1.4 Topographic speeches: Sebald’s writing architecture It is within the scope of moving topography that Sebald arranges the layers of his speech. In the format of the reports that become denser around the narrator’s experience, as preciously mentioned, there is a sense of layers of memory – elaborated from the incessant spatial and time records and their correlations. It is through this almost archeological approach that the narrative is inscribed – with space actively participating in this function. The main idea in Sebald’s work is an attempt to reconcile memory: because of the little we have managed to retain, an effort is needed to remember what is constantly in the process of being forgotten. In this sense, it is worth rescuing an enlightening passage from Austerlitz’s narrative: Even today, when I try to remember, when I go back to examining the Breendonk crab plant56 (...), the darkness does not diminish, but thickens, /when I think how little we managed to retain because all things are constantly falling into the oblivion to each life that extinguishes, how much the world empties itself through the history of countless places and objects, in themselves incapable of memory/, never to be heard, never to be shown or transmitted. (SEBALD, 2012a, page 27, own highlights and translation)
Although the displacement goes back to the spatial instance of memory functioning – a thesis elaborated throughout this chapter – what is fundamentally capable of mediating the constant process between memory and forgetfulness is writing. It is at this point that the intention to rescue the ash through literature lies57, a strategy that will be addressed in the third chapter. Before that, it is necessary to continue exploring the sources used by Sebald in the process of reconciling memory, such as the space category.
56
Military fortification in Belgium visited by the narrator of Austerlitz. Still in Austerlitz, there is a clue to Sebald’s intentions, in accordance with the coincidences that are established between the character’s figure and the writer himself: “[…] because I wanted to put on paper my investigations on history or architecture and civilization, my long-standing intention.” (SEBALD, 2012a, page 112, own highlights and translation)
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