The Roar of the Minotaur: W. G. Sebald's Echospaces Stuart Burrows
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The Roar of the Minotaur: W. G. Sebald’s Echospaces Stuart Burrows The more one reads W. G. Sebald, the more one gets the sense that one is reading someone else. This might seem an odd thing to say, considering that Sebald’s fiction is narrated by a writer indistinguishable from the author, recounts the experiences of a writer equally indistinguish- able, and contains numerous descriptions of writing a novel that appears to be the very one that we are reading. Yet Sebald’s work, despite its self- referentiality, functions as a kind of echo chamber of modern literature, a dense web of references, tributes, allusions, and outright borrowings, both acknowledged and unacknowledged.1 Sebald frequently referred to the “incredible number of hidden, obliterated citations” within his novels, and so wide- ranging was his reading that these citations alone would qualify him as an exponent of what has come to be known as world literature (quoted in Jacobs 2015: 234).2 In addition to being literary romans a clés, Thanks to Michelle Clayton, once again, for her keen eye and ear, and to Sina Rahmani, a sure guide through Sebald’s many labyrinths. 1. Carol Jacobs speaks of “an epistemology of citation” (2015: 234). 2. Two edited volumes outlining the extent of this debt are Wilke 2012 and Finch and Wolff 2014. boundary 2 47:3 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 8524408 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/61/813778/0470061.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 62 boundary 2 / August 2020 each of Sebald’s four novels contains extended accounts of the lives of novelists, detailed recounting of the plots of well- known short stories, criti- cal reflections on individual writing styles, plotted summaries of writers’ autobiographies, personal descriptions of the reading of memoirs, exten- sive quotations from letters, even photographs of various novelists. Numer- ous episodes in his novels are suggested by, similar to, or directly taken from the work of other writers. Numerous episodes are also, however, sug- gested by, similar to, or directly taken from his own work, for Sebald’s texts also function as an echo chamber of each other. Images recur throughout his work with surprising regularity: the flight of moths, the spinning of silk- worms, the labyrinthine windings of buildings, streets, and histories. The meaning of these figures does not so much change with each iteration as accumulate, linking together moments, episodes, and persons otherwise distinct. In place of the temporal forward motion of plot, Sebald’s novels turn in a spiral. Sebald’s commitment to citation, both of others and of himself, is particularly striking given that the distinctive feature of his fiction is the measured, uniform, immediately recognizable voice in which it speaks, a voice that never seems to vary no matter which of his characters is talk- ing or what subject is being discussed. Sebald’s even, flat tone has clear antecedents: the long unbroken monologues of Thomas Bernhard, the fea- tureless terrain of the nouveau roman, the unflinching gaze of the Holo- caust survivor memoir. Yet Sebald’s work has a pitch, a timbre, all its own, one that resounds through every page of his four novels: muted, hesitant, resigned, weary, monotonous, bewildered. Judith Ryan calls this timbre “Sebald sound”; its characteristics are long, labyrinthine sentences, and a distrust of metaphor—his simple, unsurprising figures of speech might even be called banal (Ryan 2009: 48). The effect is both mesmerizing and a little deadening. The unvarying, at times almost monotonous flow of the language of Sebald’s novels collapses the difference between otherwise very different historical events and personages. For no matter how far Sebald travels, how many centuries he crosses or continents he traverses, he ultimately circles back to the same subject, a subject as unvarying as his style is unbroken. Reviews of his work have described his represen- tation of the Holocaust as oblique, tactful; the camps are almost always present in his work but rarely named (see Aciman 1998; Coe 1997). Such responses place Sebald’s writing in a familiar category: the representation of the unrepresentable. There are, however, less predictable and more pro- ductive ways of approaching his work. Jacques Rancière has recently chal- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/61/813778/0470061.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Burrows / The Roar of the Minotaur 63 lenged the prevailing mode of understanding Holocaust narratives, arguing that it “is not ‘unrepresentable’ in the sense that the language for conveying it does not exist. The language exists and the syntax exists.” The language and syntax of the Holocaust memoir, characterized above all by parataxis, predates it—it can be found, for example, in Ernest Hemingway. The prob- lem is not that the Holocaust is impossible to represent; it is exactly the reverse—there is no “language peculiar to it. There is no appropriate lan- guage for witnessing” (Rancière 2007: 126). The singularity of the Holo- caust demands the impossible—a singular language. Sebald follows the logic of Rancière’s model, though in a sense he turns it on its head. Even if there is no language appropriate to the Holocaust, all language has some relation to it. This explains Sebald’s incorporation of “an incredible number” of writers, texts, and histories in his narratives of survival, displacement, and loss. It also explains why he describes this incorporation—in a nod to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history—in terms of obliteration. Sebald’s cita- tion of a text is also a form of erasure—not because the references are often unacknowledged but because they disappear into the monotonous fabric of his texts. Shorn of quotation marks, rendered in Sebald sound, Franz Kafka resembles Jorge Luis Borges, Borges resembles Alain Robbe- Grillet, Robbe- Grillet resembles Bernhard, a blurring of literary modes mir- roring the ceaseless repetitions which so weary Sebald’s narrator, who repeatedly notes the exact resemblance—even duplication—of people, places, and events. The uniformity of Sebald’s fiction is all the more remarkable given its heterogeneous form: the novels include photographs, illustrations, dia- grams, maps, and photocopies. The sheer number of images featured in his work, coupled with its fascination with eyes and eyesight, has under- standably led to critics focusing on questions of visuality in their readings of the novels (Köhler 2004). One of the aims of this essay is to listen to Sebald sound as well as to scrutinize Sebald’s images, to understand the ways his fiction is addressed to the ear as well as to the eye. Both approaches are equally necessary, since Sebald’s texts are experiments in synesthesia, in which writing is treated as image, image as writing. In the canvases of Paul Klee, Gilles Deleuze observes, paraphrasing Michel Foucault, “visible figures and the signs of writing combine, but in a different dimension to that of their respective forms” (1988: 69). Deleuze’s formulation captures something of the strangeness of Sebald’s novels. Here, I will describe the contours of this different dimension, in the belief that Sebald’s distinctive contribution to the global novel lies in his reordering of the space of rep- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/61/813778/0470061.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 64 boundary 2 / August 2020 resentation. This reordering is both literal and metaphorical. It is literal, in the sense that Sebald’s work explores actual spaces: the pages upon which his novels are written, which become inextricable from the world being described, and the landscape being traversed, such as the Suffolk coastline in The Rings of Saturn (1998); it is metaphorical, in the sense that Sebald’s work explores a set of imaginary spaces nested within each other, those spaces occupied by his characters, who inhabit several worlds simul- taneously, and those allocated to the narrative voice, which speaks to us out of a clearly demarcated yet ultimately unlocatable place. Sebald repeatedly insisted that he wrote prose rather than novels. His disavowal is hard to reconcile with the experience of reading his fic- tion, whose reordering of representational space fits neatly into a novel- istic tradition stretching back at least as far as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. As we shall see, that novel’s attempt to bridge the gap between word and image is similar, surprisingly, to Sebald’s own, with the obvious exception of the later writer’s incorporation of photographs. The absence of captions and explanations for these images, together with the uncertain referential status of the stories themselves, has led critics to claim that his work “challenges our notion of what is real, what is fictional” (Anderson 2003: 109).3 I will be arguing that Sebald is interested less in questioning whether the specific events he recounts took place than in exploring the ways these events continue to exist for us, forming the coordinates of the world we inhabit to the extent that past and present become impossible to tell apart—as inextricable as word and image, sight and sound. “It seems to me,” Jacques Austerlitz says in the novel that bears his name, “as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed . [as if] we also have appointments to keep in the past” (Sebald 2001: 257–58). For Austerlitz, past, present, and future “occupy the same space.” My term for this space, echo chamber, is borrowed (and translated) from Andrea Köhler, who describes Sebald’s collaboration with the painter Jan Peter Tripp as creating an “Echoraum.”4 Lise Patt, in her indispensable study Searching for Sebald, translates Köhler’s expression slightly differ- ently, as “echospace,” neatly capturing the unbounded nature of space in 3.