A Man Marked by an Image

I written several times before about some of the parallels I see between the art of W.G. Sebald and Chris Marker.  Recently, Afterall Books began issuing a new series of books (distributed by MIT Press), each of which is based on a single work of art, such as Hanne Darboven’s Cultural History, 1880-1983 (owned by the Dia Foundation) Yvonne Rainer’s The Mind Is a Muscle, and Marker’s La Jetée.  Reading Chris Marker: La Jetée byJanet Harbord only convinced me further that their work has much in common.

As Harbord notes, La Jetée “tells the story of a man marked by an image rather than a memory.”  This is a pretty good description of Sebald’s enterprise of discovering the history he did not experience through images, object, and walks; and this seems particularly true of Austerlitz, in which Jacques Austerlitz tries to uncover a family history he that had been kept from him most of his life.

The broken statues and half-demolished buildings that populate many of La Jetée’s images suggest the very incompleteness of both experience and memory.  At the same time, this sense of incompleteness “allows our own supplementation, our own interpretive creations, to take root.”  Sebald, whose real topic can be said to be history, turned to narrative fiction precisely because he felt that only an act of the imagination could bring us closer to experiencing other times and other people’s lives.  Not surprisingly, the characters in Marker’s film and Sebald’s books frequent museums.  The museum provides each artist with a complex commentary on the tangled relationship between history and the artifice that is memory.  It serves as both a starting point in one’s exploration of the past, as well as a dead end.

When Harbord writes of Marker’s work on Alain Resnais’ 1955 Holocaust film Night and Fog, she notes that “the [film's] narration  articulates questions of memory as place…Place is the retainer of traumatic memory if we know how to look.”

In one of the final images of the film the camera moves across the surface of a ceiling in a chamber.  The narrator says this: ‘The only sign – but you have to know – is this ceiling, dug into by fingernails.’  The sentence hangs in the air in its ambiguity, or its fullness of meaning – ‘you have to know’ inferring that you need to be told for the nail marks to become legible….you need to bear this knowledge from the past.  The question of what we can bear to know of the past, and of what this means for the future, is laid before us in this moment.  At the centre of this circle of questions is the place of images, their ability, or not, to retain and pass on ‘facts’, trauma and meaning – in short, to deal with the ineffable.

This, of course, was the challenge for Sebald and it remains the challenge for us who try to come to grips with the success or failure of this aspect of his work.  Can evidence ever become experience?  The quote from Harbord immediately above reminded me of the ending of Austerlitz, where Sebald refers to another book – Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom.  Here’s what I wrote previously:

Toward the end of Heshel’s Kingdom, Jacobson comes across evidence of a totally different kind.  This is evidence left by Jewish prisoners being held in the infamous Fort IX in Kaunas, originally designed to protect the country from invaders, but used by the Nazis to terrorize and eliminate Lithuanian and European Jews.  It is with this event that Sebald ends his book Austerlitz.  In the bowels of the fort, where many thousands of Jews from all over Europe were held, tortured, and slaughtered, Jacobson comes across names and dates scratched into the walls between 1941 and 1944.  “Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44″, one says.  Another reads “Nous sommes neuf cents Francais.”  We are nine hundred Frenchmen.  As evidence, these stark scratchings seem minor in comparison to the visible horror of the photographs Jacobson has seen, but he suggests that these simple attempts to be remembered, to be human, have a chilling veracity and authenticity far more powerful than documents made by the killers of these same people.

Sebald Exhibit in Paris

The Goethe Institute in Paris has announced an exhibition of notes, postcards, photographs and documents relating to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, all drawn from the Sebald Archive in Marbach.  Here’s the information directly from their website.  Note the reading of extracts from the book on June 8.  (If anyone goes to the exhibition or the reading, please post a report in the Comments.)

W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz
Vernissage : lundi 18 mai à 19h
en présence d’Ulrich Raulff,
directeur du Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach
Introduction: Patrick Charbonneau, traducteur

Exposition
19 mai – 26 juin 2009
Goethe-Institut – 17 avenue d’Iéna, 75116 Paris
Entrée libre
Tél. +33 1 44439230

En coopération avec le Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

Notes, cartes postales, photographies et documents sur Austerlitz, parmi lesquels le manuscrit original.

Plus que tout autre auteur germanophone contemporain, W.G. Sebald (Winfried Georg Maximilian), qui aurait eu 65 ans le 18 mai,  est profondément ancré dans l’histoire de la littérature internationale. L’exposition présente, pour la toute première fois, le manuscrit original de son roman le plus célèbre Austerlitz. On peut y voir tout l’art de l’écriture poétique de Sebald, ainsi que le rapport qui le liait à la France, où il situe son action. Parmi les divers documents que nous a confiés le Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach où ils sont conservés, nous suivons, de la première à la dernière page du manuscrit, l’itinéraire du personnage principal Jacques Austerlitz à travers Paris, de la découverte de son prénom français jusqu’à la découverte de son père gare d’Austerlitz.
W.G. Sebald a reçu de nombreuses distinctions, notamment, en 2000, le Joseph-Breitbach-Preis, le prix littéraire allemand le plus prestigieux. Il est l’auteur, entre autres, de Schwindel, Gefühle (Vertiges, Gallimard, 2003); Die Ausgewanderten (Les Émigrants: quatre récits illustrés, Gallimard, 2003); Die Ringe des Saturns (Les Anneaux de Saturne, Gallimard, 2003);  Luftkrieg und Literatur (De la destruction comme élément de l’histoire naturelle, Actes Sud, 2004); Logis in einem Landhaus (Séjours à la campagne, Actes Sud, 2005).

Une lecture d’extraits du “roman du siècle” aura lieu par le comédien André Wilms le lundi 8 juin à 19h, avec une introduction de Patrick Charbonneau, traducteur.

Vertigo (the magazine, this time)

Almost a year ago I wrote about Will Stone’ book of poetry Glaciation, which includes a poem entitled SS Fort Breendonk, dedicated “In memory of WG Sebald.”  (Glaciation, by the way, recently won the 2008 Glen Dimplex Prize for poetry from the Irish Writers’ Centre.)  There is now an excerpt from SS Fort Breendonk at the publisher’s website.

As every dedicated Vertigo reader knows, Stone has also published a translation of Georges Rodenbach’s seminal photographically-illustrated novel Bruges-la-Morte, in which he updated the late 19th century photographs of Bruges with his own contemporary versions.

In a few days  the British film magazine Vertigo will publish Stone’s new essay At Risk of Interment – WG Sebald in Terezin and Breendonk, which deals with the holocaust-related aspects of Sebald’s book Austerlitz. Stone’s essay will includes his own photos of Breendonk.  Stone’s essay will be in the print version of Vertigo (which I am assuming means volume 4 number 2) and not in the separate “monthly online edition”.  April 23 is the scheduled release date, so there’s still time to subscribe, get to a bookseller’s, or figure out how to order a single copy at the magazine’s website.

Appointments To Keep in the Past

Eugene Atget, Rue de Valence, circa 1920s

From W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz:

If I am walking through [Paris] and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.  It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.  And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and we must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

This is my way of saying I will be in Paris for a week – walking, not blogging.

Adler’s Journey

Today’s New York Times/International Herald Tribune carries a review of H.G. Adler’s The Journey, a book that I wrote about briefly several months ago.  Written in the early 1950s and originally published in 1962, The Journey tells a story much like Adler’s own Holocaust experience (he lost 18 members of his own family, including his parents, and barely survived himself).  Nevertheless, according to reviewer Richard Lourie, this is “not a book of hopelessness and meaninglessness.”

“The truth is merciless,…always victorious.” Adler informs us, pointing the way to a means of surviving the worst that history can throw at people: “One must have a center, an unshakable quiet space that one clings to vigorously, even when one is in the middle of the journey, the unavoidable journey.”

For information about Theresienstadt for his book Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald turned to Adler’s monumental study Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie. The Journey is the first of  six novels by Adler (1910-1988) to be translated into English.  The Times has also put the opening part of the first chapter online.

Thus we remain in flight, there is no rest for us but the interior that we remember…

By the way, if you live anywhere near Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the book’s translator Peter Filkins is scheduled to read from The Journey at Bard College at Simon’s Rock (where Filkin teaches) on February 10 at 4:00 PM.