Photography, memory, metonymy or, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo

Abstract

The precarious and vertiginous quality of memory is a continuous thread running the extent of W.G. Sebald’s writing. In Sebald’s first novel Vertigo (1990), the attributes of memory are explored through its metonymic relation with photography. Broadly speaking, one of photography’s functions is to metonymically represent memory. For Sebald, however, this metonymy is unreliable and unpredictable. The febrile, fragmented, and ultimately autonomous memories triggered by the metonym are the cause of the vertigo in the title. Sebald’s vertiginous metonymy leads us to Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum. In his meditation on photography Camera lucida (2000) Barthes explicitly states that the photograph’s punctum performs metonymically. ‘However lightning-like it may be,’ he writes, ‘the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic’ (45). Barthes’ theory provides an analytical framework for understanding Sebald’s aetiology of vertigo and his narrative treatment of the metonymic encounter between memory and photography.