On Writing with Photography

Chapter 11: Sphinxes without Secrets: W. G. Sebald’s Albums and the Aesthetics of Photographic Exchange

Years ago, I visited an elderly couple in suburban Pennsylvania, fugitives from Hitler’s Germany, who had been, during his lifetime, friends of the writer Winfried Georg Sebald (–). The two were avid collectors, in particular of photographs, and the novelist, fascinated and possessed of similar impulses, had borrowed some of their keepsakes for possible inclusion in a new novel. Sebald had died in a car accident shortly before I first met the elderly couple, and the novel that might have housed their snapshots was never written. During one of my visits, a misunderstanding arose due to my own poor English and their increasingly poor hearing. I thought I was being offered a doughnut (an offer that I politely declined), but in fact I was being asked about Robert Donat, the British heartthrob from the s. Agitated, my hostess stalked out of the room only to return with a dusty album that contained, on page after page, an exacting collection of clippings and cutouts from various magazines, teen or otherwise, of Robert Donat in all possible poses and attire. A bit of a schoolgirl crush she had developed while in England, she explained, perhaps an attempt to fit in in a new country, a new Heimat. I forgot to ask whether Sebald had ever seen the Donat album, and even if he had, he seems to have gravitated toward the couple’s family snapshots and postcard collections. But I imagine that Sebald knew quite well what I realized that day: albums used to hold a lot more than snapshots. What came as an epiphany to me is something that Sebald’s books, which themselves  11 Sphinxes without Secrets W. G. Sebald’s Albums and the Aesthetics of Photographic Exchange ADRIAN DAUB Sphinxes without Secrets  look like albums, though not just photo albums, have made an aesthetic principle. Today, most photo albums, at least those maintained by adults, contain snapshots of friends and family; and the many albums that Sebald’s narrators hunch over with their owners focus on those kinds of pictures as well. But the novels draw on motifs that exceed the family snapshot, but that an earlier age would have thought quite worthy of albumization—like the collected clippings of Robert Donat. Only the trading card album, for example for baseball cards, remains today of a long tradition of postcard albums, celebrity albums, portrait albums, and albums for newspaper clippings. Collection in albums is clearly concerned with a certain kind of domestication and encyclopedism. There is something dangerous in massproduced pictures (or texts) that needs to be harnessed, something in their circulation that threatens us, so that we are content only once their ceaseless exchange is arrested and they are on those white pages, as if wriggling on a pin. And yet, no matter how much we may caption, label, explain, alphabetize, or otherwise systematize them, albumized pictures stay in, and boldly announce, their purely contingent connection. The very notion of an album, etymologically a white space waiting to be filled with just about anything, already betrays the fact that these pictures, autographs, stamps, clippings remain arbitrary. At first blush, a photo album and a novel would seem to be characterized by an exactly reversed relationship of photograph to text. And while recent work, in particular by W. J. T. Mitchell, has complicated the simple privileging of one over the other to the effect that texts and photograph coconstitute a photo-text, W. G. Sebald’s texts have continued to perplex , precisely because they are both albums and novels. Many of those who have argued that Sebald’s photographs are not mere illustrations have tended to highlight the dynamic interactions instituted between Sebald’s writing and the photographs with which it is interspersed.To some extent, this opens up a false dichotomy: perfect interpenetration of word and image on the one hand, versus absolute privileging of the written word on the other. This false dichotomy considers it a mere surface occurrence that in Sebald’s text the first impression is often just the opposite, namely that text and image persist in relative autonomy side by side. And it turns the  ADRIAN DAUB task of the critic into a sounding out of the intricate connections between text and image that lie beneath the compartmentalized surface. But what would happen were we to take seriously the surface awkwardness ,the compartmentalization of word and image,characteristic of...