Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

(The following is taken from my MA dissertation which was also titled The Unforgetting. This is a passage on W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz which I have broken up into two separate posts. Apologies in advance for the stripped footnotes.) W.G. Sebald’s post-war novel Austerlitz portrays the central character of Jacques Austerlitz through the accounts of the narrator, an unlikely friend who has conversed with Austerlitz over a span of several years. The novel relates the plight of Austerlitz through the voice of an equally melancholic narrator, with both parties afflicted by a deep sadness that we are at first unable to find the cause of. Austerlitz, a Czech Jew, is evacuated to London’s Liverpool Street station, arriving on the Kindertransport in WWII, and grows up in Wales having suppressed the trauma of his experience of leaving his native Czechoslovakia, and with no memory even in his adult life of his childhood origins. W.G. Sebald’s prose style resists classification. In a conversation with his publisher he once argued that his books should not merely rest on the shelves of fiction, but should inhabit every genre—they ought be found in every section! As such, his work can be thought of in terms of the historical, anthropological, biographical, and as travelogue. Like a historical novel, its function does not rest with retelling history, or indeed in correcting, but rather to make history appear. Sebald’s prose is shrouded in melancholia, and an ever-present greyness and bleakness hangs over the precise, anthropological wanderings. Sebald’s narrator is forever on the move: walking through obscure locations, drawing us into the often overlooked substrata of the world’s surface, there seems to be a fear of coming to a standstill, but when he does, it is as if the world rips open to some dark truth, and Sebald’s narrator, rather than turn away, tips into this darkness, his gaze unwavering, and reveals to us inherent, uncanny interconnections between the world of objects, the natural world, time, history, architecture, and the formation of the self. Vladimir Nabakov writes in Transparent Things that “when we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object…. Transparent things, through which the past shines!” This is what one commentator in the film Patience: After Sebald refers to as “the dream life of debris”, attributing this phrase to Nabakov. This is the world as Sebald encourages us to engage with it. In Sebald’s writing, the trauma of loss is ever present; yet its site is not explicitly talked about—a refusal to recount the traumatic event— rather it is referred to through a collective memory of loss set in a post- WWII Europe. Through the narrator’s eyes, we travel in a landscape marred by this collective history, and sink into its surface, feeling the grain of a past that reverberates through us with each passing page. Sigmund Freud famously made a distinction between mourning and melancholia. The mourner moves from a position of grief, and arrives at an acceptance of loss. The melancholic, in contrast, displays a pathological and prolonged mourning. As Freud posited, the melancholic incorporates the lost object into the psyche through a process of devouring, which he terms “cannibalistic”. Anne Cheng suggests that through this process of devouring “the melancholic subject fortifies him—or herself and grows rich in impoverishment.” The melancholic is feeding off the lost object, and satiated by the devouring of this loss is forever focused on an “insistent talking about himself ”. This is what for Freud “predominates in the melancholiac.” Sebald seems to be challenging the assertion that the melancholic’s relationship with time is unproductive, and suggests that the melancholic is occupied by an ethical obligation not to forget. Midway through the novel, Austerlitz, suffering from insomnia, is drawn to “nocturnal wandering through London.” It is in these journeys through London’s gloomy streets that he encounters “familiar faces” that haunt him through their spectral, unidentifiable quality. Josephine Carter suggests that by aligning Austerlitz’s melancholia with depictions of the ghostly other, Sebald is suggesting that his protagonist is doing more than attempting to reconstitute his subjectivity through time, he is seeking a subjectivity of time dependent of the Other. During his nocturnal wanderings, he is “irresistibly drawn back” to London’s Liverpool Street Station, the emblematic site of exposure, where he was separated from his parents, and where the architectural grandness of the glass-and-iron roof first left its impression on his boyhood self, and the source of his greatest revelation—he would later become an architect of notable stature. It is here, in an abandoned waiting room, that he is shocked back into the memory of being in this place as a child with his parents. Austerlitz is drawn to reconstructing his parents’ past, of reconstituting his identity through the loss of the Other, and the proposal of an Other time, whereby the present generation are placed in the position of witness of the past. Time, for Austerlitz, is characterised by a series of “appointments”: Appointments in the present, appointments in the past, and appointments in the future; as if the future had already taken place. As he explains: “It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be [. . .] that we also have appointments to keep in the past [. . .] and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time.” This proposition of an Other time places the emphasis away from the Ego’s vision of the world, toward its relationship with the Other, and through this, we come to understand the importance laid upon his relationship with his parents, and his relationship to the past.