Corey Twitchell

Thought Paper

11/14/2007

                                                                                               

Hoffman, Torsten, and Uwe Rose.  “Quasi jenseits der Zeit: zur Poetik der Fotografie bei  W. G. Sebald.” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 125.4 (2006): 580-608.

 

Fuchs, Anne.  “'Ein Hauptkapitel der Geschichte der Unterwerfung:’ Representations of   

Nature in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe der Saturn.”  W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Ed. Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long.  Würzbug: Königshausen and Neumann GmbH (2007): 121-138.

 

 

In their article, “Quasi jenseits der Zeit: zur Poetik der Fotografie bei W. G. Sebald,” Hoffmann and Rose begin their argument by outlining the four main uses of photographs in the author’s works.  They do not prepare these categories for the purpose of neatly compartmentalizing the images that appear in Sebald’s works; rather, they offer a framework according to which they emphasize the critical interplay between text and image.  Hoffmann and Rose articulate the usefulness of this mode of analysis, citing previous scholarly works that completely dismiss the importance of this interplay.  Using his four major novels (Schwindel. Gefühle (1990), Die Ausgewanderten (1992), Die Ringe des Saturn, (1995) and Austerlitz (2001)) as the basis for their analysis, they organize the use of photos into the following arenas: text replacement, illustration, testimony or proof, and stimulation or momentum for building and furthering the plot. They convincingly argue that Sebald’s texts confront the reader with visual elements[1] that any scholarly inquiry of his works must take into consideration. 

 

Their discussion of the potential for photographs to serve as testimony or proof of what Sebald’s narrators communicate is particularly compelling.  While Hoffmann and Rose demonstrate how photographs (in general and in Sebald’s works) are generally accepted as unequivocal proof that the thing depicted on a photographic image has indeed happened, the article also outlines how Sebald problematizes this assumption as much as he engages with it.  In some instances, photographs corroborate what the Sebaldian narrator relates.  In other instances, however, photography’s ability to act as proof is called into question, often by the photographs themselves (590-1).[2]  Hoffmann and Rose proceed to describe several examples of this phenomenon.  As further proof, they cite an interview with Sebald, in which he reveals that he sometimes uses photographs in order to destabilize the reader’s sense of assurance as to the text’s authenticity (592). 

 

The interplay between the written word and photography is therefore complex and many-sided.  Hoffmann and Rose characterize this relationship between text and image as a symbiotic one, in which both not only strengthen one another, but are also interwoven and therefore mutually illuminate one another.[3]  They take their discussion of photography a step further when they argue that the photographic image in Sebald’s works also possesses its own subjectivity.  They claim that images have the power to look and therefore make the beholder into the beheld (598-9).[4]  Hoffmann and Rose argue that photographs, according to their implementation in Sebald’s texts (especially in Austerlitz), function not as memento mori (as Barthes and Sontag have argued), but rather as portals through which one may still gain access to the dead.  In this manner, the photographic image functions as a bearer of hope (606)--ostensibly not only for the narrator, but also for the reader.  We have already seen how Ulrich Baer develops a similar line of thought in Spectral Evidence, where he argues that the photographs taken of the prisoners in the Lodz ghetto can be said to have the power to “speak” to us in the present/future.  We might ask ourselves whether this analytical framework is convincing and whether Hoffmann and Rose’s argument expands/supports Baer’s in a meaningful way (or vice versa). 

 

Photography and its employment in Sebald’s texts, while not at the forefront, also underscore Anne Fuchs’ argument in “Ein Hauptkapitel der Geschichte der Unterwerfung: Representations of Nature in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe der Saturn.”  Fuchs argues that the preoccupation with the natural world in Sebald’s texts “offers a sophisticated and complex response to the modern concept of nature and the complementary notion of an idealized landscape” (122).  Employing the Sebaldian narrator’s analysis of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson with the accompanying photographs as a starting point, she avers that Sebald explicitly critiques the Cartesian mind/body split as the beginning of a historical discourse that has privileged human thought and intellectual understanding over nature--whether it be the human body or the environment.  She explains how “Sebald’s extensive description of the painting delivers critical evaluation of the modern concept of nature, which does not conceive of nature as a cosmos any longer, but rather as an objectified and experimentally accessible world of phenomena” (127).  Fuchs argues that Sebald’s juxtapostion of Rembrandt’s painting and the one by Jacob van Ruisdael highlights an alternative relationship between humans and nature.  The more traditional landscape by van Rusidael depicts people in harmonious concert with their natural surroundings, a scene that allows the Sebaldian narrator to recuperate from what disturbed him in pondering Anatomy Lesson.  

 

Fuchs argues further that the narrator’s description of Anatomy Lesson “demonstrates how the detached observation of the dead body as an object of study results in the devaluation of life” (136).  This division between the human mind and everything outside it draws attention to humankind’s complicity in both historical catastrophes (i.e. the Holocaust) and natural catastrophes that are the result of humankind’s mistaken assumption that nature can be conquered and tamed.  In order to counteract and critique this dominant discourse on nature, Sebald places his narrator in Die Ringe des Saturn in sites across the English countryside (and elsewhere).  According to Fuchs’ reading, Sebald still holds strong to the notion that nature is a powerful, independent force (134).  In analyzing the episode in which the narrator hikes through the heaths of Dunwich and gets temporarily lost, Fuchs shows how nature in Sebald can be a source of dread.  She argues further: “It is only after the narrator turns away from his own subjectivity and is in a position to focus his attention on the smallest details of the area that the landscape begins to offer sufficient reference points for orientation” (134).        

 

According to Fuchs’ analysis, the narrator’s contact with nature not only problematizes this notion of alleged mastery over the world, but also the very possibility of maintaining one’s own subjectivity.  As readers, we are also left to ponder whether or not we may think of ourselves as individual subjects anymore.  To return to Hoffmann and Rose’s article, Sebald’s complex strategies for portraying and critiquing these “modern” discourses are then dependent on the hybrid nature of his texts, with their elaborate mixture of history, biography, fiction, travel-writing, and perhaps most strikingly, photographs.  

 

 

 

Possible Discussion Questions:

According to Hoffmann and Rose, the photographs that accompany a particular block of text cause the reader to pause and consider such passages more closely.  Passages that contain this interplay between text and image thus stick in the reader’s memory more vividly than passages that do not contain images. Did you find this to be the case while reading Die Ringe des Saturn? If so, what does this phenomenon say about language’s power to represent? Would you agree with Hoffmann and Rose’s argument that the photographic image possesses a kind of power or efficacy?

 

If we pair Fuchs’ analysis with Ulrich Baer’s text, might we shed additional light on Sebald’s preoccupation with nature and the human “subject” within it?  Baer’s analysis of photography might also come to our aid in approaching Sebald through Hoffmann and Rose’s argument.  Can we view Baer’s assertion that a photograph’s deceased subject can still speak to us in the present/future as a parallel to Sebald’s understanding of photography? For example, might the photographs of the Lódz ghetto have a similar power/potential as the image of the (alleged) silk cultivators (p. 349) or the photograph of the author/narrator himself (p. 313) in Die Ringe des Saturn?  

 

 

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[1] They explicitly make this claim at the outset: “Mit andren Worten: Auch wer die Bilder in Sebalds Arbeiten zu ignoriren veruscht, wie etwa Marcel Reich-Rainicki es gaten hat, zu unnötigen Zugaben, wird selbst bei der Lektüre des Textes mit visuallen Elementen konfrontiert” (583-4), and then proceed to outline the important role photography plays in these works.   

[2]  “ . . . wird der Beweischarakter der Fotografie in Sebalds Texten aber durchaus auch ernsthaft in Frage gestellt—und das ebenfalls durch den Einstaz von Fotografien” (590-1).

[3] “ . . . von einer symbiotischen Beziehung zwischen Text und Bild sprechen, in der diese sich nicht nur gegenseitig verstärken, sondern auch ineinander verwoben sind und sich dabei wechselseitig erhellen” (593-4).

[4] To support this argument, Hoffmann and Rose offer a close reading of the descriptions of the narrator in Austerlitz and a photograph he finds of himself much later in life.  The narrator describes how the child in the image seems to come to life and exert power of him (598-9).