Literature and the Afterlife of Events: The Lost and Haunted World of Austerlitz

Abstract

Like many writers, W. G. Sebald was fascinated with the ways in which the past shapes the present. What distinguishes him is the sense that the past continues to radiate and seep into the present. The travels of his characters are often mediated via historical fragments from bygone times. Photographs, documents, passports, landscapes, streets and architectural monoliths all exude an aura from a previous life. Each object’s existence has an afterlife to be deciphered. More often than not, their talismanic afterlife is part of the larger aftermath of twentieth-century European history. Life, afterlife and aftermath are themes that permeate Sebald’s work. While many of his stories illuminate the porous layers of recent history, Austerlitz is also an example of the relationship between writing and remembering, traumatic event and its unpredictable after-life. There is a paradoxical relationship that unfolds between memory and storytelling, in which we, the readers, are carried along in Jacques Austerlitz’s struggle with writing, talking and remembering. If academic scholarship can outline the epistemological problem of memory and writing, it is literature that represents the moral contours of this complex relationship. As Sebald remarked in one of his last interviews,

The moral backbone of literature is about the whole question of memory. … Memory, if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life.