Blind Spots: Viewing Trauma in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz

Postwar literature's concern with belatedness, with coming after as much as depending upon the war, inflects any attempt to recuperate a traumatic legacy of unthinkable and often unspeakable violence. Contemporary writing such as W. G. Sebald's goes beyond an engagement with the immediate historical phase after 1945, comprising a more distanced fixation on the events and aftermath of the war and, more problematically, the Holocaust. This signals what might be termed post-postwar literature, at once at a remove from, and bound to, the already split condition of postwar writing. Under the sign of trauma, as conceived by psychoanalysis, retrieval through "Erinnerungsarbeit," "Durcharbeiten," and "Wiedergutmachung" threatens reduction to patterns of repetition. The temporal and perspectival breaks that characterize this sort of retroactive repetition and mark postwar literature question categories of memory, remembrance, and reliability.

The integration of other, often visual, material into narrative should, then, figure as a kind of authenticating supplement. This relates primarily to the use of photographs as aide-mémoire in the narrative work of recollection, of which Sebald's prose offers a complex example. The response to his work has addressed the ethical and formal questions provoked by the resulting text-image relationship; turning to theorists of the photographic image, from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes, from Susan Sontag to Marianna Hirsch, critics have constructed a framework within which they can consider how the dead might be captured in and return to haunt photographs, forcing a confrontation with the past in the present. The discussion of Sebald's work often turns on the axis between personal memory and collective history and the use of images to negotiate between the two. Using theories of the archive, Richard Crownshaw questions how photographs in Austerlitz (2001) can be used as "affective conduits for the transmission of trauma," when this material evidence exists as "a spectral residue seen only on the point of oblivion" (232, 222). While much has been written about the image's supplementing or authenticating function, there is, in the growing critical corpus on Sebald's work, a move towards questions of the excess of the image in relation to the text, to the resistance they simultaneously inscribe and picture. Samuel Pane, to cite just one example, finds that the "inherently traumatic" nature of photographs marks narrative itself with the ruptures of a violent history.

Carolin Duttlinger's article on the photographs in Austerlitz views the images in the novel through a psychoanalytic lens, drawing on the optical aspects of Freud's models of memory and trauma. Noting the importance of the gaze, vision, and perception in terms of Austerlitz's struggle with memory, identity, and history, Duttlinger emphasizes the traumatic aspects of Sebald's narrative through its preoccupation with the notion of belatedness. Her article breaks open the putative dependency of the protagonist on visual technologies to help him recall lost memories, revealing the sorts of supplementary constructions provided by these media when the past cannot be accessed. She identifies the sorts of blots and stains that, for Duttlinger, constitute the materiality of these visual media (169). This article will examine how these marks in the text and its images work as blind spots that at once resist and enhance understanding by provoking the reader/viewer to look askance. Mobilizing the scopic aspects of psychoanalytic theory, it will use the Lacanian configuration of the objet petit a as the stain or blot in the field of the visual that exposes nothing, a traumatic and abyssal point of rupture. But it will begin by looking back to the originary visual encounter of psychoanalysis, Freud's concept of the primal scene.

Austerlitz tells the story of loss and separation, the protagonist's catastrophic and dislocating loss of and separation from his parents, his childhood, and the memories of these things. The novel might be understood to picture a form of primal scene, but one where the horror of Nazi violence that brings about these catastrophic displacements exceeds the familial framework imposed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud formulated the primal scene as a constitutive moment in which the subject witnesses his...