W.G. Sebald's Artistic Legacies: Memory, Word and Image 9789048554133

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
I Sebald’s Writings, History and Voids
1 W.G. Sebald’s Cartographic Images: Mapping the Historical Void
2 Imaging the Uncanny Memory: War and the Isenheim Altarpiece in 1917–19
3 The Worlds of Eternal Present: The Quest for the Hidden Patterns of Baroque Thought in Sebald’s literature
4 Seeing the Void? On Visual Representations of “Arisierungen,” Forced Absences, and Forms of Taking Inventory in the Installation Invent arisiert by Arno Gisinger
II Memory and Art in and Through Sebald
5 Monument and Memory
6 In the Labyrinth: Sebald’s (Postwar) French Connections
7 Leaning Images: Reading Nasta Rojc and Ana Mušćet
8 Working with Images: Documentary Photography in the Oeuvres of Mike Kelley and W.G. Sebald
9 Ghostwriting and Artists’ Texts: Raqs Media Collective’s We Are Here, But Is It Now?
III Writing with Images: Academic Practices and / as Ethical Commitment
10 Models for Word and Image: Georges Rodenbach to Christian Bök
11 On Writing: Propositions for Art History as Literary Practice
12 Memory, Word, and Image in Sebald and Joyce: Towards a Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Interventions in the Form of the Printed Book
13 Sebald’s Toute la mémoire du monde
14 As a Dog Finds a Spear
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies

Heritage and Memory Studies This ground-breaking series examines the dynamics of heritage and memory from transnational, interdisciplinary and integrated approaches. Monographs or edited volumes critically interrogate the politics of heritage and dynamics of memory, as well as the theoretical implications of landscapes and mass violence, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and conservation, archaeology and (dark) tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, the power of aesthetics and the art of absence and forgetting, mourning and performative re-enactments in the present. Series Editors Ihab Saloul and Rob van der Laarse, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Advisory Board Patrizia Violi, University of Bologna, Italy Britt Baillie, Cambridge University, United Kingdom Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, USA Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, USA Frank van Vree, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies Memory, Word, and Image

Edited by Leonida Kovač, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Ilse van Rijn and Ihab Saloul

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), University of Amsterdam.

Cover illustration: Tacita Dean, Michael Hamburger, 2007, 16mm colour anamorphic film, optical sound, 28 minutes. Film still. Courtesy of the Artist; Frith Street Gallery London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 975 8 e-isbn 978 90 4855 413 3 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463729758 nur 630 © All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Figures

7

Introduction 11 Leonida Kovač

I  Sebald’s Writings, History and Voids 1 W.G. Sebald’s Cartographic Images

29

2 Imaging the Uncanny Memory

47

3 The Worlds of Eternal Present

67

4 Seeing the Void?

81

Mapping the Historical Void Anna Seidl

War and the Isenheim Altarpiece in 1917–19 Juliet Simpson

The Quest for the Hidden Patterns of Baroque Thought in Sebald’s literature Jelena Todorović

On Visual Representations of “Arisierungen,” Forced Absences, and Forms of Taking Inventory in the Installation Invent arisiert by Arno Gisinger Veronika Rudorfer

II  Memory and Art in and Through Sebald 5 Monument and Memory

101

6 In the Labyrinth

115

Mark Edwards

Sebald’s (Postwar) French Connections Catherine Annabel

7 Leaning Images

131

8 Working with Images

151

9 Ghostwriting and Artists’ Texts

167

Reading Nasta Rojc and Ana Mušćet Sandra Križić Roban

Documentary Photography in the Oeuvres of Mike Kelley and W.G. Sebald Francesca Verga

Raqs Media Collective’s We Are Here, But Is It Now? Ilse van Rijn

III  Writing with Images: Academic Practices and / as Ethical Commitment 10 Models for Word and Image

185

11 On Writing

195

12 Memory, Word, and Image in Sebald and Joyce

227

Georges Rodenbach to Christian Bök James Elkins

Propositions for Art History as Literary Practice Tilo Reifenstein

Towards a Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Interventions in the Form of the Printed Book Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes

13 Sebald’s Toute la mémoire du monde 243 Leonida Kovač

14 As a Dog Finds a Spear

261

List of Contributors

283

Hilde Van Gelder

Index 289

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

List of Figures Diagram, W. G. Sebald. Austerlitz. New York: Modern Library, 2001, p. 31.39 Map, W. G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn. New York: New Directions, 1999, p. 148.42 Arno Gisinger, Invent arisiert, 2000. Exhibition view, inventARISIERT—Enteignung von Möbeln aus jüdischem Besitz, September 7 – November 19, 2000, Mobiliendepot (Furniture Collection), Vienna. Photo: © Arno Gisinger.86 Arno Gisinger, Ohne Titel / Untitled, from the series Invent arisiert, 2000, Lambdaprint on aluminum, 25 × 20 cm. © Arno Gisinger.88 Arno Gisinger, Ohne Titel / Untitled, from the series Invent arisiert, 2000, Lambdaprint on aluminum, 25 × 20 cm. © Arno Gisinger.89 Arno Gisinger, Ohne Titel / Untitled, from the series Invent arisiert, 2000, Lambdaprint on aluminum, 25 × 20 cm. © Arno Gisinger.90 Site of former Seething airfield.103 Seething Airfield. Google Earth, November 19, 2019.104 Recovered War Memorial, Great Yarmouth, 2002. Mark Edwards.108 No. II, 2014. Mark Edwards111 Installation view, ‘Monument’ SCVA, Norwich 2014. Mark Edwards.111 Ana Mušćet, from the series I Fighter (2018).138 Nasta Rojc, Alexandrina Onslow, private photo album Bajna bašta (Bajina bašta).141 From the private photo album belonging to Nasta Rojc.143 Nasta Rojc, unpublished autobiography Svjetlo, sjene, mrak [Light, Shadows, Darkness], 1918–19.146 W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001, cover. Courtesy W.G. Sebald Estate.154 Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective. Reconstruction #20 (Lonely Vampire), 2004–5. Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.159

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W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies

18a Mike Kelly, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), no date. Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Photographer unknown.160 18b Mike Kelly, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), 2000, video still, black and white, sound, 29:44. Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.160 19 W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Adelphi Edizioni, 2002. p.11. Courtesy of the W.G. Sebald Estate162 20 Comparison of two images in Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-lamorte. Photo: James Elkins.187 21 A possible stemma for novels with photographs. Photo: James Elkins.188 22 Possible absorption spectrum of a star. Photo: James Elkins.190 23 Schema of the relation between text and images in W.G. Sebald. Photo: James Elkins.191 24 Detail view of the Thomas Paine Monument, New Rochelle, NY, August 4, 2018. © Photo: Hilde Van Gelder.263 25 Allan Sekula, Thomas Paine Park, New York City and Cod Fisher, Dover, two Cibachrome matt photographs, framed measures 75 x 103.3 cm and 75.3 x 104 cm; and Dockers loading sugar ship, Calais, framed triptych, three Cibachrome matt photographs 51.8 x 200 cm, part of Deep Six / Passer au bleu, Part 1, “The Rights of Man” – 1er volet, “Les Droits de l’homme,” 1996/1998. Installation view, presented with selected items from Allan Sekula, Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010–13), of the exhibition Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus, curated by Carles Guerra, Anja Isabel Schneider, and Hilde Van Gelder, Barcelona, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2017. © Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Allan Sekula Studio. Collections Museum of Fine Arts, Calais and M HKA/Flemish Community of Belgium.264 26a Detail view of Allan Sekula, Deep Six / Passer au bleu, Part 1, “The Rights of Man” – 1er volet, “Les Droits de l’homme” (1996 / 1998), six Cibachrome matt photographs, two text panels, one chair, and woman reading in one of two books, variable dimensions. Installation shot from the exhibition Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus, curated by Carles Guerra, Anja Isabel Schneider, and Hilde Van Gelder, Barcelona, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2017. © Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy

List of Figures

26b

27

28 29 30

31

9

Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Allan Sekula Studio. Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Calais.265 Allan Sekula, Deep Six/Passer au bleu (1996/1998), installation view, detail, chair with public library copy French edition of Thomas Paine, Les droits de l’homme (1791–92), in Voyage, de l’exotisme aux nonlieux, curated by Chrystèle Burgard and Yannick Miloux, Musée de Valence, Summer 1998. © Allan Sekula Studio.266 Allan Sekula: The Dockers’ Museum including Mutiny [title by Allan Sekula], cartoon, graphic digitally rendered as vinyl cutouts, originally published in Labor Defender 11, no. 11 (December 1937), variable dimensions, installation view, Lumiar Cité, curated by Jürgen Bock, Lisbon, 2013. © Photo: DMF Fotografia, Lisbon. Courtesy Escola MAUMAUS and Allan Sekula Studio. Collection M HKA / Flemish Community of Belgium.268 Detail view of the Thomas Paine Monument, New Rochelle, NY, August 4, 2018. © Photo: Hilde Van Gelder.269 Allan Sekula, work scan of a transparency never selected by the artist, now part of the Allan Sekula Archive at the Getty Research Institute Special Collections. © Allan Sekula Studio.270 Allan Sekula, Midwife and newborn, Kassel, from Shipwreck and Workers (Version 3 for Kassel) (2005–07), ink printed on vinyl (print system VUTEK) 26 impressions, 243 x 338 cm. Collection MACBA, Barcelona. Gift of the artist. © Allan Sekula Studio.273 On the beach near Gunton Cliff, Lowestoft, January 30, 2020. © Photo: Hilde Van Gelder.276

Introduction Leonida Kovač Most of us, said Austerlitz, know nothing about moths except that they eat holes in carpets and clothes and have to be kept at bay by the use of camphor and naphthalene, although in truth their lineage is among the most ancient and most remarkable in the whole history of nature. —W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

In 2019, an international research project titled Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacy was organized by the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam. No one could have guessed when we began our work that December that only two months later, a single microparticle, neither living nor non-living, would radically change the way of human existence. The migration of this invisible entity has confronted us with, among other things, images from Bergamo and Manaus. I now read these scenes as a kind of prefiguration of the low-resolution photographs reproduced on the pages of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn which in the author’s narrative weaving exemplify what Walter Benjamin called a dialectical image. A week before this project began, we were shocked by the sudden demise of one our key contributors, Professor Thomas Elsaesser, who was Sebald’s friend and colleague, and founder of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Both Elsaesser and Sebald began their academic careers in the 1970s at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where they often lectured together on Weimar cinema. We did not hear Elsaesser’s talk in which he would reflect on Sebald’s work to coincide with the anniversary of the writer’s death on December 14, 2001. Instead, the recently deceased media archeologist was commemorated by a screening of his own captivating essay-film The Sun Island (2017) which exudes a Sebaldian impression. Writing this syntagm, I recall the lecture given by Jacques Derrida in 1994 at the conference Memory: The Question of Archives, whose texts were

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_intro

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later published under the title Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.1 In this text, Derrida explicitly identifies archive fever with the death drive, which Freud elaborated in the study Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920. He emphasizes that Freud used three different names for this drive: the death drive, the aggression drive, and the destruction drive, concluding that this drive is mute, “it never leaves any archives of its own” but destroys it in advance; the death drive is “anarchivic” and “archiviolithic.” Derrida further claims that the archive takes place at the site of the originary and structural breakdown of memory, so its structure is spectral. He also writes that there is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Addressing the question of “the truth of the truth,” Derrida recalls that Freud wanted to indicate this “vertiginous difference” between “material truth” and “historical truth.” It can be argued that W.G. Sebald, one of the most distinctive writers whose works appeared at the turn of the twenty-first century, was preoccupied with this “vertiginous difference.” After all, Sebald’s work has also been considered in the context of the notion of “spectral materialism.”2 His writing, which resists all determinants while emerging from the interspace of poetry, novel, essay, (auto)biography and travelogue, contains numerous meticulous reflections on non-human entities and natural phenomena in its narrative trajectories. With rare virtuosity, Sebald establishes striking relationships between the world of words and the world of images not only in ekphrastic descriptions, but also through a completely non-descriptive practice of incorporating visual material into the fabric of the text. In one of his last public appearances, Sebald said that older photographs, especially those black and white pictures that came from long-forgotten boxes, often had a secret appeal, and demanded that one should address the lost lives represented in them. Writing, he said, must be an attempt at the saving of souls—of course, in a non-religious sense. According to him, these pictures “hold up the flow of the discourse and, as one knows as a reader, one tends to go down this negative gradient with the book that one reads towards the end, so books have almost by definition an apocalyptic structure, and it is as well therefore to put weirs in here and there to hold up the inevitable calamity.”3 And Eric Santer has recalled Sebald’s statement 1 Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” 9–63. 2 Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. 3 Sebald, 92Y Readings, 92Y, New York, October 15, 2001, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?­v=ccMCGjWLlhY&frags=pl%2Cwn.

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about the key role of photographs in his quest to “produce the kind of prose which has a degree of muteness about it.”4 The question of unspeakable and unrepresentable catastrophe dwells within the subtext of Sebald’s writing; Benjamin’s preoccupation with natural history metamorphosizes in Sebald into a natural history of destruction, making it evident that history is lived as a trauma. Since the trauma is mute,5 Sebald never directly approaches the issue of concentration camps or the carpet-bombing of German cities, which exist in his works as ostinato motifs, but rather does it tangentially, by crystallizing dialectical images. In his narrative procedure, dialectical image is the key discursive figure and a trace leading to the thought of Walter Benjamin, whose life and work experiences multiple pref igurations in Sebald’s prose. Insisting on the notion of historical time as an antithesis of the idea of ​​a time continuum, Benjamin defines the dialectical image as “the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.”6 Introducing the distinction between historicism and historical materialism, he concludes that historicism considers history to be something that can be told,7 and therefore historical materialism should first attack the idea of ​​universal history, while “the historical materialist can take only a highly critical view of the inventory of spoils displayed by the victors before the vanquished. This inventory is called culture.”8 Heritage, memory, and material culture are the concepts contained in the name of the institution of higher education that has chosen to contextualize the discussion on the relationship of memory, words, and images precisely through Sebald’s artistic legacy. Ihab Saloul, founder of the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, reminds us that: memory is a volatile concept. The work of memory in all its forms, from historical essays to personal reminiscences, legal testimonies, and imaginative recreations, is not only slippery but also inherently contradictory. On the one hand, memory posits a past reality that is recalled outside the person’s subjectivity. Yet, on the other hand, memory requires a narrator who is equipped with conventional cultural filters of generational distance, age and gender, class, and political affiliations, on whose 4 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 151. 5 On the muteness of the trauma, see Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. 6 Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, 403. 7 Ibid., 406. 8 Ibid., 406–7.

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authority the truth of the past can be revealed. Memories are narrated by someone in the present but nonetheless we still use them as authoritative sources of historical knowledge. Moreover, memories are always mediated, even in the flashes of so-called involuntary memory. They are complex constructions in which our present experience (individual and collective) conjoins with images that are collected by the mind from all manner of sources, including from our inner worlds. Furthermore, we are constantly confronted with images of the past, whether we actively observe them or not. Memory moves from the world of smell, sensations, habits, and images to the outer world via cultural forms such as myths, folktales, and popular narratives in the ways that we talk about traditions, national consciousness, and identities. The work of memory, then, must address itself not only to questions of what happened but also to how we know things, whose voices we hear, and where silences persist.9

W.G. Sebald, a professor of European literature and the founder of the British Centre for Literary Translation, same as his colleague Thomas Elsaesser, exemplified the impossibility of separating academic from artistic discourse. As a narrator par excellence, Sebald internalized Benjamin’s statement about the everyday experience teaching us that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end, because we have lost an ability that seemed inalienable to us—the ability to exchange experiences.” Benjamin sees the cause of this phenomenon in the fact that “experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness […] Our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible.”10 These words, written in 1936, have lost none of their relevance to this day. In 2013, Rosi Braidotti published her book The Posthuman, asking the following questions in the introduction: [F]irstly what is the posthuman? More specifically, what are the intellectual and historical itineraries that may lead us to the posthuman? Secondly: where does the posthuman condition leave humanity? More specifically, what new forms of subjectivity are supported by the posthuman? Thirdly: how does the posthuman engender its own forms of inhumanity? More specif ically, how might we resist the inhuman(e) aspects of our era? And last, how does the posthuman affect the practice 9 Saloul, Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories, 4–6. 10 Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, in Illuminations, 83–84.

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of the Humanities today? More specifically, what is the function of theory in posthuman times?11

Aware of the impasse in which the humanities are today, we have sought with our conference Memory, World and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacy, from which this book originates, to articulate questions consonant with those posed by Braidotti, and not to offer the answers, but to ask them from divergent positions, through various verbal and visual narratives, to demand the inalienability of exchanging experiences. I will venture here to call Sebald’s writing posthuman and to corroborate this claim by using the words of Braidotti, who says that “[f]or posthuman theory, the subject is a transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations.”12 Listening carefully to the registers of that writing, in conceiving the conference we actually followed what Braidotti calls the golden rules of the new transdisciplinary models of thought required by posthuman critical theory: the importance of combining critique with creative figurations, the principle of non-linearity, and the power of memory and imagination:13 Freed from chronological linearity and the logo-centric gravitational force, memory in the posthuman nomadic mode is the active reinvention of a self that is joyfully discontinuous, as opposed to being mournfully consistent. Memories need the imagination to empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject, which becomes redefined as a transversal relational entity inhabited by a vitalist and multidirectional memory.14

The issue of memory is a kind of a leitmotif of this book that consists of three parts: “Sebald’s Writings, History and Voids,” “Memory and Art in and through Sebald,” and “Writing with Images: Academic Practices and/as Ethical Commitment.” The individual essays are included in them according to some loose, to use Sebald’s words, “family resemblances.” Each essay is a result of inter- and trans-disciplinary academic and/or artistic research and reflection, not only on Sebald’s work, but also on Sebaldian motifs in which countless parallel worlds nevertheless touch at some vanishing points. This book could be structured in many ways for, as Sebald wrote, “everything is 11 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 3. 12 Ibid., p. 193. 13 Ibid., p. 163. 14 Ibid., p. 167.

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connected across space and time.”15 The present structure aims to emphasize the wide range of mutually intertwined and inseparable issues articulated in Sebald’s works, as well as the specificity of his writing that deliberately blurred the border between academic and artistic discourse, requiring a different kind of knowledge. In her essay “W.G. Sebald’s Cartographic Images: Mapping the Historical Void,” Anna Seidl deals with the performatives of Sebald’s method of juxtaposing text and cartographic images: maps, tables, ground plans, diagrams, labyrinths, and what in his Vertigo is referred to as “physical geography.” The subject of her interest is the state of flux emerging from Sebald’s questioning of the status of truth through the constant change of positions and viewpoints. Seidl uses a series of examples to show how Sebald’s aesthetic form simultaneously positions and undermines subjective experience as well as the authority of text and image. Cartographic images, she argues, function as a poetical or rhetorical tool that represents two modes of reception: emotional-dynamic and discursive-static perspectives, whereby she identifies the alteration of emotional and strategic spaces as the structuring principle of Sebald’s memory project. Detecting a similarity between the ground plan of the torture chamber in Breendok Fort, reproduced in Austerlitz, and Améry’s shoulder joint, Seidl concludes that in Sebald’s text “the map, together with Améry’s words, the torture and its failed representation establish a state of flux, authorizing several perspectives by providing a variety of angles of reception.” Juliet Simpson discusses the process of re-semanticizing Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece at the end of the First World War, in “Imaging the Uncanny Memory: War and the Isenheim Altarpiece.” It was then that the German army dismantled the altar in Colmar and took it to Munich under the pretext of protecting it from possible destruction. For months, it was exhibited at the Alte Pinakothek and became an object of pilgrimage. The author approaches the reception of Grünewald’s work in the second decade of the twentieth century through a series of literary, philosophical, and political references from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which show the genesis of the term “medieval uncanny” or, in Benjamin’s words, “nocturnal,” that at some point in history could be operationalized within the nationalist agenda. Simpson notes that the Isenheim Altarpiece entered the war in 1917, as during its exhibition in Munich, where it was seen by hundreds of thousands of people in “ a year of anguish and national crisis,” Grünewald’s work was seen “as a presence not a past, closing the gap 15 Sebald, “Le promeneur solitaire,” in A Place in the Country, 149.

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between temporally and culturally distant and near.” She argues that in 1918 the Isenheim Altarpiece disturbed the relationship between memory and the present, not only because it was identified with the experience of terrible suffering and death, but primarily because it embodied the ability to imagine an almost impossible memory: life on the very brink of death. Paraphrasing Sebald’s appropriation of Browne’s thought according to which “on every living thing there lies the shadow of its ruin,” the author concludes that “every living thing contains the possibility of its own transfiguration,” so “in 1918, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, by accident or design, offered a homeopathy—a guide—to negotiate the infinitely fine line between ruin and possibility.” The theme of fluidity permeates Jelena Todorović’s essay “The Worlds of Eternal Present—The Quest for the Hidden Patterns of Baroque Thought in Sebald’s Literature.” She recalls that Baroque, like Sebald’s literary work, is impossible to def ine because they both map a volatile, fluid, and ever-changing world, and the notions of fragment and fragmentary implicitly shaped the outlines of the Baroque world. Hybridity, as a major legacy of the Baroque era, is what characterizes Sebald’s work as well, so she approaches it through the concepts of Baroque aesthetics, especially time and space, emphasizing the influence of the seventeenth-century physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne. Todorović points out that both Sebald’s and Browne’s notions of the eternal present include the experience of time as a complex and multifocal vision of the world. She has compared Sebald’s liminal space to the Mirror Palace or the Catoptic Box of Athanasius Kircher, and to Borromini’s architecture, arguing that “like the beholder in Borromini’s church, the reader of Sebald’s novels is never certain of the space and age he is in. The landscapes become townscapes of the past or the stages of a-temporal events. […] Nothing is what it seems, and everything is what is not.” Todorović has paid special attention to an analysis of The Paston Treasure (1663) painted by an unknown artist, and kept in the Norwich Museum, noting that William Paston was a friend of Browne and collaborated with him in scientific experiments. Veronica Rudorfer points to the still unresolved issue of plundering Jewish property that in National Socialist Germany went by the name of aryanizations. In her text “Seeing the Void? Visual Representations of ‘Arisierungen’ in works by Arno Gisinger, Anna Artaker and Maria Eichhorn,” she has focused on artistic researches that make visible the void that still exists in the cultural landscape of today due to aryanizations. She recalls that the restitution process is practically impossible due to the fact that the bureaucratically precise aryanizations successfully destroyed the traces of

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provenance of the stolen property. Since for many “aryanized” works of art, family libraries, cult items and everyday objects it is impossible to determine to whom they belonged before the implementation of racial laws, and so they remain in the collections of German museums and galleries. Rudorfer has considered the consequences of the crime of aryanization in the context of a current topic in contemporary art, which is the issue of the institutional critique. Her text analyses three complex artistic research projects realized in the form of site-specific installations. These are Invent arisiert, a work performed by Arno Gisinger at the invitation of the Imperial Furniture Museum in Vienna; an installation by Anne Artaker titled Rekonstruktion der Rotschild’schen Gemäldesammlung, set up on the site of the no longer existing Rothschild Palace in Vienna; and the interdisciplinary research done by Maria Eichhorn titled Restitutionspolitik / Politics of Restitution, presented in an exhibition format in 2004 at the Kunstbau in Munich. With his “Monument and Memory Paper,” Mark Edwards has written a kind of genealogy of his work Shelter, which he conceived and performed as an invited artist for the Monument exhibition set up in 2014 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art in Norwich, and then at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Calais. The artists were asked to contextualize the theme of the monument as related to the First or Second World War. The Sebaldian coincidence underlying Edwards’s reflection on the notion of the monument arises from the fact that both the writer and the photographer lived near the airfields from which Allied bombers departed toward German cities and industrial plants during the Second World War, and that both were fascinated by the east Anglian landscapes with their imprinted traces of former military bases. By choosing to photograph woodpiles constructed to store wood at the Hethel site, where a RAF military base once stood, and to display the black and white photographs in a large light-box format, Edwards has created a counter-monument that, he says, “serves memory with more fidelity.” A sort of memory that includes 131 German cities showered by incendiary bombs, 3.5 million homes destroyed, 7.5 million homeless persons, 12,000 downed bombers and 100,000 Allied soldiers among the countless civilian victims. “In the Labyrinth: Sebald’s (Postwar) French Connections,” Catherine Annabel detects the influences of the protagonists of the French new wave and new novel on Sebald’s work, specifically of Alain Resnais and Michel Butor. The frequency of labyrinth motifs in art immediately after the Second World War is explained by the fact that the war turned familiar landscapes into uncanny places of danger, while the experience of exile and displacement became common to millions of people. Sebald’s writing, in whose field of reference the horrors of the Second World War undoubtedly reside, abounds

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with labyrinths, which has led the author to search for a possible common origin of this theme in his, Resnais’s and Butor’s work. Noting that Butor and Resnais belong to a generation of French artists that was confronted with a peculiar denial of the Vichy past immediately after the liberation, Annabel also sees this denial as the context of the new novel and the new wave. The theme of French silence rhizomatically leads to Sebald’s great theme of German silence. The author pays particular attention to an analysis of Butor’s novel L’emploi du temps, in which “the capital of France hides behind the mask of Bleston,” although Bleston has usually been identified as Manchester, where Butor, like Sebald, was employed at the university for some time. In doing so, she meticulously reads Butor’s themes transfigured in Sebald’s work. Sandra Križić Roban’s essay “Leaning Images: Reading Nasta Rojc and Ana Mušćet” is also permeated by the theme of “seeing the void.” The void can here be understood in terms of the unrecorded history of struggle for women’s rights and for liberation from gender stereotypes in southeastern Europe, which is epitomized by the personality and work of the Croatian painter Nasta Rojc. Križić Roban has deliberately assumed the Sebaldian figure of a ghostwriter to narratively intertwine her own experiences of traveling across Scotland with reading the photographs that she has found in Rojc’s photo albums, the images taken in Scotland in 1925, as well as the painter’s autobiographical notes and a series of unfixed collages in which the contemporary artist Ana Mušćet has used fragments of photographs from Rojc’s legacy. In doing so, Križić Roban goes beyond the rigid standards of academic writing, relying on the multiplicity of procedures that Sebald applied in his research, whereby she modifies her points of view during research in relation to the available material and what she encounters. Aware of the fact that ekphrasis generates fundamental change in the way knowledge is acquired and created, opening the possibility of developing new tools for dealing with various aspects of history, Križić Roban has introduced the “personal practice of collecting evidence” in her essay, while her translation of images into text indicates that “there are many different ways to record something.” Francesca Verga in “Working with Images: Documentary Photography of Mike Kelley and W.G. Sebald” links the visual artist and writer by finding that both problematize the crisis of representation and explore repression in their work. For Verga, this lasting preoccupation with the repressed may stem from the fact that both Sebald and Kelly come from Catholic families. Out of their interest in hidden, inhibited, and uncanny elements that photographs cannot reveal, and memory cannot retrieve, Sebald and

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Kelly create parallel scenarios in which it becomes possible to uncover different projections and phantasms. Verga relates Sebald’s way of using photographs to Kelly’s monumental work Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (A Domestic Scene). She argues that in Sebald’s Emigrants, Vertigo and Austerlitz, which he did not call novels but “prose books of indeterminate kind,” photographs are used to create a fictional product from reality. As such, they simultaneously reveal the fictional property of memory and the memory inherent in fiction. Verga has identified a similar approach in Kelly’s work, where documenting photography intones only the beginning of a story that exists beyond the real. In “Ghostwriting and Artists’ Texts: Raqs Media Collective’s ‘We Are Here, But Is It Now?’” Ilse van Rijn reads in parallel the “character of a traveling narrator” in the chapter on “Max Ferber” from Sebald’s Emigrants and the concept of travel in a project that Raqs Media Collective realized in 2017 in the form of their three-part booklet We Are Here, But Is It Now? (the Submarine Horizons of Contemporaneity). Working at the intersection of contemporary art, historical research, theory and philosophical reflection, Raqs Media Collective exemplifies, like Sebald, a resistance to categorization and challenges what Derrida calls the “law of genre.” The author finds a connection between Sebald’s writing and the artistic discourse of Raqs Media Collective in the polyvocality inherent in both projects. Starting from the claim that in Sebald’s discourse ghostwriting enables one to deal with a present tense and a future already imbued with a violent and mythical past that cannot be escaped, Van Rijn concludes that ghostwriting “gives an aesthetic direction to the amalgam of voices buried in a complex historical period. Ghostwriting allows the assembly of different and differentiated historical voices, resulting in a dis-location of time and a stretching of space.” Understanding it as a process of mediating uncanny history, she explores various ways to use ghostwriting with the goal of structuring, confronting, and understanding what it means to be human in today’s hegemonic capitalist regime. Aware of the fact that the stories of marginalized persons remain untold, she raises the question of how to express what cannot, yet must, be said, and whether ghostwriting can give a voice to such speech. In his chapter “Models for Word and Image: Rodenbach to Christian Bök,” James Elkins focuses on the term “writing with images” in the context of which it has been common to consider Sebald’s work, in fact the very invention of “writing with images” has often been attributed to the writer. It could be said that Elkins’s keynote lecture, included here “Models for Word and Image: Rodenbach to Christian Bök” has also been written

Introduc tion

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with images to focus more clearly on the issue of historical memory, but of a different kind. Using the form of schematic chronology, as he calls it, Elkins draws attention to the practice of writing fictional prose with images long before Sebald, vividly showing the way in which Georges Rodenbach did so in 1892 in his book Bruges-la-morte. Elkins points out that there is not just one genealogy of writing with images that would lead from Rodenbach to Sebald. Considering Sebald’s work regarding the term “writing with images,” he singles out three specif ic procedures. These are the “Sebald paradox,” in which a sudden reference to the deep time in the images stands in contrast against the more continuously woven narrative; the practice of “anchoring” images in the nearby text; and the possibility that photographs might “promote forgetting” while the surrounding narrative “fosters remembrance.” The author also addresses the question of Sebald’s followers as well as completely different, transmedia literary practices articulated by the dynamics of words and images, such as Christian Bök’s Xenotext in which the use of scientif ic images along with improvised graphics illustrates the process of creating the first poem generated by a non-human organism. In the articulation and intonation of his presentation, Elkins focuses primarily on ways of paying academic attention to “writing with images,” asking an important question: “Can we avoid writing about photographs as illustrations of ideas in the texts and attend to text and images as equal partners in the construction of books that are not, in the end, amenable to the usual kinds of analysis that take text as the vehicle and arbiter of sense?” In his text “On Writing: Propositions for Art History as Literary Practice,” Tilo Reifenstein challenges the fundamental assumptions of art history as an academic discipline, primarily its methodology. In his demand to abandon the rigid disciplinary matrix, it is possible to recognize the echoes of Norman Bryson’s statement made almost forty years ago in the preface to his groundbreaking book Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, which reads: What is certain is that while the last three or so decades have witnessed extraordinary and fertile change in the study of literature, of history, of anthropology, in the discipline of art history there has reigned a stagnant peace; a peace in which—certainly—a profession of art history has continued to exist, in which monographs have been written, and more and more catalogues produced: but produced at an increasingly remote margin of the humanities, and almost in the leisure sector of intellectual life. What is equally certain is that little can change without radical

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re-examination of the methods art history uses—the tacit assumptions that guide the normal activity of the art historian.16

Starting from Sebald’s practice of verbo-pictorial writing, Reifenstein supports his demand to abolish the boundary that separates artistic practice from theory, that is, his demand for an art-historical text that, while not being external to its object of interest, must also have the creative charge of a literary text, among other things by Jean-François Lyotard’s conclusion that “terror through theory only begins when one also claims to axiomatize discourses that assume or even cultivate inconsistency, incompleteness, or indecidability.” The chapter “Memory, Word, and Image in Sebald and Joyce: Towards a Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Interventions in the Form of the Printed Book” by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes starts by detecting analogies in Joyce’s and Sebald’s procedures of inscribing visual contents into the fabric of a literary text. Deconstructing the Euclidian diagram reproduced in Finnegans Wake, Lerm Hayes emphasizes the agency of the “sigla” as a basis for both Joyce’s and Sebald’s memory work. Furthermore, she reminds the readers of the peculiar extensions of Joyce’s work in the oeuvre of Joseph Beuys. Analyzing the performatives of these distinctive artistic practices, Lerm Hayes has indicated their spaces of resonance in the works of two contemporary visual artists, Tacita Dean and Walid Raad. The paradigmatic nonlinearity and transhistorical narrative trajectory characteristic of both Joyce and Sebald has been read in the context of Aby Warburg’s iconology of changing, traveling images, which has been further operationalized through Georges Didi-Huberman’s understanding of the political import of Warburg’s legacy. The notion of transhistorical ethics highlighted by the title of this text also implies the author’s view that radical historical insights arise when the art-historical discourse exceeds the boundary that separates theory from artistic practice. Accordingly, she introduces the concept of ethics of cross-reference, or quotation in a sense of: letting the voices of the other still be heard through one’s own stories, whether that may be the stories of friends, photographers, Homer, characters from history books or newspapers, or especially those absent from spectacular stories: individual holocaust victims, emigrants, or underdogs with an everyday humanity in still-colonial Dublin, or in nearly post-industrial/colonial Manchester. 16 Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, p. xi.

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Lerm Hayes’s understanding of transhistorical ethics is inseparable from the activities of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture by which the conference Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacy was organized. By outlining the transversal that connects Beuys’s “project of mourning” at his Free International University for Interdisciplinary Research, Louwrien Wijers’s series of panel discussions Art Meets Science and Spirituality in Changing Economy, Sebald’s outstanding response to the introduction of Research Assessment Exercise at UK universities in the late 1980s, and Walid Raad’s lecture-performances, Lerm Hayes stresses the necessity of unceasing conversation within loose communities. In her words, “the quality of the connections appears to be what Joyce, Sebald, Beuys, Dean, and Raad focus on. Attending to the connections, as these artists and writers propose, it appears to me implies care and empathy: through attending to the past, work toward a better future.” In the chapter “Sebald’s Toute la mémoire du monde,” Leonida Kovač deals with Sebald’s re-semanticization in his novel Austerlitz of three films by Resnais, reading it as an internalization of Benjamin’s imperative to develop to perfection the “art of citation without citation marks.” In doing so, she has focused on the implantation of a transpersonal discourse by which Sebald’s work materializes a sort of spectral presence. Using the motif of the Parisian Bibliothèque nationale, which travels between Resnais’s film and Sebald’s novel from Rue Richelieu to a place near Gare de Austerlitz, where Nazis sorted looted Jewish property during the Second World War, she has followed the micro-narratives through which Walter Benjamin’s life and work metamorphize into a paternal figure from Sebald’s novel. Furthermore, Émile Zola’s book that is visible in a frame of the only film by Resnais that Sebald explicitly mentions in Austerlitz and Austerlitz’s Parisian address in Rue Émile Zola have led her to identify a series of photographs from Sebald’s novel as somewhat modified citations of photographs that the author of J’accuse personally took and developed in the late nineteenth century. Finally, in her essay “As a Dog Finds a Spear,” Hilde Van Gelder performs a transgression in which academic discourse exceeds the boundary that separates theory from artistic practice. She is thereby referring to the phrase “objective chance,” a coinage of artist Tacita Dean, which Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes has introduced to theoretical discourse relating the work of Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean and W.G. Sebald. Van Gelder explicitly says that in researching and articulating the book Ground Sea: Photography and the Right to be Reborn—the “making of” she exposes in this text—it was Sebald’s literary approach that encouraged her to replace the strict protocol of photo-theoretical writing with a more personal image-text

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practice. The book in question arose from “a lengthy and slow investigation of the lives of people on the move, as we should identify them, who found themselves stranded near the shore of Calais, in today’s France.” Like Sebald, Van Gelder writes “in the way a dog searches”; her travelogue, or rather a transhistorical textual pilgrimage, begins with a description of her visit to the Thomas Paine Cottage, which has rhizomatically led to her personal exploration of the critical legacy of artist Allan Sekula. She has realized in the process that Sekula’s stilled photographs “magnificently capture the frozen utopia that Paine’s ideals embody in a US democracy presently put to the test by autocratic decline.” The author has tangentially linked the shameful exhumation of the earthly remains of the human rights’ ideator Thomas Paine with the leitmotif of Sebald’s Rings of Saturn—the skull of Thomas Browne, and Browne’s sentence “who is to know the fate of his bones” emerges as a chord that masterfully modulates the image of the Bronze-Age spear made of deer antler, fished out by Colinda, into a question of the right to rebirth of those deprived of human rights.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History.’” In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott et. al. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9–63. Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Saloul, Ihab. Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sebald, W.G. “Le promeneur solitaire.” In A Place in the Country. New York: Modern Library, 2015.

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About the Author Leonida Kovač is an art historian and theorist, curator and full professor at the University of Zagreb, Academy of Fine Arts. Her main fields of interest are contemporary art, critical theories and feminist theories. She has published nine books and numerous academic articles on contemporary art. She has also curated more than forty exhibitions including Ivan Faktor’s exhibition at the São Paulo Biennale (2002) and Patterns of Visibility for the Croatian Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice (2003). From 2003 to 2006 she was vice president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

I Sebald’s Writings, History and Voids

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W.G. Sebald’s Cartographic Images Mapping the Historical Void Anna Seidl Abstract W.G. Sebald’s work contains a number of images: in addition to a large corpus of photographs there are fifteen cartographic images in the form of maps, tables, plans, diagrams, and labyrinths that become iconographic in relation to the texts. Their various effects on the reader are discussed and systematized here through case studies. Against this background, I propose that Sebald’s practice of embedding cartographic images in the tissue of the text is closely connected to his ideas concerning processes of memory, and in particular, his interest in alternative historiographies, which enable a privileged personal entry to the past. Within discourse about the function of cartography for literature, maps are predominantly read in one of two ways (Dünne / Schlögel): either as historical artifacts of a geographically mediated world order, or for their poetic or iconographic dimension. Both models count for Sebald’s writings, wherein he uses cartographic features to evoke identificatory effects with historical places and their imaginary past. In dialogue with Michel de Certeau’s theoretical treatises on space / place (carte / parcours), I raise two central questions concerning Sebald’s use of cartography: What is the iconographic implication of the cartographic image, and why is it important for Sebald’s memory project, linking space, imagination, and processes of remembrance? Keywords: Post-representational, Pre-history, Epistemological, Cartographic, Psychological and Phenomenological Dichotomy

Introduction The more images I collected of the past, I said, the more unlikely I found it that the past should have played out in this manner, for nothing about

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch01

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it was what you could call normal, rather it was laughable for the most part, and if not laughable, then appalling.1

W.G. Sebald’s alternative historiography, his well-known recollection and reconstruction of the past, is closely connected to a rejection of representational authority situated entirely with the author. Instead, he introduces a narrative voice that cultivates a post-representational mode of perception, by continuously switching perspectives, viewpoints, and mediums, such as text and (cartographic) image. Rather than staying true to a single perspective, Sebald establishes different intellectual/discursive, emotional, affective and self-reflexive points of view. They don’t merge, but remain independent, and in a continuous state of flux. Generally, one can distinguish in Sebald’s oeuvre two dominant modes of reception, between which he continuously switches to avoid a fixed and/or authorized subject position: the direct observant view and the distant view. The direct observant view has a penetrating quality, related to emotional states of being and which simulates direct access to the historical material; the distant view is a synoptic, intellectual view from above linked to the act of seeing and discursive knowledge. According to Sebald, both perspectives, if used exclusively, are limiting. They risk establishing too narrow a pointof-view, thereby conveying a false sense of the past, or turning history into a rigid image. Especially when it comes to the recollection of traumatic events and humanitarian disasters, Sebald rejects the imposition of any kind of narrative conformity that might imply epistemological certainty.2 Instead, he introduces a new rhetorical mode, where different viewing-positions take their turns in providing a variety of angles of reception; that is, we encounter a constant questioning of whether a reliable relationship with the past is possible at all. This strategy has also been a major ethical challenge of Sebald’s aesthetic form. According to writer and journalist Arnold Grunberg, Sebald’s mystery, power, and hallucinatory effect—as well as the weakness of his work—are intimately related to this indeterminate status.3 Introducing a narrative voice that time and again fails to create a stable concept of memory, operating instead on the threshold of true and false, real and unreal, has been Sebald’s answer to the quest of (historical) restitution by means of literature. 4 For this 1 Sebald, Vertigo, 100. 2 Grunberg, “Onze duistere wereld,” De Groene Amsterdammer. 3 Ibid. 4 Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision, 115.

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reason the main narrator of his work is a mediator who negotiates between the living and the dead; between past and future; between blindness and insight; between ethical commandments on the one hand, and desires and missteps on the other. I argue that Sebald’s particular method of juxtaposing text and image, especially text and cartographic image, and direct and indirect sight develops a perspective of ambiguity, a state of flux. The perpetual switch of positions and points of view fundamentally questions the status of truth, in particular the authority of discursively documented history. In short, one could say that Sebald’s memory project switches the authority of the historical documentation on the side of the narrative voice, which develops multiple viewpoints, and establishes a privileged state of flux. He does so in three ways: a) by playing with the wrong perspective, in order to question its position and subsequently correct it; b) by introducing an alternative multifaceted sight and c) by continuously scrutinizing discursive and mimetic forms of representations, thus undermining the ability to see and know. In a first step, I introduce two scholarly approaches to Sebald’s memory project allied with the development of a special relationship between seeing and knowing following Carol Jacobs’s blurry sight as literary trope and Christian Moser’s view from the edge as privileged sight.5 In a second step, I elaborate the function of cartographic images and their narrative dimension with reference to Michel de Certeau’s dichotomous spatial concept and Marie-Laure Ryan’s distinction between the strategic and emotional use of maps.6 These theoretical notes are followed by an analysis of two passages from Sebald’s novels, Austerlitz7 and The Rings of Saturn,8 and an examination of selected cartographic images from each with respect to their function in relation to the text and the perceptual dilemma of seeing and not-seeing, knowing and not-knowing. Whereas the map in Austerlitz fills a narrative gap, pointing toward the limits of textual representation, the cartographic image in The Rings of Saturn authorizes the imaginary content of the narrative voice. Both passages are representative of Sebald’s use of extradiegetic material and multiple viewpoints that place the reader in a constant state of flux, switching between image/map and text, between the establishment of one order/reality and another. 5 Moser, “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” 6 Ryan, Foot, and Azaryahu, Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. 7 Sebald, Austerlitz. 8 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn.

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Walking, Seeing, and Knowing: Sebald’s Memory Project They were silent, as the dead usually are when they appear in our dreams, and seemed somewhat downcast and dejected. […] If I approached them, they dissolved before my eyes, leaving behind them nothing but the vacant space they had occupied.9

Walking, seeing, and knowing are inseparable dynamic modes essential to Sebald’s memory project and his emphasis on speaking indirectly. This conscious play with uncertainty highlights his ethical imperative to represent history while at the same time questioning the possibility of that representation. In the depiction of traumatic events, the ability to see clearly is put at risk when moving too closely to the neuralgic core. As indicated in the above quote from The Emigrants, while approaching a victim’s traumatic truth it dissolves, leaving nothing behind but “the vacant space they had occupied.” Just as problematic as getting too closed and transgressing ethical limits is the view from above. Although Sebald frequently evokes the “bird’s-eye-view” or helicopter view, as Jacobs argues, “any naive attempt to presume that this perspective will enable an overarching view and understanding in relation to the particular issues Sebald addresses, is meant to fail.”10 In this context, we should look at Sebald’s use of (cartographic) images. Given the ethical stance of his work, one could assume that the visual material functions as illustration, to make something directly visible for inspection, to map an event in (geographical) reality. One soon notices that this is not the case, since Sebald plays with the purposeful uncertainty of what he places before the reader’s eyes.11 What is crucial is the switching between mediums that adds another perspective to the narrative discourse and content. Jacobs’s insightful study in Sebald’s Vision goes so far as to argue that his use of visual material serves the purpose of readerly disorientation. By blurring the vision, it becomes clear that there is no way to make the telling of the past adequate to the object of its description. It is precisely this ambiguity, this evasion of factual narrative of knowledge, the inability of language to simply name, document, and describe that, according to Jacobs, “haunts Sebald’s vision.” 9 Sebald, The Emigrants. 10 Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision, 12. 11 Ibid., 5. Sebald himself has often criticized representational modes of history, which insinuate a clear position with respect to knowledge.

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For the purpose of “blurring sight,” his aesthetic form is characterized by meandering tours, crossings of borders, surreptitious citing, announced blindness and the famous feelings of vertigo (Schwindelgefühle).12 How can we, as Jacobs asks rightly, reconcile such radical strategies, manifesting a constant state of limbo, with moral certitude? After all, writing is for Sebald a way of reminding people that “we have all seen images, but those images militate against discursive thinking, for reflecting upon those things. But it also paralyzes, as it were, our moral capacity.”13 Sebald is aware of this ethical dilemma confronting what he calls, “the entire questionable business of writing.”14 That is to say, offering an account of things and events, of which he himself has no memory, and which may be said to be both unspeakable and unutterable. Summarizing Jacobs’s point, one could say that Sebald insinuates his prose into an emptiness that needs to be filled. But how? Whereas Jacobs mainly focuses on the self-reflexive component of Sebald’s struggle with the right aesthetic form and representational uncertainty, Christian Moser looks at the realization and cultivation of a certain mode of perception, which he refers to as “the view from the edge.”15 This liminal view is developed with the peripatetic act of walking and seeing, and Sebald’s attempt to recover the repressed and marginalized contents of history by placing his work in a pre-existing tradition of the literary walk: The old-fashioned practices of traveling, such as pilgrimage and wandering interest Sebald to the extent that they cultivate a certain mode of perception. This mode of perception is tied to a specific type of movement: the movement of walking. […]. Sebald’s endeavor to oppose the officious history of modern progress and enlightenment by an archeology of the particular, the marginal, and the incommensurable is related to the cultural practice of walking and its literary representation.16

In line with Jacobs’s view, Moser states that Sebald’s memory project rejects the distant view from above that ossifies the peripatetic view into a rigid image, a map. This, for Sebald, represents a totalizing perspective related to a mode of experiencing history.17 In addition to this critique, Moser highlights Sebald’s rejection of a penetrating internal view. Instead, Sebald establishes 12 Ibid. 13 Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, 80. 14 Sebald, The Emigrants, 138. 15 Moser, “Peripatetic Liminality,” 45. 16 Ibid., 37, 38, 40. 17 Ibid., 49.

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a liminal position, a view from the edge, between self and other, between inside and outside, between direct and indirect representation. According to Moser, this liminal position is the narrator’s privileged perspective, where meaning is synthesized from the interstitial space between viewpoints. Sebald’s reflections on this matter in his literary and non-literary works are highly normative. There is only one right way to represent the past, and this is through a multifaceted uncompromised sight. In his reading of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in The Rings of Saturn, in which Sebald’s narrator gives the painting a self-referential turn, he switches to the side of the painter and criticizes, for example, the bird-eye’s-view, which leads to blindness and problems in seeing what is important.18 The painting depicts a group of surgeons who stare at an anatomical atlas in the right corner. Focused on the map, they lose sight of the person in the center of the painting: the victim Aris Kindt. The Amsterdam guild is more interested in the totalizing overview of the human body in the anatomical atlas, than in the materiality of the body itself. Sebald’s narrator interprets the painting as Rembrandt’s critique of scientific discourse represented by the narrow and one-sided perspective of the surgeons, questioning the rational objectification of an individual submitted to scientific authority. The fallacy of the scientific view, is, according to Sebald’s narrator, seen in replacing the mimetic realistic representation with the anatomical illustration. Rembrandt superimposes “the clip on the site of the bodily cut, which, in itself cannot be shown […]. In other words, what we are faced with is a transposition taken from the anatomical atlas.”19 The body of the deceased Aris Kindt is represented by means of a disfiguring misrepresentation, while seeing is rectified by means of falsifying the appearance of the limbs.20 Another instance in which Sebald criticizes the helicopter view is in his collected essays on war and literature On the natural history of destruction.21 With few exceptions, he denounces literary authors for their silence and incapacity to represent the air raids on Germany during the Second World War. His whole argument centers around the question of what perspective to choose, in order to retrieve a sense of understanding of the horrifying effects of the firestorms that followed the bombing. After introducing a series of wrong attempts, at the end Sebald seems to suggest that those representations are not able to give the readers any sense of knowing at all. 18 Ibid., 51. 19 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 14–15. 20 Moser, “Peripatetic Liminality,” 52. 21 Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction.

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In my own reading of Sebald, I take a slightly different turn than Jacobs and Moser, not arguing for a blurry sight or liminal position, but for an oscillating perspective. In this state of flux, Sebald’s readers are asked constantly to switch positions between text and image, between a direct observant and a distant glance. As a result, Sebald’s aesthetic form at once positions and undermines subjective experience, as well as the authority of the text and image. In the subsequent section, I argue that cartographic images, which play an essential role in questions of representation, function as poetic or rhetorical devices representing two modes of reception: the emotive, dynamic perspective and the discursive, static perspective.

The Cartographic Image In total, we can count fifteen cartographic images in Sebald’s fictional work, which are included in the tissue of the text: maps, tables, floorplans, diagrams, labyrinths and a “physical geography.”22 These self-reflexive narrative maps establish a post-representational perspective wherein the narrative voice switches from text to map, where language reaches its limit. They are also poetic devices; in that they expand the diegetic frame. The French theorist Michel de Certeau distinguishes between map (carte) and tour (parcours) as two perspectives on space, both of which are discussed in the context of everyday practices such as walking and seeing.23 Whereas the map represents a static and panoptic view of space, the tour (parcours) envisions space as a dynamic concept, used by the actors, who come and go, and individually organize and dissect the open space. This dialectic energy inherent to de Certeau’s spatial theory is especially interesting in relation to Sebald, insofar as it resembles the structure of his programmatic use of a fluctuating vision. The state of flux is reached by switching between those two receptive modes, which can also be referred to as the emotive perspective, represented by the parcours, and the static, represented by the map. A further differentiation of the concept of the map can be found in MarieLaure Ryan’s contributions to Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative in which she distinguishes two modalities of the map24: 1) representing the abstract representation of spatial significations or “strategic space” and 2) as catalyst for imaginary activity, conceiving mental images. Ryan calls this 22 Sebald, Vertigo, 103. 23 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 24 Ryan, Foot, and Azaryahu, Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative.

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the “emotional space” where “spatial objects matter for what experiences they afford, for what aesthetic feelings they inspire, and from what memories they bring to mind.”25 The emotional space has a special affinity with stories and memories; it involves a lived, embodied experience, best acquired by walking in the space or by encountering pictures taken from a horizontal perspective, which resembles the perspective held by the human body. The switch from emotional to strategic space is the structuring principal of Sebald’s memory project. He negotiates the openness of the individual trajectory while attempting to rescue the narrative voice from its personal perspective through multiple discursive viewpoints. Importantly, Sebald’s maps are embedded in this dichotomy—especially in connection to the walking-tours (parcours), where the narrator develops an emotional individual viewpoint, and which have their own poetic quality while compensating for the narrator’s Sebald’s penetrating glance. Sebald’s main concern is to represent the past that his narrator encounters on his endless and aimless meanderings through European cities and landscapes. The past should neither turn into a rigid, static image, symbolized in the abstractions of the map, nor should it be too emotionally charged with the imaginary activity of the narrator’s individual gaze. When narratives, such as Sebald’s, use the dual modalities of language and maps, each express what the other cannot do by itself—or only insufficiently: maps are not well suited to express a subject’s lived experience in an environment; language-based narratives, because they rely on a temporal medium, are not well suited to convey a mental image. However, when language and map complement each other, space can be represented in its emotional, phenomenological, and strategic dimensions.26 Along these lines Sebald develops his ethical dimension of refusing a single authorial perspective, introducing a narrative voice that embraces rather than conjoins the different modalities of language and maps.

Mapping the Void in Austerlitz Let me turn to my first example, an episode at the beginning of Sebald’s most famous prose work, Austerlitz, in which the narrator recalls his visit to Fort Breendonk in Belgium in 1967. This military fortification served the Nazis during the German occupation of Belgium in the Second World War 25 Ibid., 39. 26 Ibid., 66.

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as a prison camp (Auffanglager). It acquired its literary fame through Jean Améry’s famous essay “Die Tortur,”27 in which he describes the physical torture he experienced there. Améry configures his memorable and intellectual approach to torture as a phenomenon by providing a spatially and successively structured description of the entry into the fort. Sebald does likewise. His first-person narrator approaches the fort as usual by walking. He begins a tour on the outside, then follows the fourteen stations, which visitors have to pass between the entrance to the exit. The scene starts with some intellectual reflections, establishing a distant view, while the narrator recalls a mental image of the fortification, inspired by Austerlitz’s musings, when they first met a day earlier. Austerlitz talks about fortresses in general and about Breendonk in particular as emblematic for the absolute power inherent to all of those outsize buildings: “At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”28 Further, Austerlitz points at the discrepancy between the beauty of the fortresses’ form, as an outstanding example of the craft, and its military purpose, between the star-shaped ground-plan, “a kind of ideal typical pattern derived from the Golden section”29 and the sheer monstrosity of the war strategy. At this point Sebald includes a map, which shows the fortress Saarlouis Vauban in Germany. The map seems to support Austerlitz’s critical statements about the incommensurability of aesthetic beauty, the “fantastic nature of the geometric, trigonometric and logistical calculations they record […]” and “the shadow of their own destruction.”30 Yet, the full implications of this map only become apparent in relation to the following passage, when the narrator decides to see for himself and pay Fort Breendonk a visit. After his intellectual approach to the nature of fortifications, focusing on the discrepancy of form and function, Sebald switches perspectives when he puts his narrator in confrontation with the place, and Fort Breendonk becomes a lived experience. The passage begins: It was unusually hot for the time of the year, and large cumulus clouds were piling up on the south-west horizon as I crossed the bridge over the 27 Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. 28 Sebald, Austerlitz, 29. 29 Ibid., 26. 30 Ibid., 24.

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dark water. After the previous day’s conversation, I still had an image in my head of a star-shaped bastion with walls towering above a precise geometrical ground-plan, but what I now saw before me was a low-built concrete mass, rounded at all its outer edges and giving the gruesome impression of something hunched and misshapen: the broad back of a monster, I thought, risen from the Flemish soil like a whale from the deep.31

Just as Austerlitz had predicted, the narrator too is immediately struck by the incongruity of the star-shaped architectural plan, represented by the map and the visual appearance of the walls when viewed at close range (emotional space). Reluctant to enter the fort, as described above he starts with a tour of the outside. This walk is accompanied by images that confirm the monstrosity of the place and question the map’s architectural reality. Approaching the fort, he not only fails to register its architectural beauty, but also fails to recognize any structure, because: its projections and indentations kept shifting, so far exceeding my comprehension that in the end I found myself unable to connect with anything shaped by human civilization, or even with the silent relics of our prehistory and history. And the longer I looked at it, the more often it forced me, as I felt, to lower my eyes, the less comprehensible it seemed to become.32

Although a symmetrical ground-plan is at this point prominently placed in the text, the narrator keeps doubting its authority and rather sees “the anatomical blueprint of some alien and crab-like creature.” His reliability of vision and sight gets further troubled, once he enters the fort and follows the fourteen stations. Moreover, this walk is accompanied by images, which show different perspectives of the fort as well as a section of a map, with the mortuary and torture room marked by small arrows. The further the narrator advances into the fort, the more his emotional state begins to affect his ability to see. The narrative keeps switching between his descriptions of the fort and his emotional state. He starts to feel increasingly noxious, experiencing a growing weight on his chest. Nevertheless, he decides to continue his walk into a dark tunnel. When f inally arriving at its heart, the casemate, the place where the tortures took place, the narrative takes a strange turn. Instead of remaining in the 31 Ibid., 30. 32 Ibid.

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Figure 1 Diagram, W.G. Sebald. Austerlitz. New York: Modern Library, 2001, p. 31

confined frame of the fortification, recollecting the narrator’s phantasies and associations of what could have happened down here, or what the prisoners could have felt and experienced, the narrator tells the story of his own physical punishment as a child, in place of those who had been victimized in this space and with no relation to their suffering. The evasion changes perspective, breaks the logic of the text, and creates a narrative gap; a void provisionally filled with the narrator’s own childhood experiences. A second attempt to tell the story of Fort Breendonk arrives in Sebald’s intertextual references to Améry’s descriptions of the dreadful physical closeness between torturers and their victims, and the torture Améry himself suffered there in 1943. By individualizing and emotionalizing the historical atrocity, a story of human failure, mediation shifts and returns to the map: “when he was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and a splinting sound, which, as he says, he had not yet forgotten when he came to write his account, his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling as they were wrenched up behind him and twisted together above his head.”33 In this passage, Sebald takes a critical stance against the penetrating view his narrator tried to apply in the torture room. He shows what happens when one gets too close to the traumatic event, attempts to obtain an insider’s perspective or gain direct access: the empathetic imagination leads to a psychological shutdown, making the actual victims vanish, “leaving behind them nothing but the vacant space they had occupied.”34 Nevertheless, the narrative gap does get filled by switching to another medium, the map, and the intertextual reference to Améry. 33 Ibid., 33. 34 Sebald, The Emigrants, 100.

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Austerlitz’s intellectual reflections at the beginning of the passage, the narrator’s voice, and the mood in which the scene is set, position the traumatic past in flux. Switching from the text and the narrative voice to the map, means switching between different authorities. Against this backdrop, I return to the map of the torture chamber, which resembles a shoulder joint, Amery’s shoulder joint—the cartographic becomes an image with iconographic power. The map, together with Améry’s words, the torture and its failed representation, establish the state of flux, authorizing several perspectives by providing various angles of reception. Sebald’s strategy of diversion, as applied in this passage, is of great importance for his ethical commandments. At its dramatic climax the narrator tries to reveal the fort’s traumatic past with a penetrating, emotionally charged gaze and fails. To fill the void Sebald “corrects” this mistake by switching to an extradiegetic voice (Améry) and medium (map). The map functions here as placeholder for the traumatic content of the fortress. Also in the following passage from Rings of Staurn a map becomes symbolically charged and fills a historical void, questioning the status of the documented and official truth of a former nuclear test station in East Anglia.

Mapping of No-Place in The Rings of Saturn Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words. All I do know is that I finally walked along the raised embankment from the Chinese Wall Bridge past the old pumphouse towards the landing stage, to my left in the fading fields a collection of black Nissen huts, and to my right, across the river, the mainland.35

Those are the words with which the narrator in chapter 8 of The Rings of Saturn concludes the memories of his stay in Orfordness, a peninsula at the coast side of East Anglia. After a hurricane-like storm, he reaches the small medieval town of Orford. Like the passage in Austerlitz, the narrator starts with an intellectual recollection of the place’s precarious history, while sitting on the rooftop of an old dungeon, overlooking the empty landscape at his feet. According to the stories surrounding the local history, an atomic research facility was stationed for several decades during the Second World War and the Cold War in Orfordness, experimenting with 35 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 150.

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weapons of mass destruction. Special attention is paid to the rumored stories about the catastrophic consequences of those experiments, which until today, according to the narrator, circulate amongst people, keeping the “the mystery of Shingle Street”36 alive, although officially they do not have the documented status of truth. At first sight, the recollection of the story of Orfordness reads as a quest to unveil the mystery surrounding the place, to unveil the truth behind those unauthorized experimental operations and, above all, to reveal their terrible consequences. Further undefined rumor even specified that in the course of a chemical experiment, which was carried out in in the 1940s, a serious accident occurred. This experiment was supposed to be a test for a new nerve gas, which was developed as a deadly weapon to destroy and exterminate entire areas. Further along the course of these military experiments, a petroleum pipeline was developed, which reached into the sea, so that in case of an invasion, a fire could be lit of such speed and intensity that the surface of the water would begin to broil. During these experiments, rumor has it, a whole group of English pioneers lost their lives in the petroleum fire in the “most appalling manner.”37 Some eyewitnesses reported how the “pain-stricken, charred corpses” were afterwards washed ashore. These experiments, it is conjectured, were conducted during the Cold War under the strict secrecy of the Secret Weapons Research Establishment. What strikes the narrator at this point of his story is the fact that “the inhabitants of Orford, for example, could only speculate about what went on at the Orfordness site, which, though perfectly visible from the town, was effectively no easier to reach than the Nevada desert or an atoll in the South Seas.”38 At this point, the text is interrupted by a map, which Sebald has modified significantly, so that it only gives a vague idea of the topographical location and can no longer be used as a clear device for orientation. The map is indeed so blurry that it seems to suggest a symbolical representation of the mystery of the peninsula. While the village of Orford can still be seen, Orfordness itself is not marked. Only a subsequently added black arrow gives an idea of the former location of the research site somewhere between land and water, represented as an undiscovered country. In the context of the story of Orfordness, the vagueness of the map initially reads as an allegory of the mystery surrounding the place. However, at the same time, referring to the initial quotation, “where and in what time I truly was 36 Ibid., 148. 37 Ibid., 147. 38 Ibid., 148.

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Figure 2 Map, W.G. Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. New York: New Directions, 1999, p. 148

that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words,” it becomes clear that the narrator’s own lived experiences on the peninsula are so unreal that they elude any spatial positioning. But why would Sebald use a map in order to represent the vagaries of perception, when at the same time, mapping this discursive non-place gives its mystery a historical urgency? From this perspective, map, and narrative seem to fight each other. While the narrator approaches Orfordness in the beginning of the paragraph with great interest in its local history and presents the rumors and mystery of the place as precise recollections of its precarious history, the reader is confronted with the vagueness of the map, which Sebald uses to question the rumors and their undocumented status. The map symbolizes at this point the contrast between the precision of the historical recollection and its failed authorized state. However, the map’s ambiguity only unfolds its full potential, when read in the context of the whole passage. After the narrator finishes recollecting Orford’s history, pointing out that these stories

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are still circulating, despite having never been documented or granted official status, he decides to leave his elevated position on the top of the fortress and, just as in the Austerlitz passage, decides to take a walking tour through this contaminated place. The second part describes this encounter with the place. What follows are descriptions of his lonely walk through an abandoned and deserted waste land, “as if I were passing through an undiscovered country,” feeling “at the same time, utterly liberated and deeply despondent.”39 Throughout his visit in Orfordness, Sebald’s narrator presents the place as a kind of non-place, a waste land, symbolized in the ambivalent position between the unbounded freedom of the walker, and feelings of alienation, knowing that the place is haunted by its hidden and secret past. Whereas the map in Austerlitz functions as narrative device mapping the monstrosities of history, the map in The Rings of Saturn questions the general status of reality. Put in relation to an event that has happened, yet has no official status, Orfordness’s reality becomes an ungrounded place, just as the truth of its history remains a mystery: And it is a fact that until recently a f ile labelled Evacuation of the Civil Population from Shingle Street, Suffolk was in the archives of the Ministry of Defence, embargoed for seventy-five years as distinct from the usual practice of releasing documents after thirty, on the grounds that (so the irrepressible rumors claimed) it gave details of a horrifying incident in Shingle Street for which no government could accept public responsibility. 40

The void, which appears in this passage, is the void of the failed documentation, being f illed by the narrative voice that captures the event, as in Austerlitz, from multiple perspectives, offering multiple truths and strategies of diversion. As Grunberg has stated, the authority doesn’t lie any longer with the author, but with the narrative voice. Based on the analysis of the Austerlitz—and the Breendonk—passages, I tried to show that historical truth is authorized through discursively manifest documentation and put into question via alternative sight. With this sight intellectual, emotional, affective, and self-reflexive perspectives can exist next to each another. Blindness and sight, knowing and not knowing, truth and lie, are compellingly unresolved dilemmas. 39 Ibid., 149. 40 Ibid., 147.

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Sebald plays with these dilemmas. He reinforces the non-representational historical and traumatic material in the narrator’s (imaginary) walking tours and their textual and visual representations within the reader whose emotional attachment he has won by offering them many perspectives—even if this material itself never finds closure. As Jacobs asks: Why does Sebald insist there was a moral obligation to record what took place? Is there perhaps a glimmer of hope that something might be learned? If so, learning is not that at which you arrive, one day, definitely.41

The question is important to Sebald’s moral imperative, and one cannot help but ask it as a reader. Ultimately, Sebald’s vagaries of perception condition the epistemological import that literature might have had, or yet still might.

Works Cited Améry, Jean. “Die Tortur.” In Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 37–59. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988. Grunberg, Arnon. “Onze duistere wereld.” De Groene Amsterdammer, January 29, 2020. Accessed April 16, 2021. https://www.groene.nl/artikel/onze-duisterewereld. Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, edited by Markus Zisselberger, 37–63. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Jacobs, Carol. Sebald’s Vision. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foot, and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space. Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Schwartz, Lynne. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants. New York: New Directions, 1997. Sebald, W.G. On the Natural History of Destruction. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. New York: New Directions, 1999. Sebald, W.G. Vertigo. New York: New Directions, 2011. 41 Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision, 94.

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About the Author Anna Seidl, former principal dancer at the HNB (Het National Ballet, Amsterdam), is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Analysis and German Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research area entails different fields of cultural and literary studies and recently revolves around topics such as “body and motion pictures,” “dance and ageism,” new developments in the performative arts and narratological structures in political/cultural discourses. The special quality of her research lies in the fruitful combination of her expertise in the field of artistic practice and scientific and analytical reflection. Her latest publications are Hans van Manen: Between formal austerity and dramatic expression (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Das Virus: Sinn des Sinnlosen (KulturRevolution 2020).

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Imaging the Uncanny Memory War and the Isenheim Altarpiece in 1917–19 Juliet Simpson Abstract “A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.” Thomas Mann’s 1924 words on war, memory, and art also distils his emblematic encounter with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.1 Transported from Colmar to Munich in October 1917, exhibited from 1918–19 at the Munich Alte Pinakothek, as this article explores, it became the focus of an extraordinary moment of German national crisis and expiation widely imaged, projected, reported, and seen by countless visitors including Mann. My concerns are two-fold. First, to explore responses in word and image stimulated by the Altarpiece’s display and extensive photographic imaging in the contexts of a significant cultural shift toward engagement with the potency of medieval art, and its mediation of practices of “uncanny” memory. Entwined with an acute sense of present trauma, this activates what Hans Belting calls the borderlines between memory and image; devotion and distance2—pivoting in 1918–19 on the Altarpiece’s power as an afterlife, restaged to make present what appears absent: a medieval turbulence as a contemporary imaging and consciousness of

1 Mann, Der Zauberberg. All citations in this article are taken from The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. All translations from French and German sources are mine unless otherwise stated. 2 In highlighting what Belting calls an approach to the “non-iconic” elements of image perception and transmission, which in redressing a perceived gap in W.J.T. Mitchell’s triad of “word, image, ideology,” foregrounds the bodily (as opposed to its semiotic elision in the “ideological”) as a potent site of image “inter-mediality” and material memory-projection, dissolving binaries between “virtual” and “physical” images. Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology”; on Belting’s elaboration of his anthropological approach to the body as “a living medium for images,” an image “locus,” see also Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body.

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch02

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pain. Second is to consider how this process becomes amplified in the aftermath of the war, in particular, via its writing as an unheimlich past in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, echoed in Marc Bloch’s invocation of a material memory of power, malady and sacred touch in his Les Rois thaumaturges, both 1924. Thus the conclusions suggest the recurrent, yet overlooked artistic figure of pre-modern memory within this constellation as pivotal to an imaginary of the unimaginable of what is seen and unseen. Keywords: Art and Narrative, Cultural Memory, Medieval Border Crossing, Alterity and Identity, Resistance and Reconnection

A Medieval Nachleben—Spectral Presences/Enigmatic Differences I start with two observations: first, W.G Sebald’s gloss in his The Rings of Saturn on Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial, evoking Browne’s central insight that “on every new thing there lies already the shadow of its annihilation.”3 Second, is James Elkins’s perception of Sebald’s use of the photographic image in Rings of Saturn as a “fracturing” not a distracting practice, which Elkins links to the unseen and traumatic memory. Elkins associates this imaging with that which cannot be represented or resists representation. 4 Both Sebald’s and Elkins’s perceptions turn on the shadow, unseen memory in negotiating what slips interleaved between the fault lines and interstitial spaces of history and story, image and its “other,” art and matter. Or, to develop these ideas, is to open a space between body and memory, dissolution and transformation, for as Hans Belting puts it, “while images may be in art, they are also not of it […]. [O]ur bodies themselves constitute a place, a locus where the images we receive leave behind an invisible trace.”5 Here I explore this “unseen” memory, or the practice 3 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. 4 Especially in relation to Sebald’s photographic image of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, arguably the “image-key” in The Rings of Saturn, in redressing what Elkins perceives as an overemphasis in scholarly treatments of Sebald’s use of photographs to question the “reliability of visual knowledge,” when they are equally concerned with fracturing—ergo “the disorientating affect of the Real.” Elkins, Writing with Images: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. 5 In relation to what Belting proposes as a three-fold interaction between his idea of the “body” as a “site” (of images), a “picture” (of itself) and a place (“in the world,” the complex point of intersection between the personal and cultural). Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, 38. See also Victor Stoïchita’s conception of the embodied image as a constitutive

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of memory as an intricately patterned “placing” figured in Sebald’s central image of Browne’s “quincunx.”6 Its approach breaks linear constructs of time, narrative and object-body relations. In so doing, it opens up suggestive perspectives on a neglected entanglement of art, memory, and war in the early twentieth century in the mediation of the most conflicted realities of that time. The figure of the medieval artist becomes a potent interest at this period in metaphorizing processes of cultural alterity and displacement, that is, to bring distant pasts close to the present as uncanny presences in the cultural modernities pre- and in the aftermath of the First World War. In this, Medieval art undergoes a complex shift in its cultural reception to embody potent new ideas of inwardness and border-crossing identities. I argue that this is a very different perception and treatment of medieval, in particular Gothic art, from its uses in revivalist contexts, or indeed its early twentieth-century associations with more virulent nationalist and purist geo-cultural ideological appropriations. As evinced, for example, in Charles Maurras’s Action Française and Karl Scheffler’s and Josef Strzygowski’s writings, such arguably problematic constructs used medieval visual cultures in overtly polemical ways to propound the origins, “spirit” and telos of peoples, and advance overtly racialized ideas and symbols of national identity-construction.7 By contrast, the emblem of that different, other medieval border-crossing cultural identity is exemplif ied by Matthias Grünewald’s art pre- and post-1918, which I will discuss shortly. However, certain aspects of the contexts for it are particularly salient. Grünewald’s “rediscovery” relates to a broader move in late nineteenth-century art and cultural historiography to a preoccupation with beginnings and cultural ownership in building genealogies and constructs of “national” cultures: what, in Jan Assman’s terms, mark their transformation into cultural memory, differentiating heterogeneity of the body object (“l’hétérogénéité constitutive de l’objet corps”), which figures the “un-representable.” Stoïchita, Des Corps, Anatomie, Défense, Fantasmes. 6 According to Sebald, a structure Browne “identif ies everywhere,” but its imaging with Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in the opening chapter of Rings of Saturn transforms them into a dynamic image-memory dyad setting in motion Sebald’s patterning of infinite increase (possibility and plenty) and infinite loss (ruin). 7 Particularly to disrupt more traditional categories of “barbaric” and “civilized” in appropriations of medieval art and culture by ideologues to construct ultra-nationalist and racial-biological memory typologies; see, in particular, Hanna, “Iconology and Ideology; Images of Joan of Arc in the Idiom of Action Française,” 215–39; Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artefacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: the Case of Josef Strzygowski,” 106–30; and Scheffler, The Spirit of Gothic (Der Geist der Gotik).

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as he sees it, these symbolic constructs and their temporal span from the social markers of “communicative” memory.8 Yet these beginnings and endings develop in contexts that also test, and in notable instances blur perceived borderlines of cultural, institutional, and social memory, of time, place, and its symbolic (individual and collective) capital. Added to this, is the porosity of boundaries between invented epochs, the spaces, and images of lost pasts, of embodied memory. Indeed, the sense of endings that permeate early twentieth-century responses to medieval and Renaissance cultures, the relationship between what is, and is not remembered, the uneasy borderlines between the redemptive and violent image, suggests a more unstable cultural, political, and material nexus of recovery, imaging, borrowings, and rewritings than Assman’s binary allows. The temporal and geo-cultural boundaries of medieval-Renaissance; pre-modern-modern, demonstrable in Louis Courajod’s lectures at the École du Louvre between 1887 and 1896, become redefined as shifting, fluid and recursive.9 Highlighted in the German revivals of the 1890s and century’s turn, these interests are elaborated in the panoramic European exhibitions of so-called medieval and Renaissance “primitifs” in the early 1900s on the international stage in Berlin, Bruges, Paris, Düsseldorf, London, and Siena.10 Yet this shift to a late nineteenth-century “long Middle-Ages” also interrelates with more complex mediations and perceptions of the medieval as a present alterity via recursive tropes of “origins” as cultural endings in a pattern of reverse teleology of art’s civilizing “progress.” It is a theme which runs in a line from Eugène Fromentin’s Les Maîtres d’Autrefois (1876) to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Trois Primitifs (1905) to Johan Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919). In each, such medieval tropes and figures focused 8 Indeed, while acknowledging the work of key twentieth-century precursors, notably Aby Warburg and Thomas Mann in framing a conception of “collective memory” as an excavation through images or language traces of the sediment of distant epochs working through the present (Assmann identifies this as “cultural memory”), he proposes a key, if problematic variant on this construct in separating “cultural” and “social” (“communicative”) collective memory, the latter seen as outside institutions, traditions, being conf ined to “everyday interaction.” Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 111. 9 Courajod’s core theme advanced in his lectures and Les Véritables origines de la Renaissance emphasizes the greater prominence of Northern Renaissance, particularly French, of locality, and the enlarged role of medieval practices in the historiography of the Italian Renaissance that he contends “n’était pas un point de départ universel” (“was not a universal point of departure”). Courajod, Les Véritables origines de la Renaissance, 2. 10 Ausstellung von kunstwerken des Mittelalters und der Renaissance aus Berliner Privatbesitz verantstaltet von der Kunstgeschichtlichen Gesellschaft, Alten Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, May 20–June 3, 1898; Les Primitifs Flamands, Bruges, 1902; Les Primitifs Français, Paris, 1904; Mostra dell’Antica Arte Senese, Siena, 1904; Ausstellung zu Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 1904.

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on Gothic art emerge as uncanny avatars of a new artistic cosmopolitan energy and of border-crossing identities. We find this medieval construct in Emile Verhaeren’s amplified decadent perspectives in his 1886 “Gothiques allemandes”—with Gothic as a badge of a different belonging—giving heightened visibility to rediscoveries of the lesser-known German late Gothic-early Renaissance artists, Matthias Grünewald, Hans Baldung Grien, Michael Wolgemuth, Hans Burgkmayer.11 For Verhaeren, seen as bearers of a dark, tenebrous, and visceral art, their “otherness” is echoed in J.-K. Huysmans’s treatment of Grünewald as his “barbare de génie.”12 And this theme recurs in the case of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s and his Workshop’s multiple fin-de-siècle “pupations” (to gloss Huizinga’s image of cyclical survivals), viewed through the 1899 Cranach Dresden Exhibition as a torchbearer of a turbulent Reformation memory strung between the medieval and modernity, reason and enchantment, word and magic image. Or as presented in Max Friedländer’s and Jakob Rosenberg’s landmark 1932 study as a “turmoil,” Cranach’s Gothic and Renaissance-Reformation legacy is a memory they aver, which enchants, yet “disturbs us.”13 A parallel preoccupation with “endings” and a shadow medieval mood is evoked in Georges Rodenbach’s visual-photographic and narrative experiments with the medieval city and its monuments in his novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892) as an oneiric presence. Rodenbach’s medieval disturbs boundaries of past and present, of historical retrieval and its subjective re-imagining, imaged in the novel as an ambiguous hybrid of “reproductions”: of memory and its fictive images; of absences and recreations. What is important here is not only the novel’s experiments with photographs as “relics,”14 but their uses to trigger an image-making at the intersection of a tenebrous medieval and present imaginary. And there are suggestive parallels in Rodenbach’s photographic evocations of a deserted medieval Bruges to amplify states of subjective alterity, creating narrative, temporal and visual discontinuities through a remediated medieval cityscape that looks unreal yet is saturated 11 First published in the Brussels-based, avant-garde L’Art moderne (August 1886), and in shorter form in the Parisian, La Vogue, organ of the Symbolists (September 27–October 4, 1886), reprinted in Verhaeren, Sensations d’art, 57–59. 12 Huysmans, “Les Grünewald du Musée de Colmar,” republished with minor alterations in Trois primitifs, 299–415 (397). 13 Friedländer and Rosenberg, Die Gemälde von Lukas Cranach, trans. and rev. J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, 16; on Cranach’s “fin-de-siècle” reception, see Simpson, “Lucas Cranach’s Legacies—‘Primitive’ and Rooted identities of Art and Nation at the European Fin de Siècle.” 14 See Edwards, “The Photograph in Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte,” especially 75–76.

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with palpable menace, and Sebald’s fogged “dead city” imaging and narrating in his Rings of Saturn. Perhaps most striking are Sebald’s Rodenbachian circumnavigations of Lowestoft, east Anglian ruinous sites and spectral coastlines as the material remains of a barely accessible, dissolving (and almost un-writable) past.15 Rilke, too, responds to Rodenbach’s medieval in his 1906 Belgian Reise,16 recording that he read Rodenbach to prepare for it. Two examples are prescient for this discussion: his tenebrous, Gothic Bruges “almost lost” (“Verging nicht diese Stadt?,” asks Rilke)17 and his overlooked, yet no less potent essay on Furnes in West Flanders as a palimpsest of shifting memory images and erasures.18 Here again, it is the medieval that activates these displacements. Furnes becomes a densely layered tissue of sensory echoes, images, and disappearances—of its Gothic churches and medieval square intimated as a place invaded with a physically palpable sense of the immanence of its past, a stillness, embodying states of dissonance, and uncanny connection. In the Platz, Rilke opines, “The enormous space continues to absorb inflows of emptiness. […] You can almost see no-one walking”19; absence is paradoxically an embodied presence; the shadow past moves everywhere. Most pervasive in Rilke’s distillation, however, is the Omnipresent memory of the bells of Furnes evoked in a textured immateriality, as “images” of sound, both past and present. They fill, haunt (or, to use Rilke’s metaphor, like a “cloudburst,” “ein Wolkenbruch”20) the spaces of absence with echo and reverberation, time and loss, much as his extended evocation of Furnes’s medieval past 15 Observing of Lowestoft, “not a living soul was about the long streets […] a town on which the marks of insidious decay were everywhere apparent,” of its memory, “like a mirage over the water.” Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 41, 45, 48; on comparable treatments of the dissolving or “non-place” in Sebald’s Vertigo, see Pieldner glossing Marc Augé, “Narrative Discourse, Memory and the Experience of Travel in W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo,” especially 72–74. 16 Reise nach Flanders, July 29–August 16, 1906; see Rilke, Werke in vier Bänden 1, 950. 17 Rilke, “Quai du Rosaire—Brugge,” Neue Gedichte, in Werke 1, 493–94: a key locus in Bruges-la-Morte. 18 Rilke, “Kleine Schriften—Furnes.” 19 “Die enorme Platz nimmt fortwährend noch Zuflüsse von Leere auf, die aus allen Straße in ihn munden […] Dabei sieht man fast niemanden.” Ibid., 1008. 20 Suggestive also of “downpour” evoking a density of image and sound that “falls” on the city (“während die Glocken wie ein Wolkenbruch uber sie niedergehen”), mirroring it as “verschlossen” (“shuttered”/“closed”). Ibid., 1009. An imaging that recurs in its even more layered and synaesthetic poetic counterparts, “Der Platz” (“Furnes”) in the towers (of St. Nicolas), “silent before each other”/“von einander scheu verschweigend,” and in “Quai du Rosaire’s” “der süßen Traube der Glockenspiels/das in den Himmeln hangt,” Werke 1. On the image of the medieval city in the Furnes and Bruges poems, see Thum, “The Medieval City: A Motif in Rilke’s Neuen Gedichten,” yet the “Furnes” essay remains untreated by scholars.

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is “a foreign country,” a silence (to borrow from L.P. Hartley).21 Yet it is also resonant and porous, shifting through the act of poetic perception into a permeating presence as an interference of place, memory and poetic “placing.” Once more, Rilke suggestively anticipates Sebald’s interruptive use of a photographic image of a late Gothic shrine (“St. Sebald,” the patron Saint of Nuremberg, claimed as Sebald’s emblematic protector) in his Rings of Saturn as both relic and revelation. At a point where the digressive and aleatory starts to build, it reverberates and continues to do so as a visual and virtual touchstone for the mystery of presence and its elusive remains. The reliquary—precious vessel, bones and air, grainy photographic trace and illusion—(like Browne’s “Quincunx”/“Urn” dyad) thus becomes key to a larger patterning of materia and transfiguration.22 It is both physical trace and relic, absence, and shrine.23 What is more, as a monstrance, an accretion of dissolving yet transfigured matter from the earthbound snails at the base to the tabernacle of God, it holds in tension a movement activated in the imperfect image, between decay, dissolution, and transmutation. To return to Grünewald: in these elaborations by Rodenbach and Rilke of a medieval uncanny as a medium for alterity and inwardness, Grünewald’s art becomes critical. It emerges from the shadows of art history in the early 1900s as a focus of contemporary artistic struggle and dark illumination—what Walter Benjamin in 1916 with reference to Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, calls “the nocturnal” in art.24 In fact, by the early 1910s, Grünewald’s fin-de siècle rediscovery had fueled a substantial, contemporary interest in this barely known early sixteenth-century master. In his highly colored 1903 treatment, Huysmans vaunts Grünewald’s “barbarous” primitivity, his 21 Hartley, “Prologue,” 9. 22 Indeed, it points to suggestive, yet underexplored ways in which Sebald conjures a memory of the miraculous image or journey (as, for example, by the St. Sebald shrine) as a recursive analog of the auto-fictional “life story” in the miracle-story as a “rites of passage” account (vide van Gennap), but more: as mediated through a recurring image network, evoked by the shrine as metaphor for a continuing state of liminality and transfiguration—Sebald’s journey after Nuremberg to Schiphol airport where the announcements morph into Angelic summons, “one might have thought one was already a good way beyond this world.” Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 89, see A. von Gennap, cited in Bailey, “Latin Miracle Narratives in the Medieval West.” 23 Again, this echoes Rodenbach’s placing of a photograph of the jewel-like shrine of the “holy blood” in Bruges-la-Morte, “une petite cathédrale en or” (housed in the heavily restored Chapel of the “Saint-Sang”), as a nexus of liminal encounters between sacred object and image, pivoting on a juxtaposition of a grainy, out-of-focus-photograph of the reliquary object, and its entwining with an all-engulfing mood of the obsessive cult and foreboding as the prelude to the crime that ensues, Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, Oeuvres, 168–69. 24 Of Grünewald’s art, “The radiant is true only where it is refracted in the nocturnal.” Benjamin, “Socrates,” 234.

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Altarpiece’s “typhoon of unhinged art.” For Huysmans, this art bridges the “gulfs of lost ages” bringing a disturbingly corporeal medieval alterity in paint and image close to the present.25 Huysmans’s reception was anticipated by Arnold Böcklin who, from the late 1860s, claimed that the Altarpiece was a constant (if troubling) inspiration for his art; in his Magdalen Mourning over the Body of Christ (1867, Basel Kunstmuseum) obsessively re-figuring its drama of bodily torment, of shadow, mortality, and liminality,26 echoed in his later Isle of the Dead.27 In his 1916 essay “Socrates,” Walter Benjamin takes up and expands on these ideas, without the fin-de-siècle trappings, twinning Socrates and Grünewald. In both, Benjamin sees an occulted conjunction at work: a Nachleben of the memory of pagan Antiquity (to borrow Aby Warburg’s term) yet, departing from Warburg’s Antique focus, a memory of medievalearly German Renaissance art. Benjamin here innovatively links both (Socrates and Grünewald) as suggestive figures of turbulence, violence (“Gewalt”), and “awakening” (“Erwachen”) to connect and embody ideas of an “absolute” and states of emotional intensity or pathos.28 The significance of this presentation of the Altarpiece is that it forges a connection between these different cultural afterlives, and acknowledges its power and contemporary potency. Pivotally in the “Crucifixion” panel (position 1), Benjamin perceives a medieval figuration of darkness, the phantasmal and revelatory as suggestively foregrounded. Yet this is also an essential, intuitively apocalyptic confrontation with an absolute—a theater of a present uncanny, poised between the turbulent, expressive, and still image. As Benjamin affirms: “Grünewald painted the Saints with such grandeur that their halos emerged from the greenest black.” He goes on: this “awakening” is “the radiant refracted in the nocturnal,” an idea, which, despite 25 “‘Un typhon d’art dechaînée’; les abîmes des âges revolues.” Huysmans, “Les Grünewald du Musée de Colmar” in Trois primitifs, 392. 26 See Lecoq-Ramond, “Les artistes devant le ‘Retable d’Issenheim’: de l’invention au pèlerinage (1850–1914).” 27 Painted in several versions between 1880 and 1886, of which arguably the best known is the 1883 version in Berlin at the Alte Nationalgalerie. 28 Yoking together Benjamin’s recurrent Nietzschean interest in the radiant-dark figure of “awakening” and a proto-Warburgian concern with the emotionally affective memory image (pathosformeln), with his neglected but marked interest in the affects of German medieval and early Renaissance art, detailed in his accounts of the Basel Kunstmuseum, the “primitive violence” (“Gewalt”) of Holbein (the Elder’s) and Dürer’s work. He writes, for example, of being “seized” (“ergriff”) by Grünewald’s Christ on the Cross following his visit to the Isenheim Altarpiece (1912), noting: “I am getting closer and closer to the art of the German Renaissance’ (“Ich nähere mich immer meher der Deutsch Kunst der Renaissance”). Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1892–1940, 143.

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its Nietzschean resonances (and pathos formula), is complicated by his perception of Grünewald’s Altarpiece as the bearer of (what he terms) the “expressionless” (“Ausdruckslosen”). Distancing his treatment from the Altarpiece as a magnet for its “expressionist’” re-figuring as in Max Ernst’s Crucifixion (Kreuzigung, 1913), rather Benjamin perceives in it a vector of alterity, confrontation, and epiphany.29

Touching Trauma: The Isenheim Altarpiece—Memory and War, 1918–19 To develop this argument’s Sebaldian concerns with how art and literature navigate hidden trauma, darkness, and conflict, presciently, in 1917, the Altarpiece enters the war. What is extraordinary about this episode are the ways in which Grünewald’s great work intervenes in a year of anguish and national crisis as a presence not a past, closing the gap between the temporally and culturally distant and near, to image and embody present trauma. The removal by military authorities of the Altarpiece from the Unterlinden Convent in German-held Colmar in October 2017 to Munich took place on the pretext of its protection and preservation from harm.30 But following its arrival in Munich, it was exhibited at the Alte Pinakothek from November 24, 1918 to June 28, 1919, where, seen by countless visitors, it became the focus of an intense expression of grief, veneration, and expiation. Central to this was the physical encounter with, and wider projections in word and photographic images, of an object, which—to reprise this argument’s Sebaldian thread—activated for its viewers an acute emotional identification with misery, suffering, and loss as visible and omnipresent. Even so, the responses it aroused, tapped into a deeper, unseen, and borderless pain. Intimated in the memory-construction of the event in photographic images and accounts, these suggestively invoke medieval devotional practices and the grisly echoes of battlefield casualties or survivors’ bodily wounds and remains. The museum’s collection directed by Friedrich Dörnhoeffer and the decision to exhibit the monumental Altarpiece at a time of war exhaustion and 29 Benjamin, “Socrates,” 234–35. 30 On the contexts of its removal and transportation, see Stieglitz, “The Reproduction of Agony: Towards a Reception-History of Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece after the First World War,” 92–93; however, the significance of the medieval as the key point of connection with the Altarpiece’s display and reception is not developed.

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the German Armistice, following some of the longest and most devastating battles—Verdun (1916), Passchendaele (1917), Cambrai (1917)—seems hardly coincidental. However, if Ludendorff’s offensive on the Western front in the spring of 1918 had been a late rallying call to arms and German patriotism, by November 1918 this zeal had collapsed. Even so, the responses generated by the Altarpiece display suggest a more ambiguous collective mood, mirroring the turbulent state of events in Munich’s transmogrification into vast field hospital, mortuary, and locus of the brief but bloody “Munich uprising.”31 This problematizes the display’s relationship with contexts of War theologies, patriotic, and spiritualized expressionist narratives of German art that pitted a barbaric image of the past against the “suffering” artistic genius who struggles to absorb and heroically overcome it.32 (It is a theme uneasily entwined in Aby Warburg’s 1917 essay “Luther and Portents” in which a key target is medieval “superstition”: practices Warburg associates with “unreason.”33) An idea of the impact of the Altarpiece on visitors is clear in the display’s extensive press coverage. These responses complicate assumptions that the character of such reactions is homogeneous or scriptable in 1918 as patriotic endurance in the face of defeat, or in terms of an (in some ways) opposed nationalist discourse of German “Geist” or spiritual becoming. Exemplified by Wilhelm Worringer’s angst-ridden idea of Innerlichkeit (“inner spiritual essence”) as the determining character of the German male artist (and poet) with his “barbaric” antecedent in Gothic man, he had proselytized it, yet as an ill-defined construct, in his influential 1911 Formprobleme der Gotik.34 31 A turmoil evoked by Thomas Mann in many of his Munich diaries following the November Armistice. He notes, for example, on November 28 that “internal destruction proceeds apace”; on November 29 the “catastrophe, the inhumanity of militarism”; and December 28, widespread looting, food shortages, attacks, and restrictions on movements. Mann, Diaries, 27. 32 Notably, as promoted by Karl Scheffler’s gloss on Worringer’s powerful and political construct of German “Gothic man” in The Spirit of Gothic (Der Geist der Gotik); see Stieglitz, “The Reproduction of Agony,” 87–88. 33 Conceived originally as a lecture to coincide with the 400-year jubilee celebrations of the beginning of the Reformation organized by the Gesellschaft für Hamburgische Geschichte: on its ideological subtexts and war contexts, see Newman, “Luther’s Birthday: Aby Warburg, Albrecht Dürer and Early-Modern Media in the Age of Modern War,” 79–110. 34 See Stieglitz, “The Reproduction of Agony,” on Worringer’s “chauvinism” and nationalism (87); on Worringer’s appropriation of the Gothic (German) artist to promote a mythic geo-cultural construct of the German modernist artist, see Donahue (ed.), Invisible Cathedrals: the Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, especially pages 1–9, which redresses treatments of Worringer’s Gothic “form” mainly as an issue of style eliding its political dimensions, Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision.

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A recurrent theme in accounts of the Isenheim Altarpiece showing from 1918–19 is the comparison of its many queuing visitors to “pilgrims,” to penitents; devotees, witnesses, and to visiting and viewing it as an act of pilgrimage. While in some the emotive appeal to martyrdom and nationalist sentiment is undeniable,35 the medieval resonances of such treatments make them less susceptible to a consistent reading, problematized by the ubiquity of dramatic intensifiers—”overwhelming,” “awe-inspiring,” “dumb-struck,” “like a legend”—underscoring frequent slippage between reporting, dramatic and novelistic registers. Two particular examples present cases in point in these respects. First, is a 1918 report that appeared in Münchener Neueste Nachrichten (Munich Latest News) by art critic Wilhem Hausenstein,36 elaborated in his 1919 study, Der Isenheimer Altar (Munich). Striking in his account is the extent to which he constructs an imagery of the Altarpiece’s effects and the experience of seeing it almost entirely in terms of medievalizing tropes: Never before could people have made such a pilgrimage to an altar; it was like in the Middle Ages. They came. They were drawn to it. The altar was a magnet. […] A changed spirit moved in the constant devotion even of the most wretched. After the mechanisms of more than four years of war, the masses gathered together for the first time before the Spirit of a German artist—probably the greatest we have ever had—to share their innermost common predicament.37

Second, is Oskar Hagen’s and Reinhard Piper’s Album of photographic images produced in 1919 in response to the Altarpiece showing. It is worth noting here, the Altarpiece’s arrangement in the Alte Pinakothek galleries: the three main panels were disposed not as a unified polyptych, but in a sequence, shown one behind the other (as currently arranged in the Colmar Unterlinden chapel). Hagen’s Album indebted to Worringer and his publisher, Heinrich Piper is distinctive in its focus on “close-ups” of the “Crucifixion” panel (position 1). The particular emphasis on gestural details—repeated 35 Notably by Tietze, commenting on the “tens of thousands” coming as pilgrims to the Alte Pinakothek fired by Grünewald’s “ingrowth into the national artistic consciousness of the whole of Germany” (“Grünewalds Einwachsen in das künstlerische Nationalbewusstsein des ganzen deutschen”), “Moderne Kunst und Kunstmuseum,” 61. 36 Founded in 1848, one of the highest-circulation newspapers in Germany, it was a leading liberal newspaper under the editorship of Georg Hirth, but during the First World War, it adopted more conservative views; Hausenstein, a Catholic Socialist, prolific art historian, and journalist, served on the editorial board until his dismissal in 1933 instigated by the Munich police force. 37 Hausenstein, “Der Isenheimer Altar,” 14.

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images of Christ’s lacerated torso and the contorted rictus of his arms, hands and outstretched fingers—along with close-ups of the arcing bodies of the despairing Mary and John the Baptist, and agonized hand-wringing Magdalen (with head thrown back), were reproduced in his 1920 Grünewald study.38 In 1919, these images that draw attention to patterns of somatic and facial and other emotive expressions of violent pain resonate with the uneasy quasi-theatrical viewing experience stimulated by the Altarpiece display’s layout, inspiriting Hausenstein’s perception of “constant devotion even of the most wretched.” In other words, visitors—many of whom were war-wounded, mutilated and in wheelchairs—could not avoid being confronted from the start by gruesome “close-ups” on and amplification of pain. We might see these visual technologies and tropes as amplifying a nationalist narrative of identification with the Isenheim—and Christ’s bodily extremis promoted by Hagen39—as the uber-icon of war suffering around pervasive stereotypes of Gothic pain via an appeal (of these images) to what Stieglitz terms the dark allure of Schaulust (the “morbid gaze”).40 The correspondence of responses in word and image to the display, the memory it activates, is neither clear-cut nor contiguous. In fact, encountering it via the dark Crucifixion panel, its “horror” was the principal focus of fin-de-siècle and earlier nineteenthcentury (notably Böcklin’s) treatments41—reprised by Benjamin’s (and not, as has been claimed, via its “Nativity,” “Angelic Concert” or “Resurrection” panels). The narrative of Grünewald and the Altarpiece’s alterity of suffering inflects the “pilgrimage,” “devotional,” “penitential,” gestural, and display discourses of 1918–19. However ideologically motivated, these pervasive (even excessive) verbal and visual emphases on the work’s stimulation of medieval devotional practices paradoxically alludes to their unseen, unvoiced narratives, their “otherness.” The evocations of a sensory nexus of liminal memory and trauma (silent stories of individual suffering) that remain, the imagery of touch as cathexis in encounters with “presence,” gesture toward multilayered human and cultural attempts to communicate trauma: that is, to find a point of connection to navigate discontinuous and traumatic realities. 38 Hagen, Matthias Grünewald, 11–15. 39 Despite his claims to have captured Grünewald “in the widest possible range of images,” ibid., 10. On Hagen’s construction of Grünewald, notably his suppression of Grünewald’s Catholicism to promote a Reformation narrative of his art’s exemplary historical memory in anticipating an expressive, ergo nationalist art, see Moxey, “Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the work of Dürer and Grünewald,” especially 752–53. 40 Stieglitz, “The Reproduction of an Agony,” 97. 41 As in Böcklin’s Magdalen Mourning over the Body of Christ (1867) and in Huysmans’s Trois Primitifs, see note 12.

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Medieval Uncanny: Resistance and Reconnection—Crossing Borders of Image, Art, and Word It is this idea of the medieval object and encounter as both (uncanny) resis­ tance and reconnection to which I shall now turn. Among the visitors who flocked to the Munich Alte Pinatkothek in 1918–19, including Rilke, was Thomas Mann. In December 1918, he records his viewing as an experience of shock: “amongst the strongest [works] that that ever came before my eyes.”42 Mann was to distil the effects of that encounter, but not again until 1924, suggestively and allusively in The Magic Mountain. As a “tale,” despite its apparent realism, the novel reads as an allegory of an over-refined Belle Époque poised on the brink of imminent destruction. Of concern here, however, is Mann’s depiction of a striking and suggestively present medieval imaginary in a story whose central preoccupation is the diseased condition of body-mind, monastic sequestration; and which circles around bodily and spiritual abjection-purification and the dynamics of pain and purgation. Several key episodes serve to make clear the medieval as pervasive as metaphor and embodied alterity. The main protagonist, Hans Castorp’s impressions of his journey to the mountain Sanatorium mark his separation from the worldly and familiar. It propels him into a disorientated state, amplified by a succession of fantastical landscapes mimicking a Gothic painting: “a magnificent succession of vistas opened before the awed eye, of the solemn, phantasmagorical world of towering peaks, into which their route wove and wormed itself.”43 Their hallucinatory affect and Hans’s “attack of giddiness and nausea,”44 is further compounded by the image of the limping war veteran who greets him on arrival with the injunction that “they make pretty free with time up here,” and the gloomy first sight of the Sanatorium disappearing into the “vague blackness of the pine forest.”45 In this disquieting setting, Hans, aware of the “invalid state which is all body,”46 enters a kind of pre-modern condition of strange and constant dreaming, his unraveling sense of time, tilting between a felt present and the shadow of eternity. 47 He succumbs increasingly to afflictions by nosebleeds (bodily effusions), strange sensations of burning, 42 He records two visits on December 2nd and 8th, 1918. Mann, Diaries, 18, see also 25. 43 Mann, The Magic Mountain, 6. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 10. 46 Ibid., 97. 47 Evoked as “full of matter and tenacious of life […] they could expand into a little eternity.” Ibid., 288.

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as if gripped by demonic fever or an echo of the “burning sickness” of the Isenheim Antonite Order. 48 The Sanatorium inmates take on the character of a Danse Macabre. Everywhere is a pervading sense of death “that plays on the spirit and the senses,” and as Hans later muses, “comes from quite another point on the compass.”49 It would not be too far-fetched to see in Mann’s novel more than an echo of his preoccupations of the immediate post-War years, many of which, along with Grünewald’s Altarpiece, turn on his overlooked concern with medieval culture.50 His novel appeared in the same year as Bloch’s first great work of medieval scholarship, Les Rois thaumaturges: a study of the belief that the kings of France and England could heal the disease known as scrofula by their mere touch. Both works converge interest in a contemporary responsiveness to a memory of medieval art and culture that taps into present trauma mediated by extreme bodily suffering inflicted by war, and on difference and cultural possibility. This approach is quite in contrast to the melancholic “Geist” and spiritualized necessity (aka nationalist) story, which reveals hidden contradictions in the Munich showing of the Altarpiece event, rarely commented on. I would like to take up this idea by way of conclusion in the case of Marc Bloch. Les Rois thaumaturges displays two key interests that were to be characteristic of Bloch’s work. First is the social and collective power of nonrational beliefs and practices (those that Warburg had denounced for their backwardness in 1917, in his Luther essay, referencing both Dürer’s use of the “primitive” woodcut medium and war accounts of soldiers finding comfort in talismans and locks of hair).51 Second is Bloch’s concern with the power of secondary beliefs and practices generated within the interstices of orthodoxies. Bloch holds that “power” whether it is magical or not relies on (unattributed) collective acts to maintain it.52 He notes in one passage that the “marvelous” or sacred monarchical (power) depended on social rites or superstitions to sustain it, and that the survival of these rites (“survivances”) and their longevity 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 26, 294. 50 As revealed in diary entries, notably on the conception of The Magic Mountain as “a renewal of the Christian Civitas” (April 17, 1919) and his reading “with keen interest” (April 20, 1918) of von Eicken’s major work on the medieval worldview, Geschichte und System des mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, 47. 51 On Warburg’s conflicted responses to medieval practices, see Newman, “Luther’s Birthday,” especially 99–102. 52 Bloch conceives this as “le merveilleux monarchique.” Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royal particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, 18–19.

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Bloch sees as not a symptom of their degeneration but rather of their “profound vitality” which persists and continues to mark the temper of modernity.53 His focus on the power of touch to make things work, to heal (its waning in the hands of kings and transfer to people), resonates with histories and devotional purposes guiding the Altarpiece’s conditions of production in the early 1500s. Created to salve sufferers of ergotism54—an incurable, ravaging disease known as St. Anthony’s Fire, it is a history and memory, arguably reactivated in 1918 in wider, yet highly porous contexts of a liminality of pain, bodily trauma, and healing. Bloch concludes with a larger, startling proposal: In biology, to take account of an organism’s existence is not merely to study its father and mother, it is just as much to establish the nature of the milieu which both allows it to survive and constrains its change. The same applies—mutatis mutandis—to social facts. In sum, what I have wished to set out here is essentially a contribution to the political history of Europe in a larger sense.55

He continues that the study of civilizations, which the present inherits, of necessity must be considered beyond, in fact transcending “the too narrow frame of national traditions.”56 In other words—with the medieval as his guiding yardstick—it is through the practices of people, not nations (and their myths) that the cultural particularity of memory and belonging may be grasped and communicated. With a different, yet no less focused force of inwardness is Michael Hamburger’s later observation on the “Inner emigrations” of those writers and artists caught up in the dislocations post-1918 in a complex of circumstances neither national nor geographical, but through an “interaction that amounts to a placing of [themselves].”57 In sum, the potency of both Mann’s and Bloch’s texts is to suggest a perception and framework of memory-making in which the figure of the medieval artist, the suggested rituals that construct it, finds resonance for the aftermath of the First World War as a larger interweaving of the 53 Bloch, “une vitalité profonde,” Les Rois thaumaturges, 20. 54 See Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision. 55 “En biologie, rendre compte de l’existence d’un organisme, ce n’est pas seulement rechercher ses père et mère, c’est tout autant determiner les caractères du milieu qui à la fois lui permet de vivre et le constraint a se modifier. Il en va de même—mutatis mutandis—des faits sociaux. En somme, ce que j’ai voulu donner ici, c’est essentiellement une contribution à l’histoire politique de l’Europe, au sens plus large.” Ibid., 21. 56 “Du cadre trop étroit des traditions nationales.” Ibid., 21. 57 Hamburger, “Introduction,” 30–31.

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artistic and social, the particular and redemptive—yet not nationalist. This places the potential in memory as materia not dark ghosts, which can be refashioned, recreated—reimagined—in spite of and because of trauma. It is an idea that resonates with Otto Dix’s attempts in his series Der Krieg (“The War,” 1924) and great War Triptych (1929–32, his deeply felt response to Grünewald’s Altarpiece) to create works to confront trauma: to exorcise war, and in George Grosz’s appeal in 1931 invoking the art of the Middle Ages, to a reconnection with particular memory.58 In 1918, the Isenheim Altarpiece disturbed memory and the present not because it connected only with experiences of terrible pain and death, but because it embodied the capacity to imagine the almost impossible memory. It gave a medieval object and shape to individual war anguish, and as a collective experience of loss and mourning; of life wrenched from the very edge of death. In Sebald’s response to the horrors of fascism and the Second World War, in his imaging and writing of destruction (the hoard, the anatomical corpse, the haunted place, the vaporizing land), would appear little that speaks to the redemptive or reconnected memory as Grünewald’s great work did for Mann, Bloch, Dix and their contemporaries. Yet even in Sebald’s very concern with annihilation oscillating between natural, human—and spiritual disaster, is patterned a glimpsed “other” image and object: the quincunx; the shrine. To Sebald’s reprise of Sir Thomas Browne, that “on every living thing there lies the shadow of its ruin,” we might add that every living thing contains the potential of its transf iguration. In 1918, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, by accident or design, distilled this deeper cathexis of war and its shadow, offering a homeopathy—a guide—to negotiate the infinitely fine line between ruin and possibility.

Works Cited Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Merll and Ansgar Nünning, 109–118. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Bailey, Anne E. “Peter Brown and Victor Turner Revisited: Anthropological Approaches to Latin Miracle Narratives in the Medieval West.” In Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 110–1600, edited by Matthew M. Mesley and Louise E. Wilson, 17–39. Medium Ævum Monographs 32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 58 Grosz, “Unser anderen, ein Wort für die deutsche Tradition” (“Among Other Things, a Word for German Tradition”), 82.

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Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Belting, Hans. “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 302–319. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Briefe, 1892–1940, edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2016. Benjamin, Walter. “Socrates.” Walter Benjamin, Early Writings 1910–1917, translated by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Bloch, Marc. Les Rois thaumaturges: Etude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royal particulièrement en France et en Angleterre. Strasbourg-Paris: Librairie Istra, 1924. Courajod, Louis. Les Véritables origines de la Renaissance. Paris: Sceaux, 1888. Donahue, Neil H., ed. Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Edwards, Paul. “The Photograph in Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte.” European Studies 30 (2000): 71–98. Elkins, James. Writing with Images: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (2014). Accessed October 23, 2020. http://writingwithimages.com/4-3-w-g-sebald-the-rings-ofsaturn/. Friedländer, Max, and Jakob Rosenberg. Die Gemälde von Lukas Cranach. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Grosz, George. “Unser anderen, ein Wort für die deutsche Tradition.” Das Kunstblatt 15 (1931): 79–84. Hagen, Oskar. Matthias Grünewald. München: Reinhard Piper, 1920. Hamburger, Michael. “Introduction.” In German Poetry 1910–1975: An Anthology, edited and translated by Michael Hamburger, 30–31. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977. Hanna, Martha. “Iconology and Ideology; Images of Joan of Arc in the Idiom of Action Française, 1908–1931.” French Historical Studies 14, no. 2 (1985): 215–39. Hartley, Leslie Poles. “Prologue.” In The Go-Between. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1913. Hausenstein, Wilhelm. “Der Isenheimer Altar.” Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, December 1918. Hayum, Andrée. The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Ecrits sur l’art. Edited by Jérôme Picon. Paris: GF Flammarion, 2008. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Trois Primitifs. Paris: Albert Messein, 1905. Lecoq-Ramond, Sylvie. “Les artistes devant le ‘Retable d’Issenheim’: de l’invention au pèlerinage.” In Histoire du musée d’Unterlinden et de ses collections: de la

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Révolution à la Première Guerre mondiale, edited by S. Lecoq-Ramond, 361–381. Colmar: Musée d’Unterlinden, 2003. Mann, Thomas. Diaries, 1918–1939, edited and translated by K. Hermann (trans.). London: André Deutsch, 1983. Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg. Berlin: Fischer, 1924. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter. London: Vintage Books, 2011. Marchand, Suzanne. “The Rhetoric of Artefacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski.” History and Theory 33, no. 4 (1994): 106–130. Moxey, Keith. “Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the work of Dürer and Grünewald.” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2004): 750–63. Newman, Jane O. “Luther’s Birthday: Aby Warburg, Albrecht Dürer and EarlyModern Media in the Age of Modern War.” Daphnis 37, nos. 1–2 (2008): 79–110. Pieldner, Judit. “Narrative Discourse, Memory and the Experience of Travel in W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica 8, no. 1 (2016): 67–78. Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Kleine Schriften—Furnes (1907).” In Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 493–94; 1005–16. Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1966. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Werke in vier Bänden 1. Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: InselVerlag, 1996. Rodenbach, Georges. Bruges-la-Morte. Edited by G. Compère and C. Delcourt. Brussels: Le Cri edition, 2001. Scheffler, Karl. The Spirit of Gothic (Der Geist der Gotik). Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1919. Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. London: The Harvill Press, 1998. Simpson, Juliet. “Lucas Cranach’s Legacies—‘Primitive’ and Rooted identities of Art and Nation at the European Fin de Siècle.” FNG Research, issue 5 (2020): 1–22. Accessed December 16, 2020. https://research.fng.fi/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ fngr_2020-5_simpson_juliet_article1.pdf. Stieglitz, Ann. “The Reproduction of Agony: Towards a Reception-History of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece after the First World War.” Oxford Art Journal 12, no. 2 (1989): 87–103. Stoïchita, Victor. Des Corps, Anatomie, Défense, Fantasmes. Geneva: Droz, 2019. Thum, Reinhard. “The Medieval City: A Motif in Rilke’s Neuen Gedichten.” Colloquia Germanica, 15, no. 4 (1982): 331–44. Tietze, Hans. “Moderne Kunst und Kunstmuseum.” In Lebendige Kunstwissenschaft. Zur Krise der Kunst und der Kunstgeschichte. Vienna: Krystall-Verlag, 1925. Verhaeren, Emile. Sensations d’art. Edited by François-Marie Deyrolle. Toulouse: Séguier, 1989. Von Eicken, Heinrich. Geschichte und System des mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung. London: André Deutsch, 1983.

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About the Author Juliet Simpson is Full Professor of Art History, Chair of Cultural Memory and Research Director for the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities, Coventry University. She is the author of numerous publications on long nineteenth-century art, art critics, word-image relations, symbolism, art and the emotions, and Gothic and Renaissance afterlives in object, image and word, ca. 1830–1930. Recent publications include the books Primitive Renaissances (Ashgate-Routledge, 2022); and Gothic Modernisms, co-edited with T. Bauduin, J. Baetens and A.-M. von Bonsdorff (Peter Lang, forthcoming); and articles “Baudelaire’s Prodigal Guys” (2021), “Lucas Cranach’s Legacies” (2020), and “Hodler and Mallarmé” (2019); she is Guest Curator and Principal Investigator for the international exhibition, Gothic Modern, 1875-1925—Munch to Kollwitz (Helsinki-Oslo-Berlin, 2024–25). She was Royal Netherlands Academy Visiting Full Professor of Art History, University of Amsterdam (2017–18); Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College, Oxford; and is currently Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London since 2019. Simpson is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and Royal Historical Society, UK, and sits on the International Editorial Board of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.

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The Worlds of Eternal Present The Quest for the Hidden Patterns of Baroque Thought in Sebald’s literature Jelena Todorović Abstract Although the main topic of the conference is directed to the influence of Sebald’s interdiciplinary and highly hybrid work on contemporary artistic production, I would aim to present the other aspect of interdisciplinarity present in his work. It is the aspect the that looks backwards in time, and opens the different dimension for perceiving Sebald’s work. I would like to show how Sebald’s literature reflected the pronounced hybridity and polyvalence of an age as complex and calamitous as his own—the time of the Baroque. These concepts of multi-disciplinarity and hybridity were first epitomised in the Baroque age and stood prominently in the work of many artist, including the ouvre of one great, albeit invisible character of Sebald’s Rings of Saturn—Sir Thomas Browne. As usual to Sebald’s writing, Thomas Browne was present indirectly, through his writings (The Urn Burrial and Religio Medici) but even more through a prevailing sense of time that enveloped the entire book—the concept of eternal present. “The eternity has no distinction of tenses” wrote Thomas Browne, the notion that was to define Sebald’s perception of time where everything that was, lasts forever, where past eternally outlines our present. It was in the Baroque that such sense of the past “as an open category” was first introduced, a concept that would stand as one of the central concepts of Sebald’s literature. Keywords: Sebald’s Artistic Production, Baroque, Eternal Present, Thomas Browne, Hybridity

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch03

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I now think that the time will not pass away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments in time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us, is true. —W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

It was in the Baroque era that the West first fully began to explore the depths of time. While it continues to be a main preoccupation within Western culture, few contemporary writers engage with it as profoundly as in those first forays. Yet W.G. Sebald did, embarking on what I would call Baroque questions, namely in his two key novels The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. In these he unravels the importance of the past in our present in exploring both memory and oblivion in relation to the self. For Sebald, time is fragmented and circular—the ever-present composition of diverse elements belonging to different epochs; like his emblematic “rings of Saturn,” time comprises individual particles belonging to our various presents and pasts that perpetually ambulate in one unending vortex. This fragmentation in time and space resonates throughout the Baroque world. Not unlike Sebald’s literature, the Baroque is difficult to define: they’re both cumulative and both chart an inconstant, fluid, and ever-changing universe. Although already established in Renaissance and Mannerist culture, the fragment shaped the Baroque as “particular,” “unfinished,” “discontinuous,” and “incomplete,” reflecting the polivalence and plurality of the then-contemporary worldview. Primarily evident on the political level—when religious wars transformed Europe into a compendium of fragments and state capitals, enhancing the polycentricity of the Baroque age—it was not all negative, as for some a wealth of meanings could be explored in both the sacred and secular spheres. Applied to the crumbling world, fragmentation faithfully depicted the Baroque human being, especially the man, as fragmented self.1 Affiliated with fragmentation, hybridity—that great legacy of Baroque culture—is readily present in Sebald’s novels. Baroque art’s striving to unify sculpture, painting, and architecture toward one beautiful whole, the bel composto so evident in Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1647–52) or Cathedra Petri (1657–66), could be likened to Sebald’s merging of documentary, historiography, fiction, and travel writing toward a new artistic form. The author 1 On Baroque fragmentation see Todorović, The Spaces that Never Were in Early Modern Art: Exploration of Edges and Frontiers, 1–41.

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claimed that his literature was outside fixed categories and rather united them. Baroque artworks, too, often evade classification, transcending genres to become hybrids of different art forms and media. Hybridity also provided a much-needed flexibility and power of amalgamation that transformed the Baroque from being purely European into the first global culture. In The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz—hybridity is seen in Sebald’s interweaving of past and present, time evoked and perceived, memory and fiction, record and recollection, documentary, and historical study. The crossover between the Baroque and Sebald’s writing is no accident. Seventeenth-century doctor and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne’s effect within The Rings of Saturn, situated as it is in Norfolk where Sebald was raised and where Browne wrote and published Religio Medici and Urn Burial is clear, with Browne’s concepts pivotal to Sebald’s vision on temporality. Much of Austerlitz could not be understood without being versed in Browne’s philosophy, namely his concept of the “eternal present” in which different times and spaces co-exist as exemplified in media and visual regimes.2

The Plurality of Worlds Confined to One Eternal Instant Both Sebald’s and Browne’s notion of eternal present includes the experience of time as a complex multi-foci vision of the world: “It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry.”3 Austerlitz’s words envisaging his own experience of space and time could equally depict the experience of movement through Baroque sacred spaces, like Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quatro Fontane (1638–46) in Rome—one of the most dynamic spatial phenomena of the age with its polyphonic understanding of time molded into space. Borromini renders the endless temporal and spatial intertwining present in other media in the Baroque arts in three dimensions: stone is used to create a sense of elasticity, an architectural answer to the illusionistic frescoes of Baccicco’s Il Gesu where the beholder can never be fully aware of the place, time or medium. The painting has the voluminosity and depth of sculpture, the stucco looks like gilded bronze, and the statues have the color of flesh. Like our own misconceptions of the past and present, which Sebald so often explored, Borromini’s space questions 2 Ibid., 33–60. 3 Sebald, Austerlitz, 181.

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the boundaries of spatial organization. In the interior of San Carlo, loosely based on the shape of an oval, there is no sharp corner, no straight wall; everything seems to undulate in one unending movement, never ceasing in one eternal instant like Sebald’s vision of time and space where “various spaces interlock according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry.”4 Relentlessly moving, Borromini’s space challenges the usual boundaries between interior and exterior, billowing I and rippling nave. It also blurs the edges of the palpable present world and the atemporal domain of the heavens. Similar liminal spaces in Sebald’s literature hold an ambiguous sense of temporality, a time without chronology: “Although in my dream I was sitting, transfixed with amazement, in the Chinese pavilion, I was at the same time out in the open, within a foot from the very edge, and knew how fearful it is to cast one’s eye so low,”5 or, “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 must go there in search of places and people who have some connections with us on the far side of time, so to speak?”6 Like the beholder in Borromini’s church, the reader of Sebald’s novels is never certain of the space and the age he is in. The landscapes become townscapes of the past, or the stages for a-temporal events. Space and time never function as fixed categories, moving with a curious flow. In Austerlitz the beholder cannot ascertain what he experiences: the solidity of the present, the flow of the past or the infinity of eternity: “It is as if the time which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as the years behind us were still to come.”7 These words almost echo those of the famous Baroque poet Louis de Gongora, who was also mesmerized by the reversal of the usual roles of man and time: Where do you imprint your fingerprints That I cannot find your trace? Now I realise I am wrong If I believe you fly, run and roll; You are the time, the one who stays, And I am the one who goes.8 4 Ibid., 144. 5 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 174. 6 Ibid., 360. 7 Ibid., 152. 8 De Gongora, “Measuring Time by the Stars,” in Zvjezdani sat, 54–55.

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Such spatial ambiguities were not confined only to the sacred spaces of the Baroque world, but were equally prolific in other interiors. One of the most curious examples of the unification of different temporal and spatial entities was Athanasius Kircher’s Mirror Palace.9 Known as one of the last universal men of the Baroque epoch, in Collegio Romano in 1651 the Jesuit polymath founded one of the most conspicuous cabinets of curiosities of his time. Very quickly his wunderkammer, largely thanks to the widespread network of Jesuit colleges, became one of the richest museums in Europe. The museum had to envisage the image of the true faith, of the only righteous Catholic Church, but even more to represent the new approach to space and time. Of his collection, a symbolic image of its multiple founder Italo Calvino lucidly noted: “It is my image that I want to multiply [in a mirror], but not out of narcissism or megalomania … on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me.”10 If there was one object that truly represented that multiplicity, it was the Mirror Palace or Catoptic Box—the most peculiar illusionary space of the Baroque age: Shaped like a Theatre, the inside of the box is covered in mirrored planes whose backs are joined together at acute angle such that it curves into a four-sided hollow space; the horizontal plane is a quadrilateral, which revolves around a moving axis in the center, so that the four sides presents a variety of figures or planes; thus the mirrored planes exchanging by reflexion one of the presented planes for another reflect, distribute and multiply the images and by continuously gathering up the same images they break them up optically, so that it is impossible to count them.11

From interior to the exterior, from banquet hall to lavish formal garden, the spectator is offered a sight of, as Kircher himself had explained, infinite spaces in motion. Unlike Borromini’s church, the beholder is never a true participant, always outside. However, the illusion the mirrors fabricate is so powerful, so deceptive, that it creates a semblance of immersion in this plurality of worlds that no other enclosed space could then ever have offered. In Kircher’s Mirror Palace that was exhibited in his museum in Collegio Romano, as in Sebald’s literature, the beholder perceives no clear distinction between times and spaces. Everything is superimposed, overlaps; one is 9 For Kircher’s Mirror Palace see Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. 10 Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, 162–63. 11 Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 256.

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never certain where present stops and past resurfaces: “It seems to me that if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if the future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last,”12 or, in The Rings of Saturn, “And now they are all gathered here, my Berlin relatives, my German and my English friends, my in-laws, my children, the living and the dead. Unseen by them, I walk through their midst, from one room to the another, through galleries, halls and passages.”13 The space Kircher created was the ultimate space that contained all loci and times of this world where the beholder encountered, like in Browne’s eternal instant, the sense of boundless time, the true image of the a-temporal. It was a place like that in Austerlitz that contained all the hours of his life: “In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood contained all the hours of my past life, all the superimposed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the end game would be played, and it covered the entire plane of time.”14 By its multiplication of times and spaces the Mirror Palace annihilates any border between them, rendering invalid any parameters upon which our world is founded. The mirrors of time, for Kircher and for Sebald, forever change their angles, shaping our own fleeting existence.

Movement and Memory The cultural climate of the Baroque period enhanced impetus of the retrospective journey into history and memory. Sebald likewise evokes memory through ambulations of his main protagonists in Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, recalling the Baroque “man” was the first to connect the physical movement and the movement of the soul.15 Inner and outer journeys reflected and replicated one another. In both of these novels the process of walking as recollection, of movement as symbolic pilgrimage to the past, personal and collective is a main topoi, with The Rings of Saturn originally titled An English Pilgrimage. The greatest revelations come to Austerlitz through walking the cities of his past and present: Antwerp, Paris, Prague, London. In Sebald’s novels they are simultaneously the cities of the 12 Sebald, Austerlitz. 13 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 180. 14 Sebald, Austerlitz. 15 See Todorović, O ogledalima, ružama i ništavilu [About mirrors, roses and nothingness].

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present and of memory. For the Baroque person and Sebald’s characters respectively, it is the movement through space that opens up emotion and allows memory from the past to resurface: “Such ideas infalibly come to me in places which have more of the past about them then the present. For instance, if I am walking through the city 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.”16 In the cultural and spiritual climate of the Catholic Reformation, the return to the past was seen as a process of enrichment and retrospect. The past of the Early Church had to be revived to be believed, restored to be included in our present. Religious images like that of S. Cecilia, San Alessio or San Clemente served only as departure points, as an inspiration of one’s own recollection of the past. After reviving it that past was to be relived in the meditations upon holy history of the Christianity and Church itself.17 Re-enactment of the past lies at the basis of the meditative mechanism that marked Baroque culture, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignazio Loyola (1548). The connection between movement and memory was embedded in this mnemonic exercise where the faithful, through a set of exercises would meditate on the passion of Christ, gradually inserting themselves as witness to the biblical narrative, achieving greater identification and compassio by meditating on a specific space with their own scenography of the past populated with sacred protagonists. This meditative visualization, or composition of place, was foundational to this particular Jesuit practice as much as the Baroque person and their virtural spaces. The Baroque period is rich with examples of evocative spaces that invited the faithful onto a dual journey—the visible and invisible, most prominently in the seventeenth and eighteenth century being sacro monti, where the sacred topography of the Holy Land was projected onto Western European landscapes. From the most renowned in Varallo in North Italy, to the less known Sacro Monte di Ossuccio (one of the nine scari monti created only in Lombardy and Piemont at the time), these mnemonic lands translated the concept of spiritual exercises into the realm of nature. Clusters of chapels represented one chapter in the sacred history of the Christ and the Virgin Mary, condensing time and space, where each particle of the present evoked a past event. As stated earlier on Sebald and walking, space opened up emotion, self-discovery and inner transformation, and in turn 16 Sebald, Austerlitz, 359. 17 For the Baroque concept of the return of the past in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn see Todorović, Hidden Legacies of Baroque Thought.

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recalls space as experienced by Austerlitz: “He had often found himself in the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotions in the Parisian railway stations, he regarded them as places both marked by blissful happiness and profound misfortune.”18 Baroque mnemonic spaces were at times integrated into sacred places of Counter Reformation Rome. one of the earliest being the interior of the Early Christian martyrium San Stefano Rotondo.19 Previously a fifth-century circular Christian martyrium, venerating Saint Stephen on Celianhill, it could not have been a more appropriate space to develop the idea of a past that should inspire our present: it was connected to the same past that the Catholic Church now strove to integrate. There has been several restorations, the most pivotal in 1580 when it was given to the Jesuit order to be its Collegium Germanicum for future missionaries. It was further restored and frescoed around the circular nave by Nicolo Circignani—il Pomarancio (1582) with twenty-four scenes depicting Early Christian martyrs. Never before had a frescoed cycle depicted such highly naturalistic martyrdoms presenting each terrifying detail of their torture. Although on separate wall planes between pillars, the scenes are interconnected by the circular wall and situated in the same landscape that weaves from one image to the other, creating a novel sense of time and place. The frescoes were constructed in such a way as to enable a more profound meditation upon the sacred space: each detail was carefully marked by a letter that, in a legend (incorporated into the fresco), identified each protagonist and explained their role in sacred history. The future missionaries could study them carefully and later incorporate them in their inner world of meditations. Their space was the current Baroque church, but also Early Christian martyrium and the site of numerous sacrifices for faith and the Church. Their movement through it immersed them in a virtual projection of the past while also evoking a fictional memory of the martyrs as memory of themselves. They had to be prepared for their destiny, for martyrdom, to not only re-enact but re-live the sacred history. Memory and retrieval were united in one eternal instant, as Sebald’s literary spaces, to mark one’s place in history: “The closer I came to these imaginary ruins, the more any notion of mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our civilization after some future catastrophe.”20 18 Sebald, Austerlitz, 46. 19 For a detailed discussion of Cricignani’s frescoes in San Stefano Rotondo see Dillon, “Michelangelo and the English Martyrs.” 20 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 237.

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In S. Stefano Rotondo, the devout would visit all of the sacred places of Early Christian martyrs—fictional places that offered a pseudo-historical narrative created through illusion. The virtual history becomes real through producing seemingly true visual evidence. The same process is crucial in Sebald’s writing. Like the pseudo-documentary photos embedded in his narrative, these loci of virtual history create a reality unto itself. It is the image that possesses a veracity, that contains its own official memory, far more powerful than conventional altarpieces, a far more suggestive and more vivid reconstruction of the Christian past. As Austerlitz remarks: “One has the impression […] that images have the memory of their own and remember us, remember the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer with us, played in our former lives…”21 Physical movement of the devout through the constructed sacred landscape, pointed to the symbolic movement of the soul, in both sacri monti and in San Stefano Rotondo. Temporal shift could happen only in meditating on a specif ic image in the space imbued with the past. The image and space, as in Sebald’s work, bear memory. Similarly, to the spatial plurality of Sebald’s literature, the beholder of these virtual pilgrimages exists in two spaces—the external in which they walk, and the inner in which they create through that walking.

The Fragmented Universe In contrast to previous periods, the Baroque glorified transience, fugacity, and nothingness, while simultaneously favoring visual and sensory abundance. Despite their disparate nature, these fragmented elements coexisted dynamically, permeating all spheres from macrocosm to microcosm—a grand tide, the same tide of time that moved through Sebald’s work centuries later. “If Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is it its source, and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so were seen in those terms are the banks of Time? What would be these river’s qualities, qualities perhaps those of water, which is flowing rather than heavy and translucent? In what way objects immersed in Time differ from those untouched by it?”22 The fragmentary Baroque spaces of Francesco Borromini and his follower Guarino Guarini were matched by Andrea Pozzo and Franz Antoin 21 Sebald, Austerlitz, 258. 22 Ibid.

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Mauelberch in their translations of the concept to paint on ceilings. Uniting dissonance echoes in Sebald’s depiction of a waiting room at Liverpool Street station in Austerlitz in which several spatial segments belonging simultaneously to different epochs create a solid composite.23 Temporal and spatial planes similarly overlap in early Christian basilicas later renovated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome, namely: Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano, San Paolo fuori le Mura, San Pietro… The most conspicuous ones were the great martiriums of the first Christians built to glorify faith and rebuilt in the Baroque period when faith and sacrifice were needed more than ever as proof of ecclesia militans, to show that there had been no change. As Cardinal Cesare Baronio wrote in the opening to his Annales: “it is the uninterrupted chain of years, when Church has never altered and was always one and the same. These very words resound in the words spoken by Austerlitz: that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was.”24 Some early Christian churches in Rome display an even more complex overlapping—like Santa Prasede and the martirio of San Clemente under Cole Opio combining Early Christian, Pagan and Baroque structures. The rebuilding of these sacred spaces was intended to contain all the times in one inseparable eternal instant, the one and only time of the Catholic Church, in which, as Austerlitz believed, the years behind us were still to come.25 The Paston Treasure/Yarmouth collection (1663) by unknown is a Baroque painting in the Norwich Museum that had been forgotten for almost two centuries.26 After its thorough restoration and exhibition in 2017, the remarkably sized (165 x 246 cm) Baroque painting of William Paston’s collection received detailed study that gave insight not merely into his fragmented universe. On visits to Cairo, Constantinople, Athens and Alexandria, Paston acquired his collection as his symbolic alter ego, commissioning the painting possibly in 1663 as a monument.27 The collection is presented with utmost precision on a large, slightly angled table. While larger than other works in the genre, customary examples of wunderkammer artifacts like gilded 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 144. 25 Ibid., 152. 26 Anon., The Paston Treasure—Norwich Castle Museum inventory number NWHCM: 1947.170. For a detailed study, see Bucklow, The Anatomy of Riches: Sir Robert Paston’s Treasure and The Paston Treasure—Microcosm of the Known World, ed. Moore, Flis, and Vanke. 27 On collections as images of the collectors’ selves, see Todorović, “The Pursuit of Tradition—the State Art Collection and the Process of Creation of Multiple Identities,” 14–45.

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nautilus shells, ivory chalices, mother of pearl flasks and bejewelled ostrich eggs are combined with flowers, shells, fruits, and even two surprising figures—an ornately dressed black servant with a monkey on its shoulder, and the little girl with a musical score and a bunch of roses. Further enhancing the complexity, the elaborate collectors’ items are combined with objects usually connected to vanitas paintings—an extinguished candle, abundance of the musical instruments, hourglass, mechanical clock, and soap bubbles, becoming memento mori. The panoply of treasures as representing wealth and fragmentation acutely demonstrates the notable paradox of the Baroque worldview: harmony in disharmony, a concordant unity. Returning to John Donne’s The Storm: Darkness, lights elder brother, his birth-right Claims o’er this world, and to heaven hath chas’d light. All things are one, and that none can be, Since all formes, uniforme deformity Doth cover, so that wee, except God say Another Fiat, shall have no more day.28

The unrelated objects that cast no shadow nor reflect one another in the painting could be said to share this uniform deformity with Donne’s poem, seemingly stable atop a sloped table. The painter desired to portray the “world’s fragmented and unstable nature.”29 It belongs to a space that is also Sebald’s: Norfolk and Suffolk, the protagonists of The Rings of Saturn. Paston was also a friend of Browne, the great polymath from Norwich, with whom he often collaborated on scientific experiments. Like the objects in the painting, for Browne all elements of the living world were interconnected fragments. Sebald would use Browne’s His precise diagrams of these centuries later to illustrate, obliquely as always, the pattern of destruction in The Rings of Saturn. “There is no antidote,” Sebald writes, “against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself ‘grows old’.”30 If the painting indicates Paston’s awareness of fragmentation, he may have already sensed that “the representation of history is a falsification of 28 Donne, “The Storm,” ed. cit. I. 177, Excellence in Literature by Campbell (excellence-inliterature.com), accessed in March 2021. 29 Bucklow, The Anatomy of Riches. 57. 30 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 27.

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perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.”31 The painting’s structure resembles that of Sebald’s narratives and the land in which they and the painting were created and reduced to—particles in the eroding sandy shores of the Suffolk coastline. “The lake is encircled by deciduous woodland that is now dying, owing to the steady erosion of the coastline by the sea. Doubtless it is only a matter of time before one stormy night the shingle bank is broken, and the appearance of the entire area changes.”32 This painting converges thought patterns in the Baroque period and Sebald’s literature—a polyvalent and incoherent monument to a world that, by its fragmentation, disconcertingly anticipates our own age of disquiet.

Works Cited Anon. The Paston Treasure. Norwich Castle Museum. Inventory number NWHCM: 1947.170. Bucklow, Spike. The Anatomy of Riches: Sir Robert Paston’s Treasure. London: Reaktion, 2018. Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Boston: Mariner Books, 1982. De Gongora, Louis. Zvjezdani sat. Banjaluka: Glas, 1979. Dillon, Anne. “Michelangelo and the English Martyrs.” The American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (2014): 302–8. Donne, John. “The Storm.” Excellence in Literature by Janice Campbell. Accessed March 2021. https://www.excellence-in-literature.com. Kircher, Athanasuius. Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. 1646. Moore, Andrew, Nathan Flis, and Francesca Vanke, eds. The Paston Treasure— Microcosm of the Known World. New Haven, CT and Norwich: Yale University Press, 2018. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. London, Vintage, 1995. Todorović, Jelena. O ogledalima, ružama i ništavilu [About Mirrors, Roses and Nothingness]. Serbia: Izdavačko preduzeće CLIO, 2012. Todorović, Jelena. Hidden Legacies of Baroque Thought. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 31 Sebald, Austerlitz, 144. 32 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 59.

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Todorović, Jelena. “The Pursuit of Tradition—the State Art Collection and the Process of Creation of Multiple Identities.” In The Catalogue of the State Art Collection in the Royal Compound, 14–43. Novi Sad: Platoneum, 2014. Todorović, Jelena. The Spaces that Never Were in Early Modern Art: Exploration of Edges and Frontiers. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.

About the Author Jelena Todorović  (BA, Faculty of Philosophy Belgrade, MA and PhD, University College London) is a Full Professor of early modern European culture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of the Arts in Belgrade and the Vice Dean for International Cooperation. Since 2006 she runs the project of the State Art Collection in Belgrade, for which she received European Union Award for cultural heritage in 2018. Although an art historian by training, her interests have always been more directed toward early modern cultural history, as well as curating and the history of collecting in the first half of the twentieth century. Her latest publications include Spazi d’illusione, lugoghi di confine e di fromntier nella arte moderna (Kappabit, 2020), “Spaces of the A-Temporal: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the Spaces of Imagination”  in Architectural Space and the Imagination—Houses in Literature and Arts from Classic to Contemporary (ed. by Jane Griffits-Adam Hannah, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and The Realms of Eternal Present—the Hidden Legacy of Baroque Culture in Modern Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).

4

Seeing the Void? On Visual Representations of “Arisierungen,” Forced Absences, and Forms of Taking Inventory in the Installation Invent arisiert by Arno Gisinger Veronika Rudorfer Abstract In this essay I analyze contemporary artistic practices that visualize “Ari­ sierungen” (“aryanizations”)—a term coined by the National Socialists for the forced transfer of property from the Jewish population in Germany, Austria, and German-occupied Europe to Nazi owners. How can this robbery, the destruction of contexts as well as restitution be visualized in art? Which interdisciplinary forms of medialization are found for the absence of these stolen objects and their relationships to their former owners? How are these non-human entities witnesses of trauma? These questions are relevant today in light of the decreasing number of human witnesses to the holocaust, and the subsequent transformation of communicative memory into cultural memory (Jan Assmann) that necessitates new forms of memory. Discourses on legitimate forms of visual representation of Nazi crimes and art after Auschwitz (Theodor W. Adorno) raise questions also addressed in the critique of W.G. Sebald’s work, and relevant to my interdisciplinary analysis of artistic practices dealing with “Arisierungen” that pulls on memory, history/historicity, and void/absence in the work of Anna Artaker, Maria Eichhorn and Arno Gisinger. I also concentrate on the relationship between institutions and artists, asking: Do artists work on behalf of institutions to research institutional history, or are artists’ projects independently executed? How can these works be contextualized in terms of (post-)conceptual art and institutional critique? Do they employ an archival aesthetic, one also used by Sebald? And finally, how is language relevant in these artistic practices? Keywords: Appropriation, Representability, Aesthetics, Ownership, Systematization and Destruction

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch04

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To see the void means to register something in perception that belongs to that perception but is absent in it; it means to see the absence of what is missing as a quality of presence.1 —Rudolf Arnheim, Anschauliches Denken

Introduction “Seeing the void” is a way to address the emptiness and absence caused by “Arisierungen” (“aryanizations”) in selected works of contemporary art and approaches. Each “aryanization” has been accompanied by the destruction of ownership and property relations, connections and contexts, forcefully inflicting emptiness where an intact, living environment had once thrived. The consequences of these National Socialist raids—which through bureaucracy and precision dissolved every human aspect of the victims’ lives and can only be partially reconstructed—are still felt today, some seventy-five years after the end of the Second World War. Restitution processes that have not yet been completed, museum collections that have only been falteringly processed and provenance research projects that remain underfunded are just a few of the current headlines. The National Socialists “aryanized” all the Jewish-owned property they could get hold of—from land and real estate, companies, and patents, to works of art, libraries, cult items and everyday objects. And because the plunder was so comprehensive, untraceability, destruction or unidentifiability now make actual restitution—returning the stolen goods to the original owners or descendants—often all but impossible.

“Arisierungen” / Ownership / Possession The problematic term “Arisierungen” was coined on the basis of National Socialist racist ideology and refers to the initially unregulated, later legitimized and legalized expropriation of those classified as Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws in Germany, Austria, and Nazi-occupied territories, and the confiscated property’s subsequent transfer to new owners classified 1 See Arnheim, Anschauliches Denken, 92. The original quote reads: “Die Leere sehen heißt, etwas in eine Wahrnehmung aufnehmen, das in sie hineingehört, aber abwesend ist; es heißt, die Abwesenheit des Fehlenden als eine Eigenschaft des Gegenwärtigen zu sehen.” Translation by Marc Brooks.

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as “Aryan.”2 The dual aim of “aryanizing” both material and immaterial property was firstly to enrich the National Socialists and secondly to displace and extinguish—initially the economic—livelihood of the Jewish population.3 It is important to make a conceptual distinction between ownership and possession. Legally, ownership means the comprehensive material rights to an item, that is, the owner may dispose of the item at his or her discretion. In contrast, possession means to have an item in one’s possession and to have the will to retain the item as one’s own—that is to say, only to have the item at one’s disposal. 4 In the deceitful processes subsumed under the term “aryanizations,” first legal possession and then ownership relations were forcefully dissolved by the National Socialists. So how can such robbery, the associated destruction of relations and the various forms of restitution be visualized? While W.G. Sebald focused on absences left by Second World War in the f ield of literature, in my analysis I am turning to visual artists of the subsequent generation, who are dealing with specific absences caused by the National Socialists. Which medializations can be found for the absence of objects brought about by “aryanizations” and the dissolution of their original contexts? What role does the presence or absence of objects play here and to what extent might they act as a witness to the trauma of “aryanizations”—inflicted on them by the National Socialists—with their rightful owners in most cases no longer be able to act as witnesses to the respective “aryanization” themselves?5 A further complex of questions also addresses the specific relationship between artist and institution in this context: were the presented works 2 Research on “aryanizations” is still mainly conducted in the fields of contemporary history and economic history—depending on the character of the material or immaterial goods. In Austria, the Österreichische Historikerkommission (Austrian Historical Commission) did comprehensive interdisciplinary research on “aryanizations.” Their research was published in forty-nine volumes in the series Veröffentlichungen der Österreichischen Historikerkommission: Vermögensentzug während der NS-Zeit sowie Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen seit 1945 in Österreich. Only in recent years have museums addressed “aryanizations” in exhibitions. See, for example Bertz and Dorrmann, Raub und Restitution: Kulturgut aus jüdischem Besitz von 1933 bis heute; RECOLLECTING: Raub und Restitution. See also Sophie Lillie’s research on the seized art collections in Vienna: Lillie, Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens and the databases https://www.lootedart.com/ and http://www.lostart.de/. 3 The database http://www.ns-quellen.at/ offers original legal sources and legal texts, issued by the National Socialists. 4 Contemporary historian Herbert Posch has pointed out the importance of this distinction in the context of “aryanizations” in Fliedl and Posch, inventarisiert: Enteignung von Möbeln aus jüdischem Besitz, 19. 5 These questions were addressed in a contemporary art historic context in Rudorfer, “Die Leere sehen: Konstellationen der Abwesenheit,” 27–31.

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created on behalf of an institution or independently? How can these positions be situated in the discourses of institutional critique—especially regarding questions of site-specificity? These questions will be pursued in what follows first by examining Arno Gisinger’s installation Invent arisiert (2000) and then by making comparative connections with Anna Artaker’s installation REKONSTRUKTION DER ROTHSCHILD’SCHEN GEMÄLDE­ SAMMLUNG (2013) and Maria Eichhorn’s project Restitutionspolitik/Politics of Restitution (2003/2004). By comparing these three artistic projects, similar methodological approaches, and specific differences in representing forced absences will be elaborated.

Transitions / Memory / Witnessing An examination of these three artistic positions requires situating them first in discourses both of memory and of the representability of National Socialist crimes, such as “aryanizations.” How do these new forms of remembrance become topical in the practice of contemporary art? The gradual disappearance of contemporary witnesses and the accompanying transition from communicative to cultural memory (following Aleida and Jan Assmann) have made questions about adequate or new forms of memory culture more relevant and urgent in recent years.6 How can these positions be situated in those discourses that negotiate not only the representability of the Shoah but also the legitimacy of an art after Auschwitz? The former wavers between two premises: f irst, a ban on images and second, images in spite of all, a concept shaped by Georges Didi-Huberman,7 which responds to Theodor W. Adorno’s paradigmatically ambivalent position that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz and his later partial retraction. 8 In their artistic confrontations with “aryanizations,” Arno Gisinger, Anna Artaker, and Maria Eichhorn each add an additional level to these discourses, since depicting what is forcibly absent—in this case an absence caused by the National Socialists—requires an aporetic ontology, as formulated by Walter Benjamin in his philosophy of history.9 6 Aleida and Jan Assmann conduct thorough research on these aspects of cultural memory. See, especially, Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization; Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives; Assmann, “Zur Mediengeschichte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses,” 45–60. 7 See Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. 8 See Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 9 See Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 691–704.

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These questions bring to mind many related aspects addressed in other contributions to this book.

Invent arisiert/The Force of the Inventory/“Arisierungen” in Vienna The ways of representing “aryanizations” and the absences that persist today are the focus of the installation Invent arisiert by Arno Gisinger (b.1964 in Dornbirn/Austria, lives and works in Paris). Initially, Invent arisiert was an installation commissioned by the Mobiliendepot, or Furniture Collection, in Vienna—an institution founded in 1747 by Empress Maria Theresia for the storage and distribution of the Habsburg Empire furnishings, which is known today as the Imperial Furniture Museum Vienna. The installation Invent arisiert (fig. 3) was presented there as part of the exhibition inventarisiert (2000).10 The historical basis of Invent arisiert is constituted by the approximately 5,000 pieces of furniture, works of art and utensils of the eight Jewish families of Hugo Breitner, Viktor Ephrussi,11 Wilhelm Goldenberg, Moritz König, Oskar Pöller, Hedwig Schwarz, Emil Stiaßny, and Paul Weiß, which were “aryanized” by the Gestapo in Vienna and the surrounding area over the course of 1938 following Austria’s “Anschluss” to National Socialist Germany on 15 March 1938.12 Using the example of these eight “aryanizations,” a highly bureaucratic process can be traced, at the end of which the items were integrated into the inventory of the Furniture Collection: the entire furnishings were confiscated from the apartments or houses of the eight families and then transferred to the administration of the Chief Finance President for Lower Danube “for the benefit of Austria.” The Office of the Reich Governor via the Furniture Distribution Committee in the Ministry of Economics and Labor then instructed the Furniture Collection to record 10 Arno Gisinger has exhibited the installation Invent arisiert on numerous occasions since 2000 at, for example, in a modified form, Imagiques: Rencontres photographiques en Sud Gironde, Langon, 2004; Septembre de la photographie, Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Lyon 2006 and Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, 2012, as well as during a performance with Annie Zadek in 2013. It also appears in an exhibition at the Musée de la Résistance de Limoges in 2022. 11 Regarding the history of the Ephrussi family in Vienna and their palace on the Wiener Ringstrasse, see De Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes and Rudorfer, Das Palais Ephrussi in Wien and Palais Ephrussi. 12 Herbert Posch researched the archive of the Mobiliendepot in Vienna in preparation for the exhibition inventarisiert and published his research about the eight families, the history of the institution from 1938 to 2000 and the partial restitution in the exhibition catalogue. The following summary of the bureaucratic processes is based on Posch’s research (see note 4).

86 Veronika Rudorfer Figure 3  Arno Gisinger, Invent arisiert, 2000

Exhibition view, inventARISIERT—Enteignung von Möbeln aus jüdischem Besitz, September 7–November 19, 2000, Mobiliendepot (Furniture Collection), Vienna Photo: © Arno Gisinger

the items in lists. Commodities of minimal value were handed directly to National Socialist welfare organizations. Works of art considered valuable were sent to museums, books to the Austrian National Library. The remaining items were initially taken to the Furniture Collection for storage. Legally, they were then in the possession of the Furniture Collection, even though they were still owned by the families.13 On April 27, 1939, the Furniture Collection’s Inventory Office informed the Furniture Distribution Committee of the Ministry of Economics and Labor that the confiscated items had been transferred to the Furniture Collection. Thereupon, the Inventory Office applied to the Ministry of Economy and Labor to make an inventory of the items and then convert the Collection’s status from the items’ possessor to their owner. The request was granted by the Ministry on June 16, 1939, and the inventory of 575 items was made by the Furniture Collection later in the same month. Each of the items was given a Furniture Collection inventory number (a “Mobiliendepot” or “MD” number) on a file card, a verbal description—photographic archiving was not yet possible on a large scale in the institution at that time—and a note of origin, stating “From the

13 As described in note 4.

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confiscated property of the Jew.”14 Thus were the “aryanizations” of the items and the change of ownership completed, according to National Socialist law.

Aesthetics/Archiving/Taking Inventory The installation Invent arisiert by Arno Gisinger comprises 648 C-prints (Lambda), which are laminated on aluminum plates (each in the format 25 x 20 cm). Within the installation, the panels are first structured according to the eight cases of “aryanization,” then according to the order in which the items are inventorized by the Furniture Collection, and finally according to the ascending inventory numbers (each beginning with “MD”). The installation has three types of image plates, reflecting the different status of the items in the inventory: 152 plates show photographs of the inventoried items that could still be physically located in the Collection in 1999. 448 plates are dedicated to items that were still part of the inventory in 1999 but could no longer be located in the collection. They form the most extensive part both in the collection inventory and in the installation. At the end of each case of “aryanization,” the installation contains plates and lists of the “aryanized” items that, due to their low material value, have not been inventoried by the collection. These lists make up a total forty-eight of the installation’s plates.15 Arno Gisinger set up a temporary on-site photography studio in a storage room at the Furniture Collection, shooting the items from the front against the anthracite-colored concrete floor and a wall he painted a neutral gray following the standardized gray card used to measure the exposure. He photographed both listed items and those in the collection, focusing on the items and leaving the ground and background out of focus. For the inventoried items no longer physically present, he photographed the floor and wall. The photographs of were digitized and caption levels inserted: the inventory number assigned by the Furniture Collection in 1939, how the item was used before or after 1945 (if known), and information on their current status (as of July 2000). A fourth caption level can be found for items no longer in the collection, namely the designation under which they were inventoried in 1939. Lists of the uninventoried items were also created; these state their 14 Posch published pictures of some of these file cards in the exhibition catalogue (see note 4). 15 This complex system of the installation was described by Arno Gisinger to Veronika Rudorfer during a visit at the artist’s studio in Paris in February 2020. A short summary of the system is published in the exhibition catalogue (see note 4).

88 Veronika Rudorfer Figure 4 Arno Gisinger, Ohne Titel / Untitled, from the series Invent arisiert, 2000, Lambdaprint on aluminum, 25 × 20 cm

© Arno Gisinger

last known location or destination. Gisinger also chose the same gray he used for the storage room wall for the background of the lists, with typography corresponding to that used in the plates. The standardized studio and perspective, distance and focus generate a normative aesthetic in the photographs that treats items in the same formal way whether present or absent. This continues in the strict systematization of the installation; in sequences of photographs and lists, the visual and textual representations of the items merge to form an inventory of “aryanizations.” The systematization forms a connection between the historical starting point of Invent arisiert and the aesthetics of the installation,16 clear in its title, a play on words that links the German “inventarisieren” meaning “inventoried” 16 This aspect was also discussed by the philosopher Monika Schwärzler, who wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue; see Fliedl and Posch, inventarisiert: Enteignung von Möbeln aus

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Figure 5 Arno Gisinger, Ohne Titel / Untitled, from the series Invent arisiert, 2000, Lambdaprint on aluminum, 25 × 20 cm

© Arno Gisinger

and “arisieren,” alluding to alternative ways to read the work. The dialectic of presence and absence creates a tension between the supposed order of the system and the items whose absence undermines it. It becomes especially clear in the depiction of absent items just how precise the choice of photographic medium is within the installation. The viewer’s expectation is thwarted if the photographs do not show their referents and only their absence is captured by the picture. Gisinger quotes jüdischem Besitz, 54–63. Schwärzler interprets Gisinger’s setting as a scenography, seeing the objects as actors who either enter the stage or remain absent.

90 Veronika Rudorfer Figure 6 Arno Gisinger, Ohne Titel / Untitled, from the series Invent arisiert, 2000, Lambdaprint on aluminum, 25 × 20 cm

© Arno Gisinger

from historical documents from the collection and allows this linguistic level to replace the photographic image. Rather than visible images, only descriptions such as “desk,” “etagère” or “bookcase” can be read. A peculiar absence also seems to be inscribed in the photographs of the remaining items: the lighting, identical for all photographs and largely avoiding shadows, causes the items to lose their corporeality and haunt the (image) space.

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The Artist/The Institution/Institutional Critique Since Invent arisiert is an artistic work commissioned by the Furniture Collection, the institutional framework within which it came about is of interest: Ilsebill Barta-Fliedl (then Deputy Academic Director of the Museums of the Furniture Collection) and Herbert Posch (then a member of the Museology Working Group of the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Research and Further Education of the University of Klagenfurt) worked on the history of the Furniture Collection holdings from 1938 to 2000 and revealed how vigorously the institution refused until 1993 to process these and make at least a partial restitution possible. Barta-Fliedl’s and Posch’s results were presented in the exhibition inventarisiert in 2000. Gisinger’s installation Invent arisiert was supplemented by scans of historical documents concerning the Furniture Collection’s “aryanized” holdings and biographical outlines of the eight Jewish families that were expropriated, which could be viewed. The two curators, Barta-Fliedl and Posch, commented on the motivation for the exhibition in the foreword to the catalogue: In this situation, conscious that “reparations” for these events were impossible, it was not enough for us to merely report internally. In addition, the institution also wanted to turn the reappraisal of its own history into a public theme: the bureaucratic steps of expropriation and appropriation as well as their legalization, “inventory,” and exploitation. The medium of the exhibition is intended to trace, remember and introduce these historical processes into the present to keep them open for reflection.17

For the exhibition, to avoid a repeated unjust “appropriation” by the institution, the two curators decided against simply displaying the existing items. What does this specific starting position mean for Gisinger’s artistic work? What form of restitution is intended by Invent arisiert? How do history and place correlate here? Gisinger’s original commission from the Furniture Collection was to only photograph those items that, as a result of the provenance research at the collection, were identified as “aryanized” and to be returned to their original owners or heirs. The artist expanded his focus and sought a way to place the items that no longer existed in the picture. Through this ethical and factual image-absence, he demonstrates the futility or impossibility of reparations. The absence goes beyond the missing “aryanized” items and further includes 17 See note 4. Translated from German by Mark Brooks.

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their rightful owners and the contexts obliterated by the theft. It is “as if the presence and absence of items represents people,”18 notes Gisinger. That the installation was made for the exhibition in the Furniture Collection, which played a role in the processes of “aryanizations” of the items, creates a tension between place and history. In Invent arisiert, both the present and the absent objects act as non-human entities that witness trauma.19

Reconstruction/Restitution/Site Specifics At this point, a comparative look at the work REKONSTRUKTION DER ROTHSCHILD’SCHEN GEMÄLDESAMMLUNG (fig. 5) by Anna Artaker and Restitutionspolitik/Politics of Restitution (fig. 6) by Maria Eichhorn is productive. Artaker’s installation was created as part of the AKKunstprojekte der Arbeiterkammer Wien, an art program founded by the Vienna Chamber of Labor.20 The starting point is the history of the present location of the main building of the Vienna Chamber of Labor at Prinz-Eugen-Strasse 20–22. The Albert Rothschild Palace, built between 1879 and 1884, was on this site until 1955. It was “aryanized” in 1938 and used by the National Socialists until 1943 as the “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” headed by Adolf Eichmann. The Rothschild family art collection, located in the palace and comprising around 400 paintings by mainly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists, was also “aryanized.”21 After the end of the Second World War, the palace was handed over by Louis Rothschild to the Republic of Austria, sold in 1954 to the Vienna Chamber of Labor, which then demolished it in 1955 and built its new headquarters there. Artaker produced a six-part fleece wallpaper showing photographic reproductions 18 As stated by Arno Gisinger in conversation with Johannes Inama in Steiner (ed.), Arno Gisinger: Topoï, 117. (Translated from French to English for this paper by Veronika Rudorfer). 19 On witness and trauma in this context see Lyotard, Der Widerstreit and Lyotard, Das postmoderne Wissen: Ein Bericht. 20 No catalogue was published with the exhibition. A photographic documentation as well as a short text by Kerstin Engholm can be found on the Arbeiterkammer’s website: https://kultur. arbeiterkammer.at/projekte/2013_artaker/. 21 The collection included works by artists such as Friedrich von Amerling, François Boucher, Canaletto, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jan Fyt, Thomas Gainsborough, Francesco Guardi, Frans Hals, Hans Holbein, Melchior de Hondecoeter, George Romney, Jacob van Ruisdael and Adriaen van de Velde. Many of the paintings were confiscated to be used in the “Führermuseum Linz.” Art historian Birgit Schwarz has been conducting research on Hitler’s museum project, see Schwarz, Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub and Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst.

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of eighty paintings from the Rothschild Collection on a scale of 1:1—in color or black and white, depending on the availability of the illustration. Each photograph is accompanied by a caption with artist name, title, date of “aryanization,” use by the National Socialists, place of discovery after the Second World War and the time of restitution. What site-specif ic interactions result between the objects depicted in the installation and the exhibition site where the Albert Rothschild Palace used to be, and which itself was used by the National Socialists for systematic expropriation, eviction and ultimately deportation of the Jewish population? By referring in her RECONSTRUCTION to the palace, which no longer exists, Artaker addresses not only the painting collection’s but also the building’s absence. The work discloses a double absence because the RECONSTRUCTION of the collection also imaginatively reconstructs the location of the original collection. As Abigail Solomon Godeau points out, the artist’s research on the collection and that installation incorporates it might have been an attempt at “imaginary restitution.”22 While created as part of the Chamber of Labor Art Program, the theme was not predetermined by the institution as a commissioned work. The history of the place came about on the artist’s own initiative. Maria Eichhorn’s interdisciplinary project Restitutionspolitik/Politics of Restitution was shown for the first time in 2004 in an exhibition of the same name curated by Susanne Gaensheimer at Kunstbau München.23 The work deals with the past and present of the fifteen so-called “Federal loans” in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus collection in Munich and the painting Trabrennen in Ruhleben (1920/1921) by the artist Max Slevogt. “Federal loans” are the artistic and cultural assets collected by the American occupying power after the end of the Second World War from National Socialist outsourcing collections at so-called Collecting Points and inventoried with the aim of returning them to their rightful owners. In Munich, the Central Collecting Point was in the former Administrative Building of the NSDAP in Arcisstrasse. After these holdings had been administered in trust by the Bavarian Prime Minister from 1948/1949 and by German Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer from 1951 through a special Federal Foreign Office department, they became the property of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1963 and were given on permanent loan to German museums. For Restitutionspolitik, Eichhorn commissioned the historian Anja Heuß to carry out comprehensive provenance research on the sixteen works of 22 Solomon-Godeau, “Activating Archives: Five Artists Address the Historical Record,” 10. 23 See Gaensheimer (ed.), Maria Eichhorn. Restitutionspolitik/Politics of Restitution.

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art.24 Part of the project is an exhibition at Kunstbau München, in which the works—arranged alphabetically according to artists’ names—are presented in specially designed displays, making it possible to view not just the front but also the back sides, where stamps, labels, and notes are visible. In addition, the displays contain brief summaries of the provenance of each work as well as information about the artist, title, date, technique, and dimensions. The exhibition also includes a reader containing the results of the provenance research, historical documents, and correspondence concerning the restitution and purchase of the Max Slevogt painting, as well as information about museums, galleries, and the National Socialists involved with cultural and museum policy. The project too encompasses a reference library and lectures at Kunstbau München. What is the site-specific relationship between content and location if the Kunstbau or the Lenbachhaus are located right next to the “Führerbau” and the “Verwaltungsbau”? The artist herself negates site-specificity when she states: The form of presentation developed for my exhibition project Restitutions­ politik / Politics of Restitution, which transforms the work of art into a testimony or analytical object and at the same time connects it with a specific provenance research both to determine its status and to initiate a possible restitution, is not bound to a specific location and a specific collection, but is potentially applicable as an enlightening model to all unsolved cases.25

However, the topography of Restitutionspolitik / Politics of Restitution shows that Eichhorn establishes close links between the project and the exhibition site, which strengthen the historical context through the specificity of the location.

Conclusion / “Seeing the Void?” / Impossible Restitution In the artistic works of Arno Gisinger, Anna Artaker and Maria Eichhorn, various approaches are used to represent and illustrate the emptiness and absence violently imposed by “aryanization.” What Gisinger and Artaker 24 Anja Heuß’s research was published in the exhibition catalogue (see note 23). 25 Maria Eichhorn responding to Adam Szymczyk, in Szymczyk, Die unauslöschliche Präsenz des Gurlitt-Nachlasses. Adam Szymczyk im Gespräch mit Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn und Hans Haacke.

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have in common is an undermining of expectations associated with their medium in their choice of photography to represent these forms of absence. They address the relationship between photography and forms of collective memory and raise questions about the significance of the visual in the processes that constitute memory. In their photographs, Gisinger and Artaker each take up the respective aesthetics of the archive and the inventory, and expand it into strictly systematized installations, placing the historical context and display in a direct spatial relationship. In employing different forms of aesthetic of the archive, both Artaker and Gisinger operate with aesthetics frequently used by Sebald in his writing and use of images.26 But while Artaker and Gisinger—as well as Sebald—share a profound artistic interest in the trauma and loss caused by National Socialist policies, they both use the photographic medium to create forms of systematic clarity in the attempt to bring back structure into destroyed living environments—Sebald chose a different way to use photographs. His use of images signified a different kind of archive, with no intention to be complete, systematic, or universal. I would argue that Artaker’s and Gisinger’s practices are trying to show cases of “aryanizations” in an artistic visual system they have created; neither Artaker nor Gisinger intend to create narratives themselves but develop aesthetics to visualize their artistic research. This fact leads them to take or use photographs of either “aryanized” property or its respective absence, filling existing gaps in the collective memory with the artistic means of photography. Sebald’s use of the (visual) archive allowed itself to act more independently in relation to the historic facts, making a different kind of reception necessary. Maria Eichhorn chooses another method, which incorporates provenance research into the artistic work and develops various formats to communicate the results. Photographs are not employed as autonomous artistic works, but as instruments within the research. This didactic impulse is reflected in the specific aesthetics she developed for Restitutionspolitik/Politics of Restitution, such as specially designed display cases or lectures given by experts on provenance research as a part of the exhibition program.27 26 These aspects were discussed during the Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacy conference organized by the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam, especially in “Session 8—Pensive Images 3,” December 13, 2019. In my presentation in “Session 1—Memory Revisited,” I concentrated on works by Arno Gisinger and Anna Artaker as they are closely linked to Sebald’s practice in the use of the photographic medium to represent forms of absence, void, and loss. 27 In this context, it is of interest that Maria Eichhorn will represent Germany at the German pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022.

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The three artistic positions of Artaker, Gisinger and Eichhorn share a specific critical relationship to their respective institutions, most productively analyzed with reference to the locations. It turns out that artists do interrogate the respective historical contexts on behalf of or at the invitation of institutions. It is of central importance that these artistic investigations do not replace research into the history of the institution’s own holdings or location: however, the positions of these artists clarify the continuing absence of items and their owners with the works shining a light on the inextricable, absence of displaced or murdered people and enable viewers to see—according to Arnheim—“the absence of what is missing as a quality of presence.”28

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge, 1900. Arnheim, Rudolf. Anschauliches Denken. Cologne: DuMont, 1972. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Assmann, Aleida. “Zur Mediengeschichte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses.” In Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität, Historizität, Kulturspezifität, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 45–60. Berlin and New York: Springer, 2004. Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, 691–704. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Bertz, Inka, and Michael Dorrmann, eds. Raub und Restitution: Kulturgut aus jüdischem Besitz von 1933 bis heute. Exhibition Catalogue, Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. De Waal, Edmund. The Hare with Amber Eyes. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Fliedl, Ilsebill Barta, and Herbert Posch, eds. (2000). inventarisiert: Aneignung von Möbeln aus jüdischem Besitz. Exhibition Catalogue, Mobiliendepot Wien. Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2000. Gaensheimer, Susanne, ed. Maria Eichhorn. Restitutionspolitik / Politics of Restitution. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2014. 28 See note 1.

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Lillie, Sophie. Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens. Vienna: Czernin, 2003. Lyotard, Jean-François. Das postmoderne Wissen: Ein Bericht. Vienna: Passagen, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-François. Der Widerstreit. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1989. Reininghaus, Alexandra, ed. RECOLLECTING: Raub und Restitution. Exhibition Catalogue, Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna. Vienna: Passagen, 2009. Rudorfer, Veronika. Das Palais Ephrussi in Wien. Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2015. Rudorfer, Veronika. “Die Leere sehen: Konstellationen der Abwesenheit.” In Der Sand aus den Uhren, edited by Benjamin A. Kaufmann, 27–31. Vienna: Passagen, 2017. Rudorfer, Veronika. Palais Ephrussi. Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2020. Schwarz, Birgit. Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub. Darmstadt: Verlag Konrad Theiss, 2014. Schwarz, Birgit. Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst. Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2009. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Activating Archives: Five Artists Address the Historical Record.” In 5 x 5. Photo Tracks, edited by Carl Aigner and Nela Eggenberger, 2–14. Vienna: Eikon, 2016. Steiner, Aline, ed. Arno Gisinger: Topoï. Exhibition Catalogue, Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, Centre photographique d’Île-de-France, Pontault-Combault, PhotoForumPasquArt, Biel, Landesgalerie Linz. Hohenems: Bucher, 2013. Szymczyk, Adam. Die unauslöschliche Präsenz des Gurlitt-Nachlasses. Adam ­S zymczyk im Gespräch mit Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn und Hans Haacke, 2015. https://www.documenta14.de/de/south/59_die_­unausloeschliche_ praesenz_des_gurlitt_nachlasses_adam_szymczyk_im_gespraech_mit_ alexander_ ­a lberro_maria_eichhorn_und_hans_haacke.

About the Author Veronika Rudorfer lives and works in Vienna. She studied art history at the universities of Hamburg and Vienna and completed her master’s degree in 2012 at the University of Vienna summa cum laude. An extended version of her master thesis Das Palais Ephrussi in Wien was published in 2015 by Böhlau (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar). A second, extended edition of the book was published in German and in English in 2020 under the title Palais Ephrussi by Böhlau. Since 2017 she has been working as curator for modern and contemporary art at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in Vienna, where she has curated numerous exhibitions—most recently an extensive retrospective of the work of Daniel Spoerri (2021) as well as an exhibition

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on Herta Müller’s collages (2020)—and is currently preparing an exhibition of David Hockney’s work. In addition, she has curated numerous freelance exhibition projects in galleries and artist-run spaces. Since March 2019, she has been working on her dissertation supervised by Professor Sabeth Buchmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She regularly publishes essays and reviews in art magazines such as EIKON, Springerin, and Texte zur Kunst.

II Memory and Art in and Through Sebald

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Monument and Memory Mark Edwards Abstract This paper is based on a body of research and photographs titled Shelter. Acting as a form of recovery and monument to its legacy, it focuses on a former Second World War RAF bomber station: a place where memory, trauma, and loss are all embedded. They address Britain’s postwar distain for the air campaigns and what Sebald described as Germany’s “individual and collective amnesia” in refusing to confront the resulting catastrophe of the shattered cities. “Horrors” and silence, which, he claimed, cast a shadow over his life. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald wrote about the image of bomber squadrons embarking on their nightly missions over Europe. These raids set out from bases situated across the East of England. Most stations were temporary and after the war were reclaimed by farming, landowners, and nature. Sebald lived in Norfolk, once home to over fifty Second World War bomber stations, and he would often walk around one such base imagining the horror the airmen were about to encounter and inflict. In 2014, I made a series of photographs on one of these decommissioned stations depicting a series of woodpiles and corrugated metal structures (built to store wood and repel rain) that I encountered as I walked the overgrown perimeter track of the former Second World War RAF base at Hethel, Norfolk—a base situated just seven miles from Sebald’s former home in Poringland, Norwich. Built from the enveloping coppiced woodland and sitting amongst the last vestiges of dilapidated military buildings, perimeter tracks, and barbed wire, these woodpiles allude to a form of shelter reminiscent of the aircraft hangers, bomb shelters, and accommodation huts originally found on the camp. They also reference the forest camps described by Primo Levi, and, intriguingly, mirror Sebald’s vision of Cologne and other bombed-out cities across Europe at the end of hostilities. Keywords: Second World War, Military, Landscape, Destruction, Memory, Infrastructure

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch05

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In 2014 I was invited to make a body of work for an exhibition titled, Monument. The resulting work was exhibited in a larger group show at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais, France. The exhibitions curator asked several artists, working in a range of mediums, to consider and respond to the subject of “monument” that in some way referenced either the First or Second World War. This paper aims to contextualize my resulting photographs and to explore their affinities with Sebald’s landscape, writings, and personal history. In this sense it is written from the position of artist as opposed to art historian. In 1999, I moved into a village four miles south of Norwich. Quite by chance I discovered that this village, Poringland, was also the home of W.G. Sebald. Of equal distance between our two homes is where John Crome, a significant and important landscape painter associated with the Norwich School, painted Poringland Oak (ca.1818–20). I have always found it slightly curious that Sebald never referenced or wrote about Crome. Perhaps it was a way marker made too conspicuous by its proximity. That is not to say that he wasn’t interested in or affected by the landscape that surrounded him. Poringland, with its close connections to the airfields of the Second World War, linked a personal biography with an intellectual curiosity that found its way into his thinking and writing.1 Five miles southeast of Poringland is the former airbase of RAF Seething, an American bomber base during the Second World War. It is now privately owned by a local flying club who occupy a small portion of the base, make use of what’s left of the runways and have converted the control tower into a museum. Beyond this, nothing has been restored or managed to any great extent. It was here that Sebald regularly walked his dog and encountered the former RAF buildings: Grass has grown over the runways, and dilapidated control towers, bunkers and corrugated iron huts stand in an often eerie landscape where you sense the dead souls of the men who never came back from their missions, and of those who perished in the vast fires. I live very close to Seething airfield. I sometimes walk my dog there, and imagine what the place was like when the aircraft took off with their heavy freight and flew out over the sea, making for Germany.2 (Fig. 7) 1 “But I do not necessarily have to return to Germany and my place of origin to visualize that period of destruction. It often comes back to my mind where I live at present. Many of the more than seventy airfields from which the war of annihilation was waged against Germany were in the county of Norfolk.” Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 77. 2 Ibid., 77–78.

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Figure 7  Site of former Seething airfield

By the end of the Second World War, the British landscape was occupied by 720 airf ields and had risen from 37,000 acres in 1935 to 360,000 by the end of the conflict in 1945.3 While some of these were permanent pre-war bases, the vast majority of them were requisitioned from farmers and landowners. Sixty percent of operational bases were situated in eastern Britain with over a quarter clustered in East Anglia and Lincolnshire, due to their strategic location, terrain, infrastructure, and transport networks. 4 The impact on the landscape was signif icant; trees and hedgerows were removed to be replaced by perimeter tracks, dispersal points, technical areas, ammunition storage facilities, off ices and accommodation buildings. The majority of the wartime airf ields consisted of paved runways. Runway alignment was oriented to the prevailing wind and typically E–W or NE–SW and most commonly a three-paved-runway design (traces of this alignment are often evident in aerial photographs, or on Google Earth, visible by their imprint on the contemporary landscape (Fig. 8).

3 4

Blake, “The Impact of Airfields on the British Landscape,” 508, 520. Ibid., 511.

104 Mark Edwards Figure 8  Seething Airfield

Google Earth, November 19, 2019

By 1950, sixty percent of them were closed.5 Given that the British government made a decision to compensate farmers for the wartime construction of airfields on their land, as opposed to a process of demolition (the 1939 Compensation Defense Act & the Requisitioned Land and War works Act of 1945), most air infrastructure remained, was put to other uses, or became derelict as the amount of compensation offered didn’t cover the demolition or clearance costs.6 Some remained permanent bases while others were developed into commercial airports. Most, however, slowly returned to their former use and have gradually slipped back into the landscape. Runways became roads, Nissen huts places to store farm machinery and many simply left. To find yourself walking on such a site is to become aware of a faint and underlying structure to the tarmacked paths, dips, and mounds in the ground, brick foundations and Nissen huts, a palimpsest of their former life. Sebald’s encounters with this landscape led in part to his account of Great Britain’s bombing campaign and its impact and legacy on the German people and their industrial landscape, first through his Zurich lectures of 5 Ibid., 518. 6 Ibid., 52.

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1997 and the subsequent publications, Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999) first published in Germany then in Britain under the title, On the Natural History of Destruction (2003).7 Sebald, born in the last year of the Second World War in what he described as an idyllic place untouched by the conflict, was unnerved and troubled by Germany’s unwillingness to engage in Bomber Command’s destruction of their major cities and the trauma and impact it had on the population. Germany fell into a state of what Sebald described, in his Zurich lecture Air War and Literature, as “individual and collective amnesia.”8 Whether this silence was a conscious position or not is open to interpretation and debate. However, Sebald felt the “literature of the ruins” didn’t confront the catastrophe of the shattered cities and the death symbolized by the rumble. “Horrors” and silence, which, he claimed, cast a shadow over his life: “Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were a child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience had cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge.”9 The RAF’s Bomber Command was an instrument of the British government’s political policy and strategy. During a time of mostly defensive countermeasures Bomber Command offered the only viable chance to take an offensive position, although its success could initially be measured more in terms of a morale boosting exercise than inflicting any significant damage on Germany’s military and industrial infrastructure. “Bombing” Churchill remarked was “not decisive, but better than doing nothing.”10 With the advent of new navigational technologies the RAF shifted its strategy from any pretense of precision bombing to cities and the German population.11 This tactical shift echoed the RAF’s first commander Lord Trenchard’s somewhat spurious belief, and based on no credible evidence, that targeting the enemy’s population would break their will and inflict such damage on their morale as to shorten the war.12 The Luftwaffe’s bombing of British cities had removed any moral obstacles remaining in undertaking such a campaign on German cities and was endorsed in Lord Cherwell’s (Churchill’s 7 Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction. 8 Ibid., 9. 9 Ibid., 71. 10 Beaumont, “The Bomber Offensive as a Second Front,” 6. 11 As noted in Sir Charles Portal’s, the Chief of Air Staff, memo: “Ref the new bombing directive: I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories […].This must be made clear if it is not already understood.” Childers, “Facilis descensus averni est: The Allied Bombing of Germany and the Issue of German Suffering,” 86. 12 Ibid., 81.

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science advisor) 1942 report advocating the destruction of German cities through fire, a view Churchill endorsed.13 If concentrated on large cities, a study claimed that a third of the German population would be homeless and by way of consequence the industrial capacity debilitated.14 In Bomber Command’s commander in Chief, Author (“Bomber”) Harris they found a willing advocate of this policy. Under his orders the RAF launched the thousand bomber raids, a precursor of the raids to come toward the end of the war and where any strategic advantage was negligible, and revenge and all conquering destruction could be viewed as the only perceivable rationale. Such a policy was typified when on the 27th of July 1943, the RAF and USAF initiated a sustained week-long attack on the city of Hamburg; “Operation Gomorrah.” The biblical reference from Genesis outlined the allied intentions; “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” Its strategic intention was to eliminate the city. Over the course of the week over nine thousand tons of bombs and a staggering three million firebombs were dropped. That summer’s high temperatures together with low humidity created the conditions for a firestorm of hurricane strength. In the ensuing inferno that engulfed the city and razed its twenty-two square kilometers to the ground, an estimated thirty-five thousand people were killed or injured. Causes of death ranged from suffocating in air-raid shelters and basements, people literally stuck to the melting pavements from the soaring temperatures on the street and roads, being sucked into and engulfed by the fire, and buried alive under collapsing buildings. An estimated further million were made homeless, or “de-housed” to use the allied phrase. In her essay “Memories Carved in Granite: Great War Memorials and everyday Life,” Katie Trumpener asks, who owns the memory of war and trauma?15 Across Europe one can find national monuments to both wars and stumble across those reflecting Pierre Nora’s idea of lieux de mémoire. After the First World War Britain took the decision that all those who died fighting abroad should be buried abroad, in individual but identical graves, what Sue 13 In 1942, Churchill reported to the government’s War Cabinet that he had advocated to Stalin a “ruthless” air offensive aimed at the morale of Germany’s population as “one of our leading military objectives.” Beaumont, “The Bomber Offensive as a Second Front,” 11. 14 Childers, “Facilis descensus averni est,” 86. 15 “Who owns the memory of the war? What kind of public landscape does the war memorial inhabit? How does its physical presence affect the rhythms of daily life?” Trumpener, “Memories Carved in Granite: Great War Memorials and Everyday Life,” 1097.

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Malvern describes as a “double displacement.”16 The fallen soldiers were commemorated in the imposing war cemeteries and monuments listing the dead and missing.17 In 1919, designed in wood as an impermanent monument, Lutyen’s Cenotaph, became a central fulcrum of Britain’s national mourning. An “empty tomb,” which seemed to symbolize a nation’s collective loss and grief following the First World War.18 Based upon the monumentality of Lutyens model, cities, towns, and villages quickly adopted this centralizing model of grief and on which all the local dead and missing were carved into its stone and memorialized on its avenues’ names.19 Ian Hay wrote in 1931 “every English highway is now one continuous memorial avenue. The cumulative effect upon the traveller’s mind is almost unendurable in its poignancy.”20 The English relationship to the war memorial is a complex one where the lines between honoring the fallen and providing a sense of closure for the public are blurred. Now on each village and town memorial, what Anne Fuchs describes as the “carriers of memory,” names have become less defined, decades of wind and rain eddying each one away, barely noticeable from one year to the next but accumulative over the temporal measure of a century.21 More localized memorials can also be found. I photographed a wooden memorial uncovered during the restoration of an Edwardian school classroom, covered away behind a 1950s false wall that seemed to serve no purpose apart from being a physical form of willful forgetting. The names of the schools fallen once revealed felt raw in their pristineness (Fig. 9). But inevitably, as time passes memory and experience fade from living consciousness and monuments become increasingly abstract markers of something past. To quote Sebald: “everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”22 Perhaps the “counter-monument” serves memory with more fidelity; “where the official monument fails, may not the ruin take its place?” Burgin asks.23 Discovering the remnants of the former airf ield at Seething, Sebald 16 Malvern, “War Tourisms: ‘Englishness’, Art, and the First World War,” 47. 17 Trumpener, Memories Carved in Granite, 1096. 18 Ibid. 1097. 19 Mayo, “War Memorials as Political Memory,” 62. 20 Malvern, “War Tourisms,” 47. 21 Fuchs, “Commemoration and Controversy: Remembering Air Raids and Their Victims Since 1945,” 175. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvggx2r2.14. 22 Sebald, Austerlitz, 30–31. 23 Burgin, The Camera: Essence and Apparatus, 182.

108 Mark Edwards Figure 9  Recovered War Memorial, Great Yarmouth, 2002

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encountered the past through material debris, what Burgin refers to as “monuments of melancholia” living “in the margin, in near ignorance,” oblivious to the official monuments.24 This is never more evident than in the landscape of eastern England. The impact of the Blitz on British cities resulted in large urban areas being reduced to rubble. Vast cavernous bomb craters marked each explosive impact. Within this devastation, a new wartime urban ecology emerged. Flourishing in London alone, amongst the debris and craters, there existed over a hundred species of plants, cherry blossom trees, and new pond life, thriving in the water-filled craters.25 During the postwar reconstruction of England’s cities, these pockets of wilderness were erased, swept away, and buried. However, evidence from what was termed, “The Countryman’s Blitz” remained untouched, and is still visible today.26 Surplus bombs dropped by enemy aircraft, jettisoned bombs from stricken returning allied aircraft, were released over unpopulated areas 24 Ibid., 175. 25 Matless, Landscape & Englishness, 316. 26 Ibid., 258.

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of the countryside, pot-marking England’s fields—jarring interruptions in a bucolic landscape that represents a nation’s identity. Many of these concave markers can be found in Sebald’s landscape of southern Norfolk. The craters, now filled with indigenous trees, plants, and wildlife, have become unofficial monuments to the conflict, unwittingly created by the airmen who flew, and perished, in it. I first went to Hethel with the purpose to visit the Hethel Old Thorn, reputedly one of the oldest Hawthorns in the country. While walking, I slowly became aware of the presence and emergence of a former airbase, RAF Hethel. Built in 1942 it served as an operational base for 389th USAAF Eighth Air Force Group. Its primary function was to focus on strategic objectives in France, the Low Countries, and Germany. Amongst their intensive air campaigns, the group participated in the Normandy invasion in June 1944 by bombing gun batteries, airfields, and enemy positions in addition to flying support missions. Dispersed around the circumference perimeter track of this now overgrown base I encountered large woodpiles, constructed to store wood and roofed with corrugated iron sheets in order to repel the rain. Walking around Hethel, one is aware that both the site and its memory are on the verge of slipping away from our collective memory, where tarmac and the remains of buildings emerge from the undergrowth you become aware of what Burgin was referring to when he wrote; “if the past is really in touch with us then it is more likely to be when we least expect it, as when some of its litter blows across our past.”27 Even the soundscape of the place evokes something akin to what its function was over seventy years ago as part of the site is now occupied by Lotus cars. The sounds of heavy bombers taxiing, taking off and landing is replaced by the testing of high-performance engines and the screeching of tires as they are raced on the old runways. Built from the enveloping coppiced woodland and sitting amongst the last vestiges of dilapidated military buildings, perimeter tracks, and barbed wire, these woodpiles allude to a form of shelter reminiscent of the aircraft hangers, bomb shelters, and accommodation huts found on the camp. They also reference the forest camps found in Primo Levi’s “If Not Now, When?,” and, intriguingly, mirror Sebald’s vision of Cologne and other bombed out cities across Europe at the end of hostilities when he describes the ruins and makeshift shelters as being “transformed by the dense green vegetation growing over them—the roads made their way through this new landscape like peaceful deep-set country lanes.”28 On thinking about the 27 Burgin, The Camera, 175. 28 Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 39.

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shelter woodpiles on my first encounter, and repeatedly on further visits, they were, for me, symbolic of something beyond their functional use. Monuments to something, somehow. In his interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Sebald commented on such symbols: “They are simply there to give you a sense that there must be something of significance here at that point, but what it is and what the significance is, is entirely a different matter.”29 Around the perimeter tracks a woodland has been allowed to establish itself and is managed through traditional methods of woodmanship. One of the oldest woodland industries is charcoal burning, which dates back over two millennia. The construction of the woodpiles reminded me of the conical shapes of the charcoal burners. During the coaling season, wood colliers, as they were known, burned stacked lengths of coppiced wood in huts. Conoid in shape, they were constructed from coppiced poles, a primeval form of building though recognizable through the centuries. Dry wood and red-hot charcoal were dropped down a central flue and once alight, were sealed in to starve the fire of air, ensuring complete combustion. Burning could last up to ten days, depending on the climate conditions with white smoke hanging over the woodland colliers’ camps. During this process, moisture was eliminated in addition to other unwanted elements resulting in black carbon. The analogy to the victims of bombings, such as Operation Gomorrah, and its aftermath is striking—suffocation, incineration, and acrid smoke that hung over the cities (and which, on occasion, the bomber crews could smell). In a strange irony the residue of ashes left after the charcoal was extracted was used to cover burns and in the manufacture of gunpowder. Dating from around 4000–2000 BCE the population of the Neolithic period-built monuments in accordance with their burial rituals. These stone monuments, covered with earth but which has long dissipated into the landscape, housed the dead, normally cremated, accompanied by personal goods and artifacts for the afterlife. In their monumental structure, which the woodpiles of Hethel strangely echoed, they also represented not only a similar form but a marker on the landscape and a monument to the dead. There were variants in type but there are several consistent features; a stone-built chamber with an entrance at one end and the whole structure either covered with stones or earth: symbols of death, mourning, and the continuation of life. I made my f inal images one winter. Since initially discovering the woodpiles the previous year, more had appeared over the course of the months. I chose to photograph, with a 10 x 8-inch camera, just five woodpiles. 29 Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, 53.

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Figure 10  No. II, 2014

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Figure 11  Monument, installation view, SCVA, Norwich 2014

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Each one represented and embodied elements that, I felt, symbolized the connections to its history and more broadly the bombing campaign of the Second World War (Fig. 10). They were made in black and white and presented as large back-lit lightboxes (122 cm x 152 cm each), mnemonic devices recalling much of the photographic imagery of the war and its discernment through the cinematic newsreels broadcast during the conflict (Fig. 11). Installed in Sebald’s former place of work, they acted as, I hope, monuments of remembrance, to use Bergin’s phrase, to the 131 German cities attacked, 3.5 million homes destroyed, 7.5 million homeless, 12,000 heavy bombers shot down, 100,000 allied airmen lost amongst countless civilian victims.

Works Cited Beaumont, Roger. “The Bomber Offensive as a Second Front.” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 1 (1987): 3–19. Blake, R.N.E. “The Impact of Airfields on the British Landscape.” The Geographical Journal 135, no. 4 (1969): 508–28. Burgin, Victor. The Camera: Essence and Apparatus. London: Mack, 2018. Childers, Thomas. “Facilis descensus averni est: The Allied Bombing of Germany and the Issue of German Suffering.” Central European History 38, no. 1 (2005): 75–105. Fuchs, Anne. “Commemoration and Controversy: Remembering Air Raids and Their Victims Since 1945.” In The Blitz Companion: Aerial Warfare, Civilians and the City since 1911, edited by Mark Clapson, 173–228. Westminster: University of Westminster Press, 2019. Malvern, Sue. “War Tourisms: ‘Englishness’, Art, and the First World War.” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 1 (2001): 45–66. Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 2016. Mayo, James M. “War Memorials as Political Memory.” Geographical Review 78, no. 1 (1988): 62–75. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. London: Seven Stories Press, 2007. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Sebald, W.G. On the Natural History of Destruction. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. Trumpener, Katie. “Memories Carved in Granite: Great War Memorials and Everyday Life.” PMLA 115, no. 5 (2000): 1096–103.

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About the Author Mark Edwards is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Suffolk. The primary focus of his research is the landscape tradition found in the painting and literature made broadly within the geographical and cultural boundaries of East Anglia. This inquiry is underpinned by his photographic practice, which is included in major photographic collections including the V&A Museum, The Government Art Collection, The Hyman Collection of British Photography, and Norwich Museum. It has been published and exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions including Spotlight, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich (2019–20); Into the Woods: Photography & Trees, V&A Museum, London; and A Green and Pleasant Land, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2017–18). His work is also currently on display at the British Embassy, Berlin, the British High Commission, Islamabad, and the Northern Ireland Office, London. Recent publications featuring his work include, Into the Woods: Photography & Trees (V&A/Thames & Hudson) and Approaching Photograph (Bloomsbury).

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In the Labyrinth Sebald’s (Postwar) French Connections Catherine Annabel Abstract The generation that came to adulthood during or immediately after the Second World War faced the challenge of making art in the postAuschwitz world, of confronting a world in which not only people but ideas, conventions, and beliefs were displaced. In France this resulted in the phenomena of the nouveau roman, and the nouvelle vague in film, both of which rejected conventional narrative linearity and challenged ideas of authorship, as well as in music that embraced dissonance. W.G. Sebald was from the next generation, born at the very end of the war and thus without the direct experiences that had shaped those artists, but confronting as an adolescent and then as a young man the way in which the status quo had reasserted itself, the “denazif ication” process had stalled and the Cold War had changed priorities and stifled the kind of challenging debate that had briefly seemed possible before. Sebald’s interest in the French innovators in f ilm and literature is evident in his work. Here I consider the influence of Alain Resnais, in particular L’Année dernière à Marienbad (screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the theorist of the nouveau roman), but concentrate on writer Michel Butor, whose novel L’Emploi du temps (Passing Time) was particularly influential on Sebald. I draw upon Sebald’s poetry, on his “Manchester” works including The Emigrants, and on Austerlitz, to show how Sebald responded to their strategies and how they affected his own response to the postwar world. Keywords: Liberation, Metaphorical, Trauma and Translation, Postwar Narrative and Resistance

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch06

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Introduction Two key f igures in the postwar French cultural landscape—new wave cinematographer Alain Resnais and my main focus in this chapter, the “nouveau romancier” Michel Butor—had a signif icant impact on the work of W.G. Sebald. While Sebald and Butor are very different in style and approach, Sebald’s indirect encounter with Butor’s novel L’Emploi du temps in Manchester at the start of his career is explicitly evidenced in his early poem “Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical,” which quotes directly from Butor’s novel, and in his descriptions of Manchester in After Nature and The Emigrants. I argue that it can be seen too in his last novel Austerlitz. It is surprising that this connection is little explored, given the impact was so immediate and intense, and it is likely that a lack of familiarity with Butor’s work is to blame. I take Butor as the starting point, drawing out the multiplicity of shared motifs and themes, reading Sebald through the lens of Butor, and vice versa. The way in which Butor interweaves the real city of Manchester, and another presence, or presences, is what held such sway for Sebald. The image of the labyrinth as evoked in my title has for centuries conveyed getting and being lost, disorientation and confusion, whether in the mythical Cretan labyrinth, naturally occurring labyrinths (such as forests) or in city streets and crowds. This image came into prominence again after the Second World War had turned known landscapes into unfamiliar spaces of danger and confusion, and the experience of exile and displacement was replicated for millions, across continents. The unicursal labyrinth (only one route through, no choices to be made) had been appropriated by the church as a metaphor for faith (one must relinquish one’s own sense of direction and simply trust), and the postwar labyrinth symbolized the loss of faith in the gods and institutions that had allowed destruction and brutality on such a vast scale. Hendia Baker argues that its renaissance relates to the main characteristics of postmodernism—uncertainty, fragmentation, indeterminacy, decentering, and meaninglessness. Within this contemporary labyrinth, the experience is that of “instinctively feeling that everything must, somehow, some day, make sense, that there must be a way out, while simultaneously being faced with evidence that there is no way out, that nothing makes sense, that ultimate meaning remains elusive.”1 Umberto Eco, in his study of the encyclopedia as labyrinth, proposes three types: the first is the classical, 1

Baker, “Minotaur Lost: The Labyrinthine Nature of Time in Postmodern Fiction,” 298.

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linear, unicursal labyrinth, referred to above; the second is the maze, which offers choices between alternative paths, some of which are dead ends, navigated by a process of trial and error, with the threat that one might never find one’s way out; the third is “a net, an unlimited territory, with neither a center nor an outside,” which Eco relates to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome.2 While the Cretan labyrinth had at its heart the monstrous Minotaur, the postwar labyrinth may thus have no center, and no monster. So where does its threat lie? Perhaps, as Mireille Calle-Gruber suggests, the labyrinth acts as a mirror so that the monster that one must defeat is within oneself?3 Another postwar interpretation is found in André Gide’s 1946 retelling of the Theseus narrative. Gide’s Minotaur is not monstrous, but beautiful (if stupid), a seductive figure rather than a terrifying one. The threat posed by the labyrinth is not of being devoured, but of being seduced and sedated, internalizing the labyrinth so that escape becomes unimaginable, 4 and hope is lost.5 Sebald’s work is full of labyrinths: literal and metaphorical, buildings and cities, man-made Somerleyton maze and naturally occurring Dunwich Heath. I argue that this is, in part, the result of the influence of postwar French culture—particularly the “nouveau roman” and its cinematic counterpart, the “nouvelle vague.”6 I briefly explore connections with Resnais’s films before focusing on Butor’s 1956 novel, L’Emploi du temps, whose effect is recognized but, I believe, underestimated, both in its pervasiveness and significance. Butor and Resnais were part of the generation of French writers, filmmakers, and composers who, in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, confronted a particular form of denial of the past. This denial was inspired by de Gaulle’s speeches following the Liberation, in which he established a version of history, “a mythic vision of France victimized by Nazism yet heroically united in its resistance to the enemy.”7 Explicitly, he argued that Vichy was not the Republic, which nonetheless had never ceased to exist, but had been embodied in the free French armies and the resistance: “Vichy 2 Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 82–84. 3 Calle-Gruber, La Ville dans L’Emploi du temps de Michel Butor, 12. 4 Gide, Thésée, 75–76. 5 Ablamowicz, “L’Espace de l’homme égaré,” 56; Kubinyi, “Defense of a Dialogue: Michel Butor’s Passing Time,” 887. 6 It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the presence of the labyrinth in postwar music and visual art, but I am grateful to Elize Mazadiego for alerting me to this fascinating collection of articles on art and curatorial practice: https://stedelijkstudies.com/issue-7-lose-yourself/. 7 Sanyal, “The French War,” 92.

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fut toujours et demeure nul et non avenu.”8 Of course, many had their own reasons—trauma or shame—for treating that period as best forgotten, “as if a horrible parenthesis had at last been closed,” as Butor put it.9 This was the context for the “nouveau roman” and the “nouvelle vague.” They were not coherent movements, rather, loose categorizations that encompassed different generations and approaches. In this context, the three most signif icant writers identif ied with the nouveau roman (the term itself was first used in 1957) are Claude Simon (1913–2005),10 Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) and Michel Butor (1926–2016). Robbe-Grillet produced the key theoretical study in 1963 with Pour un nouveau roman, but this was his own manifesto rather than that of a group of writers. The nouvelle vague label is again applied to a disparate group of filmmakers, the best known of whom areAlain Resnais (1922–2014), Jean-Luc Godard (1930–), and Francois Truffaut (1932–84). Truffaut’s 1954 essay, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” in Cahiers du cinéma summed up many of its preoccupations and principles, denouncing the “tradition de qualité”—the adaptation of safe literary works into unimaginative films which, he argued, had come to typify French cinema and which the nouvelle vague was to disrupt. What these writers and cinematographers had in common was their experimental approach to narrative and style. Whether or not they confronted directly the legacy of the Occupation, the compulsion to reject the conventions of the past was inspired or strengthened by the alienation of those who were adolescents or young adults during the war, from their parents’ and teachers’ desire to gloss over those years. There are parallels with Sebald’s response to the postwar culture in Germany. Obviously, the older generation in Germany was tainted in ways that most in the occupied countries were not. As a teenager, he was shown film of the liberation of a concentration camp as part of the denazification program, but without any context or explanation: “When we were about seventeen we were confronted at school […] with one of those documentary films. I think it was the opening of Belsen Camp, without comment and without further ado. So there it was, and somehow, you know, we had to get our minds around it, which of course we didn’t.”11 His alienation from his homeland came from the gradual realization that his teachers, and 8 De Gaulle, cited in Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours, 31. 9 Butor, Improvisations sur Michel Butor: L’Écriture en transformation, 13. 10 Sebald quotes Simon’s Le Jardin des Plantes in Austerlitz. 11 Sebald in conversation with Maya Jaggi in In Other Words: The Journal for Literary Translators 21 (1997), cited in Schütte, W.G. Sebald, 9.

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those in positions of authority, were the context. This came to him partly through his exposure to the details of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials while studying in Freiburg from 1963–65, which he describes as “the first public acknowledgement that there was such a thing as an unresolved German past.” He determined that he had to find his own way “through that maze of the German past and not be guided by those in teaching positions at that time.”12 I argue that Sebald found in the postwar French literary and artistic scene those whose approach to ideas on memory, time and trauma inspired him, and turn first to the most Sebaldian cinematographer of the New Wave, Alain Resnais. Two of his films have an overt presence in Sebald’s work, Toute la mémoire du monde, his short documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and L’Année dernière à Marienbad, both of which feature in Austerlitz. The former is ostensibly an inquiry by a user of the library into what happens between the filing of a request and the issuing of a book. It explores the quintessential labyrinth of the library, in which every page of every book potentially leads the reader to other pages of other books. But the labyrinth is always a carceral space, and Resnais’s commentary describes the library as a fortress in which each book is a prisoner (“les mots sont imprisonnés”)—hence the link to and echoes of Resnais’s previous documentary, Nuit et Brouillard, commissioned to mark the tenth anniversary of the Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. This film is never referenced directly by Sebald, but is powerfully present in his work, particularly in Austerlitz, the one work in which he ventures beyond the point of deportation and enters into the “univers concentrationnaire.”13 There are other resonances too, with some of Sebald’s poems. Nuit et Brouillard opens with, the depiction of a summertime pastoral idyll, with rolling green fields set beneath a wide blue sky […] the absolute antithesis of what one might expect from a controversial Holocaust documentary. […] After a few seconds, however, the camera slowly starts to move downwards, bringing the barbed wire fence of a concentration camp into view, and immediately the opening glimpse of rural tranquility is refashioned as a kind of primal scene: a scene of loss.14 12 Bigsby, “In Conversation with W.G. Sebald,” 146–47. 13 Silverman, “Horror and the Everyday in Post-Holocaust France: Nuit et Brouillard and Concentrationary Art,’” 8. 14 Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, 137.

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One thinks of a poem such as “Somewhere,”15 which seems, as its translator says, “nothing short of idyllic,” until one learns what lay “behind Turkenfeld”: the Kaufering network of satellite camps, and a route for the transport of prisoners to and from Auschwitz and Dachau to labour or to be killed.16 While the imagery of items arriving at the library, never to leave it again, being categorized, stamped, and stored, certainly carries uneasy echoes of Nuit et Brouillard, the library is at the same time devised to protect, to be a bastion against forgetting, through the archiving of memory—and thus an answer perhaps to the challenges posed in Nuit et Brouillard. It is a lieu de mémoire, literally and metaphorically, and, as Emma Wilson says in her study of Resnais, it “preserves and commemorates the very obsessions of Resnais’ cinema [also very Sebaldian obsessions], his interest in the move between life and death, the material and the immaterial.”17 Sebald echoes the ambivalence of Resnais’s treatment of the library when he writes (again in Austerlitz) about the “Lager Austerlitz” that he is told once occupied that site, a Nazi labor camp in which Jewish prisoners sorted, catalogued, and packed for transport the properties seized from Jews who had been or were being deported.18 L’Année dernière à Marienbad features in Sebald’s poem, “The Year before Last,” which clearly references the film, and includes passages that are reworked in a significant episode in Austerlitz, where it becomes “a signifier for an irretrievably idyllic interlude of happiness.” Austerlitz’s second visit is “like a trip to a looking-glass underworld in which the Orphic hero loses his beloved to life while he is drawn uncomprehendingly towards death. […] Marienbad as a physical place is really a metaphorical city of the dead or underworld in temporal terms.”19 The film itself (whose screenplay is written by Alain Robbe-Grillet) is highly intertextual (another form of the labyrinth, and a common feature of nouvelle vague and nouveau roman), woven out of repetitions of words and images. Its location is a composite place (it may or may not be Marienbad, where its protagonists may or may 15 Sebald, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001, 135. 16 Galbraith, “Translator’s Preface” in Sebald, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001, xx–xxii. 17 Wilson, Alain Resnais, 35. 18 Sebald, Austerlitz, 401; as so often with Sebald, it is not easy to sift the fact from the fiction in this account. For a thorough analysis, see Cowan, “W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory,” 59, 68–72. 19 Kilbourn, “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W G Sebald’s Austerlitz,” 148.

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not have met last year) with labyrinthine mirrored corridors, in which a man asserts, and a woman denies a past encounter. We never find out the truth (if there is one), and the ending is ambiguous but as their conversation plays out, we see on screen images that sometimes reflect and sometimes contradict the man’s assertions, and it seems clear that the woman has experienced and is remembering some kind of trauma. Time, memory, and trauma, each of them a labyrinth.20 We find—and Sebald found—the same preoccupations and recurring images in French postwar literature. In Austerlitz Sebald quotes from Claude Simon’s Le Jardin des plantes, in which (as he puts it) “Simon descends once more into the storehouse of his memories”21 to tell the story of one Gastone Novelli, and the traumatic aftermath of his torture at the hands of the Nazis. One can also see the influence of Georges Perec, whose novel W deals with the difficulty of retrieving childhood memories (Perec survived the war in hiding but his parents were murdered),22 although Perec’s use of photographs is the inverse of Sebald’s: he refers to and describes in detail actual but unseen photographs of his family, whereas Sebald includes in Austerlitz (as is his practice elsewhere) unattributed photographs that he suggests relate to the people and places he describes, but whose provenance is uncertain.23 I focus, however, on Michel Butor, who died in 2016, just before his ninetieth birthday. He was the youngest of the writers associated with the nouveau roman and did not care greatly for the label. A highly prolific writer until well into his seventies, he wrote only four novels, all during the 1950s, after which he began writing much less easily defined works with much greater structural experimentation, including a large number of artist books. Of the novels, only two seem still to be read. La Modification has been a set text in French schools, and Butor’s obituaries all mention it. However, in the UK particularly, it is L’Emploi du temps that has exerted the greatest fascination because of its setting, a fictionalized version of Manchester, where Butor stayed for two years, working as a lecteur in the French department at the university. He calls the city Bleston, and the dark, dry humor of the descriptions, as unflattering as they are to Manchester and to the Britain of the early 1950s, is one source of its popularity. It is presented as the diary of a young Frenchman, Jacques Revel, in Bleston for a one-year 20 See Luc Lagier’s documentary, Dans le labyrinthe de Marienbad (2009). 21 Sebald, Austerlitz, 34. 22 Perec, W, ou le souvenir d’enfance. 23 Vice, “‘Yellowing Snapshots’: Photography and Memory in Holocaust Literature,” 295, 297.

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work placement, and at first it seems as though this will be a gritty, realistic account of life in a grim northern city, where the weather is unremittingly terrible, and the food, if anything, even worse. But very quickly the reader begins to feel a disjunction between the mundane events described and the narrator’s heightened emotional response to them. Butor not only uses the metaphor of the labyrinth (with references to the story of Theseus) for the dark English city he describes, but also creates a labyrinthine narrative structure, which seems to be taking us closer to revelation of some central truth but then loops away from it, so that the book ends, arbitrarily, with questions unanswered. The city takes on other aspects: it is a labyrinth that changes shape as Revel attempts to navigate it, a sorcerer who sedates the inhabitants with narcotic fumes that sap their resistance, an implacable enemy, blocking him in all his enterprises, practical, creative, and romantic. Revel arrives late to find the streets dark, and everything closed. The recurring image of the barred door or the grille over shop windows goes along with repeated images of night and fog, of citizens hurrying home with their heads down as if there was a curfew, of unspecified dangers and unexpiated crimes, of imprisonment, betrayal, resistance, and revenge. Are we simply reading the account of an unreliable narrator, as several critics have proposed? Is Revel just a young man having what would have been called at the time a nervous breakdown, which leads him to see threat and menace in everyday situations and occurrences? If he is indeed an unreliable narrator, it is worth asking what traumatic memories he brings into the labyrinth of Bleston that might cloud his judgement. Butor himself has said that it is easy to see how the capital of France hides behind the mask of Bleston.24 It’s a puzzling statement: how do we reconcile Bleston, dark, dirty, and xenophobic, with Paris, the city of light, the epitome of cosmopolitanism? If, however, we look at the Paris in which Butor grew up, we start to see the connections. That Paris was epitomized by darkness, oppression, and danger. Butor has acknowledged that he was writing about an English city in order to not write directly about Paris, that Revel is a Parisian in exile, who lived during the “occultation” of Paris.25 And an early reviewer comments that his adolescence during the years of the Occupation left impressions on him that haunt the novel.26 The term “occultation” is usually used to describe an astronomical phenomenon 24 Calle-Gruber, La Ville dans “L’Emploi du temps” de Michel Butor, 7–8. 25 Sicard, “Michel Butor au travail du texte,” 17. 26 Bourin, “Instantané: Michel Butor,” 28–32.

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whereby one object is hidden by another that passes between it and the observer. In this context, the known Paris was blocked from view, not by the distance of exile but by the presence of the occupying force that rendered it literally foreign (road signs in German, swastika flags on public buildings, German soldiers on the streets and posters everywhere reminding the inhabitants that this city was no longer theirs). L’Emploi du temps is not only about Manchester (as a specific place, as an archetype of the modern industrial city, or both) but about Occupied Paris. As Butor has said, it hides behind the ostensible location for the narrative. Once one sees this, it cannot be unseen. The evidence that L’Emploi du temps held particular significance for Sebald lies not only in his descriptions of Manchester, particularly in the Max Ferber section of The Emigrants and in After Nature,27 nor in the annotations on his copy of the novel, which is in the archives at Marbach. We also have his poem, “Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical,” completed in January 1967, and first published in English translation in the collection Across the Land and the Water (2011). Sebald arrived in Manchester to take up his role as Lektor at the university in September 1966. He appears to have acquired very shortly after his arrival a copy of the French edition of L’Emploi du temps (he may have read the book before this, perhaps in the German translation). He wrote on the title page on November 13th, locating himself in Chorlton/Bleston (Chorlton being a suburb of Manchester, where he had lodgings).28 Several critics have attributed Sebald’s rather negative take on Manchester in the Max Ferber episode of The Emigrants, where he seemed to focus on areas of dereliction and decay, to his reading of Butor’s book. Sven Meyer’s notes in the German edition state that: “Bleston. A Mancunian Canticle [sic] ist eine Reaktion auf die Lektüre von Michel Butor’s L’Emploi du Temps (1956, dt. Der Zeitplan, 1960), die Sebald zum Anlaβ nahm, die eigene, zuweilen unglückliche Situation an der von Butors Erzähler zu spiegeln.”29 Richard Sheppard speaks of Sebald’s low spirits during at least the early part of his Manchester sojourn in similar terms: “The acute culture shock and sense of isolation that Max suffered during his first term at Manchester could not have been helped by his Baudelairean / Benjaminian flâneries through scenes of slum clearance and urban decay […] or by his reading of Michel Butor’s L’Emploi du temps.”30 27 Sebald, The Emigrants; Sebald, After Nature. 28 Ryan, “Sebald’s Encounters with French Narrative,” 124. 29 Sebald, Über das Land und das Wasser: Ausgewählte Gedichte 1964–2001, 107. 30 Sheppard, “The Sternheim Years,” 66.

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To be sure, Butor does present a very bleak picture of the city, and some of what he describes might in reality have improved by the time of Sebald’s arrival. I would argue, however, that the novel spoke to Sebald’s state of mind, rather than creating it, and that rather than seeking out in some perverse way the most depressing aspects of the city he selects in his own writing those which connect with his preoccupations. Butor did likewise. While Manchester was certainly smokier, grimier, and grimmer in the early 1950s than in the second half of the 1960s, it had, even then, many redeeming features (particularly in terms of its cultural life) that Butor chooses not to incorporate. The title of the poem—“Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical”—makes the connection explicit, but it also includes both direct quotations (shown in French in Sebald’s German text) and “hidden quotations,” which he renders in German so that, unless one is familiar with Butor’s novel, there is nothing to flag that they are quotations. Taken together, these quotations suggest very strongly the points of connection that Sebald felt with L’Emploi du temps. They also demonstrate the depth of Sebald’s reading of the novel—he has incorporated phrases even the most attentive reader of Butor might miss. The first and last of the poem’s five sections take their titles from L’Emploi du temps. Firstly “Fête Nocturne,” which Galbraith translates as “night party,” perhaps underplaying the sinister implications of the phrase. Bleston is a city where night can seem to last interminably, the “snowless, lightless month of December,” and “a bleak and forsaken place.” In part III Sebald speaks of “Der Schatten eines Festes Fantom/Eines verstorbenen Festes” (“the mere shadow of a feast-day phantom / Of a defunct feast-day Bleston”). These phrases derive directly from Butor’s text: “L’ombre d’une fête, le fantôme d’une fête morte.”31 In the novel, Revel spends Christmas Eve wandering the city, in the rain, from one church to another, hearing everywhere “the same canticles” and sensing the emptiness behind the compulsory jollity. Elsewhere in L’Emploi du temps, the festival of All Saints (see line 10 of “Fête Nocturne”: “In den Himmel des Parks von All Saints”) is a recurring motif, cropping up (as in Sebald)32 in place names as well as in relation to the date itself (All Saints Church, All Saints Gardens, All Saints Park, “la Toussaint, le jour des fantômes”).33 The phrase also contains two of the most prevalent motifs in L’Emploi du temps: shadows and phantoms. Bleston tries to reduce its inhabitants 31 Butor, L’Emploi du temps, 237. 32 Sebald, The Emigrants, 157; Sebald, Across the Land, 18. 33 Butor, L’Emploi du temps, 75, 83, 84.

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to ghosts. It is a city of shadows, literal and metaphorical, obscuring both the way ahead and the motives and intentions of the people. The boundary between death and life recurs throughout Sebald’s text—“Now that death is all of life,” “In eternity,” “a time / Without beginning or end,”34 “Alma quies optata,” translated as “How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie, / And without dying, O how sweet to die.”35 These words are echoed in The Emigrants: “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,”36 and there is a more literal phantom, the beautiful woman in grey who visits Ferber each day.37 “Perdu dans ces filaments” refers to Revel’s sense that he was a virus, caught in Bleston’s threads. “Filaments” also echoes “fil d’Ariane,” a reference to the story of Theseus who found his way through the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne’s thread, a legend that is central to L’Emploi du temps. Galbraith suggests that a further reference to the story of Theseus is suggested in the (probably) Yiddish phrase, “opgekilte schottns,” meaning “frozen shadows,” in the context of “a return antithetical to the desired echo’”(Theseus’s failure to change the signal of a black sail to white, thus causing the death from despair of his father).38 Not identified by Galbraith is the phrase “this cave within a cave,” a translation of Butor’s “la cave de cette cave,” which refers to the imprisonment in the underworld of Theseus and his companion Pirithous.39 The phrase “my ashes / In the wind of your dreams” is also a translation from Butor. However, whereas Sebald suggests that it is Bleston being addressed, in context, it is the city that is addressing Revel—whether this is a deliberate shift, or Sebald’s misreading of the French text, we cannot know. Ash and fire are predominant themes for both writers. Bleston’s air is full of ash, from the fires that burn on the areas of wasteland that ring the city and from industrial pollution. Ash also signifies of course death and the industrialization of death. “The howls / Of animals in the zoological Department,” which in L’Emploi du temps uses the animals to echo Revel’s despair, and reinforces the theme of imprisonment, finds an echo in Austerlitz, where the recording from Terezin, slowed down to facilitate Austerlitz’s search for an image of his 34 Sebald, Across the Land, 18–19. 35 Ibid., 179. 36 Sebald, The Emigrants, 23; see also Sebald, Austerlitz, 188: “I felt at this time as if the dead were returning from their exile.” 37 Sebald, The Emigrants, 181. 38 Sebald, Across the Land, 179. 39 Butor, L’Emploi du temps, 279.

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mother, reduces the commentary to a menacing growl, reminding him of the big cats in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, driven out of their minds in captivity and raising their hollow roars of lament. The themes of silence and music are prevalent in the poem, and in Butor’s novel. Sebald speaks of “a shuttered world mute” (echoing the repeated motif of the “grille de fer baissée/fermée” in L’Emploi du temps), 40 of “the silence of revelation,” “Reclining in silence on the river of time,” “The valleys of Bleston do not echo. […] Word without answer.” Set against this silence is the screaming of the starlings, the howls of the animals, and the final words of the poem: “Flutes of death for Bleston.” In The Emigrants, Max Ferber speaks of the loss of his mother tongue, German, which he has not spoken since parting from his parents in 1939, “and which survives in me as no more than an echo, a muted and incomprehensible murmur.”41 Thus, the ghost who visits him never speaks to him, nor he to her. For Sebald, silence carries a terrible weight of loss, and of complicity. Ernestine Schlant has described West German literature since the war as “a literature of absence and silence contoured by language.”42 There is another reference to Butor’s novel, which occurs in the lines: the astonishment that Sadness exists—one’s own Never the other of those who suffer Of those whose right it really is Life is uncomplaining in view of the history Of torture à travers les âges Bleston.

L’Histoire de la Torture à travers les âges is the title of a book that Revel sees in a Bleston shop, alongside cookery books and DIY manuals, and greenjacketed Penguin detective novels. 43 Butor here suggests the co-existence of horror with the mundane—he said of the Occupation that it seemed as though nothing was happening, but that the nothing was bloody.44 In the context of the poem, Sebald is reminding the reader that his experience of exile, however deeply felt, is in a sense trivial—it cannot and must not be compared with the experiences of “those whose right it really is.”45 40 Ibid., 11, 104, 112, 241, 281, 327. 41 Sebald, The Emigrants, 182. 42 Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust, 1. 43 Butor, L’Emploi du temps, 131, 362. 44 Butor, Curriculum Vitae: Entretiens avec André Clavel, 25. 45 Schütte, Figurationen: Zum lyrischen Werk von W G Sebald, 25–26.

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All of these quotations and echoes from Butor confirm what we find in the marginal annotations to Sebald’s copy of L’Emploi du temps. These emphasize the experience of exile, recurring motifs of fire and smoke, and of the labyrinth. Judith Ryan observes how Sebald traces the theme of resistance through writing through the pages of the novel: It would go too far to suppose that Sebald identifies with Revel’s belief that writing can protect him from the hostility of the city, but […] Other underlinings and marginal lines show that Sebald is reading the book attentively, following the connected motifs of fire and smoke, the theme of irrational action, and the narrator’s notion that he can assuage his distress by burning his original copy of the city map and continuing to work laboriously at the text of his diary. 46

And Bleston as a carceral space perhaps finds its most striking parallel in Austerlitz, with its focus on the theme of imprisonment. The echoes of L’Emploi du temps thus carry through Sebald’s oeuvre, from this early poem through to his last major work. To conclude: what was the source of L’Emploi du temps’s significance for Sebald? In his work, we may be in the Suffolk countryside, the Manchester dockland, in Venice or Verona, in Prague or Paris, but we are never just in one place or one time. In Manchester we may think ourselves in Poland, in the Litzmannstadt ghetto. A bookshop in London may link us to Prague. Halfway between Lowestoft and Southwold we are transported to Belsen. There are always other geographical, phantasmic, and persistent presences. Sebald saw this in Butor’s novel, and Resnais’s films and, I believe, it helped him toward a way of writing about his homeland and its terrible history. In her study of West German literature and the holocaust, Ernestine Schlant described how Sebald (and, I would argue, Butor) create “dense time”—a time in which past and present intersect, commingle, and overlap. This commingling destroys sequence and evokes the sense of a labyrinth with no exit.”47 It was not merely the recognition of one European exile in an uncongenial city for another, but the way in which layers of past and present, of myth and reality, of different cities from different eras and places, are present within Butor’s novel, challenging the reader constantly to sift and order in the hope of finding Ariadne’s thread to guide them through the labyrinth. 46 Ryan, “Sebald’s Encounters with French Narrative,” 125. 47 Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust, 225.

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Works Cited Ablamowicz, Alexandre. “L’Espace de l’homme égaré.” In Espaces romanesques, edited by Michel Crouzet, 47–57. Paris: PUF, 1982. Baker, Hendia. “Minotaur Lost: The Labyrinthine Nature of Time in Postmodern Fiction.” Literary Studies 12, no. 3 (1996): 297–313. Bigsby, Christopher, ed. “In Conversation with W.G. Sebald.” In Writers in Conversation with Christopher Bigsby, Volume 2, 139–65. Norwich: EAS Publishing, 2001. Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bourin, André.“Instantané: Michel Butor.” Entretiens: Quarante ans de vie littéraire 1, no. 1567 (1957): 28–32. Butor, Michel. Curriculum Vitae: Entretiens avec André Clavel. Paris: Plon, 1996. Butor, Michel. L’Emploi du temps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1956. Butor, Michel. Improvisations sur Michel Butor: L’Ecriture en transformation. Paris: La Différence, 1993. Butor, Michel. Passing Time. Translated by Jean Stewart. Manchester: Pariah Press, 2021. Butor, Michel. “Preface.” La Ville dans L’Emploi du temps de Michel Butor. Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1995. Calle-Gruber, Mireille. La Ville dans L’Emploi du temps de Michel Butor. Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1995. Cowan, James L. “W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part 1.” Monatshefte 102, no. 1 (2010): 192–207. Eco, Umberto. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. London: Macmillan, 1984. Gide, André. Thésée. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. Higgins, Lynn A. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Kilbourn, Russell J.A. “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, edited by J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 140–55. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Kubinyi, Laura R. “Defense of a Dialogue: Michel Butor’s Passing Time.” Boundary 2 4, no. 3 (1976): 885–904. Perec, Georges. W. ou le souvenir d’enfance. Paris: Éditions Denoël/Gallimard, 1975. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1961. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Dans le labyrinthe. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1959. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Pour un nouveau roman. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1963.

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Rousso, Henry. Le Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Ryan, Judith. “Sebald’s Encounters with French Narrative.” In From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form, edited by Sabine Wilke, 123–42. New York: Continuum, 2012. Sanyal, Debarati. “The French War.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, edited by Marina Mackay, 83–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Schlant, Ernestine. The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. Schütte, Uwe. Figurationen: Zum lyrischen Werk von W.G. Sebald. Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2013. Schütte, Uwe. W.G. Sebald. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. Sebald, W.G. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001. Translated by Iain Galbraith. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011. Sebald, W.G. After Nature. Translated by Michael Hamburger. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002. Sebald, W.G. Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2001. Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage Books, 2002. Sebald, W.G. Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1995. Sebald, W.G. Über das Land und das Wasser: Ausgewählte Gedichte 1964–2001. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008. Sheppard, Richard. “The Sternheim Years.” Saturn’s Moons: W.G. Sebald—A Handbook, edited by Jo Catling and Richard Hibbitt, 64–81. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. Sicard, Michel. “Michel Butor au travail du texte.” Magazine littéraire 110 (1976): 17. Silverman, Max. “Horror and the Everyday in Post-Holocaust France: Nuit et Brouillard and Concentrationary Art.” French Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2006): 5–18 Simon, Claude. Le Jardin des Plantes. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1997. Truffaut, François. “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français.” Cahiers du Cinéma 31 (1954): 15–29. Vice, Sue. “‘Yellowing Snapshots”: Photography and Memory in Holocaust Literature.” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 3 (2004): 293–316. Wilson, Emma. Alain Resnais. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Wolff, Janet. “Max Ferber and the Persistence of Pre-Memory in Mancunian Exile.” Melilah supplementary vol. 2 (2012): 47–56.

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Filmography Lagier, Luc. Dans le labyrinthe de Marienbad, 2009. Resnais, Alain. Nuit et brouillard, 1955. Resnais, Alain. Toute la mémoire du monde, 1957. Resnais, Alain. Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Resnais, Alain. L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1960.

About the Author Catherine Annabel studied English and Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 1978, before embarking on a long career in higher education administration. She returned to part-time study in 2005 to complete a second undergraduate degree, in French Language and Cultures, and then went on to a part-time PhD at Sheffield, on labyrinths and intertextuality in the work of Michel Butor and W.G. Sebald. During the course of her doctorate she retired from her post at the University of Sheffield to focus on her research. She is co-editor of the new edition of the English translation of Butor’s L’Emploi du temps (Passing Time, Pariah Press, 2021) and a contributor to the forthcoming volume Sebald in Context, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

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Leaning Images Reading Nasta Rojc and Ana Mušćet Sandra Križić Roban Abstract This paper introduces the work of early-twentieth-century artist Nasta Rojc that exists at the periphery of the Croatian art scene.1 Her extensive diary (Light, Shadows, Darkness, 1918–19) allows us to trace her travels across the Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkans, and to relate them to Sebald’s subjects such as war and biography, whereby his “firm grip” creates room for research on history, feminism, photography, and collage. Rojc’s silenced voice resonates within the work of Ana Mušćet, who used unfixed collage to create numerous intimate statements, temporarily uniting materials and treating them as an opportunity for contact. Instead of photography’s immanent “capturing,” she takes parts of photographs and sketches left behind by Rojc, as well as those appropriated from other sources, arguing that the past, events, and facts do not exist, only interpretation. In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald’s own particular practice of witnessing includes a description of an office filled with scattered notes, letters and all kinds of written documents, where the author feels as though he is standing in the midst of a paper flood. I bring the weight of the details that the narrator describes into my own interpretation of the complex relationships of a particular female artist, whose journey to Scotland I recently “reconstructed.” “The greater the distance, the clearer the view.”2 Is it possible to establish a connection in a grain of sand captured by Rojc’s camera without threatening her convincing “I”? The order of things begun with Rojc’s Self-Portrait with a Rifle (1912) continues with the complex intertextual interpretation in the work of Mušćet, as a composition of

1 This work has been supported in part by Croatian Science Foundation under the project IP-2019-04-1772. 2 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 23.

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch07

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travelogs, facts, fictions, images, and text. The narrative that connects the work of two artists is marked by a gaze through the crosshairs, one of them painted and the other spoken as a kind of threat. The focus is on leaning images, which make possible the study of the past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. Keywords: Multiplicity and Modernization, Unconscious, Archaeology and Landscape, Reminiscent, Monarchy

Introduction The background of Nasta Rojc’s Self-Portrait with a Rifle, which she painted in 1912, consists of a series of short, almost summarized brushstrokes.3 Their rhythm is in tune with the haze that envelops the almost completely empty clearing and forest in the distance; a haze that does not cover or obscure the landscape, but allows certain parts of it to retain their properties. Somewhere around the center of the whitish surface of the middle plane, there is a slightly brighter segment. Perhaps it is a strip of light that the artist noticed, or just a skillful way of indicating the culmination of her motif, her own figure in an intriguing posture: Nasta Rojc contrasts the sequence of background planes with the diagonals of her own body, her tilted head, and especially her gaze, which may seem as if directed from an elevated perspective, while her right hand is resting on a double-barrel rifle seemingly nonchalantly, yet with noticeable certainty. Her brown suit and white shirt, coupled with a tie and her oversized leather gloves, conceal her feminine attributes, and only a single curl of her dark hair resists f itting the image of a new woman, whose touch of androgyny indicates departure from the social conventions of “passive femininity.”4 Using Rojc’s photographs I establish a personal practice of collecting evidence, while my translation of images into text indicates that there are many different ways to record something. Therefore, I also introduce the work of contemporary artist Ana Mušćet, who conveys specif ic details from Rojc’s autobiographical writings through collage, 3 Leonida Kovač has referred to the painting as Self-Portrait with a Rifle, while Modern Gallery lists it in its collection as Self-Portrait in Hunter’s Clothes. Leonida Kovač, Anonimalia. Normativni diskurzi i samoreprezentacija umjetnica 20. stoljeća [Anonimalia: Normative discourses and the self-representation of women artists in the twentieth century] (Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2009), 109. 4 Ibid., 113.

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pointing to the multiplicity of positions from which it is possible to witness and record events. On the covers of her small photo albums, two of them including pictures from a trip to across Scotland, and which are bound in cardboard of faded pink, Rojc glued a piece of paper with a signature in her characteristic handwriting. One album contains several photographs taken on various occasions: young women in pale dresses, a couple accompanied by two women, photographed in a yard surrounded by a fence. One page contains three photographs, one with the jagged edges typical of the period: older women standing by the lake, with a garden to their right, photographed slightly carelessly, off handish, with an inclination suggesting that the author’s attention was focused on the flower bed in the foreground, while the path in the background hangs slightly toward the right edge. At the top of the page, there is a lovely portrait of a woman by the lake, wearing a small white hat, her head turned away from the landscape, but not to the photographer: instead, her gaze is directed beyond the frame, past the camera. A dozen of her small photo albums seem to speak about the need to look back into a history and childhood spent in the Croatian countryside. From there, she went first to Zagreb and then to Vienna, at that time the capital of the Habsuburg Monarchy, where she acquired a knowledge of art and who she was. She managed to establish this knowledge despite the strained social and historical circumstances,5 telling her story through paintings, drawings, and photographs, constructing the space in which she lived and worked. In allowing us to see a part of it, we are able to think about what we see as well as the way we see things. The way in which one can approach her photographic legacy recalls the practices of witnessing inaugurated by Sebald, whose texts allow the ghosts of the past to speak for themselves, activated as social and historical f igures. His method of producing historical knowledge is achieved by confronting “the ghostly aspects of history, the absences that are covered over but still felt and transmitted in the historical unconscious.”6 His 5 Nasta Rojc (Bjelovar, 1883–Zagreb, 1964) was a Croatian artist, educated first at a private painting school in Zagreb and then in Vienna and Munich. She initiated the foundation of the Club of Women Fine Artists in Zagreb and actively promoted the gender equality of artists. Together with her partner, Alexandrina Onslow, whom she met after the end of the First World War, she assisted the partisan movement during the Second World War. Through Onslow, Rojc became acquainted with a number of suffragettes who were active in the area of former Yugoslavia. 6 Diedrich, “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald’s Practices of Witnessing,” 257.

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methods reveal the lives of these spirits; they make us open to a freer combination of historical events, the words that describe them, and the images that document them. In relation to the material available, as well as what I have “stumbled upon” during my research, I have been changing my own vantage point. I have placed myself above or in between, counting on unexpected turns; I have devoted myself to another person’s words and images, trusting that Sebald’s use of a multiplicity of practices in his own research might serve as a guide. Yet it is impossible to apply his structure, in which Susan Sontag finds there to be musical relations of composition; the score that Sebald transposed into the spatial and visual order eventually establishes relations within the text.7 In The Rings of Saturn, he attributes the need to establish a stable structure to Sir Thomas Browne, whose skull, stolen from a coffin, Sebald uses as the motive behind his archeological method that traces the fate of the bones back into the past while writing the polymath’s story. Before bringing the reader to the structure of the quincunx, which would help him study the order of things—“We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence” 8 —Sebald recalls the view from his hospital room, “draped with black netting.” In a black and white photograph of the usual low quality in Sebald’s work, we can only sense the clouds and the sky rather than know they exist, having to rely on his having seen them. “I don’t want to integrate images of high photographic quality in my texts; they are rather documents of findings, something secondary. It is actually quite nice when this indistinctness somehow f inds its way into the images.”9 The network structure shows how the text is constructed, and its rhythm of parts following one another, which also occurs in the aforementioned quincunx. Such seemingly balanced order—a textual “template” reminiscent of patterns of recurring rhythm—judging from what is written, also preoccupied Browne. Similarly to Rojc, there is relatively little known about Browne’s childhood, to which Sebald attests in mentioning the uncertainties regarding some of Browne’s data. Photography, from the start, establishes its function in more than just epistemological terms or within scholarly practices, having an influence in public debate and intellectual discourse, broadcasting social views and reflections on modern society. Using the material from Rojc’s small 7 Sontag, Where the Stress Falls: Essays, 43. 8 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 23. 9 Scholz, “But the Written Word Is Not a True Document,” 106.

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photographic archive (inaccessible to the general public), I have reached out to the ghostwriter f igure that Sebald used often in his practice. Ekphrasis, as a literary mode, brings about a fundamental change in how we acquire and create knowledge, or develop tools to confront various (or selected) historical aspects. I envision these networks in building active relationships between the viewer and the viewed, while their empty f ields included in a specif ic pattern (an ordinary protective net or the more sophisticated quincunx) can be interpreted as cracks caused by ignorance. Rojc wrote most of her autobiography toward the end of her life, speaking about herself in the third person singular. The structure is loose, though there seems to be a need for order. Parts of the text lean against others, as in the collage work of Ana Mušćet, who, inspired by Rojc’s extraordinary life and artistic experiences, juxtaposes different periods. Mušćet uses a written narrative without neglecting the visual, basing her decisions on Rojc’s paintings and photographs. In this double reading of these two artists, I look back at what I know (or sense), which, even if not personally witnessed, I can choose to trust in others who have. This comes close to Sebald’s method, those multiple practices of memory, with myself as distant witness digging in and around past events. A new structure is then created that is not necessarily similar to a netting or a quincunx, because one’s own pattern cannot be reconciled with those of others. We incorporate our personal memories and knowledge, responsible for looking back on what once was. Using the paths of two narrators—Rojc and Mušćet—one might invent spaces, imagining where something happened. The power of the relations is in the balance of a complex system, which has been established by Sebald, made up of “permission and prohibition,” that what we do not see is still sensed strongly.10 The relations of power between the viewer and viewed are subject to a scopic regime, whereby the resulting optical tension caused by the photographs does not give rise to questioning certain theses. The observed scenes (Rojc’s, Mušćet’s) do not bring the viewer into a state of chaos or make them unable to master what they see. The practices of witnessing, consisting of walking, drawing, painting and photographing, and writing, allow us to ask whether the past happened the way we see it. Can events that feel foreign, and part of which border on horror, be presented in a way that we can come to understand, even accept? How do we capture the past?

10 Diedrich, “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts,” 263.

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The Void I admit that I hate everything to do with hunting. All the symbols, images, the tattered fur hanging down people’s bodies as status symbols, the smell of gunpowder, the sound of shots. The numerous pictures that I have seen at some point, all the nonsense of the world lying at the feet of hunters, those complacent fools, pass before my eyes. I also remember that huge deer, eventually shot and displayed at Balmoral Castle, where the queen is staring, her eyes almost blank. Admittedly, it was for the needs of the movie, but the message was sent. I have come across this information in The Monarch of the Glen (1851), one of the three very popular scenes painted by Sir Edwin Landseer. An image is never just that, and so the deer as the ruler of the Scottish Glen has a special significance for the House of Westminster, which commissioned these three paintings in the mid-nineteenth century, at the time of the Great Exhibition. The deer became a cliché over time, much like shortbread: a symbol of Scotland, especially its Highlands that needed to be conquered—by buying paintings, killing deer, and by design, which eventually turned all that into a biscuit advertisement. I traveled to the Highlands last summer. Driving along a narrow winding road with lay-bys that needed getting used to and through dense forests, as much as it seemed that it shouldn’t take long from my primarily urban perspective and that of the people I was traveling with, it still lasted a while. By late afternoon we got to our destination, a small place on the edge of nowhere, with a school long closed, a few houses, and a community center for people that somehow resisted the global tourism demand. The sky above us was huge, but although I expected no light pollution, the atmosphere was not completely dark. We stood at the Loch Awe in silence. I do not know what route Rojc took when she and her partner Alexandrina Onslow traveled across Scotland (1924–25). The photographs in those small private albums are documents of her personal history. Looking at them in a wider perspective, using the meanings and mechanisms of a documentary, we can follow an itinerary full of unknowns as scenes that give an idea of how the photographic document is constituted in a particular historical context, “in a consistently ambivalent and polemical way.”11 Have our paths crossed, separated by almost a century, alone on that lake’s edge?

11 Ribalta, Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia, 1.

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Rojc’s albums are simply bound in pink paper with two stitches, made perhaps by Onslow, who was a member of the society for transporting the wounded at the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and had been to many battlefields during the First World War and even received a medal.12 Was she equally skilled at suturing the wounds left by photographs? I yearn to take them out of the album and take a look at their backs, because that is where their narrative probably rests, after they have satisfied their “nomadic existence,” as Sebald has called it, by reposing over many years13: “I’ve always noticed that an enormous (ungeheurer) appeal emanates from these images; a demand on the viewer to tell stories or to imagine what one could tell, by starting with these pictures.”14 The albums featuring Rojc’s and Onslow’s photographs experience an afterlife in Mušćet’s collages. A ruin and a tree next to it, with its disorderly canopy, a single-masted boat sailing with its sail rolled up, the darkness in which a narrow strip of light emerges from inside a distant house (reminding me of our school next to Loch Awe), Rojc sitting by the fireplace—I would say that she is wearing her riding boots, as I don’t know how else to explain the shining mark on her lower leg. As I magnify the scene, I notice that the house (I was wondering how oddly lit it was) is in fact a painting on an easel—its top edge held by a round wooden wheel, with a front vertical member at the junction and an invisible brace piece. Its handle is shiny, polished. Above these individual scenes is a photograph of Onslow in uniform: stern, serious, one of her feet slightly, almost imperceptibly stretched forward. She has taken off her right glove and holds it in her left hand. In the aforementioned album, this photograph is on the first page, with the caption: “Onslow in uniform.” Restrained, with an austere expression, she stands in the garden near the house, its façade partly made of brick. Mušćet has somewhat softened the atmosphere in which she has placed her, but it is impossible to avoid the question: what sorts of things did Onslow see? In the daily Scotsman, it is described how the physician and suffragette Elsie Inglis, founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, deployed a 300-bed mobile hospital immediately upon arrival at the Serbian front in 1915 to prevent the spread of typhoid. Her unique discipline enabled her to cope 12 Mušćet and Kovač, Nasta Rojc: Me, the Fighter, 53. According to Rojc’s records, Onslow received a special medal for her engagement on all battlefields, and after the war, founded an orphanage in Bajina bašta together with some fellow women, among them the famous suffrage activist and former actress Vera Holme, where they cared for some sixty children regardless of ethnicity or religion. 13 Scholz, “But the Written Word Is Not a True Document,” 104. 14 Ibid.

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Figure 12  Ana Mušćet, from the series I Fighter (2018)

with the most difficult situations, which caused the Russians to note that anything could be expected of those women “because they were born without fear.”15 In the collage, to Onslow’s right is a photograph of tree canopies, below which is a car ready to leave. In the letters she sent to her parents, Rojc described her almost two-year stay in Scotland and England, where she cut her hair and learned how to drive. She wrote to her parents almost every day, according to her own testimony, describing the freedom enjoyed by the women, who were independent in their decisions, drove cars, rented rooms at local inns, and wore trousers because they lived a “sportive life.”16 Mušćet’s collages create a sort of balance between the two female figures, whereby Onslow’s dominance is undeniable due to her posture and uniform, but also her pronounced size compared to the other elements. Her stern gaze bypasses the painting on the easel, while Rojc’s seems to be focused on the boat, the voyage. It is as if the past, the events and the facts did not exist, only interpretation. A space opens up between reader and author, word and image to challenge and create new subjectivities, to speak about emancipatory gender policies, women’s authorship and 15 Cited in The Daily Graphic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Women%27s_Hospitals_for_Foreign_Service. 16 Mušćet and Kovač, Nasta Rojc: Me, the Fighter, 54.

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destabilizing the historiographical canon in line with Rojc’s “position of unplacement.”17 In 1926, Rojc held a solo exhibition at the “Gievs [sic] Art Gallery” in London,18 probably the Gieves Gallery on the Old Bond Street. A company of the same name had been supplying the Royal Navy since the late eighteenth century. I relate the facts to a loose connection between the two motifs—the gallery and the uniform—in the whirl of the precarious history of two women who are somehow close to me, although most of their lives is likely to be fiction from today’s perspective. After attending a painting school in Zagreb, Rojc continued her education in Vienna, where she resided between 1902 and 1912. In a short autobiographical note from the late 1940s, she mentions that she sometimes took part in “fights until blood flows” in her childhood for women’s rights.19 Growing up in the countryside, she participated in ploughing, climbing trees, and horseback riding, and often used weapons. Far from what is commonly understood as feminine, Rojc based her life attitude on observing nature, acquiring knowledge that did not meet the behavioral standards of the time. The torrent of her notes written from 1917 to 1919, which can be found in her autobiography Shadows, Light, Darkness, brought to my mind the writing desks that I, naively and perhaps a little pretentiously, have considered, like those in the offices of Janine Rosalind Dakyns—an esteemed professor whose practice included obscure details from the correspondence of French novelists.20 I was astonished, like Sebald, by the long passages—Sebald wonders at Dakyns and her reading of thousands of Flaubert’s pages, whereas I “cling” to the passages from Rojc’s autobiography and letters, “obscure details” that gave rise to “Leaning Images.” The paper landscape that surrounds me is like a nursery rhyme, with paper pieces leaning against each other, their fragile structure bound to collapse if I pull anything out. Rojc ventured into painting at age 18 in 1901 upon attending the private painting school of Oton Iveković in Zagreb. Iveković specialized in historical painting, often presenting important events from national history. Due to his frequent use of scenes from the history of the famous Zrinski / Zrínyi family, the Viennese called him “Zrinyimaler,” perhaps jokingly, and more likely a little mockingly. Rojc’s father was a minister of education at the 17 Kovač, Anonimalia, 115. 18 Mušćet and Kovač, Nasta Rojc: Me, the Fighter, 57. 19 Kovač, Anonimalia, 82. 20 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 15.

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time and her decision to study with Iveković was probably the result of their personal acquaintance, as with her friendship with painter Branko Šenoa, whom she later married, though only on paper. Iveković had painted the Golden Hall of the Zagreb palace that housed the Department of Education where Rojc’s father worked. Shortly thereafter, Rojc left Zagreb for Vienna, where she attended the Kunstschule für Frauen und Mädchen—not without reason, as Leonida Kovač mentions, was she taught plain-air painting and still life by Tina Blau.21 At the time, Blau would have been a role model for young Rojc, as she was the only Jewish artist professionally acknowledged by her contemporaries in Europe.22 In addition to painting, Rojc attended the photography school in the Köllnerhofgasse in Vienna. What happened to the photographs she might have taken there? Sebald said in an interview that “the written word is not a true document.”23 Continuing his train of thought, I reflect on Nasta’s photographs and the nature of a medium that may or may not represent the reality. The life trajectories that emanate from individual photographs are much clearer than those that come from paintings, according to Sebald. Here I look at the scenes shot in Vienna during the years when Rojc was there, but I am not sure whether what I see is related to her gaze. There are several men in Mušćet’s works who are used to illustrate Rojc’s preparations for Vienna. One almost casually holds a large device in his hand, something like a megaphone, which disappears under her head. One of the two following him in the next scene has a camera around his neck, and the pull-out lens yet another element that indicates some gender anxiety. The collage illustrating this part of Rojc’s autobiography is reminiscent of an attitude prevalent before the Second World War—Kaja Silverman has called it “dominant fiction”24—regarding the ideology of masculine wholeness. Indeed, armed with these apparatuses, men dominate Rojc at that moment, while new opportunities emerge in the background. We sense them in the next scene, dominated by the figure of the “strict, good professor” under whose leadership she felt she would make progress, as she hurried to Tina Blau and the landscapes she would paint under her supervision.25 By cutting into the fabric of the photograph and overlapping an important part of it, leaving most of the face invisible, Mušćet puts the viewer in the position of 21 Kovač, Anonimalia, 81. 22 See https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/blau-tina. 23 Scholz, “But the Written Word Is Not a True Document,” 104–5. 24 Vettel-Becker, Shooting from the Hip. Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America, XI. 25 Mušćet and Kovač, Nasta Rojc: Me, the Fighter, 21.

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Figure 13 Nasta Rojc, Alexandrina Onslow, private photo album Bajna bašta (Bajina bašta)

a special researcher, such as William Fox Talbot was, according to Margaret Olin, as he held a magnifying glass and leaned over a photograph to focus on a selected part.26 Thus we leaned over the glass cases in which the Leaning Images rested during the exhibition, eager for a touch that would allow us to connect with the artist’s thinking protocol. According to Walter Benjamin, distraction as a way of perception involves touch. Distraction certainly influenced the process of exploring and searching for the selected scenes, and the touch of Mušćet was involved in the construction of a fictional narrative, outlining a three-dimensional space, and resisting the flatness of photography.27 Sebald left behind archival boxes in which he had stored his Bildmaterial. In Searching for Sebald, I found a photograph of one of the open boxes with his catalogued and compiled images and manuscripts, preserved at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach: widely open eyes of a small night animal and a magnified view of the Theresienstadt stamp above them. Searching further, I learn that the stamp was forged many times and that a series of details not visible in the reproduction indicate the indexicality of each version, the original and the eleven counterfeits identified so far. Sometimes, when there is no better option, the internet is such a box, but this kind of atlas, unlike Sebald’s, it is devoid of volume and touch. 26 Olin, Touching Photographs, 1. 27 Ibid., 8.

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Another album that, according to the signature, belonged to Onslow and the crew, is titled Bajna bašta (1918–19). In fact, the place is called Bajina bašta and is located on the border between Bosnia and Serbia. Among the photographs of children in traditional folk clothing, performing their frolics, I see the serious, austerely uniformed bodies of the members of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. In a somewhat disordered, almost random arrangement of photographs, I also find shots taken at the Drina River: suffragettes seated next to the houses, planning and coordinating the construction of the orphanage; snapshots of vegetable gardens, then the slopes of Mount Tara below which, in a tamer spot of nature, they erected a tent. The whole area is filled with the complicated history that Sebald would write about. I remembered the physical discomfort while reading The Rings of Saturn: That morning, as I closed the marbled cover of the logbook, pondering the mysterious survival of the written word, I noticed lying to one side on the table a thick, tattered to me that I had not seen before on my visits to the Reading Room. It turned out to be a photographic history of the First World War, compiled and published in 1933 by the Daily Express, to mark the past tragedy, and perhaps as a warning of another approaching. […] One section of the book is devoted to the chaos in the Balkans, a part of the world which was further removed from England then than Lahore or Omdurman. Page after page of pictures from Serbia, Bosnia and Albania show scattered groups of people and stray individuals trying to escape the War by oxcart, in the heat of summer, along dusty country roads, or on foot through drifting snow with a pony half-dead with exhaustion.28

Bajina bašta was founded in the Ottoman times, to which the name of the place refers. It is located on the banks of the Drina, a river whose course has been marked by the nationalist idea of the “bulwark of Christianity,” a myth that the Croatian radical right-wingers like to resort to, seeking any confirmation that would link this artificial construct to a tangible historical fact. In the immediate vicinity of Bajina bašta, the Romans built an ancient settlement; remains of an imperial palace, basilicas and mosaics have been found there, covered by layers of other nations and cultures that came along. A hatt-i sharif from 1830, a hand-signed order of the Ottoman sultan allowing the modernization of the Ottoman state, proclaimed the religious, civil, and political equality of the Christian and Muslim populations. However, three years after that, the Muslim population moved to Bosnia and Bajina bašta 28 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 104.

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Figure 14 From the private photo album belonging to Nasta Rojc

became a Serbian varoš. It is a word of Hungarian origin (város) that in the local context denotes a kind of urban environment, not necessarily a real town, but rather a hybrid form that strives to become a town. At the time when the suffragettes stayed in Bajina bašta, it was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and continually developing, including, as we know, a newly established orphanage. Vera Holme, an associate and driver of Emmeline Pankhurst, political activist and suffragette, and Evelina Haverfield returned to Bajina bašta in 1919, joined by Onslow. As a result, Bajina bašta became a place on the map of lesbian history, in which the Scottish Women’s Hospital played its part.29 The circle of women gathered by Holme and Haverfield, also seen in the photographs, had short hair, played sports, smoked, knew a thing about automobiles, and did not shun performing any auxiliary services in war.30 Their identity was subject to what we call “sapphic modernities,” according to Laura Doan and Jane Garrity: a distinctive blend of gender, sexuality, and class to which, according to Dimitrijević and Baker, Rojc belonged as well.31 Despite the unusual appearance and behavior of these women, judging by the photographs and the records referenced by Dimitrijević and Baker, 29 Dimitrijević and Baker, “British-Yugoslav Lesbian Networks During and After the Great War,” 49–63. 30 Ibid., 54. 31 Ibid.

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the local community was tolerant and friendly. Serbian women, however, lived in completely different circumstances, and so did, after all, women of other ethnicities of the former Yugoslavia. They moved almost exclusively in private space, with no employment opportunities, mostly illiterate and deprived of basic social rights. Even after the Second World War, there are indications that they were considered mentally inferior. Rojc fought for her emancipation in a different way: After staying at the sea, and having returned home completely healed, I tortured my father with my wish to go into the world and study painting. My father in turn tortured me with his wish that I should learn how to cook. Perhaps my Mom could not even imagine how I suffered when I had to spend all morning in the kitchen, although I was fighting the kitchen smells by smoking constantly, and boredom by contemplating whether cooking was natural in the first place, and why no other animal cooked. I finally reached a compromise with my father. I was to stay in the kitchen, and he would allow me to have painting lessons.32

Recent research into Bajina bašta and the location of the famous archeological site has resulted in responses that erase layers of former cultures, modernization, and equality among the local population. When entering the archeological site on a search engine, data comes up on mass killings, war crimes, and political usurpations of the area in the 1990s. Trying to understand what their life looked like in those war and postwar years in Serbia, I reach for the screen version of Gentleman Jack, and as a nice coincidence I find out that a certain Serbian officer, in a written correspondence, called Vera Holme “Jack” as well, but I sincerely doubt that he could have learned the connotation of that name in the officers’ school.33 However, the costumed historical drama about Anne Lister, filmed in the beautiful sceneries of the 1830s, can hardly evoke the conditions that the Bosnian-Serbian border would not have even a hundred years later. On the other hand, data on the Scottish women active in Serbia (and probably elsewhere) during the second decade of the twentieth century, many of them suffragettes and lesbians, indicate the instability of gender roles as we are accustomed to in standard historical chronology, where privilege is gained through ethnicity and the social role (in this case, in the fields of 32 Mušćet and Kovač, Nasta Rojc: Me, the Fighter, 15. 33 Dimitrijević and Baker, “British-Yugoslav Lesbian Networks During and After the Great War,” 55.

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medicine, health, and social care), cloaked by a special position that they gained by participating in the war.

The Gunpoint It seems that writing about the Balkans cannot happen without thinking of Vienna and the war. What is it that still links the capital of the monarchy with the war? Can we look away from the photograph of Franz Ferdinand’s blood-stained uniform that Sebald brings in The Rings of Saturn, writing about this relic of modern history “holed by bullets and soaked with blood, which must have been photographed for the press after being stripped from the body of the heir to the throne and transferred by rail to the capital of the empire, where it can be viewed to this day, together with his feather bushed hat and trousers, in a black-framed reliquary in the army museum.”34 As in all other examples, the photograph is not of particularly high quality, and we are not able to test whether the optical unconscious can be applied to these examples. I glance at the shots whose content is almost unrecognizable, although I know a lot about what they describe. I return to Vienna, but it resounds with the words that once, probably suppressing Sebald’s memories of the Second World War, were uttered by “one of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence officers at that time [was] a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements, described as imperative for humanitarian reasons.”35 Spoken thirty years later, his words were carried off into orbit on the Voyager 2 Golden Record, with recordings of human laughter, tapping footsteps, greetings in 55 languages. He had come a long way since he received the silver medal of the crown with oak leaves from a criminal—the Croatian Head of State Ante Pavelić—to symbolize human civilization across the solar system. “My son, your dad’s having a hard time, since he keeps dreaming of you being targeted as he targeted the Serbs in ’91.”36

Rojc took her revolver and her rifle with her during her childhood holidays, carrying a weapon over her shoulder in her most famous work, Self-Portrait 34 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 105. 35 Ibid. 36 Ana Mušćet’s father addressing his daughter. Interview with the artist, summer 2019.

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Figure 15 Nasta Rojc, unpublished autobiography Svjetlo, sjene, mrak [Light, Shadows, Darkness], 1918–19. Ana Mušćet, from the series, I Fighter, 2018

with a Rifle.37 She hung the rifle over the bed of her Viennese student room, instead of the saintly image she had removed. Her whip hung on a nail she had found on the wall, as ready as she was in Rojčevo, where she spent her school holidays, armed.38 In the collage piece in which Mušćet describes what Rojc took with her to Vienna, besides the weapons, ammunition, and travel suitcases, the centerpiece is a segment of a double bass, an instrument that means a lot to my family.39 “After staying at the sea, and having returned home completely healed, I tortured my father with my wish to go into the world and study painting. My father in turn tortured me with his wish that I should learn how to cook. Perhaps my Mom could not even imagine how I suffered when I had to 37 See note 3. 38 Kovač, Anonimalia, 90, 109, 111. 39 Mušćet and Kovač, Nasta Rojc: Me, the Fighter, 19.

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spend all morning in the kitchen, although I was fighting the kitchen smells by smoking constantly, and boredom by contemplating whether cooking was natural in the first place, and why no other animal cooked. I finally reached a compromise with my father. I was to stay in the kitchen and he would allow me to have painting lessons.” —Nasta Rojc, unpublished autobiography Svjetlo, sjene, mrak [Light, Shadows, Darkness], 1918–19

Sebald’s statement “The greater the distance, the clearer the view”40 is close to Mušćet’s thinking: If we are to adopt the approach that the past doesn’t exist, that the events don’t exist, that the facts don’t exist, that only interpretations exist, the privacy remains intact in its entirety (the author, time, place, groups, events, motifs, etc.). Everything that has been individually conditioned is a whole that Adorno classifies as the most untruthful and that the most important thing is to look at its parts. 41

If we perceive nothing more than “isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance,” studying the order of things without discerning what is inside, 42 we might understand Mušćet’s decision to create a space of intimate statement, a construction of unplanned, simply found coincidences of confession from Rojc’s autobiography. This is an opportunity for an encounter, while further action is left to the future, when, if necessary, the collages may be rearranged. “All other supporting content needs to be invented. And the one we have fits in. It is consistent. Silly. Like writing.”43

40 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 23. 41 Križić Roban, “Temporarily Assembled Material—Interview with Ana Mušćet,” 54–55. 42 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 40. 43 Meyer-Wehlack, Hodanja, čežnje. Berlinsko-zagrebački dnevnik 1970–1977, 87.

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Works Cited Diedrich, Lisa. “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald’s Practices of Witnessing.” In Searching for Sebald. Photography After W.G. Sebald, edited by Lise Patt with Christel Dillbohner, 256–79. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007. Dimitrijević, Olga, and Catherine Baker. “British-Yugoslav Lesbian Networks During and After the Great War.” In Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR, edited by Catherine Baker, 49–63. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Kovač, Leonida. Anonimalia. Normativni diskurzi i samoreprezentacija umjetnica 20. stoljeća [Anonimalia: Normative discourses and the self-representation of women artists in the twentieth century]. Croatia: Izdanja Antibarbarus, 2009. Križić Roban, Sandra. “Temporarily Assembled Material—Interview with Ana Mušćet.” Fototxt 1 (2019): 54–55. Meyer-Wehlack, Benno. Hodanja, čežnje. Berlinsko-zagrebački dnevnik. [Walks, longings: A Berlin-Zagreb diary]). Zagreb: Disput, 1970–77. Mušćet, Ana Mušćet, and Leonida Kovač. Nasta Rojc: Me, the Fighter. Translated by Marina Schumann. Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018. Olin, Margaret. Touching Photographs. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Ribalta, Jorge Ribalta. Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008. Scholz, Christian. “But the Written Word Is Not a True Document.” In Searching for Sebald. Photography After W.G. Sebald, edited by Lise Patt, 542–49. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007. Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Translate by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1999. Sontag, Susan. Where the Stress Falls: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. The Daily Graphic. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Scottish_Women%27s_Hospitals_for_Foreign_Service. Vettel-Becker, Patricia. Shooting from the Hip. Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

About the Author Sandra Križić Roban is a senior scientific advisor in tenure at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb who investigates neo-avant-gardes, history and theory of photography, postwar architecture, and counter-memorials.

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Križić Roban holds a PhD from the University of Zagreb, and is a principal investigator of the scientific project Ekspozicija—Themes and Aspects of Croatian Photography from the 19th Century until Today (2020–24) funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. As a head of the Office for Photography, a non-profit association dedicated to contemporary photography, she is responsible for the program of Gallery Spot, publishing and national and international research projects. She has talked, curated and published extensively on photography, her most recent publications and comprehensive book chapters being Branko Balić: A Close Reading (Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2022); “A Box, a Suitcase, a Museum: Photographic Records of the Croatian Immigrants to the USA,” Contact Zones. Photography, Migration, and Cultural Encounters in the U.S. (Leuven University Press, 2021); “Laughter Protocol. Elements of Humor in Proto- and Conceptual Photography in Croatia,” Photography Performing Humor (Leuven University Press, 2019); “Learning from Graz,” Camera Austria International Labor für Fotografie und Theorie (Specor Books, Leipzig and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, 2019); and Vlado Martek—Preparing for Photography (UzF, 2018).

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Working with Images Documentary Photography in the Oeuvres of Mike Kelley and W.G. Sebald Francesca Verga Abstract Departing from W.G. Sebald’s use of photographic images in Austerlitz (2001) and other writing to reflect on memory and history, this text examines artist Mike Kelley’s use of photography in relation to the reconstruction of memories and the fictional. Kelley’s and Sebald’s practices are here compared in their respective uses of found and repurposed photographs to highlight their play with arbitrary boundaries between the real and imagined. The focus is on Kelley’s monumental work Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (A Domestic Scene) (2000), which particularly resonates with Sebald’s themes. The American artist was born in 1954, ten years after Sebald, and like the German writer grew up in a Catholic working-class family. While their similarities are striking, beyond this their backgrounds differ greatly. In closing, the text seeks to pinpoint what kind of a contribution to memory studies the imagined dialogue between the word and image practices of Sebald and Kelley could make. Keywords: Reconstruction, Spiritualistic, Utopian, Performance, Historical and Projective Authenticity

In the twentieth century, memory was the subject of debate and change in the fields of art, philosophy, and science. A remarkable turning point came about with the misconception surrounding memory as an objective reconstruction of the past, reformulated through the theoretical model of the “false memory syndrome.” This was especially prominent in the 1980s, when personal memory recovery in psychotherapy was found to be potentially misleading or inaccurate, along with a set of parameters in

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch08

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collective memory that presented the history as the only true story that was possible.1 Shifts between the past as the paradigm of memory, from History to histories, from memory to memories, became central of the view of postmodernism as the “death of centers” and “incredulity towards metanarratives.”2 Modernity led to the questioning of the past that never remains stable and the same, but is constantly reconstructed by individual forms of collectivity (family, institution, nation). As Andreas Huyssen has observed: “in literature, the old dichotomy between history and fiction no longer holds. Not in the sense that there is no difference, but on the contrary in the sense that historical fiction can give us a hold on the world, on the real, however fictional that hold may turn out to be.”3 This concept has been received in art history, where the misconception of memory as a localized structure for the visual archive, has been related to the “memory boom.”4 Sebald worked extensively on the reconstruction of twentieth-century memory, giving much relevance to the images and perception of them in constructing the narrative process. Sebald’s use of images is dominant throughout his writings, namely Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001). The weight of memory on the people portrayed is a central theme, as they are often concerned with the past and German history. His inclusion of photographs evokes private memories and the collective culture in which he was immersed. When discovering images in the texts, one cannot help but seek to find out more about those memories and the journeys on which Sebald takes his characters. Photographs in Sebald’s texts are usually placed after full lines of writing, yet in the middle of sentences. They are sometimes referred to in the text, and in other cases seem to be placed to enhance or complement the writing. A photograph never includes credits or captions to identify the source, but it 1 Jenkins, Rethinking History. 2 See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 3 Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, 101. 4 The term “Memory Boom” was originally associated with Andreas Huyssen and named by Jay Winter in 2000. But the first insights were at the beginning of the twentieth century. The term indicates the proliferation of interests in the topic of memory, often associated with collective meditation on war and generations of postwar. At the end of the nineteenth century, memory became a central topic in philosophical thinking with Henri Bergson, psychological thinking with Sigmund Freud, and autobiographical literature with Marcel Proust, and many other theorists and philosophers paid attention to this subject. Memory gradually became central to individuals and society. In the late twentieth century Pierre Nora and Jan Assmann started to use the term in cultural history. The study of memory has gone through a phenomenological approach, for which people remember and interpret their own past, in relation to the present. A key reason for the growing importance of memory and remembrance is the passing of holocaust witnesses.

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is the text that—one needs to assume—justifies its placement. Sebald collected photographs from various sources: postcards, archives, flea markets, charity shops, and newspapers. It was done arbitrarily, as he stated: “I have to rush in and sit there for a week or two and collect things like someone who knows he has to leave before too long. You gather things up like a person who leaves a burning house, which means very randomly.”5 He used those images for inspirational memoirs for his writings and incorporated them in the texts. “And when I began to write, somehow it became clear to me that they, these images, were part of the material that I had stored up […] as very frequently they provided the starting points or they came from the photo albums of the people I had talked to.”6 The interdependence of images and their stories in Sebald’s writing has also been mentioned by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) for whom photography is the medium that most subverts the power of the written word to work as vehicle for memory. Sebald, Sontag affirmed, wanted the reader to remember.7 As Roland Barthes said: photographs are astonishing because they “attest that what I see has existed […] in Photography the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric.”8 What can be added to this is a reflection on how the photographic images in Sebald’s novels are not explained in terms of visual memory aids alone, but as visual supports used to assist the literature, as a recent paper by Karolina Kolenda suggests.9 In fact, the photographs that Sebald inserted in his books were invented in the sense that the material follows the text to verify something that supports the textual message, while the original sources are not the same as those depicted in the text. The photographs show that something did exist, even if the connection with the text has not been proven. According to the writer, this is the first purpose for his insertion of photographs into the texts: verification.10 The photographs show the reader that the text is grounded in fact and the mysterious old black-and-white quality emphasizes the story that is to be told and resolved. “We all tend to believe in pictures more than we do in letters.”11 Sebald linked this notion to realist fiction, suggesting that photographs help to give a sort of legitimacy. 5 Lubow, “Crossing Boundaries,” 162. 6 Catling and Hibbitt, Saturn’s Moons. W.G. Sebald—A Handbook, 366. 7 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 70. 8 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 78. 9 See Kolenda, “The Present Pasts: Image and Text in the Fiction of W.G. Sebald.” 10 Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” 40. 11 Ibid., 41.

154 Fr ancesca Verga Figure 16  W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001, cover

Courtesy W.G. Sebald Estate

Austerlitz, Sebald’s final novel published in 2001, is composed of 87 images spread across 415 pages. The writer refused to designate Austerlitz as a “novel,” calling it “a prose book of indefinite form.”12 The focus of the “prose book” can be the reconstruction of the protagonist’s memory: because of the traumatic separation of protagonist Jacques Austerlitz from his parents, the British architectural historian does not remember his own past, not even when reconnecting with his nanny Vera who she shows him photographs of himself as a boy. He is incapable of recognizing himself in the picture. He says that he “could not recollect (himself) in that part.”13 That’s the whole purpose of Austerlitz in this story: trying to retrieve his past in a travel journey. Sebald involves photography in his pages as testimony to the existence of people, events, and places, as if the material speaks of authenticity and proves events really happened. When the story fails to provide essential details there is the picture. In addition, a profusion of facts is included, such as street names, dates, and real events, even reproductions of train tickets and restaurant receipts. That “authentic” material helps the photographs even more to serve as proof, together becoming a collection 12 Franklin, “Rings of Smoke,” 122–23. 13 Sebald, Austerlitz, 259.

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of witnesses to the story. These materials are associated with Sebald’s own autobiography, as in The Emigrants written in first person, which causes the reader to believe it to be a biography of sorts. But as soon as we are sure we are reading an authentic story, facts get mixed with the fictional and the unreal: the photograph on the cover that seems to prove Austerlitz’s existence is actually a picture of Sebald’s close friend who, like Austerlitz, is an architect. The reader unconsciously knows that Austerlitz is a fictional character, and that the photograph of him in the book cannot be historical. Sebald use the verity and the documentative role of photography within his books to achieve a reconstructed truth. This inconsistency surfaces in The Emigrants, in which the man in the photographs is not the purported character Dr. Henry Selwyn, but Vladmir Nabokov, to whom Selwyn is compared in passing. The photographs could be true objects and testimonies but are not—they depict unknown individuals. Researcher and professor Silke Horstkotte analyzes Sebald’s use of images, especially in The Emigrants (1992), asserting that this work has shown inconsistency and that the writer “means to deliberately mislead the reader.”14 In Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle) at the Hotel Sole in Limone on Lago di Garda, the wife of the hotel’s owner Luciana asks the narrator some questions in an interesting passage on ambiguity and autofiction: On the occasion she asked if I was a journalist or writer. When I said that neither the one nor the other was quite right, she asked what it was that I was working on, to which I replied that I did not know for certain myself, but had a growing suspicion that it might turn into a crime story, set in upper Italy, in Venice, Verona and Riva. The plot revolved around a series of unsolved murders and the reappearance of a person who had long been missing. Luciana asked whether Limone featured in the story too, and I said that not only Limone but indeed the hotel and herself would be part of it.15

Sebald’s books are ambiguous objects, amphibians, very peculiar cases of autofiction, where the first-person narration of a protagonist intertwines with landscapes and collective stories, mixing chronicles, history, and emotions. Photography in both The Emigrants, Schwindel, Gefühle, and Austerlitz plays a key role in maintaining the novel as it is and in ensuring the reader of the illusion of the factual evidence. Family photographs were 14 Horstkotte, “Pictorial and Verbal Discourse in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants,” 42. 15 Sebald, Vertigo.

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very interesting to him, as they could disclose hidden stories, personal lives, and historical contexts; they could instill a sense of intimacy. But they were used to create a second move, a fictional product from reality. Like in the historical photo of Austerlitz, photographs reveal both the fictional quality of memory and the memory we find in fiction. Hence, Austerlitz becomes a fictional historical piece. The choice to use photographs in order to focus on personal memories and traces is symptomatic also of Mike Kelley’s work in which documenting photography is only a start for a narrative beyond the real. Kelley (1954–2012) f irst began performing in the 1970s together with his band Destroy All Monsters at the University of Michigan. After finishing his studies in 1976, Kelley moved to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) under the influence of minimal and conceptual art (with professors John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Michael Asher among others) and generations of “post-studio” practices of the late 1960s and 1970s. Kelley met a group of conceptual artists within the faculty who used photography as a medium and narratives as means, namely Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, Huebler, and David Askevold.16 Following that summer at CalArts, Kelley began to develop a series of performance pieces, shown first at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) space in 1978, and continued to produce his work through installations, sculptures, paintings, and other interventions until he passed in 2012. Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction is a monumental work created by the artist in 2000, initially intended to be composed of 365 parts ending in a 24-hour play, but sadly never fully completed. The 36 completed parts were related to a previous work of his, Educational Complex (1995), in which the artist merged every school building he had attended (seven) together with his childhood home into a cluster of buildings, like a utopian architectural model, entirely from his memory.17 The model, made of foam core, fiberglass and wood, is sixteen feet long and eight feet wide.18 All of the sites and architectural zones in the model are left blank as impossible to be remembered, and open to be designated as sites of abuse and repression. A peculiar coincidence arises: one page from Austerlitz is a surprisingly accurate description of Educational Complex, when the protagonist reflects on architecture as witness: 16 Kelley, “David Askevold: The California Years,” 195. 17 A one-room kindergarten schoolhouse, Catholic elementary school, junior high school, high school, two undergraduate art schools, and an art school. 18 Singerman, “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural Studies,” 45.

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All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy at the sight of it, however, was not the question whether the complex form of the capital, now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the children’s transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself.19

It is important to remember how, in the worlds of Sebald as well as in Educational Complex, architecture and spatiality are rooted in the lived past—as if the freezing of time and space could converge in an act of remembrance. For the German writer, remembrance is acted out also through architecture with descriptions and photos of buildings in his texts that bear witness to and develop imagination. The architecture can surround and influence the individual on a collective level, playing with the individual. For both Sebald and Kelley, architecture holds memory. The importance they both project onto architecture in reconstructing memory is reflected in Rings of Saturn character Thomas Abrams (pseudonym of Alec Garrard, Sebald’s friend), a farmer and model maker. In Sebald’s novel, Abrams wonders if he will ever finish the reproduction of the Temple in Jerusalem, an architectural model of ten square meters on which he has worked for thirty years, unable to make further progress in making it like the original. The unfinished architectural model is the symbolic figure of the memory that cannot be recovered; both the artist’s and writer’s narrative draw their strength from what cannot be represented, the missing parts of a story, and what in the shadows is unspoken. Starting from those blank spaces in the architecture complex, the writer and artist construct an imagination, a fictitious reconstruction in the form of a story. This imagination derives from their personal engagement. For Sebald this often concerned his travels (see his landscape descriptions) from which he shares encounters both real and of the mind. Kelley visually discloses the spaces from his memories in Educational Complex and works on the projections of the mind. Both choose to depart from a remembrance

19 Sebald, Austerlitz, 221.

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and construct something further, substituting the blankness with an image, a story of sorts. We can consider the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series as a second stage after Educational Complex, an attempt to fill in these memory lapses in the complex with video narratives and photographs. As Kelley has described in his texts: The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series is designated to fill in these memory blanks with standardized abuse scenarios based on descriptions in the literature of Repressed Memory Syndrome. Details are provided by my own biography, intermixed with recollections of popular films, cartoons, and literature. Personal and “mass cultural experience” are treated equally as “true” experience.20

The creations by Kelley in the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction work offer a montage of personal memories and collective American preoccupations in a chaotic mixture of rituals, obsessions, fantasies, religious themes, student plays, and real facts. As mentioned earlier, the premises for the video and installation are predominantly photographs of extracurricular activities Kelley found in high school yearbooks in America, often ambiguous with activities not necessarily recognized as school-related. The yearbook functions as a historical memory record for students, depicting sports or extracurricular activities during school hours. For the performance The Poltergeist (1979), Kelley worked with David Askevolt who taught at CalArts at that time and created seven self-portrait photographs that reconnect to a nineteenth-century spirit imaginary.21 The images chosen for The Poltergeist underline the transformation from puberty into the metaphysical, linked to sexual imaginary, darkness and selfhood. I won’t dwell too much on Kelley’s relationship to metaphysical forces, but suffice it to say that occult figures, rituals and spiritualism have always fascinated the artist, so much so that they almost drove him to buy Aleister Crowley’s house in Cefalù, Sicily (Thelema Abbey). The combination of art and spiritualism is vital, as he himself said: “Occult rituals interest me because they are akin to art-making.”22 He was interested in fictive and spiritualistic photography and the loss of photography’s connection with the

20 Kelley and Welchman, Minor Histories. Statements, Conversations, Proposals, 239. 21 Kelley, “The Poltergeist (1979, with David Askevold),” 6. 22 Ibid.

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Figure 17  Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective

Reconstruction #20 (Lonely Vampire), 2004–5. Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

“real.”23 The photographs at the base of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, as with those in Sebald’s work, are witnesses of events that occurred that also allow for the viewer to interpret for themselves what they see, experience, or believe to have happened. The gigantic work that results from this endeavor represents each day in a year, never finished, with a mixture of videos and performances supposed to be restaged live, consecutively, in a twenty-four-hour period. Kelley referred to Max Reinhardt’s theatrical spectacles as addressing something outside the framework of theatre, a mixture of different theatres, magnetic, extravagant use of scenic effects, lighting, and full of the “free and imaginative use of the revolving stage.”24 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction begun with a series number: #1 (A Domestic Scene), first shown at the Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan in 2000 and later that year in Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Thought to be the first chapter of the monumental work of 365 parts,25 #1 is a twenty-nine minute and forty-four-second school play in a domestic environment that 23 Mike Kelley in conversation with Jeffrey Sconce, “I’ve Got This Strange Feeling …” in Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, Chit-Chat, 1986–2004, 268. 24 Esslin, “Max Reinhardt: High Priest of Theatricality,” 3–24. 25 Producers: Mike Kelley, Greg Kucera and Catherine Sullivan in conjunction with Galleria EMI Fontana. With Darrel Guilbeau, John Engmyr, and Julia D’Agostino. Director of Photography: Greg Kucera. Cameras: Greg Kucera, Florian Stadler, and Tony Garcia. Assistant Camera: Rebecca Carter. Sound Recording: Damon O’Steen and Mayo Thompson. Editing and Effects: Greg Kucera. Sound Arrangement: Mark Reveley. Organist: Adam Benjamin. Production Assistants: David

160 Fr ancesca Verga Figure 18a Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Figure 18b Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Domestic Scene), no date Scene), 2000, video still, black and white, sound, 29:44

Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for The Arts. Photographer unknown

Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation of the Arts

originated from a photograph of high school activity and developed into a stage set installation with a video shot on the stage itself. The half-hour 1950s-style psychodrama treads through the torment and hysteria of two men in a romantic, paranoid relationship. The original photograph, a still from a school play, depicts the two young men in a shabby apartment. There is something perverse and uncanny between them, and the picture plays a major role within the setting. From this image, Kelley restaged a “Domestic Scene” as video and set: a recreation of that domestic environment in which the unnerving protagonists unveil their histrionic personalities within their relationship. Kelley’s staging explores the plot of men searching for the self and alienated from the world and topics such as shame, victim culture, regret, Freudian family romance, homosexual attraction, and abduction. Much like in Sebald’s texts, the photographs drive the reader into a semblance of truth. According to Sebald, this type of photography embedded in a text attests to the passage of time for the reader who feels taken out of time, being now, the past and into the present.26 The same is true for Kelley’s work—the viewer seems to perceive the photograph together with the stories behind it. In which way do Sebald and Kelley unfold fresh narratives from photographic sources? How do their approaches differ Huges, Abram Boosinger, Chris Boosinger, Farhad Sharmini, Cameron Jamie, Elaine Brandt, and T. Kelly Mason. 26 Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” 40.

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when questioning the authenticity of the photographic material? In which direction do projections and reconstructions from that material resonate in Sebald’s writing and Kelley’s work? Like Sebald, Kelley’s interest in photography is multilayered, dating back to 1976 when he used 35mm black-and-white photography for the first time. Since then, he appropriated images and found materials to inform his work up until Day Is Done (2005). He also curated a documentary photography show, Street Credibility, held from January 25 through June 7, 2004 at The Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured over 200 photographs from the 1940s to 1970s by Diane Arbus and her peers, and other artists inspired by her vision,27 examining the transition to postdocumentary photography in the blurred boundary “between reality and what was artificially created.”28 Arbus pioneered this change in documentary photography, playing with documentary and street photography genre in questioning their objective authenticity and depicting reality in between the real and the staged or constructed. This “Crisis of Depiction” interested Kelley (and Sebald) who looked to consider “the subtle shift which occurred during the mid-twentieth century when photographers began to move away from photographing the factual nature of the street and toward stylized arrangements made for the camera.”29 Both Sebald and Kelley had informal and private sources; we can compare the family albums and personal memories that Sebald used with the school yearbooks collected by Kelley. Photographs came from rituals: the ritual of the photo album for a family can be compared to the photographic rituals in the formal education system. Similarly, and maybe because both Kelley and Sebald came from Catholic families and questioned their educational apparatus, both were interested in working with suppressed and repressed memories: the hidden, inhibited, uncanny elements that photographs might not reveal, and memory cannot retrieve. What stories can these photographs convey, or rather, what stories can be invented to make sense of the photograph’s existence? Kelley and Sebald unlock these elements and create parallel scenarios in which projections and fantasies can be revealed to shed light on memory and remembrance. In a way, photography as documentation of an event, fact or story is given another life toward questioning of the real and employing fictional elements to do so. 27 Artists included Larry Clark, Robert Frank, Lee Friendlander, Charles Gatewood, Ls Krims, Danny Lyon, Sally Mann, and Bill Owens. 28 Street Credibility, Geffen Contemporary MOCA, MOCA archive, press release, 2004. 29 “MOCA Showcases a Natural Shot,” Daily Trojan, January 24, 2004.

162 Fr ancesca Verga Figure 19  W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Adelphi Edizioni, 2002. p.11

Courtesy of the W.G. Sebald Estate

Differently from Sebald, in Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, Kelley took photographic material from vernacular American culture, drawing from pop and folk culture rituals, from personal photos of singular characters, and jumbled them together in a mixture of video, performance, and installation. The narratives in Sebald’s Austerlitz and Kelley’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 fill in memory blanks, with photography proof of existence in the former and basis of existence in the

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latter. Photographs are displaced and replaced, for Sebald through the story and for Kelley in scenes. They have a shared meditation on reconstruction: “If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farmyard, you do a sort of bricolage,”30 Sebald has said to describe the construction of his own playthings. He continues: “Bits of string and bits of wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider. The urge to connect bits that don’t seem to belong together has fascinated me all my life.”31 Assembling texts/productions with images as in a collage, from personal stories and a resemblance of collective memoirs, is central piece to Kelley’s work. While remembering for Sebald is a political act raised in a society of willed amnesia, for Kelley remembering is a partial and personal reconstruction of the repression resulting from American society. Despite being dissimilar in form and concern, Kelley’s use of photography to navigate between fact and fictions, memory, and history, resonates with that in Sebald’s writing. To look beyond initial impressions and observe the deeper repercussions of their work in relation to memory, it is important to note how they both returned to architecture and the built environment as the epitome of cultural history for its mnemonic importance. They did this through a reconstruction of spatiality and lived past, using photography as additional lens of deceptively accurate but often misleading documentary “evidence.” In both their works, there is an element of projection into the future and—on the part of readers—to other places, memories, and reference points. For me, in reading Sebald, this reference point is Kelley’s work, as far removed from the “old world” and its histories as possible and yet a kindred practice. I find that both Kelley and Sebald play with arbitrary boundaries between the real and the imagined, and with fleeting memory and its (im)possible reconstruction.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. France: Hill and Wang, 1980. Catling, Jo, and Richard Hibbitt, eds. Saturn’s Moons. W.G. Sebald—A Handbook. London: Legenda Modern Humanities Research Association, 2011. Esslin, Martin. “Max Reinhardt: High Priest of Theatricality.” The Drama Review: TDF 21, no. 2 (1977): 3–24. 30 See Lubow, “Symposium on W.G. Sebald.” 31 Ibid.

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Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory. Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. Horstkotte, Silke. “Pictorial and Verbal Discourse in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2002): 33–50. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jenkins, Keith. Rethinking History. London and New York: Routledge Classic, 1991. Kelley, Mike. “David Askevold: The California Years.” In Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, edited by Mike Kelley and John C. Welchman, 194–204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Kelley, Mike. Photographs, Sculptures. Tokyo: Wako Works of Art Exhibition, 2009. Kelley, Mike. “The Poltergeist (1979, with David Askevold).” In Mike Kelley, edited by Eva Meyer-Hermann and Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Amsterdam and Munich: Stedelijk Museum/Prestel, 2012. Kelley, Mike and Jeffrey Sconce. “I’ve Got This Strange Feeling ….” Tate Etc. 1 (2004): 88–93. Reprinted in Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, Chit-Chat, edited by John C. Welcher, 263–75. Zurich: J.R.P. Ringier, 2005. Kelley, Mike, and John Welchman, ed. Minor Histories. Statements, Conversations, Proposals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Kolenda, Karolina. “The Present Pasts: Image and Text in the Fiction of W.G. Sebald.” In “Spectrality and Cognition: Haunted Cultures, Ghostly Communications,” edited by Edyta Lorek-Jezińska and Katarzyna Wiȩckowska. Special issue, Theoria et Historia Scientiarum 14 (2017): 71–86. Lubow, Arthur. “Crossing Boundaries.” The Emergence of Memory. Conversations with W.G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, 159–73. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. Lubow, Arthur. “Symposium on W.G. Sebald,” Three Penny Review 89 (Spring 2002): 18–21. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Paris: Midnight Press, 1979. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books, 2001. Sebald, W.G. Vertigo. Translated by Michael Hulse. Germany: Eichborn, 1990. Singerman, Howard. “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural Studies.” October 126 (2008), 44–68. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Wachtel, Eleanor. “Ghost Hunter.” The Emergence of Memory. Conversations with W.G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, 37–62. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.

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About the Author Francesca Verga is a PhD researcher at the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, whose thesis concentrates on the conceptual reconstruction of memories in Mike Kelley’s performances and video installation works. She is interested in artistic research that explores the tensions between memory and fiction, especially reconstruction and repetition. Her research is supported by the Italian Council scholarship for the Arts (Ministry of Culture Italy, 2020). Verga has professional experience in the management of cultural institutions and art biennials. With a master’s degree in Museums Management (Milan, 2013), she held the position of General Coordinator for Manifesta 12 (Palermo, 2018) and was Curatorial Coordinator at the biennial Manifesta 13 (Marseille, 2020). Previously, she founded the online cultural platform Liaux (liaux.org), a program of visual art projects presented in dialogue with a non-physical space. She has also collaborated with cultural institutions and universities such as IED Istituto Europeo Di Design (Florence), Museo MACRO (Rome), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), NEMO The Network of European Museum Organisations (Berlin), Barnard College (Columbia University, New York), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and IMT Schools for Advanced Studies (Lucca).

9

Ghostwriting and Artists’ Texts Raqs Media Collective’s We Are Here, But Is It Now? Ilse van Rijn Abstract Contemporary artists’ texts are often composed of an amalgam of disparate voices: they are fragmented, layered, multivocal projects frequently referring to those “ever returning to us, the dead.”1 Much like W.G. Sebald’s writings, artists’ writerly projects use specific textual strategies enabling them to speak in the name of or on behalf of another human being, resulting in the internalization or incorporation of what is invisible, mute or lost. A Sebaldian form of ghostwriting is at stake in contemporary artists’ texts, I want to argue. The paradoxical emergence of unspeaking, silent voices in both artists’ writings and Sebald’s works, is not only predicated on the recognition of a “complex personhood”2—it happens in various ways as well. In this paper I study both what the visual artists’ textual procedures look like in order for wordless presences to return and how they express the notion of complex personhood, comparing Sebald’s ghostwriting as a “Poetics of History,”3 concentrating on Vertigo and The Emigrants, with Raqs Media Collective’s We Are Here, But Is It Now?. Reading Sebald’s and Raqs’s writings through each other, this paper intends to get a firmer grip on the specificity of the guiding spirits (ghosts) lending shape to Sebald’s works, simultaneously shedding light on the relevance of his textual gestures for current artists’ texts and art writing alike. Keywords: Sociopolitical, Environmental, Transdisciplinary, Deconstruction, Heterogenous and Hegemonist Narration

1 Sebald, The Emigrants, 23. 2 See Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. 3 See Gray, Ghostwriting. W.G. Sebald’s Poetics of History.

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch09

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Introduction “What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?”4 —W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

A few years ago, a visual artist brought W.G. Sebald to my attention.5 It soon became clear to me that they were not the only artist interested in the German author, as I discovered other responses to Sebald’s writings, including films, drawings, paintings, texts, and installations.6 Sebald’s influence is widely acknowledged,7 yet the diversity of artists’ complex, sensuous and material approaches to his multifaceted work and the links among them continue to surprise. Here I concentrate on the confluences and disparities between Sebald’s work and the artists’ texts inspired by them, specifically We Are Here, But Is It Now? (the Submarine Horizons of Contemporaneity) (2017) by Delhi-based artist group Raqs Media Collective who work at the intersection of contemporary art, historical inquiry, philosophical speculation and theory. I take this work as a case study to see how Sebald’s work and the projects it inspires defy categorization in probing the boundaries of what Jacques Derrida called “the law of genre.”8 Initially confusing and vertiginous, artists’ writings in general are hard to grasp and difficult to pin down—not only the demarcation of genre, but also among the narrative layers. In both artists’ texts and Sebald’s “novel-poem-essays,”9 I argue that an interpenetration of narratological functions and layers 4 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 80. 5 I am thankful to Juul Hondius who recommended I read Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. 6 Some examples include Tacita Dean, Julie Mehretu and Tess Jaray in W.G. Sebald. Far Away—But From Where?, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (May 11–August 18, 2019), Carlos Amorales’s installation Black Cloud (2007) and Kate Zambreno’s novel Drifts (2020). 7 Sebald’s impetus for artistic work inspired the organization of the international conference Memory, Word and Image. W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies, convened by Professor Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Professor Leonida Kovač, Professor Ihab Saloul, and myself in the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam, December 12–14, 2019. For a reflection on artists’ engagement with Sebald’s writings to examine twentieth-century history and its consequences for our current time, see Sebald Variations, Centre de Cultura Contamporania de Barcelona, March 10–July 26, 2015. 8 Derrida, “La loi du genre.” 9 I borrow the idea of unclassifiable work from French poet Francis Ponge, who in his prose poem “My Creative Method” (1961) uses hyphenation, describing his writings as “descriptionsdef initions-objects of literary art” to circumvent prior classif ications. Ponge, “My Creative Method.”

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takes place, resulting in their own rhythm,10 exploring the potential of a position between: “between two milieus, or between two intermilieus, on the fence, between day and night, at dusk.”11 The narratological functions of which the layers consist are emphasized differently: whereas the narrator seems largely responsible for Sebald’s labyrinthian works, the unstable character of artists’ texts is situated in an elsewhere. How can the reader come to terms with writing that escapes categorization, tracing sinuous paths within their confines? The impossible position “between” that characterizes both Sebald’s works and artists’ writings prompts my reading of them in conjunction. I use the “conceptual metaphor” of ghostwriting, a transdisciplinary lens that can illuminate the undefined and undefinable thinking these texts enact despite the stories beyond reach.12 Concentrating on Sebald’s story “Max Ferber” in The Emigrants, I am curious to see what can be learned from Sebaldian narrative procedures, especially the role of the narrator in this story toward understanding forms of art writing that proliferate in contemporary art and seem indebted to their progenitor. How do textual strategies—the urge to write with the world most prominently—in recent artists’ texts affect the reading of Sebald’s work? In thinking “Max Ferber” and We Are Here, But Is It Now? together I seek to provide new knowledge on the texts as much as the unclassifiable transdisciplinary thinking in the direction of which some contemporary artists aim. I am not the first to refer to Sebald’s work as a form of ghostwriting. Finding a way to speak of the horrors of the holocaust that weighed heavily on him, the American literary scholar Richard Gray mentions ghostwriting in reference to Sebald’s poetics of history, or his reflection on history and the writing thereof through a fictional re-enactment of the obscure lives of individuals and their entanglement with modern history.13 The origin of the word ghost is linked to the Old English term gast and can be traced back to thirteenth-century West Germanic languages. Both are conjectured to be from the Proto-Indo-European root gheis, implying excitement, amazement or fear. “Ghostwriting” surfaced much later, in the late nineteenth century, when London’s The Pall Mall gazette announced on June 23, 1884 that a plaintiff had come across “a sculptor’s ghost,” understanding it to mean that 10 The interweaving of narrative layers is a returning feature of the contemporary artists’ text, as I demonstrated in my PhD dissertation “The Artists’ Text as Work of Art.” 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 12 Del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. 13 See Gray, Ghostwriting, 2017.

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a person who was supposed to do a work did not do it. The initial meaning of ghostwriting as Gray uses it is “speaking or writing in the name of or on behalf of someone else.”14 He applies the phrase to the structure of Sebald’s writing, in which writer, narrator and character often merge, the narrator-figure mediating the story’s consequently untraceable and echoing, or haunting voices. Sebald himself refers to the sense of both abandon and closeness, the illusion of proximity and distance in which his writing results as “periscopic” narration.15 What can be learned from Sebald’s way of mediating gruesome history? American sociologist Avery F. Gordon describes mediation as “the process that links an institution and an individual, a social structure and a subject, and history and a biography.”16 Perhaps ghostwriting allows the writer to bridge the gap among these. How then could it be used to structure, face and understand what it means to be a human in today’s world within a hegemonistic capitalistic regime? How might this look according to Raqs? In the words of Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip on the untold stories of marginalized people, how can one say what cannot be said, but which has to be said anyways?17 How can ghostwriting facilitate this? In Sebald’s case, ghostwriting can serve to express the burdensome past of the Second World War. Ghostwriting enables him to deal with a present tense and a future already imbued with a violent and mythic past, from which he cannot escape. Ghostwriting gives aesthetic direction to an amalgam of voices buried in a complex historical period. Ghostwriting allows the assembly of different and differentiated historical voices, resulting in a dislocation of time and a stretching of space.18 How then might Raqs Media Collective wield this Sebaldian technique of ghostwriting to face a contemporary condition marked by economic, sociopolitical and environmental crises as part of capitalist monstrous effects? Sharing a position “between” and characterized as a form of ghostwriting, I propose that insistent cries—from marginalized people and forgotten humans and other than humans—can be heard in both Raqs’s We Are Here, But Is It Now? and the Max Ferber story in Sebald’s The Emigrants. The challenge is to learn to listen to them, to trace their polyvocality as 14 Ibid., 7. 15 Ibid. 16 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 19. 17 Telling the story of murder by drowning of 150 Africans by the captain of the slave ship Zong in November 1781, Philip describes Zong! as a work of haunting, “a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make themselves present.” NourbeSe, Zong!, 201. 18 Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International.

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part and parcel of the construction of the narrative, instead of dismissing them as just noise. I try to perceive seemingly marginal aspects of narrative construction as patterns, silent witnesses, that support the structure of the works under review here, to discern the fringes of those structures that might surge forth—unbeknownst to the author—at the peripheries of their major, clearly circumscribed task. These patterns interrelate the narrative’s past, present and potential for the future, extending its space. A story that Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero borrows from Karen Blixen elucidates the status, figure, and force of the narrative “asides” I have in mind: a man wakes in the night to noises from a hole in a dike, and runs to and fro in the dark to repair it in the morning seeing his footprints have drawn the figure of a stork.19 The “chance encounter” between the man, dike, trampled soil, night and day is a constellation of elements thought together, listened to and appreciated in the plural; the discordant and haunting detail is appreciated instead of omitted for being irrelevant. What effects and affects do these haunting figures produce, once we’re made aware of them and do not push them to the margins? What happens when we look back and learn to listen to, feel, and enjoy shadows? How are they deployed in We Are Here, But Is It Now? and with Max Ferber in The Emigrants? We Are Here, But Is It Now?20 is particularly redolent here: the small booklet of about fifty pages, consists of three parts—“The Diver meets the Rhinoceros,” “Enter the Robot” and “Yaksha and Yakshi.” The consecutive pieces create a speculative narrative situated in a submarine universe that reflects on today’s world while suggesting solutions for the sociopolitical, economic, technological, and environmental issues that determine it. The reader is presented with a cast of characters, besides the diver and that “ghost-beast in armor,”21 the rhinoceros, there is also a robot-poet based on the nineteenth-century Urdu poet of Delhi Ghalib as much as Isaac Asimov’s formulation of robotics, which enters in the second part of the story; Yaksha and Yakshi, two guards “pulled out of mythic time,”22 join the troupe in part three. These personages impersonate and articulate the “new alphabet” needed to resist and transgress present times asked for in part one.23 For instance, it is said that one needs poetry and new 19 Cavarero, “A Stork for an Introduction,” 1. 20 Raqs Media Collective, We Are Here, But Is It Now? (The Submarine Horizons of Contemporaneity). 21 Ibid., 22. 22 Ibid., 30. 23 Ibid., 16.

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technologies (the robot-poet) to subvert exhaustive working conditions and low wages in part two. However, arguing for alternative, counter-hegemonic power structures, organizing a non-hierarchical encounter between nature and the human (rhinoceros and diver), between technology, myth, and art in the story, the question is how the artists’ writing enacts the non-hierarchical structure on a textual plane. The story is written like a play with images printed on separate pages inserted in the narrative, visualizing and quasi-documenting what is presented as a surreal, otherworldly realm; endnotes add yet another more scholarly dynamic to the intersecting textual forms. A glossary closes the text, presenting neologisms explained through a combination of dictionary entry and encyclopedic overview, including their visual illustrations, written in an intimate and diaristic, conspiratorial, and fictional tone. The plurivocal construction of time is precisely what the artists’ writing seems to share with Sebald’s work. To what extent can one speak of similar narrative patterns? How, where and when do they resonate with each other? How, where, and when can we trace their deviant trajectories, recognizing unbridgeable gaps? In what follows I trace what might appear as a sinuous path, moving back and forth between Sebald’s writing and Raqs’s work. Please bear with me: the seemingly deviant route is part of the argument. We Are Here, But Is It Now? starts with a scene far removed from the “real” world. In the first part “The Diver Meets the Rhinoceros,” we find ourselves in an ocean where a deep-sea diver meets a “ghostly”24 rhinoceros called Gainda—dispatched from the far Indies to the king of Portugal and then to the Pope, nothing remained of Gainda than the drawing Albrecht Dürer made of him. He is a “gift from one age to another.” The rhinoceros is, in other words, “every anomalous history, every time out of joint.”25 The deep-sea diver and the rhinoceros hurry to keep their appointment. What ensues is a dialogue between the two. The setting of the story, written in the form of a play is telling: the sea is presented as a world where natural and political laws are suspended. A rhinoceros crosses a zebra made of fishes; a diver coordinates her watch with an animal with which she speaks. The reader is offered a view on this surreal, unfamiliar, and slightly alienating scenery, where “echoes of times past,” the rhinoceros, meet “today,” the diver. We Are Here, But Is It Now? reflects on history and storytelling: “I am the ghost of your time in the future,” says the rhinoceros to the diver. “I am history’s trespasser and the history of trespassing. I am a traveler, a truant, 24 Ibid., 9. 25 Ibid., 10.

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a troll,” he continues.26 The diver, equated with “today” consciously inserts herself into this so-called incongruous world (the sea) where the despots’ reign ceases, and power and influence are suppressed. The reader holds this bizarre and contradictory universe in their hands. Trying to invent an alternative life, a milieu somewhere “between” utopia and dystopia, the rhinoceros suggests calling a set of characters into being that are “of this time, but not quite of this time […] the future’s emissaries, and the custodians of the past […] but […] more present than anyone.”27 These characters do not only enable one to think of an alternative conception of time, they also reflect Raqs’s art practice, the cast having emerged at different points in their oeuvre.28 The text is an amalgam of voices, a possible solution for current environmental, economic, and political problems when “time is out of joint.” The plurivocal work mirrors the artists’ other work, and points to their suggestion that art is a way out of a “real world’s” problems. But it also proposes that the entanglement and interpenetration of formerly disparate voices allows one to leave a modern industrial “untimely” condition, embracing the “weirdness’ of the current world instead. Like Raqs’s speculative narrative that abstains from clearcut answers, Sebald’s novels do not offer a direct response to present-day situations. Sebald too frames his work as an aesthetic possibility with which to face the problematic time in which he lives. His narrative encounters and enacts the ghostly past events that call out to him, in order to confront an unknown future. In an interview, Sebald refers to not only the dark center of German history between 1925 and 1950, a primal landscape that left an imprint on him, but also how that country, which he left in his early twenties, “creeps up on you.”29 His place of origin became “prominent in his mind” while it also “happened to come his way.” In the same interview he addresses the photographs in his novels: “We get this sense of appeal; the [lost relatives, unknown persons] are stepping out, having been found by somebody after decades or half centuries. All of a sudden, they are stepping back over the threshold and are saying, ‘We were here too once and please take care of us for a while.’”30 I suggest this sense of appeal or calling out of “something,” “someone,” “someplace” is a haunting: a call from history that is charged but diaphanous 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 15. 28 Ibid., note 1, 39. 29 Sebald and Turner, “Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald (Interviewer: Michael Zeeman).” 30 Ibid., 24.

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perhaps. Derrida calls this spectral presence the secret from which one always inherits, and “which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’”31 This urgent ghostly call needs to be confronted, it seems, and excavated, if that is possible at all, in order to be able to live the contemporary moment and the future: since this historical ungraspable “something”/“somebody,” which is forgotten and steps out, by which one is haunted, in other words, produces an effect. Or as Gordon has it, this charged strangeness obfuscates sensuous knowledge and unsettles property lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge.32 In his essay “Air War and Literature,” Sebald formulates it as follows: “The retrospective learning process […] is the only way of deflecting human wishful thinking towards the anticipation of a future that would not already be pre-empted by the anxieties arising from the suppression of experience.”33 And Derrida writes: “What seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back.”34 The emphasis on specific confusing, or disruptive points in time differs in Raqs’s and Sebald’s writings, so that the reader is moved through (in and by) the text in different ways. Whereas Raqs’s We Are Here, But Is It Now? concentrates on a future, for which the past is indispensable, Sebald’s writings delve into the past, so that living in the future is at all possible. Imagination is used to build bridges between the present moment and the unknown: Raqs’s writing and facing the future; and Sebald’s “angel of history” turning its back toward the future and facing the past, following linear time. Their problematic pasts differ, once more, Raqs address the nefarious consequences of a hegemonistic capitalistic regime; and Sebald describes the holocaust about which he needs to speak but cannot and does so anyways. Imagination allows one to address that which is difficult, to think situations otherwise. The outcomes of this “detour” are uncertain for Sebald and Raqs. Traveling across and trespassing borders are necessary metaphors in an unbearable present-day world. In Sebald’s writing, the narrator is the traveler par excellence: he incorporates travel, incorporating life. In Raqs’s work, a colorful cast of characters, both human and more than human, faces and transgresses the contemporary world and attempts to change it. The juxtaposition of Sebald’s and Raqs’s works brings a single individual and a diverse collective together. 31 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18. 32 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63. 33 Sebald, “Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures,” 64. 34 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10.

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To gauge the trajectories that led to this encounter, I first, quite expansively, elaborate on the way the traveling narrator is employed in “Max Ferber” before returning to Raqs’s routes. In “Max Ferber,” the narrator, “I,” showing striking similarities with Sebald himself, moves to England and befriends a painter. Upon his arrival in Manchester, the I-figure is overcome with a “sense of aimlessness and futility” on Sundays, as described in the beginning of the story. On those days, he would go on walks through “anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world,” and which “displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see.”35 Little by little the narrator’s Sunday walks take him beyond the city center. Venturing ever further out, passing “restless shadowy figures” and children “straying in small groups” where it was “so strangely silent […] that I could hear sighs in the abandoned depots and warehouses,” he reaches the port of Manchester, where he comes across “a sign on which ‘to the studios’ was painted in crude brush-strokes.”36 The narrator continues: “In one of these seemingly deserted buildings was a studio which, in the months to come, I visited as often as I thought acceptable, to talk to the painter who had been working there since the late Forties, ten hours a day, the seventh day not excepted.” One sees a few things occurring in this passage. Next to the accidental happening upon the sign “to the studios” and the equally accidental acquaintance with the painter Ferber, the mise-en-scène adds to the sense of ambivalence, worry even, in the narrative. The narrator’s experience of Manchester as an abandoned city, marked by degradation, empty rows of houses, looks like what Gordon describes as an encounter in which the ghostly matter of things is touched upon, a place full of “ambiguities, complexities of power and personhood, the violence and the hope, looming and receding actualities, the shadows of ourselves and our societies.”37 Manchester is not merely a city where the wind blows “through smashed windows and doors,” as the narrator observes. “By way of a sign that someone really had once been there,” the narrator notices traces, like “the barely decipherable brass plate of a one-time lawyers’ office.”38 It is upon these fading and ghostly material vestiges of former times that the story is built, generating a sense of narrative uncertainty. 35 Sebald, The Emigrants, 156. 36 Ibid., 160. 37 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 134. 38 Sebald, The Emigrants, 157.

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The ungraspable foundation of the story motivates the narrator’s meandering trajectory and is intertwined with the landscape in which these travels take place. The abandoned Manchester houses are located in the former Jewish quarter, next to Victoria Station, where “whole square kilometres of working-class homes had been pulled down by the authorities, so that, once the demolition rubble had been removed, all that was left to recall the lives of thousands of people was the grid-like layout of the streets.”39 While the holocaust is not mentioned—it remains a secret, as Derrida would have it—the image brings to mind the concentration camps. 40 The silent, catastrophic destruction is counterbalanced by the hand-painted sign, the studio occupied by the painter working on his paintings day and night in an attempt, one could say, to rebuild by hand what has been lost, what the Second World War demolished. The wandering life of the narrator could be read as a means to rewrite in an alternative, meandering fashion what systematic violence destroyed. The creative process of the painter, Max Ferber, is tortuous. However, as the narrator notes: Time and again, at the end of a working day, I marvelled to see that Ferber […] had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I marvel when, the following morning […] he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set out excavating the features of his model […] from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction, […] [the painting] had evolved from a long lineage of grey ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper. 41

Destruction paradoxically marks the creative process of the painter. The constructive attempt in the brushstroke of the hand-painted sign is delusory. It is rather the dust generated by the paintings that “he loves more than anything in the world,” Ferber admits. “He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water,” the “I” of the narrator comments. 42 Describing Ferber’s studio, the narrator further notes that “since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted 39 Ibid., 157. 40 See Aliaga-Buchenau, “‘A Time He Could Not Bear to Say Any More About’: Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants,” 141–56. 41 Sebald, The Emigrants, 162. 42 Ibid., 161.

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deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimetres thick at the centre and thinning towards the outer edges, in places resembling the flow of lava.”43 The neighborhood in which the narrator wanders and the studio he visits repeatedly are described in terms of unremitting dissolution, violent destruction and decay, the writing process, an “arduous task,” parallels the attempt to get a grip on a life (Ferber’s) that continues to dissolve. Just before he hears Ferber is taken to the hospital with pulmonary emphysema, the narrator confesses: Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not unfrequently I unraveled what I had done […] I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a “final” version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched. 44

The reader is confronted with a disintegrating landscape and the “utterly botched” text. The narrator’s gaze on the story parallels the reader’s gaze on the text, providing a unity that could be what Cavarero calls an intolerable sequence of events not yet woven together in a narrative structure that “makes sense.” However, the wrecked pattern the narrator presents to the reader is carefully constructed and permeates all levels of Sebald’s writing; the labyrinthine sentences form a mise-en-abyme, with distinctions between narrative layers being muted as the reader becomes lost in a forest of voices. In terms of who speaks, one might notice that the narrator’s words merge into those of the character at the level of the text; Ferber’s words are communicated through the first-person perspective of the narrator, who doesn’t care to use quotation marks to distinguish his story from the painter’s. The impression of interconnected, overlapping to the point of intertwining lives is heightened by the parallel creative processes of the visual artist and the writer and the analogous worlds that surround them: the studio full of debris is to the painter what the decaying city is to the wandering writer. The lack of quotation marks in the direct course contributes to the sense of uncertainty, leading to the question: who speaks? In an attempt to define this form of narration, in which the “voice of the narrator and character” are placed in “inseparable relation,” American writer and scholar Saidiya 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 230–31.

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Hartman uses the term “close narration.”45 And although Sebald doesn’t tell the stories of the subaltern and enslaved, as Hartman does, nor does he use the vast range of archival material she reworks, his is also an attempt to unearth the lives of individuals who have been lost in an historical narrative that concentrates on the conquerors and survivors, giving them a voice of their own. Much like Philip, both Hartman and Sebald do not merely show the downside of modern historical narration, re-enacting history, they tell it. “Max Ferber” translates the character’s words through the voice of the narrator, transforming the initial tale, a procedure comparable to that used within Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Instead of Hartman’s footnotes and italics, Sebald gives his reader other sparse indications that they are still witnessing Ferber’s account, instead of the I’s: a hardly noticeable “said Ferber” now and again. The tangled use of mise-en-abyme structure on the level of the text—where the writer is inextricably linked with the narrator and character—leads to heterogeneous voices in the construction of the story. 46 When the narrator intends to leave Manchester and wants to say goodbye to Ferber, Ferber hands him “a brown package tied with string, containing a number of photographs and almost a hundred pages of handwritten memoirs penned by his mother.”47 of which the narrator says: “The manuscript which Ferber gave me that morning in Manchester is before me now. I shall try to convey in excerpts what the author, whose maiden name was Luisa Lanzberg, recounts of her early life.” The life Ferber’s mother lived between 1939 and 1941 is, then, relayed to the narrator, who unfolds it, passing it on to the reader. Time is out of joint, spanning several generations, and space is stretched: from pre-war and early war Germany to Manchester and back, the narrator visits the places Ferber’s mother once lived. The narrator pays meticulous attention to this dislocating and disintegrating of heterogeneous and spectral life. He not only travels to the sites where these unknown persons, who call out to him, spent their lives, but also pays Ferber a visit in the hospital “where much muttering and groaning went on, and doubtless a good deal of dying.”48 It is this close and detailed look at an existence on the edge, at the ruins, monuments and debris that make up disintegrating modern life, that reflect the narrator’s movements: 45 Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiii. 46 See Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 47 Sebald, The Emigrants, 192. 48 Ibid., 231.

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the “spectral materialism” of Sebald’s prose that recurs in the form of dust, ashes, scraps, bits and pieces and other leftovers. 49 With Max Ferber, unpacking life on the threshold of existence allows for a haunting and ungraspable past, with many voices, to be articulated with the narrator as conduit. The appropriation of voices is handled otherwise in Raqs’s text. We Are Here, But Is It Now? doesn’t offer a first-person perspective on a complex situation, but rather a concatenation of voices leads to as many characters incorporating them. Likewise, Sebald’s muffled mise-en-abyme adopts structures in nature that appear in Raqs’s work: cacti,50 phyllotactic spirals, how leaves on the plant stem of certain cacti follow a Fibonacci sequence, each number the sum of the preceding pair for optimal sun exposure, low energy output, as a gentle way to be in the world. Sebald softens the barriers between narrative layers, making them porous; the potential in artists’ writings resides in their radically hybrid character and of the characters themselves. In order to understand We Are Here, But Is It Now?, I want to suggest subverting the linearity of Sebald’s “Max Ferber,” much like the characters in the artists’ text cross traditionally separate domains and corresponding to the way Sebald’s textual structure mirror’s the story. Returning to the structure of Raqs’s text, it ends with a dictionary or encyclopedia, advancing some of “our” urgent needs to make sense of today’s as much as future times that would require a chronobeater, “a device with which to whip hours, minutes and seconds as a preparation of the cooking of time.”51 We live in the “yesternow,” in which the ambiguity of today is what was yesterday.52 The hybrid, spectral figures enable the reader to think of a contemporary in which past and future are never far away. Much like the compression of narrative layers in Sebald’s work, a close narration, Raqs flatten and extend those layers. While the hierarchy of discourse is toppled in Sebald’s work confusing narrator and speakers, the reader is drawn into the loop of incommensurate accounts due to the integration of paratextual devices in Raqs’s work and to its unstable relationship between image and text. In both cases, the reader’s imagination is called upon to build the bridge between formerly separate layers and structures, and ask who is speaking, to whom, with whom, for whom? In what way? Which language? Who is included and who’s excluded? To what effect? It is crucial to 49 Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, xvi. Santner refers to the ash, like Sebald’s other privileged materials and objects such as dust, moths, bones, flayed skin and silk, salt and herring, as “spectral objects” (114). 50 Raqs, We Are Here, But Is It Now?, 34. 51 Ibid., 42. 52 Ibid., 43.

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traverse boundaries by making them fluid (Raqs) and letting them crumble (Sebald)—or otherwise acknowledge their limits and ensure their dissolution. Situating themselves “between,” both Raqs’s and Sebald’s writing urge the reader to insist on the question: which voice am I listening to? Looking back at your life, you might discern a pattern (a Fibonacci series), but most of the time life remains unfathomable. The sinuous textual pathway is a means to approach, perhaps even grasp, an elusive moment and to tell a story that cannot be told but has to be told nonetheless.

Works Cited Aliaga-Buchenau, Ana-Isabel. “‘A Time He Could Not Bear to Say Any More About’: Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” W.G. Sebald. History, Memory, Trauma, edited by Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh, 141–56. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Cavarero, Adriana. (2000). “A Stork for an Introduction.” In Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated by Paul A. Kottman, 1–6. London and New York: Routledge. Del Pilar Blanco, Maria, and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. “La loi du genre.” In Parages, 249–87. Paris: Galilée, 1986. Derrida, Jacques Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Gray, Richard. Ghostwriting. W.G. Sebald’s Poetics of History. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019. NourbeSe, Philip, M. Zong!. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Ponge, Francis. “My Creative Method.” In Méthodes. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Raqs Media Collective. We Are Here, But Is It Now? (The Submarine Horizons of Contemporaneity), edited by Geoff Cox and J. Lund. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017.

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Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sebald, W.G. “Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures.” In On the Natural History of Destruction. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2003. Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage Books, 2002. Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. Sebald, W.G., and Gordon Turner. “Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald (Interviewer: Michael Zeeman).” In W.G. Sebald. History—Memory—Trauma, edited by Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh, 21–29. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Van Rijn, Ilse. “The Artists’ Text as Work of Art.” PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2017. Zambreno, Kate. Drifts. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020.

About the Author Ilse van Rijn is an art historian who teaches in Amsterdam in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Amsterdam, Gerrit Rietveld Academie and DAS Graduate School. Her research situates itself at the crossroads of literature and visual art. She has written papers on the subject and published in various journals and magazines such as Metropolis M, De Witte Raaf and Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, as well as in (artists’) publications. Her two book projects include a rewrite of her PhD research, The Artists’ Text as Work of Art (Brill) and a publication on artists’ writings and feminist affinities.

III Writing with Images: Academic Practices and / as Ethical Commitment

10 Models for Word and Image Georges Rodenbach to Christian Bök James Elkins Abstract The prevalence of W.G. Sebald in studies of f ictional narratives that incorporate images has led to a lack of theorization of other practices that operate within this terrain. Sebald’s practice is generally to anchor the image in its surrounding text in such a way that the reader is led up to, into and past the image with minimal interruption in the flow of reading. In that way his narratives can explore continuous paths of memory on which images are passing waystations. It is also possible to permit images to slow the narrative, or to draw readers repeatedly back to the images or to use images to cast doubt on the narrator or the narration. I compare Sebald’s practices to what can be found in Georges Rodenbach, André Breton, Tan Lin, Anne Carson, Christian Bök, Fernandez Mallo, Philipp Weiss, and others, in order to suggest that Sebald is only one example in a long discontinuous history of writing on images. This brief chapter, I’ve arranged into a schematic chronology. First, I’ll make a couple of observations on fiction with included photographs before Sebald; then I’ll propose some possibly characteristic qualities of his own practice; and last, I’ll ask some questions about how we might understand his influence on recent fiction that uses photographs. Keywords: Remembrance and Narrative, Absorption, Interruptions, Observations, Surrealism

Introduction: Practices Before Sebald There’s a lot to be said about the practice of writing fiction with included images before Sebald, especially because he has become the default model

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch10

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for that practice in academic scholarship. Our emphasis has threatened to eclipse other histories, and it has made it seem as if Sebald was the signal innovator in the tradition. The initial problem with that eclipse of precedent is that there is no consensus on what those precedents are. In part that is because the histories depend on what is understood by “writing with images.” Just for my own purposes, I found it useful to think of the histories that include Sebald as having three characteristics in particular: the books in question have continuous narratives whether they are fiction or nonfiction; the images that they include generally do not have captions or call-outs (as in “see Fig. 5”); and the images in question are usually photographs or scans, and less often drawings and other visual material. If “writing with images” is understood in that way, then it names a discontinuous stemma of examples that begins with Georges Rodenbach’s book Bruges-la-morte (1892). As Paul Edwards has demonstrated, the widespread practice of illustrated, serialized novels in the nineteenth century was different in kind because the authors expected illustrations but did not oversee their production or placement.1 In contrast, Rodenbach’s book was planned from the beginning together with its illustrations. A number of practices that can be found in Sebald are present in Rodenbach from the very beginning. The opening pair of photographs in Bruges-la-morte are mesmerizingly similar and yet clearly different, since they were taken at different times of day (notice the differing directions of the shadows of the trees) and from slightly different positions (notice there are three trees on the left image, but that the right image was photographed more or less from the position of the first of those trees). It’s not easy to know if Rodenbach wanted his readers to notice these differences or to experience them as part of the narrator’s “search” (chercher, a very Sebaldian trope) for images of his dead wife, but Rodenbach does say, in the “Avertissement” facing the first of the two images, that the church towers of Bruges in these photographs “cast a shadow over the text” (“l’ombre des hautes tours allongée sure le texte”), an amazing observation to stand at the very beginning of the first book in this tradition. Sebald never went as far as to name the uncanny presence of the images he chose. Yet from that beginning point, there is no single genealogy that leads to Sebald. It is likely, for example, that André Breton saw only an unillustrated edition of Rodenbach’s book. The American writer Terry Pitts has assembled a bibliography of almost nine hundred books that conform to the three heuristic criteria I mentioned, and it suggests there may be a 1

See Paul Edwards, Soleil noir.

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Figure 20  Comparison of two images in Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-morte

Photo: James Elkins

double stemma for such texts: Breton’s Nadja, even more than Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, was influential throughout the mid-twentieth century, especially in the context of the reception of Surrealism; and Sebald’s practice has been influential for the past thirty years.2 But the precedents for work written after Surrealism are often unclear, and there may be multiple parallel geneaologies. Uwe Schütte has informed me, for example, that Sebald did not know Yves Bonnefoy’s book l’Arrierepays (1972, reprinted and revised 1982, 1992, 2005), which has some truly remarkable similarities to Sebald’s novels, including grainy black and white photographs, real and imagined travel, the ghosts of history, interpolations of fine art and a melancholic but fascinated tone. Bonnefoy was clearly aware of and influenced by Breton, but Bonnefoy may be effectively the end of his branch of the stemma. On the other hand, Breton’s Nadja was demonstrably influential for Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Alexander Kluge, Klaus Theweleit, and others, and they in turn were known to Sebald. This entangled and multiple history gets more complex when it comes to recent literature. The writer, photographer, and critic Teju Cole says that he 2 See Pitts’s lists of “photo-embedded literature” on sebald.wordpress.com, and the list on goodreads.com.

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Figure 21  A possible stemma for novels with photographs

Photo: James Elkins

did not know Sebald when he first started pairing narrative and photographs, but only Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003). The former was written in the shadow of the memory of Surrealist precedents, but the latter is directly influenced by Sebald. That would apply a branching lineage, more or less like this: These are only the most schematic of comments on this subject, and I make them only to signal the potential for misapprehending the history of the practice of “writing with images” when Sebald remains the nearly exclusive object of academic attention.

Observations on Sebald’s Practice with Images One thing that might help define the history of “writing with images” is a practical list of characteristics of Sebald’s practice. Here I will propose three: the “Sebald paradox,” in which sudden references to deep time in the images contrast against the more continuously woven narrative; “anchoring”

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images to nearby text; and the possibility that photographs might “promote forgetting” while the surrounding narrative “fosters remembrance.” One of the characteristic functions of photographs in Sebald’s work is to create sudden (visually) specific and particular leaps away from the narrative and into the time of the photographs. In an interview with James Wood, Sebald remarked that photographs in The Emigrants are largely “authentic,” and “a direct testimony” of actual events and people.3 Understood in that way, they take readers out of the constructed narratives of the past and place them face to face with actual and often dateable times and places. In another interview he put the temporal disjunction between text and image more strongly: “without memories,” he told Maya Jaggi, “there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight and image or phrase needs to get across to the reader [and] can only come from things remembered—not from yesterday but from a long time ago.”4 The juxtapositions of narrated memories with images “from a long time ago” create a punctuated rhythm in the narrative, with aperiodic interruptions pointing to specific times and places, even when the visual details of those times and places are not mentioned in the narrative. There is a contrast, in other words, between that structure of interruptions and the carefully woven transitions between narrated episodes. I would like to call this the “Sebald paradox”: the simultaneous need to display continuity, and to interrupt it. Or to put it the other way around: to display rupture, and then to heal it. In place of academic callouts, Sebald often anchors images to the narrative by placing them within a line or two of the reference in the text. This anchoring ensures that there is minimal interruption in the flow of reading: the reader can move without pausing up to the image, over it and onward. The image’s inevitable discursive interruption is minimized. This practice of “anchoring” (I’m thinking of software anchors, invisible links in the digital text) permits images to function as what Jacques Lacan called quilting points: intermittent widely spaced fasteners that tie discourse (the narrative) to what is real. The narrative is continuous—both physically in the way it flows across images and pages, and conceptually in the knitting together of scenes and stories—and by contrast, the images are sudden deep dives. I’d like to compare the effect to a graph of the absorption spectrum of a star: the spectrum (narrative) is continuous, punctuated by dives where certain frequencies are absorbed (by images). 3 Interview with James Wood, Brick, July 10, 1997, brickmag.com/an-interview-with-w-g-sebald. 4 Interview with Maya Jaggi, Guardian, September 22, 2001, www.theguardian.com/books/2001/ sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation.

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Figure 22  Possible absorption spectrum of a star

Photo: James Elkins

If it weren’t for these moments of absorption, the narrative—in this analogy, the spectrum of the distant star—would be smoother. Memory is here represented as the contrast between continuous narration and visual interruptions. A third theme that I have found useful in studying Sebald’s practices is the idea that photographs “promote forgetting”—the opposite of the way they’re usually imagined in Sebald’s work—while descriptive narratives “foster remembrance.” This thought is articulated in Unheimliche Heimat (1995): “Photographs are the mementos of a world in the process of destruction and disappearance,” he writes, but painted and written images “live into the future and can be understood as documents of awareness (or conscience).”5 From this perspective, photographs pull experience toward forgetting, while “describing” pulls back in the direction of awareness. Here is an attempt to visualize that, in which the reader’s path through Sebald’s text is represented by a wandering interrupted line, pulled first toward an image, which I’ve placed lower as a reminder that it can be associated with forgetting, and then toward a passage in the text, imagined as something positive, a “document of awareness.” 5 “Photographien sind die Mementos einer im Zerstörungsprozeß und im Verschwinden begriffenen Welt” but painted and written images “haben ein Leben in die Zukunft hinein und verstehen sich als Dokumente eines Bewußtseins.” W.G. Sebald, Unheimliche Heimat, 178.

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Figure 23  Schema of the relation between text and images in W.G. Sebald

Photo: James Elkins

As in the other visual analogy of the absorption spectrum of a star, what matters is the contrast, the push and pull, which moves the combined image and text along an uneven path that would not be available to an unillustrated narrative. The effect of photographs pulling down toward forgetfulness is strengthened when they may not be truthful, or when they have no clear reference (for example, the dark landscapes in The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants). Sebald said such photos are intended to make the reader “insecure” or “uncertain.”6 If we read carefully, the passage in Unheimliche Heimat describes a double relation, not a single comparison. Photographs remind us of forgetting, and writing “fosters remembrance,” and at the same time writers and photographers both seek and avoid experience.7 It’s an exceptionally complicated thought and it implies that my visualization, above, can also represent the narrator’s and the implied author’s vacillation between participation and avoidance of experience.

6 Sebald in Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 2, 1995, and interview with Wood, respectively. Suzanne Jones has argued that these kinds of doubts enable imaginative, affective engagement with history in The Multiplicities of Memories in Contemporary German Literature: How Photographs are Used to Reconstruct Narratives of History (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). 7 Sebald, “[D]er ebenso erfahrungsgierigen wie erfahrungsscheuen Technik des Photogra­ phierens” in Unheimliche Heimat.

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Problems of Emulation I want to close with at least a gesture in the direction of a problem that I think awaits the next generation of literary historians, and that is how to think about the problems of emulation that Sebald has presented to the generation—now almost two—that has followed him. Just as it’s difficult to be clear about the multiple antecedents of his practice, so it is exceptionally difficult to understand how his practice has been received by writers. Here I can only evoke the subject with two illustrations. Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul is partly an elegy to old (that is, Ottoman) Istanbul, with this wooden yalı (mansion). The book makes use of poorquality black and white images, with many details too small to see. In Pitts’s bibliography there are several dozen books like Pamuk’s, in which Sebald’s intentionally faded, grainy or under- or over-exposed photographs are reduced to signifiers of nostalgia. This is one sense in which Sebald has been a treacherous model, because his practice lends itself so easily to uncontrolled sentiment and the implicit equation of grainy photographs and a precious and vanished past. Other authors follow Sebald by including photographs, but do not consider how they might be understood by readers who pay as much attention to pictures as to text. Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Lab (last volume of the Nocilla Trilogy, 2003) is an example. On page 84 in the English edition, there is a snapshot, first one in the book, of a sketch map. Like Rodenbach’s opening images—like any first image in one of these books, which may often surprise readers who aren’t expecting them—this photo commands special attention. The sketch map, we’re told, is taken from a notebook, but there is no mention of when the sketch was drawn, who looked at it, and what else is in the notebook. Readers are meant to understand that the narrator kept a notebook, but hardly ever mentioned it or referred to it except when he photographed a page of it (for whom?). Thoughts like this will then lead readers to ponder the implied author, because in “real life” he’s the one who actually had the notebook, photographed a page of it and decided to put one page of it into the novel.8 This may seem like an illegitimate way to reason, but Sebald’s practice shows that he put a great deal of thought 8 This disconnect between the thought invested in the narrative and in the images recurs throughout the novel, which ends with a graphic novel, in which a writer who looks like Fernández Mallo meets the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas. There is no explanation for this, and no connection between the choice or style of the graphic novel and the preceding five hundred pages of narration: it is an eruption of autofiction, the implied author’s ambitions and life.

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into exactly those kinds of questions, the sort that are inevitably raised by the sudden appearance of photographs of actual objects in the middle of putatively fictional narratives. Nocilla Lab is typical in its lack of awareness (or insouciance) of the possibility that readers might linger over the images and wonder how they were manipulated, what other details they might reveal, or how they arrived on the pages of the book. The same disparity between the motivations, framing and justification for images and text occurs in a number of writers in the wake of Sebald.9 There is a tremendous amount waiting to be written on the ways writers in this tradition—if it is coherent enough to count as a tradition—have imagined that images might work with narratives. There are books like Barbara Browning’s I’m Trying to Reach You (2012), which invites readers to look at still from videos, but also to go on YouTube and watch the original videos, placed by the author; Tan Lin’s complex Seven Controlled Vocabularies (2010), which contains an aesthetics of reading and looking that asks readers to skim both images and texts without “reading” either and Christian Bök’s Xenotext (2015), which uses scientific images along with improvised graphics to illustrate his project of creating the first poem generated by a non-human organism.

Conclusion As in any under-studied subject, many questions remain. What histories lie behind Sebald’s practices? How can we learn to read his books as contributions to an ongoing conversation on writing with photographs? And how has he appeared to contemporary artistic practice? I think these historiographic questions are important for framing our close readings. How can we pay appropriate and balanced attention to Sebald’s strategies for knitting (weaving, interpolating, anchoring) images to text? How can we think about the way his desire for a continuous narrative was itself continuously interrupted by his desire to insert photographs? Is there a relation between the careful tapestry of times and places in the narratives 9 Some books that are especially interesting in this regard are Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun (2014); Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005); Ben Lerner, 10:04 (2014); John Gardner, Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982) and Will Self, Walking to Hollywood (2010). Teju Cole’s Blind Spot (2017) is an attempt to rebalance attention to text and images by providing critical glosses on the images, re-presenting them as artworks after, and in addition, to their function as evidence, something Sebald avoided.

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and the abrupt disjunctions of the images? And perhaps most importantly: can we avoid writing about the photographs as illustrations of ideas in the texts, and attend to text and images as equal partners in the construction of books that are not, in the end, amenable to the usual kinds of analysis that take text as the vehicle and arbiter of sense?

Works Cited Edwards, Paul. Soleil noir. Rennes: P.U. De Rennes, 2008. Jones, Suzanne. The Multiplicities of Memories in Contemporary German Literature: How Photographs are Used to Reconstruct Narratives of History. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013. Sebald, W.G. Unheimliche Heimat. Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1995.

About the Author James Elkins teaches at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, 1999). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, 1998) and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes, 2000). Recent books include What Photography Is (2011) written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; Artists with PhDs (2014), second edition; and Art Critiques: A Guide (2011), third edition.

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On Writing Propositions for Art History as Literary Practice1 Tilo Reifenstein Abstract This paper embraces W.G. Sebald’s irreducible “writing with pictures” as a proposition for art-historical practices. By exploring theoretical and philosophical approaches to writing’s epistemic capacity, the paper uses Sebald’s work to interrogate a history of art that often struggles to give up restraining the images it covets. The paper develops the characteristics of art-historical writing as a practice that necessarily not only negotiates the boundary of the visual and verbal, but also manifests a literary fiction produced in the discursive framing of knowledge and meaning-making about artifacts, subjects, processes, and their historic contexts. In developing a methodological approach from Sebald’s word-picture combinations, we glimpse an art-historical practice that is necessarily already bound up in the liabilities of its subjects. Following Boris Groys’s suggestion that the writing of art history occurs in a literary space, which implies that the historian, too, is involved in artistic production and thus cannot approach the work (formally) under scrutiny from an external position, the paper reflects on the exigencies of writing about art. Recognizing the limitations of what Derrida identified as teleological genre restriction and institutional pressures to preserve language as a transparent vehicle for “communication,” the paper advances a notion of art history as a literary pursuit that writes (with) pictures. Art history’s recursive self-reflexivity—producing image-texts to trace the words and pictures of artists—is therefore used to reflect on the creative practice of art-history writing, as well as the assumed division between writing’s own form, material, and content.

1 See Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes in this book, “Memory, Word, and Image in Sebald and Joyce: Towards a Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Interventions in the Form of the Printed Book.” Insert Page number after proofs

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch11

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Keywords: Art and Linguistic Discourse, Translatability, Juridicopolitical, Imperialism, Metaphysical

On Writing: Propositions for Art History as Literary Practice Much has been said and written about W.G. Sebald’s semi-fictional, associative, and historically motivated writing and his work with pictures. Rather than add another interpretive layer onto the writer’s work, I would like to think methodologically or, perhaps, in a way that thinks alongside the author about theoretical concerns that arise when one writes (with pictures) about an author’s writing that includes pictures. Right from the outset then, it is evident that this kind of writing cannot be external to its object. Object and subject overlap, and the subject is used to scrutinize itself and is found to do so already. It becomes necessary to take up the task of writing to address (itself as) an epistemic practice. Moreover, there is an explicit requirement to recognize that two writers already partake in a shared space. Writing about Sebald’s work manifests not only the necessity to address the imbroglio of pictures and writing, but also the secondary imbroglio of combining text and picture to address text and picture. The literary or art-historical challenge to explore Sebald’s verbo-pictural work is mirrored in the work of history writing and thus becomes a methodological problem and opportunity. Conventionally, art-historical or critical writing about such work produces verbo-pictural texts about verbo-pictural works without indicating the confluence of the two activities. If the writers’ or artists’ particular and intricate ways of negotiating the relations of writing and pictures in their work is picto-discursively explored, perhaps suggesting a kind of mutual verbo-pictural graphism or hinting at the irreconcilable gap between the verbal and the picture, the works’ careful equipoise and the makers’ reflection thereof are, all the while, subsumed into the dictate of convention. A convention that is persistent despite the proliferation of writing that elaborates its conventionality, and which undermines the very possibility of interpretive art-historical practice by showing itself as governed by rules external to those it addresses. It is therefore an incumbent necessity to take on an implicit form-content separation that prevails in the writing of art history or visual culture. This separation operates on multiple levels and abounds, despite having been made explicit and revoked. It is a separation that has subsumed its revocation into and through the very separation at the heart of the rebuke of the perceived distance between form and content.

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Fiction and Fact If writing is one of the practices of art or literary history—though decidedly not the only, unless we assume that artists write art history in different ways, that is, they merely write in different ways—what are the relations between art and its history, and art-history writing? What is art history prior to the writing of art history? Is art history before the writing of art history? Is art history before the writing of art history? To follow Jacques Derrida in Writing and Difference is to recognize writing as a practice that inscribes itself in a place that is not yet. Meaning is here something that comes about in writing. In order for meaning to arise, it must be different from itself: meaning arises in writing, and it is neither prior, nor discovered, nor transcendent: To write is to know that what has not yet been produced within literality has no other dwelling place, does not await us as prescription in some topos ouranios, or some divine understanding. Meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning.2

Derrida goes on to cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty to reinforce the point that meaning, which is here the possibility of art history, does not precede writing “as part of an a priori of the mind,” it is not given before it is written, it is not a given before writing: “The writer’s thought does not control his language from without; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself.”3 Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty elaborates his rejection of the conceptualizations of language, which either reduce it to mere representation of thought or make it the bare mechanics of physiognomy, when he notes that “the process of expression brings the meaning into being or makes it effective, and does not merely translate it.”4 Language is here not a theoretical construct that is medially used to take on the mantle of pre-existing truths or to re-present a thought or meaning that has been had differently elsewhere. In writing, meaning is constituted, inaugurated, if, however, in response to an “already-there”; conversely, “speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it.”5 Similarly Jean-Luc Nancy, whose 2 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 11. 3 Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text: A Prospectus of His Work,” 8–9. 4 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 213. 5 Ibid., 207; also in Derrida, Writing and Difference, 12.

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philosophical language does not seek to perform a neutral role in the face of thought, describes the inseparability of form and content in drawing in The Pleasure in Drawing and seemingly performs it in the writing.6 As David Espinet suggests, “Nancy does not want to write about drawing […] but to answer it appropriately in the medium of writing,” relating the form-content connection of drawing to writing “by, as it were, writing drawingly.”7 This constitutive non-neutrality of language is nothing new, and so it hardly comes as a surprise when Jaś Elsner notes of art history’s ekphrastic description of its objects that it creates its own work of art. It adds what is not already there and deletes what it cannot express: “In other words, description is not merely selective; it is (at its best) a parallel work of art.”8 For Elsner this statement is not meant to condemn art history for a failure of objectivity, of neutrality or of the application of proper scientific standards, rather he emphasizes the inevitability of the “tendentious” qualities of any descriptive gesture and urges the writer of art history to be cognizant of the “ekphrastic process” itself.9 And similarly, the photographic representation that almost by default has to accompany the writing of art history, rather than enabling “greater objectivity,” is also affected by “partiality and tendentiousness” because it is “a visual ekphrasis” exhibiting the same bias for particular angles as an essay might, except for reassuring the reader of the “thereness” of the external object.10 The inclusion of photography in art-historical inquiry is often linked to ideas of shedding subjectivity to achieve greater objectivity. Yet as Ralph Lieberman argues, the camera and other devices only appear to offer “scientific” avenues for humanities disciplines, and in the case of art history led to “Kunstwissenschaft, an oxymoron, [being] born.”11 Elsner’s description of art history’s writing as ekphrasis is perhaps unsurprising. It already supports the planting of the practice firmly in the purview of poetry, literature, or fiction, though be it, in his words, “fiction with footnotes.”12 However, ekphrasis is an interesting label to affix to art history for another reason, for it renders part of art-historical practice as 6 Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing. 7 Espinet, “Skizze einer Ästhetik des Entwerfens,” 167; italics in original, my translation. “Nancy möchte nicht über das Zeichnen […] schreiben, sondern im Medium der Schrift angemessen darauf antworten,” “indem er gleichsam zeichnend schreibt.” 8 Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” 12. 9 Ibid., 12, 13. 10 Ibid., 13, 24. 11 Lieberman, “The Art-Historical Photograph as Fiction: The Pretense of Objectivity,” 118. 12 Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” 24.

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translation (or more precisely intersemiotic transposition) and therefore at once re-inscribes the impossibility, yet also the necessity, of the very process.13 Again, the correspondences and equivalences between a content and form out there, and the form and content of the very practice that wants to address the out there, are questioned. In the idea of art history as f iction, 14 a f iction that creates its own space, rather than occupying a given one, we then also recognize Derrida’s beginning of writing. That is, a writing that has stopped to be form for a preconceived idea, that has stopped to function as signifier for a predetermined meaning: It is when that which is written is deceased as a sign-signal that it is born as language; for then it says what is, thereby referring only to itself, a sign without signification, a game or pure functioning, since it ceased to be utilized as natural, biological, or technical information, or as the transition from one existent to another, from a signifier to a signified.15

Thus, visual culture studies and art history, far from being ignobled by the fiction tag, are enobled to pursue the multiplicity that they have already displayed but which hitherto sat uneasily with the scientistic (not scientific) pursuit of linearity, resolution and teleological determination. Derrida is particularly interested the “institution” of fiction because it “gives in principle the power to say everything” (though this may be restricted in view of wider political, social and familial, etc. contexts).16 In not abiding by the rules, Derrida detects the possibility to draw up new ones and to recognize “the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature and conventional law, nature and history.”17 Fiction harbors a juridico-political force in its potential to say everything. It can dream what is not already constituted and appreciate the constitutive forces already at work. Yet art history’s fictions are not only discursive; its literary appeal also concerns its 13 For a perspective that reverses Elsner’s relations between ekphrasis and art history, making “ekphrasis […] a subset of art writing,” see Swensen, “The Ekphrastic O,” 162. 14 For art history and fiction, see Barolsky, “Art History as Fiction,” 9–17; Grant, “‘A Narrative of What It Wishes to Be’: An Introduction to ‘Creative Writing and Art History,’” 230–43. For an account that clearly differentiates genres, see Chapman, “Art Fiction,” 785–805. 15 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 13. 16 Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” 37. Italics in original. 17 Ibid. On this very aspect and f iction’s relation to its truth, see Culler, “Derrida and the Singularity of Literature,” 872.

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letters, a scale at which the boundary between image and text is transgressed through graphic writing. As Boris Groys has argued, theorization occurs within a space produced by the text. Texts position themselves and other texts, not in relation to reality but to a literary space. The writer needs to be aware of this jostling about space as any assumption of reality promotes a position outside of textual production: Even if theory claims to describe and interpret reality, it remains literature and situates itself in an artificial, literary space. Now: If the theoretical positions are thus situated in the literary space, the figure of the theoretician remains extra-textual. It is therefore in the space of literature that the oft-described death of the author comes about.18

Moreover then, the practice of writing cannot extract itself from its own position of artistic production. The writer who wants to adjudicate from the outside, who considers their own (literary) work to occupy an external space in relation to the object, “only manifests his inability to reflect on the artistic dimension of his own textual production.”19 This is also what Hayden White calls the “lack of linguistic self-consciousness.”20 Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes similarly emphasizes the propinquity between the work of the art historian and the artist, especially since their roles and practices already overlap more obviously in activities such as curation, as well as critical, interpretative and conceptual engagements.21 She highlights the “radical historical insights” that can be brought about when art-history writing suspends the division of theory and practice, not because it does not recognize it, but because the suspension itself is fruitful.22 Artistic practice ceases to be a realm discrete from its (own) articulation and critique but cannot help but be shaped by the same forces of so-called creative practices: 18 Groys, “Versklavte Götter: Kino und Metaphysik,” 243. My translation. “Auch wenn die Theorie den Anspruch erhebt, die Realität zu beschrieben und zu interpretieren, bleibt sie doch Literatur und situiert sich in einem künstlichen, literarischen Raum. Nun: Wenn die theoretischen Positionen auf dieser [sic] Weise im literarischen Raum situiert werden, bleibt die Figur des Theoretikers dabei außertextuell. So vollzieht sich im Raum der Literatur der so oft beschriebene Tod des Autors.” 19 Ibid., 242. My translation. “[M]anifestiert er damit bloß seine Unfähigkeit, die künstlerische Dimension seiner eigenen Textproduktion zu reflektieren.” 20 White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 95. 21 Lerm Hayes, “Writing Art and Creating Back: What Can We Do with Art (History)?,” 17–18. 22 Ibid., 14.

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Questions of the kind: “What is an image?” or “What does this text mean?” etc., cannot be asked and discussed from a meta-artistic perspective, if they deal with modern images and texts, because every theory is for itself already a text—and thus a literary piece. At the same time, as Plato had already noted, every text is also an image—which, in our time, has been made especially clear by conceptual art, which works with the text in the image.23

The affordances and exigencies of the literary space require the writer not “to confuse ontology and grammar.”24 The putative address of an object subsumes it into the rules of the literary text that carries itself forth through the questions posed within it. The attempted instrumentalization of the literary text in pursuit of an object is inevitably turned into the workings of the text itself, “all the tortures inflicted upon it, are always transfigured, drained, forgotten by literature, within literature; having become modifications of itself, by itself, in itself, they are mortifications, that is to say, always, ruses of life.”25 White is similarly blunt when he stakes that historians who believe they “deal with ‘real’ [not] ‘imagined’ events” need to be reminded that they and novelists deal with a “problematic and mysterious” scenario in the same way, by shaping it into “a recognizable, […] familiar form. It does not matter whether the world is conceived to be real or only imagined; the manner of making sense of it is the same.”26 In art historians’ lack of self-recognition as writers, however, Paul Barolsky detects the reason why their prose is so often lacking to express the love they (presumably) have for the subject.27 Though distinguishing between scholarship and style, content and form, Barolsky nevertheless maintains that there must be a strong relationship between how we say what we say. 23 Groys, “Versklavte Götter,” 242. My translation. “Die Fragen vom Typ ‘Was ist ein Bild?,’ oder ‘Was ist der Sinn des Textes?’ usw. können, wenn es sich um moderne Bilder und Texte handelt, nicht aus einer meta-künstlerischen Perspektive gestellt und diskutiert werden. Denn jede Theorie ist doch ihrerseits vor allem ein Text—und damit auch ein Stück Literatur. Zugleich ist jeder Text, wie schon Plato festgestellt hat, auch ein Bild—und das hat in unserer Zeit die Konzeptkunst, die mit dem Text im Bild arbeitet, besonders deutlich gemacht.” 24 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 95. 25 Ibid. 26 White, Tropics of Discourse, 98. 27 Barolsky, “Writing (and) the History of Art: Writing Art History,” 398. On the same subject in the same volume, see also, Carrier, “Writing (and) the History of Art: Artcriticism-Writing, Arthistory-Writing, and Artwriting,” 401–3; Gaskell, “Writing (and) the History of Art: Writing (and) Art History: Against Writing,” 403–6; Kosuth, “Writing (and) the History of Art: Intention(S),” 407–12; Schele, “Writing (and) the History of Art: History, Writing, and Image in Maya Art,” 412–16.

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Catherine Grant draws on a number of these issues, although from a different theoretical base, in her introduction to the themed Art History issue “Creative Writing and Art History.” She suggests that “all writing is to some extent creative” though seemingly differentiates between art-history writing and creative art-history writing in stating that the latter is “writing that is self-conscious of its own process, foregrounding form as much as content.”28 A number of issues, whose (dis)entanglement seems crucial, come to the fore in this understanding of writing. Firstly, the use of “creative” in “creative art-history writing” does not only function as an adjectival qualifier that characterizes a particular kind of art-history writing, it also has a pejorative, parasitic trajectory—whether intended or not—in distinguishing one kind of writing, in need of qualification, from another that does not demand attributive distinction. In other words, “creative” art-history writing is decidedly not “normal” art-history writing or “proper” art-history writing, whichever it is that must be attributively opposed to the word “creative.” Secondly, if creative writing is self-conscious of its own process, proper writing is presumably not. If creative writing foregrounds form as much as content, proper writing presumably does not. It is one thing to claim, as Groys and White do, that the writer is lacking a particular linguistic self-consciousness to understand the constitutive, performative, material, even creative powers of their writing. However, to pin the consciousness or creativity on the writing itself is to propose the possibility of a writing whose form is subordinate to its content. It is to propose the possibility of a neutral kind of writing that can express content without the very form that expresses it to affect that expression. Finally, it is to reassert the distinction between form and content that presupposes meaning before it is realized in writing, articulation, or whatever other form. Of course, it is possible and potentially useful to affix the descriptive labels “creative,” “poetic,” “lyrical,” “technical,” and so on to art writing, though this needs to be seen within a context in which there is no attribute-less writing. Art writing without complement positions itself as a default or center seeking its place inside of content but outside of style. It entertains a naturalization or neutralization of form that implicitly disavows its own and renders attributed writing as the other writing. If the attributions made in response are the adjectives “scholarly,” “traditional,” “typical,” and so on, we find the illegitimating forces of “creative” confirmed. There is no inherent opposition between “poetic” and “scholarly,” yet in the act of application the indivisible difference between 28 Grant, “‘A Narrative of What It Wishes to Be,’” 231.

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giving a name and its involution in discourse surfaces. On the one hand, there is “nomination,” the giving of a “proper name [as] the asemantic limit of the semantic gesture,” through which Nancy, for example, characterizes Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.29 On the other hand, there are the semantic operations of discourse that relate word and world in a play of illimitable meanings. However, the evocation of a possible discursivity should already question any immutable relation between truth, fact, and fiction. To limit the connections between them, especially by asserting a simple correlation between truth and fact and asserting a pellucid translatability into language also manifests specific socio-cultural beliefs. As White asserts, the association of truth with fact—rather than with a multitude of possibly verifiable interpretations—is a historical occurrence: “In the early nineteenth century […] it became conventional, at least among historians, to identify truth with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of truth, hence as a hindrance to the understanding of reality rather than as a way of apprehending it.”30 Art history’s particular and probably unrequited love affair with fact is possibly most succinctly exemplified in the kind of “text” that is permitted to remain closest to the work, when all “interpretative” panels have been left behind. As though the tiny wall or page label with name, date of birth and death, perhaps place, title, date of creation, and medium are irrefutable, they are finally a way to assure that the bewildering interpretability before us can be boiled down, explained, classified, and subsumed into an unimpeachable catalog of facts—far removed from the conflicting, mutually exclusive, and yet individually justified interpretative fictions around the work. As this account more than hints at, the fact presumed to be in the formal value “is in fact not the object’s own object-hood and existence as matter but that ekphrastic transformation which has rendered it into a stylistic terminology.”31 This also applies to the broader picture of the work’s history or the artist’s story, which, equally, may not be separated from the fictional business of interpretation. Story and thus history, White remarks, should not be confused with life: “We do not live stories, even if we give our lives meaning by retrospectively casting them in the form of stories. And so too with nations or whole cultures.”32 The telling of the story itself, its relations between fact, truth and fiction, is moreover already structured by the particular nomenclature chosen. Through it and in it, the engagement with the work, the artist 29 Nancy, “The Deleuzian Fold of Thought,” 111. 30 White, Tropics of Discourse, 123. 31 Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” 16. 32 White, Tropics of Discourse, 90.

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or the phenomenon is framed and positioned in view of other discourses. In the adherence to or contamination of disciplinary approaches the story is already foretold. Whether biographical, historical, technical, theoretical, critical or of another kind, in the allegiance to genre a unified, consistent, and distinctly categorizable discourse, that is, one that responds to its own call, is affected. Theory too, which seeks claims beyond the historical or critical, is equally prone to pursuing its own self-determination. As Jean-François Lyotard argues: “Theory is in effect a genre, a tough genre. Modern logic has elaborated the rules for this genre: consistency, completeness, decidability of the system of axioms, and independence of the axioms.”33 In the (self-)identification with a genre writing already forfeits the possibility not to axiomatize as per the law of the genre. Derrida reminds us that theory in the classical sense sets limits on its concerns but paradoxically seeks to address its object totally. It necessarily develops hierarchies and “oppositional values” that betray an “intrinsic ethics and teleology” that are incongruent with the putatively descriptive and abstracting relationship it has to its object.34 The aim is not to develop a self-enclosed, limited, and conclusive theory—whether of the graphic, the picture or writing—but to draw on “another discourse, another ‘logic’ that accounts for the impossibility of concluding such a ‘general theory.’”35 Such a discourse endorses its own volatility and impossible boundedness by a margin that does not exclude its own processes and practices of production (including those that seemingly transgress its proper form), nor its identity as other. Genres depend on telos, the telos of “do” and “do not” that seeks to uphold “the essential purity of their identity.”36 This identity of the genre is only an identity unto itself. It proposes an outside to itself that already supplements it. Neither unity, nor consistency, nor completeness is pure and absolute, because the iterability of writing breaks with the unity of the center. Though necessary for the law of genre, purity is contaminated in the instantiation of genre, when the generic begets and bears its kin(d), the latter cannot be subsumed in the former. “What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination? And suppose the condition for the possibility of the law were the a priori of a counter law, an axiom of impossibility that would confound its sense, order, and reason?”37 33 Lyotard and van den Abbeele, “Interview: Jean-François Lyotard,” 19. 34 Derrida, Limited Inc., 71. 35 Ibid., 117. 36 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 56. 37 Ibid., 57.

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Not to axiomatize in the moment of undecidability, not to unify in the view of difference without border and not to paper over either is the impossible demand for a writing that tells a story other than its own. Though this story too will inevitably display its own conventions and procedures, just as Jonathan Culler diagnosed with reference to Derrida about the Tel Quel group.38 Any assumption of freedom or emancipation from language and concept is illusory in writing because it is a way to produce meaning and ensure the possibility of communication. We can offer “resistance” and “dream of emancipation,” knowing that the work of displacement and deconstitution will continue with and in our own writing.39 The difference between Derrida’s and White’s writing accentuates an important aspect of language’s framing capacity. While Derrida is concerned with the displacement of discursive power that already operates in writing, White’s semiological engagement moves from authorially conscious, subconscious, or unconscious ideological hues to the “seemingly self-evident, obvious, natural ways of making sense of the world.” White thereby inscribes texts with particular—though not necessarily inevitable—logics or mechanisms. 40 The aporia of language as a non-neutral medium for the fiction of non-fiction remains. Different expressions will engender the historical narrative in different ways, and contradictory versions of historical narratives are possible without requiring one of them to be illegitimate: This aporia or sense of contradiction residing at the heart of language itself is present in all of the classic historians. It is this linguistic selfconsciousness which distinguishes them from their mundane counterparts and followers, who think that language can serve as a perfectly transparent medium of representation and who think that if one can only find the right language for describing events, the meaning of the events will display itself to consciousness. 41

Forty years on from this project to unravel history and art history as ideological, how is the art historian to write, now that there has been a visual and material turn, or at least its identification? Can we not just in name extol the virtue of historical turns and carry-on writing as before? 38 Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, 252. 39 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 33. 40 White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 202. For White on ideology and the writing of history, see especially, White, Tropics of Discourse, 62–75. 41 White, Tropics of Discourse, 130. Italics in original.

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Figures Any general response would defeat the purpose of my previous account, while any specific one needs to be implicated within a literary discourse that anticipates and promotes its own maturation, senescence and redundance. Dealing with the relationship of writing and pictures in Sebald’s or any other writer’s or artist’s work textually and picturally, that is, in a text that itself is constituted by writing and pictures, cannot disregard that these works deal with similar relationships. To recognize the literary space of this inquiry is to recognize its graphic intervolution. Sebald, for example, exploits this intervolution of the space of picture and text in his essay on Johann Peter Hebel’s Kalendergeschichten. In a long sentence that explores the precision and order that Sebald detects in the author’s writing, he requires the reader to become a viewer who needs to preserve the grammaticality of the sentence he has written by reading through the inserted figure that shows a photographic image of a Kempter Calender. The reader-viewer completes the sentence by reading the words “Kalender der Juden” in the picture before picking up Sebald’s writing in the next line. 42 The displacement of the text in the figure is, however, not just textual. Through the Faktur typeface of the image’s “Jewish calendar” Sebald graphically unravels the Nazi state’s uneasy relationship with the appearance of writing expressed in the 1941 Frakturschriftverbot. Sebald’s writing through the figure manifests here not only the imbrication of word and picture, but also the need to write in graphic marks, that is, a kind of writing that is decidedly not merely writing down but writing that constitutes meaning that is not available elsewhere. My selection of an essay by Sebald for this example—rather than any of his other texts classed as fiction—is deliberate, for it broaches again the putative boundary between discursive and artistic or scholarly and literary practices. The literary fiction of art-history writing like literature itself cohabits form and content (if we must continue to divide them). That does not mean art-history writing needs to assimilate or simulate the verbopictural relations of its subject matter. If these relations matter in art, visual culture, or historic discourse, then the contextualizing text is part of these entanglements. It cannot extract itself by referring to conventions that equate reproductions with works, use figure numbers to sort unruly images, format images at the convenience of the text, and treat its own textual graphic qualities as invisible or neutral. Neither is adding a few externalizing 42 Sebald, “Es steht ein Komet am Himmel: Kalenderbeitrag zu Ehren des rheinischen Hausfreunds,” 16.

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and exculpatory words toward formulating a general problem sufficient as it, too, still seeks to exclude the specificity of this text. To meaningfully address “literary hegemony” or “verbal imperialism” held over the visual arts—or, showing the English term’s scopo-centrism and -phobia, following Derrida we might say “les arts que vous appelez visuels”43 or the German “bildende Kunst”—all figures in writing must be recognized. The inserted figure as illustration must be joined in recognition by the figure in the text without presumption that the latter’s relationship to the former is either static or the referral one-way. Finding the figure in discourse and language, Lyotard’s approach in Discourse, Figure similarly revokes certain putative oppositions between art and language.44 Though he considers the recognition of the plasticity of the writing’s line as writing’s death, preferring it to remain verbal or graphique, that is, part of textual space, the figure still partakes in writing and yet cannot be contained by linguistics. Lyotard identifies three types of figures with varying degrees of visibility. The figure-image is visible but marks the disturbance of any “‘real’ space” in the image. 45 This figure is not figurative, though it may be part of figuration, but rather belongs to the lateral vision of a curved space, refusing the subsumption by perspective, single pointof-view, focus, etc., thus objecting to becoming readable as signification. The figure-form may be visible but is more removed from the line and its construction or the trace itself, rather marking “the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a picture, the scenography of a performance, the framing of a photograph—in short, the schema.”46 The figure-matrix finally, is neither visible, nor legible, and links discourse, image and form without belonging to either. Rather it is the difference of the plastic (as the space of image and form) and the textual, violating one through the other. In the figure-matrix Lyotard notices the realm of the artist’s work, recognizable as the thickness or opacity that renders words inisolable from form and image, or form from words and images, or images from words and form. Though the figure may be a product of vision, Lyotard’s recognition of it in discourse hinges on the designation of another object as a point of reference that both share. 47 Speaking particularly of poetry, Lyotard asserts that the figure in discourse does not permit the alternative of a “deceptive figural space and 43 Derrida, Artaud le Moma: interjections d’appel, 19. 44 Lyotard, Discourse, Figure. 45 Ibid., 275. 46 Ibid., 268. 47 Ibid., 268–80; see also, Lydon, “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” 14.

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a textual space where knowledge is produced,” the figural is precisely not “a second discourse in discourse.”48 Thinking of the figural merely as another discourse would absorb it into textual space, rendering it explainable as, in and through discourse. Rather, the figure in writing partakes in textual space, though without being limited by textual borders. Writing’s figure overlaps text, form, and image, thus violating linguistic restrictions of the structure and order of language, and “produc[ing …] meaning-effects that cannot be the result of the normal interplay of semantic and/or syntactic givens.”49 Though the violations occur within linguistic space they cannot be explained by it as the figure itself exceeds this space. Lyotard’s figure in writing finally promotes sensory effects that move us bodily. The figure disturbs the arbitrariness of language, which becomes sensorially available: The key property of arbitrariness, which radically distinguishes language from all sign-systems, is precisely what the figure subverts in discourse. Through the figure words begin to induce in our bodies (as would colors) such and such a hint of attitude, posture, or rhythm: yet further proof that discursive space is dealt with as a plastic space, and words as sensory things.50

Lyotard’s plastic space of writing is not the material ground of inscription or the implication of the gesture in thought, rather the figure beyond signification and designation opens the reader’s body to the sensuous of writing. As Daniel Rubinstein points out, Lyotard is, however, not interested in using this setup to promote sense over logos (or vice versa) but designates them as already partaking in each other through the figural.51 In doing so, the isolation of sense from thought is pre-empted and the subordination of images by words forestalled. Nevertheless, it would be preposterous to claim linguistic imperialism null and void because the figure and sensorial experience have been written into discourse again. Rather, Lyotard’s move emphasizes the necessity to acknowledge the figure in language in order to move away from writing that externalizes images because it cannot recognize its own. Or differently, the figural demands that the restrictions of traditional forms of discourse are acknowledged and reconsidered. As Kiff Bamford argues: 48 Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 278. 49 Ibid., 283. 50 Ibid. 51 Rubinstein, “Discourse in a Coma; A Comment on a Comma in the Title of Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure,” 106; see also Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, 15–16.

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It [the figural] is not a romantic or nostalgic search for that which language is unable to say but rather draws attention to the need to find a mode of presentation for that which has been repressed—an inevitably unending search which confronts the paradox that the unsignifiable aspect of the figure is changed through attempts to make it “present.” The effect of this attempt, however, displaces the assumed preconditions of the view, disturbs notions of fixed address and resists assimilation to established orders, forms and means of signification.52

The task is not to present the figural but to transgress and displace modes of discourse and knowledge that perpetuate the repression of the lateral, the undecidable, the pictural, and so on. Lyotard’s own texts are often demonstrations of the possibility of such discourses, as they refuse to resolve and dissolve differences and evade the unifying tendencies of focalized, that is, non-lateral, engagement. Figure and discourse are not opposed, yet discourse that does not recognize its own sensorial appeal, “implies,” as Martin Jay suggests, “the domination of textuality over perception, conceptual representation over prereflexive presentation, rational coherence over the ‘other’ of reason. It is the realm of logic, concepts, form, speculative reciprocity, and the symbolic.”53 Such discourse is premised on its own transparency, the self-contained closedness of its language, and the possibility of singular contexts and references. Undecidability, diffuse vision, and sensing are not opposed to discourse, rather, they are the moment of non-automated decision, “the lateral in the focal”54 and the other of intelligibility, all of which are usually repressed in discourse.

Border Patrol Lyotard confirms, too—as Derrida did vis-à-vis the possibility of emancipation from language—that the philosopher as writer will never be able to shake off the “structuralist unconsciousness” imposed by language as long as they deal with words.55 Yet, short of “becom[ing] a painter,” the writer can 52 Bamford, Lyotard and the Figural in Performance, Art and Writing, 21. 53 Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, 564. 54 Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 155, see also 156, 232. For discussions of laterality in Lyotard’s Discourse, figure, see also Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event, 74; Bennington, “Go Figure,” 39; Hudek, “Seeing through Discourse, Figure,” 54; Murray, “What’s Happening,” 108; Lydon, “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” 21; Readings, Introducing Lyotard, 20. 55 Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 51.

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displace and reverse the orders and conventions of discourse, and pursue its form and image, so that “[i]t is not even a question of drawing or painting, but rather of painting and drawing with and in words.”56 Comparable to Groys’s proposition about the interpretive work that seeks to position itself outside of creative production, Lyotard asserts that the interpretation of a poem that positions itself outside of the poem’s language (extratextual relations) can only present “a negative proof.”57 For an approach that seeks to respond to the work, the writing needs to be situated on the side of the poem’s language, generating the poem’s language and grammatical structure through intertextual relations instead of as a mode of negative comparison to regular language. Bamford outlines polemically why it is a requirement for art history or visual culture too, to recognize the figure in their discourse and in the texts that they engage: “It is necessary as it disturbs the complacency of art-historical discourse, which neuters philosophical challenges and fails to reconsider the basis of its engagement.”58 For Bamford it is indispensable to the engagement with Lyotard’s ideas that they are inassimilable to a rationalizing and linearizing discourse whose language gives up on its constitutive power of the figural in writing. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that the writer is ever in control of the interactions any text may open up and draw upon. For Lyotard, writers do not “use […] language like a toolbox,” they are not the anthropocentric players of a “language game” that is closed onto itself, because the “phrases” they employ are already loaded with innumerous past and future intervolutions.59 Lyotard refers to intention in the act of writing (or speech) as merely another “phrase” that inscribes itself in other phrases that are already multiply inscribed, in a way akin to Derrida’s designation of iterability. The burden and boon of the attraction of pictures and writing makes it possible for the writer to be an image-maker, and for the artist’s work not to escape the word, facilitating the recognition of the image that writing already performs and the writing that issues through the picture. Notwithstanding the extension of practices, this is not to suggest that the writer’s picture offers an infinitely accessible array of translatable truths waiting to be verbalized. Yet in the confluence of activities the common conventions and borderless differences of a shared practice can be recovered. Testing material 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 307. 58 Bamford, “Better LyoTard than Never, I Figure,” 887. 59 Lyotard and van den Abbeele, “Interview,” 17; more elaborately, see also Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute.

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and technological affordances, intervolving gestural and motor-sensory processes with intellectual ones and positioning practice in its product are aspects that cognizance of the work of making offers. These elements and situations are not external to the hermeneutic practice of looking at finito work, however their recognition is facilitated when the act of making is a priori given a position in the formation of the work, as well as in its subsequent itemization as art history, visual culture, material culture and so on. In this particular case, the practice of writing was already part of the investigation of graphic marks and could not be prevented from perpetually contaminating the “report” on itself. Or perhaps, it could have been excluded on the grounds that one writing is artistic and the other scholarly, one exceptional and the other typical, one parasitic on the conventionality of the other, but in this exaggerated fashion the course of iterability would have also been betrayed. Any such exclusion would have had to follow a different path in which the rigorous adherence to models, categories and genres is as unshakable as it is implausible. Lacking such conviction, writing this requires the acknowledgment that the practice of writing is not outside the ones with which it may already share a desk, materials, bodies, gestures and which also probed the same questions. Are the cogitation and its deportment of writing this and picturing (whatever it may be that would be) it identical? No! But neither are they the same for the writing of this in pen, pencil, typewriter, word processor, in the first place, in its transcription, in quotation, in quotation as an involuntary intertextual echo, as an example of grammatical construction et cetera. As long as the question aims to establish a self-identity that belies the possibility of repetition in alteration, that is, it belies a non-oppositional difference, it will already anticipate its reply and adjudicate based on metaphysical or empiricist parameters that implicitly constitute the question and are yet also external to it, or, differently, that explicitly constitute the question and are already internal to it. To acknowledge the effects of writing in art-historical practice may begin with the cellulosic or digital sheet that presents a material space that is not merely neutral content holder for any inscription. That writing possesses a material trajectory that is also visual, figural, graphic, and so on, is already apparent when one considers the enmeshing of “content and form” in aspects of writing, such as headlines, content pages, indices, lists, tables, footnotes, etc., that art history normally also abides by.60 This visual 60 Mitchell has of course often argued that there are no pure texts or pure images and also noted the picture qualities of titles, narratives, iconology, monograms, signatures, hieroglyphs, ideograms, etc. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, 98–99.

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dimension is, however, highly conventionalized, and restricted, repressing the possibility of seeing writing outside of acknowledged parameters. Writing art history or visual culture also partakes in the production of visible and readable artifacts, though ideally we look through them to some transcendent content—logos—beyond. If art-history writing also performs ekphrasis then it needs to come to terms with the tautology implicit in James Heffernan’s canonical definition and recognize the imbrications of its diagnoses of artifacts in itself.61 More generally, though, a refusal to provide resolutions and establish consistencies to differential phenomena is a necessary response. Drawing similarly on White, Gavin Parkinson points out that if inconsistencies and gaps structure our understanding of history (as well as our lives at large) and if we intend to avoid the deliverance of a uniform narrative in light of a variety of interpretative situations, art-historical writing cannot continue to proceed without questioning itself.62 Explicitly, while the annalist may provide an empty record to designate years during which “nothing happened,” the historian feels obliged to sustain “narrative strains for the effect of having filled in all the gaps, of having put an image of continuity, coherence, and meaning in place of the fantasies of emptiness, need, and frustrated desire that inhabit our nightmares about the destructive power of time.”63 Parkinson’s call for the disruption of the homogenizing tendencies to offer “the consistency, unity, systematism, fixity, coherence, and monism that continue to characterize our ideal of rational communication through writing” extols the necessity to embrace literary writers.64 This means in no way aping the writing of any one person or particular group but ceasing to “coloniz[e],” “assimilat[e],” and “domesticat[e]” language-bound ideas into the “functional realism of art-historical rationalism” as though this strategy can meaningfully partake in their ideas.65 The attempt of usurping complex ideas but divorcing them from a use of language that challenges institutional and metaphysical assumptions about writing and knowledge fails to engage and recognize their workings and force. In fact, as Lyotard suggests, it is with violence that writing that deliberately works against the 61 Reifenstein, “The Graphics of Ekphrastic Writing: Raymond Pettibon’s Drawing-Writing,” 203–18. 62 Parkinson, “(Blind Summit) Art Writing, Narrative, Middle Voice,” 273. 63 White, The Content of the Form, 11. Part of the latter quote is also in Parkinson, “(Blind Summit),” 273. 64 Parkinson, “(Blind Summit),” 273. 65 Ibid., 271.

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metaphysical desires of closure and difference as opposition is subsumed into the very discourses it seeks to displace: “Terror through theory only begins when one also claims to axiomatize discourses that assume or even cultivate inconsistency, incompleteness, or indecidability.”66 Writing that resists totality or refuses the plenitude of telos is neither def icient nor can it be straightened and meaningfully absorbed into the discourses of intent and closure. Rather, it seeks to pose questions that do not already propose—and thereby prepose—their own answers; that do not already limit the answer by way of a teleological trajectory that has been built into the question: A community of the question, therefore, within the fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been already and fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the question.67

The language of the question and the writing still seeks itself, still probes, interrupts and questions itself in order not to predic(a)t(e) the answer. Of course, however probing and self-reflexive such a language may be, it will always fail to contest the presumed coherence of history, philosophy, and metaphysics among others through language. There is no language outside language—”no syntax and no lexicon”—that escapes its intervolution in the logic it aims to displace.68 Yet this is precisely why the inconsistent, incomplete, and undecidable are so necessary, because they continuously deconstitute the existing logic and themselves without the proposition of a general theory that merely affirms the possibility of a general theory. The lack of closure opens the pleasure to do again and return to a language and object that have never been identical to themselves. It is the chance to review, reread, and rewrite a response that was already built on iterability. Derrida chides the reader who wants to know in advance what is to be read. The reader in need of certitude like the writer of a language that captures and envelops its object totally and transparently seek to know what is proper to their object through a language that is not their object’s. Their reading and writing is an act of appropriation, of wanting to contain and limit what is without borders and not within language: 66 Lyotard and van den Abbeele, “Interview,” 19. 67 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 98. 68 Ibid., 354.

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Because I still like him, I can foresee the impatience of the bad reader: this is the way I name or accuse the fearful reader, the reader in a hurry to be determined, decided upon deciding (in order to annul, in other words to bring back to oneself, one has to wish to know in advance what to expect, one wishes to expect what has happened, one wishes to expect (oneself)). Now, it is bad and I know no other definition of the bad, it is bad to predestine One’s reading, it is always bad to foretell. It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing one’s steps.69

Within the literary space of writing art history, the language of art history and its thought cannot be divorced. As Margaret Iversen and Stephen W. Melville have argued, such a separation of idea and language is typical for an understanding of methodology that “mechanistic[ally]” aims to apply abstract, “transferable” methods and as such divides the discipline itself into its “archive and canon” on the one hand, and its “method or methods” on the other:70 Whatever their differences, the very idea of a “methodology” course or book suggests that there is a field of freestanding objects (visual art and architecture) and that certain specialist tools and techniques must be wielded by the art historian in order to study them. In other words, the underlying assumption is that “method” bears an external relation to both the subjects and the objects of art history.71

Instead, they suggest, we need to embrace the writing in writing about art more comprehensively in order to recognize the (continuing) development of the discipline and not to limit it from itself. Iversen and Melville’s argument references “French theory,” while Parkinson’s is centered on the Tel Quel circle and Bamford’s addresses of Lyotard’s writing in particularly, yet either’s is open to being expanded to accommodate a wider range of different writers. Significant to these various considerations is that form and content of writing present themselves as inisolable. The difficulty of paraphrasing Derrida’s or Lyotard’s work and the indulgence in extended quotes that commonly characterize the discussion of it, are testament to intervolution of so-called content and so-called form. As Parkinson has noted, the tendency to extricate a 69 Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, 4. Italics in original. 70 Iversen and Melville, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures, 8. 71 Ibid., 7.

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theory or notion from its language is also a taming and naturalization of its wide-ranging effect that cannot help but reorient it. That Parkinson continues to speak of style,72 as though it were a mode that could be applied to writing, rather than being, as he explicitly states, part of the workings of the writing is curious but also exemplif ies how prevalent and language-bound the content-form division is. On the other hand, the persistence of the term also marks that the notions of form and content, or style and substance cannot and should not be simply disabled and replaced with another metaphysical center that re-inaugurates the same discourse merely differently. Derrida rather advocates the operation of the graft, which is attached to a historical concept in order to intervene and displace: Deconstruction cannot be restricted or immediately pass to a neutralization: it must, through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing—put into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the f ield of oppositions it criticizes and that is also a field of nondiscursive forces.73

For Derrida, the graft assures that the historical concept remains palpable in order for the intervention and transition to proceed through the friction with a discursive order that it does not seek to replace or neutralize but whose permeating force needs to be traced, opposed and displaced. Harald Tesan, who describes Derrida’s writing as working against dualisms, against linear uniformity of concepts and against wholeness, comments that his writing continuously questions “the metaphysical character of language” while recursively unraveling itself.74 His thought too, though already bound up in the intricacies of Derrida’s language, is inevitably also already structured by the impossible separations of language: [Arguments, theses and enquiries] evade the economy of conceivability through language ornament, through metaphor and through linguistic jokes. Derrida creates a kind of allegorical writing, in which the deficient 72 Parkinson, “(Blind Summit),” 272. 73 Derrida, Limited Inc., 21. Italics in original. 74 Tesan, “Form ohne Wissen—Wissen ohne Form: die Schrift, das Bild und die Unmöglichkeit absoluten Denkens. Nebst Überlegungen zur Ordnung der Dinge bei Maciunas, Beuys, Derrida,” 297. My translation. “[D]en metaphysischen Charakter der Sprache.”

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character of the singular image is annulled through variety—as large as possible—of expressive possibilities.75

The questions that touch upon the content-form divisions of language concern the kind of division drawn between writing’s form and its content. What is ornament in writing? Is there unornamented writing, and if so, what does it look like? What is style in writing? Is the consideration of the graphic a style? And, if this style structures the argument of writing, how can it be style? Catherine Soussloff and James Elkins have asked why Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, and Jacques Derrida “tend to have their texts viewed as sources for art history, rather than examples of art history.”76 And, as Parkinson points out, perhaps Derrida had already given the answer, when he wrote that within the university language is a neutral tool, which will be defended in its neutrality: the “content” of one’s writing may be provocative and revolutionary, but we may not touch the neutral integrity of language.77 Derrida recognizes in the university’s attempt (as well as in that of other institutions) to preserve an untempered language a “juridico-political” endeavor that also paradoxically seeks “the effacement of language.”78 On the one hand, it is an insistence on ideal translatability of language, which is fundamental to the traditional notion of pedagogy and its forms of communication and knowledge. The institution is here also the place for the transmission of a national language. On the other hand, this translatability also reassigns the universalism of language and thus the erasure of the singular idiom. Derrida insists that the institution protects both, the national and the universal of language, because they ensure that all other contractual, political, judicial et cetera agreements are upheld.79 Engaging with the constrictions imposed by the university 75 Ibid., 296. My translation. “Durch ein sprachliches Ornament, durch Metaphern und durch Wortwitz entziehen sie [‘Argumente, Thesen, Fragestellungen’] sich einer Ökonomie der Erfassbarkeit. Derrida kreierte eine Art von allegorischem Schreiben, in dem der defizitäre Charakter des Einzelbildes durch eine möglichst grosse Bandbreite an verschiedenen Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten annuliert wird.” 76 The quote is Elkins, who asks this question explicitly about Barthes, Derrida, Berger, and Cixous. James Elkins, “Writing Schedule,” James Elkins, August 2015, http://www.jameselkins. com/index.php/component/content/article/16-vita/258-writing-schedule. Italics in original. Soussloff asks a similar but differently worded question about Foucault. Catherine M. Soussloff, “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” 734. 77 Parkinson, “(Blind Summit),” 274. 78 Derrida, “Living on / BORDER LINES,” 95, 93. 79 Ibid., 90–96.

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from a methodological perspective, Iversen and Melville argue similarly that the compartmentalization of methodology and subject which promotes the former “ever more [… in] defining the terms of enquiry” restricts the scope of the discipline to something that sees itself external to it.80 As Derrida identifies a juridico-political drive in the institution, Iversen and Melville comparably detect the exigencies of econometric politics at work, diagnosing that the dubious “ongoing professionalization of the subject” is overall part “of the reduction of the world to a stock of available and, as it were, merely denumerable items.”81

(A)destination Insisting on the import of the differential inseparability of form, matter, substance and content does not seek to broaden the “readable” text or any horizon of “readability.” Rather, what holds for the picture also holds for writing, and in keeping with Lyotard’s figure, which is illimitable to discourse though partakes in it, and Derrida’s pursuit of the oppositional even in nondiscursive forces, the aim is to emphasize continuous processes not static objects, as well as transformations not meanings. The intervolution of form and content in writing—as in the picture—cannot be successfully unraveled to excavate or produce another limited and limitable text. Neither does it generate a mysterious, unfathomable force about which nothing can be said. The diminution of form, material and process or their reduction to another content are part of what Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp call the “discursivation of (the understanding of) culture.”82 Lamenting the shift that has made culture and its products less connected to their creative and skillful making and turned them into a rarefied intellectual activity as text, Krämer and Bredekamp recognize a concomitant fortification of the borderlines between language and image. Not only is writing derogated to being a discursive text but the overall effect of discursivation is a separation of practice from interpretation, material(ity) from symbol(ism), non-verbal from verbal phenomena, and more broadly cultural production and art 80 Iversen and Melville, Writing Art History, 14. 81 Ibid. 82 Krämer and Bredekamp, “Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik: Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur,” 11, 12. My translation. “[D]ie Diskursivierung der Kultur,” “Diskursivierung des Kulturverständnisses.”

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from research and knowledge.83 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has similarly sought to question “an institutional configuration within which the absolute dominance of meaning-related questions had long led to the abandonment of all other types of phenomena and questions.”84 Though the approaches diverge, what they have in common is a refusal to render writing or images into a fixed text that can be structurally dissected and whose force may be captured or contained. Conversely the recognition of the content in the form does not seek to institute another formalism that dogmatically insists on purely differential or arbitrary reading, writing and picturing. Neither the procession of this chapter, nor the rest does in any way advocate a free-for-all for writing or pursue the so-called obscurantisme terroriste85 of meaningless writing. Rather, the writing here is a response to the paradox of writing’s fictional nonfiction, its material linguistics, its verbal substance, and its formal content. It is an attempt not to limit writing to a verbal activity of speech transcription or to imply a transparent legibility of communication. Hence, it seeks to decelerate reading and speed it up, to indicate how language may perform itself in being written, to note the displacement of the inky word from its phoneme, to demonstrate the gap between description and described. How can we address each other without go-between, without deviation when all our attempts are indirect, via couriers, via language that does not reach its destination but arrives? As Derrida writes in a lengthy postcard from June 6, 1977: Would like to address myself, in a straight line directly, without courrier, only to you, but I do not arrive, and that is the worst of it. A tragedy, my love, of destination. Everything becomes a post card once more, legible for the other, even if he understands nothing about it. And if he understands nothing, certain for the moment of the contrary, it might always arrive 83 Ibid., 12–13. 84 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, 16. Italics in original. Interestingly, Gumbrecht remains attached to the hylomorphic model in his investigation of materialities and the nonhermeneutic. 85 Searle claims that Foucault had described Derrida’s writing in this way. Apparently, “obscurantisme” reflected the baffling opacity of the writing that did not allow certitude, while “terroriste” referred to a perception of unimpeachability of the author who would scold the incomprehensive reader with “vous êtes idiot.” Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” 77. Italics in original. The charge is here not repeated to develop any comparison between Derrida’s writing and this chapter but to signal that Derrida’s ideas (and in the wider sense, what is called “French theory”) used throughout are commonly countered from this perspective.

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for you, for you too, to understand nothing, and therefore for me, and therefore not to arrive, I mean at its destination.86

Yet it is not only the courier who runs and stumbles but also the currere of the writer’s hand and the message caught between itself, its language, its sender, and its receiver. Derrida’s postcard (or the writing of art history and this chapter) may always not arrive at its destination. Yet this “adestination” already structurally underwrites all communication and is part of the destiny of the postcards of all writers.87 But who speaks in writing and whose discourse addresses itself to the image. And if it is not the writer, or not only, what of the message, what does it say? That is to say, the who and the what, which burst the walls of that-is-to-say in advance. Who will say the that-is-to-say which goes beyond saying when it joins [articule] the elements of a discourse with those of visual art? and when it orders grammar and semantics on the laws of the phoneme? when it adjusts the clamour to a graphy of words and things, even a graphy without word and without thing?88

In the phrase “that is to say” Derrida recognizes what occurs in all saying and in all writing. To speak of “that is to say” is to say the impossible, adding another saying onto the said and requiring a further “that is to say” to say what was to be said. Recursively and ad infinitum, another “that is to say” piles on the need to say more and say again in a language that can(not) explain itself. Yet what is this “that is to say” in relation to its phoneme, can we say what is to be said about these two “that is to says”? And if this “that is to say” occurs vis-à-vis visual art—and here it does not need to say “that is to say” because it already says so in saying anything—it speaks in view of silence that does not stop saying. “That is to say, these silent works are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses,”89 which cannot be exhausted 86 Derrida, Post Card, 23. Italics in original. 87 Ibid., 29. Like différance and différence, there is no difference in pronunciation between l’adestination and la destination. However careful addresser and addressee thus are, adestination already performs itself as nothing can guarantee its certain arrival at its destination. 88 Derrida, Artaud le Moma, 17. Italics in original. My translation. “C’est-à-dire le qui et le quoi qui crèvent d’avance les parois du c’est-à-dire. Qui dira le c’est-à-dire qui emporte au-delà du dire quand il articule les organs d’un discours à ceux d’un art visuel ? et quand il ordonne la grammaire et la sémantique aux lois du phonème ? quand il ajuste la vocifération à une graphie des mots et des choses, voire à une graphie sans mot et sans chose ?” 89 Derrida in Brunette and Wills, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” 13.

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by the explanations of any “that is to say.” In the virtual discursivity we may also recognize why Maurice Blanchot indicates that criticism disappears in the space it allows the work to inhabit.90 Critical writing permits a literary experience that is in search of what was already silently loud at work in the work. As for Lyotard, Groys, Bamford and others, critical writing is for Blanchot “an action taken within and in light of creative space.”91 Writing about Sebald and his images, and art and artistic production more broadly, are in this text not only practices that occupy a shared creative space, but they also partake in each other through the figure and the irreducibility of their discourses. When J.R. Nicholas Davey observes that writing about art animates the work, keeping it “alive, open and productively unresolved,” he refers to a kind of writing that recognizes the non-oppositionality of material artefact and discursivity.92 The artwork is an inseparable confluence of sensuous material and ideational content, and writing itself partakes in these realms. While Lyotard does not fully recognize the material, gestural, and motor-sensory dimension of writing, he affirms the plastic space in writing through the figure’s corporeal appeal. The figural is not outside writing because, on the one hand, discourse invokes bodily resonances that are illimitable to the linguistic yet irreducibly part of it. On the other hand, writing is also already a graphic inscription that shares material, deportment, and contingencies with other graphic practices, such as drawing. Krämer and Bredekamp are optimistic about a looming discursivization of culture because they recognize in the increased interest in “‘performance’ and ‘performativity,’” the strengthened value of “‘tacit’ procedures of knowledge,” the “willingness to dehermeneutise ‘thought’ and ‘sense’” through the turn to materials, processes and functions, and the acceptance of the knowledge function of “picturality” or “iconicity” a waning of the trope of culture as text.93 Through Derrida and Lyotard we are able to reframe this statement, noting that performance, material, picturality, iconicity and affect are not outside of discourse and that the picture may also already be in writing, while the latter may write picturally. Writing is here not a practice about something, though it may respond to an already-there, rather it arrives 90 Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, 4. 91 Ibid., 6. Derrida similarly notes: “‘Good’ literary criticism […] implies an act, a literary signature or counter-signature, an inventive experience of language, in language.” Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” 52. Italics in original. 92 Davey, “Writing and the In-Between,” 379. 93 Krämer and Bredekamp, “Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik,” 14. Italics in original, my translation. “‘Performanz’ und ‘Performativität,’” “‘stummen’ Prozeduren des Wissens,” “Bereitschaft zu Dehermeneutisierung von ‘Geist’ und ‘Sinn,’ ” “Erkenntnisdimension der Bildlichkeit.”

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adestinately as literary inauguration, literal instantiation, and letteral initiation in the littoral of many practices. Such a wide-ranging understanding of discourse, however, is only possible through a non-oppositional difference of form and content. It relies on an institutional framework that permits the complexity and intervolution of disciplines without seeking to reduce and compartmentalize. Recognizing the subordination of writing’s figure to the transparency of linguistic discourse also demands the interrogation of the juridico-political aspirations of the institution, as well as its econometrics, from page numbers to bean counting. Both forces are so potent that they may need to be countered through fiction’s power first.

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Culler, Jonathan D. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Davey, J.R. Nicholas. “Writing and the In-Between.” Word & Image 16, no. 4 (2000): 378–386. Derrida, Jacques. Artaud le Moma: interjections d’appel. Collection Écritures, figures. Paris: Galilée, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Translated by Avital Ronell. In “On Narrative,” edited by W.J.T. Mitchell. Special issue, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 55–81. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Edited by Gerald Graff, translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. “Living on / BORDER LINES.” In Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom et al., translated by James Hulbert. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–75. London: Routledge, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001. Elkins, James. “Writing Schedule” (2015). Accessed March 25, 2016. http://www. jameselkins.com/index.php/component/content/article/16-vita/258-writingschedule/. Elsner, Jaś. “Art History as Ekphrasis.” Art History 33, no. 1 (2010): 10–27. Espinet, David. “Skizze einer Ästhetik des Entwerfens.” In “Zur Händigkeit der Zeichnung,” edited by Hana Gründler, Toni Hildebrandt, Omar Nasim, and Wolfram Pichler. Special issue, Rheinsprung 11 3 (2012): 166–73. Gaskell, Ivan. “Writing (and) the History of Art: Writing (and) Art History: Against Writing.” Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (1996): 398–416. Grant, Catherine. “‘A Narrative of What It Wishes to Be’: An Introduction to ‘Creative Writing and Art History.’” In “Creative Writing and Art History,” edited by Catherine Grant and Patricia Rubin. Special issue, Art History 34, no. 2 (2011): 8–21. Groys, Boris. “Versklavte Götter: Kino und Metaphysik.” In Inzenierungen in Schrift und Bild, edited by Claudia Öhlschläger and Gerhard Neumann, 199–221. Schrift und Bild in Bewegung 7. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2004. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. (2004). Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hudek, Antony. “Seeing through Discourse, Figure.” Parrhesia 12 (2011): 52–56. Iversen, Margaret, and Stephen W. Melville. Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

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Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Kosuth, Joseph. “Writing (and) the History of Art: Intention(S).” Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (1996): 407–12. Krämer, Sybille, and Horst Bredekamp.“Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik: Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur.” In Bild, Schrift, Zahl, edited by Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp, 1–13. Kulturtechnik, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “Writing Art and Creating Back: What Can We Do with Art (History)?” Oratiereeks [Inaugural Lecture] 537, June 5, 2015. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Accessed July 7, 2017. https://pure.uva.nl/ws/ files/2542257/164566_Oratie_Lerm_WEB.pdf. Lieberman, Ralph. “The Art-Historical Photograph as Fiction: The Pretense of Objectivity.” In Fictions of Art History, edited by Mark Ledbury, 118–32. Clark Studies in the Visual Arts. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2013. Lydon, Mary. “Veduta on Discours, Figure.” In “Jean-François Lyotard: Time and Judgment,” edited by Robert Harvey and Lawrence R. Schehr. Special issue, Yale French Studies 99 (2001), 89–97. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by Georges van den Abbeele. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Lyotard, Jean-François, and Georges Van den Abbeele. “Interview: Jean-François Lyotard.” Translated by Georges van den Abbeele. Special issue on the work of Jean Francois Lyotard, Diacritics 14, no. 3 (1984): 15–21. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “An Unpublished Text: A Prospectus of His Work.” Translated by Arleen B. Dallery. In The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, edited by James M. Edie, 3–11. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London, New York: Routledge, 2002. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Murray, Timothy. “What’s Happening?” Special issue on the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Diacritics 14, no. 3 (1984): 99–113. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Deleuzian Fold of Thought.” Translated by Tom Gibson and Anthony Uhlmann. In Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Pleasure in Drawing. Translated by Philip Armstrong. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

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Parkinson, Gavin. “(Blind Summit) Art Writing, Narrative, Middle Voice.” In “Creative Writing and Art History,” edited by Catherine Grant and Patricia Rubin. Special issue, Art History 34, no. 2 (2011): 268–87. Searle, John. R. “The Word Turned Upside Down.” The New York Review of Books 30, no. 16 (1982): 74–79. Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. Critics of the Twentieth Century. London, Routledge, 1991. Reifenstein, Tilo. “The Graphics of Ekphrastic Writing: Raymond Pettibon’s Drawing Writing.” In Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, edited by David Kennedy and Richard Meek, 203–18. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Rubinstein, Daniel. “Discourse in a Coma; a Comment on a Comma in the Title of Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure.” Philosophy of Photography 4, no. 1 (2013): 29–33. Schele, Linda. “Writing (and) the History of Art: History, Writing, and Image in Maya Art.” Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (1996): 398–416. Soussloff, Catherine M. “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting.” In “Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method,” edited by Dana Arnold. Special issue, Art History 32, no. 4 (2009), 734–754. Swensen, Cole. “The Ekphrastic O.” In Fictions of Art History, edited by Mark Ledbury, 162–72. Clark Studies in the Visual Arts. Williamstown. MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2013. Tesan, Harald. “Form ohne Wissen—Wissen ohne Form: die Schrift, das Bild und die Unmöglichkeit absoluten Denkens. Nebst Überlegungen zur Ordnung der Dinge bei Maciunas, Beuys, Derrida.” In Wissensformen: Sechster Internationaler Barocksommerkurs Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln, edited by Werner Oechslin, 280–97. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2007. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

About the Author Tilo Reifenstein is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at York St John University, United Kingdom, and a KWI International Fellow in Essen, Germany (2022). He co-edited the “Between Sensuous and Making-Sense of” special issue of Open Arts Journal, no. 7 (2019). Other publications include “The graphics of ekphrastic writing: Raymond Pettibon’s drawing-writing” in Ekphrastic

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Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (ed. David Kennedy and Richard Meek, Manchester University Press, 2018), “Ideal identities and impossible translations: drawing on writing and writing on drawing” in Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and Contemporary Visual Culture (ed. Johannes Riquet and Martin Heusser, Palgrave, 2019) and “Drawing the letter” in Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (2018). Reifenstein was a Franz-Roh Fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (2015–16), and a trustee and Hon. Secretary of the London-based Association for Art History (2016–20).

12 Memory, Word, and Image in Sebald and Joyce Towards a Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Interventions in the Form of the Printed Book Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes

Abstract The writers James Joyce and W.G. Sebald adhered to, but also manipulated in similar and often hardly perceptible ways, the typographical conventions within the institution of literature. Writing on either side of the Second World War, they sought to sensitize readers to both the connectedness and the fragility of human lives. Both authors, by humbly placing their characters’ lives (micro-histories) at the outer edges of the maelstrom of catastrophic failures of regimes, ultimately make their readers hope against hope that remembering, connecting, and conceptualizing history through their word and image strategies can somehow modify the otherwise inevitable repetitions in and of history. Keywords: Materiality of Books, Word and Image, Artists’ Responses to Literature, Trauma and Colonialism, Iconology, Experimental Institutionalism, Connections

This chapter extends the above argument to the—related—ways in which contemporary artists give form and value to societal connectedness: Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Louwrien Wyers, and Walid Raad. Lastly, such understated experiments with institutional and academic conventions are referred to the life and work of the research school Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), host of the symposium from which this volume emerged.1 1 The author was Academic Director (with Ihab Saloul) of this School from February 2019 until January 2022. I would like to thank Ilse van Rijn for being the heart and soul of the editorial

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch12

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Among James Joyce scholars, W.G. Sebald’s death in 2001 prompted the comment that the “new Joyce” had passed away. Despite the fact that different predecessors have more frequently been associated with Sebald’s oeuvre, I wish to ask how both writers’ visual interventions in their texts can be compared. Some close readings of examples will reveal some surprisingly close connections in their use of imagery to accompany texts. Subsequently, I will ask what one may learn from this, why vaguely iconographic similarity may be in any way interesting. My associations and speculations go in several directions: first to posit that it would be wrong to remain with iconography if a certain Warburgian iconology of changing, traveling images can be ascertained. That kind of a personally inflected ordering of the visual (and textual) world lets memory and a historical psychology enter, which is arguably quite close in art-historical terms to how Georges Didi-Huberman sees the political import of a Warburgian legacy.2 I will touch on aspects of how contemporary artists Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, and Walid Raad perceive the connections between the personally experienced present and the historical, and between what is there and what is (already) absent. That one needs to attend to the past in order to envisage the future is not a surprising insight in the context of this volume that has emerged from a conference organized by the AHM.3 The quality of connections ultimately appears to be what Joyce, Sebald, and some contemporary artists attend to. In conclusion, picking up on the topic of connections differently, I will ask how the material presented may help us to think about an academic community, to institute a School such as AHM in a way that is cognizant and respectful of what is being researched and created within it. In the most obvious way, a comparison between Joyce and Sebald can easily be established in the sense in which Jacques Derrida has written about Joyce, namely that “all that happened to me, including the narrative that I would attempt to make of it, was already pre-dicted and pre-narrated, in its dated singularity […] within Ulysses, to say nothing of Finnegans Wake.”4 Sebald, at least in my experience, appears similarly to predict and team in shouldering the main organizational tasks of editing this book—and Jessica Lentz and Maya Dong for assisting me with formatting this chapter’s references, as well as being involved in the overall editing process as BA research assistants. 2 Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. 3 See Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture conference site, Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies—AHM Conference 12–14 December 2019, https://ahmsebaldmemorywordimage.humanities.uva.nl/. 4 Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” 281.

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enclose his readers’ lives, experiences and memories, as he himself traces and connects his characters’ lives, as well as his own. This feeling of being personally meant by Sebald has extended not least to artists like Tacita Dean.5 And he, Sebald, has (to me) clearly incorporated his Irish colleague across space and time. This strangely concerns most prominently the visual field, but not exclusively so. The beginning of Rings of Saturn is, like Joyce’s Dubliners, characterized in terms of paralysis. Austerlitz reflects, like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, on the circularity of life and is conceived of as a spiral. The title of The Emigrants plays in an almost ostentatious way (most clearly in German) with the title of Joyce’s only play, Exiles—and the way of life described thus, obviously links both authors’ lives. What is more, they both felt attracted to displaced people. In The Emigrants,6 an old man from Trieste (where Joyce lived for over a decade) and called Giorgio like Joyce’s son, spends Summers with the author’s alter ego and leaves a lasting impression. The Emigrants contains a photograph of a peculiarly shaped (possibly animal-like) branch,7 something that is almost too close for comfort to Joyce’s Fluviana, photographs of driftwood pieces, published in 1929 “courtesy of James Joyce” in the Paris avant-garde magazine transition (where instalments of what was to become Finnegans Wake were serialized). In each case, these companion pieces arise out of a writerly discussion of flow (water and words). Joyce’s and Sebald’s books are like a Wunderkammer with a profusion of archaic material, sometimes marvelous specimens. In my discussion, however, I would like to draw attention to the not-so-spectacular: Sebald’s profusion of poor, often decidedly everyday or “uninteresting” images. Joyce’s texts’ visual accompaniments, often line drawings, are also restrained. Typography could be seen as the equivalent of contractual small print, that is, an important but deliberately understated element of the text, easily overlooked but ultimately rewarding, maybe even central. Concerning typographic deviations from the norm, a comparison with Joyce is relatively easily established: for literary texts, Joyce pioneered the absence of inverted commas, using hashes instead. Sebald goes a little further again and often begins a quotation without any announcement. He also preferred to drop other distinctions like paragraphs. But Austerlitz’s unparagraphed text has its most famous precedent in the last episode of Ulysses, “Penelope.” 5 For the experience of other artists and readers see Patt, Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald. 6 See the German original: Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten, 316, 317. 7 Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten, 344.

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Unannounced quotations can be said to amount to unorthodox, de facto interior monologues; they appear as such when first reading the text. We are unsure whose first-person statement has just crept into the narrative, until being told later (often much later). Interior monologues have long been identified as a means to let the (visual) imagination enter; as the closest technique for writers to approach visual thought processes, while not leaving the medium of the written text behind. Sebald thus pursues a two-pronged strategy: he utilizes aspects of the interior monologue and he introduces a wealth of images.8 There is also a clear “scientific” or scholarly aspect to Sebald’s use of many of the images. When there is an element of proof—incidentally, a section of Finnegans Wake also contains footnotes—Sebald often picks printed material: newspaper clippings and ads, tickets,9 and cuttings from old books. Joyce provided evidence of research and local knowledge through the inclusion of minute detail of the Dublin cityscape of 1904, which was irretrievably historic at the time of writing due to the Civil War. However, there is a close Joycean parallel in the visual field also: it is the “Aeolus” episode that contains a large number of “headlines” and thus puts both content and form in the service of relating the goings on at the off ices (with printing presses in the background) of the Freeman’s Journal. Similar self-referentiality can be found in Sebald’s photographs of the abandoned working space of his colleague Michael Hamburger in Rings of Saturn.10 (This space features again in Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger, the outcome of her own Sebaldian research.) As early as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce explored the typographical peculiarities of a diary or journal. Ulysses can then be said to be the “newspaper” of that one day, June 16, 1904. Sebald’s research is often based on diaries and he presents his own research and writing largely in journal format. And we must not forget that Joyce used that seafarer’s journal, the Odyssey as his model or scaffold. Sebald’s archaic turn of phrase and outdated vocabulary (belonging to an emigrant, removed from recent changes of his native tongue), let the whole Paul Bereyter section of The Emigrants appear as an illustrated journal or annotated photo album by 8 The long delay observed concerning the identification of first-person narrators also points to a Joycean means: the Irish writer included—like Sebald—long sentences in Ulysses that leave the reader waiting for a “solution.” These have Homeric origins and are also In Joyce’s and Sebald’s texts intentionally archaic. The German language facilitates this better than English. 9 For an example in German original, see Sebald, Schwindel. Gefühl, 135, 135 and 80, 96, 97, respectively. 10 For German original, see Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 218, 219.

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quoting the text that he himself had apparently written under the reproduced photographs. “Dated” images confuse temporal allocations and add a transhistorical element, too. On the other hand, there is a great specificity in terms of both fictional and actual lives, locations, and times that carries into many aspects of the books that lends them a witnessing quality. Both writers, certainly in their later years, shared an outlook on life that valued the old, conjured its return and also viewed technical innovation with some suspicion: to put it in the words of Constantin Brancusi, when speaking about Joyce: He is “something of a fogey like myself, deploring […] the speed of modern trains.”11 Joyce established correspondences between Dublin’s streets and blood circulation, the brain, and the universe, Sebald seems to stress less the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm than a material continuity, when Manchester dust echoes that emanating from the chimneys of Auschwitz. Both writers were primarily concerned with lines of connections, a re-cycling in and of history, and the humanity and roundedness of their characters: all things that we cannot but value more the closer we come to realizing just how destructive a neglect of these elements—the inherent connectedness of all things in time and space—is to human relations and the world’s ecological wellbeing. Let me turn to the Euclidian diagram that Joyce reproduces in Finnegans Wake to indicate the female protagonist, Anna Livia. ALP, as she is otherwise called, is a river and her geometric form or letter is the (river) delta. This diagram is one of very few overtly visual features. With its zeros, spectacle lenses, and bicycle wheels, it serves many purposes. The most fundamental of which is to focus on the circularity of the book’s structure that in turn expresses a circular historical worldview, as mentioned and as borrowed from Giambattista Vico. Both writers seem to have worked with a small number of simple visual motifs or what one could call “sigla” as the basis for each of their works.12 Each is then used within the writing process and the reading to establish coherence. Their simplicity enabled the writers to locate it again and again in their rather disparate material (like battlefield monuments, etc.) and insert it into the texts’ universe. In fact these visual motifs are even apt to stand for the writers’ method: how he integrated material within a larger context.13 The three boards with silk-worm formations 11 Joyce, Letters I, 279. 12 Most recently, the PhD thesis of Yael Greenblatt supervised by Ruben Borg has attended to the typographic aspects and materiality of Joyce’s prose: Greenblatt, “The TypoGraphic Novel: Visual Materiality and the Joycean Image.” 13 For German original, see Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 349.

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that accompany the last pages of Rings of Saturn see the “rings” multiplied and are as striking a visual summary of the strategy just described as the text’s last few pages, which manage to pull together the many proverbial and actual threads it had woven over almost three-hundred-fifty pages. This main theme of the book and its title is visually introduced with a diagram of a horse’s fall from a cliff. There are accompanying letters to identify the horse’s position, etc. All this serves its illustrative purpose well. However, it also takes a similar geometrical shape as the Euclidian diagram in Joyce—and the use of individual letters for identifying characters is continued: in the list of lovers illustrated also.14 I could go on.15 I am here not explaining Sebald, using Joyce, nor does Sebald explain Joyce. Sebald may, however, extend Joyce’s work—something that Joseph Beuys thought he was doing as an artist. Incidentally, the Euclidian diagram is also central to Beuys’s universe. The artist used two cymbals that do not interlock for his last installation, anticipating his own death: he shows the absence of the life-affirming, life-giving two triangles that are created by the overlap of the circles. Another work, Show your Wound (1974/1975), features this non-intersecting presence of two circles in the context of death.16 Sebald appears to have learned from Joyce’s understated manipulations of the typographically set text: understated and yet stretched nearly to the maximum technically available at the time. And, as I hope to have argued here, many of Sebald’s images are an extension of Joyce’s technique to operate with sigla or visual ciphers, in order to construct the narrative strands and motifs. They also serve to retain relative clarity despite a high degree of opacity. That is what images can do, according to W.J.T. Mitchell: hold contradictions, exceed the sayable.17 They act out a set of values that circles around links with other human beings, by way of connections or extensions. The affordances of the analog printing process, which is not what Sebald needed to follow any more in his later quasi-autobiographical fiction, but which he does not exceed there either, establish a visual similarity with Joyce, but also with potentially other authors, who paid attention to the materiality of the form in which their works were going to be received. In a very narrow spectrum of visual adjustments, deviations take on an air 14 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 32. 15 In Joyce in Art, I elaborate on visual artists, who have taken, e.g., visual elements of Joyce’s writings as a starting point for their own works. See Lerm Hayes, Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce. 16 Lerm Hayes, Post-War Germany And “Objective Chance”: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys And Tacita Dean / Nachkriegsdeutschland und ‘Objektiver Zufall’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys und Tacita Dean. 17 Mitchell, “Word and Image,” 51–61.

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of similarity to other authors. Few are likely to have read Sebald’s works against Joyce’s as pedantically as I have at the beginning of this paper. Yet, a connectedness emerges, a family resemblance in the forms that consciously, sensitively, meaningfully considered type takes in books. One could also call it an ethics of cross-reference or quotation: letting the voices of others still be heard through one’s own stories, whether that may be the stories of friends, photographers, Homer, characters from history books or newspapers, or, especially, those absent from spectacular stories: individual holocaust victims, emigrants, or underdogs with an everyday humanity in still-colonial Dublin, or in nearly post-industrial/colonial Manchester. The motif, its iconography is therefore not an aim in itself, it points to what I think we can identify as a Warburgian iconology of traveling images in changing contexts through time and space, which are characterized by repetitions with a difference. The borrowing and extending is personally inflected, charged with affect and memories. Elsewhere, I have sought to establish a politics of Aby Warburg’s art-historical tools in analyzing whether a society was safe or not for potential scapegoats, such as artists or Jews.18 His textual and visual world of frozen, affective memory apparently also needed to be ordered around a reading room that features two centers instead of one, like in the Euclidian diagram: thinking in between poles, complicating binary oppositions between magical thinking and enlightened rationality. He was instituting a space for such thought to develop: the Warburg Institute, KBW in Hamburg—which emigrated to London in 1933. Sebald’s ordering of the visual (and textual) world lets memory and a historical psychology enter. That is arguably close to how Georges DidiHuberman has explained the sociopolitical import of a Warburgian legacy: through transhistorical image-and-text worlds connecting with one another. Didi-Huberman’s privileged example in this context was Chris Marker’s film Grin Without a Cat (1977), where a woman’s gesture of wiping her eye, taken from Battleship Potemkin by Joyce-fan Sergei Eisenstein, is continued in footage from student protests in Paris, 1968. Traveling motifs are shown through time and space, as analytical instruments, as reminders of ethical, in this case revolutionary, principles. Joyce’s use of Homer and Sebald’s use of his own emigrant life as corresponding in some way to those who fled the holocaust can be placed into such a connection-focused modus 18 Lerm Hayes, “Das Jüdische Erbe in Aby Warburg’s Leben und Werk” in Menora 5: Yearbook for German-Jewish History 1994, 141–69. See also Lerm Hayes, “Jüdische Themen in Warburg’s and Joyce’s Werken: Periphere Interessen” in Denkbild Ellipse: Jüdische Identität in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 87–101.

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operandi. Sebald’s move in this regard has incensed some, particularly German commentators, who have continued to plead for the exceptionality and incomparability of the holocaust to other atrocities. That appeared to be the most respectful strategy vis-à-vis this unspeakable evil. It is a position in the so-called Historikerstreit in Germany in the 1980s. Joseph Beuys has, similar to Sebald after him, followed a critical strategy in this regard, focusing instead on transhistorical connections: his so-called Ulysses-extension from the late 1950s and early 60s features not just commentary on Joyce’s two mature works, but shows designs for an Auschwitz Monument (a competition entry for sculpture on the site of that extermination camp) that harks back to both Neolithic passage tombs (especially in Joyce’s home country, one can assume). He also, during the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and Martial Law in Poland, intervened by pointing out connections, linking people and places, by communicating during his visits to Ireland in 1974, his exhibition (A Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland) was the first to be shown in both North and South since the beginning of the violent clashes: as a peace gesture. He visited the passage tomb Newgrange, a site of prehistoric commemorations of the dead—and gave artworks with Irish themes to the Muzeum Sztuki, Łodz (near Auschwitz), as a gesture of connectedness with the Solidarity movement. He thus linked recent history (Auschwitz) with prehistory and the then current struggles against oppressive forces in both the Cold War and late British colonial legacies. In current times, the Historikerstreit is largely overcome; rather than claiming exceptionality for one unmeasurable atrocity, one is more inclined to see connections: similarities in the ways in which the legacies of dehumanization cast their shadows, how they play out in different societies at different times—and what one may learn from that. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of our Discontents is a powerful account of enslavement in the US,19 the caste system in India and Nazi Germany, employing such a current perspective. It also becomes abundantly clear that the Germans in the 1930s took their lessons from the US in terms of how to dehumanize. In wishing to overcome such still present, toxic legacies around the world, I agree with Wilkerson that highlighting connections is as good a way forward as is imaginable. For both Joyce and Sebald, working in temporal proximity to a World War, there is an ethical drive at play in employing the strategies that have here been in the foreground: they seek to sensitize readers to both the connectedness and the fragility of human lives. Both authors, by humbly placing their 19 See Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

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characters’ lives at the outer edges of the maelstrom of catastrophic failures of regimes, ultimately make their readers hope against hope that remembering, connecting, and conceptualizing history in the ways they did (through their word and image strategies) can somehow modify the inevitable repetitions in and of history. Joyce’s and Sebald’s are minor histories in minor literatures (to use terminology from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) that forcefully resonate today—especially with artists. This is where contemporary artists enter: Tacita Dean and Walid Raad perceive certain transhistorical (and geographical) connections and, in unique ways, they present them to audiences in the here and now. Their works particularly bring to our attention what is anticipated to disappear and what is (already) missing. Dean has created a whole universe of what she calls “objective chance” connections. She has a knack for filming in places about to disappear (such as the Kodak film factory in France) and interviewing people, like Sebald’s friend Michael Hamburger, shortly before they pass away. Accessing such “relics” demands skills of the previous generation: Dean wrote letters to Hamburger (real ones: on paper). I was able to conclude that her focus on the not so chancy way in which things and people are connected communicates that she sees merit in belonging to a flawed, but at least connected humanity.20 Retaining the old (such as the film medium) grounds us—and reminds us of the ground on which we stand, ecologically speaking and in terms of comparability of experience—and (hopefully) resulting in empathy. Walid Raad takes a differently Warburgian, a historically psychological, stance: increasingly, the collision or derangement between the personally experienced (often violent) present and the historical has come to the fore: a break between what is there and whom we are missing. Raad is an activist in the real world, a member of the Gulf Labour Coalition, which protested the building practices at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi that involved what can be called the contemporary enslavement of workers. In his artwork, however, he has also explored less directly instrumental and logical forms. It includes both poetic and fictionalizing or magical ways in which things and people are (dis-)connected. That makes him relevant here, as Sebald’s images are also not only logically or illustratively relating to the text. From Beirut, now living in New York, Raad’s work is similar to Dean’s in the sense that disappearing things feature: the exact car model and color of vehicles used for car bombs are cut out of magazines and deceptively “unprofessionally” (in a topsy-turvy way) collaged alongside descriptions 20 See also Lerm Hayes, Post-War Germany.

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(in Arabic) of information pertaining to the event. What by definition no longer exists (the car used for a car bomb) is conjured, researched—and yet nothing solid emerges, a mere mirage: war defies logic, yet humans will research, try to find reasons. The work is evidence of both necessity and futility of such psychological labor. This, I argue, he shares with Sebald—and with Joyce to the extent that, by the time Ulysses as a portrait of his home city was published, Dublin was unrecognizable in many places, following the Civil War. I would like to introduce two more works from Raad’s 2019 retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. On flowery wallpaper that purports to be a family heirloom, Raad mounted (on pins) cut-out portraits of politicians, financiers, and cultural figures in a loose arrangement: the heads trace real-life connections that show how the (art) world works in quite a straight-forwardly enlightening way. The wallpaper makes all this look a little comical, however—or maybe it is the archaic background that connotes that not much has changed in terms of how extractive, abusive, and chauvinistically hierarchical the world used to be in the nineteenth century. The apparent solidity and longevity of this status quo now looks ridiculous, and the viewer is tempted to pull the wallpaper away like a table cloth. Commenting on museum lending practices globally—and specifically on the now built Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, and other franchises by Western museums in other parts of the world—Raad presents fusions of objects: in the series of Scratching on Things I Could Disavouw (2007, ongoing), a stone head has the outer shape of a bowl, an ivory relief now appears as a vase-shaped object… The story that Raad told in his lecture-performance within the exhibition presents objects as sentient beings, getting confused on their high-security journeys back and forth between museums, crates, depots, cultures, and climates. The travel of images and motifs that Warburg sketched now appears to be affected by forces akin to quantum physics: what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Connections are irrefutable, but logic is not all that governs them: both global capital and individual psychology, untranslatable cultural specificity and comparable, relatable human and more-than-human angst pervade. Raad’s work hopefully clarifies—takes further than the other protagonists of this investigation—the search for ways in which to address, show and make experienceable the kinds of connections that govern our lives. At the beginning, I said that one needs to attend to the past to envisage the future and that—at a conference organized by the AHM—this is not a surprising insight. The quality of the connections appears to be what Joyce, Sebald, Beuys, Dean, and Raad focus on. Attending to the connections, as

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these artists and writers propose, it appears to me, implies care and empathy: through attending to the past, work toward a better future. I propose that the material presented may help to imagine, to institute a School like AHM in a way that is cognizant and respectful of what is being researched and created within it. What hints do the protagonists of my paper give to us? I have on occasion argued that the reading group format that Joyce’s late works necessitate implies a coming together as groups of differently socialized, differently knowledgeable readers: his works make community, imply both high erudition and human tendencies to treat personal associations as relevant for all (with attendant epiphanies and frustrations).21 In any case, such groups relate to what universities do, but in asking more than module-sized engagement, they are also more commonly found at the fringes of educational institutions—and that often, and certainly in this case, means fodder for the art context. It is a specific kind of caring, thoughtful instituting that is happening then. One could compare such activities to the symposium, the ancient idea of the conference that has as its core activities not just discussing but eating and drinking together. The conference from which this book has emerged and that took place as the first cases of Covid-19 were detected in Wuhan, remains in my mind as such a pretty ideal symposium. We shared our conference dinner in a university building in Amsterdam’s heart, by its three-canal corner. This let my workplace literally appear in different (dimmed and candle) light. Joseph Beuys’s “project of mourning,” as Gene Ray has put it, has also brought many people together, such as when Beuys instituted the Free International University for Interdisciplinary Research (FIU).22 It was first intended to be housed in brick and mortar (since Beuys had been dismissed from the Düsseldorf Academy in 1973, owing to too radical intra-institutional “instituting”: he refused to admit only the standard number of students to his class, thinking that everybody who wanted should have the chance to study with him). The FIU became a loose community of international people, friends, ecological activists, etc. One of them was (or is) the artist Louwrien Wijers, who carried out long interviews with Beuys, asking him future-oriented, systemic questions. He suggested she should also ask these 21 Lerm Hayes, “Mad, Marginal, Minor (Artistic) Research,” 120–133, 298–312. See also Lerm Hayes, “The Finnegans Wake Reading Group as a Model for ‘Stealth Activities’ Between Art and the University,” 278–87. 22 Ray, “Mourning and Cosmopolitics: With and Beyond Beuys,” 22–48; see also Lerm Hayes, “Beuys’s Legacy in Artist-Led University Projects,” 31.

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questions of certain others. Eventually, she brought the Dalai Lama into contact with Beuys. After his death in 1986, she carried the project further, made films and, in 1990, at another historical threshold, she organized a series of panel discussions in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum: Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy. Nobel-prize-winning scientists, the Dalai Lama, and other inspirational figures (such as artists Robert Rauschenberg and Lawrence Weiner) debated issues of great consequence, exceeding their narrow specialisms, but very much based on their deep insights. If such a simplistic summary is permitted, the speakers focused more than anything on the connections between people, events, and things in the world: physicist David Bohm highlighted that economy comes from the word household, which is nothing extraneous, no environment, but something concerning all inhabitants of the world equally;23 the de-monetization of culture and food were advocated. Instituting such visionary thought—with art’s word- and image-based imagination, its systemic ways of thinking and attention to connections unmissable in the mix—such insight may today be more important than in 1990. This was certainly the contention of audience members at an AHM and Institute of Advanced Studies ArtScience theme event with Louwrien Wijers, commemorating those 1990 gatherings.24 With the Gulf Labour Coalition, Raad’s attention is directed more at institutional critique. He alerted me to his friend Jalal Toufic for his directorship of ALBA, the Art Academy in Beirut, and the “Notification” that is still on this institution’s website: an inspirational perspective on “instituting” within art and beyond.25 I would like to echo the importance of an: autonomous zone [enabling] intelligent and subtle incomprehension [, making] students keenly aware that artists collaborate in an untimely 23 David Bohm in Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy: 5 panel dialogues 1990 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, https://www.louwrienwijers.nl/amsse90dvd.html. 24 This event was listed among worldwide programming for Beuys’s centenary celebrations (https://beuys2021.de/en/weltweit). It should be remembered that Wijers took her enabling, caring inspiration in this from Beuys, whose centenary is being celebrated, as I am editing this text: the media seem—by contrast—to be intent on headlining Beuys’s past as a German soldier, as if research (some of it quoted in this text already) had not been carried out to refute the prejudice that he had always remained a Nazi. In Lerm Hayes, Post-War Germany, 33, I address such allegations. Mario Kramer and Gene Ray could be added to those whose conclusions about Beuys’s engagement with his past are drawn from evidence in the work. On Wijers see https:// ias.uva.nl/content/events/events/2021/04/artscience-interview-louwrien-wijers.html?origin= 5stlxoO%2BSgu6vwzHnf7uPg&%3Bcb. 25 Lerm Hayes, “‘Sometimes you need help from other people’s ghosts’: Alastair MacLennan’s Multi-Disciplinary and ‘Instituting’ Practice as Civil Action,” 97–108.

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manner with future and past artists and thinkers [, that they need] intuition [and a] “shit detector”. [Culminating in the assertion that:] The real artist and the real thinker are not cultured, but countercultured [, whereby] tradition consists of that part of counterculture that continues to be counterculture, perennially.26

What remains to be done in this essay is to return the argument to W.G. Sebald. His archaic prose may gesture to the “untimely” collaboration in Toufic’s quote, but what I am really aiming at is institutionally critical and instituting work at the University of East Anglia by the academic W.G. Sebald. Had Thomas Elsaesser lived to give a keynote lecture at the conference from which these thoughts originate, he would have spoken about how his colleague Max Sebald, the German Literature scholar, responded to the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) at UK universities in the late 1980s with an evasive move: the turn to semi-autobiographical fiction, something that for some time remained not “returnable.” He also made the case—and a successful case it was in institutional / RAE terms—to render literary translation research, as such “returnable” to the RAE and thus valued in the system that has since become the Research Excellence Framework and that is responsible for the funding of academic institutions. Creativity may be more fun outside of institutions, but it also has a vital place within them, often in spite of them and then still, of course, for their intellectual and other benefit, often profit. This was also Sebald’s contention.27 Both W.G. Sebald and James Joyce shared concerns for the traumas of history (a “nightmare” from which Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus wished to awake), make them both fruitful case studies of cultural memory—and traditions (in Toufic’s countercultural way) that have proven to be fruitful points of departure for visual artists like Beuys, Dean and Raad, interested in connections, in systemic / experimentally instituting thinking and acting. Joyce’s and Sebald’s works shared a focus on the subtle, materially sensitive inclusion or manipulation of typesetting or visual elements, such as placing advertisements, musical scores, footnotes, and diagrams in the text. Such word-and-image combinations can break the linearity and the speed of the narrative, while establishing particularly poignant links to historical occurrences and sites. These elements are constrained by analog printing conventions yet interpret this restriction as an opportunity to engage in a subtle way: mostly connecting visually and linguistically to the store of 26 Toufic, “Jalal Toufic’s Notification / Notice de Jalal Toufic.” 27 Lerm Hayes, “Minor Literature in and of Artistic Research,” 49–62.

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language and the book’s visual form that have been and are used by writers before and after: the institution of literature. The adherence, the connections are as important as the countercultural deviations: it is from within that (silken) web that they cast their net to envelop or inspire us to widen our circles/cycles/rings, experiment with our institutions, and attend to the nature of the systemic connections that we forge.

Works Cited AHM conference site, Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies—AHM Conference 12–14 December 2019. Accessed March 2021. https:// ahmsebaldmemorywordimage.humanities.uva.nl/. Bohm, David. Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy: 5 panel dialogues 1990 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2016. DVD recording, https:// www.louwrienwijers.nl/amsse90dvd.html Derrida, Jacques. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge. New York and London: Routledge, 1992: 253–309. Didi-Huberman, Georges. The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2006. Greenblatt, Yael. “The TypoGraphic Novel: Visual Materiality and the Joycean Image.” PhD thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021. Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Amsterdam, events website: Interview with Louwrien Wijers, March 2021. Accessed March 2021. https://ias.uva.nl/ content/events/events/2021/04/artscience-interview-louwrien-wijers.html?or igin=5stlxoO%2BSgu6vwzHnf7uPg&%3Bcb. Joyce, James. Letters I. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “Beuys’s Legacy in Artist-Led University Projects.” Tate Papers 31 (2019). Accessed June 28, 2019. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/tatepapers/31/beuys-legacy-artist-led-university-projects. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “The Finnegans Wake Reading Group as a Model for ‘Stealth Activities’ Between Art and the University.” In “Text, Image, Performance,” edited by Jan Lazarzig. Special issue, Forum Modernes Theater 32, no. 2 (2021): 278–87. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “‘I will re-create Finnegans Wake anyway’: Beuys Reads Joyce.” In “Visual Poetics,” edited by Jakub Lipski. Special issue, Nordic Journal of English Studies 17, no. 1 (2018): 152–80. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2004.

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Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “‘The Joyce Effect’: Joyce in the Visual Arts.” In A Companion to James Joyce, edited by Richard Brown. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007: 318–40. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “Das Jüdische Erbe in Aby Warburg’s Leben und Werk.” In Menora 5: Yearbook for German-Jewish History 1994, edited by J.H. Schoeps. Munich: Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute of German-Jewish History, 1994: 141–69. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “Jüdische Themen in Warburg’s and Joyce’s Werken: Periphere Interessen.” In Denkbild Ellipse: Jüdische Identität in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, edited by Martin R. Deppner. Evangelische Akademie: Rehburg-Loccum, 1998: 87–101. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “Mad, Marginal, Minor (Artistic) Research” / “De la recherche (artistique) folie, marginale et mineure.” In Dora García, Mad Marginal: Cahier #4, edited by Chantal Pontbriand. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015: 120–33, 298–312. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “Minor Literature in and of Artistic Research.” In Artistic Research and Literature, edited by Corina Caduff and Tan Wälchli, 49–62. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2019. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. Post-War Germany and “Objective Chance”: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean / Nachkriegsdeutschland und ‘Objektiver Zufall’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys und Tacita Dean. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. Reprinted in Tacita Dean, Seven Books Grey. Göttingen and Vienna: Steidl, MuMoK, 2011. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. “‘Sometimes you need help from other people’s ghosts’: Alastair MacLennan’s Multi-disciplinary and ‘Instituting’ Practice as Civil Action.” In Actional Poetics—ASH SHE HE: The Performance Actuations of Alastair MacLennan, 1971–2018, edited by Sandra Johnston, Paula Blair, and Cherie Driver 97–108. Belfast and Bristol: BBeyond, LADA and Intellect Books, 2020. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria, and Victoria Walters, eds. Beuysian Legacies in Ireland and Beyond: Art, Culture and Politics. European Culture and Politics. Münster, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, and London: LIT, 2011. Mitchell, W.J.T. “Word and Image.” In Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 2003: 51–61. Patt, Lise (ed.). Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald. Los Angeles: Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007. Raad, Walid. “Les Louvres and/or Kicking the Dead.” Performance as part of the exhibition Let’s Be Honest, The Weather Helped at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in May, June, August and October 2019. Accessed March 2021. https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/walid-raad-2.

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Ray, Gene. “Mourning and Cosmopolitics: With and Beyond Beuys.” In Beuysian Legacies in Ireland and Beyond: Art, Culture and Politics, edited by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Victoria Walters, 22–48. Münster, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, London: LIT, 2011. Sebald, W.G. Die Ausgewanderten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994. Sebald, W.G. Die Ringe des Saturn. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. Sebald, W.G. Schwindel. Gefühle. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994. Toufic, Jalal. “Jalal Toufic’s Notification / Notice de Jalal Toufic.” Université De Balamand—Académie Libanaise Des Beaux-Art, 2019. Accessed June 2019. https://alba.edu.lb/english/school-of-visual-arts-Directors-Statement. Wilkerson, Isabel. (2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020.

About the Author Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (2019-2022), University of Amsterdam. Until 2014 she was Professor of Iconology in Belfast, where she led a Research Graduate School. She studied in Heidelberg, London, and Cologne. Her PhD was researched as James Joyce Foundation Scholar, Zurich. She held an Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UCDublin. Her books include: Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique (ed., Valiz, 2017); Post-War Germany and “Objective Chance”: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (Steidl, 2011); Joyce in Art (Lilliput, 2004); and James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys (Olms, 2001). She has curated exhibitions internationally.

13 Sebald’s Toute la mémoire du monde Leonida Kovač Abstract In 1956 Alain Resnais opened his film-essay Toute la mémoire du monde with the statement that owing to the short-lived nature of human remembering, people tend to accumulate countless auxiliary memories. The issue of “auxiliary memories” related to the search for one’s own identity is an ostinato theme of Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz where the titles and certain motifs articulated in three films by Resnais are appropriated in order to depict the twentieth century in terms of the uncanny. It was not by chance that a Jewish boy named Jacques Austerlitz, before he was sent from Prague in England by the last Kindertransport, and his mother to Theresienstadt, spent his last summer with the parents in Marienbad, a place to which he would return many years later and become haunted by something unknown. In Sebald’s narrative tissue such reference to L’Année dernier á Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) rhizomatically lead to 1955 Resnais’s f ilm-essay Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), as well as to the psychoanalytic notion of the originally lost object. But, in the novel, Resnais is explicitly mentioned only once, in Austerlitz’s remembrance of the scene from Toute la mémoire du monde as fantastic and monstrous owing to footage of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris that shows the transportation of notes from reading room to storage. The performative of Sebald’s “monstrosity” is through narrative transversal related to the erasure of historical (holocaust) memory: the new library—erected on a site where Nazis had stored Jewish property which they had stolen during the Second World War—was, following a 1988 decision by the French president, to be the most modern and biggest library building in the world. Keywords: Architecture and Philosophy, Auxiliary Memories, Translation, Uncanny, Film and Novel

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch13

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Alain Resnais’s essay film Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) opens with the claim that “because he has a short memory man amasses countless memory aids.” The question of “memory aids” in the process of searching for one’s identity is a recurrent theme in W.G. Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz, where the author, internalizing Benjamin’s imperative of the “art of citation without citation marks,” operationalizes the titles and specific motifs from three films by Resnais to portray the twentieth century in terms of the uncanny. These are the essay films Night and Fog (1955), Last Year in Marienbad (1961), and Toute la mémoire du monde, where “all the world’s memory” is condensed into a twenty-one-minute swirl of frames shot at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. On October 15, 2001, just two months before he lost his life in a car accident, W.G. Sebald was a guest at the 92nd Street Y Center in New York, where he read for twenty minutes from the English translation of his novel Austerlitz, published seven months earlier.1 In his opening remarks, the writer summarized in just a few sentences the contents of this masterpiece of the multi-directional and multilayered, transtemporal narrative trajectory. Saying that the main character of the novel was called Jacques Austerlitz, he emphasized that his name was identical to that of the famous battle site. In 1939, at the age of four years and a few months, Austerlitz left his native Prague in one of the so-called Kindertransporte, arranged by the British to save the children from what Sebald called “the threat of my compatriots.” The boy, said Sebald, arrived at London’s Liverpool Street train station, where he was welcomed by his foster parents, a Calvinist minister and his wife, who would deprive him of his identity by changing his name to Dafydd Elias and by concealing from him who he really was and where he had come from. As an adult, Sebald continued, Austerlitz himself conspired, as it were, against his own will in this erasing of his identity by constructing in his mind a system of avoidance that allowed him to ignore that which constantly troubled him. However, as he drew toward retirement age, as it so often happens, said Sebald, he felt obliged to confront the problem and set out to search for his identity, which led him to his native city of Prague, where he met his former neighbor and student of Romance languages, Vera Ryšanová, who used to take care of him as a child while his mother, an actress, was at work. Vera told him, among other things, that in the summer of 1938 she, Jacques, his mother, Agáta Austerlitzova, and his father, Maximillian Aychenwald, spent several pleasant days in Marienbad, which 1 Sebald, 92Y Readings, 92Y, New York, October 15, 2001, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?­v=ccMCGjWLlhY&frags=pl%2Cwn.

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reminded Austerlitz of the devastating physical sensations and emotional states he used to experience while staying at the already dilapidated spa in 1972. Presenting his last novel to the New York audience, Sebald chose to read exactly the passage in which Jacques Austerlitz tells the narrator that while he was in Marienbad, accompanying his friend Marie de Verneuil on her journey to the Czech Republic, where she was to conduct some research on the architectural history of European spas, something unknown was causing changes in his mood: “something very obvious, like an ordinary name or a term.” He often lay for hours in the bubbling mineral baths and the retiring rooms, which did him good in one way, yet in another may have weakened the “resistance I had put up for so many years against the emergence of memory.”2 In 1938, when the fictional character Jacques Austerlitz spent his last happy summer with his parents and Vera in Marienbad, Sigmund Freud fled the Nazi pogrom in Vienna and moved to London, where he would die in 1939. The enthusiastic cheering of the Viennese masses at the sight of Adolf Hitler, the unbearable sound that would become the backbone of Bernhard’s drama Heldenplatz (premiered at the Burgtheater on December 4, 1988), is also featured in Sebald’s novel. In 1919, Freud had published a study of that something, unknown yet quite familiar, which kept changing Austerlitz’s moods, not only in Marienbad, but always and everywhere, making him unable to write and feeling as if, in fact, he had neither memory nor the power of thought.3 He eventually suffered from a nervous breakdown, when this self-censorship of his mind, his constant suppression of the memories surfacing in him, led to the almost total paralysis of his linguistic faculties, the destruction of all his notes and sketches, his endless nocturnal peregrinations through London, and hallucinations, which plagued him with increasing frequencies. 4 Freud labeled this something in German as unheimlich, which may best correspond to the English word “uncanny.” He relied on linguistics to explain the term and used various narratives from German literature as examples. Thus, unheimlich is clearly contrary to the meaning of the words heimlich or heimisch, which signifies something that “belongs to home,” that is “familiar” or that we know well. Although Freud concludes that the unheimlich is frightening because it is not known or close to us, he overrides the simple binary opposition by asking how it is possible for something that is heimlich to become unheimlich. The same 2 Sebald, Austerlitz, 374. 3 Ibid., 227. 4 Ibid., 254–55.

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question resonates through Sebald’s novel. Freud emphasizes that the word heimlich itself is not unambiguous, since it belongs to two types of notions that are different yet not contradictory, quoting the German Dictionary of the Grimm Brothers, in which heimlich was interpreted as “a place free from ghostly influences; something friendly and familiar.” Ghostly influences might be what defines the weft of Sebald’s novel, and it was also the subject of Jacques Derrida’s stratigraphic analysis in his 1994 lecture at the conference Memory: The Question of Archives held at Freud’s house in London, which was later published under the title Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.5 It is a study in which the implantation of transpersonal discourse, analogous to Sebald’s narrative procedure, tangentially circles around the person and work of Freud. In his considerations of the uncanny, Freud referred to Ernst Jentsch’s claim that intellectual uncertainty was a key factor in the emergence of uncanny feelings. In fact, Jentsch considered the source of the uncanny to lie in the inability to be convinced that an object was even alive and argued for this conclusion by saying that in storytelling, one of the best means to arouse the sense of uncanniness was to introduce a character that seemed to be human and was actually an automaton. While discussing Jentsch’s hypothesis, Freud focuses on the analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s character Sandman, who throws sand in the eyes of children to make them jump out of their heads, paying particular attention to the episode in which a student, Nathaniel, recognizes the Sandman he was terrified of as a child in an Italian optician called Coppola. Looking through a pocket telescope he has bought from the optician, Nathaniel sees Olympia—an automaton he will fall in love with as if she were a woman. Her eyes, which Coppola has made and then removed from her head in order to “throw them at Nathaniel’s breast,” rekindle the young man’s madness.6 Jacques Austerlitz learns from Vera in Prague that he was named after Jacques Offenbach, whom his mother admired above all. In fact, she first performed at the Prague opera, in the autumn of 1938, in Hoffman’s Stories, in the role of Olympia: the role she had been aspiring to since the beginnings of her career.7 In Sebald’s narrative tissue, Marienbad is by no means a randomly chosen toponym. The name of the once fashionable Czech spa rhizomatically leads to three films by Alain Resnais, in which this originator of the essay-film reflected on the issues of memory, oblivion, the spectral, and of course, the 5 Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, In Diacritics 25, no.2 (1995), 9–63. 6 Freud, The Uncanny. 7 Sebald, Austerlitz, 279, 289.

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holocaust. His film Last Year in Marienbad made in 1961 in collaboration with screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, is one of the most enigmatic films in cinema history. Its protagonists are two men, X and M, a woman, A, and above all—a mirror. It is uncertain whether these characters are alive at the moment when they appear on the film screen, or perhaps that which is given to be seen is narrated from a kind of posthumous perspective. It is also uncertain whether that which X relates to A really happened last year in Marienbad, or if happened at all, or maybe something happened that, to her, is a traumatic experience that she has therefore driven out of her memory, namely sexual violence. The interference of oblivion, illusion, mirroring, violence, and phantasm resounds throughout the discursive space of the film. I am convinced that this enigmatic film by Resnais and Robbe-Grillet is a kind of homage to Jacques Lacan, who presented the first version of his seminal elaboration of the mirror stage as formative of the I function at the 1936 International Congress of Psychoanalysts in Marienbad. Because, just as with Lacan, the woman in Last Year in Marienbad does not exist. In the film, A is, just like Lacan’s petit a, linked to the imaginary, moreover the phantasmatic: the (partial) object of desire. Jacques Austerlitz, symptomatically, does not carry his father’s family name, but his mother’s. This fact must be seen in the context of Lacan’s concept of the Name of the Father, related to the regulation of desire, that is, the acquisition of language and identity. The surname Austerlitz begins with the letter A, and so does his mother’s first name, Agáta. Austerlitz remembers neither his mother nor the summer vacations in Marienbad with his parents and Vera, because what followed soon afterwards was a traumatic experience for him. At the moment of parting at the Prague Main Station, from which the Kindertransport started, Agáta literally became the original lost object for Jacques. Shortly thereafter, she was herself put on a train, one to Terezín. I would like to remind the reader here that Freud identified the mother’s body with the first “home” and thus something that is familiar, yet of a Heimlichkeit that, with the passing of time, becomes archaic, unheimlich. In 1955, ten years after the fall of the Third Reich and the entry of the Allied forces into the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek, Resnais articulated a cinematic reflection on the holocaust titled Night and Fog. Montaging the then current footage of desolate landscapes intersected by railroads and the abandoned ruins of camp architecture with archival footage produced by the Nazis themselves, while documenting the technology of the “final solution,” Resnais raised questions about recognition, as Harun Farocki would thirty years later with his film Bilder der Welt und

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Inschrift des Krieges (1989). Do we see that the camp, like a modern city, has a carefully designed urban structure? Manufacturing facilities, apartment blocks, research and hospital facilities, a brothel, and a crematorium? Do we see that production is rationalized there, that every substance is recyclable, that nothing is left to chance and improvisation, and that the control towers, for example, can be built in an Alpine, garage or Japanese style? While the cinematic image shows scenes from Auschwitz, the narrator’s voice asks: “Is it in vain that we try to remember?” Analyzing the film, Phillip Lopate has argued that Night and Fog is an anti-documentary because that particular reality cannot be “documented”—we would be defeated in advance, because it is too heinous. Asking what can be done, he concludes that Resnais and his screenwriter Jean Cayrol (himself a former camp inmate) provided the following answer: “We can reflect, ask questions, examine the record, and interrogate our own responses. In short, offer up an essay.”8 Sebald offered such an essay with his novel Austerlitz. Among other things, it even contains a reflection on the urban design of the Terezín camp. Inserting reproductions of photographs showing Terezín in the text of the novel, in an order of appearance that follows a completely cinematic logic, Sebald made a kind of homage to Resnais’s essay-film on the holocaust. The first in a series of images embedded in the text shows a detail of the outer perimeter wall of the city-fortress, branching in arcades, followed by a wide shot in which the walls vanish in the valley vegetation on the right side of the frame and then the exterior gives way to the interior of a desolate city—footage in which the marginal lines of the street emptied from people are lost like tracks in a vanishing point. This wide shot is followed by a detail of the wall, perforated by a single window under which a horizontal sequence of numbered trashcans is neatly assembled, and after that scene by four photographs of entrance doors into Terezín’s staircases. Sebald concludes the Terezín visual with a shot of a bizarre shop, over whose windows stretches the giant inscription “Antikos Bazar,” and with two frames showing the even more bizarre contents of the shop window in a close-up. The only Resnais film that Sebald explicitly mentions in Austerlitz is Toute la mémoire du monde, shot in 1956, one year after Night and Fog: Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliothèque and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading rooms to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together 8

Lopate, “Night and Fog.”

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with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn. I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais. Even before then my mind often dwelt on the question of whether there in the reading room of the library, which was full of a quiet humming, rustling, and clearing of throats, I was on the Island of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony.9

I will repeat here that Resnais opens said film with the statement that “because he has a short memory man amasses countless memory aids.” Unlike Resnais’s “memory aids,” Austerlitz, who has no memory at all, admits to the narrator that he had constantly been preoccupied by the accumulation of knowledge that served as a substitute or compensatory memory.10 The photographs that Sebald regularly inserted into the fabric of his literary texts functioned at the same time as memory aids, substitute or compensatory memory, but Resnais’s claim about memory aids must be related to the question that accompanied the footage of Auschwitz in his film Night and Fog: “Is it in vain that we try to remember?” Such relationalizing finds its justification in the fact that the reference to Resnais’s essayization of the concept of all the memory of the world is the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, which in his view becomes a figuration of the uncanny, or perhaps more precisely, of the monstrous perspective written out by the permanently multiplying cubes and grids: endless corridors. At the very end of the twentieth century, we would be spun into an abyss analogous to that of Resnais’s by the Matrix of the Wachowski brothers. While a close-up in Toute la mémoire du monde shows a book on whose title page one can read the name of Zola, the narrator’s voice informs us that, among other things, the Bibliothèque nationale has the collected works of Émile Zola. Among them, I suppose, a copy of the magazine L’Aurore, from whose front page he thundered on January 13, 1898: J’accuse…! As a twenty-year old man in Paris, Sebald’s Austerlitz lived on the rue Émile Zola: When I was first in Paris at the end of the 1950s, he said, turning to me, I had a room in the apartment of an elderly lady of almost transparent 9 Sebald, Austerlitz, 446–47. 10 Ibid., 254.

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appearance called Amélie Cerf, who lived at Number 6, rue Émile Zola, not far from the pont Mirabeau, a shapeless concrete block which I still sometimes see in my nightmares today. On my return now I had really meant to find somewhere to stay in the same street, but then after all I decided to rent a place here in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, since my father, Maximilian Aychenwald, whose last known address was in the rue Barrault, must have frequented this area at least for a while before, as it seems, he disappeared irrevocably and without trace.”11

Austerlitz’s first Parisian address in Sebald’s novel is by no means accidentally chosen, because the name of Émile Zola symbolizes a public condemnation of systemic anti-Semitism that caused the writer to be sentenced to prison and likely to pay for this act of civic courage with his own life. His J’accuse…!, an open letter to the President of the French Republic, was published in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, which as a whole, in Hannah Arendt’s view, heralded the twentieth century. Arendt concluded that the Dreyfus affair could survive in its political implications because two of its elements grew in importance during the twentieth century: the first was hatred of the Jews, and the second suspicion of the republic itself, of parliament and the state machine.12 She further argued that “it was not in France that the true sequel to the affair was to be found, but the reason why France fell an easy prey to Nazi aggression is not far to seek. Hitler’s propaganda spoke a language long familiar and never quite forgotten.”13 In addressing the political significance of the Dreyfus affair, Arendt pointed out that some of the features of the twentieth century were sharply outlined there. “The déclassés, produced through nineteenth-century economy,” she wrote, “had to grow numerically until they were strong minorities of the nations, before that coup d’état, which had remained but a grotesque plot in France, could achieve reality in Germany almost without effort. The prelude to Nazism was played over the entire European stage.”14 I recall here that the object of Austerlitz’s scholarly interest is the very architecture created to serve the nineteenth-century economy. It is perhaps not too well-known that the writer Émile Zola became obsessed with photography at the age of fifty-six and made thousands of shots with his ten cameras. He personally developed and experimented with the negatives. There is a photograph that shows Zola, wearing a 11 Ibid., 437. 12 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 92. 13 Ibid., 93–94. 14 Ibid., 94.

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long apron to protect his clothing, checking the developing solution in the garden. In 1900, he made a prof ile portrait of Lt. Col. Picquart, the chief of military intelligence, who was dismissed from duty and sent to Tunisia for his efforts to investigate the facts of the Dreyfus case. There are numerous photographs in which Zola captured buildings erected for the World Exhibition, including the Palais de l’Electricité, from angles that were quite unusual for his time. From the period of Zola’s London exile of 1898–99, there are a number of photographs that testify to his fascination with nineteenth-century architecture and urbanism, and some of them are reminiscent of the shots Sebald inserted into the fabric of his novels. Zola frequently photographed The Queen’s Hotel in London, where he lived in the district of Upper Norwood, and the nearby Crystal Palace, built in 1851 for the World Exhibition in London. Similar to Sebald’s fictional character Austerlitz, he was fascinated by the nineteenth-century marvels of architecture, structures made of cast iron and glass. And so was Walter Benjamin, who in 1928 or 1929 wrote his essay “The Ring of Saturn or Some Remarks on Iron Construction,” which he did not publish in his lifetime. He opens it by stating that the beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed those initial experiments with iron construction whose results, in conjunction with those obtained from experiments with the steam engine, would so thoroughly transform the face of Europe by the end of the century. Benjamin recalls that iron construction was first used in the construction of luxury establishments—winter gardens and arcades—but soon found the true range of its technical and industrial application in constructions that had no precedent and were occasioned by wholly new needs, such as covered markets, railroad stations or exhibition halls.15 These are the very constructions that the scholar Austerlitz studies in Sebald’s novel. Benjamin does not fail to mention in the “Ring of Saturn” that Offenbach’s operetta Parisian Life was the first theatrical piece to be set in a railroad station.16 It is the Gare de l’Ouest station where the two Parisian dandies meet. Although the protagonists, or more accurately the voices of Sebald’s novel, the narrator and Austerlitz, are all but dandies, it is impossible for me not to see in the enactment of their first encounter in that Salle des pas perdus, the waiting room of the Antwerp Centraal Station, Benjamin’s fully developed art of citation without citation marks. What is cited is, of course, as in several other places in the novel, the life and work of Walter Benjamin. 15 Benjamin, “The Ring of Saturn or Some Remarks on Iron Construction”, In The Arcades Project, 885–86. 16 Ibid., 886.

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I suspect that, when Alain Resnais made the film Toute la mémoire du monde in 1956, he did not know that there were unpublished manuscripts of Walter Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale. It was only in 1981, namely, that Giorgio Agamben, editor of the Italian translation of Benjamin’s works, discovered a series of texts in Benjamin’s hand at the Bataille Archives in the Bibliothèque nationale and concluded that they must be the writings that, fleeing the Nazi pogrom in 1940, Benjamin had entrusted to Bataille for safekeeping. These writings were long considered lost.17 In one letter, Benjamin acknowledged that “nothing in the world could replace the Bibliothèque nationale to me.”18 Thus, the Bibliothèque nationale became an explicit link between the life and work of Walter Benjamin and Sebald’s fictional character, Jacques Austerlitz. It is at that library, then located in the rue Richelieu, that young Austerlitz meets Marie de Verneuil, with whom he would stay in Marienbad in 1972. For him, a man with no memories, Bibliothèque nationale is a refuge. In the novel, Sebald reproduced a photograph of a detail of its oval reading room. It is the interior of a building designed by architect Henri Labrouste, whose adaptation for the needs of the then largest library in the world took place between 1854 and 1875. On July 14, 1988, President Mitterrand suddenly announced in a television interview the construction of one of the largest, if not the largest and most modern libraries in the world, which would cover all areas of knowledge, be accessible to everyone and use the most recent technologies of data transfer.19 The new Bibliothèque nationale de France was designed by Dominique Perrault, whose project Mitterrand personally chose from among those recommended to him for tender. It was fully opened October 8, 1998. It is at the site where the new library was built at the very end of the twentieth century that the genealogy of suppressing historical memory crystallizes in Sebald’s narrative fabric. Namely, librarian Lemoine tells Austerlitz the following: “On the waste land between the marshalling yard of the gare d’Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.”20 While filming his Night and Fog and Toute la mémoire du monde in the mid-1950s, Resnais could not have foreseen that 17 Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, 668. 18 Ibid., 654. 19 See http://www.bnf.fr/en/bnf/history_bnf/a.from_royal_collections_to_bnf.html. 20 Sebald, Austerlitz, 486.

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Mitterrand would, by decision of a sovereign, build a new National Library on that very spot thirty years later, and that no famous writer would send him an open letter because of that. During their last Paris meeting, Austerlitz tells the narrator his own view of this new library complex, which, with its regime of surveillance and its rigid control of movement, was designed solely “to instil a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers.”21 He also conveys to him the reflections of librarian Lemoine: The new library building, which in both its entire layout and its nearludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy, might be described, so Lemoine thought, said Austerlitz, as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past.22

The librarian’s conclusion is analogous to what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno stated in 1944, in a book whose first sentence establishes that the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. For they wrote in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: The threateningly well-meaning advice frequently given to emigrants that they should forget the past because it cannot be transplanted, that they should write off their prehistory and start an entirely new life, merely inflicts verbally on the spectral intruders the violence they have long learned to do to themselves. They repress history in themselves and others, out of fear that it might remind them of the disintegration of their own lives, a disintegration which itself consists largely in the repression of history.23

Librarian Lemoine takes Austerlitz to a lookout located on the eighteenth floor of the largest library in the world, built on the site of a warehouse where the Germans once brought looted Jewish property, and tells him: Over f ive hundred art historians, antique dealers, restorers, joiners, clockmakers, furriers and couturiers brought in from Drancy and guarded by a contingent of Indochinese soldiers were employed day after day, in 21 Ibid., 473. 22 Ibid., 483. 23 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, 179.

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fourteen-hour shifts, to put the goods coming into the depot in proper order and sort them by value and kind. […] More than seven hundred train loads left from here for the ruined cities of the Reich. Not infrequently, said Lemoine, Party grandees on visits from Germany and high-ranking SS and Wehrmacht officers stationed in Paris would walk around the halls of the depot, known to the prisoners as Les Galéries d’Austerlitz, with their wives or other ladies, choosing drawing room furniture for a Grunewald villa, or a Sèvres dinner service, a fur coat or a Pleyel piano. The most valuable items, of course, were not sent off wholesale to the bombed cities, and no one will now admit to knowing where they went, for the fact is that the whole affair is buried beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grande Bibliothèque, said Lemoine.24

Today, the new Bibliothèque nationale de France bears the name of François Mitterrand. An encyclopedic entry in the Britannica brings a little-known fact that the president, before joining the Resistance Movement in 1943, worked with the collaborative Vichy government.25 This new building of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, beneath whose foundations “the whole affair is buried in the most literal sense”—concerning the prisoners of the Drancy detention camp who were forced to evaluate and sort Nazi booty before being deported to extermination camps—is located in the Thirteenth Arrondissement of Paris, where Austerlitz’s father lived for a while “before, as it seems, he disappeared irrevocably and without trace.” During their last meeting in Paris, Austerlitz tells the narrator about having been told that his father, Maximilian Aychenwald, “had been interned during the latter part of 1942 in the camp at Gurs, a place in the Pyrenean foothills which he, Austerlitz, must now seek out.”26 He also tells him that, when he had come back from the Bibliothèque Nationale and changed trains at the gare d’Austerlitz, he had felt a premonition that he was coming closer to his father […] part of the railway network had been paralyzed by a strike last Wednesday, and in the unusual silence which, as a consequence, had descended on the gare d’Austerlitz, an idea came to him of his father’s leaving Paris from this station, close as it was to his flat in the rue Barrault, soon after the Germans entered the city.27 24 Sebald, Austerlitz, 487–89. 25 See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francois-Mitterrand. 26 Sebald, Austerlitz, 489. 27 Ibid., 489–90.

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The figure of Austerlitz, woven from the multiple voices of oppressed28 and lost lives, is that of a storyteller29 par excellence, and in his Wittgenstein backpack, Sebald’s “embodied criticality”30 also smuggles numerous prefigurations of Walter Benjamin’s life and work. Let us recall that, just like Benjamin,31 at one point in his life, Austerlitz faced the inability to write and a constant rejection of every memory that lead him to being unable to speak and to destroy all his notes. A reference to Austerlitz’s obsession with nineteenth-century architecture is found in Benjamin’s seminal work, The Arcade Project (Das Passagen-Werk), which he worked on from 1927 until his death and that was actually the basis for his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Therefore, in the narrative texture of the Austerlitz novel, which I understand as a sort of essayization of the concept of history as inseparable from “all the memory of the world,” the never-mentioned Walter Benjamin functions as a paradoxical paternal figure. Namely, that Benjamin, who permanently settled in Paris in 1933, was interned in September 1939 as a foreign national at a camp in Nevres, located some two hundred kilometers south of Paris, from which he was released two months later, following an appeal of Adrienne Monnier to the international PEN club. Benjamin was first transported by bus to Gare d’Austerlitz under armed escort, and then by train to Nevres. He returned to Paris on November 25, 1939, where he wrote his Theses on the Philosophy of History in his apartment in the rue Dombasle before the beginning of May 1940, which he then mailed to New York, to his friend Gretel Adorno. It was not Benjamin who stayed at the Gurs camp, to which Austerlitz’s father, Maximilian Aychenwald, was allegedly deported, but his sister Dora, who was released from there in June, a month after German troops invaded France. Hannah Arendt was deported to the same camp in 1940 from Paris, but managed to escape after a few weeks. On June 14, 1940, Benjamin and his sister boarded one of the last trains transporting refugees from Paris to the south. They landed in Lourdes, at the foot of the Pyrenees, where they spent 28 With the term “oppressed” I am referring to Benjamin’s Thesis VIII on the notion of history, which says: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 29 I am referring here to Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” from 1936, where he argues that the art of storytelling is coming to an end, because we have lost an ability that seemed inalienable to us—the ability to exchange experiences. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, 83. 30 I am using the term “embodied criticality” in the sense Irit Rogoff proposes in her text “‘Smuggling’—An Embodied Criticality,” https://xenopraxis.net/readings/rogoff_smuggling. pdf. 31 On Benjamin’s six years of “publishing silence” and its causes, see Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, 26.

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several weeks, since on July 10 Pétain’s collaborative government banned all foreigners from traveling without special permission. In mid-August, Benjamin went to Marseille to obtain a visa from the US Consulate, as arranged by Horkheimer and his colleagues from the Institute for Social Research, whose headquarters were relocated from Frankfurt to New York after Hitler came to power. In addition to the US visa, he received a transit visa to Spain and Portugal, but what he did not have was the permit to leave France because his name was on the list of enemies of National Socialism. Late in September, Benjamin took a train to the Spanish border with an acquaintance from Marseille, Henny Gurland, and her minor son. With no way to legally exit France, in order to reach the Portuguese port from which he was to sail for the United States, he started on foot with a group of refugees on September 26 across the Pyrenees, although seriously ill, and managed to reach the town of Port Bou at the border. During their last Paris meeting, Austerlitz tells the narrator that he thought his father “would surely have left Paris in time, had gone south on foot across the Pyrenees, and perished somewhere along his way.”32 On the day Benjamin arrived on foot in Port Bou, Franco’s Spain for some reason closed the border to those who did not have a French exit visa, and the refugees were told that they would be returned to France the next day. That night, in the hotel room, Benjamin committed suicide with an overdose of morphine. The next day, the border was opened and Benjamin was buried. Prior to leaving Port Bou, Henny Gurland destroyed a number of letters according to Benjamin’s instruction, probably including the manuscript that he had carried in his briefcase across the Pyrenees. Years later, a list of the deceased’s belongings was found in the municipal files under the label “Benjamin Walter”: a leather briefcase (no manuscript mentioned), a watch, a pipe, six photographs, an X-ray, spectacles, several letters, a newspaper, and some money.33 At the beginning of this text, I argued that in his last novel, Austerlitz, Sebald internalized Benjamin’s imperative to master the art of citation without citation marks by operationalizing the titles and specific motifs from three films by Alain Resnais in order to portray the twentieth century in the terms of the uncanny. Giorgio Agamben, who discovered Benjamin’s lost writings at the Bibliothèque Nationale (which is both a protagonist of Resnais’s film Toute la mémoire du monde and the scene of Sebald’s novel), has argued that Benjamin’s citation has a strategic function, thereby referring 32 Sebald, Austerlitz, 441. 33 For the biographic data about the last year of Benjamin’s life, I have relied on Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, 647–67.

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to a comment in Benjamin’s index cards that contains remarks on cognitive theory in which he stated: “This work should fully develop the art of citing without citation marks.”34 With its fully developed art of citing without citation marks, Sebald’s narrative procedure has woven the person and work of Walter Benjamin into the very fabric of the novel. The novel echoes with the very questions that Benjamin raised in his essay “The Task of the Translator.” For Benjamin, translation was a mode, and therefore “it must be pointed out that certain relational concepts gain their proper, indeed their best sense, when they are not from the outset connected exclusively with human beings. Thus, we could still speak of an unforgettable life or moment, even if all human beings had forgotten it.”35 One should keep in mind that W.G. Sebald was the founder of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the East Anglia University in Norwich. Describing an image he remembered from Resnais’s Toute la mémoire du monde, Austerlitz speaks of the library as a complicated, constantly evolving being—a hybrid between non-human and human. Therefore, in his imagination, this film “assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions.”36 Juxtaposing the notions of image and violence, Jean-Luc Nancy has observed that the German word for the image—Bild—comes from the root bil, which signifies a prodigious force or a miraculous sign, hence the monstrosity in the image.37 In Benjamin’s last work, the Theses on the Philosophy of History, the term “image”—Bild—appears repeatedly, and Agamben has recognized it as one of the most enigmatic concepts in Benjamin’s later thought.38 In “Thesis V” Benjamin writes: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. […] For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”39 Elsewhere, he wrote that “it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”40 It is this coming together that is passionately explored in the visual and verbal tangents of Sebald’s writing—tangents that seamlessly generate the 34 Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, 138. 35 Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task”, in Illuminations, 151–65. 36 Sebald, Austerlitz, 447. 37 Nancy, “Image and Violence,” in The Ground of the Image, 22. 38 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 141. 39 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 255. 40 Quoted in Agamben, The Time that Remains, 141.

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constellations within which remembrance inaugurates the “new genres of knowledge.”41

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich & Company, 1973. Benjamin, Walter. “The Ring of Saturn or Some Remarks on Iron Construction.” In The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, 885–87. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” In Illuminations. 83–109. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10, no. 2 (1997): 151–65. Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9–63. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Translated by Shane Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Lopate, Phillip. “Night and Fog.” Criterion Collection. Current. June 23, 2003. https:// www.criterion.com/current/posts/288-night-and-fog. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Image and Violence.” In The Ground of the Image, 15–26. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

41 A syntagm “new genre of knowledge” is borrowed from Didi-Huberman’s book on Aby Warburg’s Bilderaltas Mnemosyne. See in Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, 11.

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Rogoff, Irit. “‘Smuggling’—An Embodied Criticality.” Vienna: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2006. https://xenopraxis.net/readings/ rogoff_smuggling.pdf. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library, 2011.

About the Author Leonida Kovač is an art historian and theorist, curator and full professor at the University of Zagreb, Academy of Fine Arts. Her main fields of interest are contemporary art, critical theories and feminist theories. She has published nine books and numerous academic articles on contemporary art. She has also curated more than forty exhibitions including Ivan Faktor’s exhibition at the São Paulo Biennale (2002) and Patterns of Visibility for the Croatian Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice (2003). From 2003 to 2006 she was vice president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

14 As a Dog Finds a Spear Hilde Van Gelder 1 Abstract In an interview shortly before his untimely death in 2001, W.G. Sebald shed light on how he pursued research: in a diffuse manner. Proudly he clarified that for refining his approach he had been contemplating at length how dogs run through a field. His was a way of proceeding exactly as a dog searches: to and fro, back and forth, sometimes slowly and at times fast until, eventually, there is a find. When, two years later, Susan Sontag paid tribute to her departed friend (in Regarding the Pain of Others), she emphasized Sebald’s extraordinary capacity for remembering, not by means of recalling a story but instead by calling up a picture. It was, according to Sontag, through seeding his narratives with photographs that he became the militant elegist we now continue to praise. Sebald, she added, actively wanted the reader to remember almost alongside with him, that which he himself still seemed in the process of gathering together with regard to lost lives, lost nature, and lost cityscapes. On both of these levels, Sebald’s artistic legacy has been a source of inspiration for writing my forthcoming book, Ground Sea. Photography and the Right to Be Reborn (Leuven University Press, 2020). The outcome of a decadelong investigation of the infamously called “migrant crisis” in Calais, France, this project started out as a classical study in photography theory (including case studies from the work of Allan Sekula, Sylvain George, and Bruno Serralongue among others). Encouraged by Sebald’s embedded way of working, however, reiterated field trips to the maquis of Calais and 1 Sincere thanks to Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Ilse van Rijn for their invitation to deliver a keynote address at their most inspiring conference, co-organized with Ihab Saloul and Leonida Kovač. Furthermore, I am grateful to the Allan Sekula Studio: to the artist’s widow Sally Stein, for having granted permission to reproduce a work scan of an unpublished photographic transparency now part of Sekula’s vast archive; and to Ina Steiner for the readying and providing of the image. Thanks as well to Erien Withouck for logistical and technical assistance, to Joeri Verbesselt for precious feedback, and to Ton Brouwers for copy editing.

Kovač, L., Lerm Hayes, C.M., Rijn, I. van, & Saloul, I. (eds.), W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies. Memory, Word, and Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463729758_ch14

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its vicinity proved necessary soon after the forceful eviction—between October 24 and 27, 2016—of 6,500 inhabitants from what French Government officials euphemistically called the “camp de la Lande.” From then on my art historical approach transformed into a creative practice geared toward turning cosmic vision, in the sense of Édouard Glissant in Philosophie de la relation (2009), into political ideas. Keywords: Trans-generational, Visual, Sculpture, Tautological, Revolutionary

August the 2nd was a peaceful day. I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order. I wrote with an ease that astonished me. Line by line I filled the pages of the ruled notepad I had brought with me from home. —W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

On the morning of August 4, 2018—just days before US First Lady Melania Trump’s Slovenian-born parents Viktor and Amalija Knavs were sworn in as American citizens at 26 Federal Plaza—I took the Amtrak from Penn Station to the bedroom suburb of New Rochelle, NY. Suzanne Tanswell, board member of the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical (H & NRH) Association, had agreed to a meeting at the Thomas Paine Cottage that afternoon. As she learned through our preliminary email exchange that I never visited the site before and would be traveling from overseas, she deemed it necessary to inform me in advance of the volunteer-run space’s summer closure for renovation works. It was kind of her to prevent me from setting my expectations too high. Still, the unlucky tiding that it would not be possible to pay a visit to the sole museum dedicated to the author of Common Sense (1776) had only mildly discouraged me. Mostly, I was eager to spend time outside on the now parceled grounds of the former Thomas Paine farm. And one of the items on my bucket list was to search for the spot of Paine’s desecrated tomb. In 1784 Thomas Paine received the land from the State of New York as a reward for his patriotic services, together with the charming house in Euro-American style, then positioned slightly more to the northeast of the terrain. In 1839, public contributions allowed for the erection of an outdoor monument to this key f igure of both the American and

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Figure 24 Detail view of the Thomas Paine Monument, New Rochelle, NY, August 4, 2018

© Photo: Hilde Van Gelder

French Revolutions, who had died thirty years earlier in precarious circumstances. It is the only open-air monument in the United States dedicated to him. Its present location at the crossroads of North and Paine Avenues, just next to the cottage, marks the northwest corner of Paine’s former farmland. A f ine bust portraying the hero stands mounted on a carved marble column. Adorned with a luscious wig, his cleanly shaved face looks radiant. Wideopen eyes peer straight into the world from beneath heavy eyebrows. Sculptor James Wilson Alexander MacDonald further enhanced Paine’s delicately modeled features by making him wear an English ditto suit. Casually hidden under his coat is a waistcoat with the upper buttons undone, so as to allow the shirt ruffles to show. A neck stock of pleated linen completes this sharp dress. The titles of all of Paine’s major writings are carved into the bronze’s base. The US artist Allan Sekula (1951–2013) made several photographs of this statue on a cold and clear day in March 1996, while working on a sequence that he later came to title Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996 / 1998). But the transparencies of that shooting session, now preserved within the Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, never made it into the final edit of Sekula’s artwork. At the Northeast Regional station NRO, a brick structure with gabled roof and stylized pilasters vaguely reminiscent of similar constructions in French Normandy, I asked the local taxi driver to take me straight to the Thomas Paine Monument. To my surprise, he had no clue of its whereabouts. As well as possible, I gave him directions from the set of printout documents

264 Hilde Van Gelder Figure 25 Allan Sekula, Thomas Paine Park, New York City and Cod Fisher, Dover, two Cibachrome matt photographs, framed measures 75 x 103.3 cm and 75.3 x 104 cm; and Dockers loading sugar ship, Calais, framed triptych, three Cibachrome matt photographs 51.8 x 200 cm, part of Deep Six / Passer au bleu, Part 1, “The Rights of Man”—1er volet, “Les Droits de l’homme,” 1996/1998. Installation view, presented with selected items from Allan Sekula, Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010–13), of the exhibition Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus, curated by Carles Guerra, Anja Isabel Schneider, and Hilde Van Gelder, Barcelona, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2017

© Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Allan Sekula Studio. Collections Museum of Fine Arts, Calais and M HKA/Flemish Community of Belgium

from online research, stuffed in my backpack. Together we searched for the column, which we eventually identified from a fair distance with the help of work prints from Sekula’s unpublished visual materials. Upon arrival, I started trying out a few angles with my camera. The only assignment I had given myself was to make pictures resembling the ones Sekula had made twenty-two years earlier. The idea behind this rather tautological exercise was to compare images of the same place of interest, made at separate moments in time. The drive behind this silly experiment, which may appear preposterous to some, was to both investigate and unpack Sekula’s critical legacy. A couple of days before this summerly field trip to New Rochelle, I re-photographed the spot where Sekula had made intriguing shots of a metal garbage can,

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Figure 26a Detail view of Allan Sekula, Deep Six / Passer au bleu, Part 1, “The Rights of Man”—1er volet, “Les Droits de l’homme” (1996 / 1998), six Cibachrome matt photographs, two text panels, one chair, and woman reading in one of two books, variable dimensions. Installation shot from the exhibition Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus, curated by Carles Guerra, Anja Isabel Schneider, and Hilde Van Gelder, Barcelona, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2017

© Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Allan Sekula Studio. Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Calais

rather oddly positioned on a walking path in New York City’s Thomas Paine Park. From the small set of slides and transparencies that he made of the trash bin, he selected one for inclusion in the first part of Deep Six / Passer au bleu, titled “The Rights of Man—Les Droits de l’homme.” Coincidentally, this small urban park is just across the street from the abovementioned 26 Federal Plaza. What is more, the square immediately leading visitors from the park to the building’s front entrance bears the scars of a painful legal battle that resulted in the removal of Richard Serra’s

266 Hilde Van Gelder Figure 26b Allan Sekula, Deep Six/Passer au bleu (1996/1998), installation view, detail, chair with public library copy French edition of Thomas Paine, Les droits de l’homme (1791–92), in Voyage, de l’exotisme aux nonlieux, curated by Chrystèle Burgard and Yannick Miloux, Musée de Valence, Summer 1998

© Allan Sekula Studio

controversial thirty-seven-meter COR-TEN steel sculptural installation Tilted Arc (1981) in 1989. Thomas Paine Park, New York City belongs to a group of thirteen photographs that is accompanied, in installation context, by a specific book: Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–92). Following Sekula’s instructions this volume must be borrowed from a local public library. The exhibition protocol stipulates that it must be offered for inspection in the vicinity of the work, where the visitor can sit on a chair should she wish to engage in further reading. Thomas Paine Park, New York City is part of a diptych. When published or shown in a space it needs to figure side by side with a portrait taken on a rainy day of a cod angler measuring his line on a pier in Dover, almost ready to cast his fishing line into the Channel. (see fig. 2) Together these images appear to suggest that something could be “fished” from a dustbin. The visually most prominent candidate for such a recovery operation is a paper shopping bag shaped like a US flag, deposited in the trash can. The obvious reference seems to be that, in our commercialized “global” economy, we have collectively trashed Paine’s radically democratic ideals.

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That impression is further conf irmed by Deep Six/Passer au bleu’s bilingual title. In both the English and French languages, the verbs “deep six” and “passer au bleu” are synonymous expressions meaning to “make something disappear, to take away all trace.”2 As if inspired by Houdini, this lesser-known work in Sekula’s oeuvre somehow appears willing to perform a perfect vanishing act. Its subject matter deals with “sending someone or something to the bottom,” as Sekula wrote in a letter to Annette Haudiquet, then director of the Calais museum.3 There exists only one complete set of it in the world (in the collection of the museum that commissioned it). As a result, it is tempting to presume that Sekula deliberately buried it away in what novelist Orhan Pamuk has fondly called an “empty museum.”4 Of course, empty museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Calais are not literally void of content. Fact is that they own collections, but hardly anyone will ever inquire about them. *** As soon as I started making my first tentative snaps of Paine’s statue, I realized how difficult it was to find an interesting angle. It seemed easy to understand the reasons why Allan Sekula had decided to edit out his pictures from Deep Six/Passer au bleu. How could one avoid that Paine’s sculptural effigy appeared dull? Intuitively I tried something more audacious and attached my tote bag depicting Mutiny, a cartoon originally published on page 15 of the December 1937 edition of the radical left-wing magazine Labor Defender, to the monument’s enclosure. Representing two ship owners from the higher social classes (one wearing a top hat and the other a pince-nez) yelling at a supposedly mutinous ship tied to the dock, the cartoon is now part of the vast collection of “objects of interest” that Sekula assembled for his body of work Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum (2010–13).5 Right when I had stepped back across the street and my visor was all set again for shooting, a police vehicle emerged seemingly out of nowhere. It was a quiet Saturday morning and, from having taken a quick look around, 2 Beausse, “Deep Six/Passer au bleu. Or Social Work Seen From a Ferry,” 8. The complete photographic sequence is available for consultation in this book. 3 This unpublished letter, March 13, 1998, is available in the archive of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Calais and in the Allan Sekula Archive, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 4 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 679. 5 For more on the Mutiny graphic, which Sekula intended to be used as a cutout on various supports, see Van Gelder, Allan Sekula and Verbeeck, “The Residual Poetics of Mutiny in Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013).”

268 Hilde Van Gelder Figure 27  Allan Sekula: The Dockers’ Museum including Mutiny [title by Allan Sekula], cartoon, graphic digitally rendered as vinyl cutouts, originally published in Labor Defender 11, no. 11 (December 1937), variable dimensions, installation view, Lumiar Cité, curated by Jürgen Bock, Lisbon, 2013

© Photo: DMF Fotografia, Lisbon. Courtesy Escola MAUMAUS and Allan Sekula Studio. Collection M HKA / Flemish Community of Belgium.

I imagined myself to be out there alone in this residential neighborhood. The car’s steady approach at the decisive moment made me conclude that its driver must have been observing me for a while already. Through a Megaphone speaker, a man’s aggressive voice instructed me from afar to immediately remove the tote bag from the fence. Nervously I decided to push the button first nonetheless, upon which the officer shouted once more that I instantly had to obey his orders. After yet another too-quick-shot, I gave up. Disappointed, I grabbed the bag, and walked away up North Avenue, trying to hide my fear that he would requisition the photo materials. He went on to intimidate me by slowly following for a while from behind with his black and white. Since this cop probably saw me as an out-of-place and ill-mannered middle-aged, foreign-looking tourist, rather than as a potential vandal, he eventually crossed the double yellow line abruptly while making a sturdy U-turn. To impress me further, he put his sirens on and drove back loudly toward the town center. Camouflage had granted me such favors before.

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Figure 28 Detail view of the Thomas Paine Monument, New Rochelle, NY, August 4, 2018.

© Photo: Hilde Van Gelder

While killing time that morning in the residential streets of New Rochelle, waiting for my afternoon appointment at the sun-drenched cottage, I pondered the emotional shock caused by that verbally violent policeman. There could be no doubt that he and I—both members of social classes obliged to work hard to gain their salaries—shared an objective common interest in revitalizing Paine’s revolutionary ideas. But, at best, this angry, law-abiding officer had but shown a small glimpse of understanding that. At sunset, while the warm evening light cast a yellowish glow on the shiny red, faux leather pillow seats of the crawling train, I browsed through the images of that overwhelming day, as I made my way back into the mouth of the megalopolis. The frame of my only useful picture of the monument-cum-tote-bag, I came to notice to my dismay, happened to cut off Paine’s head. The result of this bizarre framing was an unexpected shift of focus to a bewildering tangle of iron pins and electricity cables, which seemed to strangle the ornamented column like creeping snakes. Suddenly, the attention came to fall much more on the central medallion. Paine’s motto crowns his idealized face in profile, surrounded by a laurel wreath. The citation right above is from Rights of Man (1791–92), “The World is My Country. To Do

270 Hilde Van Gelder Figure 29 Allan Sekula, work scan of a transparency never selected by the artist, now part of the Allan Sekula Archive at the Getty Research Institute Special Collections

© Allan Sekula Studio

Good My Religion.”6 Within the picture, Sekula’s Mutiny graphic, positioned closer to another carved quotation from Common Sense slightly lower on the column (“The palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise”), appeared to engage in an intriguing image-textual dialogue.7 As I observed this bewildering décor completed by age-old trees, shrubs of Eupatorium purpureum and Hydrangea flowers, I wondered what Sekula and Paine—now reunited in the dark back of time—would have thought of their occasional, transgenerational conversation. As the capital of Empire was about to gobble the commuter train up again, my last thoughts went out to another of Sekula’s unpublished photographs made during his upstate excursion in the winter of 1996. It represents the neatly kept but, sadly, uninhabited cottage. Its celestial blue shutters and entrance door make it seem an otherworldly place, a fairytale house. In this picture, the cottage appears as if it were the paradisiacal home from where an evil force chased Hansel and Gretel. 6 Paine, Collected Writings, 614. 7 Ibid., 7.

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Sekula’s stilled photograph magnif icently captures the frozen utopia that Paine’s ideals embody in a US democracy presently put to the test by autocratic decline. The specific angle from where the artist decided to take this picture is telling. Fond as he was of the Brothers Grimm’s tales, we might fancy him to have looked for the imagined position of the two children who have just found their father’s home back after a dangerous journey into the darkest of forests. As they will cross the little bridge, their shouting voices will resonate from afar within the living room. They will come to warm up the icy silence that has reigned for much too long near these magnificent dwellings, originally “purchased” by colonial settlers from the native Siwanoy tribe in the seventeenth century. *** How, in the afternoon of that same fourth of August, the volunteers from the H & NRH Association helped me locate the commemorative plaque indicating the spot where, in 1819, William Cobbett had shamelessly exhumed Paine’s body from his grave, and how we eventually found it, unreadable since completely overgrown with wild shrubs, is discussed at greater length in my Ground Sea. Photography and the Right to Be Reborn. The above recollection of that special day serves to illustrate a key instance from the many years of writing this book, marked by numerous moments of “objective chance,” a term used by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes in the context of her writings on the work of Tacita Dean in connection to W.G. Sebald. Working yourself through “objective chance,” according to Lerm Hayes, requires a particular associative process—one that is unrelated to the need to explain the visual and/or verbal connections that arise. Describing post-factum any such instants of “objective chance” involves retracing these associations, well aware that this can only be done by spinning a web of facts from which a decisive contextualization or final interpretation will remain missing.8 It was during these moments of “objective chance” that I came closest to grasping what Susan Sontag possibly might have meant when she wrote the following lines about W.G. Sebald while identifying him as a “militant elegist”: “To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture. Even a writer as steeped in nineteenth century and early modern literary solemnities as W.G. Sebald was moved to seed

8 Lerm Hayes, Post-War Germany and “Objective Chance”: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean, 24.

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his lamentation-narratives of lost lives, lost nature, lost cityscapes with photographs.”9 For the trained art historian that I was and inevitably continue to be, Sebald’s unconventional method of prose and novel writing—with its unique mode of combining words and images—turned out a liberating force. His literary approach allowed me to complement the strict protocols of phototheoretical writing with a more personal image-textual practice, in which self-made photographs as well as sourced photographs found their place. Ground Sea’s topic necessitated such an open approach. The book primarily amounts to a lengthy and slow investigation of the lives of those people on the move, as we should identify them, who find themselves stranded near the shores of Calais, in today’s France. It scrutinizes what photography (and writing with photographs) can do for those who have run aground there and who saw their journey come to a halt against their own will. Spread across its ten chapters, Ground Sea deploys photography as a key instrument put at the service of finding more solid and more common ground underneath both their feet and ours (with “us” I mean all the people who can praise themselves lucky for not having had to see themselves through such a dismal fate). Concretely, Ground Sea has used photography as a midwife in this delicate search for a universal right to be reborn (an admittedly fragile claim at present). I have tried to imagine this right first on the level of individual persons, but I also explored its potential for present-day “societies” such as, in particular, the European Union.10 The most didactic example that the book provides as an illustration of this endeavor is a photograph by Allan Sekula taken in Kassel, Germany in July 2006, showing an immigrant Filipina midwife who has just lifted a newborn from a blue pillow with yellow EU stars on it. In an interview from 1993 with Sigrid Löffler, titled “Wildes Denken” (wild thinking), Sebald aptly, and famously, identified his way of proceeding with writing in reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of “bricolage,” as developed in The Savage Mind (1962 / 1966).11 What spoke to me was Sebald’s rather audacious conviction that it was necessary to take this 9 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 80. 10 I am aware of the legal tensions between imagining fundamental rights for individual persons or for groups (i.e., well-defined minorities within a given society), and of the numerous pitfalls with regard to conceiving fundamental rights for groups as a whole. For more on that subject, which surpasses the scope of the present essay, I refer to Sands, East West Street. On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. 11 Sebald, “Wildes Denken,” 84. My translation. Sebald said: “Ich arbeite nach dem System der Bricolage—im Sinne von Lévi-Strauss. Das ist eine Form von wildem Arbeiten, von vorrationalem

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Figure 30 Allan Sekula, Midwife and newborn, Kassel, from Shipwreck and Workers (Version 3 for Kassel) (2005–7), ink printed on vinyl (print system VUTEK) 26 impressions, 243 x 338 cm

Collection MACBA, Barcelona. Gift of the artist. © Allan Sekula Studio

“wild work” seriously in order to obtain new insights, or to come to a shift in perspective. In another interview conversation, he shed further light on how he pursued his research: in a diffuse manner. Proudly, and touchingly, Sebald clarified that for refining his approach he contemplated at length how dogs run through a field. It should involve a find or discovery, he said, and therefore the approach should be like that of a dog searching: to and fro, up and down, sometimes slowly and sometimes fast. In his view, we all know how dogs do that while running through a field. When reflecting on them, “I have the feeling,” he concluded, “that they are my brothers.”12 Sebald practiced writing in the way a dog searches: back and forth, to and fro, until, eventually, there is a find. Since animals do not possess the same linear sense of temporality as humans, animals, in particular dogs, embody this alien, wild capacity to see through us; and according to Sebald they are somehow better at it than human beings. In an essay on the works of the visual artist Jan Peter Tripp, Denken, wo man in zufällig akkumulierten Fundstücken so lange herumwühlt, bis sie sich irgendwie zusammenreimen.” 12 The original is: “Man muß auf eine diffuse Weise recherchieren. Es soll ein Fund sein, also genau wie ein Hund sucht, hin und her, rauf und runter, manchmal langsam und manchmal schnell. Das hat jeder von uns schon gesehen, wie die Hunde das machen beim Feldlaufen, und ich habe das Gefühl, wenn ich sie betrachte, das sind meine Brüder.” Sebald, “So wie ein Hund einen Löffel findet. Gespräch mit Jean-Pierre Rondas (2001),” 214. My translation.

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he argued that the dog knows certain things more accurately than we do.13 Sebald developed his argument from a detail in a painting by Tripp, in which a dog is shown with one illuminated eye and one dull eye. Whereas we might think the dog is looking at us with his brighter, domesticated eye, Sebald convinces us to presume that the dog actually sees through us by using the other, seemingly less sharp eye—his wild eye. Sebald suggests in that same text that objects, since they “(in principle) […] outlast us, […] know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experiences they have had with us inside them and are—in fact—the book of our history opened before us.”14 *** While never losing subtlety out of sight, Sebald was uncompromising about his opinions. In the same (posthumous) publication, Unrecounted (2003/2005), the reader can find a micro-poem titled “The red….” It is printed in combination with an etching of the eyes of the Spanish novelist Javier Marías (by Jan Peter Tripp), and reads as follows: The red spots on the planet Jupiter are threehundredyear-old hurricanes.

How could Sebald possibly “know” all these things so affirmatively, as well as penciling it down with an ease that astonished even the writer himself (as he acknowledged in Vertigo)? Why could he, for example, so firmly assert that objects and things, since they (in principle) survive us, know more about us than we know about them? After a while I realized that I could translate my feelings of bewilderment and puzzlement at reading such enigmatic lines into an encouragement. In other words, it seemed possible

13 Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp,” 94. 14 Ibid., 79, 80.

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to engage in the game that Sebald appeared to be willing to play with his readers, and to proceed to action. In Ground Sea I have combined a photograph made of the dog who accompanied me on most of the journeys undertaken for the book project with an earlier version of this same poem: Apparently the red spots on Jupiter are centuries old hurricanes.

Sebald included this initial iteration of the poem in his collaborative work with the artist Tess Jaray, For Years Now (2001). There, it makes up for a double-page spread in which the text (on the left page) is combined with a monochrome red page filled with a dynamic pattern of one hundred white dots.15 Such micropoems convey an impression one often gets upon reading Sebald’s enigmatic lines: a sense that pre-rational thought somehow hooks up with the most disciplined and skilled intellectual endeavors imaginable. His works display an exceptional talent for making the most unlikely, at times eerie connections seem nonetheless plausible, if not almost coherent. As an illustration for the present essay I wish to include a different photograph of the same dog. It serves, first, to echo the above-described doodle included in the Ground Sea book. In that publication, I call this type of text-image combinations doodles, in the wake of Erasmus of Rotterdam. This humanist, as Jessica Stevenson Stewart wrote, was actually “a habitual doodler.” The visual effects of Erasmus’s drollery are “striking” at times, and sometimes even “comedic.” But they always possess “qualities [that can] typically be associated with memory images.”16 The rough subject matter of my research-in-progress demanded a vehicle for the cooling down of emotions—one that doodling typically can provide. Thus, the doodles took on the role of gentle reminders—of pense-bêtes, as the French say—that allowed my brain and body to cope with the brutality of the topic addressed in my book. Secondly, this photograph serves to engage in a dialogue with the Unrecounted version of Sebald’s “The red….” I made it when my dog and I first arrived at the beach in Lowestoft on a misty day in late January 2020. One 15 Sebald, For Years Now. A collaboration with Tess Jaray. 16 Stevenson Stewart, “Toward a Hermeneutics of Doodling in the Era of Folly,” 409.

276 Hilde Van Gelder Figure 31 On the beach near Gunton Cliff, Lowestoft, January 30, 2020

© Photo: Hilde Van Gelder

large, rectangular red brick stands out within this picture, and it turned out to be portending something. Let me clarify this by briefly returning to Jan Peter Tripp’s above-described etching of the eyes of the Spanish novelist Javier Marías. Your Face Tomorrow, the trilogy that Marías published between 2002 and 2007, and which further established his reputation as another peerless master of photo-textual novels, as well accompanied my research for Ground Sea from an early stage onward. The subtitle of volume one is “fever and spear”—another omen. One night in September 1931, the fishing trawler Colinda, which had sailed from Lowestoft (Britain’s most easterly point), fished a large piece of peat out of the waters near the Leman and Ower Banks in the southern North Sea, from a depth of 19–20 fathoms. Usually the fishermen would immediately throw overboard such flotsam (also called moorlog) drifting in their nets, since they would consider it useless ballast.17 Yet this time Skipper Pilgrim E. Lockwood, for reasons unexplained, felt triggered to inspect it f irst with a shovel. When the shovel hit something hard, he decided to take the log—measuring about four feet square by three feet deep—inside for closer investigation. What he found in the middle of the block, upon breaking it open carefully, was an object that he wiped clean. He then saw that it was “quite black.” This very object, miraculously 17 See Gaffeny, Fitch, and Smith, Europe’s Lost World. The Rediscovery of Doggerland, 14. The authors reference Muir Evans, “East Anglian Notes.”

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retrieved from the depths of the seabed, turned out to be an elegantly shaped prehistoric artefact. Soon after experts identified it as a stag’s horn (actually, red deer antler). Oval in section and carved on one margin with a range of seventeen sharp recurved barbs, its first inspectors considered it must have been a harpoon. After the British Museum declined the proposed gift, Harold Muir Evans donated it to the Castle Museum in Norwich, which today preserves it at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse. A first photograph of the so-called Colinda or Dogger harpoon was published in the June 1932 issue of the archeological journal Antiquity. Eventually experts further identified the object—measuring overall some 21.5 cm (and the row of barbs measuring approximately 16 cm)—as rather being a bone “point” belonging to the Maglemose people, who once lived on the western coast of the Danish island of Zeeland and elsewhere. These points, singly or tied together, were used as a leister, eel, or fish spear.18 As for substantiating the hypothesis of how the man using this tool could have gotten there, in an area now many fathoms below the surface of the sea, the anonymous author of the short note accompanying the photograph as published in Antiquity registered soberly: “the answer to the question is that he walked across either what is now the North Sea or the English Channel.”19 *** My January 2020 voyage to the UK had been planned many months in advance, not only because traveling overseas with a pet is administratively complicated, but also because I needed to arrange permission with the Castle Museum in Norwich to inspect, study, and photograph the Bronze Age spear. As only in late January I would be free from my obligations of teaching and taking exams, I had given my assistant a range of days for scheduling the appointment. With the conservator in Norwich, she agreed on January 31. As the date approached, it became clear that this—coincidentally—was going to be the last day of Britain’s EU membership. So it happened that, on Brexit Day, I was in the area intimately familiar to Sebald and described by him as “the outermost limit of the earth,” where people find themselves “in expectation of the miracle longed for since time immemorial, the miracle 18 For a drawing of how the spear most likely was used, see http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov. uk/record-details?MNF11171-Mesolithic-harpoon-from-Leman-and-Ower-Bank-Doggerland& Index=10473&RecordCount=56734&SessionID=53b0c8f7-1a35-4192-b9c0-ed79fd5e349b. 19 Schede, “Harpoon Found in the North Sea,” 218.

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which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings.”20 That day, when the kind conservator at Gressenhall generously allowed me to hold the spear in my hands and spend as much time with it as I wished, I also found an answer to the question Sekula implicitly appeared to have raised to the spectators of his New York-Dover diptych: “what else may be of a revolutionary nature that can still be ‘fished for’ in the depths of the Channel waters?” Today, as Sebald has described in an unsurpassable way, the North Sea waters flowing above former Doggerland find themselves in a dystopian state: Every year the rivers bear thousands of tons of mercury, cadmium and lead, and mountains of fertilizer and pesticides, out into the North Sea. A substantial proportion of the heavy metals and other toxic substances sink into the waters of the Dogger Bank, where a third of the fish are now born with strange deformities and excrescences. Time and again, off the coast, rafts of poisonous algae are sighted covering many square miles and reaching thirty feet into the deep, in which the creatures of the sea die in shoals. In some of the rarer varieties of plaice, crucian or bream, the females, in a bizarre mutation, are increasingly developing male sexual organs and the ritual patterns of courtship are now no more than a dance of death, the exact opposite of the notion of the wondrous increase and perpetuation of life with which we grew up.21

I took on a fondness for exploring the metaphorical potential of this dark sea bottom, these shallow waters where plaice with their red spots live. As Christina Kraenzle as well argued in relation to Sebald’s observations, the coastline is a liminal space or symbolic boundary that provides a gateway to (imagining) another world, as yet unknown to us but tangibly there. The sea, this silent realm “beyond the limits of perception” had spit out the so-called Colinda harpoon.22 As mentioned above, it turned out to be made of red deer bone in a time when people could still walk around in the area where it was found. This reminded me of a page from Sebald’s influential novel Austerlitz (2001), where the main protagonist, Jacques 20 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 52. 21 Ibid., 53. 22 Kraenzle, “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography, and Imaginative Geography in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn,” 142. Kraenzle references Catling, “Gratwanderungen bis an den Rand der Natur: W.G. Sebald’s Landscapes of Memory,” 48.

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Austerlitz, recalls an episode from his regular visits to the Parisian Zoo in the company of Marie de Verneuil. While reading, Sebald invites us to observe a photograph that, strikingly literally, illustrates Austerlitz’s recollection of a fenced “family of fallow deer” intimately “gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty enclosure where no grass grew.”23 Among the animals, according to Austerlitz, we observe, “mutual trust and harmony,” but never without a sense of “constant vigilance and alarm.” “Captive animals as much as we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another à travers une brèche d’incompréhension.” The word “counterpart” catches the reader’s eye. Sebald appears to have introduced a suggestion of comparable human captivity. In this he seems to align with John Berger, who similarly argued that it is as if we are all captives, humans and animals, but nonetheless stare at one another “across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension” and misunderstanding.24 What metaphoric meaning a deer bone, shaped to a point, may generate for humans today? In The Rings of Saturn (1995/1998), Sebald laments—in reference to Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658)—that “to be gnawed out of our graves is a tragical abomination.” But he seems to find resignation in Browne’s phlegmatic comment on the matter: “who is to know the fate of his bones?”25 I took this line as a pense-bête motif with me to Calais. It turned out that the best spot for observing the trains entering the Channel Tunnel is a tiny, old cemetery on a hill slope, with an ossuary. On repeated occasions, I spent hours sitting there on the carefully trimmed lawn, thinking about such topics as what did Hannah Arendt actually mean to say when, in On Revolution, she reminded her readers, that Paine identified both the French and American Revolutions as no more than “counter-revolutions”?26 I will disappoint those readers who hope that I have been able to identify an idyllic earlier time replete with rights and liberties, of which tyranny and conquest came to dispossess people—this “definite, though undefined, period in history” that Arendt mentions. But I have searched, and searched, and searched even more. When finally, after many years, I came across this one object, another f ind, that spoke to my imagination, I found it striking that it turned out to be a bone harpoon recovered near the Leman and Ower banks by f ishermen who had sailed from Lowestoft. Sebald, 23 Sebald, Austerlitz, 264. The following quotation is on the same page. Emphasis in the original. 24 Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 3. 25 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 11. 26 Arendt, On Revolution, 45. The following quotation is on the same page.

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who held an academic position at the University of East Anglia, has his final resting place not so far from where the Colinda spear is preserved today. Early on the morning of January 31, therefore, I first paid a visit to Sebald’s grave. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself all alone there. This made it easier to engage in a silent conversation about the provisional culminating moment in the sad saga of profound incomprehension that now dooms people living on both sides of the English Channel—close to the edge of the abyss. Later that same day, Sebald’s “as a dog finds a spoon” transformed into “as a dog finds a spear.” Like so many others, I have come to find myself under the spell of Sebald’s unique ability to churn up seemingly coincidentally accumulated elements that, eventually, almost obtain a quasi-logical meaning when they are joined. There is also a compulsiveness about presenting materials as cosmically connected in this way. Even things that in the opinion of a rationally trained mind could not possibly ever have matched, after having encountered them like this, one will get the impression that they always belonged together already, and that merely it remained up to us to find that out, if at least we have the necessary talent for patience. In the Ground Sea book, the harpoon/spear/blade metaphorically transforms into a weaving shuttle. This is my way, in other words, of having attempted to turn cosmic vision, in the sense of Édouard Glissant in Philosophie de la relation (2009), into political ideas for imagining collectively no less than this social miracle longed for since time immemorial, about which Sebald also dreamt on the pebble beach just south of Lowestoft—“when the dog days were drawing to an end.”27

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London: Penguin, 1990. Beausse, Pascal. “Deep Six / Passer au bleu. Or Social Work Seen from a Ferry.” Calais vu par Allan Sekula. Deep Six / Passer au Bleu. Calais: Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle, 2001. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Catling, Jo. “Gratwanderungen bis an den Rand der Natur: W.G. Sebald’s Landscapes of Memory.” In The Anatomist of Melancholy: Essays in Memory of W.G. Sebald, edited by Rüdiger Görner, 19–50. Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 2003. 27 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 3.

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Gaffeny, Vincent, Simon Fitch, and David Smith. Europe’s Lost World. The Rediscovery of Doggerland. Bootham: The Council for British Archaeology, 2009. Kraenzle, Christina. “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography, and Imaginative Geography in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn.” In Searching for Sebald. Photography After W.G. Sebald, edited by Lise Patt with Christel Dillbohner, 126–45. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. Post-War Germany and “Objective Chance”: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. Muir Evans, Harold. “East Anglian Notes.” Proc Prehist Soc East Anglia 7 (1932): 131–32. Paine, Thomas. Collected Writings. New York: Penguin, 1955. Pamuk, Orhan. The Museum of Innocence. Translated by Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2008; 2010. Sands, Philippe. East West Street. On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. London: Widenfeld & Nicholson, 2016. Schede, M. “Harpoon Found in the North Sea.” Antiquity 6, no. 22 (1932): 218. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Sebald, W.G. (2003). “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp.” In Unrecounted, by W.G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp. Translated by Michael Hamburger. London: Penguin, 2003. Sebald, W.G. For Years Now. London: Short Books, 2001. Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. Sebald, W.G. “So wie ein Hund einen Löffel findet. Gespräch mit Jean-Pierre Rondas (2001).” In “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis.” Gespräche 1971 bis 2001. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2011. Sebald, W.G. Vertigo. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage Books, 1990; 2001. Sebald, W.G. “Wildes Denken.” In Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis. Gespräche 1971 bis 2001. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2011. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2004. Stevenson Stewart, Jessica. “Toward a Hermeneutics of Doodling in the Era of Folly.” Word & Image 29, no. 4 (2013): 409–27. Van Gelder, Hilde. Allan Sekula. Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015. Verbeeck, Jeroen. “The Residual Poetics of Mutiny in Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013).” Image [&] Narrative 18, no. 2 (2017): 12–32. http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1528/1213.

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About the Author Hilde Van Gelder is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture (LGC). She is also editor of the Lieven Gevaert Series (Leuven University Press) and of Image [&] Narrative, a peer-reviewed online journal part of Open Humanities Press. Her research focuses on how photography within contemporary visual art and culture is an operative force for both re-legitimating and imagining fundamental rights. She was PI of the research project “Art Against the Grain of ‘Collective Sisyphus’: The Case of Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013),” funded by KU Leuven and the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO), and pursued in partnership with M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp (2014–20). She guest curates research exhibitions, such as Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona in 2017 (publication with Walther König Books London, 2019). groundsea.be is her working platform for online critical, curatorial, and artistic research. Her most recent book is Ground Sea. Photography and the Right to Be Reborn (Leuven University Press, 2021). She is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (KVAB).



List of Contributors

Catherine Annabel studied English and Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 1978, before embarking on a long career in higher education administration. She returned to part-time study in 2005 to complete a second undergraduate degree, in French Language and Cultures, and then went on to a part-time PhD at Sheffield, on labyrinths and intertextuality in the work of Michel Butor and W.G. Sebald. During the course of her doctorate she retired from her post at the University of Sheffield to focus on her research. She is co-editor of the new edition of the English translation of Butor’s L’Emploi du temps (Passing Time, Pariah Press, 2021) and a contributor to the forthcoming volume Sebald in Context, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Dr. Mark Edwards is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Suffolk. The primary focus of his research is the landscape tradition found in the painting and literature made broadly within the geographical and cultural boundaries of East Anglia. This inquiry is underpinned by his photographic practice, which is included in major photographic collections including the V&A Museum, The Government Art Collection, The Hyman Collection of British Photography, and Norwich Museum. It has been published and exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions including Spotlight, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich (2019–20); Into the Woods: Photography & Trees, V&A Museum, London; and A Green and Pleasant Land, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2017–18). His work is also currently on display at the British Embassy, Berlin, the British High Commission, Islamabad, and the Northern Ireland Office, London. Recent publications featuring his work include, Into the Woods: Photography & Trees (V&A/Thames & Hudson) and Approaching Photograph (Bloomsbury). Prof. James Elkins teaches at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, 1999). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, 1998) and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes, 2000). Recent books include What Photography Is (2011)

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written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; Artists with PhDs (2014), second edition; and Art Critiques: A Guide (2011), third edition. Prof. Hilde Van Gelder is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture (LGC). She is also editor of the Lieven Gevaert Series (Leuven University Press) and of Image [&] Narrative, a peer-reviewed online journal part of Open Humanities Press. Her research focuses on photography within contemporary visual art and culture as an operative force for both re-legitimating and imagining fundamental rights. She was PI of the research project “Art Against the Grain of ‘Collective Sisyphus’: The Case of Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013),” funded by KU Leuven and the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO), and pursued in partnership with M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp (2014–20). She guest curates research exhibitions, such as Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona in 2017 (publication with Walther König Books London, 2019). groundsea.be is her working platform for online critical, curatorial, and artistic research. Her most recent book is Ground Sea. Photography and the Right to Be Reborn (Leuven University Press, 2021). She is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (KVAB). Prof. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and previously Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam. Until 2014 she was Professor of Iconology in Belfast, where she led a Research Graduate School. She studied in Heidelberg, London, and Cologne. Her PhD was researched as James Joyce Foundation Scholar, Zurich. She held an Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UCDublin. Her books include: Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique (ed., Valiz, 2017); Post-War Germany and “Objective Chance”: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (Steidl, 2011); Joyce in Art (Lilliput, 2004); and James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys (Olms, 2001). She has curated exhibitions internationally. Prof. Leonida Kovač is an art historian and theorist, curator and full professor at the University of Zagreb, Academy of Fine Arts. Her main fields of interest are contemporary art, critical theories and feminist theories. She has published nine books and numerous academic articles on contemporary art. She has also curated more than forty exhibitions including Ivan Faktor’s

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285

exhibition at the São Paulo Biennale (2002) and Patterns of Visibility for the Croatian Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice (2003). From 2003 to 2006 she was vice president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Dr. Tilo Reifenstein is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at York St John University, United Kingdom, and a KWI International Fellow in Essen, Germany (2022). He co-edited the “Between Sensuous and Making-Sense of” special issue of Open Arts Journal, no. 7 (2019). Other publications include “The graphics of ekphrastic writing: Raymond Pettibon’s drawing-writing” in Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (ed. David Kennedy and Richard Meek, Manchester University Press, 2018), “Ideal identities and impossible translations: drawing on writing and writing on drawing” in Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and Contemporary Visual Culture (ed. Johannes Riquet and Martin Heusser, Palgrave, 2019) and “Drawing the letter” in Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (2018). Reifenstein was a Franz-Roh Fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (2015–16), and a trustee and Hon. Secretary of the London-based Association for Art History (2016–20). Dr. Ilse van Rijn is an art historian who teaches in Amsterdam in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Amsterdam, Gerrit Rietveld Academie and DAS Graduate School. Her research situates itself at the crossroads of literature and visual art. She has written papers on the subject and published in various journals and magazines such as Metropolis M, De Witte Raaf and Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, as well as in (artists’) publications. Her two book projects include a rewrite of her PhD research, The Artists’ Text as Work of Art (Brill) and a publication on artists’ writings and feminist affinities. Dr. Sandra Križić Roban is a senior scientific advisor in tenure at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb who investigates neo-avant-gardes, history and theory of photography, postwar architecture, and counter-memorials. Križić Roban holds a PhD from the University of Zagreb, and is a principal investigator of the scientific project Ekspozicija—Themes and Aspects of Croatian Photography from the 19th Century until Today (2020–24) funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. As a head of the Office for Photography, a non-profit association dedicated to contemporary photography, she is responsible for the program of Gallery Spot, publishing and national and international research projects. She has talked, curated and published extensively on photography, her most recent publications and comprehensive

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book chapters being Branko Balić: A Close Reading (Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2022); “A Box, a Suitcase, a Museum: Photographic Records of the Croatian Immigrants to the USA,” Contact Zones. Photography, Migration, and Cultural Encounters in the U.S. (Leuven University Press, 2021); “Laughter Protocol. Elements of Humor in Proto- and Conceptual Photography in Croatia,” Photography Performing Humor (Leuven University Press, 2019); “Learning from Graz,” Camera Austria International Labor für Fotografie und Theorie (Specor Books, Leipzig and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, 2019); and Vlado Martek—Preparing for Photography (UzF, 2018). Veronika Rudorfer lives and works in Vienna. She studied art history at the universities of Hamburg and Vienna and completed her master’s degree in 2012 at the University of Vienna summa cum laude. An extended version of her master thesis Das Palais Ephrussi in Wien was published in 2015 by Böhlau (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar). A second, extended edition of the book was published in German and in English in 2020 under the title Palais Ephrussi by Böhlau. Since 2017 she has been working as curator for modern and contemporary art at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in Vienna, where she has curated numerous exhibitions—most recently an extensive retrospective of the work of Daniel Spoerri (2021) as well as an exhibition on Herta Müller’s collages (2020)—and is currently preparing an exhibition of David Hockney’s work. In addition, she has curated numerous freelance exhibition projects in galleries and artist-run spaces. Since March 2019, she has been working on her dissertation supervised by Professor Sabeth Buchmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She regularly publishes essays and reviews in art magazines such as EIKON, Springerin, and Texte zur Kunst. Prof. Ihab Saloul is Founder and Research Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) at the University of Amsterdam, and Professor of Memory and Narrative at the International Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities “Umberto Eco” at Bologna University. He is a Research Domain Leader of ‘Conflict’ at the Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity (ACHI). Saloul has been a Visiting Professor of Culture and Politics at Free University Berlin, and held several research positions and fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Studies (ISA) at the University of Bologna, Marburg University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (WIKO), and Maastricht University. Saloul is also a founding editor of two book series: “Heritage and Memory Studies” (Amsterdam University Press), and “Palgrave

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Studies of Cultural Heritage and Conflict” (Palgrave Macmillan), Editor-in Chief of the International Peer-Review Open Access Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC), and Editor-in-Chief of the new Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PECHC). Dr. Anna Seidl, former principal dancer at the HNB (Het National Ballet, Amsterdam), is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Analysis and German Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research area entails different fields of cultural and literary studies and recently revolves around topics such as “body and motion pictures,” “dance and ageism,” new developments in the performative arts and narratological structures in political/cultural discourses. The special quality of her research lies in the fruitful combination of her expertise in the field of artistic practice and scientific and analytical reflection. Her latest publications are Hans van Manen: Between formal austerity and dramatic expression (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Das Virus: Sinn des Sinnlosen (KulturRevolution 2020). Prof. Juliet Simpson is Full Professor of Art History, Chair of Cultural Memory and Research Director for the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities, Coventry University. She is the author of numerous publications on long nineteenth-century art, art critics, word-image relations, symbolism, art and the emotions, and Gothic and Renaissance afterlives in object, image and word, ca. 1830–1930. Recent publications include the books Primitive Renaissances (Ashgate-Routledge, 2022); and Gothic Modernisms, co-edited with T. Bauduin, J. Baetens and A.-M. von Bonsdorff (Peter Lang, forthcoming); and articles “Baudelaire’s Prodigal Guys” (2021), “Lucas Cranach’s Legacies” (2020), and “Hodler and Mallarmé” (2019); she is Guest Curator and Principal Investigator for the international exhibition, Gothic Modern, 1875-1925—Munch to Kollwitz (Helsinki-Oslo-Berlin, 2024–25). She was Royal Netherlands Academy Visiting Full Professor of Art History, University of Amsterdam (2017–18); Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College, Oxford; and is currently Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London since 2019. Simpson is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and Royal Historical Society, UK, and sits on the International Editorial Board of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.   Prof. Jelena Todorović  (BA, Faculty of Philosophy Belgrade, MA and PhD, University College London) is a Full Professor of early modern European culture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of the Arts in Belgrade and the Vice Dean for International Cooperation. Since 2006 she runs the project of

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the State Art Collection in Belgrade, for which she received European Union Award for cultural heritage in 2018. Although an art historian by training, her interests have always been more directed toward early modern cultural history, as well as curating and the history of collecting in the first half of the twentieth century. Her latest publications include Spazi d’illusione, lugoghi di confine e di fromntier nella arte moderna (Kappabit, 2020), “Spaces of the A-Temporal: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the Spaces of Imagination”  in Architectural Space and the Imagination—Houses in Literature and Arts from Classic to Contemporary (ed.y Jane Griffits-Adam Hannah, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and The Realms of Eternal Present—the Hidden Legacy of Baroque Culture in Modern Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). Francesca Verga is a PhD researcher at the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, whose thesis concentrates on the conceptual reconstruction of memories in Mike Kelley’s performances and video installation works. She is interested in artistic research that explores the tensions between memory and fiction, especially reconstruction and repetition. Her research is supported by the Italian Council scholarship for the Arts (Ministry of Culture Italy, 2020). Verga has professional experience in the management of cultural institutions and art biennials. With a master’s degree in Museums Management (Milan, 2013), she held the position of General Coordinator for Manifesta 12 (Palermo, 2018) and was Curatorial Coordinator at the biennial Manifesta 13 (Marseille, 2020). Previously, she founded the online cultural platform Liaux (liaux.org), a program of visual art projects presented in dialogue with a non-physical space. She has also collaborated with cultural institutions and universities such as IED Istituto Europeo Di Design (Florence), Museo MACRO (Rome), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), NEMO The Network of European Museum Organisations (Berlin), Barnard College (Columbia University, New York), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and IMT Schools for Advanced Studies (Lucca).



Index

Ability To See 32-33, 40 Absence 2, 54-55, 86-88, 90, 95-96, 98-99, 101-102, 135, 248, 250 Absence 189, 193 Academic 11, 14, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 199, 202, 245-246, 258, 280, 303, 309 Aesthetics 2, 17, 94, 101-102, 206 Aftermath 50-51, 65, 118, 125, 129 AHM 245-247, 256-257, 259, 311 ALBA 257 Ambiguous 53, 59, 74, 129, 167, 170 Analog Printing 251, 259 Anchoring 22, 202, 207 Aporia 220 Arbitrary Boundaries 162, 175 Archaic 247, 249, 255, 258, 268 Architecture 18, 72, 129, 137, 160, 168-169, 175, 222, 230, 239, 263, 268, 271-272, 276, 310 Artistic Position 89, 102 Association Of Truth With Fact 218 Attachment 46 Authenticity 166, 173 Authority 14, 16, 31-32, 35-36, 40, 46, 127 Automaton 266 Awareness 82, 204, 206 Baroque 4, 17, 71-75, 77-78, 80-84, 312 Bibliothèque Nationale 24, 263-264, 270, 272-273, 275 Black And White 7, 12, 19, 76, 99, 120, 143, 165, 172-173, 200, 205, 269, 291 Cartographic 16, 30-33, 36, 42 Catastrophic Failures Of Regimes 245, 253 Church 18, 74, 76, 79, 124, 133, 199 Cinematic Counterpart 125 Citation Without Citation Marks 24, 264, 272, 278 Cityscape 54, 248 Civilization 40, 79, 155 Collective Memory 53, 101, 102, 116, 163 Community 145, 154, 229, 246, 256 Comparable 55, 191, 255, 302 Compensatory Memory 270 Conference 11, 15, 24, 71, 102, 180, 246-247, 256, 258-259, 266, 283 Confrontation 39, 57 Connection 21, 37, 54, 57-58, 61, 77, 94, 124, 133, 140, 148, 164, 170, 206, 212, 252, 274, 294 Conquering Destruction 113 Construction 22, 51, 58, 62, 111, 117, 151, 158, 175, 183-184, 191, 207, 222, 227, 272-273 Cosmic 284, 303 Cottage 285, 291, 293 Counterculture 258

Creative Art-History Writing 216 Crimes 86, 89, 131, 154 Death 11-12, 17, 63, 65, 112-113, 118, 128-129, 133-135, 163, 214, 218, 222, 246, 250, 257, 276, 283, 301 Deconstruction 231 Dehumanize 253 Democratic Ideals 289 Destination 94, 145, 233, 235-237 Destruction 12-13, 17, 36, 39, 43, 59, 62, 65, 82, 86-88, 110, 112-113, 124, 188-189, 204, 265 Diagram 249-250 Discursive 13, 16, 31-32, 34, 36-37, 44, 203, 209, 214, 220-221, 223, 231, 234, 267 Discursivization 237 Diversity 180 Documentary 73, 79, 112, 126-128, 130, 146, 173, 175, 268 Dynamic 16, 33, 36-37, 52, 73, 184, 298 Echo 55, 63, 74, 134-135, 227, 257, 298 Ecological 249, 256 Ekphrasis 20, 212-214, 228 Emancipation 154, 220, 225 Emblematic Encounter 49 Emigrant 249, 252 Emotive 36-37, 60-61 Empathy 24, 254, 256 English Channel 300, 303 Enigmatic 267, 278, 297, 298 Enslavement 253-254 Epiphany 57 Epoch 49, 75 Equal 22, 109, 207 Essayization 270, 276 Ethical 31-34, 38, 42, 98, 252-253 Ethical Imperative 33 Euclidian Diagram 23, 249-250, 252 Evolving 269, 278 Exhibition 6, 53, 91, 103-104, 145, 176, 271 Expressive 57, 62, 232 Extension 226, 251-252 External 14, 23, 80, 209-210, 212, 214, 226, 230, 233 Fabric Of The Novel 278 Factual 34, 98, 167, 173 Familiar 19, 62, 133, 216, 265-266, 268, 271, 301 Family Album 173 Fiction 125, 129, 137, 165, 176, 211, 213-214, 239, 241 FIU 256 Fragility Of Human Lives 245, 253

290  Framing 53, 206-207, 209, 220, 222, 292 Future 21, 24, 32, 76, 78, 158, 175, 182-183, 185-187, 192, 204, 226, 246, 256-258 Genealogy 18, 22, 200, 273 Genre 21, 81, 173, 180-181, 193, 209, 218-219, 280 Ghostly 142, 185-186, 188-189, 266 Ghostly Influences 266 Grainy 55-56, 200, 205 Haunting 182-183, 186, 191 Heterogeneous 191 Historical Urgency 44 Historikerstreit 252-253 Holocaust 23, 86, 128, 130, 135-139, 164, 181, 187-188, 251-252, 263, 267-269 Homage 267, 269 Humanity 13, 15, 23, 249, 251, 254 Identity 50, 243, 309, 311 Image-Making 54 Imagination 15, 30, 41, 168-169, 192, 248, 257, 269, 278, 303 Immersion 76 Inaugurated 142, 212 Industrialization 134, 187 Influence 18, 71, 123, 125, 129, 144, 167-168, 180, 185, 198 Institution 97, 214, 238, 240 Institution Of Literature 245, 259 Institutional Critique 18, 86, 89, 257 Interior Monologue 248 Interpretative 215, 218, 228 Inwardness 51, 56, 65 Iron Construction 272 Juridico-Political 214, 232-233, 238 Labyrinth 4, 19, 123 Labyrinthine 129-130, 190 Landscape 108, 111, 116, 120, 141 Language 125, 135-139, 211, 307 Legacy 13, 17, 20, 23, 25, 53, 72, 108, 111, 126, 142, 153, 260, 283, 287 Library 6, 26, 40, 47, 83, 92, 120, 129, 137, 274, 280, 305 Linear 51, 125, 187, 231, 296 Linguistics 222, 235, 265 Listen 183 Literary Space 79, 209, 214-215, 221, 230 Logic 41, 219, 224, 229, 255, 269 Marginalized 21, 34, 182-183 Material Continuity 249 Materiality 35, 250-251 Meaning 211, 235, 240 Medieval 50-51, 55-56, 62, 66, 68 Meditative Mechanism 77 Medium 31, 33, 38, 41-42, 49, 56, 63, 74, 95, 97, 101-102, 109, 149, 164, 167, 212, 218, 220, 248, 254 Memory Aid 164, 264, 269, 270

W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies

Memory Blank 169, 175 Metaphorical 123 Milieu 64-65, 185 Militant Elegist 283, 294 Military Bases 19 Minor Histories 254 Misrepresentation 36 Mnemonic Spaces 78 Modernity 53, 64 Monstrous 125, 182, 263, 269-270, 278 Monument 19, 81, 83, 108-109, 114-115, 118, 285, 289, 292 More-Than-Human 255 Motifs 13, 16, 19, 124, 133, 136, 148, 158, 250-252, 255, 263-264, 278 Movement 34, 56, 73-74, 77, 79, 80, 143, 253, 274 Multiplicity 20, 75, 124, 142-143, 213 Mythic 59, 125, 182, 184 Narrative Beyond The Real 167 Narrative Layer 180, 182, 190, 192 Narrative Procedure 13, 181, 266, 278 Narrative Structure 130, 190 Narratological Function 180-181 Neutrality 212, 232 Non-Neutrality 212 Ordering Of The Visual (And Textual) World 246, 252 Out Of Joint 185, 191 Paradox 22, 82, 202, 224, 235 Pattern 39, 52, 76, 82, 144, 190, 193, 298 Perceptions 50, 52 Personal Biography 109 Personal History 109, 146 Phenomenological 38, 164 Phoneme 235-236 Photographic 49-50, 53, 55, 58, 60, 92, 95-96, 98-99, 101-102, 120-121, 142-144, 146, 152, 162, 164, 173, 175, 212, 221, 283, 290, 307 Photographic Reproduction 98 Plastic Space 223, 237 Plurality 73 Poem 22, 82, 124, 128, 132-136, 180-181, 207, 225, 297-298 Polyvalence 71 Practice 5, 22, 37, 46, 202, 210, 243, 258, 261, 309 Practices Of Witnessing 142, 145 Predetermined 99, 213 Psychology 246, 252, 255 Questioning 16, 31, 33, 35, 42, 145, 163, 173-174, 228 Quotation 23, 44, 190, 227, 248, 251, 293, 303 Readable 222, 228, 233 Reconstruction 7, 20, 31, 79, 98, 116, 162-163, 165, 268-169, 171-172, 175, 177, 312

291

Index

Re-Cycling 249 Rediscoveries 53 Remain Independent 31 Remembrance 22, 30, 89, 120, 164, 168-169, 173, 202, 204-205, 263, 279 Renaissance 124 Repetitions In And Of History 245, 253 Representation 129, 137, 221, 227, 241-242 Resistance 50, 62, 123, 275 Retrieve 20, 36, 166, 173 Revolutionary 232, 252, 292, 301 Rules 15, 73-74, 210, 214-215, 219 Sacred 50, 56, 64, 72-73, 75, 78-79, 80-81 Scientistic 213 Self-Conscious 215-217 Self-Reflexive Points 31 Separation 62, 165, 211, 230, 234 Shame 126, 172 Sigla 23, 250, 251 Social Class 289, 292 Source 80, 130, 136, 163, 266, 283 Spatial 32, 37, 44, 73-75, 80, 101, 143 Spectral 12, 24, 54, 186, 191-192, 267, 274 Speculative 183, 186, 224 Speech 21, 212, 226, 235 Spiritualism 170 States Of Being 31 States Of Dissonance 54 Static 16, 36-38, 222, 233 Static Perspective 16, 36 Storytelling 14, 185, 266, 277 Strategic Dimensions 38 Structural 12, 130 Structure 12, 16, 37, 40, 52, 83, 101, 111, 118, 143-144, 149, 163, 182-184, 191-192, 202, 223, 225, 228, 250, 268, 286 Superstition 59 Surrealism 198, 200 Symbolism 69, 311 Symposium 245, 256 System Of Avoidance 264 Testimony 100, 148, 166, 202 Theatre 171, 180

Thomas Paine 7, 8, 25, 284-286, 288-289, 291 Time 75, 80, 82, 123, 125, 129, 137, 139, 163, 176, 189, 191, 193, 241, 247, 259, 279, 301, 307 Times And Places 202, 207 Transformation 50-51, 78, 86, 127, 137, 170, 218 Transgenerational Conversation 293 Translation 20, 132, 134, 139, 141, 213, 215-216, 232-234, 237-238, 258, 264, 273, 278, 295-296, 307 Translation Of Images 20, 141 Trauma 13-14, 49, 58, 61, 63-65, 86, 88, 98-99, 101, 108, 112-113, 123, 126-127, 129, 193-194, 245 Traumatic 31, 33, 41-42, 46, 50, 61, 129, 131, 165, 267-268 Traumatic Experience 267-268 Trespassing 185, 187 Truth 11-12, 14, 16, 32-33, 42-43, 45-46, 129-130, 166, 172, 214, 217-218 Turbulence 49, 57 Turbulent 53, 57, 59 Uncanny 4, 17, 19, 20-21, 49, 51, 53-54, 56-57, 62, 172-173, 199, 263-267, 270, 278, 280 Uncertainty 33-34, 124, 188, 190, 266 Undecidability 220 Universal 13, 53, 75, 101, 233, 295 Universe 72, 81, 183, 185, 249-250, 254 Unknown 7, 18, 81, 166, 172, 186-187, 191, 263, 265, 302 Unrepresentable 13 Urban 116, 132, 145, 153, 268, 288 Violence 2, 57, 188-189, 228, 267, 274, 278 Visual Elements 251, 259 Warburgian Iconology Of Traveling Images 251 Warburgian Legacy 246, 252 Wild 293, 295-297 Witness 88, 98-99, 142, 144, 168 Written Narrative 144 Yearbook 170