The photographic grain as punctum in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001)
Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès
Abstract
This paper aims at pointing out the importance of the film grain in Sebald’s Austerlitz, where granularity plays the role of a subjective sting, a punctum around which the experience of the intermedial narrative as event coalesces for the reader. The grainy quality of the photographs gives time a spectral appearance in Austerlitz: as a visual trace of bygone times, it enables the photos to fulfill their roles of witnesses to past events which the film grain materializes on the page. However, the grain also signals the difficulty in trying to retrieve the past since it often alters the quality of the photograph beyond recognition. The film grain in Austerlitz can therefore be said to conjure up the phantoms of a past which it vividly recreates by means of its insertion in the economy of the intermedial apparatus. It produces incarnation effects, while guaranteeing the existence of a distant past which it simultaneously designates as lost. It lies at the core of the reader’s very special experience of Sebald’s novel as being haunted by a spectral kind of truth.
Résumé
Cet article vise à mettre en lumière l’importance du grain photographique dans le roman de Sebald intitulé Austerlitz, roman dans lequel la granularité joue le rôle de déclencheur d’affect, de punctum par lequel l’expérience du récit intermédial prend valeur d’événement pour le lecteur. La qualité granuleuse des photographies donne au temps une dimension spectrale dans Austerlitz: comme trace visuelle des temps passés, elle permet au photos de remplir leur mission de témoins d’événements passés que le grain matérialise sur la page. Cependant, le grain signale également combien il est difficile de tenter de se réapproprier le passé dans la mesure où il altère la qualité de la photographie au point que cette dernière devient difficilement identifiable. Le grain photographique fait également surgir les fantômes d’un passé qu’il recrée dans toute son intensité en l’insérant dans l’économie libidinale du dispositif intermédial. Il produit des effets d’incarnation, tout en garantissant l’existence d’un passé lointain qu’il désigne simultanément comme perdu. Il est au cœur de l’expérience toute particulière que le lecteur fait du roman de Sebald comme étant hanté par une vérité de type spectral.
Keywords
Intermedial narrative; Trauma; Photographs; Apparatus; Spectral; Punctum; Crystal of time; Incarnation; Grain; Flesh.
Austerlitz is part of the trilogy of Sebald’s novels where an intermedial narrative seeks to retrieve a
traumatic past that has been repressed by the narrator himself or by one of the protagonists in the story. Connected as is it with the history of the World War II, this traumatic past resurfaces in the form of a sense of unease in the narrator, which he tries to elucidate by producing an anamnetic narrative including a number of drafts, fragments of articles and archives, as well as a wealth of black and white photographs. It is my contention in this paper that those photos in Austerlitz’s intermedial narrative work as a punctum for both narrator and reader thanks to their grainy quality which installs a mechanism of temporal differentiation. If, according to Barthes, the punctum is the “photographic ecstasy” (Barthes 119) capable of “prompting the amorous and frightened consciousness into remembering the very letter of Time”, in Austerlitz, this photographic capacity to transmit a truth about time revolves around the role played by the film grain within the framework of the intermedial narrative which captures affects. Indeed, the grain “roughens” the smooth surface of the picture by making it hard to read, thus testifying to the inscription of the referential material in time, since it mimics the consequences of the passage of time. The film grain which is foregrounded in Sebald’s novel thus conjures up the physical presence of the past, whose ghostly body hovers over the narrative to create an effect of presence. The grain gives film photographs their textured and sensual appearance which prompts the circulation of meaning, emotions, affects and desire. By blurring the contours in the photograph, it makes it resemble a fragment of memory retrieved from the past, which produces an effect of truth about the past. Thus, the narrator in
Austerlitz thinks he recognizes his mother in a picture which dramatically stages a young actress’s face
emerging from the dark (253), because in its lack of focus and definition, the photo is similar to his own memories of his lost mother:
I also spent several days searching the records for the years 1938 and 1939 in the Prague theatrical archives in the Celetna, and there, among letters, files on employees, programs, and faded newspaper cuttings, I came upon the photograph of an anonymous actress who seemed to resemble my dim memory of my mother, and in whom Vera […] immediately and without a shadow of a doubt, as she said, recognized Agata as she had then been. (253)
The ironic twist in the text must be underlined, which uses the expression “without the shadow of a doubt” to describe the grainy, fuzzy and defocused quality of the photograph, which makes it look like memory itself.
In the course of this article, it will be shown that the grain in Austerlitz is no mere photographic technicality, but it carries a metarepresentational function similar to the one underlined by Roland Barthes in The
Grain of the Voice. In Austerlitz, the grain refers not only to the film grain or to the granularity of the
photo due to the presence of clumps of small particles of metallic silver, developed from silver halides that have received photons. It also refers to the optical effects created by the grain which make Sebald’s photos look like archives. The grain in Austerlitz therefore refers to the fuzzy effects, the fog effects, the weave effects, the effects of over or underexposure in the photographs which aim to produce an illusion of incarnation the better for the photos to conjure up the presence of the past as spectral.
Film grain changes the reading experience, because it turns the photograph into archival material testifying to the reality of the past, since the grain is a technical imperfection which the reader attributes to a technological lag due to historical distance. The grain inscribes the resilience of the past into the narrative and moves the reader, stirring up her feelings and touching her heart because it guarantees the “having been there” of the past, to take up Barthes’s phrase (1977: 44). In that sense, the film grain in
Austerlitz is the punctum of the photograph, i.e. the subjective sting of the image; it displays the intensity
of the passage of time itself:
“This new punctum, which no longer has a form but an intensity, is Time, it is the fractured force of the noema not in the form, but in the intensity, it is the heart-wrenching emphasis of the noema itself (“it has been”), its pure representation” (Barthes, 1993: 148).
The film grain fleshes out the temporality of the photograph, as it lures us into thinking that the photograph is made of the texture of time itself. Through its misty appearance and its fuzzy effects which defy our interpretation, the photograph strikes us as a visual embodiment of the very difficulty to remember and recollect the past. Simultaneously, the film grain makes the photograph appear as the embodiment of the passage of time, since it gives the photo the patina of age. It therefore creates an effect of truth which places it at the heart of the literary event of Sebald’s text. In that sense, it is through the film grain that epiphanic moments occur in the intermedial narrative.
In the same way as the texture of the voice appears to Roland Barthes as the “sublime locus of the affect” (Kristeva 120), similarly, for Sebald, the film grain is where significance accrues in the narrative, it is inherent in the textual apparatus which captures us, affects us and forces us to think. I am using the word apparatus in the Deleuzian sense here, as an heterogeneous assemblage of discourses, bodies, institutions and ideologies characterized by productivity and power (in the sense where we can say that a machine is powerful), because this apparatus is productive (of meaning), even though it is also constraining. It is a creative combination of forces which capture the reader and force her to remember. At the centre of this apparatus lie the granularity of the black and white film grain and its theatrical and introspective dimensions.
The adjustable concentration of dye clouds may indeed be used to evoke appearance as well as disappearance. A case in point is the comparison between Austerlitz’s mother’s photo and that of the
eponymous character as a young child dressed up in the costume of Tinker Bell’s little Prince (Sebald 183). What we see in the underexposed photo is the emergence of the past looming up towards us, whereas the overexposed little Prince seems to be retreating from under our eyes in an evocation of the uncertainty and vagueness of memory itself (interestingly enough, the narrator finds it difficult to recognise this little Prince as being an early picture of his own self).
The two pictures offer two complementary visions of our own ways of accessing the past. This is corroborated by the photograph of the little girl with the dog which, for Austerlitz, is the very image of a past that has been made soluble in water by the passage of time:
As there were no other pictures of any kind in the manse, I leafed again and again through these few photographs, […] until the people looking out of them, the blacksmith in his leather apron, Elias’s father the sub-postmaster, the shepherd walking along the village street with his sheep, and most of all the girl sitting in a chair in the garden with her little dog in her lap, became familiar to me as if I were living with them down at the bottom of the lake. (52)
In the photograph of the little girl with the dog, the film grain enables the fluid circulation of affects in the text, for, like the eponymous narrator, the reader sees it as “the shadows of reality [that] emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long” (77). Like the developing bath which transforms the latent image into a visible one, the film grain “develops” the past so that Sebald’s narrative appears as a desperate and necessary quest for the recovering of memory. The epiphanic moments provided by Sebald’s textured photographs echo the epiphanic moments felt by the eponymous character himself, on the occasion of his visit to Iver Grove with his landlord, when he discovers a house that has managed to stand the test of time, in the midst of ruins:
It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that when we were standing in the billiards room of Iver Grove with Ashman, Hilary remarked on the curious confusion of emotions affecting even a historian in a room like this, sealed away so long from the flow of the hours and days and the succession of the generations. (108)
Is the photograph such a means of preserving the past, of fixing it, sealing it away and immortalizing it, as if in a bath of formaldehyde?
process, the opening up of another temporal scale which is experienced by the viewer as ekstatic. This
ekstasis of the gaze is anchored in formal details, as Barthes makes clear when he draws a distinction
between the punctum and the studium. When it comes to formal details, the four gazes on which the novel opens, while thematizing the reciprocity between onlooker and looked upon, are a case in point (4-5).
In the four juxtaposed photographs, the gaze of the predator and that of its prey combine with that of philosopher Wittgenstein and painter Jan Peter Tripp, to make visible the link between gaze, knowledge and desire, which lies at the core of our repeated attempts to penetrate the dark secret of reality, as is explicitly put in the text surrounding the photos. The point of insertion of the photographs is important: therein lies the strength of the apparatus, since the gazes of the philosopher and of the painter are framed by the narrative, and interrupt the text immediately after the verb “surrounds”, as though they were meant to underline the signifier and make it resonate with imaginary echoes, or as though they were meant to force the reader to question their immediate meaning:
All I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.(5)
When considering these gazes which look at us without seeing, we realise they embody two different kinds of approach to meaning and meaning making. The direct frontality of the gazes of the lemur and of the painter contrasts with the indirectness of the gazes of the owl and of Wittgenstein, which follow two oblique lines of flight materialising the obliquity of meaning in a photograph, as a kind of preliminary warning to the reader which Sebald has placed at the outset of his novel.
For in Austerlitz, the meaning of the photograph is paradoxically as oblique as that of the text; in spite of its status as an indexical imprint, as a material trace of the real, the photograph is also an image, as Jean-Marie Shaeffer underlines in L’Image précaire, ie it is an analogon, not the object itself. Hence its quality as a memento mori, which Susan Sontag underlines in On Photography:
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. (Sontag 15)
Photographs in Austerlitz therefore guarantee the existence of a distant past, and by the same token designate the past as lost. On the one hand, they produce incarnation effects, on the other, they seem to deny us an access to the real thing since, as Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, they are but a mere emanation of reality (Barthes 138). They are barely a trace of reality; they point to reality’s disappearance.
Thus, the film grain comes to reinforce the contradiction that lies at the core of the very essence of photography, which makes the photograph a witness of the past as well as a pointer towards its irreversible loss. Isn’t the source of our emotion when looking at the photographs inserted in Austerlitz’s intermedial narrative located in their capacity to reconcile two radically opposed definitions of time? Those definitions of time correspond to two different definitions of an image: as a crystal of time where the past is enabled to well up into the present (Benjamin 478), and as a stroboscopic image which shows us the interval, the gap, the temporal difference (Didi-Huberman 17) between past and present. To push this a bit further, one may wonder whether the punctum of the photographs in Austerlitz does not lie in their capacity to reconcile two modes of thinking our insertion in time and our ways of world and meaning making: a “granular” one and a “cloudish” one. The granular mode corresponds to an aesthetics and politics of the grain, the cloudish one, a politics of the dot, or of the cloud. I would like to suggest that spectrality is what Sebald’s photographs use in order to reconcile the grain and the dot.
The photograph is spectral, this is what its grain evinces. The spectre is an in-between creature, a figure of becoming that is both dead and alive. It disappears and comes back with a vengeance so as to haunt the photographic noema much in the same way as it is seen to hover over the narrative as a figure of the incarnation of individual as well as of historical trauma. It represents the untimely return of an impossible experience which has been repressed and can only be acknowledged in phantom form. Witness this quotation where Austerlitz admits that what fascinates him when he develops his own photos is the moment when reality appears on the film in phantom and veiled form, when the paper is plunged in the chemical bath activating the die clouds. Similarly, what fascinates us in Austerlitz’s
intermedial narrative is the return of the photo in phantom form, as the figure of an almost retrieved past (116 -128).
Those spectral photographs appear as simulacra of an incarnation; they are mnesic protheses which simulate the movement of time and becoming, as their meaning folds and enfolds.
Austerlitz as a novel is maze-like and dream-like, which is partly owed to its structure of embedded
narratives in which the narrator, who can be identified as the author himself, reports Austerlitz’s narration in free indirect speech. This reported narrative which relates Austerlitz’s quest for his own past is a painful one: Austerlitz as a Jewish child in Prague just before the Second World War was sent to London by his mother at the age of five, in order to escape the Nazis. Austerlitz’s mother disappeared without a trace after having been directed to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. His father took exile in France, then he, too, disappeared. Austerlitz was adopted by an English couple who erased all traces of his past, and changed his name. Only when his parents died did Austerlitz learn about his new identity. His reported narrative, haunted as it is by the desire to revivify the visual memory of places and to conjure up the
past invites the reader to ponder over the mysterious workings of memory and the possibility to give a faithful account of the past. The photographs inserted in it interrupt the narrative flow and, by introducing moments of dilation, induce changes of gears which end up creating an hallucinated temporality which encourages dreaming as a prelude to remembering. As the photographs force the reader to pass on from a “digital” to an “analogical” (Mitchell 66-68) mode of apprehension of Austerlitz’s narrative without a transition, they interrupt the chronology of the reading process, much in the same way as the psychoanalyst punctuates the patient’s discourse during the talking cure to enable the imaginary and symbolic echoes of signifiers to resonate. The insertion of the photographs in the intermedial narrative creates echoes and resonances with the past that make anamnesis possible. However, the photos also make tangible to the reader the fact that the past can only be present in spectral form, as a series of hazy unsatisfactory pictures, so that Austerlitz’s undertaking proves hopeless to a certain extent, which is probably the reason for his suicide towards the end of the novel. For all that, the main narrative can be said to finish on an optimistic note, and on a wager on photographic truth, if only in spectral form, since the novel ends up with a transmission, a photographic legacy. Austerlitz, who has destroyed all the notes he made to record his quest for the past in a gesture of rage and frustration at not being able to remember, gives his flat key to the narrator for him to have access to his photographic archives:
I don’t know, said Austerlitz, what all this means, and so I am going to continue looking for my father, and for Marie de Verneuil as well. It was nearly twelve o’clock when we took leave of each other outside the Glacière Métro station. Years ago, Austerlitz said as we parted, there were great swamps here where people skated in winter, just as they did outside Bishopgate in London, and then he gave me the key to his house in Alderney Street. I could stay there whenever I liked, he said, and study the black and white photographs which, one day, would be all that was left of his life. (292-3)
The beauty of Sebald’s novel probably lies in this wager on photography’s spectral truth, on the capacity of photographs to present us with an incarnate form of reality in the very flesh of their film grain.
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Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès is Professor of English Literature at Université du Maine (Le Mans) in France. Her research interests focus around the representation of violence and the body in contemporary British fiction. She has published books on Martin Amis and postmodernism (2003), on the figures of violence (2005), and on text/image relations (2008) in British fiction. She has published a number of articles on British literature and its relation to the event, be it historical or personal. Her current research focuses on trauma theory and post 9/11 British fiction and art.
