EÖTVÖS LORÁND TUDOMÁNYEGYETEM BÖLCSÉSZETTUDOMÁNYI KAR DOKTORI ISKOLÁK TANULMÁNYAI 3. TANULMÁNYOK IRODALOMTUDOMÁNYI DOKTORI ISKOLA Főszerkesztő BÁRDOSI VILMOS BUDAPEST, 2012 EÖTVÖS LORÁND TUDOMÁNYEGYETEM BÖLCSÉSZETTUDOMÁNYI KAR DOKTORI ISKOLÁK TANULMÁNYAI 3. A kötet megjelenésére az „Önálló lépések a tudomány területén” ELTE TÁMOP-4.2.2/B- 10/1-2010-0030 jelű projekt keretében, annak támogatásával került sor. A borítón az ELTE peduma látható. A sorozat főszerkesztője: BÁRDOSI VILMOS Szerkesztők: TAMÁS ÁBEL SCHEIBNER TAMÁS Szakmai lektor: KÁLLAY GÉZA Nyelvi lektor: CHRISTOPHER RYAN Technikai munkatársak: GYULAFI MÓNIKA OLÁH ÁGNES SZABÓ JÁNOS Doktorandusz szerkesztők: BOKOR JULIANNA KONCZ ISTVÁN PÁLOS MÁTÉ SMID RÓBERT ISBN 978-963-284-254-7 © A szerzők, 2012 © Bárdosi Vilmos főszerkesztő, 2012 A kiadásért felelős: Dezső Tamás, az ELTE BTK Dékánja A nyomdai munkálatokat a Komáromi Nyomda végezte. “How to not be here” The Construction and Re-Construction of Memory and Remembrance in W. G. Sebald’s two novels ANTAL , NIKOLETT – HERMANN , VERONIKA Some (already failing) theories claim that text is more primal and important a me- dium (or vehicle) than pictures, thus it rather belongs to elite culture. This idea relegates pictures to popular culture only because of the pure and high visuality and visibility they offer. According to our cultural presuppositions and stereotypes, proper novels which want to be taken seriously are not something illustrated with pictures and photographs. However, in the case of Winfried Georg Sebald’s novels, the reader cannot let these misconceptions lead into misinterpretations. In the last few decades literary and cultural studies have been shaped and controlled by pic- tures and visuality. Visual politics and picture theory has become one of the most important disciplines and discourses in contemporary philosophy of art, ethics and aesthetics. In his famous paraphrase on Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre, W. J. T. Mitch- ell points out that “This is the age of biocybernetic reproduction when (as we sup- pose) images really do come alive and want things. What follows is an attempt to sketch out a thick description of this moment, and to assess some of the artistic practices that have accompanied it.” (Mitchell 2005: 310). In daily life, as well as in art theory, pictures have not just become far more than illustrations but have even grown upon texts in many ways. There are two steps in the philosophy of Husserl, Freud, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Castoriadis – wrote German art theorist Gottfried Boehm in his paper Jenseits der Sprache? An- merkungen zur Logik der Bilder (Boehm 2004). The first step is determined to pull the rug out from under metaphysics and objectivity by proving that cognition basi- cally depends on language. In the second step it is shown how the supposed strength of language proves to be an illusion. The linguistic turn has resulted in the iconic turn. Ken Aptekar is a contemporary painter who plays games with classical paint- ings, but on the surface these are Ken Aptekar’s poems. These poems are about reminiscences from the past: childhood memories, scenes of family life and happy moments. The connection between the past and the present is readable in these paintings: Aptekar’s art is possible as multiple intermediations because the past communicates something to Aptekar’s present, and this present is in relation with the past. Experiences from the past are written over the classical paintings, creating another, new masterpiece. “The old masterpiece is wrested from its then-and-there to be planted in the here-and-now. The copy is an after-effect of great painting, belonging to the past and available in the present.” (Bal 1999: 72) The texts on the paintings’ surface re-identify the images; they become biographical and voyeuristic 6 Antal, Nikolett – Hermann, Veronika pieces of evidence. There are several layers in the painting: the original picture, Aptekar’s work and the poem. These are the layers of remembrance, as in the pic- ture in the novel Austerlitz : the protagonist (also called, as a kind of mirror-image, Austerlitz) glances at himself, his own past and at the past of humanity. This is his individual and the collective “consciousness”, which he has to study and live again. The photos are the unfamiliar bodies in the novel, like the foreign-language words and sentences in the text. Austerlitz is a voyeur and/or thinker who contemplates his life; when he faces his past, he realizes that his future will be different than he thought. In the novel he has to look at photos as a survivor, a boy whose parents died; he is an outsider, a visitor in a museum. A visitor in his possible life, which was to be his own, alt- hough he lived another. Austerlitz’s viewpoint is twofold: he is a survivor, but he didn’t know about it, he looks at himself and his family in the photos, but he doesn’t meet those people, he is a visitor viewing exhibited masterpieces. Ernst van Alphen writes about trauma (van Alphen 1999) as a failed experience. He deals with the symptoms of discursivity, differentiating between experience, memory and trauma. The mediated experiences depend on a certain discourse: this discourse means something in a given community which is based on social consen- sus. In this way, experience is a linguistic event and identity becomes a linguistic experience. However, it is not a straightforward truth that trauma is an experience because traumas can mean the impossibility of experiencing. Austerlitz‘s decision that he has to face the past, together with the photos, contains this past. There are several discussions in the novel between various witnesses of the past (Austerlitz, Věra, etc.) yet Van Alphen claims that although the Holocaust is of course traumat- ic, it cannot really be experienced because the survivors are not able to make a distance between the event and themselves. They can do it only with the help of language, and thus experiencing is the result of a typically discursive process. There are four approaches which can help us represent traumatic experience. The first is “...to allow memories of this past by ascribing the memories to some- body else. One of the survivors describes this mechanism of follows: ‘I’m thinking of it now... how I split myself. That it wasn’t me there. It was somebody else.’” In Austerlitz there is an interesting game with this: Austerlitz, the central character, cannot bring his two selves together: he does not remember a persona he could call himself. Thus, properly speaking, he does not remember himself. Thus, he can only create a distance from his one-time self through language as a prerequisite for be- ing able to remember at all. Yet he cannot identify with what he actually did in the past. He feels he is nothing. One of the reasons why the persona feels he is nothing is that he could not do anything against genocide. The self becomes nothing. A gap emerges between the narrated and the narrating self, where at first the main character cannot remember his childhood and parents, but after a while the truth is revealed through various layers, in the form of photos, giving more and more information to us, just as it “How to not be here” – The Construction and Re-Construction of Memory… 7 gives to Austerlitz. In these pictures, Austerlitz learns something about his mother, his past and childhood and as the memories are reconstructed, they build up Aus- terlitz’s new and old self. This happens in a parallel fashion: as far as his life- history is concerned, we proceed in a chronological order, and the past gradually becomes known to us and to Austerlitz. Yet all this is filtered through the main character’s present and what neither he, nor we, will ever know is how “true what he and we attribute to his past is, how “valid” or how “accurate”. Is it the past , or “only” his (reconstructed) memories ? Austerlitz is a modern Oedipus story, but the novel refers to Wagner’s classical hero, Siegfried, too. In the space of the narration, the various intermediated stories are triggered by certain images, which are, in turn, emerge through specific phonic elements. Es war das Interesse an der französischen Zivilisation in all ihren Ausdrucks- formen, das ich als passionierte Romanistin mit Agáta ebenso wie mit Maximi- lian teilte, aus dem gleich nach unserem ersten Gespräch am Tag ihres Einzugs die Freundschaft zwischen uns zu erwachsen began, und aus dieser Freund- schaft ergab es sich dann sozusagen naturgemäss, so sagte Věra zu mir, sagte Austerlitz, dass sie, Věra, die im Gegensatz zu Agáta und Maximilian weitge- hend frei über ihre Zeit verfügen konnte, sich nach meiner Geburt erboten ha- be, für die paar Jahre bis zu meinem Eintreten in der Vorschule die Aufgaben eines Kinderfräuleins zu übernehmen, eine Offerte, sagte Věra, die sie nicht einziges Mal später gereut habe, denn bereits ehe ich selber habe sprechen kön- nen, sei es ihr immer gewesen, als verstünde sie niemand besser als ich, und schon im Alter von nicht einmal ganz drei Jahren hätte ich sie mit meiner Kon- versationkunst auf das angenehmste unterhalten. (Sebald 2003: 226) 1 Ernst van Alphen claims that in remembering traumatic events, it is narrative frames that are able to handle events like the Holocaust. Yet the frame should be envisaged as a narrative vacuum or negation, a denial of itself and of the possibility of any narrative framework at all. This negativity may take two basic forms: some- times it is the traumatic experience itself which is a vacuum, and the survivor can- not make a connection between events that took place before and after it. But it is also possible that the survivor denies that very narrative frame which she thinks is imposed on her by contemporary society.