

prose,

travels

extensively

in

searchof the past, in search of an idiom thatwill addresswhat he con-

tinually

finds

along

his

way:

the stories of

victims,

survivors,

and ruins.

Sebald's narrator

n

Austerlitz ravels not

only

for

study,

but also for

reasons

which were never

entirely

clear to him

(3).

Like

Sebald,

he

began

his

studies

in

Germany,

where

he

learned

almost

nothing

from

his teachers

-

scholars

who

built their

careers

n the

1930s

and 1940s

and

still,

that is

after

the

war,

nurtured

delusions

of

power (32-

34).21

Just

as his

experiences

with

Jewish

emigres

were essential

for

Sebald,

Austerlitz

is

the

first

teacher o whom the narrator s

able

to

listen since his

days

in

primary

school

(33).

Furthermore,

he narra-

tor's scarce remarks reverberate

in

Austerlitz's

own words. While

describing

his visit to

the

fortressBreendonk n

1967,

the

narrator

on-

templates,

in

a

way

reminiscent

of

Austerlitz'sGreenwich

monologue,

how

everything

s

constantly lapsing

into oblivion

with

every

extin-

guished

life,

how the world is ...

draining

tself,

in

that the

history

of

countless

places

and

objects

which

themselves

have no

power

of

mem-

ory

is

never

heard,

never describedor

passed

on

(24).

It is not, however,that Austerlitz s subsumed n the narrator r that

the latter

should

be

equated

with the writer.22Rather han

stylizing

the

narrator s

a

German

attentive

to

the

story

of the

Jews,

Austerlitz the-

matizes

modem

uncertainties,

he difficulties

of

telling

the

past

reas-

suringly

in

an era

suspicious

of all

grand

narratives. Much

like

Sebald's

previous

prose,

Austerlitz

reflects a

poetic

stance that sus-

pends

all

object-subject

polarities.

It is a

prose

that is

intransitive

n

Roland

Barthes' classic sense. Its

subject

is

conceived

as

immediately

contemporarywith the writing, being effected and affected by it. 23

21.

See,

for

example,

Sebald'sremarks

n the interview

with JamesWood

29.

22.

See Sebald's

own

remarks

n

his Der

Spiegel

interview

233.

23.

See Roland

Barthes,

To Write:An IntransitiveVerb?

The

Rustle

of Language

(New

York:

Hill

and

Wang,

1986)

18-19.



AmirEshel

81

Thematizing

ime's

artificiality,

ts

non-occurrence,

he

simultaneity

of

all its modalities,Sebald'sprose is not interiorbut anterior o the pro-

cess

of

writing: 24

All

its

subjects

are defined

by

the act

of

narrat-

ing,

the

act of

writing,

rather han

by

the

objects

they

address

or

events

they

evoke. Sebald's

subjects

ransgress

he border between

textual

and transtextual

ealities,

between the writer and the

written,

between

the events at stake

and their

presentation,

between

the time

of the

events

and the time of the

narration.

The result

is the

writing

of

life,

of

lives

-

not

only

the lives of the narratoror the

writer,

but also

the

attentive writing of those lost lives that Sebald so relentlessly

researched.

This

writing

of life

is

present

not

only

in

the semantic

and

thematic

figuration

of times

past,

but

also in Austerlitz's sense of the

natureof modem

time.

II

In

the

hope

. .. that

time will not

pass away,

has

not

passed

away:

To be

sure,

Austerlitz's

polemic against

time,

his

hope

o

halt

time's

maddeninggallop,

is

configured

o relate

to a traumatic hildhood and

an

oblivious,

neurotic

life as an adult. Austerlitz s

haunted,

he narra-

tive

suggests,

by

the

paralyzingpower

of

forgetting

and

by

his fear

that

oblivion

might

claim

victory

over

his

pain.

No careful

reading

of

Austerlitz's

polemic against

time could

overlook,

however,

the

scene's

marked

topography

and thus the

work's overall

allegorical

dimension.

Metonymically

read,

Greenwichdenotes the

rapid pace

of

technologi-

cal

and

industrial

progress

in

Europe

as

of

the

mid-nineteenth

entury

-

a

process

epitomized

by

the

transportation

evolutionand the

spread

of railwaytracksthroughout he continent.It was the need to regulate

railway transportation

hat

in

the 1840s

brought

about

the standardiza-

tion

of all local times

in

England.25

n

1884,

Greenwich ime

became

World

Time,

and the town

was

chosen as the

world's

Prime

Meridian

-

the

topographic

marker of

a

modem universe based on the

rapid

transportation

f

goods

andthe

unprecedented

movement

of

individuals.

Reflecting

on the

opening

of the

Paris-Rouen

and

the Paris-Orleans

railway

ines

in

1843,

Heinrich

Heine noted:

24.

Barthes

19.

25.

In November

1840,

the

director

of

England's

Great

Western

Railway

ordered

that London

time be set as the

standard ime

for all

purposes

of


across

the

country.

This was the

beginning

of the end

of local time.

See Derek

Howse,

Greenwich

Timeand the

Discovery

of

the Longitude

Oxford:

Oxford

UP,

1980)

87.



82 W.G. Sebald 's Austerlitz

Let us

simply

say

that our

entire

experience

is

being

ripped up

and

hurledon new tracks; hat new relations,pleasures,and tormentsawait

us,

and the unknown exerts

its

ghastly

fascination,

rresistible

and,

at

the same

time,

fearful....

Even

the

elementary

concepts

of time and

space

have

become

shaky.

The

railways

have

killed

space,

and

only

time remains for us. If

only

we

had

enough money

to

respectfully

kill

time,

too.26

Writing

from the

perspective

of what

ReinhartKoselleck has illus-

trated as the

rupture

between

the

space

of

experience

and

the

hori-

zon of

expectation

that announced

modernity,

Heine's declaration

of

the

death of

space

reflected the

emergence

of a

new,

moder con-

sciousness

of

temporality

and

space.27 Space

will

no

longer

be a

sig-

nificant obstacle.

No

longer

will it

propel

the same

longings,

desires,

and

anxieties.

The death

of time that

Heine

envisioned

was

soon to

become

one

of the characteristics

of the moder era:

Time

and

space

died

yester-

day,

wrote

Marinetti

in

1909,

We

already

live

in

the

absolute,

because

we

have created

eternal,

omnipresent

peed. 28

Modernity,

as

reflectedin

literary

modernism,would be the first

epoch

to define itself

through

radical concentrationon the

present,

through

the Nietzschean

life

-

the desire

to unload the

weight

of the

preceding epochs,

to

curb

all

traditions,

query

metaphysical

constraints,

and delve

into

the

now and its

promise

of

unprecedented

movement

through

space.29

While Austerlitz

is

narrated rom the

perspective

of

this

modernist,

absolute

now,

the

protagonist's

polemic against

time

is

only

one

thread,

albeit a decisive

one,

in a web of

textual references

that

target

26.

Heinrich

Heine,

Lutezia.

Zweiter

Tell,

trans.

Todd

Samuel

Presner,

Schriften

uber

Frankreich,

ed.

Eberhard

Galley

(Frankfurt/Main:968)

509-10.

1

am

indebted o

Todd Samuel Presner

not

only

for his

splendid

ranslation

f Heine's

sentences,

but also

for his

inspiring

dissertation:

Todd

Samuel

Presner,

Tracking

Modernity,

Nationalizing

Mobility:

German/Jewish

ravelLiterature s

a

History

of

Possibility

Ph.D

diss.,

Stan-

ford

University,Department

f

Comparative

Literature,

001).

27.

Reinhart

Koselleck,

Futures

Past,

trans. Keith

Tribe

(Cambridge:

MIT,

1985)

231-66.

On

modernity's

distinctive

emporal

onsciousness,

see

Peter

Osborne,

The Poli-

tics

of

Time.

Modernity

nd Avant-Garde

London/New

York:Verso

1995)

5-29.

28. F. T.

Marinetti,

Let

s Murder

he Moonshine:Selected

Writings,

d. and

trans.

R.

W. Flint

(Los

Angeles:

Sun

and Moon

Classics,

1991)

49.

29. See

Paul

de

Man,

Literary

History

and

LiteraryModernity,

Blindness

and

Insight:

Essays

in

the

Rhetoric

of

Contemporary

riticism,

2nd

ed.,

revised

(Minneapolis:

U

of

Minnesota

P,

1983)

142-65,

and

Karl Heinz

Bohrer,

Das absolute

Prasens: Die

Semantikdsthetischer

Zeit

(Frankfurt/Main:uhrkamp

994)

143-83.



AmirEshel 83

the modem

consciousness of

temporality

and

thus

modernity

and its

perilsas thosearesymbolizedby railway ransportation.

Railway

tracks

had

previously

served in a

similar manner

in

Sebald's

work.

In

Sebald's

first

major

prose

volume,

Vertigo

(1990),

the

narrator ravels

throughGermany

by

train. From this

symbolically

laden

perspective,

the

country

seems

to

him full of

objects

and devoid

of

humans:

it

was as

if

mankindhad

already

made

way

for another

species,

or had

fallen under a kind of curfew

(254).30

While his

jour-

ney through

the Rhine

region

is

told

in

a

manner reminiscent

of

Heine's Deutschland, ein Wintermarchen255), his arrival in the

Heidelberg

train

station is marked

by

angst.

The

crowd

strikes

him as

a

gathering

of

people

who are

fleeing

from

a

city

doomed

or

already

laid waste

(254).

In his

story

Paul

Bereyter,

n

The

Emigrants,

he

photo

of

railway

tracks at

the onset of

the

narration s

merely

the

first

sign

in a

crypto-

gram leading

to the

protagonist's

death

as he

lays

himself down

in

front of

a train. 31Like

the

life

of

Austerlitz,

Paul

Bereyter'spast,

the

story

of the

three-quarterAryan (50),

was

tragically shaped by

National Socialism.

Like

Austerlitz,

Bereyter

had

a

puzzling passion

for

railways,

a

symbolic

fervor

that had

led

his

Aryan

uncle

to

prophesy

that

the

young

Paul would

end

up

on

the

railways

(62).

Railway transportation

ominates

he

thoughts

and

life

of Max Aurach

(Max

Ferber n

the

English

translation),

he

protagonist

of another

story

in The

Emigrants.

Sent

by

his

parents

n

May

1939 to a safe haven in

England,

two and

a

half

years

before

they

were

to

be

murdered

by

Nazis near

Riga,

Ferbersees no

promise

of

freedom and movement

in

the imagea train,butonly infinitethreat: sitting n the train,the coun-

try

passing

by

.

. .

the looks

of fellow

passengers

-

all of

it

is torture

to

me

(169).

Austerlitz

further

expends

Sebald's

symbology

of

railway

transporta-

tion. The

first

scene,

also

the

first encounter

between the

protagonist

and the

narrator,

akes

place

in the

Antwerprailway

station. The

Cen-

tral

Station,

designed by

Louis Delacenserie and

opened

in

1905 with

the

Belgian

king present,

appears

o

Austerlitz's

excavating, Benjamin-

ian gaze as the incarnation f religiosityin the moder age: When we

step

into the

entrance

hall,

Austerlitz

remarks,

we are

seized

by

a

30.

Sebald,

Vertigo,

rans.

Michael

Hulse

(New

York:New

Directions,

1999)

254.

31.

Sebald,

The

Emigrants

27.



84

W.

G. Sebald

s

Austerlitz

sense of

being beyond

the

profane,

in a

cathedralconsecrated

o inter-

nationaltrafficand trade 10). Inspiredby the Pantheon n Rome, this

modem constructioncelebratesthe

centrality

of

movement in

the

new

epoch's

horizon

of

expectation.

Set

even above the

royal

coat of

arms,

watching

over the

symbols

of

capital

accumulation,

nd

reigning supreme

n

the divine

arrange-

ment,

is

the

governor

of

a new

omnipotence,

ime,

as

symbolized

by

a clock.

Surveying

from its central

position

all movementsof its

subor-

dinates,

it

obliges

all to

adjust

their

activities to its demands.

Austerlitz

sees in this regimethe most decisive markof the modem era: Not until

the clocks were standardized round

he

middle of the nineteenthcen-

tury,

he

emphasizes,

did time

truly

reign supreme. Only

by

follow-

ing

the course that time

prescribes,

he

concludes,

can we hasten

throughgigantic

spaces separating

s fromeach other

12).

Significantly,

t

is

the narrator

who,

after Austerlitz's

peroration

t the

Antwerp

rain

station,

classifies the

protagonist's

bility

to

discover

the

marks

of

pain

which . . .

trace countless

fine

lines

through

history

14)

as a kind of historical

metaphysics 13).

The core of this

metaphysics

will

continue to

unfold

in

scenes

encircling

railway

transportation

nd

train

stations

-

spaces

of blissful

happiness

and

profound

misfor-

tune

(34)

that hold Austerlitz

in the

grip

of

dangerous

and

entirely

incomprehensible

urrents

of emotion

33-34)

and

cause him

thoughts

of the

agony

of

leave-taking

and the fear

of

foreign places

(14).

Train

stations

become

for Austerlitz

the

signifier

of his

personal

fixation on

loss

-

the momentof

leave-taking

romhis mother

n

Prague's

Wilson

station

in

1939.

They

markthe

post-Baudelaireian

oetic

consciousness

thatall that is present s alreadypast, already ost.

32

Austerlitz's

fixation

on

and

studies of

railway

stations are

guided

by

his conviction

that


olds the

key

to understand-

ing

the

moder

age,

that the

entire

railway system

embodies

the

idea

of a network

hat

is based

on what

Wittgenstein

called

family

resemblances, 33

y

which the

members of the

extension of a certain

32.

See Karl Heinz

Bohrer,

Der

Abschied:

Theorie der

Trauer

Frankfurt/Main:

Suhrkamp,1996)

9-10,

15.

33.

Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical

Investigations,

rans.

G E. M.

Anscombe,

revised

ranslation,

rd

edition

Oxford:

Blackwell,

2001)

27.

WhileSebald

specifically

and

in

an

unquestionable

eference

o

Wittgenstein

ses the

term Familienahnlichkeiten

see

Austerlitz

[German]

48),

the

English

translation,

family

likeness rather

han

family

resemblances

33)

misses

the

reference

o

Philosophical nvestigations.



AmirEshel

85

concept-word

may

be united

in

a

system

of

similarities

33).

The

entry

to this system and to the work's allegoricaldimension is given in the

scenes

surrounding

he

Liverpool

Street

Station n London.

Covered

by

smoky

darknesscaused

by

diesel oil and locomotive

steam,

the Liver-

pool

Street

Station

lures and

appalls

both

narrator nd

protagonist.

In

their

descriptions,

this locus

emerges

as the

crypt

of the modem

age,

the

symbolic sight

of

rapid

industrial

progress

(36)

and thus as a

kind

of

entrance o the

underworld

127-28).

Like

Dante's

inferno,

this underworld

s

labyrinthine

and

layered.

Whatenables the movement from one section to another s Austerlitz's

excavating

gaze.

While

dwelling

in the station for

hours,

Austerlitz

penetrates

ts enclosed

past,

a

past

still

engraved

n its

image

even

after

the station

had

gone

through

renovation

at the end of the

1980s. The

grounds

of the station

served

in the

past

to house the

Orderof St.

Mary

of

Bethlehem

and

the Bedlam

hospital

for the

insane

and

other

desti-

tute

persons

129).

When

during

the

demolition

work

of 1984 at the site of the Broad

Street

Station,

the

skeletons

of over four

hundred

people

are found

underneath taxi

rank (130),

Austerlitz

s

drawn

to the

site

to

unearth

their

story.

It is

the

fate of

the

discardeddead that will now

point

to the

network

rganizing

his

marked

space.

The

modem

consciousness

of

temporality,

he

killing

of

space

and time as

symbolized

in

railway

transportation,

s seen

in

relation

to human life and

human

remains.

Before

work on the

construction

of the two

northeast erminals

began,

poverty-stricken

uarters

were

forcibly

cleared. Vast

quantities

of

soil mixed

with humanbones were removed from the site to

enable

the

placementof railwaylines, which on the engineers' plan looked like

muscles and

sinews in an anatomical

atlas. The

burialsite is now noth-

ing

more than a

gray-brown

morass,

a

no-man's land

where not a liv-

ing

soul

stirred,

nd

the

symbols

of

intact

nature the

little

river,

the

ditches and

ponds,

the elms

and

the

mulberry

ree

-

are all

gone

(132).

The shift in

the

symbolic

order,

in

the nature of the

system

of

Austerlitz's

direct and

implied

historical

metaphysics,

could

hardly

be

more

evident. Humans

and

human

remains are

removed from their

natural lace, and nature itself is crushedby the nonhuman, ndeed

inhuman

body

of

modernity

-

a

body

whose

threatening

muscle,

as

the

forceful

image

attachedto

the narrative

uggests

(133),

is

that of

railway

transportation.

What is left of

nature

s

only railway

tracks,



86

W.G.

ebald'sAusterlitz

spaces

of

transitionon

which

trains

carrying

heir

material

and

human

loads are rushingback and forth. Time, standardizedime, and rail-

way

transportation

re two

elements of

the

nexus of

modernity

and

bar-

barism.

They

participate

n

and

perpetuate

he

cycle

of

ruthless,

narrow

rationalism

the

narrative's

ronical

presentation

of

Newton's

idea that

time

is

a river

like the

Thames

[100]),

ever-growing

demand for

more

production,

more

consumption,

and more

movement.

The

consequences

of this

cycle

are

unveiled

during

Austerlitz'svisit

to Theresienstadt.

There,

facing

the

material

remainsof

persecution

and

annihilation, he railwaylike system of modernityandthe cosmic sys-

tem that

relates the

star-shaped

ortification

architecture f

the

seven-

teenth

century(15),

the

octagonal

observation

room

of

Greenwich

98),

the

star-shaped

lower

at

the entranceof

his

childhoodhouse

(151),

and

the

star-shaped

orm of

Theresienstadts

fully

revealed:

Theresienstadt

is the

most

radical facet

of

the

economic,

political,

and

symbolic

order

of

post-Enlightenmentmodernity.

The

star-shaped

Theresienstadt is

the

model of a world made

by

reason and

regulated

n all

conceivable

respects

(199),

a

world that

was enabled

by

standardized

time,

by

the modem

temporal

onsciousnessreflected

n

railway

ransportation.

Austerlitz's

polemic

against

time

is

thus

crucially

related

to

his

study

of the

architectural

tyle

of the

capitalist

era

(34)

and to

his

analysis

of the

compulsive

sense

of

order

and

the

tendency

toward monumen-

talism evident in

law courts and

penal

institutions,

railway

stations and

stock

exchanges,

opera

houses

and

lunatic

asylums

and the

dwellings

built

to

rectangular

rid

patterns

or the

labor

force

(33)-

a sense

that

culminated

in Theresienstadt. t is

this

system,

this

model,

at

which the narrativeallegoricallyaims. It is not that for Austerlitz time

has no real

existence,

as J.

M.

Coetzee

remarks,

but rather that

he

questions

the

law of a certain

perception

of

time,

a

specific

mode

of

temporality.34Railway

transportation

nd

railway

stations are

decisive

elements of the

oppressive

universeruled

by

time,

he universe of the

Enlightenment

roject

as

viewed

by

the FrankfurtSchool and

in the

writings

of

Michel

Foucault.The

railway system

and its time

the

governor

f the

moder

era

-

signify

both

modernity'spromise

and

its perils, both humanity's seeming freedom from the boundariesof

nature

and the

all-encompassing,

unprecedented

lienation of

humans,

34. J. M.

Coetzee,

Heir

of

a Dark

History,

eview

of

W.

G.

Sebald's

After

Nature,

New

York

Review

of

Books49.16

(24

Oct.

2002):

225.



Amir Eshel 87

leading

to theirtransformationnto

human

material

n

the

death

camps.

Although Sebald is careful not to identify either the narratoror the

protagonist

with

himself,

Austerlitz's

historical

metaphysics,

his cul-

ture-critical aments

echoing

the

rhetoric

of

Marx,

Adorno,

and

Fou-

cault,

unquestionably

esult

in a

dark

allegorical philosophy

of

history

in

the vein

of

the Frankfurt

School,

in

what Andreas

Huyssen

has

described

as

Sebald's

conceptual

ramework

writing

in

the

frame

of a natural

history

of

destruction,

metaphysics

of nature

-

writ-

ing

that

is indeed

too

closely

tied to

metaphysics

and to the

apocalyp-

tic philosophyof history so prominent n the Germantradition. 35To

be

sure,

Sebald

himself voiced

more than once

concerns

about

the

lib-

eral

dreams

of the nineteenth

century,

n

which

humanity

was to con-

sist

of

emancipated,

autonomous

individuals. 36

Humanity

however,

Sebald

countered,

is

instead

a mass

that,

once

brought

to

a

boil

throughpressure

from

outside,

becomes

fluid,

and then

gaslike

[gas-

formig].37

Although

mobility

may

have seemed

from an economical

standpoint

a

positive development,

in

Germany,

t

was nevertheless

the

subject

of a dialectics hat

led to

catastrophe.38

Sebald's

affinity

with

Benjaminian

kulturkritische

metaphysics,39

his

pessimistic

view of

modernity,

combines

laments over the

decline

of

nature,

of

educational

institutions,

and

of

culture

with discontent

over the fact that

many

in

his

sleepy

German

hometown now drive

BMWs: He is

convinced

that most

subjects

of

the

moder

culture

of

consumption

suffer under the conditions of the

present

and that the

35.

Andreas

Huyssen, Rewritings

nd New

Beginnings:

W.

G Sebald

and

the Lit-

eratureof the

Airwar,

PresentPasts

(Stanford:

Stanford

UP,

2003).

On

Sebald's

implied

philosophy

of

history,

see also Michael

Rutschky,

Das

geschenkte Vergessen:

W. G.

Sebald's Austerlitz und die

Epik

der

schwarzen

Geschichtsphilosophie,

rankfurter

Rundschau 1 Mar.2001.

36. See Wie

kriegen

die Deutschen

das auf die Reihe? W.

G. Sebald

in

interview

with

Wochenpost

7

June 1993.

37. Wie

kriegen

die

Deutschendas auf die Reihe?

38. Wie

kriegen

die

Deutschen

das

auf die Reihe?

39. On

Sebald's

Benjaminian

kulturkritische

etaphysics

ee his

telling

commen-

tary

on Walter

Benjamin's llegoricalangel

of

history

n

Luftkrieg

ndLiteratur

Munich:

Hanser,

1999)

79-80.

In

a

later nterviewwith

TheNew

Yorker ebald

noted:

I've

always

thought

it

very regrettable,and,

in a

sense,

also

foolish,

that the

philosophers

decided

somewhere

n the

nineteenth

entury

hat

metaphysics

wasn't

a

respectablediscipline

and

had

to

be

thrown

overboard,

nd

reduced hemselves o

becoming ogisticians

and

statisti-

cians.... So

metaphysics,

think,

shows a

legitimate

concern. Joe

Cuomo,

The Mean-

ing

of

Coincidence- An Interviewwith the

Writer

W.

G

Sebald,

The New

Yorker

Sept.

2001.



88

W.

G. Sebald's

Austerlitz

mountains

of

painkillers

used

in

a

country

like

Germany

deliver

the

proofof collective mentalpains- painswhose causes lie ultimately n

the beliefs and

practices

of the

enlightened apitalist

world.40Nature

is the context

in

which humans

originally

belonged,

and out

of

which

they

are

being

driven

at a

rapid

pace.41

In

light

of the narrator's

ourney through

he

threatened,

partly

mori-

bund

natureof the

eastern coast of

England

n The

Rings

of

Saturn,

as

well

as the author'sown

scattered

remarks,

Sebald's

literary

archaeolo-

gies

amount to

chapters

in a universal

history

of

catastrophe.

They

seem to trace the aberration f the humanspecies42via an investiga-

tion

into the

genealogy

of

historical

phenomena:

how the

individual

psyche

is

determined

y family history,

how

family

history

in

Ger-

many

was determined

by

the

conditions

of

the

German

middle

class

in

the

1920s

and

1930s,

how these conditions

were determined

by

the his-

tory

of industrialization

n

Europe

and

in

end

by

the

natural

history

of

the human

species.43

Sebald's

tendency

to

draw

the

big picture,

at least

implicitly,

led

him to view the extinction

of certain

species

or the execution

of three

million

cows because

of

Mad

Cow Disease

in relation

to other

catas-

trophes

and to view

the German

atastrophe

s

a

European

atas-

trophe.

The

questionable

universalization

hrough

Europeanization

of

the

Holocaust

-

I

do not see

the

catastrophe

aused

by

Germans,

hor-

rible as

it

was,

as

unique....

It

developed

from

European

history,

from

the

dream,

at latest since

Napoleon,

to turn

this

very

'unorderly'

conti-

nent into

something

'orderly,

arranged,powerful '44

is not least

reflected

in

Austerlitz's

name.

Like his

pedantic

critique

of

the new

ParisBibliothequeNationale(275-86) and other elements of the book,

Sebald's

kulturkritische

otions

amount

at times to

a

questionable

ele-

ology

in

which

modernity

is

all too

clearly

configured

as

necessarily

leading

to Theresienstadt.

The

reader

is

expected

to

find inscribed

in Austerlitz's

name

the

40. Wie

kriegen

die Deutschen

das

auf

die Reihe?

41. Wie

kriegen

die Deutschen

das auf

die

Reihe?

42.

Interviewwith Uwe

Pralle.

43. Interview

with Uwe

Pralle.

44. Interviewwith

Uwe

Pralle.

On

Sebald's

view of ethnic

cleansing

in

conjunction

with

the

extinction

of certain

species

as

a

result of human

action,

see

Thomas

Kastura,

Geheimnisvolle

Fahigkeit

zur

Transmigration:

W. G Sebalds

interkulturelleWallfahrten

in die

Leere,

Arcadia31.1-2

(1996):

200.



Amir

Eshel 89

modem,

Napoleonic

historical

paradigm, 45

he

idea

of

a

forcefully

unitedEuropeunder one economic, political,and symbolic hegemony.

It is

precisely

this

paradigm

f

organizing,

aggressive

rationality

as

the root of all evil that

is echoed

in

Austerlitz's

Greenwich

mono-

logue, especially

in

the

ironic

invocationof Newton's view of time

as

a

masterable,

definable

entity. Modernity's

deification

of

standardized,

controlled time

is

challenged

in

the

monologue by

the voice of a

fig-

ure

whose entire

appearance

ignifies

the

longing

for a

different,

unda-

mentally

romanticist

paradigm,

y

a

temporal

consciousness

that

can

apparentlystill be found in many partsof the earthgovernedto this

day

less

by

time than

by

the weather

101).

Read

in

this

light,

Auster-

litz's

polemic

is

not

only

the

poetic challenge

to

the

temporal

con-

sciousness of

the

modern

age,

to the

practices

of

accelerated

production,

consumption,

and movement.

It is also the somewhat

rushed, obsolete,

and

strangely

Heideggerian-sounding

ostulation

of

an

ultimate

ogic

of

modernity,

a

logic

that removes us

humans

from

the

natural,

true and authentic

and is reflected

in

mechanized

mass

agriculture

s

much

as in

inhuman, ndeed,

fascist

cataclysms.46

III

In

the

hope

...

that time

will

not

pass away,

has not

passed away:

Viewed from the

perspective

of its

allegorical

( kulturkritische )

dimension,

Austerlitz

s

hardly unique

in its

interweaving

of time and

narrative

n

the

larger

landscape

of

postwar

and

contemporary

German

literature.

Peter

Weiss,

Heiner

Miiller,

and Botho

Straul3,

o name

only

a

few,

emplotted

in

various

forms

aspects

of

National

Socialism

as

expressionsof modernity'scapitalist,annihilation-destinedhrust.What

distinguishes

the

book,

and

Sebald's

work as a

whole, however,

is

that

this

allegory,

at

times

all

too

implicated

in

the

Enlightenmentproject

that

it

criticizes,

is

relativized

n a

manner hat

dismisses,

indeed defers

finite

insights

or

conclusions. Even

if

the

narrative'sconcentrationon

45.

Sebald

uses the term

historisches

Paradigma

n

his

Der

Spiegel

interview.

46.

In

an

unpublished

manuscript

f

the 1949

lecture hat was

later o be known as

The

QuestionConcerningTechnology,Heidegger amouslystated hat Agricultures now

motorized

food

industry

in

essence the

same

as

the

manufacturing

f

corpses

in

gas

chambersand

extermination

amps,

the same as

blockading

and

starving

of

nations,

the

same as the

manufacture

f

hydrogen

bombs. This

remarkwas

dropped

rom

the final

version of

the

manuscript.

See

Richard

Bernstein,

The

New Constellation:The Ethical-

Political

Horizons

of

Modernity/Postmodernity

Cambridge:

MIT,

1992)

130.



90 W.G. Sebald s

Austerlitz

the

catastrophic

eems

occasionally

to

be subsumed

by

all-encompass-

ing conceptualframes,one is still confrontedwith moments in which

this

tendency

is

ironically

inverted:

I

don't

know .

.

.

what all this

means.

.

.

(my

emphasis,

292).

From their

beginnings

in

After

Nature

through

Vertigo,

The

Rings of

Saturn,

and The

Emigrants,

Sebald's narrativesmaintained he tension

between

masterable

progression

and the

catastrophic,

he

moment in

which

mere succession is shattered

by

a

seemingly

meaning-generating

event

-

by

the

instant

n

which

chronos,

the

successive,

the

repetition

of the same, is succeededby kairos,the event of what FrankKermode

calls

intemporal significance. 47

Sebald's kairoi

however,

remain

remote from

any

form of

transcendence,

heir

meaning ndefinitely

deferred.

This

deference

is well

in

line with

Sebald's

overall

poetics

of

suspension

-

the mode in which this

emblematic

postmodernprose

follows and outdoes

what Fredric

Jameson

described as the

elegiac

mysteries

of duree

and

memory prevalent

n

high

modernism.48

To

put

it

differently:

Sebald's

prose

is

significant

not

simply

as a case

study

in

postmodern

historiographic

metafiction,

hat

is,

because

of

the

ways

it

thematizes

memory,

he

manner n which it

is

concerned

with histori-

cal

figures

and

events while

blurring

he

distinction

between

fiction and

history.49

Rather,

his work is remarkable

s

poetic

chronoschism,

hat

is,

because

of the

ways

in

which the narrative

organizes

and

recon-

ceives

temporality,

egardless

of its

references

o

history,

the

manner

n

which

it

manages

to

escape

altogether

he

danger

of leftist Weltschmerz

and

didactic

pedantry

n

its

suspension

of time

as

a

category

of

per-

ception

and

progression.50

Sebald's catastrophe is not epiphanic. Informed by Hans Blum-

berg's

notion

of

catastrophe

as

a

topos

of

the

human

imagination,51

47.

See Frank

Kermode,

The Sense

of

an

Ending:

Studies n the

Theory

of

Fiction

(Oxford:

Oxford

UP,

1967)

46-47.

48. Fredric

Jameson,

Postmodernism;

or;

the

Cultural

Logic

of

Late

Capitalism

(Durham:

Duke

UP,

1991)

16.

49. On

historiographic

metafiction,

ee

Linda

Hutcheon,

A

Poetics

of

Postmod-

ernism:

History,Theory,

Fiction

(New

York:

Routledge,

1988),

especially

chs.

6

and

7.

50. On chronoschism

s a

typological

device

in

addressingpostmoder

literature,

see Ursula

Heise,

Chronoschism:

Time,Narrative,

and Postmodernism

Cambridge:

Cam-

bridge

UP,

1997)

1-74.

51. See the interview with Andrea

K6hler,

Katastrophe

mit

Zuschauer,

Neue

Zurcher

Zeitung

22

Nov. 1997

Also,

Hans

Blumenberg,

hipweck

with

Spectator:

Para-

digm

of

a

Metaphorfor

Existence,

rans.Steven Rendall

Cambridge:

MIT,

1997).



Amir

Eshel

91

his

catastrophe

s

no

longer

a

sign

of

the

eschatological,

of

divine

ful-

fillment. Sebald's interest is focused on modem, man-madecatastro-

phes

marked

by

their

paradigmatic

enselessness,

by

the fact that

any

attempt

to distill sense

from them would result in

questionable

mythological

narratives.52

The

appearance

of

mythological images

such

as those

of

burning

cities and Lot's wife

in The

Rings

of

Saturn

is

not the result

of a

mythicizing interpretative

ndeavor,

but rather

the

attempt

to

present

images

of

and in relation to

the

catastrophic

images

that

only

mirror

the

narrator's

nability

to deliver

a

cohesive,

meaning-generatingaccount of the radicalcontingency inherentin

the

catastrophic,

ndeed,

in

history.53

What

we

grapple

with,

Sebald's

narratives

seem to

suggest,

is not

only

the

catastrophic,

the

marked

historical

event,

the

kairos,

but also

their

distance,

their

presentness

n

the

form

of inheritedand

produced

images,

their senselessness.

Writ-

ing

is the

measuring

of this

distance,

and

photography

can

only

the-

matize

the absence

of the

real,

of the event as

such.

If clocks tell

time,

Sebald's

narratives

ell what

wanes,

what tran-

spires

in time.54

Just

as clocks

count time

-

in

English,

to count

denotes

to

tell,

to

account,

to reckon

[in

German

zahlen/

erzahlen]

-

his work does not

simply

count

off times

gone,

but cre-

ates

its own mode

of

counting,

of

accounting

for,

its

own

time. What

marks Sebald's

poetics

of

suspension

is the

ways

in which the effects

of

figuration

hemselves

constitute he

work's ultimate

referent,

hat

is,

its

unique

time

effects,

the

ways

in which the text forms time

and

conditions the

readingexperience.55

Let us consider

the

following pas-

sage

that describes Austerlitz's

ourney

from

Prague through

Pilsen

in

52. Das ist sicher eine Gefahr

in

der

Beschreibung

von

Katastrophen:

ass

die

Katastrophe

as

paradigmatisch

innlose

ist und

dass

deshalbdie

Versuchung

esonders

akut

ist,

irgendeinen

inn aus diesen

kataklysmischen reignissen

u

destilieren.Das halte

ich im

Prinzip

fir

illegitim,

sinnlos,

vergeblich

den Versuch

also,

das

in

mythische

Dimensionen

inzuordnen,

anz

gleich

welcher

Art. Interview

with

AndreaKohler.

53. Der Erzahler

n

meinen Texten

entschlagt

sich aber

eder Deutung.

Er

macht

sich die

Moglichkeit

der

Erklarung

er

Katstrophe

icht

zunutze,

er verweist

darauf,

dass

die

Leute friiher n

dieser

oder

jener

Weise daruber

nachgedacht

haben. Was

ihn

selber

betrifft,

glaube

ich

sagen

zu

k6nnen,

dass er keine Antwortaufdiese Formradikaler

Kon-

tingenz

hat. Interviewwith

AndreaKohler.

54.

1

am

indebted n this

very

short

discussion

of

the

etymology

of

counting

n

rela-

tion

to

both time and

narrative o Stuart

Sherman,

Telling

Time:

Clocks,

Diaries,

and

English

Diurnal

Form,

1660-1785

(Chicago:

Chicago

UP,

1996)

ix-xi.

55.

I am

borrowing

he

term timeeffects from Malcolm

Bowie's

study

of

Proust,

Proust

among

the

SStars

New

York:

Columbia

UP,

1998)

35.



92 W.

G. Sebald

s

Austerlitz

western

Bohemia

to

the West:

All I remember f

Pilsen,

wherewe

stopped

or

some

time,

said Auster-

litz,

is that I went out

on

the

platform

o

photograph

he

capital

of

a

cast-ironcolumn which had touched

some

chord of

recognition

n

me.

Whatmade

me

uneasy

at the

sight

of

it,

however,

was not the

question

whether

the

complex

form of

the

capital,

now covered with a

puce-

tinged

encrustation,

had

really impressed

itself on

my

mind when

I

passed

through

Pilsen with the children's

transport

n the summer of

1939,

but the

idea,

ridiculous n

itself,

thatthis cast-iron

column,

which

with

its

scaly

surface

seemed almost

to

approach

he natureof a

living

being, might

rememberme andwas, if I

may

so

put

it, saidAusterlitz,a

witness to what

I

could no

longer

recollect

myself.

(221)

Like this

paragraph,56

much of

Sebald's work

is marked

by

poetic

verbosity, by

the

elasticity

of

the

syntax,

the avoidance of clear

para-

graph

structure,

by

the

slowness

it

practices

and

imposes

on the reader.

His

writing

demands a

wide-ranging

attention to

all

details,

to the

development

of

continuing

associative

chains,

and

obliges

the reader

o

follow

the careful movement of the

labyrinthine

plot.

Beyond

the the-

matic evocation

of

the traumatic

n

this

particular

xample,

beyond

the

presence

of the

all-encompassing metaphorics

of remembranceand

oblivion,

here,

as

in the entire

book,

the

syntax

and tense

pattern

con-

stitute

time

-

modes

of

temporal procession

and

temporal

experi-

ence.

The tense

structure maintains a constant oscillation

between

different

temporal

forms,

between I

remember

nd we

stopped,

I

went

out and that

had

touched,

What

made me and

might

remember,

between the

object's being

a witness and

the I

that

could no longer recollect. The result is an unstabletemporality hat

shifts

between

different

layers

of

the

past

and different

aspects

of the

present.

Diversions such as

ridiculous

n

itself,

seemed

almost

to,

and

if I

may

so

put

it

and

the muddled

rhythm

created

by

the narra-

tive's

gesture

of

quotation

the

repetitive

said Austerlitz

further

enhance he

sense of a

seemingly

endless

temporal

elasticity.

56. Andreas

Huyssen

notes on

Austerlitz: What

makes this

deeply

inconsolable

text such

a

pleasure

o read

is

that

processes

of

memory

and

experience

of

space

and time

are dissected

with consummate

poetic

skill and

imagination.

The narration

tself

puts

time

into slow

motion,

and it

stops

time

entirely

n momentsof

panic

and

horror

r,

alternately,

in the much less

frequent

moment

of a transcendent

ightness

of

being.

Andreas

Huyssen,

The

Grey

Zones of

Remembrance,

orthcoming

n The

New

Historyof

GermanLitera-

ture,

eds. David

Wellbery,

t al

(Cambridge:

Harvard

UP).



AmirEshel 93

In The Sense

of

an

Ending,

FrankKermode

suggests

that

the clock's

tick-tock might be seen not only as a way to humanize a certain

device, but also

as the

projection

of

plot

onto what

is,

after

all,

tick-

tick.

In the

projection

of a fictional

differencebetween two sounds

-

tick

being

a word for the

beginning,

tock

a word for the

end,

it is

the

tock,

he

end,

that

confers

organization

nd form

on

the

temporal

structure

f

tick-tock,

ndeed of

all

plots.57

If the

projection

of tock

onto

the

clock's tick-tick

is

a model of a

plot,

as Kermode

suggests,

Sebald's

time effects model

a modem

postcatastrophic

emporal

con-

sciousness,one thatreflectsthe loss of a sense of successivity,chronol-

ogy,

and

coherence.

If

Kermode

s

right

that

the

purpose

of

plotting

s

to

resist

the threat of

empty

time,

to

defer the

tendency

of the interval

between

tick and

tock

to

empty

itself, 58

Sebald's

prose

extends the

gap

between

tick

and

tock

ad infinitum.Bewildered

by

the

catastrophe

of its

time,

it

echoes Walter

Benjamin's

notion that the

concept

of

progress

mustbe

grounded

n the

idea of

catastrophe,

ts slowness fol-

lowing

Benjamin's

outcry

That

hings

are

'status

quo'

is

catastrophe. 59

In its

temporal open-endedness,

Sebald's

prose suggests

an

open-

ended

reading

process:

the words

pile up,

the sentences and

paragraphs

seem

infinite. When the

narration

arrives at its

abrupt

end,

it

is clear

that the book has none.

The

elemental tick-tock

hat

suggests

the

existence of

an

end,

a

horizon,

a

telos,

is

replaced by

the

archetypal

postmoderist

stance:

Every

comma,

every

word and

sentence,

seems

geared

at

extending

the distance

between tick and

tock,

beginning

and end.

Austerlitz's

claim never to have

possessed

a

clock,

never to

have been

exposed

to the

sound

of

tick-tock,

his resistance to the

arbitrarinessof calculatingtime in relation to the movement of the

planets,

is

addressed

by

the

poetic

creation of

a

different time alto-

gether,by

poetic

devices

that

question

he

very

existence of

a

tock

by

avoiding

it

altogether.

Like

Proust's

Recherche,

Broch's The Death

of Virgil,

or

Claude

Simon's

La route des

Flandres,

Sebald's Austerlitz is marked

by

the

ways

in

which

chronological,

ndeed,

temporal

procession

is

poetically

suspended.

Reading

the

paragraphquoted

above involves a constant

returnto other partsof the plot, trying to reconstructwhat happened

57.

Kermode,

he

Sense

of

an

Ending

4-45.

58.

Kermode,

heSense

of

an

Ending

6.

59.

Walter

Benjamin,

The

Arcades

Project,

rans. HowardEiland

and Kevin

McLaughlin

Cambridge:elknap,

999)

73.



94

W.G.

Sebald's

Austerlitz

before,

what is

it

that could

explain

Austerlitz'snotion that a cast-iron

column might rememberhim, indeed rememberat all. The placement

of a

visual

image

-

a

photo

of

a

steel and

glass

construction

aken

in a

train station

-

in

proximity

to

the scene

(220)

in a

way presumably

related

to

it,

defers

any

immediate

progression

n the

text:

The

atten-

tive reader

will

stop,

try

to decode the

image,

to

connect

it to

what

was

just

told,

to detect

its

details

and relate it to other

images

in

the book.

This

photograph,

ike all

others,

as Sebald

noted,

elicits

from

the

text

and takes the

spectators

into an unreal world unknown to them.60

Sebald'sphotographic magesare thushardlyan artfulornament o tex-

tual

images,

hardly

a

means

to enhance

aesthetic

pleasure,

but

rather

genuine

images

in

Walter

Benjamin's

sense,

devices that relate the

reader

o what is

and

will

remainabsent

-

the

events and the

protago-

nists

of

the

past.

Sebald's

photos

are indeed

Benjaminian mages,

dia-

lectics

at

a

standstill,

or,

in

Benjamin's

words: what comes

together

in the flash with the now to form a

constellation. 61

Sebald's

images

relate

the

spectator

o

temporality they

make

one

aware

of

both

the now that is frozen

in

the

image

and the

now of

spec-

tatorship,

of

the

reading

process.

His dramaticeffect

originates

from

visual

and

temporalpropositions

hat structure

nd mark ime. Once

the

book

has

caught

the

reader

n its

paragraph-long

entences,

in

the

nar-

rative's

tendency

to

dissolve

in

detours

and

distractions,

n the

myster-

ies

of

the never to be

fully

depicted

or understood

past,

the

time

of

reading

itself becomes

an element of the narrative's

emporal

fabric.

The

polemic

against

time becomes

poetic

deceleration,

he actual

rever-

sal

of time's

gallop,

and

the

production

of a different

temporality,

one

that suspends,at the metasemantic evel, the ontology of past, present,

and future.

The result

is a text that

in

its

nonsemantic

element

ques-

tions

the

reign

of

time

as this

was understood

n

the

mid-19th

century.

In their

introduction

to the

recently

published

volume

Time

and

the

Literary,

Karen

Newman,

Jay

Clayton,

and

Marianne

Hirsch

note

that

while

information

technology

is said

to have annihilated

both

time and the

literary,

the

literary

is still not

gone.

On

the

contrary,

t

structures

our

thinking

about

time.62

They argue

that

the

literary

60.

Aber

das

Geschriebene

st kein wahres

Dokument,

Christian

Scholz,

inter-

view

with

W. G.

Sebald,

Neue Zurcher

Zeitung

26 Feb.

2000.

61.

Benjamin,

TheArcades

Project

462.

62. Karen

Newman,

Jay Clayton,

and

Marianne

Hirsch,

eds.,

Timeand

the

Literary

(New

York:

Routledge,

2002)

1.



AmirEshel 95

joins

immediacy

and the instantaneous

with their

opposite,

duration

andcritique, husmarking ense, period,and millennium.63While it is

not

certain

if

all

literature

achieves

this,

if

all

literature

prolongs

the

moment for reflection and enables a

rereading

of

the

present,

as

these

authors

uggest,

Sebald's

prose

certainly

does.

Lacking

many

of the certainties

pertinent

o the

aesthetic and histori-

cal

circumstances

of

the nineteenth

century,

Austerlitz's

polemic

against

time,

like

Sebald's

work as a

whole,

is

melancholic,

but not

in

that it

passively

bemoans the

dead

or lives from

them,

in

a

kind of

poetic necrophilia,as some critics have suggested.64The suspensionof

temporal

procession

and

succession,

the concentration

on

catastrophe

and the

dead,

is

merely

a

poetic

point

of

departure,

he

birthplace

f

writing,

to

quote

Helene Cixous's

formulation,

of

a

different

experi-

ence

of the world. We need

to lose the

world,

writes

Cixous,65

and

to discover that there

is more than one world and that the world isn't

what

we think

it

is.

Sebald's

work

is more

concerned with

reflecting

on life

after the

catastrophe,

with

living

in

the face

of

destruction,

than with death

itself. Like authors such

as

Ingeborg

Bachmann,

Thomas

Bernhard,

and Alexander

Kluge,

but also

like Claude

Simone,

if one

were

to

expand

the

view

into the

perspective

of

contemporary

European

itera-

ture,

Sebald's

significance

lies

precisely

in

the manner

in

which

his

work

continually

faces the dead

through

an

opening up

of the

literary

as

a

space

of

reflecting

the

present,

as a

space

for

reflection: Melan-

choly,

Sebald

noted,

is

something

different

from

depression.

While

depression

makes it

impossible

to

conceive or

to

mediate,

melancholy

-in itself not necessarily a pleasantcondition- allows one to be

reflective ... to

develop things

one

would never have

anticipated. 66

Sebald's

melancholy

is thus not sui

generis,

but rather an

integral

part

of the

labor of

mourning [Trauerarbeit],

as Ernestine Schlant

has noted.67

Melancholy,

Sebald

emphasized,

has

nothing

to do with

the will

to die

[Todessucht].

It is

rather

a

form of resistance

63.

Newman,

Clayton

nd

Hirsch,

Time nd

he

Literary.

64.

See

Thomas

Wirtz,

Schwarze

uckerwatte:

nmerkungenu

W.

G.Sebald,

Merkur.55

(June

001):

530-34.

65.

Helene

Cixous,

Three

teps

n

the

Ladder

f

Writing

New

York:

Columbia

P,

1993)

10.

66. Interviewn

Der

Spiegel.

67.

Schlant,

The

Languagef

Silence

33.



96 W.

G.

Sebald's Austerlitz

[Wiederstand].68

The

function

of

melancholy

in

art

is

by

no means

reactive or reactionary: The depiction of calamity encompasses the

possibility

of its

overcoming. 69

The irritationcaused

by

the melan-

cholic

tone of

Sebald's

prose, by

its insistence

on

keeping

the

tension

between

the historicalevent and

its

poetic figuration

unresolved

and

by

its

unique

temporality,

broadens our sense of the

very

act

of

telling.

Sebald's

antiquarian

manner,

his

uncompromised,

onscious

slowness,

halt the

rapid pace

of

time and set limits to

modernity's

obliviousness,

even

if

only

in the

realm of the

text,

even if

only

for the brief

moment

of reading.

68. W. G

Sebald,

Die

Beschreibung

des

Unglucks:

Zur Osterreichischen

Literatur

von

Stifter

bis Handke

Salzburg:

Residenz,

1985)

12.

69.

Sebald,

Die

Beschreibung

des

Unglicks:

Zur

Osterreichischen

Literatur

von

Stifter

his

Handke.

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