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Penelope's Crossword: on W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz Yahya Elsaghe

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Penelope's Crossword: on W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz Yahya Elsaghe Penelope’s Crossword: On W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Yahya Elsaghe Translated by Sina Rahmani and Yahya Elsaghe 1 The first and already posthumous German paperback edition of W. G. Sebald’s final text, whose initial publication he oversaw, bears the title Austerlitz / Roman (Sebald 2003). The addition of this subtitle seemingly contradicted the now deceased author’s own description of it, “a prosebook of an undetermined kind [ein Prosabuch unbestimmter Art]” (Sebald 2011: 199).1 According to the publisher, the generic subtitle was a mistake on the part of the graphic design staff. Although this may technically account for the addendum to the front matter, something here evades comprehension. Notwithstanding the persistence of this generic classification in Sebald This essay was originally published in German as “Das Kreuzworträtsel der Penelope: Zu W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz,” in Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook (Stauf- fenburg Verlag Tübingen), vol. 6 (2007): 164–84. 1. As Sina Rahmani points out in the introduction to this special issue, the history of the title in English translation appears to have unfolded in exactly the opposite direction. See also Meyer 2005: 174. boundary 2 47:3 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 8524420 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/85/813794/0470085.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 86 boundary 2 / August 2020 scholarship (see Denneler 2005: 139), a question lingers: What could bring someone on the graphic design staff to declare Austerlitz fictional, effec- tively barring us from reading it as a real story about one of the 669 chil- dren Nicholas Winton helped bring to the United Kingdom in the winter of 1938–39? That this exoneration should come from the graphic design staff is not without a certain piquancy, as the book’s layout clearly contradicts this paratextual affiliation with the novel. Austerlitz is illustrated with numer- ous black- and- white photographs, which, as iconic and indexical signs and “true documents par excellence [wahre Dokumente par excellence]” (Sebald 2011: 168), seem to authenticate both themselves and the fact that the “referents” of this illustrated text “actually existed” (Barthes 1981: 77). In lieu of sublimating German Jewish history in the fictional form of a Roman, Austerlitz sets itself up to be read as a kind of factual biography, thereby provoking the charge that the text ignores all the problems and “limits of representation” (Friedlander 1992) that overburden any kind of mimetic aestheticization of this history. However, the anxiety that the discourse of the one obviates the sor- rows of the many comes undone with a closer look at the “indeterminacy” of this “prosebook.” In doing so, Austerlitz becomes a text if not virtually of a fictional kind then most certainly of a “poetic” one—in precisely the sense that Roman Jakobson uses the word when he describes the “poetic function” in terms of the projection of the “principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination” (1981: 27). The poetic function of the text is indeed explicated, or, at the very least, exposed through a mise en abyme taking place in one specific scene. Located almost at the text’s numerical halfway point, this key moment plays a decisive role in the unfolding of the rest of the plot. In the spring of 1993, following his “nervous breakdown,” Auster- litz finds himself in “an antiquarian bookshop near the British Museum” (Sebald 2001a: 140). Like the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris—the “ziggurat” (276), whose “Babylonian” (278) and “pharaonic” (289) hubris and systematic inhospitality, becomes the subject of a biting satire near the end of the text—the British Museum was once described by its own directors as “portentous and unwelcoming” (Pope- Hennessy 1977: 7) and instilling “a sense of awe” (Wilson 1993: 7). As Thomas Richards argues (1993), the institution was an important hub of the colonial empire, and a major portion of its holdings can justly be described as loot. So in contrast to what Richards calls an “imperial archive,” the bookstore constitutes a Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/85/813794/0470085.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Elsaghe / Penelope’s Crossword 87 “matriarchive” (Derrida 1998: 36) operated by someone bearing a rather extraordinary, mythically charged first name, mentioned, by the way, on the first page of Richard’s monograph: The owner of the bookshop, Penelope Peacefull, a very beautiful woman whom I had admired for many years, was sitting where she always sat in the mornings, slightly to one side of her desk with its load of books and papers, solving the crossword puzzle on the back of the Telegraph with her left hand. She smiled at me from time to time and then looked out at the street again, deep in thought. It was quiet in the shop except for soft voices coming from the little radio which stood beside Penelope, as usual, and these voices, which at first I could hardly make out but which soon became almost too dis- tinct, cast such a spell over me that I entirely forgot the engravings lying before me, and stood there as still as if on no account must I let a single syllable emerging from the rather scratchy radio set escape me. I was listening to two women talking to each other about the summer of 1939, when they were children and had been sent to England on a special transport. They mentioned a number of cities— Vienna, Munich, Danzig, Bratislava, Berlin—but only when one of the couple said that her own transport, after two days traveling through the German Reich and the Netherlands, where she could see the great sails of the windmills from the train, had finally left the Hook of Holland on the ferry PRAGUE to cross the North Sea to Harwich, only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of mem- ory [Erinnerungsbruchstücke] were part of my own life as well. I was too alarmed by this sudden revelation to be able to write down the addresses and phone numbers given at the end of the program. I merely saw myself waiting on a quay. Are you all right? I heard a voice say suddenly, as if from very far away, and it took me some time to remember where I was and realize that Penelope might have felt concerned by my sudden seizure. I remember telling her that it was nothing, that my thoughts were elsewhere, in the Hook of Holland as a matter of fact, whereupon Penelope raised her face slightly with an understanding smile, as if she herself had often been obliged to wait in that cheerless harbor. One way to live cheaply and without tears? she then immediately asked, tapping the tip of her ballpoint pen on the crossword in her folded newspaper, but just as I was about to confess that I had never been able to solve even Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/85/813794/0470085.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 88 boundary 2 / August 2020 the simplest clues in these tortuous English puzzles she said, Oh, it’s rent free! and scribbled the eight letters swiftly down in the last empty spaces on the grid (Sebald 2001a: 141–42; translation slightly amended).2 “The owner of the bookshop” calls forth ex nomine the oldest example in literary history to negotiate catastrophic events in the same tangential way that Austerlitz does—namely, not at the epicenter but rather from the margins and aftershocks. However, the intertextuality evoked by her conspicuous name does not continue beyond this act of scribbling. Just like Odysseus’s patient wife—who waits “day by day” upon her husband’s homecoming as she weaves her father- in- law’s burial shroud, the comple- tion of which signaling the end of the mourning period and the beginning of a new stage of her life—Penelope Peacefull sits as she “always sat in the mornings,” looking out “deep in thought” on the old “street” while filling out a crossword puzzle.3 She thus labors on a kind of “text,” something written and read not only horizontally but also vertically. These two dimensions, like warp and weft, live up to Walter Benjamin’s oft cited emphasis on the ety- mology of “text” as a weave. But the intertextual relationship between Austerlitz and the Odyssey does not seem to extend any further than this moment; the only way it does would be to construe the link between the two texts ironically. Thus, the intertextuality underscores the importance of the specific moment itself, in which the “sudden revelation” (141) brings time to a “petrified” halt (50), for Sebald’s Penelope does precisely what her namesake only promises but instead defers ad kalendas Graecas. By following through, Sebald’s Penelope triggers a shocking, “sudden” caesura in the continuity of time. With a “smile” on her face, Penelope “scribbled the eight letters down in the last empty spaces [Kästchen] on the grid” (142), in fact completing her textual weave. Contrastingly, Odysseus’s eternally tearful wife weaves the shroud daily only to undo her work at night (living up to her Greek name, the one who loosens the web, penos), not unlike the sisters Catherine, Clarissa, and Christina Ashbury in The Rings of Saturn (Sebald 1998: 211–13). However, just as the title of The Rings of Saturn appears to be inspired by one of the fragments of The Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999b), 2. Unlike the German original, the English translation has replaced “PRAGUE” with “Prague.” The author of this essay is basing his reading on the German, and the transla- tion has been altered to reflect this.—Trans.
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