Traces of Trauma – part 1

Legenda, which is the publishing imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association, is on something of a Sebald kick at the moment.  Two years ago they issued the rather massive anthology Saturn’s Moons: W.G. Sebald – A Handbook (which I covered extensively over several posts) and they will publish Helen Finch’s book Sebald’s Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life later this summer.  But in the meantime, they have just released Dora Osborne’s Traces of Trauma in W.G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr.

Why these two authors?  Osborne explains that Sebald and Ransmayr are both representative of post-postwar literature, both share a skepticism towards the idea of human progress, and both “respond to the non-viability of conventional forms of narrative after 1945.”  Sebald and Ransmayr are “caught between a contemporary espousal of postmodernist gestures and a nostalgic or melancholic attachment to modernist ones.”  As the title of her book makes clear, Osborne sees trauma as a central way of defining the legacy of the Holocaust and she opts to use trauma theory (largely derived from Freud and Walter Benjamin) as the principal lens through which she will explore the works of Sebald and Ransmayr.

For Freud, “violent experiences are not registered consciously because the subject does not have the psychic resources to process them,” hence trauma works on the memory belatedly and in unexpected ways.  The role of psychoanalysis is to work backward from the symptoms of trauma to locate the hidden, forgotten event that provoked the disorder. But the role of the creative writer is the totally different challenge of attempting to let non-participants or outsiders somehow comprehend the trauma of others, and this inevitably involves ethical, historical, and other complex issues.  “The production of narrative should offer a means for remembering personal experience and commemorating collective events [e.g. the Holocaust], but it is also compromised by the inadequacy of memory and the limits of perspective.”  And the dangers for a writer like Sebald or Ransmayr, who felt compelled to write about events that neither experienced personally, is “to be alert to the dangers of encroaching on territory which is not his own, a danger perhaps inherent in responding to the difficult imperative of writing about the lives of others.”

Thus, in a nutshell, it is Osborne’s intention to examine works by these two authors to see how they deal with the traumas caused by the Second World War.  In order to focus more closely on the Sebald half of her book, I’m going to ignore the chapters dedicated to two books by Ransmayr: The Dog King and The Terrors of Ice and Darkness.  I wrote about the latter book several years ago, although I can now see from Osborne’s book how much I missed the first time through.

Osborne dedicates a chapter each to Sebald’s books The Emigrants and Austerlitz.  In the four semi-biographical stories told in The Emigrants, the source of their trauma is no mystery, leaving Sebald to focus on the aftermath for each of the protagonists and on the Sebald-like narrator. In the chapter called “Displacement, Dysfunction, and Erasure in The Emigrants” she initially approaches the four stories through Freud’s case from 1909 known as “Little Hans,” which was well-known to Sebald and directly referenced by him in After Nature and elsewhere.  Peculiar to this case were characteristic spatial anxieties (“the spaces of habitation and travel”) that are shared by all of the main individuals portrayed in The Emigrants.

I will show how moments of breakdown or collapse in Sebald”s stories expose the experiences of loss that irreparably mark the lives of the emigrants and overwhelm the attempt to give belated expression to them in narrative.  In other words, I will show how, in The Emigrants, Sebald moves between the two positions of his emigrant protagonists and his emigrant narrator, that is, between a tracing of the modern experience of displacement and dispossession and its retracing as part of a post-postwar narrative.

Osborne argues that Sebald continually demonstrates that the narrator is only permitted to see traces of the traumas experienced by the others.  Even the photographs embedded in the texts tend to obscure rather than enlighten the narrative.  Thus, The Emigrants is about limits – the limits of the protagonists’ abilities to cope with their traumas and the limits of the narrator to effectively grasp the lives of others.

The emigrants seek to escape the constraints of family, family history, and history writ large, but the systems via which they seek liberation are found to be overwhelming because they are implicated in the monstrous working of recent history.  Sebald the post-postwar author is acutely aware of the sense of dislocation, even disintegration affecting the post-Holocaust subject, and viewed from this perspective, the lives he attempts to describe can only be represented in their drive to self-erasure.

In my next post, I’ll say something about Osborne’s chapter on Austerlitz.

Where Everything Is South

In the 847 days that must elapse between the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition’s departure from and return to Vienna, Johann Haller uses an exclamation mark only twice in his journal entries: both times on the day of the machinist’s death. The punctuation of mourning or horror – I do not presume to judge. I have simply preserved these marks and passed them on, so delicate and so natural, as fossils of an unrepeatable emotion.

Christoph Ransmayr Terrors of Ice

The narrator of Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991) tells an absorbing three-tiered tale of Arctic exploration. The main story recounts the ill-fated Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1872-74. A second, somewhat minor story follows an Arctic-obsessed young man named Josef Mazzini who disappeared into the far north in 1981. And the third layer concerns the narrator himself, who claims to have known Mazzini briefly in Vienna and whose subsequent obsession leads him not into the Arctic but into the archives.

Ransmayr writes in a documentary prose style that occasionally drifts quietly into a kind of poetic hysteria. The documentary style is particularly well-suited to the story of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition, where the narrator includes many quotations from diaries and other historical sources. Here’s Julius Payer, one of the leaders of the 1872-74 Expedition, writing in his diary as their ship becomes locked in Arctic ice:

The rumbling scaffolds of ice rise, jerk, and collapse, like a foundering city…New masses break off from the circumference of our small floe; the slabs sway vertically above the sea, an incalculable force raising them in arches and vaults, the fields literally lifting as bubbles, a grim reminder of the elasticity of ice. Crystalline hosts wage war on all sides, and between their flanks the surging water floods into the sunken basins; cliffs of ice plunge to ruin, and rivers of snow flow from their bursting slopes.

Payer’s diary is filled with the lush, beautifully obscure language of geology and the sciences:

The dolerite of Franz Josef Land is medium-grained, dark leek-green in color, and consists of plagioclase, augite, olivine, titaniterous iron, and iron chlorite.

The Expedition, which spent two terrible winters stuck in the ice, suffered horribly, all for the honor of hoping to discover something new. Nevertheless, it was the kind of historic event that enthralled Josef Mazzini, a young rebellious man from Trieste, who fell hard for the tales of heroism and adventure that comprise Arctic history. After drifting through Vienna, Mazzini set out for the same spot where the Austro-Hungarian Expedition departed – Longyearbyen, a small town located on a group of Norwegian islands far above the Arctic Circle. There, he convinced a local oceanographer to teach him the difficult tasks required to manage a dog sled team. One November day in 1981, when the oceanographer was away delivering a research paper, Mazzini stole his dog sled team and disappeared forever into the void.

Initially, the narrator is only curious about the motives that drove his acquaintance to fling himself into the Arctic. “Who would go to the Arctic just to imagine what once was…?” But as the narrator plunges into the history of Arctic exploration, he finds, instead of heroism and idealism, a “chronicle of failure”, a “dance of death.” The narrator comes to see that beneath the veneer of science and bravery the real motivating traits for Arctic exploration were egotism, vanity, willful blindness, nationalistic ambition, greed, and a powerful capacity for self-delusion. On top of that, the rapidity with which advances in technology rendered the previous generation’s “heroism” obsolete only added to the absurdity of the quest to inch closer and closer to the North Pole and the Northeast Passage. Here the narrator imagines Mazzini as he flies north toward his Arctic destination:

Nowadays every scurvy vacationer could fly over the fuckin’ pole in a Boeing – yeah, wearing a coat and tie, eating steak from a plastic bag on his knees, and holding his Kodak to the porthole.

The narrator roams through the minds of the main characters, but retains a curious reticence that occasionally forces him to pull up short.

Do they talk a lot about women? Or do they sometimes have a desire to lean against each other, to embrace? The world they come from severely punishes such love. But what laws are valid in the ice? Is it enough just to have the doctor or whoever is on nursing duty stroke their brows when they lie there with fever? I do not know.

The two harrowing tales of Arctic obsession are delivered with economy and suspense, but it is the narrator – elusive and often invisible – who is the real crux of the novel. Like the narrators in the works of W.G. Sebald, Ransmayr’s self-effacing narrator provides the moral compass and historical corrective and who turns the past into parables.

While my imagination pictures the Admiral Tegetthoff steaming past its first fields of drift ice and Josef Mazzini on his Scandinavian Airlines flight watching clouds tower up from below, I let myself sink gently back into the darkness of time, glide down through the centuries to the beginnings of a great longing.

And:

Time is a circle. Things return that they thought had sunk from sight long ago. One morning the cadaver of Bop, the Newfoundland that had been swallowed by the winter’s ice, is lying there on the snow again…as if he had died yesterday…Everything, including every hope, must be buried here twice, three times, again and again.

And:

This report is also an ongoing tribunal held in judgment of the past. I weigh, consider, imagine, and play with the possibilities of reality.

As the reader who brought Ransmayr to my attention noted to me, the tangents between Ransmayr and Sebald are tantalizing. The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, which was originally published in Germany (as Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis) in 1984, includes historic photographs and some of Julius Payer’s Arctic drawings, much as Sebald would do four years later when he began publishing extracts from his novel Schwindel. Gefuhle in the magazine Manuskripte in 1988. Ransmayr, like Sebald, pits mankind’s delusional quests against a chaotic, but all-powerful Nature.

There is no more melancholy scene than the whispering death of ice under the clouds of a night sky. In slow and proud ceremonial procession the white coffins are relentlessly borne to their graves beneath a southern sun. [Julius Payer]