The Roar of the Minotaur: W. G. Sebald's Echospaces Stuart Burrows

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 indistinguishable, 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.

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each of Sebald’s four novels contains extended accounts of the lives of novelists, detailed recounting of the plots of well-known short stories, critical reflections on individual writing styles, plotted summaries of writers’ autobiographies, personal descriptions of the reading of memoirs, extensive 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, suggested 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 silkworms, 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 talking 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 representation 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-

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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 problem 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 language 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 citation 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, diagrams, 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-

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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 simultaneously, 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 fiction, 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. In Lecia Rosenthal’s lucid formulation, “The image-objects reproduced in Sebald’s [work] often float in an indeterminate suspense of citation” (2011: 103). Another very help- ful discussion is offered by Long 2003. 4. Köhler uses the term in the German original of her essay “Penetrating the Dark.” Michael Hamburger translates the term as a “space of reverberations” (Sebald and Tripp 2004: 98).

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Sebald, in which past, present, and future fold and unfold into one another simultaneously (2007: 57). If echospace is the appropriate description of this non-Euclidean space, the appropriate figure is the labyrinth, a concept to which Sebald repeatedly returns. He does so, I will be arguing, because he is fascinated by the problem of representing a three-dimensional form in a two-dimensional medium. In Sebald’s representation of the labyrinth, the various forms of flatness found in his work converge: flatness of tone, of character (his protagonists, including his narrator, are two-dimensional and largely interchangeable), of temporal plane (the collapsing of past, present, and future), of photographic image, and of the page itself.

The World Will Be Tlön In his recent essay “Against Exemplarity,” Timothy Bewes convinc- ingly argues that Sebald’s work inhabits “a postfictional universe,” in which the very notion of a connection between fiction and the world it describes has been lost. The only kind of connection possible in this universe “is an immanent one, forged at the moment of the text’s composition,” one that lasts “no longer than the moment of our reading” (2014: 4). But what if

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the moment of reading Sebald were not subject to measurement, since it takes in both the entirety of the text being read and, beyond that, the entirety of the literary tradition being cited? To read Sebald is to find oneself constantly struggling to remember when a conversation began, where it is taking place, and at times even who is speaking; the images scattered seemingly at random among the novels are often the only means by which the reader can locate discrete events or descriptions in texts which continu- ally loop back on themselves, returning again and again to the same set of concerns (Ryan 2012: 129). Sebald’s work imposes a distinctive rhythm on readers, who constantly find themselves referring from the words to the pictures back to the words. This rhythm reorders the structure of photographic reference, which becomes less a matter of matching the image to the cor- responding subject or object in the world than of matching it to its description in the text.5 Indeed, the text itself is often the only referent available. Some of the images in The Emigrants take this conceit to its limit, as they supposedly “resemble . . . even in detail” (Sebald 1997: 16) a photograph referred to in the text. Resemblance is here imagined not as a process of comparison but of substitution, in which, rather than one thing looking like another, one thing stands in for another. One of the most frequent images in Sebald is the labyrinth, which is shown in photographs, maps, and diagrams and in panoramic perspective. These pictured forts, prisons, and mazes possess a doubled relation to the novels in which they appear, referring to both the individual descriptions of labyrinths (hospital and prison corridors, garden mazes, colossal man- sions, city streets, library shelves) and to the labyrinthine text as a whole. Yet the striking aspect about the maps of labyrinths found in a novel such as Austerlitz is their fatuity: little sense can be made of them; they explain nothing. Then again, since the experience of being in a labyrinth is that of not knowing where one is, the labyrinths pictured might be said to duplicate rather than to illuminate the winding pathways they show, even if the key to a labyrinth turns out to be another labyrinth.6 Ryan has called Sebald’s novels “labyrinths without a center” (Ryan 2012: 127), but if this is the case,

5. Mary Griffin Wilson argues that “there is one characteristic that is common to all of the images. Each one refers, in some way, to the text in which it is present” (2013: 55–56). 6. Richard T. Gray analyzes the image of the labyrinth in Sebald’s work in terms of perspective, noting that, “viewed close-up and from within, it defies all attempts at orienta- tion among its maze of indistinct corridors; but from the outside, in particular from the privileged position of a bird’s-eye view, it divulges its constitution as an intricately ordered pattern” (2009: 496).

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it is not because they do not lead anywhere but rather because their cen- ters are uninhabitable. The center of the labyrinth, after all, belongs to the minotaur, and the confusion, exhaustion, and anxiety suffered by Sebald’s narrator disqualify him for the role of Theseus. The sense that the minotaur is everywhere, that all paths lead to him, might account for why Sebald’s characters appear indifferent to how their stories are being received. Voices in Sebald speak almost without interruption; they are listened to in silence. When a story has to be broken off, it is resumed with no recognition that time has elapsed. “On this second meeting, as on all subsequent occa- sions,” the narrator of Austerlitz observes, “we simply went on with our conversation, wasting no time in commenting on the improbability of our meeting again” (2001: 28). The Emigrants and Austerlitz are ostensibly records of conversations, yet so one-sided are these dialogues, they are almost indistinguishable from the monologues that make up much of Vertigo (2000) and The Rings of Saturn. Sebald admitted that he struggled to “come to terms with writing dialogue. . . . I find it unbearable to read in books, ‘she said, as she stared pensively out the window’” (2011: 235).7 His example recalls the closing section of Roland Barthes’s S/Z, which declares the term pensive “the signifier of the inexpressible, not of the unexpressed (1974: 216). The nineteenth-century narrator, in opting for the word pensive, is inform- ing the reader that not everything is being said, since some things cannot be said. For Sebald, writing in a very different moment, nothing is held in reserve. His characters tell all that they know, and all that can be known about them; were one of his characters described as pensive, this would not be a momentary disposition but a permanent character trait. The sense that everything in Sebald is said, that nothing is being held back, is a surprising quality to find in novels confronting the Holo- caust. Because of the shattering losses they recount, Sebald’s novels have often been read in the context of trauma theory, which records what Cathy Caruth describes as “the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out” in texts shaped by terrible experiences. This cry bears witness to a truth the victim “cannot fully know” (1996: 2). Yet despite the unbearable events described in Sebald’s novels, no one weeps, gets angry, struggles to find the right words; no one apologizes for what he or she has said or regrets having spo- ken. The voice we hear is neutral, indistinguishable from the voice of the narrator. Reading Sebald, we find little of the incredulity and bewilderment that besets the narrating voice in Joseph Conrad or William Faulkner. Mem-

7. Quotation translated by Sina Rahmani.

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ory may play tricks, be confused or inaccessible, may fall silent or even be supplanted by “fantastic inventions,” as in the illness suffered by the narrator’s great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth in The Emigrants (Sebald 1997: 102). But the telling itself seems not to suffer from these disturbances. Sebald’s characters speak not because they hope (or fear) that their words will bring to light a knowledge that lies hidden within them; they speak as a means of placing that truth in an ever wider context—personal, social, historical, biological, cosmological. This is true even for the character whose experiences fit most neatly within the model of trauma theory. Jacques Austerlitz grows up in rural Wales seemingly having forgotten the terrible trauma of separation from his mother, leaving him in possession of a truth he “cannot fully know.” He acknowledges the difficulty of uncover- ing this truth early in the novel, when he tries to account for why it took him so long to question who he was and where he came from: “an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circum- spectly directs operations somewhere in the brain, has always preserved me from my own secret” (Sebald 2001: 44). Paradoxically, however, Auster- litz’s recognition that the “secret” of his life lies somewhere within him is precisely the means by which he uncovers it; the narrative that follows is not the cry of a truth he cannot fully know but the knowing of it, a knowledge Austerlitz converts into a model for understanding the past itself, specu- lating “that all moments in time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them” (101). The logic of his observation accounts for why the novel has no sense of narrative progression; there can be no catharsis, no redemption, when every moment feels the same. This lack of progression accounts for why Austerlitz’s extraordinary revelation leaves no mark upon him; as the narrator observes (though perhaps we might not fully trust him), his friend “had not changed at all” (39). There is no difference in tone between the final meeting between the narrator and Austerlitz and all their previous encounters, stretching back thirty years, in Antwerp, Liège, Brussels, Terneuzen, Zeebrugge, and Lon- don. Indeed, it is precisely the narrator’s ability to remain unchanged by the hearing of Austerlitz’s story that qualifies him as the “kind of listener” required (44). Sebald’s narrator asks almost no questions as he listens, as if what he is thinking and feeling has no bearing on what the storyteller is telling him, though it does seem to influence his subsequent wander- ings. As Martin Swales notes, “There is virtually no register of retrospec-

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tion or anticipation” in Sebald, rendering the moment of narration and the moment narrated oddly coterminous (2003: 85). The lack of narrative inter- jections ensures that there is very little texture to the moment of utterance in Sebald’s work, allowing his narrator to move fluently between different stories, speaking voices, historical moments, and literary texts. There is simply one story after another, stories that move from place to place and period to period, as if all points of the past and of the world were in contact with one another, giving the novels a layered or embedded structure. The subject matter of these stories (ruin, loss, bewilderment) varies much less than the dizzying moves through time and space would suggest; the order in which the stories appear is of little consequence. The cumulative effect, however, is devastating. As is typically the case with Borges, the reader of Sebald often forgets in which stories the tale being told is embedded. What markers readers are given work to erase the distinctions between time, places, and speakers. In this way, Sebald’s narratives slip easily from third person to first and back again: there is no change of register, no distinction between the “I” speaking and the “I” listening, indeed none between the “I” listening and the “I” writing. This amounts to nothing less than a derange- ment of syntax itself. Paul Ricoeur observes that the first-person singular is an “empty term,” since no definition can be adequately substituted for it. The “I” is thus reconstituted in every use: “‘I’ designates in each case only one person to the exclusion of any other, the one who is speaking here and now . . . a nonsubstitutable position” (1992: 45–46). Remarkably, Sebald converts the “I” into a substitutable term through his practice of citation. The third chapter of The Rings of Saturn ends by quoting the end of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story that, in Sebald’s retelling, describes how the “labyrinthine construction” of an artificial world, Tlön, “is on the point of blotting out the known world,” having “superseded all that we formerly knew or thought we knew” (1998: 70–71). In the face of this nightmare, Borges’s narrator retreats into his work: “Every language, even Spanish, French and English, will disappear from the planet. The world will be Tlön. In the peace and quiet of my country villa I continue to hone my tentative translation, schooled on Quevedo, of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (which I do not mean to publish)” (71). I quote from the closing sentence of Sebald’s chapter, but I could be quoting from the final sentence of Borges’s story, since they are, allowing from the translation from Spanish to German to English, practically the same. Indeed, since The Rings of Saturn itself includes an extensive reflection on Browne’s Urn Burial, and since Borges’s

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story is precisely about one text turning another into its mirror image, the “I” who translates Browne seems to be referring both to the narrator of “Tlön” and to the narrator of The Rings of Saturn. The indistinguishability of voice and person in Sebald extends to the time in which the stories he recounts take place. In a novel such as Kafka’s The Castle—the subject of one of Sebald’s most important critical essays—the time it takes people to tell K. their story is crucial in determin- ing what happens to him: the longer he listens, the more inescapable his situation becomes (Sebald 1972). In Sebald, conversely, time seems not to pass while the speaker is telling his story. The day grows dark, the teller and listener grow ever wearier, but nothing is thwarted or accomplished by the story having been told. Time passes in Sebald but it does not elapse: every day is just like the one before and the one to come. His narrator never places himself in a temporal relation to the events he is narrating in the manner, say, of another of Sebald’s models, Thomas Mann’s Serenus Zeit- bloom, who intermittently reminds the reader of the time that has passed while he has been narrating the story of Doctor Faustus. Zeitbloom is telling his story from inside Germany near the end of the Second World War: the more of the story he relates, the more of Germany falls to the oncom- ing Soviet and Allied troops. In contrast, there is no moment of narration for Sebald, since the catastrophe has already happened. The world is Tlön.

Into These Lines “If I think back nowadays to our childhood in Steinach,” Luisa Fer- ber writes in the memoirs handed to the narrator by her son, Max, in The Emigrants, “it often seems as if it had been open-ended in time, in every direction—indeed, as if it still were going on, right into these lines I am now writing” (Sebald 1997: 207). The moment is distinctively Sebaldian. Not because the writing of Luisa’s (invented) memoirs disturbs the boundary between fiction and fact, but because the conceit gives material form to the conflation of a series of temporal moments. The memoirs are written in the present-perfect continuous tense, which runs the past into the present; phrases such as “We have been going to school for a few years now” (202) recur throughout. The calm, orderly, happy life the memoirs portray cannot but be read in light of the horror to come, a horror that now stretches back to encompass the prewar Jewish community Luisa describes and forward to the reading of the memoir first by Max (the name, surely not coinciden- tally, Sebald himself preferred), then by Sebald’s narrator, and then by the

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reader. The “open-ended” nature of the memoir is redemptive, re-creating the joy of Luisa’s childhood for her and for her many readers; it is appalling, since her death is still always to come. Experience in Sebald is durational, “still going on” into the moment of reading; it is also directional, moving “into these lines” on the page, which Sebald treats almost ideographically. Leafing through the log of a patrol ship from autumn 1914, the narrator of The Rings of Saturn confesses that he is “astounded that a trail that has long since vanished from the air or the water remains visible here on the paper” (Sebald 1998: 93). The narrator’s astonishment springs from the equivalence he perceives between the wake left by the ship and the written marks testifying to where the ship has been, as if the ship’s course literally took it across the paper. The image resur- faces in a more graphic form later in the novel, in a description of one of his colleagues at Manchester University learning to write Japanese, “drawing one character after another on immense sheets of paper. I recall now how he once said to me that one of the chief difficulties of writing consisted in thinking, with the tip of the pen, solely of the word to be written, whilst ban- ishing from one’s mind the reality of what one intends to describe” (186).8 Can we say that this is how writing is regarded in Sebald, solely as image? Not exactly, since there is no doubting the reality of what is being described. But there is an unquestionable materiality to this writing, a materiality sup- plied in part by the uniform look of the words on the page (Sebald writes in extraordinarily long sentences that form extraordinarily long paragraphs), in part by the inclusion of photographic images. An image of a young boy dressed like a cavalier, such as the one on the front cover of the American edition of Austerlitz, cannot be said to banish reality, since reality is what it shows. Sebald does his best, however, to detach the photographs from their literal referents both by withholding captions and attributions and by degrading their quality by repeatedly photocopying them. His reason for doing so was to make his images as close in form and look to the words which surround them, thereby reattaching the photographs to new, fictional referents.9 As he explained in an interview shortly before his death, “if they were produced in a much better form . . . they would ruin the text. They

8. As is often the case, the image can be found elsewhere in Sebald’s work. In Auster- litz, for example, the title character recalls sitting and writing at night, “watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper” (2001: 122). 9. Thanks to Rahmani for this last point.

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must not stand out; they must be of the same leaden grain as the rest” (quoted in Bigsby 2001: 155). How can a photograph included within the pages of a fictional text not “stand out”? What does it mean to talk of writing being of a “leaden grain”? Sebald’s odd choice of terms suggests that he regards both writing and images not primarily as forms of signification but as material objects. The photographic image needs to be degraded so as not to “ruin” the prose work in which it appears, robbing it in the process of much of its referential force, of the fact that it must show reality. The menace posed by photography’s indexicality is that it threatens to break the spell of Sebald’s sound, to wrench the reader out of the representative space Sebald carefully and patiently constructs. “I write up to these pictures and I write out of them also,” Sebald says in the same interview, “so they are really part of the text and not illustrations” (155).10 An illustration is not part of the text but an ele- ment added to it; the pictures in Sebald’s work, conversely, are the start- ing point—the writing is then added to them, as it were. He writes “up to” and “out of them,” both in the sense that he invents stories for the people and places shown and in the sense that his writing literally moves through them, the way the reader moves through the novel. Patt notes that the gray box that surrounds many of the pictures in the German edition has been completely eliminated from the translations into English, “so that pictures invade instead of merely butting up to the surrounding text” (2007: 52). Such decisions speak of a minute attention not just to the way that images appear in print but to their relation to the words that surround them, and most particularly to the shape and sound of these words.11 The meaning of Sebald’s texts is in large part a question not just of the words he uses but of their placement on the page, a technique that is closely linked to his practice of citation. The Emigrants, for example, bor- rows from Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew in the Paul Bereyter chapter, echoes Michel Butor’s Passing Time in the descriptions of long walks around Manchester in the section on Max Ferber, and reproduces Robert

10. Jonathan Long neatly captures the circularity of Sebald’s composition model: “photographs function as the impulse that generates the narrative, and are simultaneously envel- oped and ‘fixed’ in their meaning by the narratives to which they give rise” (2007: 123). 11. The German originals occasionally display an image above just one line of text, which the reader might easily mistake for a caption—a feature absent in the English editions, whose translations Sebald carefully oversaw. He clearly thought of his English editions as different texts, in part because of the dissimilarity in the look of the words on the page. See Horstkotte 2008.

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Walser’s description in The Robber of a man crossing Lake Constance by moonlight in the account of Adelwarth’s adventures. These episodes do not resemble the scenes in the novels from which they are taken so much as literally reproduce them. That Sebald conceived of the relation between his texts and the ones he cites as material rather than merely analogical is clear from his discussion in his essay on Walser of the similarities between the crossing of Lake Constance in The Emigrants and the nearly identical episode in The Robber. “Barely two pages” after the scene in his novel, Sebald notes, his protagonist encounters an enigmatic woman wearing brown gloves; “two pages on” from the moonlit lake scene in The Robber, Walser’s Robber meets “a similarly mysterious woman clad all in brown” (Sebald 2009: 9). Stranger still, Sebald claims not to have been familiar with The Robber when he was writing The Emigrants, as if the curiously exact nature of the correspondences between the two texts were a matter of chance or perhaps were rendered inevitable by the similarity of the stories they tell. That odd term echospace captures the strangeness of the literary relation being claimed by Sebald, which seems to be determined by spatial proximity rather than influence or emulation. A less odd but more complex example can be found in another moment from The Emigrants, an account of a slipped disc suffered by Ferber, which renders him immobile for a long agonizing night. “The crooked position I was forced to stand in reminded me,” Ferber recalls, “of a photograph my father had taken of me in the second form at school, bent over my writing” (Sebald 1997: 172). Rather than the photograph functioning as a technology for remembering the past, it is the very thing being remembered; rather than the lines of resemblance running from image to photographed subject, they run from the present to the past. To complicate matters still further, these lines also run outside the space of Sebald’s fiction altogether, back to yet another text, in this case Bernhard’s novel Concrete, narrated by a man suffering from severe writer’s block:

I looked steadily at the desk until I could see myself sitting at it, as it were from behind. I could see myself bending forward, because of my illness, in order to write. . . . Sitting like that, I told myself, you’ve already written a few pages. . . . That’s how I sit at the desk when I’ve written ten or twelve pages. I stood motionless and observed the posture of my back. That’s the back of my maternal grandfather . . . I told myself . . . thinking of a particular photograph that had been taken only a year before his death. (Bernhard 1989: 12)

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The narrator’s autoscopic hallucination conflates the bowed back of his photographed grandfather, the sign of his grandfather’s impending death, with his own bowed back at his writing desk. Sebald makes a number of changes—the bent back reminds his character not of a photograph of his grandfather but of one of himself, the writing being imagined takes place in the past not the present—but retains the essential: the reordering (which in Bernhard’s case is perhaps even more fundamental) of photography’s relation to the past. Rather than an image recalling the moment it was taken, it is itself recalled. Sebald and Bernhard depict the lines of resemblance between the photograph and what it shows as running forward as well as backward, as if the camera were a technology not for calling back the past but calling into being the future.

The Very Spot According to Sebald, his biggest debt was to Bernhard, who taught him what he identified as the technique of “periscopic narration,” “in which two or three figures are used to narrate a story” (Sebald 2011: 235). Yet whereas Bernhard gives the sense that his speaking subject is creating the very world he describes, Sebald depicts a speaking subject trapped in a world that preexists him. “I was listening to two women talking to each other about the summer of 1939” (2001: 141), Austerlitz tells the narrator, describing the moment in which he finally remembered that, like the women he hears being interviewed on the radio, he had been part of the Kinder- transport. This sense of awakening to a world already shaped by the stories of others runs through Sebald’s work. The Rings of Saturn, for example, recounts a journey along several axes at once: the Suffolk coastline, ancient and modern history, and literary and cinematic forms. The novel has no story of its own to tell, no plot (though it covers plenty of plots of land), no real experience to relate at all, simply the exhaustion that comes with inhabiting a premade world, a labyrinthine structure that takes innumer- able forms: Somerleyton Hall, “famed for the scarcely perceptible transi- tions from interiors to exterior” (Sebald 1998: 33–34); the Somerleyton yew maze, “where I became so completely lost” (38); the “vast and endless” (257) corridors of Chateaubriand’s family home; Dunwich Heath, where, “[l]ost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly,” Sebald’s narrator finds himself “back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before” (171–72). As he wanders through these labyrinths, the narrator reflects on a number of other labyrinthine forms: the

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long and ornate sentences of Sir Thomas Browne; the wind “blowing the dust . . . in sinister spirals” (228); radar “spread[ing] its invisible net” (227) through the sky; the massive fishing nets used by the herring industry. The fishing nets are a particularly fascinating example since they are made of the very substance that allows Theseus to escape Daedalus’s labyrinth:

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silk. As Jacobs points out, every reader of The Rings of Saturn makes the same discovery: that Sebald’s repeated references to silk offer a thread with which to make our way through the novel’s bewildering form. Silk is not a means out of the labyrinth, however; it is the very form the labyrinth takes.12 The belief that one can find one’s way out forms the labyrinth in which one is trapped. The repeated discussions of silk and silkworms in The Rings of Sat- urn no more offer a guide through the novel than do the web of allusions to other writers and other texts. Like the preindustrial weavers Sebald describes, who were strapped to weighted wooden looms, the reader is encased in a world of silk. The text explicitly compares these melancholy weavers to “scholars and writers,” forced “to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created” (282). The model of reading offered here is crucial to understanding the final reference to silkworm manufacture, an account of how the Nazis encouraged the industry in the mid-1930s by producing a film extolling “the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selec- tion, including extermination to preempt racial degeneration” (294). Sebald then describes the process by which silk is made: “The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is completed” (294). The comparison to the Holocaust need not be stated; simple proximity does the trick. If Bernhard fuses narration and creation, Sebald, in moments like these, comes close to fusing reading and creation. Since meaning is accretive rather than figu- rative, it takes place both on the page and within the reader. Metaphor does very little work in Sebald’s texts, to the extent that one might say of Sebald what Deleuze and Guattari say of Kafka, that he “deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism” (1986: 21). Yet if this is true, it is toward a very different end than in Kafka.13 For whereas Deleuze and Guattari cham- pion Kafka’s novels for offering metamorphosis rather than metaphor—one thing actually turning into another rather than simply being compared to it—for Sebald things remain as they are; no transcendence, no line of flight. Webs, cocoons, labyrinths are literal entities in his work, and when we com-

12. As Jacobs observes, the repeated references to silk “neither stitches nor weaves together. . . . It might almost give us the sense . . . of everything shrunk together into a single blind and senseless point” (2015: 68). 13. Judith Ryan discusses Sebald’s familiarity with Deleuze and Guattari’s study (2009: 51).

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pare the “killing business” that is the silkworm industry with the killing business that was the Holocaust, we do so because they share the same textual space, as if resemblance functioned by means of contingency—as if, in other words, it were metonymy. Metonymy plays a crucial structuring role in Sebald. The narrator of Austerlitz is named not merely after the site of a battle but for the train station that commemorates this battle, whose “labyrinthine underpasses” (Sebald 2001: 291) he will disappear into at the end of the novel in pursuit of his dead father, who was himself last seen at the Gare d’Austerlitz.14 Metonymy works through concrete relations—the battlefields and stations referred to by Sebald can themselves be visited—and is thus an appropriate figure for his attempt to give literal form to the images that fill his pages. What interests Sebald is the conflation of the literal and the figu- rative, of actual spaces with textual ones. And in the labyrinth he finds his ideal form. As Henri Lefebvre observes, the labyrinth is a figure for the work of figuration itself: “symbols [once] had a material and concrete existence. . . . The labyrinth, for instance, was originally a military and political structure designed to trap enemies” (1991: 233). This is why the labyrinth functions as a figure for eternal return, always leading, in Deleuze’s words, “back to the same point, to the same instant which is, which was and which will be” (1983: 108). Almost inevitably, Austerlitz, like The Rings of Saturn, contains numerous descriptions of labyrinths, photographs of labyrinths, plans, maps, sketches, and outlines of labyrinths. Austerlitz gives the labyrinth back its “material and concrete existence,” indeed gives it multiple addresses: the Gare d’Austerlitz, of course, but also London’s Liverpool Street train station. Yet these actual stations are also places where time bends back upon itself, where what once was lost is lost again. These recursive spaces are best approached via another text: Peter Handke’s Repetition. Like Austerlitz, Handke’s narrator is inseparable from his rucksack; like him, he searches for a dead family member in a country that, though not his own, he feels tied to by blood and history (see Finch 2007). But the echoes are more than simply thematic. Handke’s narrator, like Austerlitz, longs for a companion “whom I would at last be able to tell . . . Tell what? Just tell” (1988: 7). What he tells is a series of experiences in which the landscape he travels through and the words he reads in his dead brother’s notebook prove impossible to tell apart. Standing in front of the orchard planted by his brother twenty years before, the narra-

14. I borrow this observation from Jacobs.

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tor compares what he sees with the notebook’s Thoreau-like description of the planting: “a light fell on the orchard . . . and in the manuscript I caught sight of a blue-bordered enclosure, where . . . I gazed around and around as though I stood in my brother’s place at the center of it” (119). Handke’s narrator stands in both the orchard described by the notebook and the notebook itself, as if description and landscape, writing and world, shared the same space. This revelatory, rapturous moment is a compelling model for what happens to Austerlitz in Liverpool Street station, which is also the place where the narrative of this loss is passed on; narration and the events being narrated once again, and quite literally, occupy the same place. During one conversation with the narrator in the Great Eastern Hotel, located next door to Liverpool Street station, Austerlitz describes stumbling upon the station waiting room where he had arrived as a boy, an experience which makes him feel as if space “were expanding, going on for ever and ever . . . at the same time turning back into itself” (Sebald 2001: 135). The effect is the result of memories beginning to take shape in his mind, “interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light” (136). The waiting room and Austerlitz’s mind mirror one another: it seems to him as if these spaces “contained all the hours of my past life” (136).15 The rest of Austerlitz describes the contours of this space, as the title character makes his way through a series of labyrinths, beginning with the city of his birth, Prague, and ending in the “long corridors” (230) and “long passages” (269) of St. Clement’s and the Salpêtrière. He lands in these hospitals thanks to his traversal of other much more terrifying spaces: “the labyrinthine corridors” (298) of the ring of twelve Russian forts converted into Nazi prisons; the Breendonk concentration camp on the outskirts of Antwerp and, of course, Theresienstadt. These horrifying sites end up invading every space in the novel: psychological—Austerlitz is haunted by a dream of “a star-shaped fortress” whose long, low passages “led me through all the buildings I had ever visited” (138–39); legal—the “corridors and stairways leading nowhere” (29) in the Brussels Palace of Justice; textual—Sebald fashions a labyrinthine ten-page-long sentence about life in Theresienstadt based on H. G. Adler’s exhaustive study of the camp; historical—the narrator loses himself in the Bibliothéque Nationale “in the small print of the footnotes to the works

15. The analogy between labyrinthine space and the labyrinthine structure of the brain is one Sebald also makes in The Rings of Saturn, which describes a dream of being lost inside a maze, which “represented a cross-section of my brain” (1998: 173).

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I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn” (260).16 The narrator describes this experience of scholarly wandering in terms of entering “the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications” (260), making explicit the link between the account of reading with which the novel ends—the last line describes how the narrator “read to the end of the fifteenth chapter of [Dan Jacob- son’s] Heshel’s Kingdom (298)—and the interminable construction of fortresses described by Austerlitz in the opening pages. Proof of the futility of such construction, Austerlitz notes, is that “no one now understands its simplest terms, escarpe and courtine, faussebraie, reduit, and glacis” (15). The joke, if it is one, recycles an extended gag in Tristram Shandy, a novel that, though vastly different in tone, subject matter, and structure, betrays an equal fascination with the material texture of fictional representation. Sterne is admittedly an unlikely source for Austerlitz, though I am not the first critic to propose a connection, prompted by Sterne’s repeated descriptions of labyrinths, fortresses, and ramifications (Lennon 2006). Indeed, the plot of Austerlitz turns on another Sternean joke, albeit one drained of all humor: when Jacques asks a teacher at his Welsh school what his name means, he is told that “it is a small place in Moravia, site of a famous battle, you know” (Sebald 2001: 68–69). Austerlitz’s teacher fails to understand that his pupil is asking about his background, not about history or geogra- phy; what the boy wants to know is what it means for him to have the name Austerlitz, not what the name means. The mistake is the same one made by Sterne’s Uncle Toby, who, in response to the Widow Wadman’s repeated attempts to learn where he was wounded, innocently tries to show her first on a map and then on a scale model of the battlefield. Toby has built the model in order to find his way out of his own labyrinth, a “multitude of dykes, drains, rivulets, and sluices.” These features of the landscape are both actual and metaphorical, figures for the difficulties Toby falls into when he attempts to tell the story of his wound (Sterne 2003: 74). Sebald maps metaphorical onto literal space in a comparable manner. The vastly different stakes of this mapping are most clearly visible in the final few pages of The Emigrants, which describe the narrator’s return to Manchester, where he takes a room in the run-down Midland Hotel. The ending dramatizes one of Sebald’s most distinctive techniques, the layer-

16. The narrator’s comparison of the readers around him to a “wandering tribe encamped here on their way through the Sahara or the Sinai desert” (280) represents yet another labyrinthine metaphor, since, as Borges’s story “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths” demonstrates, the desert is merely another labyrinth.

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ing not of one story in another (in the manner of Cervantes) nor of one time in another (in the manner of Proust) but of one space within another. As he sits in an armchair listening to the rain and the traffic, feeling as gloomy “as if he were in a hotel somewhere in Poland” (Sebald 1997: 233), the narrator imagines that he can hear music coming from the Free Trade Hall next door, a sound that mixes itself up with the voice of “the little opera singer who used to perform at Liston’s Music Hall in the Sixties” (234). This singer, in turn, reminds him of another one, a tenor who performed at the same music hall:

And now, sitting in the Midland’s turret room above the abyss on the fifth floor, I heard him again for the first time since those days. The sound came from so far away that it was as if he were walking about behind the wing flats of an infinitely deep stage. On those flats, which in truth did not exist, I saw, one by one, pictures from an exhibition that I had seen in Frankfurt the year before. They were colour photographs . . . of the Litzmannstadt ghetto. (235)

Sound, or, more precisely, the recollection of a sound, does not so much give way to vision as produce it, allowing Sebald to look upon a series of spaces that overlap in several different ways: literally (the Midland Hotel is next to the Free Trade Hall), metonymically (music can be heard at both the Free Trade Hall and Liston’s Music Hall), metaphorically (the opera singer sounds distant, as if he were singing on a stage enormous enough to be an art gallery), antithetically (the “infinitely deep” space of the exhibition displays pictures of people crammed into the tiniest of inhabitable spaces). The photographs the narrator remembers seeing at the Frankfurt exhibit are of “faces, countless faces, who looked up from their work (and were permitted to do so) purposely and solely for the fraction of a second it took to take the photographs” (236). Sebald chooses not to reproduce these images, not only because they are propaganda—taken as part of an attempt to demonstrate that the ghetto was a model state rather than a living hell—but because what he is attempting to depict is not the images themselves but the experience of seeing them. The most memorable of these photographs is the only one described in any detail:

Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty. The irregular geometric patterns of the carpet they are knotting, and even its colours, remind me of the settee in our living room at home. Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I can-

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not make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names are—Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of the night, with spindle, scissors, and thread. (237)

The rapid substitution of one space for another (which collapses Sebald’s living room into the Jewish ghetto) ends in the strangely literal insistence that the narrator sees the women from “the very spot” where the photogra- pher stood. Sebald returns to this conceit in a number of other places in his work, most notably in a discussion of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in the opening pages of The Rings of Saturn, in which the narrator talks of viewing the painting in a museum as the experience of “standing precisely where those who were present at the dissection in the Waaggebouw stood” (1998: 13). Yet if the narrator of that novel is locatable—he is standing in the Mauritshuis museum in Amsterdam—the narrator of The Emigrants is not so easily placed. Is he in his hotel, on the music hall stage, at the Frank- furt exhibition, or in the ghetto? Where, for that matter, are the women, whose grouping recalls two sets of three unmarried sisters: Catherine, Clarissa, and Christina Ashbury in The Rings of Saturn, and Babett, Bina, and Mathid Seelos in Vertigo.17 The memory of viewing the photograph allows the narrator to share the same space as the women to the extent that they are able to return his gaze, even though their eyes, paradoxically, cannot be seen—or is it that they return his gaze precisely because their eyes cannot be seen, since what this makes visible is the fact of loss itself? The women are in time and the keepers of time, their impossible gaze the thread that takes us back to their own living death—via an impossible set of spaces, sounds, and images—and the breaking of that same thread at the same moment.

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17. I owe this revealing comparison to Rahmani.

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