“One Cannot Find the Words”
“Austerlitz” and the Différend in History
This is quite obviously an undergraduate essay — reads like one, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, if you remember reading Austerlitz and you like Sebald’s prose (and you have a tolerance for words like “Lyotard” and “metonymic”) you might find this an interesting approach to deconstructing him.
W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) was a native of Germany who for the last thirty years of his life lived and worked in self-exile. Throughout his teaching career in the United Kingdom Sebald’s interests included literary translation, and the absence of the war experience in post-1945 German literature and culture. Austerlitz was the last of his highly acclaimed works, published in 2001 not long before his accidental death.
It’s often been remarked that W. G. Sebald’s writing exists in a genre of the author’s own devising. In his own words, Sebald “just want[ed] to write decent prose. … I have an aversion to the standard novel: ‘She said, and walked across the room’ — there’s something trite about it. You can feel the wheels turning.” This resistance to narrative directness is crucial to Sebald’s “densely allusive” style which obsessively circumvents a mere “telling” of its primary subject, the annihilation or exile of European Jewry.
Instead, Sebald’s writing deftly reflects aspects of the larger narrative in a fascinating metonymic bricolage of history, architecture, geography and biology, anecdotes, autobiographical text — all “so loaded with concrete detail that it has the impact of a photograph” — as well as, vitally, actual photographs, embedded within the hypnotic prose. The thesis of this essay is that Sebald’s method of metonymic metaphor in Austerlitz constitutes a fine test of the objective set for literature by Jean-Francois Lyotard:
“Le différend is the unstable state and instance of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be … What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to différends by finding idioms for them.”
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le Différend
W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) was a native of Germany who for the last thirty years of his life lived and worked in self-exile. Throughout his teaching career in the United Kingdom Sebald’s interests included literary translation, and the absence of the war experience in post-1945 German literature and culture. Austerlitz was the last of his highly acclaimed works, published in 2001 not long before his accidental death.
Written, as all Sebald’s books were, in German, and translated into English by Anthea Bell, Austerlitz and its translation together are a singular achievement. Unequivocally themed along the lines of so-called “Holocaust literature”, the book nevertheless is anything but another contribution to the well-worn Holocaust narrative. Jacque Austerlitz is neither entirely fictional nor real, being an amalgamation of several individual’s experiences including much that can only have been derived from Sebald’s own life and reading. In this book the author is conducting a para-biographical excavation of the present which leads, at every turn, to a confrontation both with the presence of the past and the absence of its inhabitants. His project is to expose and explore the illiterable nexus between history and human experience; his method, like Foucault’s, is archaeological; and he uses a variety of metaphoric tools for exposing the différend’s absence from the discourses of European history and culture.
The consistent purity of Sebald’s prose suggests a trust in the ability of language to “bear witness”, in a style uncluttered by conventions of form and supplemented with simple but invigorating visual stimuli. He himself called his writing style “old-fashioned”, and this in combination with its distinctly post-modern shape and content makes of the page itself a synchronic plane, able to catch and reflect the detail of any historical era with immense plausibility. But the uncovering of a différend and the voicing of it are different exercises, and Sebald pushes his distinctive idiom only as close to the latter as is possible while allowing no sentimentalization of the subject.
Austerlitz has only two players and is virtually plotless, consisting largely of the recounting of a sporadic series of unplanned encounters between the nameless narrator and Jacque Austerlitz over a period of almost thirty years. One of its technical triumphs is that it almost invisibly separates narrator and protagonist, whilst still at all times retaining the immediacy of first person. Jacque Austerlitz’s peculiarly sensible journey through history is told by himself, but written by another; the faceless narrator both reads and writes Austerlitz. The narrator also stands in for Sebald as the originator of both the glorious prose and its arrangement with Austerlitz’s black and white photographs. Eshel calls this the “oscillation between a narrator as the author and as a fictive figure” and regards it as an important element in Sebald’s technique of “keeping the tension between fact and fiction unresolved”. Despite the fact that his relationship with Austerlitz spans three decades, we are given almost no information about the narrator except that he shares the other’s propensity for wandering around Europe.
There are however a small number of important sections in “real” first person, which tell of the narrator’s experiences and memories rather than those of Austerlitz, and these hold to the same subject matter, experimenting with the synchronicity of history in the present much as Austerlitz does. Near the beginning of the book, for example, the narrator recounts the story of Gastone Novelli who survived torture by the S.S. and, later in his life, became an artist whose subject was, simply, the letter ‘A’. This is an important passage with respect to representing the gap between the différend and language (pp. 34-36). The narrator himself perhaps represents another différend, one which is able to give voice to its own conglomeration of experiences only by the interest it takes in another; we might say it is similar to the différend manifested through readership, which in silence selects its material according to “un-voiceable” needs and affinities.
The conversations between this mysterious person and Austerlitz himself are represented as long, hypnotic, meandering monologues in which Austerlitz conveys his deep personal interest in, and commanding knowledge of, European architectural history. They meet first in the waiting room of Antwerp Centraal railway station, dating from the nineteenth century, which forecasts the recurrence of railway stations in Austerlitz’s tying together of his own personal history with that of modern Europe. This first conversation radiates out from the history and baroque architecture of the railway station itself, and introduces Sebald’s vision of European history as embodied in the physical and cultural environment of the present. It features the concept of time as an invention of modernity, a technological tool in the essentially modern project of creating, as Foucault named them, “docile bodies”:
[The barmaid] sat enthroned on a stool behind the counter, legs crossed, filing her nails with complete devotion and concentration. Austerlitz commented in passing of this lady, whose peroxide-blonde hair was piled up into a sort of bird’s nest, that she was the goddess of time past. And on the wall behind her, under the lion crest of the kingdom of Belgium, there was indeed a mighty clock, the dominating feature of the buffet, with a hand some six feet long traveling round a dial which had once been gilded, but was now blackened by railway soot and tobacco smoke. … And time, said Austerlitz, represented by the hands and dial of the clock, reigns supreme among these [architectural] emblems. … The movements of all travelers could be surveyed from the central position occupied by the clock in Antwerp Station, and conversely all travelers had to look up at the clock and were obliged to adjust their activities to its demands.
Austerlitz, pp. 13-14
The relationship between time and space is crucial to Sebald’s exposition of the différend implicit in Austerlitz’s lost past. Sent to Wales from Prague by his Jewish parents as a small child, and unable to remember anything about his origins, Austerlitz becomes preoccupied with tracing his own past through the tangled threads of European history. His struggle with memory and his fascination with the material residue left by past lives is symbolic of the plight of the différend, whose victimhood is undeniable and yet cannot be witnessed by language. The numerous historic buildings which Austerlitz has visited and studied, and which according to the narrator’s record he describes in fluent detail, are the attempts of various European national cultures to configure their histories in special terms. Railway stations are significant not only because of their connection with the Auschwitz narrative and with Austerlitz’s own story, but because of the fixed nature of their relationship with humanity, both diachronic — as representative of the project of modernity — and synchronic — symbolizing the distance between the locations which they connect. Other buildings too, however, collapse history and space together in interesting ways. Austerlitz/Sebald gives a beautiful example:
It was several months after this meeting that I came upon Austerlitz, again entirely by chance, on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels, on the steps of the Palace of Justice which, as he immediately told me, is the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe. The building of this singular architectural monstrosity … began in the 1880s at the urging of the bourgeoisie of Brussels, over-hastily and before the details of the grandiose scheme … had been properly worked out, as a result of which, said Austerlitz, this huge pile of over seven hundred thousand cubic metres contains corridors and stairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority.
(pp. 38-39)
Sebald turns this building into a metaphor for the project of modernity: urged on by the impatience of the middle classes for permanent economic and technological security, it ended by creating instead the post-modern world of monstrous loneliness and bewilderment, where the origins of power and responsibility are untraceable.
These are early examples from the text, a section which acts as an introductory course to Sebald’s method, preparing the reader for the subject. It is in part through his analysis of architecture that Austerlitz/Sebald exposes the différend, which remains unvoiced in all this representation and reflection of history. We could return, for example, to the railway station at Antwerp which, as Austerlitz/Sebald explains, was one of numerous public buildings erected under the direction of King Leopold during the profitable phase of the Belgian colonial experiment. By Austerlitz’s description of the architecture, no reference is made to the tribes of central Africa who were brutally exploited under Leopold; they are voiceless in the Belgian architectural language of the nineteenth century, which had acquired “Byzantine and Moorish notes” but was otherwise predominantly neo-classical in its eclecticism (pp. 9-12).
But it’s specifically the différend in European history that interests Sebald. Lyotard’s model of the différend is the typical victim of Auschwitz, whose sentence by its very nature precludes any appeal to a defense, stripping the individual of all the equipment of humanity, including of course individuality and life itself, which is necessary to the action of witnessing. Austerlitz seeks to release one of these, his mother Agáta, from the prison of the différend by obtaining evidence which differentiates her death from those of the collective mass of victims.
Let’s find a selection of passages which further illustrate Austerlitz’s interrogation of history’s synchronicity in this vein.
At Broad Street station, built in 1865 on the site of the former burial grounds and bleachfields, excavations during the demolition work of 1985 brought to light over four hundred skeletons underneath a taxi rank. I went there quite often at the time, said Austerlitz, partly because of my interest in architectural history and partly for other reasons which I could not explain even to myself, and I took photographs of the remains of the dead. I remember falling into conversation with one of the archaeologists, who told me that on average the skeletons of eight people had been found in every cubic metre of earth removed from the trench. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city had grown above these strata of soil mingled with the dust and bones of decayed bodies into a warren of putrid streets and houses for the poorest Londoners, cobbled together out of beams, clods of clay, and any other building material that came to hand.
(pp. 184-186)
[Note: On p. 185 is a photograph of four skulls and a skeletal torso lying partly exposed in mud.]
Once again the topic is a railway station, but here Sebald’s archaeology exposes the foundations of modern London society on a ground composed of utterly forgotten différends, whose physical existence nevertheless remains a part of the present. This is immediately preceding the scene in the abandoned Ladies’ Waiting Room of Liverpool Street station, where Austerlitz confronts a series of visions from the forgotten past and begins the journey to rediscover his roots (pp. 189-195). The latter passage echoes the former, bringing to light the faces of forgotten generations which Austerlitz sees reflected in his own anguish:
From time to time, and just for a split second, I saw huge halls open up, with rows of pillars and colonnades leading far into the distance, with vaults and brickwork arches bearing on them many-storeyed structures, with flights of stone steps, wooden stairways and ladders, all leading the eye on and on. I saw viaducts and footbridges crossing deep chasms thronged with tiny figures who looked to me, said Austerlitz, like prisoners in search of some way of escape from their dungeon …
(pp. 190-191)
Sebald uses Austerlitz’s search for his past as a metaphor for history’s search for the différend. The Waiting Room is a doorway or a window to Austerlitz’s lost diachronicity which may still prove unattainable. Prompted by a dim memory of the architecture of the place, he has a vision of a small child meeting the oddly anachronistic Welsh couple who will bring him up and erase his recollections of his family, home and native language. In the vision, the boy is holding a rucksack by which Austerlitz recognizes him, a material remnant of the past which was disposed of by his foster parents soon after his arrival.
As so often, said Austerlitz, I cannot give any precise description of the state of mind this realization induced; I felt something rending within me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something quite different, something inexpressible because we have no words for it, just as I had no words all those years ago when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand.
(pp. 193-194)
Faced suddenly with the trauma and loss suffered by his child self, Austerlitz finds himself incapable of “putting it into phrases”. Perhaps then the only traces of history’s différends are in material things such as the rucksack. Austerlitz’s search for Agáta takes him to the Theresienstadt ghetto where she was interned by the Nazis, and vanished with many thousands of others. In the town of Terezín he visits the “so-called Ghetto Museum”:
I climbed the steps and entered the lobby, where a lady of uncertain age in a lilac blouse, her hair waved in an old-fashioned style, sat behind a kind of cash-desk. … When I asked if I was the only visitor today she said that the museum had only recently opened and not many people from outside the town came to see it, particularly at this time of year and in such weather. And the people of Terezín didn’t come anyway, she added, picking up the white handkerchief she was edging with loops like flower petals.
(pp. 277-278)
The deserted museum houses a collection of material remnants, “pieces of luggage brought to Terezín by the internees”, “lists of every imaginable kind” representing all the available historical evidence of the Nazis’ “mania for order and purity”, “endless rows of numbers and figures, which must have served to reassure the administrators that nothing ever escaped their notice.” The museum has only recently opened, and there is a sense of these items having been discarded by the rest of the post-modern world, all of the interest wrung out of them. The ghetto of the past is undeniably present in these items, and it is upon items of this kind that the power/knowledge structure of the historian’s profession is built. But any individual inhabitant of the ghetto of the past remains unaccounted for in the unimaginable numbers of the lost.
When, towards the end of the day, the museum guardian came up to me and indicated that she would soon have to close, said Austerlitz, I had just been reading, several times over, a note on one of the display panels, to the effect that in the middle of December 1942, and thus at the very time when Agáta came to Terezín, some sixty thousand people were shut up together in the ghetto, a built-up area of one square kilometer at the most, and a little later, when I was out in the deserted town square again, it suddenly seemed to me, with the greatest clarity, that they had never been taken away after all, but were still living crammed into those buildings and basements and attics, as if they were incessantly going up and down the stairs, looking out of the windows, moving in vast numbers through the streets and alleys, and even, a silent assembly, filling the entire space occupied by the air, hatched with grey as it was by the fine rain.
(p. 281)
Sebald’s archaeology ends where the synchronicity of physical evidence breaks down; the différend whose ending is unattested by that evidence spends eternity in silence.
The book does not relate the end of Austerlitz’s search for his past; when he parts with the narrator for the last time it is for Paris where he hopes to be able to trace his father. His last architectural polemic is regarding the new Parisian central library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, a postmodern horror the entrance to which
struck me as an utter absurdity, something that must have been devised — I can think of no other explanation, said Austerlitz — on purpose to instill a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers, especially as it ends in front of a sliding door of makeshift appearance which had a chain across it on the day of my first visit, and where you have to let yourself be searched by semi-uniformed security men. … first you have to put your request at an information point staffed by half a dozen ladies, whereupon, if this request to any degree exceeds the very simplest contingency, you take a number, like a visitor to a tax office; you then have to wait, often for half an hour or more, until another member of staff calls you into a separate cubicle, as if you were on business of an extremely dubious nature … Despite such measures of control I finally succeeded, said Austerlitz, in gaining admission to the newly opened Haut-de-jardin public reading room … I for my part, said Austerlitz, found that this gigantic new library, which according to one of the loathsome phrases now current is supposed to serve as the treasure-house of our entire literary heritage, proved useless in my search for any traces of my father who had disappeared from Paris more than fifty years ago.
(pp. 389-393)
This is clearly a powerful comment on the power/knowledge structure of historical research and its irrelevance to the historical différend. It’s related to an earlier, self-referential passage in which Sebald allegorizes his own writing technique with Austerlitz’s description of the long days he spent at the original Bibliothèque Nationale,
losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications.
(p. 363)
Austerlitz is a book replete with vital details; any selection of examples will seem poor compared to the variety and brilliance of the narrative itself. And, once recognized, the différend is everywhere in Sebald’s prose, testimony to the extraordinary ability of the author to expose the gaps between experience, memory, evidence, history and language. Lyotard’s claim appears to leave room for the possibility of voicing the différend:
A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the différend disclosed by the feeling [“One cannot find the words”].
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le Différend
In Austerlitz, the différend retains its identity as such in that it resists being “put into phrases”; yet perhaps, by giving voice to a variety of synchronic elements of the present, Sebald has found an idiom for it. If the broad subject matter of Austerlitz can be said to compose a European metalanguage encompassing all of the discourses it touches upon — history, art, architecture, photography, medicine, biology — then perhaps Sebald has tapped a language in which certain kinds of différend can be expressed. Certainly he has searched, and searched diligently, for “new rules for forming and linking phrases”, and in the process has provided literature and history with a new and exquisite currency of exchange.
“I’ve grown up feeling that there’s some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts, witnesses one can trust. I would never have encountered these witnesses if I had not left my native country at the age of twenty because the people who tell you the truth, or something at least approximating the truth did not live there any longer.”
W. G. Sebald, 2001
[Note: For ‘native country’, read ‘modernity’]
