Searching for Sebald Proposal

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

THE FICTIVE PHOTOGRAPH AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGINARY

EDITED

PUBLISHER: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry PUBLICATION DATE: fall/winter 2005 DIMENSIONS: approx. 8.5” H x 11” W x .75” D PAGES: approx. 400 pp EDITIONS: 2; 1 trade, 1 special PRINT RUN: 2000 trade, 100 special

BY

LISE PATT

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SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

INTRODUCTORY NOTES W.G. (Max) Sebald (1944-2001) is a literary phenomenon, catapulted to international fame through the popular and critical success of two novels published in the 1990s, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. His last novel, Austerlitz, published in the year of his death, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Although he was only 57 when he died, he was already being acclaimed as one of the great European writers of the 20th century.

Sebald’s books are sui generis hybrids of fiction, travelogue, autobiography, and historical exposé, in which a narrator (both Sebald and not Sebald) comments on the quick blossoming of natural wonders and the slow long death of all human atrocities.

All his fictive narratives are punctuated with images—murky photographs, architectural plans, engravings, paintings, newspaper clippings—inserted into the prose without captions and often without obvious connection to the words that surround them. The connection between image and text is always uncertain, tenuous, and at times even contradictory. The boundaries between image and text, between the dead and the living, the planned and the surrepti-

tious, the remembered and the forgotten find no buttresses in Sebald’s work. As the author said shortly before his death, “I am not seeking an answer…I just want to say, This is very odd indeed.”

Sebald’s engagement with the language of images reveals a creative process that defies the usual divisions between the plastic arts and written literature. Some have argued that Sebald employs too many images for a serious literary enterprise; others, that too many words keep his books outside a visual art tradition. It is perhaps for this reason that many who have attempted to describe Sebald’s method are forced to rely on an adjective formed from his own name — Sebald’s works are simply 'Sebaldian'.

What does it mean to be Sebaldian? In the last few years scholars have attempted to answer this question within literary practices. But the uncharted terrain Sebald opens up between text and image belongs to both writers and artists. And Sebald’s use of images—the inspiration for and primary subject of this book—has not been adequately dealt with by scholars to date.

Searching for Sebald adopts a unique perspective on this issue, one that is closely allied with that of visual practitioners.

BIOGRAPHY W.G. Sebald was born in 1944 in the Allgäu region of southern Germany.

Schooled in Freiburg, he became a university lecturer at the University of Manchester at the age of 21 and went on to teach at the University of East Anglia, where he held the position of professor of German and European literature. He settled in Norwich with his wife Ute, moved into a redbrick Victorian house on the outskirts of town, and became an avid walker through the East Anglian countryside. Along with his teaching, Sebald wrote literary criticism and, in 1989, founded the British Centre for Literary Translation at the campus. Not satisfied with the strict discipline required for academic writing, he began composing poetry and fiction, publishing the prose poem Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (After Nature) in 1989. In 1990 he published his first full-length “fiction,” Schwindel, Gefuhle (Vertigo). Next came Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) in 1992, followed by Die Ringe des Saturn, Eine englische Wallfahrt (The Rings of Saturn) in 1995. In 1997 The Emigrants was published in English, followed shortly by English translations of The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo . By the time his final novel, Austerlitz, was published in 2001, it appeared almost simultaneously in translation. Before his death in December of that same year in an automobile accident near his home, Sebald had been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Berlin Literature Prize (The Emigrants), the Literature Nord Prize, and the 1998 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction (The Rings of Saturn).

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

Sebald’s method is explored through aspects of the artistic process; trends in contemporary art practice that explore the regions between text and image.

In this spirit, Searching for Sebald, draws from an international roster of artists and scholars writing about visual practices to help unpack the intricacies of Sebald’s unique method. Fifteen theoretical essays approach Sebald through the multiple filters of art history, film and photographic studies, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis. In a parellel vein, documentation from the projects of fifteen contemporary visual artists offers a more anamorphic reading of Sebald. The resulting text is a rich display of thought and process that not only explores the relationships Sebald creates between word and image, but in homage to its subject, creates its own such relationships.

STRUCTURE

OF THE

BOOK

In Part I, SYSTEM, the underlying structure of Sebald’s approach to image and text is explored. Is there a formal logic to Sebald’s use of image and text? What is the nature of the photographs? How do they sit in the text? How does the text surround them? And how do these tenuous relationships generate or deny meaning?

In Part II, ARCHIVE, the pool of images that Sebald continuously draws from is scrutinized. What is the nature of this archive? Is there a separate archive for each of his five significant works or is there but a single archive from which images are recycled from novel to novel? Can we draw a ring around his archive and thereby learn more about the author’s method or is the archive unruly and self-generating, assuming a power greater than the individual images that make up its contents?

In Part III, MAP, the performative aspect of Sebald’s images is explored through the artistic impulse to involve the body in the creative process. How do Sebald’s images chart a path for the reader of his books? How do they propel or interrupt the temporal aspect of reading? How can they be used as signposts to the journey that Sebald invites us to take through his books, or even more importantly, to the paths within ourselves that art often challenges us to take.

The book will also include an introduction by Lise Patt. Although many critics have positioned W.G. Sebald within a 19th century German literary tradition, Dr. Patt sees Sebald not as someone who looks back but as an innovator who stands at the forefront of a growing trend in contemporary art practice that explores the slippery realm between historical truth and psychological fiction, the gaps between image and text, and the differences between saying and see ing. In the first part of her essay, Patt contextualizes the author within an art historical tradition, discussing not only the texts Sebald acknowledged as inspirations, such as the Head of Vitus Bering by Konrad Bayer, but also the 20th century artistic tra-

“Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like?

One of the few answers available to Englishspeaking readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.”

—Susan Sontag “Sebald is a rare and elusive species. . . . He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.”

—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker “W.G. Sebald’s writing conjures from the details and sequences of daily life. . .the dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time that makes his books, one by one, indispensable.”

—W.S. Merwin “[Sebald is] one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers.”

—James Woods, The New Republic “Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st century.”

—The Times (London)

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ditions that anticipate his work. Sebald’s method follows in a tradition that was first introduced by the Surrealists in the early part of the last century (Breton’s Nadja ), was further developed in post-war Europe, especially in Sebald’s Germany (Rolf Dieter Brinkmann), and flourished in diverse forms by the end of the century (Boltanski and Richter). But Sebald must not be seen as just a historical figure in either art or literature, for, as Patt argues, he continues to inspire younger artists of importance. These artists, many of whom push at the same genres he did – literature, film, travelogue, autobiography, confessional, the archive – either quote Sebald directly (Tacita Dean) or use methods informed or reinvigorated by the presence of Sebald’s output (the alternate histories of the Museum of Jurassic Technology or even the archival work of Thomas Hirschhorn).

In the second part of her introduction, Patt contextualizes the individual contributions to the volume, and discusses her tripartite conceptual division of SYSTEM, ARCHIVE, and MAP. The book will also include an up-to-date bibliography of secondary works of Sebaldian scholarship, as well as a comprehensive index.

AUDIENCE

FOR THE

BOOK

In just a few short years, Sebald has become not just a cult in the world of fiction but required reading for students of comparative literature, German studies, Holocaust studies, cultural history, and, most recently, visual studies. In addition, the buzz he is generating in graduate classrooms and curatorial circles, together with

his growing influence on art practice, would indicate a large audience ready for analyses that place Sebald within the traditions of visual art.

Our literature search indicates that likely audiences for this book include: • Readers of Sebald interested in finding out more about his work with images, a topic not dealt with adequately in current books about Sebald.

• Museumgoers attracted to lusciously produced, profusely illustrated scholarly publications, such as the Zone books, Barbara Stafford’s Devices of Wonder catalog, or Rosamond Purcell’s Special Cases.

• Scholars in comparative literature, German studies, Holocaust studies, cultural history, visual studies, and visual arts (including photography and architecture).

A marketing advantage here will be the inclusion of an up-to-date bibliography of secondary works of Sebaldian scholarship.

• The substantial number of artists who work with narrative in diverse forms, as exemplified by Tacita Dean, Cheryl Dunye, Lynn Hershman, and Kahn + Selesnick.

• Teachers of graduate art studio and seminar classes.

• Writers interested in traditions of visual and illustrated books.

• Artists, curators, and collectors interested in the tradition of artists’ books.

• General readers interested in Sebaldian fictions (several of which will appear in this books).

PUBLICATION SPECIFICATIONS TITLE: Searching for Sebald: The Fictive Photograph and the Photographic Imaginary SIZE:

8.5” high x 11” wide x 3/4” thick

BINDING: Perfect bound, individually shrink-wrapped COVER: 150 lb dull cover stock printed 4/0 INSIDE: 80 lb dull coated stock printed 1/1 (K only) except 1 signature printed 4/0.

IMAGES: 700 b+w, 40 color.

PRINT RUN: 2000 copies of which: 100 copies to be reserved for special edition.

PUBLISHER: self-published by the ICI. PRINTER: to be decided.

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

V

BIBLIOGRAPHY

390

INDEX

395

SYSTEM

ARCHIVE

MAP

AUTHORS

AUTHORS

AUTHORS

ƒ RICHARD CROWNSHAW, “German Suffering or ‘Narrative Fetishism’?: W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur.”

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ƒ ADRIAN DAUB, “Manufacturing Hope: The Logics of the Caption in W.G. Sebald and Alexander Kluge.”

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ƒ AVI KEMPINSKI, “Reading Sebald Reading Images: In Pursuit of the Mother-Image in Austerlitz.”

246

ƒ KRISTEN SEALE, “W.G. Sebald and Photography’s Vertiginous Dialectics.”

268

ƒ CARSTEN STRATHAUSEN, “Virtual Travel in W.G. Sebald.”

286

ƒ MARKUS ZISSELSBERGER, “Undurchschaubare Ähnlichkeiten: W. G. Sebald in the Image of Kafka.”

301

ƒ CHRISTOPHER C. GREGORY-GUIDER, “W. G. Sebald’s Memorial Photography.” ƒ MATTIAS FREy, “Sebald’s Cinematheque: Theorizing Cinema in Sebald and Sebald with ‘Cinema’. ƒ CHRISTINA KRAENZLE, “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography and Imaginative Geography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn.” ƒ BETTINA MOSBACH, “The Gleam of Gold and Silver on the Huge, Half-Obscured Mirrors: Überblendung as a Narrative Strategy in W.G. Sebald.” ƒ JOHN SEARS, “Photographs, Images, and the Space of Literature in Sebald’s Prose.”

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ƒ FLORENCE FEIEREISEN AND DANIEL POPE, “True Fictions and Fictional Truths: Text and Image in Sebald’s The Emigrants.”

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ƒ ANNELEEN MASSCHELEIN, “Negative Hands: Depicting Negativity in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and André Breton’s Nadja.”

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ARTISTS

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ARTISTS

ƒ CHRISTEL DILLBOHNER, “Field Notes” ƒ MATTHEW MARCO, “The Minimalls of Downey, California (excerpt).”

ARTISTS

ƒ LORIE JOSEPHSEN, “Sightings”

ƒ LISA DIEDRICH, “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald’s Historical and Literary Methodology.”

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ƒ CHRIS ROCHELLE, “Birdland.”

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ƒ DANIEL LASH, “Translation and Repetition: An Architectural Translation of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.”

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ƒ TIM WRIGHT, “In Search of Oldton”

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ƒ ANTOINETTE LAFARGE, “Arturo Ott: A Life Half Lived”

ƒ ANNE FLANNERY, “Sebald’s Invisible Cities.”

ƒ LISE PATT, “Searching for Sebald, or, What I Know for Sure”

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ƒ TRIS VONNA-MICHELL, “Who Is Reinhold Hahn?”

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AUTHORS ƒ RICHARD CROWNSHAW, “German Suffering or ‘Narrative Fetishism’?: W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur.”

Richard Crownshaw is a tenured lecturer in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and Associate Fellow of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of London. His writings focus on postHolocaust memory. ƒ ADRIAN DAUB, “Manufacturing Hope: The Logics of the Caption in W.G. Sebald and Alexander Kluge.”

Adrian Daub is a doctoral student of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. ƒ LISA DIEDRICH, “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald’s Historical and Literary Methodology.”

Lisa Diedrich is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Stony Brook University. She is currently finishing a book entitled Treatments: Negotiating Bodies, Language, and Death in Illness Narratives.

ƒ FLORENCE FEIEREISEN AND DANIEL POPE, “True Fictions and Fictional Truths: Text and Image in Sebald’s The Emigrants.”

Florence Feiereisen dedicated herself to German Studies after receiving her master’s degree in both German Studies and Computational Lingustics from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of

Massachusetts, Amherst, specializing in German contemporary literature.

Daniel Pope received a Fulbright Scholarship to study literature in Peru after earning a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1995. He later traveled and worked as a technical writer before joining the graduate program in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

ƒ MATTIAS FREy, “Sebald’s Cinematheque: Theorizing Cinema in Sebald and Sebald with ‘Cinema’.”

Mattias Frey is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where he is affiliated with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. His work on film history and film theory has appeared or is forthcoming in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Senses of Cinema. ƒ CHRISTOPHER C. GREGORY-GUIDER, “W. G. Sebald’s Memorial Photography.”

Christopher C. Gregory-Guider is completing his dissertation on the peripatetic as a memorialization strategy in the works of W. G. Sebald and others at the University of Sussex (UK). His doctoral work grew out of a research year spent in Berlin, German as part of a Fulbright Award. At the University of Sussex, he teaches courses on Modernist literature, film, and music. ƒ AVI KEMPINSKI, “Reading Sebald Reading Images: In Pursuit of the Mother-Image in Austerlitz.”

Avi Kempinski is a Ph.D. candidate in German Studies at the University of Michigan, completing a dissertation on the role of textual and visual strategies in the formation of a narrative voice in the works of W.G. Sebald. Before returning to academia, he worked as a librarian and a freelance writer specializing in literary subjects and travel writing. His research interests include visual studies and German-Jewish cultural history.

Recent publications include “Roman von einer Reise: MultiDimensional Travel in Barbara Honigman’s Soharas Reise ” in Begegnung und Verhandlung: Möglichkeiten eines Kulturwandel durch Reise (Münster, 2004) and “Theatrics of Sound” in Marcel Ophuls’ November Days and Hotel Terminus,” in Focus on German Studies 10 (2003).

ƒ CHRISTINA KRAENZLE, “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography and Imaginative Geography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn.”

Christina Kraenzle is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University, Toronto, Canada, where she teaches 20th-century German literature courses. Her current research focuses on issues of mobility and transnational identities in recent German literature and cinema. ƒ A N N E L E E N MASSCHELEIN, “Negative Hands: Depicting Negativity in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and André Breton’s Nadja.”

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

AUTHORS Anneleen Masschelein is currently employed as lector and research fellow at the department of general and comparative literary theory at the K. U. Leuven. Her Ph.D. dealt with the conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny in 20th century literary and cultural theories. She has published on the uncanny as well as on film and comparative literature.

ƒ BETTINA MOSBACH, “The Gleam of Gold and Silver on the Huge, Half-Obscured Mirrors: Überblendung as a Narrative Strategy in W.G. Sebald.”

Bettina Mosbach studied German, English and American language and literature in Düsseldorf and Bonn, Germany, and Norwich, UK. Her master’s thesis focused on the function of the topos of melancholy in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. She is presently working in the German department at Bonn University (Lehrstuhl Prof.

Jürgen Fohrmann) and finishing a Ph.D. thesis on Sebald’s prose. ƒ KRISTEN SE A L E , “W.G. Sebald and Photography’s Vertiginous Dialectics.”

Kirsten Seale is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sydney. She is an editor of Philament, an online journal of arts and culture. ƒ JOHN SEARS, “Photographs, Images, and the Space of Literature in Sebald’s Prose.”

John Sears is senior lecturer in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire. His research addresses theory in relation to contemporary fiction and poetry. He has published essays on Iain

ARTISTS Sinclair, Maggie Gee, and Neil Bartlett, and delivered papers in England and Hungary on the work of George Szirtes. He is currently working on a book exploring the figuring of death in contemporary fiction.

ƒ CARSTEN STRATHAUSEN, “Virtual Travel in W.G. Sebald.”

Presently an Associate Professor in German at the University of Missouri, Carsten Strathausen is the author of The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900, published in 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. He has also written more than a dozen articles on a broad variety of topics, including European intellectual history, Marxist and psychoanalytic theory as well as German literature and film.

His present book project–Aesthetics Unbound: Art and Politics in the Digital Age–tries to revitalize aesthetic theory and practice within leftist political discourse.

“Undurchƒ M ARKUS Z I S S E L S B E R G E R , schaubare Ähnlichkeiten: W. G. Sebald in the Image of Kafka.”

Markus Zisselsberger is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of comparative literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He is the co-editor of Ingeborg Bachmann: Views and Reviews (Ariadne Press, 2004).

ƒ CHRISTEL DILLBOHNER, “Field Notes.”

Christel Dillbohner is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist based in Berkeley, CA, with deep roots in her native Köln, Germany. She has exhibited extensively in Europe, the United States and Japan, with recent solo shows at Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco, the Bakersfield Art Museum, and Gallery Hirawata in Fujisawa, Japan. She is the recipeint of numerous grants and awards including those from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Washington, State Arts Commission. In 2003, she was selected for the California Arts Council Fellowship Award. ƒ AN N E FLANNERY, “Sebald’s Invisible Cities.”

Anne Flannery has lived and worked in Berlin and Vienna where she pursued her interests in photography and painting. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in the department of Germanic Languages and Literature. Her research interests include mid to late 19th century Viennese architecture and urban planning, The history of Austrian photography, the novella, and feminine travel writing. ƒ LORIE JOSEPHSEN, “Sightings” Lorie Josephsen is a filmmaker and writer working in Greenville, SC. Her films have been featured in numerous international video and film festivals including the Internation Video Festival in Brasilia, Brazil, the National Short Video Festival in

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ARTISTS Salt Lake City, Utah, the AFI Short Film Festival and in numerous venues including the Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Highways performance space. She has received numerous grants from the South Carolina Metropolitan Arts Council and was awarded first prize in Experimental Video from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

ƒ ANTOINETTE LAFARGE, “Arturo Ott: A Life Half Lived” Antoinette LaFarge is an artist and writer interested in virtual and fictive realities. She is Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of California, Irvine.

Recent publications include “25 Thesen über die Kunst der Netzwelten,” in Die Anthologie der Kunst (2004) and “Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery” in Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, 2:4 (2002). ƒ DANIEL LASH, “Translation and Repetition: An Architectural Translation of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.”

Daniel Lash completed a Master of Architecture degree at the University of Cincinnati in 2004, where he received an AIA Merit Award for Outstanding Thesis.

He currently works as an architect in L.A. ƒ MATTHEW MARCO, “The Minimalls of Downey, California (excerpt).”

Matthew Marco is a visual composer whose work often addresses the role of architecture in diaspora and the location of identity through a range of artistic media and narrative writing. In 2004, he created an artist’s book entitled The Minimalls of

LITERATURE SEARCH Downey, California. Matthew earned his B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine.

ƒ CHRIS ROCHELLE, “Birdland.”

Chris Rochelle earned his B.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute and is currently completing his M.A. at Chelsea College of Art (2005). He has been working on two photographic projects, “Lost Flower Factories (entropy in a closed place)” and “John DeAndrea (Flaws, Exile, Perfection).”

He is also beginning research into the negatives of British painter Paul Nash. ƒ TRIS VONNA-MICHELL, “Who Is Reinhold Hahn?”

Tris Vonna-Michell is completing her studies at the Glasgow School of Art. She is currently working on a project, “Who Is Reinhold Hahn?”, which consists of mail-art (edition of 100 multiples), a 10–15-minute DVD work, written text, and a box-set (edition of 3 books consisting of text, photographs and source materials). ƒ TIM WRIGHT, “In Search of Oldton” Tim Wright is a new media writer and producer specializing in interactive narrative projects. From September 2003 to August 2004, he was the Digital Writer in Residence for the Writers for the Future project in the UK, where Wright embarked on a four-month roadshow to evangelize digital writing and encourage people to contribute to the Sebald-inspired online project.

I. CONFERENCES Critical evaluations of Sebald’s work began in Germany by the middle of the 1990s and in the English-speaking world by 2000. He is now read as a key late 20th century German writer and is required reading for students of comparative literature, German studies, Holocaust studies, and cultural his tory. Numerous conferences have focused on his work, the most notable being: W.G. Sebald: Works & Influences The Third Occasional Davidson Symposium on German Studies March 13-16, 2003, Davidson College Proceedings to be published in 2005 Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London School of Advanced Study “W.G. Sebald Memorial Day” 31 January 2003 Proceedings published as: Rüdiger Görner, ed. The Anatomist of Melancholy: Essays in Memory of W.G. Sebald (München: IUDICIUM Verlag, 2003) “The Photograph” conference, an international interdisciplinary event organized by Mosaic , a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature March 11-13, 2004 University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada A special edition of Mosaic with proceedings from the conference was published in December 2004. Sebald figured prominently in both the conference papers and in the publication.

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

In July of 2005, a three-day conference will be held at the University of Cork, Ireland to investigate the place of images in Sebald’s texts. Organized by James Elkins. Published proceedings are planned for 2006.

II. ESSAYS Essays have appeared in numerous academ ic journals, no doubt on their way to future publication in anthologies. Critical atten tion to Sebald’s work in the established venues of art history and visual theory (conferences, publications) is more recent.

Because Sebald problematizes traditional image-based categories, he has drawn great interest in the field of Visual Studies, espe cially in Europe where the discipline is not as bound to film as it is in the United States.

Most notable: Anderson, Mark M. “The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald,” October 106 (Fall 2003). * Crownshaw, Richard. “Reconsidering Postmemory: Photography, the Archive and Post-Holocaust Memory in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz,” Mosaic (2004). * One of our authors Dean, Tacita. “W.G. Sebald,” October (Vol. 106, Fall 2003) Harris, Stephanie. “The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten,” German Quarterly 74 (2001) Lee, Pamela M. “The Austerlitz Effect: Architecture, Time, Photoconceptualism” in Douglas Fogle, ed. The Last Picture Show:

Artists Using Photography 1960-1982 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003) Long, J.J. “History, Narrative, and Photography in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten” Modern Language Review 98 (2003)

Past: Representations of National Socialism in Contemporary Germanic Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001)

V. DISSERTATIONS

Schlesinger, Philip. “W.G. Sebald and the Condition of Exile” Theory, Culture & Society (2004)

Numerous dissertations on the late author’s work are being written in both Europe and the U.S., some of which will undoubtedly become full-length publications over the course of the next five years.

III. BOOKS

VI. MENTIONS

To date there are only 2 books in English that focus solely on Sebald:

Sebald’s work now turns up in books on distantly related topics:

Long, J.J. & Anne Whitehead, eds. W.G. Sebald – A Critical Companion (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2004)

Kinross, Robin. Unjustified Texts: Perspectives on Typography (London: Hyphen Press, 2002)

McCulloh, Mark R. Understanding W. G. Sebald (University of South Carolina Press, 2003)

VII. REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, ETC.

IV. ANTHOLOGIES Often-cited anthologies with single entries on Sebald: Williams, Arthur. “W.G. Sebald: A Holistic Approach to Borders, Texts and Perspectives” in A. Williams, S. Parkes and J. Preece, eds. German-Language Literature Today: International and Popular? (Oxford: Lang, 2000) Williams, Arthur. “Das korsakowsche Syndrom: Remembrance and Responsibility in W.G. Sebald” in Helmut Schmitz, ed.

German Culture and the Uncomfortable

Atlas, James. “W.G. Sebald: A Profile.”

Bere, Carol “The Book of Memory: W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz” (Literary Review, 2002).

Chejfec, Sergio. “Brief Notes on Stories with Images.” Originally in Spanish, 2003. <http://www.art.man.ac.uk/Lacs/ seminars_events/newlatam/papers/ chejfec_eng.htm> Cunningham, Valentine.

“Literature Matters,” 2001. <http://www.britishcouncil.org/ arts-literature-literature-m atters-edition32fiction2001.htm>

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Cuomo, Joe . “Conversation: The Meaning of Coincidence.” Interview, The New Yorker, 2001. <http://www.newyorker.com/ printable/?online/010903on_onlineonly01> Falconer, Delia. “The Eloquence of Fragments.” Eureka St., Dec. 2001. <http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/pages/ 111/111falconer.html> Frank, Edwin. “The Rings of Saturn.”

Review, Boston Review, 1998. <http://www.bostonreview.net/BR23.6/ frank.html> Garlitz, Robert E. “Wandering with W.G. Sebald” (2002).

Heidelberger-Leonard, Irene. “Melancholie als Widerstand” (December 2000).

Jaggi, Maya. “ ‘Recovered Memories’: W.G. Sebald.” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 2001. <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/ 0,6000,555839,00.html> KB. “W.G. Sebald” (December 2001). <http://www.bu.edu/trl/kb/recent.html> Kimmelman, Michael. “Photographs That Cry Out For Meaning.” New York Times, December 2003. <http://www.wehaitians.com/ photographs%20that%20cry%20out%20 for%20meaning.html> LeClair, Tom. “Weaving Out of the Past.”

Book, November/December 2001. <http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue19/

tleclair.shtml> Lockwood, Alan. “With Us, Without Us: In Memoriam W.G. Sebald.” The Brooklyn Rail, 2002. <http://thebrooklynrail.org/2002/ 0304/20020304withuswithoutus.html> Long, J.J. “History, Narrative, and Photography in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten.” Modern Language Review, 2003.

McTague, Carl S. “Escaping the Flood of Time: Noah’s Ark in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz” (source unknown).

Mitchelmore, Stephen. “Looking and Looking Away: W.G. Sebald’s Fiction and On the Natural History of Destruction” (from blog).

Poyner, Rick. “W.G. Sebald: Writing with Pictures.” Design Observer, July 2004 (with comments from readers).

Remmler, Karen. “Citing Memory in the work of Ruth Beckermann and W.G. Sebald.” <www.ruf.rice.edu/ stmalca/DOCS/RemmlerMALCAabstr.pdf> Risen, Clay. “On The Natural History of Destruction” (review). <http://flakmag.com/ books/naturalhistory.html> Schlesinger, Philip. “W.G. Sebald and the Condition of Exile.” Theory, Culture & Society, 2004. <http://tcs.sagepub.com/ cgi/content/abstract/21/2/43> Sears, John. “More Than Any Heart or Eye Can Bear.” A Critical Companion for Pop

Matters , May 2004 (book review of W.G. Sebald). <http://www.popmatters.com/ books/reviews/w/wg-sebald-critical.shtml> Stavans, Ilan. “Obituary.” Guardian, December 21, 2001. <http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/ 01.12.21/news6.html> Tagg, John. “The Violence of Meaning” (partial text, source unknown). <http://english.binghamton.edu/crossings/ tagg.htm>

Threepenny Review, “A Symposium on W.G. Sebald.” (various responses to Sebald’s death including comments from Geoff Dyer, Susan Sontag, Millicent Dillon, Anne Wagner, James Wood, T.J. Clark, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Arthur Lubow). <http://www.threepennyreview.com/ samples/sebaldsympos_sp02.html> Williams, Arthur. “Works by Sebald” for LitEncyc.com (2004). <http://www.litencyc.com> Wood, James. “W.G. Sebald’s Uncertainty” (The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief).

ARTIST EXCERPT

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

WHO IS REINHOLD HAHN? Tris Vonna-Michell With this project I explore the interplay of narratives and histories, both personal and political. It addresses the ways in which we question and approach history. It is divided into three parts, in which the first and last create the Introduction and Conclusion of a journey. The middle section is a collection of letters, photographs, and research materials expressing the intentions and fragments of a story. My home hosts the living and written anecdotes of my Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past. The story of Berlin itself, I have entitled My Berlin Story . Since this story was created in fragments and dispatched by mail, it has achieved a speculative word-ofmouth relationship with the various postal recipients. The quest to pursue this story has now become Who Is Reinhold Hahn?

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ESSAY EXCERPT

TRANSLATION

AND

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REPETITION

AN ARCHITECTURAL TRANSLATION

OF

W.G. SEBALD’S RINGS

OF

SATURN

Daniel Lash

SEBALDIAN TOPOGRAPHY The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.

–Walter Benjamin I would like to expand ... on the problem of translation between works of literature to the problem of translation between two foreign forms of art, specifically literature and architecture. After all, isn’t it true that we often speak of each art as having its own language? The translation of ideas across art forms, as across languages, is fundamentally a test of survival. How can this idea stand up and live again through expression in a

different media? Furthermore, what does the expression in new media bring forth that was not present, or only latent, in the original? Just as the original text undergoes a transformation in the translation from one language to another, the translation of meaning from one art to another always involves significant transformations due to the internal logic of the different medium....

The translation from literature to architecture motivates my design for“The Sebald Centre for Literary Translation” located at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. The Sebald Centre will be home to the British Centre for Literary Translation and Pen and Inc Press, as well as containing teaching space for use by the departments of Literature and Creative Writing in the School of English and American Studies.

The Centre will occupy an edge condition between the campus and Earlham Park, where it will be highly visible from the major campus entrances and confirm the presence of the language arts as a major force in UEA’s academic environment.

The piece of literature that initiates this act of translation is The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. The book chronicles the narrator’s walking tour of the coast of Suffolk county in East Anglia. The East Anglian landscape is not merely the location for the novel, rather, it acts as a character itself with personality that gives rise to the narrator’s enigmatic digressions on natural, human, and literary history. The fiction and

the spatial qualities of the landscape are inseparable; Sebald has translated the visual landscape of this unique locale into the mysteriously sublime verbal topography of the fictional work.

My rational mind is…unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency. 1 W.G. Sebald’s third novel, The Rings of Saturn, was published in Germany in 1995 (under the title Die Ringe des Saturn, Eine englische Wallfahrt, literally The Rings of Saturn, An English Pilgrimage) and in English in 1998. The book travels the edge between fact and fiction, incorporating elements of documentary, history, and memoir.

It chronicles the narrator’s walking tour of the coast of Suffolk County in East Anglia, as he says, “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” 2 On this journey the narrator comes across “traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past,” which lead to his enig-

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matic digressions on natural, human, and literary history. 3 Chapter One opens as the narrator assembles the notes on his journey, writing that started when he was taken into a Norwich hospital for untold reasons, exactly one year after he had left for the coast.

The melancholic tone is evident from the outset as he ponders the mysterious death of two colleagues. This leads into a discussion on Sir Thomas Browne, a doctor and writer in Norwich in the seventeenth century, who becomes one of the central subjects and the vehicle to introduce some of the major themes of the novel.

The second chapter begins the journey; the narrator travels to the Suffolk coast in a diesel train and embarks on his walking tour, spending the nights at hotels in the coastal towns. This region of England was once populated with luxurious vacation resorts and spas, prosperous fishing communities, and important military bases. The present condition, however, is a result of devastation wrought by years of economic recession, natural disaster, and a general migration westward toward metropolitan areas. Along the journey (covering Chapters II through IX) he ruminates on a wide variety of subjects, including the massive bombing campaigns of World War II, the natural history of the herring, Jorge Luis

Borges, the battle of Sole Bay, the concentration camp at Jasenovac, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement and the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, the Taiping rebellion and the opening of China, the Dowager Empress Tz’u-his, Algernon CharlesSwinburne, the destruction of the forests on the British Isles, Michael Hamburger’s exile from Germany, the relationship between the sugar trade and art, Suffolk author Edward Fitzgerald, the Irish civil war, small game hunting plantations, secret weapons research establishments, a model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the memoirs of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Dutch elm disease, and the hurricane of October 16th, 1987 in southeast England. Ditchingham churchyard is, fittingly, the last stop on the narrator’s journey, where he returns again to the theme of mortality. In the tenth and final chapter, the story circles back to Thomas Browne and his Musaeum Clausum , the inventory of an imaginary library containing rare books and documents, drawings, paintings, photographs, and various other marvels, including a bamboo cane in which two Persian friars had brought the first silkworm eggs from China into the western world. The novel closes with a discussion on the spread of sericulture across the face of the earth. Through man’s relentless propagation of the silkworm and mulberry tree, even in climates especially unsuited to the enterprise, the practice moved from China westward to Greece, Italy, France, and England, where Norwich became a center for the wealthy silk weaving industry. Sericulture was taken up with vigor in Germany on numerous occasions despite widespread failure, the last efforts being made by the Third Reich,

who saw the practice as part of the formation of a self sufficient economy of national defense and could be used in schools “to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to preempt racial degeneration.” 4 The main subject of the novel is everpresent, ever-recurring destruction, caused by both natural and human processes.

Other major themes in the novel include emptiness and absence, migration and exile, the unreliability of memory, the non-linearity of time, and the huge gap between the representation and reality of human experience. As in most of Sebald’s works, the horror of the Holocaust is approached obliquely through allusion and metaphor, but in this novel it takes its place as yet another instance of the human tendency toward the mindless destruction of life. This approach, I believe, is more effective than a portrayal

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that chooses to treat the events head-on, striving for and relying on graphic realism for its effect. With Sebald the destruction is seen as a basic stigma of human nature, a disruption somewhere deep in human moral tissue, and thus he brings the terrifying notion that history could, and often does, repeat itself. The latter approach, on the other hand, places the Holocaust on an island as a singular and unique event of horror, making it far too easy to say, “Obviously something like that could never happen again,” and bury the memory.

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE The phenomenon of repetition is presented in the novel not only as a global historical constant, but in various other forms throughout the text. The narrator and other characters often encounter the same names and numbers over and over again, too often to dismiss them as mere coincidence. The narrator is continually losing his way amongst the dense heath-covered landscape of East Anglia, walking for what seems hours only to find himself returning to a point already traversed. Even more disturbing is the notion arising in Chapter VII of

repeated human identity, as the narrator sees in his friend Michael Hamburger a double of his own self. These occurrences all fit with the narrator’s view that time (at least as we experience it) is somehow nonlinear or nonsequential, it folds back on itself and travels in circles rather than continuing straight ahead.

Repetition is not simply a theme in the novel, however, but is worked into the very structure of the text so that it may be experienced in the act of reading. Repeated references are made to subjects such as silk, herring, and Thomas Browne; sometimes a direct reference is evident, but often the reference is only mentioned in passing or is buried within another name. 5 Furthermore, Sebald has scattered throughout the novel multiple passages that resemble one another, but are just different enough that the reader (and the narrator) is left wondering whether they have really encountered the events already - and if so, where and when?

Finally, Sebald draws on his immense knowledge of European and world literature to create sections of the novel that seem to mirror the work of other authors, particularly the famous blind Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

An analysis of the novel as a whole reveals an underlying symmetrical structure. There are ten chapters, the first and last dealing with similar subjects (Thomas Browne, silk, and mortality). These serve to bookend the remaining eight chapters that describe the narrator’s perambulation, beginning and ending in Norwich. This idea of symmetry or mirroring often surfaces as a semantic element in the text as well.

Within each chapter Sebald weaves together a complex pattern of narrative threads rich with intertextual and intratextual references. This narrative technique has been aptly described by Mark McCulloh as “the digressive structure of anastomosis.”

The novel contains no plot in the usual sense of the term and no gradual revelation of meaning. The novel brings together a wide variety of subjects and events that seem to have little connection on the surface. In Sebald’s mind, however, all things are interconnected, even though the pattern is never made entirely visible. Between events and digressions there is almost never any clear transition or connection, a slightof-hand technique that enhances the dream-like quality of the novel.

NOTES 1. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1998) p.187.

2. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p.3.

3. Ibid.

4. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p.294.

5. For example, references to herring are embedded within proper names such as Herringfleet, Heringsdorf, and Herrington.

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ARTIST EXCERPT

BIRDLAND Chris Rochelle At the end of 2003 I began an extensive investigation into the photography of Oliver G. Pike, a name familiar to ornithologists of the past, though virtually unknown today.

Had I not come across the book Nature and Camera one damp day at a Goodwill sale in Clapham the following work would not have begun. In fact, I had only opened to the first page titled “Summing up fifty years experience photographing flora and fauna” before the charity browsing became an act of rescue from the sudden downpour. Once safe and flipping through the pages, I discovered what appeared to be a collection of very bad reproductions of animals in nature.

Much less interested in the images and skimming through the text, I immediately became delighted in reading of the experiences and intimations regarding the subject, which filled the pages with advice and recollection: a window into the world of an early naturalist photographing at the beginning of the 20th century.

uninteresting.

I tried to imagine the years in which they were produced and the technology therein, or the images’ relationship to other pictorial photographs of the time, but could not find any method with which to read the images. Staring down at these crude reproductions, I could not help thinking that the half-tone dots, which make up each photograph, might have become less specific over time, and eventually they would form an altogether different pattern at some distant point. 1

“On looking back on some of the expeditions I have had into the distant parts of birdland, I think with a mixture of unbelief and self admiration of the packages of plates and other apparatus I had to take” (Oliver Pike, Nature and Camera, p.13)

“…The success or otherwise of the photographer will depend on his approach to nature and its creatures.

My way of approach will soon be obvious to anybody who cares to read the pages that follow and to look at the pictures I like to take.”

(Pike, p.1)

I thumbed through the images for a glimpse of what it could have been like, but hard though I tried, the images just seemed

I could not give up. I needed to find a means for these photographs to affect me the way the words had. The worry of trying

to accept or discard images had become devastating, while being indifferent had become ineffective. Why should these images, now eighty or so years old, be of any concern? I wanted to go into the past and see the way it actually was; I wanted to stop being haunted by the desire to understand these fuzzy, indistinct pages. 2 I spent a couple weeks contacting museums around the UK, and finally located possibly the only archive of Pike’s work at the Museum of Photography Film and Television. After a four-hour train ride I arrived in Bradford and was greeted by friendly staff in the print room, and who

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had already set aside all the items I had requested. Surrounded by walls of cabinets and boxes, some of which I imagined, were random bits of historical significance, while other extant works had made it into boxes with no intents or purposes, strange documents of a world from which they are never expected to re-emerge. Susan Stewart, in her book On Longing writes: The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world. 3 The collection’s numerous boxes and cabinets were carefully labelled and identified. The storage box next to PIKE was labelled RODCHENKO, which seemed obscure, though I realized the two had lived in almost exactly the same years. Finding these two works sitting side by side, I couldn’t help thinking what it would have been like if they had met on some occasion, as the man from the Constructivist argued the ideologies of the “group’s uncompromis-

ing war on art,”4 and the other sat, listening with the kind of patience acquired during the many years of sitting and watching from a hidden place, waiting for the moment when animals in nature no longer noticed he was there, so as then to chance a view into the wild, unaltered landscape.

What I found in the archive was but a few prints and a mass of 120 glass plate negatives and the odd few strips of film. A strange feeling ran through me. Everything appeared exaggerated. I could not remember why I was even there. Let alone, why I had travelled so far to be there. It was when the first plate came out of the box that everything became clear. Looking through the glass plates on a light table I was viewing the original; I was no longer viewing reproductions. Light was shining directly through the source. A plate illuminated. I

had the urge to rifle through—eclipsed by a fear to even touch them. There is something about looking at the photographic negative which reveals not only all the potential information that has recorded 5, but is also a witness to those choices of removing and extracting only known through the original: the actual artefact. It is also interesting to think of the negative as the only true artefact, and reproductions as secondary interests; when looking at history why not show the negatives and plates with the photographs—or even without reproductions.

This may be so in the future when technology removes all tactile materials from the recording process (no more negative)—that once time has created a generation devoid of the resource of films and light sensitive material, people may only be of a mind to view the original, somehow embedded with an immutable truth of light sensitive silver.

That maybe, future museumgoers will travel great distances seeking the original: the photographic “aura.” 6

THE TACTILE SOURCE “Perhaps one was more careful in those days, for going on a day’s outing you were limited to the number of plates carried owing to their weight…It has so often happened that when only a few plates were available, that I have paused before pressing the button, hoping that perhaps something better might occur and many a good subject has been lost through hesitation” (Pike, Nature and Camera, p. 14)

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With every accomplished photograph how many failures lay by the wayside? The lifetime’s act of collecting the things which we merit keeping, and alternately, the process of discarding those items considered failures. I can’t help to think what if Max Brod followed Kafka’s instruction and burned all those diaries and writings, which had remained unpublished at the end of his life. How many good photographs lay buried due to their owner’s politics, or suppressed under the historian’s construction?

Unknown for fifty years, photographer Lee Friedlander made prints of the somewhat disturbing, though fascinating negatives made by Bellocq, who had forcefully scratched out the faces on the negatives to remove his sitters’ identities, and yet, still these obscured plates were kept around for unknown reasons; as if he couldn’t destroy the work, and it was just as impossible to let it exist in the world. It is strange to think that the portraits became more interesting through their makers act of destruction, and that, to be sure of his sitters anonymity there are no prints surviving from before the defacement. Or even the NASA photographs documenting the first

landings on the moon. It wasn’t until five years ago that Michael Light went through NASA’s archives and found thousands of unknown negatives, from which he made numerous prints: new images from the past, displacing those same dozen images, that throughout our lives reappeared in magazines and television, during those time lined occasions, when we are reminded of the places we have travelled. And it’s true, that even in our own lives we gain more satisfaction with those images which we have seen more often than not; that we find peace in the familiar.

THE OTHER. THE REPRODUCED LIFE I set off with the task of photographing the negatives, carefully placing and then exposing each one, back lit through the light table. Within each glass plate was a miniature scene a bit smaller than the palm of my hand, and within each of these tiny scenes there was located an even smaller subject, which viewed as a negative, was barely recognizable from the other grey tones filling up space. The document titles corresponding to each frame revealed the name of the creatures: Ringed Plover Nest With Eggs, Robin Perched On Nest Surrounded By Snow, Chiff Chaff, and then others, The Dawn Patrol (one fox in the early morning), Skylark In Full Song Whilst Perched On A Post, and Alone In a White World. Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, in the chapter entitled “Melancholy Objects,” writes on the “rehabilitating” of old photographs: “A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come unstuck. It drifts away into soft abstract pastness, open

to any kind of reading.” 7 As I squinted my eyes to focus on the most infinitesimal details within the negative I did indeed feel the images “unmoored,” and I was no longer looking into the past; that all of these images had been travelling with the same speed as every image in the history of photography, to arrive unyielding, with a “pastness” embodied in the material make-up of each determined age.

Fixed on to many of the negatives were peculiar strips of thin black tape, usually four—some only two, and which, referring to my notes, 8 exist as indicators of how the image should be cropped. With this discovery, an uneasy feeling formed in my stomach. These were not intended for the photographer’s own personal reference, but markers he had laid down in the past as a guide for its future existence; I thought, not without small wonder, of the tiny strips as posthumous directions. I had a view of the unaltered image and, simultaneously, the boundary in between two places: the way it was intended, and then all the discarded areas still existing on the coated glass; directions diametrically opposed to the new reproductions I was making. 9 Alas, I could

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

say that these tiny indicators gave me a way into reading the image. It spoke of scale and distance imbedded in limitations of both technology and physical space, as well as how these choices are corrected through compositional choices. The half-used negative is both with reference to the limited ability to zoom in on the subject and the type of distance the photographer needs from each specific animal to remain unobtrusive. This unhampered relation between the photographer and nature—contrasted with the cropping and composing, inherent in reaching those ends, is what Roland Barthes refers to as “connotation: the second meaning in the message proper…realized at different levels of the production of the photograph.” 10 The choices made for reproduction had now become part of the reproduction, and for the first time revealed to me a way of reading the photographic message.

NOTES

7. Sontag, Susan, On Photography, p.71

1. Roland Barthes, in his photographic meander, Camera Lucida, separates photographs into two categories: those which don’t disturb the senses he refers to as Studium, and those that “prick” our interest as Punctum. For Barthes, it was the small details that pricked—a texture of fabric, the crossing of a boys arms, a place where we desire to live: visual descriptions that refer to “a whole life external to the portrait.”

8. In his chapter entitled “The Choice”, Pike says: “For reproduction I usually enlarged the actual bird and its immediate surroundings, and this usually meant that more than half the scene on the plate was never used.”(p.12)

2. Late one evening watching the film Vertigo I was struck when the character Scotty makes an attempt to reconstruct his past and says, “One doesn’t often get a second chance. I want to stop being haunted. You’re my second chance.”

3. Susan Stewart, On Longing. (P. 151) 4. Rodchenko, Alexander, “Program of the First Working Group of Constructivists,” Art in Theory, (p.341) 5. Early plates from around 1900 were extremely limited, not only by the slow speed of the emulsion, but also by the restricted sensitivity to the colors that make up the light spectrum. The emulsion was limited mostly to blue, slightly accepting to green, and completely nonresponsive to red.

6. In Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he discusses the loss of tradition—that because of reproduction, a single photograph can be seen in multiple places, which in turn, eliminates its “aura:” the object’s career within a certain space “withers,” or loses its ritualistic value. We do not refer to a photograph existing in a specific place in the world as a sculpture can. Art in Theory (p.520-523)

9. During the summer of 2002 I photographed a series of discarded sculptures of heads made by the sculptor John De Andrea in the early 1970s (which his daughter had rescued from the trash heap and stored in her garage). With these, I also felt there existed a double life—that the imperfections, which were not of the artist’s intent, had made their survival even more interesting. There existed the intended creation (perfection/ideal), and then concurrently, the unintended allusion to another life, caused by flaws in the process, of another kind of existence (imperfection/exile, age, survivor).

This accidental creation is of primary interest and also exists in the Pike negatives.

10. Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text, p.20.

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ESSAY EXCERPT

NEGATIVE HANDS NEGATIVITY

IN

W. G. SEBALD’S AUSTERLITZ

The following essay is an experiment in comparative reading of two texts that seem far removed in time as well as in poetics, whose only common denominator seems to be the juxtaposition of narrative and photography. Nadja by André Breton and Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald do not just exude a comparable atmosphere, which could be described as hyperreal, unreal, surreal, grotesque. . . . Several interesting parallelisms could be pursued on the level of the stories and motifs, focusing for instance on nomadic vagaries through the city, the importance of topography, motifs of the eye and the visual, the metaphor of theatre and staging, madness and breakdown, and elements of the gothic and grotesque. Both in Austerlitz and Nadja , the poetical principles are explicitly exposed in the novel in various forms, and one aspect of the hybrid status of the novels is certainly this blatant presence of guidelines for interpretation, often in the form of mise-enabymes: metafictional statements about writing, interpretation, time, space, history, memory, love, death continually double the narrative,

AND

ANDRÉ BRETON’S NADJA Anneleen Masschelein

which seems to force the reader to a position inside or outside the logic of the text.

I have chosen to approach both texts from a somewhat different angle, the problem of negativity, or the negative as it has been elaborated by the French psychoanalyst André Green, who is a kind of mediating figure between French Lacanian psychoanalysis and British so-called object relation psychoanalysis. I would like to focus here on Green’s reading of Winnicott’s work on transitional objects and transitional phenomena, and on the negative, more specifically on two types of “negative hands.” Both the imprint (or the trace) and the non-drawn hand form a motif or object that appears in both Nadja and Austerlitz, in the guise of the glove. . . .

In both cases, the starting point of the poetics is absence. In Breton’s surrealist poetics, this absence leads to an endless game of representation: the blue and the bronze glove, the account of the anecdote in the book, the bronze glove and the picture of it: all these could be regarded in terms of absence and loss, or even repression in the Freudian sense, but they are also indexes for future events in the novel. The repetition of the glove in Nadja’s drawing adds a more sinister and melancholy perspective, which could be linked with Breton’s opening question and his reflections on haunting, and with the radio message coming from an unidentified crashing airplane—“Il y a quelque chose qui ne va pas”—with which

the book ends, and could be explored in terms of identity, representation, and femininity. In Austerlitz , the glove is a truly imaginary object, present only in memory, but the memory proves to be so strong that it brings back his maternal language in a kind of (spiritual, but also sensual and linguistic) rebirth. However, the return of the repressed does not solve the trauma, but

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opens up a sequence of trauma, absence and loss, which is doubled in the accounts of (the destruction and decay of) architecture, history and nature that function as endless series of mises-en-abîme for the ongoing history of death and destruction. And yet, the very repetition of the destruction also implies that something always survives.

Likewise, the empty glove highlights the scant appearances of human hands and touch in the novel, and suggest the delicate sensuous structure of Sebaldian prose, which is both self-contained, labyrinthine, and suffocating on the one hand, and ongoing, clear, and light on the other hand, like the substance of a wasp’s nest, which is for Sebald “a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists” (Kafatou, 32). The hard, heavy, and cold glove of the surrealists versus the light, intricate, and dangerous substance of the wasp’s nest: both are objects retrieved from death rather than life, but they glow and buzz with a dim light and a faint hum.

The bronze glove, the paper doll, the hand of fire and the memory of the comfort-

ing motherly touch: this is the stuff that dreams and art are made of, and I believe that it is this magical vision that is present in Nadja and Austerlitz. Both emphasize the positive, revolutionary possibilities of this kind of visionary power, as well as the dangers of madness and destruction.

I would like to end with two short remarks. In my view, what is crucial in Nadja and in Austerlitz is not so much the unconscious or the repressed, but the medi ation of the unconscious and the repressed which opens up the realm of thought, reflection, memory, and judgement through the negative. Secondly, I believe that the effect of life must perhaps be situated in the most material aspects of the novels: the specific style of writing and the collage of text

and image. The short, enigmatic fragments of Breton mimic the convulsions of the hysteric, but also of a body on the verge of death. In Sebald’s prose, the continual shifting of focus and perspective, mimic the pulsating contractions of a very slow heartbeat underneath his tale of loss and absence. In both cases, the co-occurrence of text and image interrupts a linear reading, always forcing one to page back and forth in the book, on the one hand establishing connections between what happened and what is about to come (as I have tried to show in my reading of the glove), and on the other hand, doubling the experience of reading, making us aware of it, in a conscious, but also in a very sensuous way.

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SEBALD REVIEWS A Natural History of Destruction Editorial Reviews From Booklist Much has been written about the Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, often focusing on the resilient, rubblepicking survivors or the questionable ethics of leveling Dresden. This book focuses upon the air war’s lingering fallout for the German psyche, particularly the awkward silence of German writers on the subject of their nation’s destruction.

Postwar German writing, Sebald argues, is “looking and looking away at the same time” as writers struggle with their nation’s guilt and victimhood, but also with the destruction of their own authority as writers in a morally discredited society.

The author explores, among others, novelist Alfred Andersch’s egotistical apologies and confessions and Peter Weiss’ attempt to “attain absolution in heroic, selfdestroying work.” Himself a German writer and prolific literary scholar, Sebald approaches his subject with sensitivity, yet

avoids neither descriptions of horrible carnage nor criticism of writers too preoccupied with absolving themselves of blame to faithfully portray a destroyed Germany.

The result is a balanced explication of devastation and denial, and a beautiful coda for Sebald, who passed away in December 2001. —Brendan Driscoll From The New York Times Book Review Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written; and move by their own angles into the discourse of their day.

The very greatest write of what cannot be written; gravitating not toward the discourse but toward the silence. They break it, like the crust on untrodden snow. I think of [Anna] Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald, who died in 2001.” —Richard Eder The Emigrants Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Composed of four compelling portraits of Jewish emigres whose lives have been scarred by exile, dislocation and persecution, this unusual work of fiction is pervaded by a sensibility and a degree of circumstantial detail so authentic that it could pass for historical documentation. That Sebald has invested his fictional creations with both dignity and pathos is a mark of his achievement here. A narrator provides perspective on the lives he relates. Retired surgeon Henry Selwyn was born Hersch Seweryn and changed his name after arrival in England; his disclosure of his

true origins to his Swiss wife causes an irreparable rift in their marriage and an essential loss of identity in the now aimless man. Paul Bereyter, fired from his post as schoolteacher in Germany because he is one-quarter Jewish, serves six years in the Germany army and is haunted by the bestial violence he witnesses. Ambros Adelwarth escapes Germany, finally settling in the U.S. Concealing his traumas from family members, he commits himself to a sanitarium at age 67 and undergoes electroshock therapy, longing for extinction. German-born artist Max Ferber, a recluse in Manchester, England, suffers claustrophobia stemming from the deportation and murder of his parents by Nazis.

Though none of the protagonists is thrown into a concentration camp, they are all haunted by the effects of the Holocaust.

Two of them eventually commit suicide, all suffer shame and guilt, claustrophobia and depression. Photographs interwoven with the restrained text add to the cumulative effect, which is that of an eerie memento. Long after the Nazis have fallen, these exiled individuals endure existential agony and emotional breakdowns.

German novelist and literary scholar Sebald, who has lived in England since 1970, won the Berlin Literature Prize for this remarkable work.

From The New York Times Book Review A profound and original work . . . W. G. Sebald has created an end-of-century meditation that explores the most delicate, most painful, most nervously repressed and carefully concealed lesions of the last hundred years. Illuminatingly engaged

SEARCHING FOR SEBALD: BOOK PROPOSAL

with the history and literature of the modern era, Mr. Sebald’s book gains power through its poetic obsessions with the past.

—Larry Wolff F rom Review of Contemporary Fiction One of the best novels to appear since World War II. Austerlitz Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly The ghost of what historian Peter Gay calls “the bourgeois experience,” molded in the liberalism and neurasthenia of the 19th century and destroyed in the wars and concentration camps of the 20th century, haunts W.G. Sebald’s unique novels. His latest concerns the melancholic life of Jacques Austerlitz who, justifiably, exclaims, “At some point in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life.” The unnamed narrator met Austerlitz, an architectural historian, in Belgium in the ‘60s, then lost track of his friend in the ‘70s.

When they accidentally run into each other in 1996, Austerlitz tells the story that occupies the rest of the book the story of Austerlitz’s life. For a long time, Austerlitz did not know his real mother and father were Prague Jews his first memories were of his foster parents, a joyless Welsh couple. While exploring the Liverpool Street railroad station in London, Austerlitz experiences a flashback of himself as a four-year-old. Gradually, he tracks his history, from his birth in Prague to a cultivat-

ed couple through his flight to England, on the eve of WWII, on a train filled with refugee children. His mother, Agata, was deported first to Theresienstadt and then, presumably, to Auschwitz. His father disappeared in Paris. Austerlitz’s isolation and depression deepen after learning these facts. As Sebald’s readers will expect, the novel is filled with scholarly digressions, ranging from the natural history of moths to the typically overbearing architecture of the Central European spas. In this novel as in previous ones, Sebald writes as if Walter Benjamin’s terrible “angel of history” were perched on his shoulder.

From School Library Journal Winner of the Berlin Literature and Literatur Nord prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, Sebald has previously been published here by New Directions but now jumps to a bigger house. The narrator recounts the story of his friend, Jacques Austerlitz, who came to Britain on a kindertransport and as an adult must painfully reconstruct his past.

From Library Journal This tremendously emotional novel is far easier to sum up than to evaluate: Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, tells his life story to the unnamed narrator over the course of 30 years. What unfolds is the tale of one man’s search for the truth behind his identity after he learned that the Welsh couple who raised him are not his real parents. He discovers that his birth parents were Prague Jews who sent him to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport before being deported to concentration camps. Contrary to what

some say, Sebald is not an easy read. In fact, this novel, much like his previous ones (The Emigrants, Vertigo), cries to be reread before it even ends. Sebald constructs the narrative as if to convey that even the mundane seems more meaningful if we are unaware of the facts. The blackand-white photographs scattered throughout do not add to the depth of the story, but they do add to its genuineness, serving to validate the events and reconstruct the novel as a tangible historical document.

Ultimately, the narrative transcends fiction and becomes history. The overbearing details of architectural history that saturate much of the text are the only distractions.

Ultimately, this is a work of rare originality. —Mirela Roncevic

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