Charcoal: The Phantom Traces of W.G.

Sebald's Novel-Memoirs
Author(s): Gray Kochhar-Lindgren
Source: Monatshefte, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Fall, 2002), pp. 368-380
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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Charcoal:
The Phantom Traces of W.G. Sebald's
Novel-Memoirs
GRAYKOCHHAR-LINDGREN
Central Michigan University

W.G. Sebald's quartetof novel-memoirs -Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings

of Saturn, andAusterlitz '-are forms of travel literaturethat enact improbable
connections across space-time. Sebald's work enacts writing itself as an endless migration; as the lonely drifting of refugees; and as the directionless trek
in which "home" has become merely a sign of the brutal erasure of history.
And yet, even as the dust of forgetfulness begins to cover everything, Sebald's
art withstands, at least momentarily, that oblivion.
Sebald's novel-memoirs work patiently and with great diligence over
entire histories of displacement (a term used in physics, politics, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction). There is the displacement of one substance by another; displaced persons forced from their homes; affect displaced to an elsewhere, hidden in the blurred text of the unconscious far from its origins; and
the ways in which language itself displaces meaning, intentionality, and presence. And, perhaps, it is the non-directed eddying of time that unravels it all,
making displacement both inevitable and insoluble, a double-bind that all of
Sebald's books directly address.
Sebald, himself a displaced person, migrated in 1966 to England from
Wertach im Allgliu, Germany,where he was born in 1944. Eventually, he took
up a position as a professor of European Literatureat the University of East
Anglia, where he served as the first director of the British Centre for Literary
Translation. A deep sense of displacement pervades the entire work, stemming from a profound experience- in both Sebald's personal experience and
in the collective experience of the 20th century- of the disruption entailed by
the dissolution of the stable categories of space, time, history, identity, and
language.
Sebald remains forever an outsider, as if he is speaking for himself when
Austerlitz, the primary "other"narratorof the novel-memoir of the same title,
notes that London remains "alien and incomprehensible in spite of all the
years that have passed since my arrivalin England"(Austerlitz36). And, when
Monatshefte, Vol. 94, No. 3, 2002

0026-9271/2002/0003/368
0 2002 by The Boardof Regentsof The Universityof WisconsinSystem

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the narratorprepares to move to Paris, he feels "liberatedfrom the false pretenses of his English life, but in another oppressed by the vague sense that he
did not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world"
(Austerlitz 254). One of the primary hopes of Sebald's writing is to re-locate
that which is threatenedwith oblivion: lists of all sorts, chairs, books, railway
stations, fashion, machines, landscapes, people, and-the most enigmatic of
all-the possibility of the gesture of justice through the literary work that
gives shape to imagination and memory.
As a means of attempting to accomplish such a task, the work serves as
a productive critique of the vexed relationship between the narrativesof history and those of literature. As David Price, commenting on Giambattista
Vico's New Science, has suggested:
Historyis a narrativeconstructedin the mindsof thosewho thinkthe past;and
this thinkingrests in no small parton the memory,which, accordingto Vico,
consists of threeelements:"memorywhen it remembersthings, imagination
whenit altersor imitatesthem,andinventionwhenit gives thema new turnor
andrelationship.2
putsthemintoproperarrangement
Memory; imagination; innovation. As Arthur Williams notes, "Sebald often
undermines the reliability of his informants' memories in order to assert the
power of the creative imagination."3It is not, however, quite this simple, since
the forces that undermine memory can also undermine imagination; but,
working both strands of discourse with great precision, Sebald writes across
the traditional generic conventions of "history" and "literature"to produce a
hybrid that I am calling the novel-memoir, a term that expresses both the emergence of a new social, psychological, and literary configuration that we associate with the "novel" and the putatively accurate recollections that we expect
from the "memoir."
Although Sebald's writing does not, as Lukaicsclaims for the genre of
the novel, "tell of the adventureof interiority,"4it does reflect, in its own inimitable manner,his insights that "[o]nly in the novel, whose very matteris seeking and failing to find the essence, is time posited together with the form"5 and
that "only in the novel and in certain epic forms resembling the novel does
memory occur as a creative force affecting the object and transforming it."6
Memory is not a passive repetition of the has-been, but rather a generative
force that shapes the events it re-counts.
In Sebald, a deep interiority is inhabited by the exteriority of streets, old
hotels, bleak landscapes, crumbling fortresses, tombstones, and jet planes;
and, for their parts, all exteriorities are sites of effaced, but still expressive,
memories. They are memorials, still to be written and therefore read, of memories. And while the force of displacement ensures that the novel has no essence, no final determinability, Sebald's memorially inventive art nonetheless
provides a provisional determinability for the histories that the texts criss-

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Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

cross, a temporary capacity for the reader to hold narratedtime-sometimes

called an event-in an interpretivecrucible and thereby learn to mourn, honor
the dead, and, perhaps, to begin to make ethical judgments.
By employing the hybrid term "novel-memoir,"I hope to avoid the tired
dichotomy of the conflict between history and literature;to preserve different
aspects of both genres; and, perhaps most importantly,to gesture toward Sebald's attempt to en-fold temporality,to render the past, in the present, for the
sake of the past, the present, and the future. This will be vital if we are to continue to re-think-in a way to re-experience-the violence of, for example,
colonialism or the Holocaust. But the hyphen itself, between novel and memoir, both connects and separates the two terms, enacting a vertiginous mixing
of genres that are always in motion. How, then, does writing itself travel, constitutively displacing all of our histories? What, to put these questions in another terrain,do we say to the dead, when, displaced from the shadows of the
underworld, they return?What, when we listen to those shades as they come
to an audible visibility in Sebald's texts and images, do they say to us?
Sebald's stylistics and thematics weave all four texts into an extended
meditation on history and narration. Vertigo is divided into four sections:
1. Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet, 2. All'estero, 3. Dr. K. Takes
the Waters at Riva, 4. Il ritorno in patria. Sebald takes the reader along as he
travels through the journals and novels of Beyle/Stendhal; journeys through
Italy to study Pisanello; follows Kafka to a spa; and makes the trip back home
to Germany after a long absence. The text concludes with Samuel Pepys's
1913 description of the Fire of London. "'We flee onto the water. The glare
around us everywhere, and yonder, before the darkened skies, in one great are
the jagged wall of fire. And, the day after, a silent rain of ashes, westward, as
far as Windsor Park'" (Vertigo 263). It is always, for us, the "day after,"and it
is always a day filled with the ashen and ventriloquized voices of the past describing a fire, a being-burned.
The Emigrants is divided into the narrativesof Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul
Bereyter, Ambrose Adelworth, and Max Ferber. As Andre Aciman has said,
this novel-memoir shows us the Holocaust "not as experienced by its primary
victims, but as perceived from distant shores or after the fact. The light, like
the pain, that is refracted in emptied cities, the color of ashes, of dust, of
strayed lives that end long before death comes."'7It's as if things are delayed
interminably and yet always dragging people down into inertia and a miasmic
death, often, however, consummated by sudden violence.
The Rings of Saturn consists of ten untitled chapters that move through
meditations on Thomas Browne's skull, decaying manor houses and hotels in
England, the memoirs of Chateaubriand,the opium wars in China, and the
strangely intertwined lives of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement. Commenting on one of the many synchronicities that occur in the quartet, he says that

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No matterhow oftenI tell myself thatchancehappeningsof this kindoccurfar

more often thanwe suspect,since we all move, one afterthe other,along the
sameroadsmappedoutfor us by ouroriginsandourhopes,my rationalmindis
nonethelessunableto lay theghostsof repetitionthathauntme withevergreater
frequency.(Rings187).
It is this freedom for movement and discovery, aligned-almost malignantly
-with paralysis and horrorthat accompany him throughoutthe writing.
And, finally, Austerlitz is the story of Sebald's encounter with yet another of his others, Austerlitz, and the latter's amnesia and his search for his
origins in the Prague of the late 30s. It takes us from the star-shaped fort of
Breendonk, outside Antwerp, through Prague (where Austerlitz spent his first
five years), to the star-shaped fortress of Theresienstadt, the concentration
camp where his mother was killed by the Nazis. Austerlitz bequeaths Sebald
all his photographs and the slowly pieced together narrative of his past that
serves as a temporaryreprieve from the erasure of history that people, objects,
and events undergo. "Sebald,"then, becomes the medium of the telling of the
story of another,which, simultaneously, becomes the story of "Sebald."Grief,
in this world, is both unique to each and common to all.
In all of these novel-memoirs, which I consider a single extended text,
the most important stylistic trait is that Sebald composes seamless transitions
between different narrators,so that the texts come to resemble a chorus of different voices, each given a turn to re-sound. "Sebald,"as the organizer of the
narrative,becomes something like a conductor of an orchestra, an arrangerof
music, a director of a play. This creates, and is dependent upon, what I call a
"ventriloquism of writing," for even when others are carrying the narrative
and performing, as it were, solo, "Sebald" is present in the host of narrators
that includes, among many more, himself and his relatives, Stendhal, Kafka,
Pepys, anonymous newspaper reports, old diaries, Austerlitz, and the latter's
childhood governess.
A second trait is that Sebald works in language in a manner analogous
to the ways in which painters and photographerswork in their respective media. In The Emigrants, for example, there is a description of Max Ferber,who
like Sebald is a German who has immigrated to England. As a visual artist, he
works through excavations of paint on the canvas, deep abrasions, the thickness of impasto, and through superimpositions of images, times, figures. Sebald's writing is much the same: layers within layers, scraping words down to
the bareness of the bones of the loss effected by time, remolding a flat surface
so that it will cast distinct patterns of light and shadow. When examining a
painting by Pisanello, in Verona, he writes that:
Whatappealedto me was not only the highlydevelopedrealismof his art,exfor the time, butalso the way in whichhe succeededin creatingthe
traordinary

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Gray Kochhar-Lindgren
effectof the real,withoutsuggestinga depthdimension,uponanessentiallyflat
surface,in whicheveryfeature,the principalsandthe extrasalike,the birdsin
the sky,the greenforestandevery single leaf of it, areall grantedan equaland
undiminishedrightto exist. (Vertigo73)

This very much reflects Sebald's own ouvre, and, whether the medium is language, paint, or photographs,there is always a sorting, a layering, a simultaneity of space-times, and-through this compositional process-the most provisional protection against the forces of historical loss.
A third stylistic characteristic is that throughoutthe quartetSebald travels great distances- on foot, by train, and in the air-thus performing his textual strategy through which the life-paths of all the "fictional"narratorscrisscross his own and each other's. Paul Bereyter-an old teacher of Sebald's, an
ex-soldier in the Wehrmacht, and one of the many suicides of the quartethas had a life-long obsession, a kind of distorted love affair,with trains (which,
in fact, become the instrument of his death).
Railwayshad always meant a greatdeal to him-perhaps he felt they were
headedfordeath.Timetablesanddirectories,all the logisticsof railways,hadat
timesbecomean obsessionforhim [. . .] WhenMmine
Landausaidthis,I thought
of the stations,tracks,goods depots and signal boxes that Paul had so often
drawnon the blackboardandwhichwe hadto copy into ourexercisebooks as
carefullyas we could.(Emigrants61)
Sebald is still at it, drafting images of those networks, as he rides trains across
the European landscape, always shadowed by the image of the deportation
trains that carried people to Riga, Auschwitz, or Theresienstadt.
And, finally, Sebald makes extensive use of photographs, diagrams, pictures of diary entries, newspaper clippings, etc. This use of image generates
an ambiguous sense of veracity, a series of interruptionsin the flow of the text,
raises the question of the relationships between image and text, and gives the
quartet something of the feel of a personal scrap-book or journal. In Austerlitz, for instance, the eponymous narrator,turning to other forms of documentation as he begins to lose the sense of orientation provided by the structureof
reading, writing, and language,
began to assembleand recastanythingthatstill passedmusterin orderto recreatebeforemy owneyes, as if in thepagesof analbum,thepictureof thelandscape,now almostimmersedin oblivion,throughwhich myjourneyhadtaken
me (Austerlitz121).
This, in fact, describes the entirety of the quartet as a whole; they are a series
of personal albums- of photos surroundedby extended captions-that stand
against both the abstraction of history and the absolute darkness inflicted by
time. But the most deeply personal is also the most deeply collective.
Displacement, then, is anothername for walking, writing, traveling, and
the historical process itself. It is also a compositional method, a gathering of

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the discarded and a re-presentationof them in writing and photographs. As Sebald, in an exact description of his own strategy, says:
I was astonishedby the way Austerlitzputhis ideastogetheras he talked,forming perfectlybalancedsentencesout of whateveroccurredto him, so to speak,
andthe way in whichin, his mind,the passingon of his knowledgeseemedto
becomea gradualapproachto a kindof historicalmetaphysic,bringingrememberedeventsbackto life. (Austerlitz13)
In all four books Sebald is constantly on the move, as through the apparentstasis of letters he walks, gathering history as he goes, across the landscapes of
Europe, North America, Africa, China, the United States, and Brazil.
Walking is writing; walking is reading. Solvitur ambulando-walking,
or so we hope, will solve everything. Sebald's style of walking, like his writing, is usually a kind of drifting ramble that stumbles upon deeply embedded
connections between places and times. He is always travelling across the landscape of the intricate calligraphy of history, and the pages are inevitably torn,
stuck together by centuries of weather, or the ink has run so that only the
blurred excrescence, and no longer the meaning, of the writing is visible. We
know that writing has occurred, that a hand has marked the page, but the content of that trace has vanished. It is similar to the migrations of moths described by Austerlitz's uncle, Alphonso.
The trails of light which they seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of
curlicuesandstreamersandspirals[. . .] didnotreallyexist [. . .] butweremerely
phantomtracescreatedby the sluggishreactionof the humaneye, appearingto
see a certainafterglowin the place fromwhichthe insectitself, shiningof only
the fractionof a secondin the lamplight,hadalreadygone. (Austerlitz93)
This, for Sebald, is the manner of the appearing and vanishing of all eventhorizons. The thing itself is always already gone, but its "phantomtraces"-a
product of the conjunction of an object and the human capacity for perception-are, at least for a moment, assignable. It is this evanescence of the
movement of history that Sebald attempts to capture and pass along through
his browsings in libraries, museums, streets, caf6s, ruins, and the other sites of
the sedimentation of history.
In Vertigo, the first of the four novel-memoirs, Sebald sets out from
England, where he has been living for the past quartercentury, and heads for
Vienna. Early every morning, he sets out to
walk withoutaim or purposethroughthe streetsof the innercity, throughthe
Leopoldstadtandthe Josefstadt[.. .] If the pathsI hadfollowedhadbeeninked
in, it wouldhave seemedas thougha man had kept tryingout new tracksand
connectionsover and over, only to be thwartedeach time by the limitations
of his reason,imagination,or will-power,andobligedto turnback again.(Vertigo 34)

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And, as he is recounting his first arrivalin England in 1966, Sebald notes that
in the utterlydesertedhotel I wouldregularlybe overcomeby such a sense of
aimlessnessandfutilitythatI wouldgo out, purelyin orderto preservean illusion of purpose,andwalkaboutamidstthe city'simmenseandtime-blackened
19th centurybuildings,with no particulardestinationin mind [. . .] (Emigrants 156).
The Rings of Saturn opens with Sebald, headed out for a walk in Suffolk,
being struck by "an unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with
the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even
in that remote place" (Rings 3). Taken to a hospital, "in a state of almost total
immobility,"he recalls that "[I]t was then in my thoughts that I began to write
these pages" (Rings 3). Walking, writing, the making and unmaking of history: all are continuously being-displaced and displacing, although all are also
punctuated by the movement of bodies like the fall of a striding foot that
arches and folds itself back down on the uneven surface of the earth.
Such complex networks of movement bring history back toward us as
we attempt to live our way ahead, a step at a time. The past is always coming
to meet us from out ahead of us. "And so they are ever returning to us, the
dead," writes Sebald. "At times they come back from the ice more than seven
decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones
and a pair of hobnailed boots" (Emigrants 23). The dead come back as ghosts
of image and language, and it is such a language, with its washed out and
blurredtraces, that we must attemptto decipher if we are to imaginatively read
the rubble of history and respond to the question of ethics.
One piece of that rubble is called "colonialism" and Sebald, although his
novel-memoirs extend beyond this particularfragment of the ruins, necessarily encounters the effects of this devastation wrought by the powers of imperialist desire. In the quartetthere are a number of important strands that make
visible the damage wrought by the colonialist enterprise. These include, perhaps most extensively, the relationship between Joseph Conrad8 and Roger
Casement that geographically links Poland, England, Belgium, Ireland, and
the Congo, as well as conceptually linking the logic of the violence of colonialism with the violence of mandated heterosexuality. As Sebald says of
Casement, who was the first to report the European brutality at work in the
Congo and was imprisoned and eventually executed by the English not only
for attempting to bring German arms into Ireland, but also on the grounds of
his homosexuality:
We may drawfromthis the conclusionthatit was preciselyCasement'shomosexualitythat sensitizedhim to the continuingoppression,exploitation,enslavementanddestructionacrossthe bordersof social class andrace, of those
who werefurtherfromthe centersof power.(Rings134)

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Slowly but relentlessly, Sebald shows the effects that the violence inherent in
systems of power has on individual lives.
There are also, in Sebald's commentary on his own adopted home, extended ruminations on the collapse of England, as if it were a building rotten
from within that finally implodes from its own weight hurried along by the
gnawing of mice and termites. The post-colonial trauma is also seen in Sebald's exploration of the historical links between Brazil and Holland, or, to follow the model of the novel-memoir, of Brazil-Holland as a single site. All sites
are complexly differentiated networks of organized power, the railways and
airways of commerce, pathways and roadways, and of the dynamic hybridity
of languages. Colonialism, like all the other currents of detritus we call history, must be thought of as a series of such hyphenated sites that might be excavated and (re)transcribed.
The dead, in their phantasmaticforms, return.In The Rings of Saturn Sebald travels to The Hague to examine Rembrandt's"Anatomy Lesson," which
is exhibited at the Mauritshuis. He had spent the evening before the museum
visit in the "extraterritorialpart of town [. ..] buying a carton of chips at
McDonald's, where [he] felt like a criminal wanted world-wide" (Rings 83).
There are, gathered in the scene aroundhis hotel, oriental men, American limousines, and a pimp in a Tyrolean hat. The world, always globalized, gathers
its differences into a quasi-unity of place. The next day, Sebald visits the museum and re-narratesthe facts about its construction given by his guide book.
It was, he writes,
builtby GovernorJohannMaurits,in his homelandwhilsthe was in Brazilfor
seven years,andfittedout as a cosmographicresidencereflectingthe wonders
of the remotestregionsof the earthin keepingwith his personalmotto:"Even
untothe limitsof ourworld."Reportshaveit thatwhenthe housewas openedin
May 1644, threehundredyearsbeforeI was born,elevenIndiansthe Governor
hadbroughtwith him fromBerlinperformeda danceon the cobbledsquarein
frontof the new building,conveyingto the townspeoplesome sense of the foreign landsto whichthepowerof theircommunitynowextended.Thesedancers,
aboutwhomnothingelse is known,have long since disappeared,as soundless
as shadows[...] (Rings83)
The Indians, already commodified, had been brought back from Brazil to
Berlin and were being used to represent the foreign as it was seen in thrall to
the power of Holland. We do not know what the Indians saw or felt, there in
front of the Governor's palace.
Sebald, always on the move, will not wait. After visiting Amsterdam,
he is waiting at Schiphol Airport for his flight back to England and is reading Levi-Strauss's description, in Tristes Tropiques, of a street in Sio Paulo,
Brazil. Airports, flight paths, streets and byways, monitors and departure
times, books and narrativesof the other, heading home-which is simply the
most familiar form of the unheimlich--are all part of the cultural textuality

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Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

we call history, fiction, and post-coloniality. And along with these sorts of
transits, there is what Marx has called the "alchemical cauldron of capitalism,"9 that exchange of wealth that sublimates acts of crime into the archives
of high culture.
When he is back in the English countryside, walking once again, Sebald
meets a Dutchman named Cornelis de Jong, who
drewmy attentionto the fact thatmanyimportantmuseums,suchas the Mauritshuisin theHagueortheTateGalleryin London,wereoriginallyendowedby
the sugardynasties[. . .] The capitalamassedin the 18th and 19thcenturies
throughvariousformsof slaveeconomyis still in circulation,saidde Jong,still
bearinginterest,increasingmanytimes overandcontinuallyburgeoninganew.
(Rings194)
Colonialism, slavery, and the harnessing of the "native"other by the forces of
capital have all been drawn forward into the wake of the trans-epochal, where
we, once again, must retell the story from our own perspective, must reconstitute history in our various forms of writing.
In encountering Sebald's texts, we encounter the insoluble necessity of
thinking the relationship between time, narrative,memory, imagination, history, and ethics. The multiplicity of the genre of the novel-memoir requiresthe
poetic interaction of the imagination and memory, those very vague terms we
use to indicate the world-making creativity of language. In common sense
terms, memory is the cognitive power that refers to that which-has-been and
imagination refers to the possible, that which-might-be in the order of language. Sebald, however, deconstructs these distinctions, and, through his narrative strategies as well as through his use of images, he enacts the realization
that we imagine our memories and remember our imaginings.
His work is, however, not another example of facile postmodern selfreflexivity, pastiche, or a celebration of the play of signs, but rather, an anguished rendering of the very question of literature, whose paradoxical essence is to pose the question of the truthof events in the act of writing without
claiming the capacity to adequately respond to the question. The literary,
which necessarily leaves us suspended about the status of the real, always
leaves room for another writing to occur and reading Sebald requires that we
make this next step with the greatest modesty, with an acute wariness about
the cunning of representation and desire, as well as with the hope that injustice might be recognized in honoring those lost at the hands of the malevolent
and more powerful.
We cannot, of course, accomplish this task-which is the impossible
task Sebald has set himself-but we can, albeit all too briefly, indicate a direction for travel. Even as he recalls the colonial past to our attention, Sebald
painfully acknowledges the fallibility of memory and its links with the inventiveness of the imagination. In Vertigo, for example, while he is visiting the
village of his childhood for the first time in a quartercentury, his friend Lukas

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agreedwhenI saidthatoverthe yearsI hadpuzzledout a good deal in my own

mind,butin spiteof that,farfrombecomingclearer,thingsnow appearedto me
thanever.The moreimagesI gatheredfromthe past,I
moreincomprehensible
said, the moreunlikelyit seemedto me thatthe pasthad actuallyhappenedin
this or thatway,for nothingaboutit couldbe callednormal:most of it was absurd,andif not absurd,thenappalling.(Vertigo212)
As Hayden White has reminded us about the textual reconstruction of the past,
the opaquenessof the worldfiguredin historicaldocumentsis, if anything,increasedby the productionof historicalnarratives[.. .]Therelationshipbetween
thepastto be analyzedandthehistoricalworksproducedby analysisof thedocumentsis paradoxical:the morewe knowaboutthe past,the moredifficultit is
to generalizeaboutit.'o
The more Sebald produces the past by "uncovering" it through documentation, whether of text or image, the more its truth recedes from him in a series
of hermeneutic shocks that leads away from the normal through the absurd to
the appalling groundlessness of history.
And, while looking at the Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo in Brussels, he reflects (as he often does in the quartet) on the vantage point of an abstract height that we take when thinking about the past:
of history.It requiresa falsificationof perspecThis, then,is the representation
tive. We, the survivors,see everythingfromabove,see everythingat once, and
still we do not knowhow it was [. . .] Are we standingon a mountainof death?
Is thatourultimatevantagepoint?(Rings125)
Or, as Sebald's uncle Adelwarth notes in a diary,
Memory[. . .] oftenstrikesme as a kindof dumbness.It makesone'sheadheavy
and giddy,as if one were not lookingback down the recedingperspectivesof
time butratherdownon the earthfroma greatheight,fromone of thosetowers
whose tops arelost to view in the clouds.(Emigrants145)
It is as if, as we look in the direction we think of as "back,"we were also looking "down" from our self-constructed abstractions, that inevitable drawing
away from the immediate, that cannot not distort the perspective on the past.
The vantage point of the survivors is indeed built upon carnage and forgetfulness. In Benjamin's well-known thesis on the philosophy of history, he
notes that
Whoeverhademergedvictoriousparticipatesto this day in the triumphalprocession in whichthe presentrulersstepoverthosewho arelying prostrate[...]
Forwithoutexceptionthe culturaltreasures[thevictor]surveyshave an origin
whichhe cannotcontemplatewithouthorror[. . .] Andjust as sucha document
[of civilization]is not free of barbarism,barbarismtaintsalso the mannerin
whichit was transmittedfromone ownerto another."
The one who recognizes this, as Sebald does, "regardsit as his task to brush
history against the grain."12 For a time, those who have vanished regain a

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Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

voice; for a time, the category of the "victors" is transvaluatedby writing on

behalf of the lost. But even if, as writers or readers, we do history "againstthe
grain"of the apparentvictors, we are not freed from an acknowledgement that
our knowledge, too, rests on a "mountainof death."
Sebald himself, however, moved away from this vantage point of the survivors when, on December 14, 2001, he died in a car accident. He no longer
shares our barbaricperspective and we are not allowed to know how the dead
see those of us who, while the sun still shines on the hills, survive. Perhaps we
are even more ghostly and insubstantial than they are, but we cannot know,
only imagine. "It does not seem to me," Austerlitz says:
thatwe understand
the laws governingthereturnof thepast,butI feel moreand
moreas if timedidnotexist at all, only variousspacesinterlockingaccordingto
therulesof a higherformof stereometry,
betweenwhichthe livingandthe dead
can movebackandforthas theylike, andthe longerI thinkaboutit the moreit
seems to me thatwe who are still alive areunrealin the eyes of the dead,that
only occasionally,in certainlightsandatmosphericconditions,do we appearin
theirfield of vision. (Austerlitz185)
The hyphen in the novel-memoir is, it seems, a portal through which figures
of both the living and the dead can pass. We encounter the past, composed by
the artist,just as, perhaps, we exist at the edge of the field of vision of the dead.
Sebald has, for us on this side of the "dividing line with ordinary life on one
side and its unimaginable opposite on the other" (Austerlitz 297), become one
of his own images. He speaks, eloquently, but he now needs-like all of history- translators,composers, transmitters,relays.
The problem, then, is this. If the veracity of memory is always in doubt
because of the uncountable displacements at work in its representationand if
we would like to make ethical judgements on the tragedies of colonialism, the
Holocaust, or any other event-network,then how should we proceed? The only
way ahead that I can see is to follow Sebald and others who have already begun this work: to think the exigencies of narrative and temporality, to mark
the many ways in which the so-called past-present-futureinterpenetrateone
another.
Whenevera shiftin ourspirituallife occursandfragmentssuchas thesesurface,
we believe we can remember.But in reality,of course,memoryfails us. Too
many buildingshave fallen down, too much rubblehas been heapedup, the
morainesanddepositsareinsuperable.(Rings177).
And yet this catastrophe,however ephemeral, nonetheless appearsin language.
Temporality is the differentiality of displacement itself, but in this process something is mysteriously transmitted,a complex series of relationships
called the "I,""truth,"or "history."This is one version of what Sebald examines under the categories of memory's inability to accurately represent the
past, the commemorative imagination's recalling of the past, and the different

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379

rates of speed in which the past is abraded and ultimately obliterated. Everything wears down, but different things do so at different rhythms. And, even as
the wearing-down occurs, there are unexpected conjunctions of spaces and
times.
In a long meditation on time, Austerlitz reflects that human life is governed less by time than by the weather,
and thus by an unquantifiabledimensionwhich disregardslinear regularity,
does notprogressconstantlyforwardbutmovesin eddies,is markedby episodes
of congestionandirruption,recursin ever-changingform,andevolvesin no one
knowswhatdirection[. ..] I shallfindthatall momentsof time haveco-existed
simultaneously,in whichcase none of whathistorytells us wouldbe true,past
eventshavenot yet occurredbut are waitingto do so at the momentwhen we
thinkof them,althoughthat,of course,opensup the bleakprospectof everlasting miseryandneverendinganguish.(Austerlitz100)
Along with this anguish also comes the radical enigmaticity of the rendezvous
of heterogenous space-times. While Sebald is riding a train between Heidelberg and Bonn, a "young woman with brown beret boards the train, who, without a doubt, is Elizabeth, daughterof James I [. .. and] suddenly, I felt we were
on our way to the far north, approaching the furthermost tip of the island of
Hokkaido" (Vertigo 255). Writing as displacement, then, allows for the astonishing conjunction of times and places that enables us to utter, and, therefore,
to respond to the phantom traces of the past as they reappear.Ghosts return
and we must, to do them justice, respond to their lamentations. But to accomplish any of these activities, which are the tasks of literature, we must slow
down and pace ourselves. We must, at some point, come to a stop.
And so we circle back to Brazil, which Sebald reminds us takes its name
from the French word for charcoal.'3 Each word is a migratory act, a moment
of exile, a crossroads of history. It is this charcoal that is Brazil, England, Germany, the United States, and all other sites, with which I will conclude. Charcoal, of course, comes from a burning and a having-been-burned. It is the
residue of combustion, which, for Sebald
is the hiddenprinciplebehindevery artifactwe create.The makingof a fishof a chinacup,or productionof a televisionprogram,all dehook,manufacture
on
the
same
pend
processof combustion.Like ourbodiesandlike our desires,
the machineswe havedevisedarepossessedof a heartwhichis slowly reduced
to embers.Fromthe earliesttimes,humancivilizationhas been no morethana
strangeluminescencegrowingmoreintenseby the hour,of which no one can
say whenit will beginto waneandwhenit will fade away.(Rings170)
But charcoal is not simply a fading away into nothingness, an ember glowing
in the dark. It is a type of drawing, a tool for making yet another series of
marks on a page. The hand, the page, the letters, the tool, the past and the present: all are charcoal, left-overs, but such residue can still be used to compose

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Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

novel-memoirs that imaginatively re-make history and give us-in the midst
of our fear, ignorance, vertigo, and blindness-the possibility of a writing that
can say violence and can say justice, that can say its own burning.
'W.G. Sebald,Schwindel.Gefiihle.(Frankfurtam Main:Eichborn,1990;Frankfurtam
Main:FischerTaschenbuch1994;3rded. 2000)./ Vertigo,trans.MichaelHulse(New York:New
Directions,1999). Die Ausgewanderten.Vier lange Erzihlungen.(Frankfurtam Main:Eichborn, 1992; Frankfurtam Main:FischerTaschenbuch1994; 6th ed. 2001). / The Emigrants,
trans.MichaelHulse(New York:New Directions,1997).Die Ringedes Saturn.Eine englische
amMain:Eichborn,1992;Frankfurt
amMain:FischerTaschenbuch1997;
Wallfahrt.(Frankfurt
Frankfurtam Main:FischerTaschenbuch1997; 3rd ed. 2000). / TheRings of Saturn,trans.
MichaelHulse (New York:New Directions,1998).Austerlitz.Munich,Vienna:Hanser2001 /
Austerlitz,trans.AntheaBell. (New York:RandomHouse,2001). All citationswill be fromthe
Englishversions.
2DavidW. Price, HistoryMade,HistoryImagined:Contemporary
Literature,Poiesis,
and thePast. (Champaign-Urbana,
IL:U of IlliniosP, 1999)36.
3ArthurWilliams,"TheElusiveFirst PersonPlural:Real Absences in ReinerKunze,
Bernd-DieterHiuge,and W.G.Sebald.""WhoseStory?"-Continuitiesin Contemporary
German-languageLiterature.Eds. ArthurWilliams,StuartParks,JulianPreece.(New York:Peter
Lang, 1998) 111.
4GeorgLukics, The Theoryof the Novel,trans.AnnaBostock.(London:MerlinPress,
1978) 89.
5Lukics,TheTheoryof theNovel 122.
6Lukics,TheTheoryof theNovel 127.
7Andr6Aciman,"Inthe Crevasse,"Commentary103.6(June1997)64.
8SebaldwritesextensivelyaboutConrad'speripateticjourneying."Inthe courseof the
long voyage,in this dispiritedframeof mind,the madnessof the whole colonialenterprisewas
graduallybornein uponConrad[. ..] Bordeaux,Tenerife,Dakar,Conakry,SierraLeone,Cotonou, Libreville,Loango,Banane,Boma-after four weeks at sea, Conradat last reachedthe
Congo,one of thoseremotedestinationshe haddreamtof as a child.At thattimetheCongohad
beenbuta whitepatchon themapof Africa[. . .] sincethen,thewhitepatchhadbecomea place
of darkness.And the fact is thatin the entirehistoryof colonialism,most of it not yet written,
thereis scarcelya darkerchapterthanthe one termedTheOpeningof the Congo"(Rings117).
Sebaldproceedsto narratethis history.
9KarlMarx,"EighteenthBrumaireof Louis Bonaparte."TheMarx-EngelsReader.Ed.
RobertTucker.(New York:W.W.Norton& Company,1978)611.
"'HaydenWhite,"TheHistoricalTextas LiteraryArtifact."LiteraryTheory:AnAnthology. Eds. JulieRivkinandMichaelRyan.(Malden,MA: Blackwell,1998)1719.
"WalterBenjamin,"Theseson the Philosophyof History,"Illuminations.Ed. Hannah
Arendt.(New York:SchockenBooks, 1969)256.
'2Benjamin,"Theseson the Philosophyof History"257.
13Webster'stells us that"Brazil"comes intoEnglishfromeitherOld Spanishor OldPortuguese,brasil,fr.brase,livecoals;fr.thecolorof thewood.My Braziliancousin-in-law,Denise
Sibal,tells me thatin schoolshe learnedthat"Brazil"comesfromthe indigenousTupi-Guarani
wordfor "redwood."
All the derivations,whateverthe etymologicalhistory,seemlinkedto both
wood andthe rednessof flame.

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