The Stateless Novel: Refugees, Literary Form, and the Rise of Containerization

Home , A Place in the Country, Mehran Karimi Nasseri, The Terminal

Sina Rahmani

Halfway through Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald ) (2012), Christopher MacLehose, the original publisher of the English translation of The Rings of Saturn (1998), recounts an anecdote about W. G. Sebald’s debut on the anglophone literary stage:

One of the questions we asked him was, “Which category would you like your book to be in?” And Max [Sebald] said, “Oh, I’d like all the categories. I want fiction, I want biography, I want autobiography, I want travel, I want history, I want . . .” Well, he didn’t say Holocaust Studies, but anyways, there wasn’t a category he didn’t require. . . . Max was very clear, what he was saying was, “Don’t put me in a box; I want to be in all the boxes. I’m not writing a familiar formula.”

This essay would not have been possible without the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also benefited from helpful feedback from a number of patient readers: Imre Szeman, Todd Presner, Aamir Mufti, Jonathan Grossman, Yahya Elsaghe, Sanna Alas, Nada Ayad, Ian Newman, and Uwe Schütte. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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MacLehose’s account of Sebald’s resistance to generic classifica- tion is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it perfectly mimics the technique of “periscopic narration” Sebald learned from Thomas Bernhard, mediating a character’s speech through the voice of another (Sebald 2011a: 235). Sec- ond, this open declaration of the formal boundlessness of Sebald’s “prose books” or “prose fiction”—his preferred, albeit vague, terms for Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz—speaks to one of the most elusive questions posed by his unorthodox career trajectory and the varie- gated body of work he left behind: What exactly constituted that unfamil- iar “formula” that attracted legions of readers and provoked enthusiastic praise from the literary establishment? Critics have tackled this question with gusto, compiling a long and growing list of coinages that attempt to identify the “undetermined” generic realm where some of his books reside: “faction,” “process books,” “novel memoirs,” “narrative texts,” “literary historiography,” to name only a handful.1 That no consensus on the terminology has been reached adds a certain poignancy to Sebald’s own rendering of English travel writer Bruce Chatwin: “Just as Chatwin himself ultimately remains an enigma, one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre” (2005: 173). With surprisingly little debate, however, commentators have man- aged to agree on one point—something with far-reaching implications for how we read Sebald. Namely, the bifurcation of Sebald’s oeuvre into “critical” and “literary” halves has become an axiomatic starting point for the majority of critics. This view, endorsed by Sebald (2011a: 236), was recently codified in the introductory lines of Saturn’s Moons: W. G. Sebald— A Handbook: “This publication [of Nach Der Nature in 1988] marks the moment when Sebald the university lecturer, academic researcher and critic, known to his friends and colleagues as Max, emerged publicly as the writer W. G. Sebald” (Catling and Hibbitt 2011: 1).2 This quasi-ontological distinction is reinforced in the bibliography published in the same volume (Sheppard 2011). The most authoritative English-language bibliography to date, it divides “Literary” works from “Critical” ones, with the former further

1. Respectively, Craven 1999; Torgovnick 2005: 117; Kochhar-Lindgren 2002; Jackman 2004: 466; Wolff 2011. 2. Mark McCulloh’s Understanding W. G. Sebald drops the plumb line at the same point but uses a more sociological wording: “His literary reputation in Germany was launched with the 1988 prose poem Nach der Natur: Ein Elemantergedict (After Nature)” (2003: xvi).

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subdivided into other categories, including but not limited to “Prose Fic- tion,” “Poetry,” and “Other Independent Publications (Critical Articles and Essays).”3 But the borderline between the two Sebalds is far more porous than the pundits suggest. For starters, the labels “academic” and “essay” are misleading when applied to much of the work termed as such, since Sebald, beginning with his undergraduate thesis, flatly refused to abide by the most basic rules of the profession.4 This was most certainly rooted in deep-seated resentment of his professors, all of whom “had gotten jobs during the Brownshirt years and were therefore compromised, either because they had actually supported the regime or had been fellow trav- elers or otherwise been silent” (quoted in Atlas 1999: 290). His wholesale rejection of the disciplinary practices of academic literary studies—a “dis- missal of claims to scholarly objectivity more generally” (Pages 2007: 67)— is evident in his first major work of scholarship. As he would do in future writings, Sebald used a study of German Jewish writer and playwright Carl Sternheim to wage a “personal area-bombing campaign” (Sheppard 2011: 455) on not only the book’s main subject but also on scholars like Wilhelm Emrich, who, in Sebald’s view, championed Sternheim’s mediocre corpus to conceal personal involvement with National Socialism. And while the unsubstantiated accusations lobbed by the twenty-five- year-old Sebald were confirmed only after Emrich’s death in 1998, Sebald’s methods were often dubious and, in some instances, blatantly unethical. He often reverted to ad hominem attacks, tendentious sourcing and argumentation, and out- right calumny (Schütte 2014: 126). The consummate enfant terrible and “provocateur” (Simon 2005), Sebald, as his bibliographies signal, was dis- missive of the senior figures in the field. He largely abstained from both the digital revolution and specialist journals, preferring venues with a more general readership. Nor did he engage the radical modes of thinking imported

3. Some do not even acknowledge the poetry: “Although all of his major works—Vertigo, The Emigrants, the travelogue The Rings of Saturn, his novel Austerlitz, and Air War and Literature—constantly evolve around the themes of suffering . . .” (Moser 2012: 66). 4. On the many problems plaguing Sebald’s Lizentiatsarbeit, see Sheppard 2009: “Here, careless and inconsistent footnoting, inaccurate, selective and tendentious citation, an inattention to punctuation, orthographic consistency and the strict rules of German gram- mar, a moralizing tone, generalized and unsubstantiated opinion, a refusal to read piles of secondary literature, and a fiercely polemical stance all point to someone who is assert- ing his right as a critic to ignore established authority and be thoroughly subjective, who is forcing his chosen subject into his own mould and who is fiercely antipathetic to ‘Ger- many,’ its literary metonyms, and its hierarchical university system” (87).

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into literary studies from continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines during the 1970s and 1980s, even though he most likely would have found allies who shared his antipathy for the intellectual status quo. And yet, despite all his shortcomings as a modern academic, it is impossible to deny the profound marks that his scholarly training and decades of professional service left on his “literary” publications. In a way, his “English pilgrimage” through Suffolk is not fundamentally different than the two essay collections on Austrian literature. All three texts use a specific geographic fiction to tie together a series of loosely connected explora- tions directly or indirectly related to the region in question. To push this line of thinking further, does the presence of the first-person narrator instantly transform The Rings of Saturn into something more “creative” (Blackler 2007: 90) than, say, the “essays” collected in Logis in einem Landhaus (A Place in the Country)?5 Why is Vertigo, which according to Sebald contains “literary biographical essays” (2011b: 350) on Stendhal and Kafka, with the third section recounting an excursion to his hometown, not considered partly critical? Could the detailed rendering of Theresienstadt that Austerlitz distills from H. G. Adler’s monumental study (1955) have been possible without Sebald’s scholarly training? What, moreover, is to be done with the dozens of interviews he participated in during his lifetime? Does one separate, for instance, his “academic” contributions to a panel discussion on a Swiss radio program on Sternheim in 1971 from his publicity tour three decades later for his final “literary” work? And how does Sebald’s predilection to feed his interlocutors false information complicate the seemingly inherent factuality that enshrouds them?

• • • • In this essay, I use Austerlitz to propose yet another conceptual term to analyze the puzzling and enigmatic question of Sebaldian form. I elaborate on Franz Loquai’s claim that Sebald’s writings constitute a single Proustian “cycle” that “weaves together the essays and After Nature, Ver- tigo, and The Emigrants, all the way to The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz” (2005: 252). Loquai sees a single work Sebald authored over decades—

5. “Logis in einem Landhaus is quite different from Max’s two earlier collections of essays: two of the pieces were hitherto unpublished, only one of the others had appeared in an academic journal, the book contains no footnotes and is a series of carefully constructed peregrinations around and ruminations on the life and work of five writers and one visual artist for whom Max felt such a close (elective) affinity” (Sheppard 2005: 451).

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a “Lebensbuch” comprised of “novel and essay, scholarly treatise and autobiography” (252). This reading effectively exonerates us from manu- facturing new hybrids and periodizations by locating in Sebald’s corpus the overcoming of genre itself.6 Indeed, the insistence on occupying “all the boxes” is a key to decoding Sebald’s significance not only to the global turn in literary studies but also to the much older debate over the novel’s dominance. Austerlitz, which Loquai sees as the full maturation of a decades-long struggle against generic strictures, bears the aesthetic and formal traces of one of the most omnipresent signs of globalization that has received almost no serious attention: the shipping container. This inattention on the part of critics is surprising, as containerization, the name given to the rise of the steel shipping container as the domi- nant form of commodity transportation, “changed everything” (“Humble Hero” 2013). The revolutionary idea to separate the steel container from its undercarriage gave rise to what in industry parlance became known as “intermodal transport.” The container’s “intermodality” is another word for its translatability—the “seamless shifting” between ship, train, and the trailer truck (Levinson 2008: 9). This relatively simple act of standardization drastically reduced loading and unloading time, and since containers can be easily stacked, ships vastly expanded the amount of cargo they could carry. The figures speak for themselves: from 1965 to 1970, shortly after the “container revolution” began, the average number of tons moved per hour around the globe jumped from 1.7 to 30. In that same brief time period, the size of container ships more than doubled, establishing a pattern of expo- nential growth that continues unabated to this day. And like every process of industrialization, containerization erased most of the labor force that had hitherto dominated commodity transportation. Modern container ships, as titanic as they are, require only a skeletal crew. The stevedores, like those in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, who for centuries hauled cargo on and off cargo ships—“soldiers, gladiators, the sweaty, muscled foundation of shipping” (Sharpsteen 2011: 185)—were replaced en masse by fleets of container cranes controlled by a handful of solitary operators. Ironically, the birth of the global village has meant the death of one

6. Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff capture Sebald’s pangeneric authorial identity in their introduction to an edited collection on his relationship to H. G. Adler: “They are both scholar-poets—Dichter—who practice scholarship, fiction, poetry, and photography” (2014: 11). And Timothy Bewes offers a succinct coinage in his claim that Sebald’s prose books emanate from a “postfictional universe” (2014: 4) and constitute “a rejection (or renegotiation) of the category of fiction itself” (7).

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of the oldest and most hallowed institutions of cultural interaction: the port. The modern container port has become a military zone off-limits to anyone not directly involved in the industry.7 The boisterous reverie Jacques Brel celebrates in his homage to the port of Amsterdam, a place where sailors and their friends in the city meet to “sing,” “sleep,” “die,” “eat,” “dance,” and, above all, “drink,” has vanished. The far more accurate portrait is provided by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s documentary film The Forgotten Space. As the camera makes grandiose sweeps over dreary, depopulated north- ern European port towns, it becomes clear that the world represented in Kazan’s Hoboken and Brel’s Amsterdam has disappeared as the port itself has succumbed to the forces of mass mechanization. Missing from the scanty discussion of containerization is an appre- ciation of the profoundly intimate relationship between “the box” and statelessness. Be it as a plot device, like in the acclaimed American television series The Wire, as an art installation drawing attention to the plight of undocumented migrants, like Federica Cellini’s “Draunara” in Turin (Kostov 2015), or as actual emergency housing for displaced peoples, like the “perfect refugee camp” in the Turkish city of Killis,8 containers and stateless bodies have fused together in the cultural imagination.

• • • • As an archaeology of the life of one refugee, Austerlitz, following in the footsteps of many canonical Holocaust texts, pivots on a series of long-distance journeys across land and sea. Learning of his orphanhood as a teenager but denied any other details, Jacques Austerlitz spends much of his adult life shunning any kind of inquiry into his “true origins”

7. American authorities take port security so seriously that in 2002, US Customs and Border Patrol launched the “Container Security Initiative,” which effectively extended the sovereignty of US border agents, allowing them to scan American-bound ships in dozens of partner ports around the world. 8. Here the Turkish government, which has become host to one of the world’s largest refugee populations in the world since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, has begun con- ducting a radical experiment in refugee-camp design. As described in a recent and widely circulated New York Times profile of the camp, notably titled “How to Build a Perfect Refu- gee Camp,” “Many of the world’s displaced live in conditions striking for their wretched- ness, but what is startling about Killis is how little it resembles the refugee camp of our imagination. It is orderly, incongruously so. Residents scan a card with their fingerprints for entry, before they pass through metal detectors and run whatever items they’re carrying through an X-ray machine. Inside, it’s stark: 2,053 identical containers spread out in neat rows” (McClelland 2014).

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(Sebald 2001a: 125). Only as an elderly man does he embark on a search for the remnants of his past life, retracing his journey from Prague to Lon- don aboard the Kindertransport—the collective term for the series of private adoption initiatives that brought over ten thousand children to the United Kingdom from various parts of the continent. In the Czech capital,

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he reunites with his Kinderfräulein, Vera Ryšanová, who helps him fill in the blank spaces of his autobiography. Also in line with a great deal of fictional and nonfictional representa- tions of the Holocaust, Austerlitz pointedly invokes one of its most recog- nizable tropes: the boxcar loaded with human life. Commonly referred to as the “cattle car,” it is an omnipresent force in how we imagine the genocidal life force of National Socialism. A number of Wagen used by the Reichs- bahn have themselves been shipped around the world and transformed into freestanding museum artifacts (Stier 2005; Gottwald 1999). A children’s memorial project in a small Tennessee town collected over 29 million paper- clips from around the world, eventually placing eleven million of them in a Reichsbahn boxcar donated to the school (Magilow 2007). The boxcar provides the aesthetic inspiration for the “Holocaust Tower,” one of the center- pieces of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, enclosing visitors in a dark, disorienting space filled with the eerie sounds of the outside world. The evocative power of boxed life was on display at a recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Titled “Die Ganze Wahrheit” (“The Whole Truth”), the exhibition used the trope as a pedagogical tool to educate Ger- mans about Jewish life and culture. The premise was simple: a solitary Jewish volunteer sits in a see-through glass box and answers whatever questions visitors may have. It did not take very long before people began expressing concern that this exhibition was invoking painful memories, as one online commentator made clear: “Our grandparents and friends spent enough time in boxcars on the way to concentration camps” (Kulish 2013). Its iconic stature in the recollection of the Shoah makes perfect sense, insofar as it marks the erasure of the distinction between passenger rail and freight. As Raul Hilberg puts it, “The Jews were booked as people and shipped as cattle” (1976: 61). But there is more to the figuration of the boxcar in Austerlitz than the dehumanization of Jews and other “non- Aryans” into some “nameless animals” (Sebald 1999: 57). Sebald appropri- ates a sentence from one of the most famous boxcar scenes—“Le monde était un wagon hermétiquement clos” (Wiesel 2007: 38 / 2006: 24; The world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car)—and sews it into the fabric of the “prose book.” Beginning with the narrator’s decision to “take refuge” in the Antwerp Zoo’s nocturnal wildlife exhibit, followed by numer- ous encounters with caged animals, insects in display cases, and uprooted trees growing indoors, to mental patients and prisoners of war languishing endlessly in isolation cells, Sebald returns repeatedly to different instan- tiations of what the narrator, recalling Theodor Adorno, calls an “unreal

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world”9 (Sebald 2001a: 4). This concern with the different ways living things end up in artificial worlds “through no fault of their own” (4) culminates in the surreal confines of Theresienstadt, the Potemkin village that Nazi officials erected outside of Prague for the benefit of Red Cross inspectors. Taken together, these recurring iterations of boxed life and Auster- litz’s rescue on the “Refugee Children’s Movement,” the forgotten English name for the Kindertransport, dramatize the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity, an intermodal being taking shape in the juridical fiction of the refugee. Woven together by a series of international treaties and statutes (Hathaway 2005: 1003–50), the refugee has been for decades a point of intersection for an array of debates around questions of human rights, citizenship, and the sovereignty of the nation-state. Not coincidently, in the background of the cultural fascination with the stateless subject is the figure of the container, for the same limitless mobility undergirding commodity production today can also be found in the countless scenes of mass displacement scattered across the twentieth century. The Depression-era American hobo escaping starvation, the non-Aryans evacuated by the Reichsbahn, the Japanese internees forcibly displaced during the Second World War in North America, the Vietnamese boat people fleeing decades of war, all the way to the expelled Kosovar Albanians at the cusp of the new millennium—these boxcar scenes and the different stateless beings inscribed into them allegorize not only a century of cataclysmic violence and displacement but also the stateless economic production upon which modern life is based. Triangulating the container, the figure born inside of it, and the theory of the novel, I show that the narrative recollection, recitation, and revivification of the life story of a single, fictionally nonfictional stateless being in Austerlitz at once confirms and overrides the basic claim that “the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same” (Armstrong 2005: 3). This “prose book of an undetermined kind,” Sebald’s coy descriptor for Austerlitz, offers an instructive les- son about the novel of the global era, which has become a formal container providing refuge to any and all narrative and literary forms. In the same way that the shipping container is completely unconcerned with its own contents, Austerlitz furnishes us with incontrovertible evidence that in a stateless era, the foundational distinctions between written and visual, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, analytic and creative, and, as Stuart

9. “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (Adorno 1996: 700).

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Burrows points out in his contribution to this issue, verbal and written have been eradicated. Paradoxically, Austerlitz’s formal and generic intermodality fulfills the promise made by the oldest and most influential theorization of the novel, Georg Lukács’s century-old assertion that “the ultimate basis of artistic creation has become homeless” and “the novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness” (1971: 40–41). Before I can elaborate on this larger thesis, an understanding of the statelessness of the title character is necessary—a life bound up in a single, seemingly sinister word.

• • • • Vera’s testimony does more than reconnect the broken lines of Austerlitz’s familial history; she articulates one of the signature motifs circulating through the text. Near the end of her account, Vera recalls what Austerlitz’s mother, Agáta, says as she watches the train carrying her only son depart: “We left from here for Marienbad only last summer. And where will we be going now?” (Sebald 2001a: 205–6). The train’s slow exit from the station portends Agáta’s own deportation two years later, and “only years later, from one who had survived the ordeal” (206), does Vera learn of what awaited Agáta:

They stayed in this cold Trade Fair building for several days, until finally, early one morning when scarcely anyone was out and about, they were marched under guard to nearby Holešovice railway station, where it took almost another three hours to load them on the trucks. (2001a: 179; my emphasis)

Mehrere Tage dauerte der Aufenthalt in den Baracken beim Messe- palast, bis man schließlich, in einer frühen Morgenstunde, wenn kaum jemand um die Wege war, von Wachmannschaften begleitet zu dem nahegelegenen Bahnhof von Holešovice marschierte, wo dann das Einwaggonieren, wie man es nannte [as it was called], noch einmal nahezu drei Stunden dauerte. (2001b: 258; my emphasis)

Lost in English translation, Einwaggonieren, the strange term that Vera flags, appears again in the colossal, pages-long sentence describ- ing life in Theresienstadt, the concentration camp outside of Prague where Agáta is eventually transported. In one sentence, Sebald provides a “bird’s-

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eye view” (2001a: 169) of the site, based largely on H. G. Adler’s monumental and immensely detailed study:

It seems unpardonable to me today that I had blocked off the inves- tigation of my most distant past for so many years, not on principle, to be sure, but still of my accord, and that now it is too late for me to seek out Adler, who had lived in London until his death in the summer of 1988, and talk to him about that extra-territorial place where at the time, as I think I have mentioned, said Austerlitz, some sixty thousand people were crammed together in an area little more than a square kilometer in size—industrialists and manufacturers, law- yers and doctors, rabbis and university professors, singers and com- posers, bank managers, businessmen, shorthand typists, house- wives, farmers, laborers and millionaires, people from Prague and the rest of the Protectorate, from Slovakia, from Denmark and Hol- land, from Vienna and Munich, Cologne and Berlin, from the Palati- nate, from Lower Franconia and Westphalia—each of whom had to make do with about two square meters of space in which to exist and all of them, in so far as they were in any condition to do so or until they were loaded into trucks and sent on east. (2001a: 236–37; my emphasis)

Deshalb scheint es mir unverzeihlich, dass ich die Erforschung mei- ner Vorvergangenheit so viele Jahre hindurch zwar nicht vorsätz- lich, aber doch selber verhindert habe and dass es darüber nun zu spät geworden ist, Adler, der bis zu seinem Tod in Sommer 1988 in London gelebt had, aufzusuchen und mit ihm zu reden über diesen extraterritorialen Ort, an dem zeitweise, wie ich wohl schon einmal sagte, sagte Austerlitz, an die sezigtausend Personen auf einer Fläche von kaum mehr als einem Quadratikilometer zusammen- gezwungen waren, Industrielle und Frabirkanten, Rechtsanwaelte und Ärzte, Rabinner und Universitätsprofessoren, Sängerinnen und Komponisten, Bankdirktoren, Kaufleute, Stenotypistinnen, Haus- frauen, Landwirte, Arbeiter und Millionäre, Leute Aus Prag and aus dem übrigen Protektorat, aus der Slowakei, aus Dänemark und aus Holland, aus Wien und München, Köln und Berlin, aus der Pfalz, aus dem Mainfränkischen und aus dem Westfalen, von denen ein jeder mit zirka zwei Quadratmetern Wohnplatz auskommen musste un die alle, wofern sie irgendwie dazu imstande waren, bezie-

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hungsweise bis sie, wie es hiess, [as it was termed] einwaggoniert und Richtung Osten weitergeschickt wurden. (2001b: 335–37; my emphasis)

It is tempting to read the marked emphasis on Einwaggonieren as another example of National Socialism’s conscription of the German language. Austerlitz seems to encourage this in his discussion of his troubles reading Adler’s book and having to “unravel syllable by syllable” the “long compounds, not listed in my dictionary, which were obviously being spawned the whole time by the pseudo-technical jargon governing everything in Theresienstadt” (2001a: 233). This reading is even more tempting given Sebald’s decision to reproduce an entire page of Adler’s study con- sisting solely of a list of dozens such neologisms, and thereby underscoring an absurd irony of National Socialism. That is, in its pursuit of racial purity, the Third Reich inadvertently “spawned” a language just as foreign to the German narrator as it is to the non-German title character. But to subsume Einwaggonieren under the text’s emphasis on the linguistic dimensions of Nazi persecution—Agáta: “Really, the way these people write!” (176)—would be incorrect, for the simple reason that Ein- waggonnieren is not a Naziwort (Klemperer 2002). It began circulating in the second half of the nineteenth century with the construction of the first national railway systems (see Máday 1912: 155). Although used today almost exclusively in discussions of National Socialism (Hilberg 1981: 127), Einwaggonieren—like its equally antiquated English counterpart entrain— literally means to board a Wagen. Sebald clearly wants readers to dis- mantle the word “syllable by syllable” and take note of the obvious implications of Ein in this context, namely that this is a one-way journey. So why did the translation, supervised by Sebald, not simply use entrain, which certainly conveys the ominous nature of the journey? The phrase “loaded onto trucks” could warrant the charge of mistranslation, especially in compari- son to the French, Spanish, and Italian editions, all of which retain Wagen.10

10. “. . . ils furent conduit en colonnes, sous bonne escorte, à la gare de Vyšehrad toute proche, oú l’enwagonnement, pour reprendre le terme employé, dura encore près de trois heures” (Sebald 2006: 249); “. . . chacun devant se contenter pour vivre d’un espace d’environ deux mètres carrées et, dans la mesure où il était à peu près en état de le faire ou plutôt jusqu’à ce qu’il soit enwagonné, comme on disait, et expédié à L’Est” (324); “. . . finalmente, a primera hora de una mañana, cuando no había casi nadie por allí, fueron acompañados por guardias a la próxima estación de Holešovice, donde la ‘vagonificación,’ como la llamaban, duro todavía case tres horas” (Sebald 2002a: 181);

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But the precision of Bell’s word choice ultimately makes little difference, since the power of Einwaggonieren lies in its total erasure of the seemingly infinite lines of class, gender, and national demarcation that Sebald painstakingly draws leading up to its articulation. This brings to mind Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of sacrifice in the opening ges- tures of The Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Even though the hind which was offered up for the daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities of its own, it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness of the specimen. But the sanctity of the hic et nunc, the uniqueness of the chosen victim which coincides with its representative status, distinguishes it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange. Science puts an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is a sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal fungibility. . . . The rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar. (2002: 6–7)

Be it into a truck or Wagen, the bodies “loaded” into the “hermetically sealed” box are part of a recurring set of images and “exemplar[s]” all pointing to the “universal fungibility” governing the modern. Recalling the ailing quail in solitary confinement at Somerleyton (Sebald 1998: 36), the narrator encounters in the Nocturama a pensive raccoon perched “beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing . . . would help it to escape the unreal [falsche] world in which it had arrived so to speak, through no fault of its own” (2001a: 2; 2001b: 7). Later, Austerlitz describes all the marvelous “natural curiosities” collected under one roof at Andromeda Lodge, particularly an “ancient parrot” that has to be let out of “his box” (2001a: 83): “There was some kind of cabinet of national curiosities in almost every room at Andromenda Lodge: cases with multiple drawers, some of them glass-fronted, where the roundish eggs of parrots were arranged in their hundreds; collections of shells, minerals, beetles, and butterflies; slowworms, adders, and lizards preserved in formaldehyde;

“Parecchi giorni durò la sosta nelle baracche accanto al palazzo della fiera, sinché una matina, alle prime luci dell’alba, con le strade pressoché deserte, tutti si misero in marcia, accompagnati dalle guardie, fino alla vicina stazione di Holešovice, dove ‘l’invagona- mento’—come lo chiamavano allora—durò quasi tre ore” (Sebald 2002b: 194).

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snail shells and sea urchins, crabs and shrimps, and large herbaria con- taining leaves, flowers, and grasses” (2001a: 83). The discussion of the Haut-de-Jardin at Paris’s Bibliothèque Natio- nale underscores the violence and domination underwriting these pleas- ant showcases. Austerlitz explains how he “sat for many hours and days on end, looking out abstractedly . . . at the inner courtyard and the curious nature reserve cut, so to speak, from the surface of the promenade deck and sunk two or three stories deep, which has been planted with about a hundred full-grown stone pines from the Forêt de Bord transported, how I do not know, to this place of banishment” (280). If there seems to be a whimsical or quasi-fantastical tone to this passage—Austerlitz ponders at one point if some of the trees “perhaps are still thinking of their home in Normandy”—the consequences of this false world created solely for the benefit of readers literally announce themselves: “And several times, said Austerlitz, birds which have lost their way in the library forest flew into the mirror images of the trees in the reading room windows, struck the glass with a dull thud and fell lifeless to the ground” (281). The most significant “unreal world” in Austerlitz is the “extra-territorial place” that awaits Sebald’s mother after her own entrainment. A place where “some sixty thousand people were crammed together in an area little more than a square kilometer in size,” forcing each inmate “to make do with about two square meters of space in which to exist,” Theresien- stadt provides the surreal stage for an array of boxed beings to converge (236). Austerlitz describes how “the transport of goods maintained within the walls of the fortress” took the form “of a medley of carts of every conceivable kind and four dozen ancient hearses” (237), and “much of the load carted round Theresienstadt every day was made up by the dead” (239). Once again, disentangling “syllable by syllable” the name of the camp provides insights into both the text and Sebald’s profound aversion to the modern city pervading much of his writing. That is to say, Nazi officials, more correctly their slave laborers, manufactured an “unreal world” out of an eighteenth-century fortress town and declared it a “city.” And like the Biblio- thèque Nationale, Brussels Palais de Justice, and the English capital itself, Theresienstadt offers “the model of a world made by reason and regulated in all conceivable respects” (199). What makes Theresienstadt stand out in the annals of Nazism and the vast network of camps, ghettos, and worksites it constructed across the continent was the decision made in the first half of 1944 to use the camp as a staging ground for a bizarre and sadistic fiction—a decision articulated in

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yet another neologism: Verschönerungaktion. This “general improvement campaign”

was undertaken, with an eye to the imminent visit in the early summer of 1944 of a Red Cross commission, an event regarded by those authorities of the Reich responsible as a good opportunity to dis- simulate the true nature of their deportation policy, and consequently it was decided to organize the ghetto inmates under the command of the SS for the purpose of a vast cleaning-up program: pathways and a grove with a columbarium were laid out, park benches and signposts were set up, the latter adorned in the German fashion with jolly carvings and floral decoration, over a thousand rosebushes were planted, a children’s nursery and crèche or Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of those perverse formula- tions, were adorned with pretty fairy-tale friezes and equipped with sandboxes, paddling pools, and merry-go-rounds, whilst the former OREL cinema, which until now had served as a dumping ground for the oldest inmates of the ghetto and where a huge chandelier still hung from the ceiling in the dark space inside, was converted within

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a few weeks into a concert hall and theater, and elsewhere shops stocked with goods from the SS storehouses were opened for the sale of food and household utensils, ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing, shoes, underwear, travel requisites, and suitcases; there were also a convalescent home, a chapel, a lending library, a gymnasium, a post office, a bank where the manager’s office was furnished with a sort of field marshal’s desk and a suite of easy chairs, not to men- tion a coffeehouse with sun umbrellas and folding chairs outside it to suggest the agreeable atmosphere of a resort inviting all passersby to linger for a while, and indeed there was no end to the improve- ments and embellishments, with much sawing, hammering, and painting until the time of the visit itself approached and Theresien- stadt, after another seven and a half thousand of the less present- able inmates had been sent east amidst all this busy activity, to thin out the population, so to speak, became a Potemkin village or sham Eldorado which may have dazzled even some of the inhabitants themselves and where, when the appointed day came, the commission of two Danes and one Swiss official, having been guided, in conformity with a precise plan and a timetable drawn up by the Kom- mandant’s office, through the streets and over the spotless pave- ments, scrubbed with soap early that morning, could see for themselves the friendly, happy folk who had been spared the horrors of war and were looking out of the windows, could see how smartly they were all dressed, how well the few sick people were cared for, how they were given proper meals served on plates, how the bread ration was handed out by people in white drill gloves, how posters advertis- ing sporting events, cabarets, theatrical performances, and concerts were being put up on every corner and how, when the day’s work was over, the residents of the town flocked out in their thousands on the ramparts and bastions to take the air, almost as if they were passengers enjoying an evening stroll on the deck of an oceangoing steamer, a most reassuring spectacle, all things considered, which the Germans, whether for propaganda purposes or in order to jus- tify their actions and conduct to themselves, thought fit after the end of the Red Cross visit to record in a film, which Adler tells us, said Austerlitz, was given a sound track of Jewish folk music in March 1945, when a considerable number of the people who had appeared in it were no longer alive, and a copy of which, again according to Adler, had apparently turned up in the British-occupied zone after

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the war, although he, Adler himself, said Austerlitz, never saw it, and thought it was now lost without trace. (242–44)

But, as Austerlitz explains, the film was not lost, and he finds a few brief seconds of a woman who may or may not be his mother. Here the end of the text unites with the opening, the raccoon from the Nocturama and this unnamed woman reduced to nothing else but two boxed lives trapped “through no fault of [their] own” inside an “unreal world.”11 As Ben Hutchinson (2009) and Helmut Schmitz (2009) have pointed out, Sebald’s preoccupation with those encased in artificial worlds is marked by another important intervention connected to the Frankfurt School: Adorno’s oft quoted declaration at the end of Minima Moralia’s eighteenth aphorism that “[t]here is no correct life in the false” (my translation). Despite its short length, “Asyl für Obdachlose” (“Refuge for the Homeless”) is itself a weave of three different works: Kurt Tucholsky’s 1928 poem of the same name; Friedrich Nietzsche’s comment in The Gay Science on “his good fortune not to be a homeowner” (2008: 147); and Lukács’s diagno- sis of the novel’s “transcendental homelessness” as a symptom of God’s departure from the philosophical horizon (1971: 61). Adorno interlaces these three texts to illustrate how the impossibility of meaningful modes of private life is one expression of the “difficult relationship in which the individual now stands to his property” (2005: 39). The problem, according to Adorno, comes down to scale: “Private property no longer belongs to one, in the sense that consumer goods have become potentially so abundant that no individual has the right to cling to the principle of their limitation; but that one must nevertheless have possessions, if one is not to sink into that dependence and need which serve the blind perpetuation of property relations. But the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too” (39; my emphasis). Today, with the “immense heap of commodities” having reached heights that Adorno (or Marx, for that matter) could never have imagined, we should add that no individual has the right to cling to their own individu- ality. In other words, “universal fungibility” (Adorno 2005: 120) is not limited to the deportees and wild animals trapped in a “hopeless fix” (Sebald 1998: 36). Even though he did not live to see intermodalism and the shipping con-

11. Austerlitz makes the same analogy when he explains how a decrepit dovecote filled with ailing pigeons reminds him of the story of Robert Schumann’s sad decline (Sebald 2001a: 214–15).

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tainer’s global ubiquity, Adorno was keenly aware that the transformational change in commodity transportation that allowed for the vast majority of goods to be produced far away from where they are consumed pointed to more than just an explosion in consumerism. Rather, it signifies a crisis in the management of life itself: “The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those

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who have no choice. They live, if not in slums in bungalows that by tomor- row may be leaf-huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the open air. The house is past” (Adorno 2005: 39). While tempting to dismiss this as a self-indulgent lament decrying the shabbiness of modern housing by “the son of well-to- do parents” (21), for Adorno the death of the Haus is a radical restructuring in how subjects relate to the world outside the private home. Here, consult- ing the original is illuminating: “Am ärgsten ergeht es wie überall denen, die nicht zu wählen haben. Sie wohnen wenn nicht in Slums so in Bunga- lows, die morgen schon Laubenhütten, Trailers, Autos oder Camps, Blei- ben unter freiem Himmel sein mögen. Das Haus ist vergangen” (Adorno 1996: 698). Lost in the overly literal English translation of Laubenhütten, the reference to the Sukkah, the traditional dwellings built during the Jew- ish festival of Sukkot commemorating the escape from Egypt, is the key to unlocking both the aphorism’s underlying concern and the wide-reaching implications of the final sentence. A “false” era defined by unlimited global commodity production, Adorno stipulates, can no longer rely upon one of the foundation stones of the bourgeoisie and the nation-state it helped con- ceive: citizenship. The fungibility of beings, the total separation between where commodities are produced and where they are consumed, and the impossibility of private life converge in a single word. Although global has become the operative word in the theorization of the present, the refugee best exemplifies for many what Giorgio Agamben terms “bare life,” overlooked and underappreciated statelessness as a hermeneutical cipher. While it is unnecessary here to rehearse the three-decades-long prehistory of the official birth of the refugee in 1951 (Cabanes 2014: 133–88; Goodwin- Gill 1996; Glynn 2012), what is necessary is a recognition of the fact that the legal infrastructures of refuge erected in the aftermath of the Second World War—which have come under attack in recent decades, notably by the so-called Dublin Regulation—exemplify what Roberto Esposito terms the “paradigm of immunization.” “To survive,” according to Esposito, “the community, every community, is forced to introject the negativity of its own opposite, even if the opposite remains precisely a lacking and contrastive mode of being of the community itself” (2008: 51). Statelessness has unfortunately been sidelined by a fixation on the legal fiction of the refugee and its myriad relatives: “Refugeeness involves not a single identity position but a multiplicity of them, as can be witnessed in the recent proliferation of categories to describe the extraordinarily large and varied global phenomenon of coerced displacement: Charter refugee,

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political refugee, environmental refugee, nonstatus refugee, internally displaced person, asylum seeker, émigré, oustee, deportee, relocee, involun- tary displaced person, involuntarily resettled person, forced migrant, invol- untary migrant, and so on” (Nyers 2006: 14). The fixation on the various “identity positions” of statelessness rather than the concept itself can in a sense be traced to Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees.” The privileging of the individuated refugee (manifesting either as a solitary figure or a member of a group) is evident in both the title as well as the opening sentences: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants.’ . . . A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. . . . With us the meaning of the term ‘refugee’ has changed. Now ‘refugees’ are those who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees” (1994: 110). In her deeply personal essay, Arendt, speaking as a member of the margin- alized European Jewry scattered around the world, inaugurates an influential mode of thinking that obscures statelessness.12 Agamben’s elaboration of Arendt’s argument, in which he expands the “We” to include all human beings, does much the same: “The refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come” (1995: 116). While none of these claims are incorrect and the proliferation of identity categories is symptomatic of a chaotic political order, it is important to remember that refugee in contemporary usage is inextri- cably linked to a very specific, very exclusionary juridical categorization— a semantic boundary that restricts the entry of, say, millions of Palestinians. Ultimately, any exploration of these issues should never forget a straightfor- ward claim penned by an American political scientist in the direct aftermath of the war: “Although many refugees are stateless, statelessness is not the essential quality of a refugee” (Carey 1946: 113). Indeed, Arendt herself had front row seats to the first real crisis of statelessness prompted by the catastrophic fallout of the Great War. Along- side the mass migrations directly related to the war and the realignment of national boundaries, the 1920s saw two key political developments that permanently altered the conceptual mechanics of citizenship. “The first,” according to Bruno Cabanes, “consisted of writing the movement of dis-

12. In “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Arendt (1966) appears to tackle the term more directly, but, like in the earlier piece, the concept is inter- twined with the vagaries of the Jewish Question and “denationalization,” a word that over- laps with but does not equate to statelessness.

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placed peoples into peace treaties and bilateral accords: for the first time in European history, the forced movement of refugees—not voluntary, even if the distinction is not always easy to make—was legislated by international law” (2014: 134). The second “was the practice of collectively stripping people of their citizenship, on the basis of their political allegiances, social class, ethnicity, or religion” (135). During this time, millions of Russians, Ital- ians, Germans, and Armenians suddenly became the first occupants of a new subjective terrain, joined in ensuing decades by hundreds of millions more. Although many only end up transiting through this unheimlich land— escaping statelessness through forced or voluntary repatriation, winning charter refugee status, or by other elaborate means—more and more face the very real possibility that they will linger for decades beyond the pale of the state-sanctioned political identity, a foundation stone of modernity for centuries. Therefore the widespread view that the twentieth century was the “century of migration” needs to be amended to include statelessness, a word that captures not only the unique political dilemma of the last hundred years—the juridical gap between the rights of the citizen and those of the human13—but also the cultural logic of the contemporary. This follows recent work that aims to expand the term’s semantic range. Affirming Arendt’s definition of statelessness as the loss of “the right to have rights,” Margaret Somers designates those engulfed in an anarchic vacuum that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as “stateless citizens”: a “condition of pure market exposure no longer mediated by the now absent government” (2008: 134). For Somers, the mostly African American class of disenfranchised citizens left to fend for themselves is a direct result of “the noncontractual relations of citizenship [that] are becoming contractualized and driven by market principles” (135). In literary studies, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse reimagine the origin story of the US novel under the rubric of statelessness (2015). Bypassing the national hermeneutics underpinning the theories of the novel, they argue for a revamped understanding of the US novel that looks beyond the traditional periodizations and scrutinizes how this “virtually stateless people” used novels to imagine community (365).

13. “The traditional concept of statelessness, which comes from an international law per- spective, follows the logic of that because one generally needs to be a citizen in order to receive diplomatic protection from a state, no international wrong is committed if another state’s citizen is wronged (i.e., if a stateless person is wronged)” (Weissbrodt and Collins 2006: 248).

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The omnipresent specter of stateless economic production—the shipping container—is not only intimately bound up with the ever-growing population of stateless beings but also offers a powerful metaphor for the novel of a stateless era. According to Alexander Klose in The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think, “containerization is a prevailing cultural technology of the 20th and early 21st century” (2015: 5). “The container hides its cargo,” another reading argues, “transforming its concrete contents into abstract units that, stacked up, even resemble money” (Szeman and Whiteman 2012: 51). The erasure of difference in the box also operates on the formal level. The generic indeterminacy of Auster- litz and the critical hand-wringing over Sebaldian form demonstrate what Fredric Jameson describes as the driving force behind postmodern cultural practices: “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic inno- vation and experimentation” (1991: 4–5; my emphasis). Paradoxically, reading Austerlitz as a stateless novel symptomatic of “frantic economic urgency” both accedes to Sebald’s resistance to the label and vindicates those critics, including some in this special issue, who overrule him. On the one hand, Sebald’s objections are based on his view that a novel is defined by two main characteristics. “A novel,” as he puts it in one of the final interviews he gave, “turns fundamentally on human relationships and contains a lot of dialogue. I just can’t come to terms with writing dialogue. Although this may be just my own disposition, I find it unbearable to read in books, ‘she said, as she stared pensively out the window’” (Sebald 2011a: 235). Certainly, Austerlitz could be described as a text that does not “turn fundamentally on human relationships”—at least in the sense that the only substantial “human relationship” is between the title character and a mostly aloof, dispassionate narrator. Nor does it include “a lot of dialogue,”

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Sebald’s personal distaste for which he articulated repeatedly: This “busi- ness of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along is fine for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding and going on” (Sebald 2007: 124). On the other hand, just as valid is the view that Sebald’s position “changes little” (Schütte 2011: 177). “Although Sebald refused to give his works a generic label beyond the blandly denotative term ‘prose,’” J. J. Long points out, “his texts betray an almost obsessive need to anchor their narrative worlds in named physical spaces and to fill these spaces with objects that are described at length or accumulated in long inventories and lists. In this sense, they clearly participate in the discourse of bourgeois realism” (2007: 106). For Long, Sebald’s novel can be located in Auster- litz’s “biographical trajectory,” which “provides the book with a plot.” This narrative movement, “however fragmentary and however concerned with questions of its own mediation, structures the text almost from beginning to end and renders it more conventionally novelistic” (150). Amir Eshel’s verdict is much the same: “Rereading the plot from the narrator’s per- spective, it now seems obvious that the narrative is a postmodern crypto- Bildungsroman stretching over some thirty years” (2003: 73). According to Eshel, Sebald’s view hinges on a “somewhat naïve . . . understanding of the relation between fictional and historiographic narratives of history” (76). So what makes Austerlitz a stateless novel? Most obviously, and I should add, least instructively, the title character is himself mired at least temporarily in a kind of statelessness. (One could argue that the themat- ics of embodied statelessness are just as prevalent in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations). What distinguishes Sebald’s prose books generally and Austerlitz in particular is not simply the fact that they provide a home to a seemingly endless array of fragments representing different cultural forms like narrative fiction, poetry, autobiography, scholarly research, analog photography, cinema, newspaper articles, just to name a few. Rather, the definitive feature of a stateless novel is its intermodality, the “seamless shifting” between those fragments, some of which, like local newspapers and print photography, have more or less per- ished. Austerlitz himself hints at the imminent death of print media when he recounts what he notably calls a “work of destruction”: “One evening, said Austerlitz, I gathered up all my papers, bundled or loose, my notepads and exercise books, my files and lecture notes, anything with my writing

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on it, and carried the entire collection out of the house to the far end of the garden, where I threw it on the compost heap and buried it under layers of rotted leaves and spadesful of earth” (Sebald 2001a: 124–25). Indeed, Austerlitz does more than confirm Maurice Blanchot’s pro- nouncement that “a book no longer belongs to a genre, every book pertains to literature alone” (1995: 141). It is “a work of destruction” that bombards some fundamental textual binaries that govern our thinking, like visual and written, fiction and nonfiction, history and contemporary. Its statelessness necessarily entails an attack on the long-treasured bond between national literature and national language. This is, after all, a written account (pre- sumably but not explicitly confirmed to be composed in the narrator’s native tongue, German) of a decades-spanning conversation between two men who initially speak French and then switch to English. Sebald’s purported desire to simultaneously occupy “all the boxes” is far more incisive than it first appears. More than just a comment on the inability of standard generic categorizing, it uses the intermodal box carrying the “fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods” as a metaphor for the future of the novel form itself.

• • • • In his 1962 introduction to The Theory of the Novel, Lukács states that he had considered writing the The Theory of the Novel in “the form of a series of dialogues,” with “a group of young people withdrawn from the war psychosis of their environment, just as the storytellers of The Decameron had withdrawn from the plague” (1971: 11–12). These young people would “try to understand themselves and one another by means of conversations which gradually lead to the problems discussed in the book—the outlook on a Dostoevskian world” (12). This jettisoned frame story aligns perfectly with the basic argument Lukács makes about the fundamental distinction between the novel and all other preceding narrative forms. The Decameron consists of refugees weaving narratives together in an effort to survive their collective exile, a process that anticipates not only The Theory of the Novel’s central dilemma of transcendental homelessness but also its solu- tion: aesthetic recuperation. If modernity means being in exile, then the novel, Lukács argues, is what allows for the hope of “a return home” (127). Written before Lukács’s explicitly Marxist studies, like History and Class Consciousness (1923), The Theory of the Novel is a work steeped in the literary, philosophical, and aesthetic tradition of German Romanticism.

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It opens with a portrait of that “Happy” epic age in which the soul and world were “sharply distinct” yet never “permanent strangers” (29). Like Nova- lis’s Hymns to the Night or Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine,” The Theory of the Novel is suffused with the thought that, in the words of Hölderlin, “we have come too late” (1980: 247). From its opening invocation of an earlier golden age to the concluding articulation of a new world to come, Lukács’s study pursues a quintessentially Romantic narrative in which the alienation of modernity is not only bemoaned but also taken as the basis for the possibility of its formal overcoming. Lukács announces with nostalgic pathos that the “old parallelism of the transcendental structure of the form-giving subject of the world of created forms has been destroyed, and the ultimate basis of artistic creation has become homeless” (1971: 40–41). Although dire, Lukács finds hope in “the novel form [which] is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness” (41). The novel emerges from the separation of life and meaning and paradoxically becomes the possibility of surmounting this very condition. As Lukács argues, “what is depicted [in the novel] is the total absence of any fulfillment of meaning, yet the work attains the rich and rounded fullness of a true totality of life” (126). The novel’s “song of comfort rings out from the dawning recognition that traces of lost meaning are to be found everywhere,” and it is for this reason that the novel points toward the possibility of a “new historical moment” with a “complete totality” and “renewed epic” (123, 152). For Lukács, the novel is a perfectly dialectical form, one that provides what it lacks. The rise of the stateless novel requires a new admission to the pan- theon of literary individuals that have long embodied what critics see as the form’s basic characteristics. Once again, the literal homelessness of Sir Alfred Mehran, who languished for eighteen years in a nightmare of statelessness in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport after losing his travel documents, is the least interesting dimension of his novelistic biography. For like Robinson Crusoe, Mehran’s “strange surprising adventures” have taken up residence in the ambivalent terrain between the real and the fictional, which Catherine Gallagher sees as one of the novel’s most definitive features. “The novel has also been widely regarded as a form that tried, for at least two centuries,” Gallagher argues, “to hide its fictionality behind verisimilitude or realism, insisting on certain kinds of referentiality and even making extensive truth claims. If a genre can be thought of as having an attitude, the novel has seemed ambivalent toward its fictionality—at once inventing it as an ontological ground and placing severe constraints upon it” (2006: 337).

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Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal, which transformed Meh- ran’s tragic tale into a comedic farce about a man from a fictional eastern European state whose government falls to a military coup just as the main character lands in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, deserves only par- tial credit for Mehran’s transformation into an iconic stateless citizen. In fact, Mehran largely authored his own fate as a standard bearer for the sans- papiers by intentionally extending his detention by years. Although the facts of his case are not entirely certain, more than a decade into his actually existing Kafkaesque ordeal, he was provided with French nationality only to refuse it. This excerpt from The Terminal Man—which like Austerlitz weaves together real and unreal events, reconstructed fragments of dialogue, and excerpts from Mehran’s diary compiled and arranged by another author— captures precisely how the fiction of national citizenship no longer provides the refuge it once did. “This is how things work,” his lawyer explains to him. “When you are born in a country, then you have the nationality of that country until you get another one, which you have not done. You are Iranian as long as you are not of another nationality. If you sign these documents, then France has to accept you as a citizen” (Mehran and Donkin 2004: 221). But Mehran refuses, telling his advocate that the name on those documents— Mehran Karimi Nasseri, erstwhile an Iranian national—is not his real identity. He cannot possibly validate these documents unless his proper name and correct nationality, Swedish, are acknowledged on paper. Channeling Bartleby, Mehran can only repeat a single refrain: “I am not Iranian” (223). He would remain another six years in the airport as a direct result of this refusal, until a health emergency forces him to a hospital and eventually lands him in the care of a Paris charity. It is tempting to dismiss Mehran’s self-destructive stance as symptomatic of decades of psychological violence inflicted upon him by the absurd juridical gauntlet stateless peoples are forced to navigate. Though self-destructive it may be, there is nevertheless a very radical honesty to his autobiographical transformation, insofar as it exposes the absolutely fictive logic of nationality underpinning “how things work.” In effect, Meh- ran is articulating Agamben’s claim that, “by breaking the continuity of man and citizen, nativity and nationality, [refugees] put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis” (1995: 116). At the same time, he undoubt- edly is driven by the same contradictory desire that Lukács identifies in the homeless hero’s yearning to return to the home that never existed. Thus, it is no accident that an “undetermined kind” of postnational subjectivity has

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assumed a marquee role in an era that gave rise to the “prose book of an undetermined kind.”

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