Sheets of Past: Reading the Image in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz

Abstract

Sheets of Past:Reading the Image in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz Mary Griffin Wilson (bio) Numerous critics have touched upon the use of images—particularly photographic images—in the fictional work of W. G. Sebald. The majority of these comments have focused on the implicit analogy between photography and memory, one in which the photograph becomes emblematic of—and bears witness to—an irretrievable past. In Austerlitz, Sebald's final novel, this analogy may appear particularly fitting. The novel centers around a character whose life is defined by the absence of memory, both of his origins and of the violence that erased them. Having escaped the European continent at the age of five, Austerlitz's experience of the Holocaust is one of absence, erasure, and lack. In this sense, it is akin to what Jacques Rancière describes—in reference to Claude Lanzman's Shoah—as an experience not of "the elimination of the Jews" but of "the elimination of the traces of elimination," the elimination of evidence (127). Against this absence, Austerlitz accumulates a massive compendium of knowledge, one in which photography plays a crucial documentary role. As J. J. Long points out, Austerlitz, like many of Sebald's characters, is "obsessed with processes of archivisation and with places where the past has deposited traces and fragments that have been preserved and in many cases systematised, catalogued, or indexed" (W. G. Sebald 11). These thematic elements are undoubtedly present. However, a close reading of the novel suggests that Sebald's inclusion of images in Austerlitz—photographic and otherwise—goes far beyond the rhetoric of trauma, memory, and [End Page 49] witness to which so many critics have attached it.1 Such rhetoric has tended toward the application of a preformulated theory of the photograph as temporal shock, one which, when applied to Austerlitz, divorces the image from its actual function within the novel. As Carolin Duttlinger argues, many of the associations between photography and trauma "remain based on structural, symbolic or metaphorical analogies between the two phenomena" and cannot fully account for the nuances of such analogies when transplanted into a work of fiction (155). While Duttlinger rightly points out the fallacy of reducing Sebald's discourse on photography to a theoretical or aesthetic exploration of this analogy, it nevertheless occupies a central place in her argument. She remains focused on the visual and temporal displacement enacted by the photographs, on their "belatedness" within the narrative progression (159).2 Hence those images which are, as I shall argue, quite explicitly integrated into Sebald's text are not entirely accounted for. By overemphasizing the mnemonic properties of photographs, these analyses have marginalized the radically nonlinear, non-chronological understanding of time that Sebald puts forth in Austerlitz, an understanding which could not have been accomplished without them. For beyond the mnemonic, the images Sebald includes in this novel serve several crucial functions. At times, they occupy an indexical relation to the text, by pointing back to the language that surrounds them or by becoming a kind of silent indicator or unspoken word within it. At other times, [End Page 50] their purpose is more metaphorical, as the images form various threads of visual contiguity in which places, times, and characters are implicitly linked through resemblance. Bettina Mosbach describes this tendency as a kind of superimposition, a word whose German correlate, Überblendung, is borrowed from the novel itself (390). In Mosbach's analysis, this term comes to indicate Sebald's ability to present disparate historical or chronological moments as being somehow contemporaneous, or to blend them into one another until the sense of time as a series of discrete fragments is all but obliterated. Yet despite its filmic connotations, superimposition does not wholly account for the function of Sebald's images in relation to the novel's temporal structure. Time, in Austerlitz, is not a linear progression. The superimpositions that occur do not necessarily take succession as their model, although the characters may use this model to account for them. Rather, the temporal structure at work in Austerlitz is, I would argue, more accurately a kind of Bergsonian duration, one which Gilles Deleuze defines as operating "less by succession than by...