Rick Poynor
W. G. Sebald: Writing with Pictures
For his many admirers, W. G. Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001, is one of the greatest European writers of recent years. His books Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1993), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001), first published in German, defy easy categorisation and have been regularly summarised as part hybrid fiction, part memoir and part travelogue, while the adjectives most frequently used to describe their extraordinary prose style, built on long, elegant sentences, are haunting and mesmeric. These four books, which I have been reading for the last couple of years, have excited and affected me more deeply than anything I have read in a long time. I share the view of many Sebald readers that Austerlitz, his final publication while living, is a masterwork, a book so good that you find yourself constantly re-reading passages to savour the luminous intensity with which he evokes people encountered, places visited, things seen, and atmospheres recalled.
Sebald is brilliantly visual. He makes you realise, with some discomfort, that we often fail to look attentively enough at what we see. Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in Sebald’s sentences, superbly rendered by his translators, is his ability to convey not just the detail of so many things hitting the senses in a rain of fleeting simultaneous impressions, but the precise emotional shading and personal import of each of these moments. His eye records with photographic accuracy, then these perceptions are recovered from memory and reconstituted as fictional experience with the same exhilaratingly scrupulous fidelity. The complication in Sebald’s writing - a complication he apparently intended - lies in our uncertainty about how much of what he describes derives from his own experiences (seemingly a lot) and how much of it is largely or entirely imagined. Based on a reading of the books alone, the narrators show every sign of being Sebald himself, but we know from what he has said elsewhere that these melancholy figures are at most fictionalised versions of the author.
Another striking aspect of the books is the use Sebald makes of photographs and other visual material, such as architectural plans, engravings, paintings and restaurant bills. These uncaptioned images are inserted into the text, providing an additional level of documentary “evidence”, and this is done so effectively that you become convinced that Sebald really must have undertaken the walk or visited the building that he describes. Literary reviewers usually note the presence of these images, acknowledging that they add to the books’ unique flavour, but their role in the composition of the texts and the exact ways in which text and images relate to each other have received little attention. This isn’t something that reviewers usually have to consider since few literary writers work in this way. John Berger, beginning with A Fortunate Man (1967), using photographs by his friend Jean Mohr, is one of the most notable. Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme (1994), a book about war and remembrance (also Sebald’s themes), has elements of this approach.
If Austerlitz is Sebald’s most sophisticated marriage of writing and imagery, its use of images also raises the most questions because of all the books it is the one most like a work of fiction, though of a highly unconventional kind. In 1939, not yet five, Jacques Austerlitz is sent to Britain on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents in Wales. Never happy, he excels at school and becomes an architectural historian. He is told nothing about his identity and it is years before he even learns his original name. Later, the past he has always avoided thinking about returns to haunt him and he goes in search of his lost parents. He relates this story in a series of sometimes coincidental meetings with the book’s narrator, who reports it to us. (Everything in Sebald is indirect. The narrator wasn’t a witness to these events and neither can we be. To pretend otherwise would be a delusion and morally wrong.) British and American editions of Austerlitz show a photograph of a young boy dressed like a cavalier on the cover and the assumption that this must be Austerlitz is proved correct - the photograph is presented as him in the text. Yet, clearly, if Austerlitz is a fictional character the picture must be of someone else. The status of many of the images in the book becomes similarly questionable. In fact, the photograph is a boyhood picture of a real architectural historian, one of Sebald’s friends. Austerlitz was a composite of several real people.
In the book, Austerlitz is a constant taker of photographs and he entrusts his collection, which “one day would be all that was left of his life”, to the narrator, who uses them to assemble his story. At one point some of Austerlitz’s photographs are employed as a therapeutic aid after a breakdown to reconstruct his “buried experiences” and there is a sense in which the book’s entire sequence of 87 images in 415 pages (Penguin UK edition) has been used for this purpose. Here, more than ever, it seems clear that the images haven’t arrived after the writing as “illustrations”. Rather, they have been used as source material by Sebald as a way of generating, or one might say designing, this apparently meandering but beautifully shaped narrative. In one of the book’s most remarked upon uses of photography, the text stops and Sebald shows a sequence of four doorways in Terezin outside Prague, site of a Jewish ghetto in the Second World War, which Austerlitz visits - these are his photos. In this context, the brutal last door, with its heavy iron bands, cannot fail to suggest a death camp gas chamber, though no such thing is stated in the text.
The question of page design naturally arises here. In a rare essay about the visual aspect of Sebald’s books, Robin Kinross criticises the crudity of design and production in the Harvill editions that introduced Sebald in Britain (see Unjustified Texts, 2002). Kinross notes that in The Rings of Saturn some of the images have moved from their positions in the original German edition published by the Andere Bibliothek. What isn’t clear, however, is the extent to which Sebald was involved in the placement of these images in the original or subsequent editions. He is known to have been highly involved in the revision of his translations into English and French, so it seems unlikely, given the importance of the pictures, that he would have wanted no say at all in the matter. Like Austerlitz, he was a devoted photographer. “In school I was in the dark room all the time,” he told an interviewer, “and I’ve always collected stray photographs; there’s a great deal of memory in them.” He carried a small camera and was constantly on the lookout for old photos, postcards and clippings. An obituary noted that, “He was an exacting customer at the University of East Anglia copy shop, discussing what might be done with his images, adjusting the size and contrast.” In the earlier books, the degraded, photocopied look of some of the pictures seems to have been a deliberate effect.
The Penguin Austerlitz design shows a marked improvement on the Harvill volumes. The book takes the form of an almost continuous paragraph and one stupendous crucial sentence unwinds over 11 pages, but the text is made much less overwhelming than this sounds by a narrow measure, generous line-spacing and ample margins. The pictures relate to this text area more carefully than in the earlier English translations. The last three Terezin doors fill the height of the text column and all are cropped to the same narrow width - by Sebald? - like a series of tombstones. They become bleak and moving portents of the fate of Austerlitz’s family. Perhaps future research will be able to uncover the extent to which this superb literary artist directed these pages and the book’s many other moments of subtle visual nuance and drama.
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the photography (content, texture, placement) in sebald's work seems often to act as a window-literally in a few cases-in that it offers an opening out, a widening of perspective that is not just implicit in the visual but in the suggestion (by dint of the fact that the single images are alonside multiple words-phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages) that these images are choices out of many, that alongside, behind, just apart from each image there are multitudes-not in a filmic, sequential sense, but in a notion of something that would exist in-between poetry and music. there is a something about those pictures, alongside that text (placed with a slow, enigmatic, perhaps not-visual, care); not a something definitive, but a something like tasting, the action of tasting-holding, biting, sensing, experiencing, living-through, understanding-that is compelling in an instinctive, essential way.
thankyou for mentioning him here.
When you said ‘Sebald makes of photographs and other visual material...providing an additional level of documentary “evidence”’ I immediately thought of Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography A children’s book in which the author uses photographs and documents that seem like evidence but actually add layers of obscurity. In fact all photographs of the author in the flyleaves of books in his lengthy series are ambiguous. There’s a very mature concept throughout that what you see with your own eyes may be misleading.
One I saw recently was a photo of a man in a dark coat and hat, back to the camera, back-dropped by a wooden rollercoaster. It had more than a passing resemblance to a Magritte painting. But this was a photograph so it was “real,” Right?
The Unauthorized Autobiography a playful book and the design is clever (if not amazing). The chapters can be read in any order and the more “evidence” you collect the less you know. The dust jacket is reversible to disguise the book as a kid-kitsch book about “the happiest kids in the world.” (The real Snicket series is called “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and details the adventures of the unluckiest children in the world.)
Slightly off topic but there was a British publisher that used to publish 'dossier' books of mainly crime/spy stories and sherlock holmes stories. They took the form of case file's containing realistic letters, photo's, maps and even objects recovered from the scene of the crime. Although no doubt an expensive concept for the ubiquitous beststeller to adopt, it does add a huge amount of realism to the narrative, especially when its suits the genre so well.
I think Danielewski's book 'house of leaves' is the closest to this published recently.
Thank you for bringing light to Sebald's incredible visual and literary talents. Many contemporary writers bring visual elements into their texts, which often distracts the reader and interrupts the experience of reading. Sebald's use of images adds depth and humanity to his luminous, haunting prose.
I picked up the book, and thank you for the recommendation. I have enjoyed it, and am constantly thinking about it.
It brings up the interesting interplay of text and image, and I, like Graham, think that the photography focus’s the work towards the indefinable and beautiful. I am struck by the harshness of the images when I come across them in the text, they jar me out of the insular world language has created. It is not the juxtaposition of the image and the text, it is the shocking and haunting switch of system that intrigues and enlightens me.
Again, thank you.
I’m interested in the remark you quote by Sebald about stray photographs and memory: “I’ve always collected stray photographs; there’s a great deal of memory in them.” For me it makes two points about what you call the “questionable” status of the photographs in his books, especially Austerlitz. First, it underscores that we have to take the relationship of the photographs to Sebald’s narratives as a fictional one, even when that relationship appears most “documentary.” Second, it suggests that when Sebald incorporates these often stray or found photographs into his texts, he’s doing so in order to restore memory to them--in a sense to reanimate them--for stray photographs are of course loaded with memory only in a notional sense. There’s an intriguing resemblance here between Sebald’s found photographs and the Box of Ku project of photographer Masao Yamamoto, who plays on the same memory-effect by creating putatively stray photographs. (http://www.pdxcontemporaryart.com/main/artists/artists_yamamoto.html)
Early in Austerlitz, there are hints that we should not take the photographs in a documentary spirit, or take the idea of “photographic accuracy” (your term) for granted, much less equate it with “scrupulous fidelity.” The first images in the book--tightly cropped photographs of four pairs of eyes--immediately suggest that we’re in the hands of a possibly eccentric collector. Then comes the narrator’s first encounter with Austerlitz, in the waiting room of Antwerp Centraal Station, with its “huge, half-obscured mirrors.” Austerlitz produces a camera from his rucksack and takes “several pictures of the mirrors, which were now quite dark.” Far from soliciting the idea of photographic objectivity, the book’s opening pages would seem then to establish photography an almost occult medium. It’s a sense of photography that emerges again at the end of the novel, when Sebald reproduces a damaged film still that to Austerlitz recalls “the fluidal pictures and electrographs taken by Louis Draget in Paris around the turn of the century” (or that to us might recall Bill Morrison’s Decasia).
And yet Sebald, through his narrator and through the choice of photographs, continually begs the issue of objectivity. Many of the photographs partake of a realism that makes them almost inert. I’m thinking especially of the photographs that accompany Austerlitz’s architectural disquisitions. For example, there’s the postcard-like elevated view of the Palace of Justice in Liege, which, as Austerlitz tells the narrator, “is the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe.” Much of Austerlitz’s conversation is made up of odd facts like this, which the narrator glosses as “his usual rigorous objectivity.” But occasionally, and in “curious contrast,” as the narrator says, Austerlitz offers up “apocryphal stories” or “anecdotes” that are more revealing. The photographs are used to support or extend (I don’t want to say “illustrate”) both varieties of Austerlitz’s conversation, but they have the effect of collapsing them into the same register, claiming “objectivity” across the board, so to speak. The result is occasionally jarring, even comical. At one point the narrator says that he hit upon the idea of a physical resemblance between Austerlitz and Wittgenstein because they both carried a rucksack, and that Austerlitz had described his rucksack as “the only truly reliable thing in his life.” So this is a rucksack that might carry some figurative freight. But Sebald deflates any such a reading by giving us the photograph of a rucksack, hanging forlornly from a peg, any vestiges of symbol or sentiment drained from it by the camera’s harsh strobe.
It’s hard to decide, then, what evidentiary effect the photographs (not to mention the other images) achieve, unless it’s an effect of undecidability. But on another level they do manage the effect of warming up Sebald’s rather dour narrative style.
the dourness might be something to do with translation-although i find his writing redolent of twilight or daybreak, of reflection (on windows, in the mind), a drifting narrative that at points-for me, particularly in 'vertigo'-is like being very very far from home, alone, half-dreaming. the only work that comes close (for me) is andrei tarkovsky's.
the 'box of ku', while beautiful, elegant-perhaps subtle-is too seductive and complete to bear any relationship to sebald's use of photography. the 'box of ku' is most certainly a box, things contained, related, understandable as an 'enigma', but certainly and obviously the work of a single photographer-and if the intention was/is to create a sense of 'found' photography, then that element is utterly lacking (unless in the sense of pastiche), and more in line with the 'artful' textures, marks and creases that illustrators and graphic designers so dearly love to 'play' with. sebald's world is far more textured than that, whilst also being just as it is: what you see is what is there and needs nothing else. and yes-sebald is sometimes wickedly funny.
one thing in, exemplified in sebald, is how much we rely on caption (or writing about the photography) to be able to understand photography even in the simplest of ways. i think that sebald sometimes weaves the photographs too much into the text-that, on occasion, just the prescence, the juxtaposition of picture and text can conjure lifetimes without the one needing to explain or make relevant the other, because no matter what the reader will, by instinct, attempt to relate the two. it's a project worth doing (photography next to text with no obvious, i.e. captioned, relationship)-the responses can be surprising.
Graham, I take your point about A Box of Ku, though I'm puzzled that you see it as something "complete." The first time I saw an installation of the work, in 1995 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Yamamoto had heaped the photographs into a small leather suitcase. (The suitcase, as I recall, was of British colonial vintage, which put an interesting spin on Yamamoto's nostalgia.) Viewers were free to leaf through the photographs, and I have to admit I was fooled for a few moments into thinking they were found pictures. Since then, every exhibit I’ve seen has had the photographs on the wall, in one configuration or another, and always a different selection. It seems an open-ended project. But maybe you mean complete in another sense.
I am translating the German version of "Austerlitz" into Croatian. Although interesting, the photographs do not seem to have much influence on the reception of the text. They are rather a reference to art nouveau Gesamtkunstwerk books, which is relevant because within the next ten years we may expect the standard book form to be completely replaced by electronic readers (pocket-book sized palmtops) with memory sticks or mini-discs. That technology will be able to illustrate in many ways, manipulate characters (script), highlight sentences, animate the background etc. Are we ready for that? Or shall we plead and protest (do not assasinate the book) for a couple of years, delay the progress and finally yield?
Memory is slippery enough without having the visual hooks the author provided removed, or even moved. Contrary to what the Croatian translator is suggesting, the only way his people, who surely have plenty of oblivion of their own to probe, are likely to take anything away from this book at all is to leave it the way it was conceived, with the rhythm of those uncaptioned photos and the margins and the widely spaced lines holding the narrative.
I'm reading Vertigo now, having earlier read The Emigrants and Austerlitz. Soon after the beginning of the second section (travels from Vienna to Venice and Verona), there is a photo, on a page describing a German castle, of what might be a castle. But there is cactus coming out of it. I'm sure they are cactus.
