Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Located at the intersection of biography and autobiography, history and fiction, travel writing and memoir, the narrative works of W. G. Sebald resist traditional genre categories.They partake instead of a generic hybridity dictated by the ambitious scope of Sebald's project, which involves an exploration of man's historical relationship to his environment, the connection between individual, familial, and collective memory, and the means by which such memory is passed on from one generation to the next.Narratives that seek, like Sebald's, to reconstruct or revaluate family history and biographical itineraries tend to use photographic images in one of two ways.On the one hand, biographies and autobiographies, especially those of a 'non-literary' nature, frequently include photographic plates that may even occupy a separate quire and whose primary function is documentary.Such photographs assume a 'naive' reader for whom the images refer to a reality that is ontologically prior to the text that frames them.On the other hand, numerous post-war novelists have used family snaps as a starting point for narrative meditations, some prominent German-language examples being G • unter Grass's Die Blechtrommel (1959), Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976), Thomas Bernhard's Ausl• oschung (1986), and Peter Schneider's Vati (1987).In all these works, however, photographs are merely described; they are not reproduced within the pages of the text.In the first instance, then, photographs exist as pure evidence, while in the second instance they are paradoxically accessible solely through the interpretations to which they give rise.In contrast to these stable, even reductive, uses of photography, Sebald's literary work, from the 'Elementargedicht' Nach der Natur (1988) to Austerlitz (2001), is striking in its combination of heterogeneous photographic material and verbal text.Perhaps the most obvious question that comes to mind when reading Sebald's work concerns the authenticity of the photographs.The author himself obliquely touched on this issue when he confessed in a Guardian interview that he had always collected 'stray photographs' because 'there's a lot of memory in them'.These comments implicitly call into question the photographs' documentary status: do the images in Sebald's text really represent what the text tells us they represent, or are they merely 'stray photographs' around which a story has been woven?The nature of the chemical and physical processes involved means that photographs always represent specific realities, but the text that situates the photograph historically and geographically may mislead, undermining the documentary reliability of the photographic image.This device contributes to the ontological hide-and-seek that Sebald plays with his readers, which both invites and thwarts attempts to separate fact from I wish to thank Andrea Noble, Steve Giles, and Je•erson Chase for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.Monika Maron's recent Pawels Briefe (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1999) is comparable to Sebald's work in that it incorporates photographic images and uses them to reconstruct family history.A comparison of the two may be instructive, but falls outside the scope of the present article.'Recovered Memories', Guardian, 22 September 2001, Review Section, pp.6-7 (p. 7).
Source: The Modern Language Review
Author: J. J. Long
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2089786680