The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
W. G. Sebald · a novel without chapters, with uncaptioned photographs and documents set into the text · Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001 · scored on Sebald’s German, read from knowledge, with Anthea Bell’s translation (2001) beside it for sense; no text in hand, no German quoted, and Bell’s English quoted for two words only
Mode
Novel of memory and testimony at two and three removes; the essay, the photograph and the novel in one form
Mythos
The foundling raised under another name who learns his true one; the son’s search for the lost mother and father; the descent into an underworld whose gates are railway stations
Phase
From the narrator’s first meetings with Austerlitz in Antwerp in 1967, through London in the 1970s and a silence of about twenty years, to their meeting again in 1996, reaching back to 1939 and the war
Presentation
Fiction; one unbroken text without chapters and with few paragraph breaks, reported speech nested within reported speech, and photographs, plans, documents and film stills set into it without captions
Register
A long hypotactic period of deliberate nineteenth-century cast, in which every voice, the narrator’s, Austerlitz’s and Věra’s, speaks in one low and level grief
Scale
Two solitary men talking, one life recovered, and the architecture and administration of Europe from the fortresses and stations of the nineteenth century to the camps
Governing Proposition
An unnamed narrator meets Jacques Austerlitz, a scholar of the architecture of the capitalist age, in Antwerp in 1967, and over some thirty years hears from him the story of a man raised in a Welsh Calvinist manse under another name, who learns in middle age that he came to Britain as a small child with the Kindertransport in 1939, finds his nanny in Prague, and follows his mother to Terezín. The wager of the novel is that the destruction of the European Jews destroyed the memory of them in the survivors too, so that a life can be built over an absence without knowing it, and that such a past can reach anyone only at a remove, told by someone who was told.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens in Antwerp, in the late 1960s, with an unnamed narrator in the Nocturama of the city’s zoo, among nocturnal animals with large watching eyes, and then in the waiting room of the station. There he meets Jacques Austerlitz, a scholar of the architecture of the capitalist age, with its stations and its fortresses. Austerlitz talks, and the narrator listens. The book is that listening, and almost all of it is what Austerlitz said.
The first thing Austerlitz explains is the fortresses. The star-shaped forts built around Antwerp grew more vulnerable the more they were fortified. The digression is the book’s argument given in advance: the structures of order hold their own catastrophe. It is also a man’s way of not speaking about himself. Austerlitz has spent his life studying buildings because buildings are the one subject that does not lead back to him.
The book is built to match. It has no chapters and few paragraph breaks; the text runs on as one telling, interrupted by photographs, plans, documents and film stills, none with a caption. The reader meets an image of a station, a fortress, a moth, a child, and must decide what it is evidence of. The meetings run from 1967 in Antwerp and Belgium into the 1970s in London, then stop for about twenty years. When they begin again, Austerlitz has something to tell that he did not know when they met.
Movement II
Clause after clause ends with the same two words: “said Austerlitz”. The narrator reports what Austerlitz told him, and Austerlitz reports what others told him, so that at times a third voice sits inside the second, Věra’s words inside Austerlitz’s inside the narrator’s. Nothing in the book is witnessed by the one who tells it. The past it carries arrives always at a remove, and the removes are the form of the knowledge: this is how a destroyed past reaches anyone at all.
Austerlitz grew up in Wales, in a Calvinist manse, under another name, with a preacher and his wife who were not his parents, in a house that seemed to him a house of the dead. At Andromeda Lodge on the Welsh coast, Gerald’s uncle Alphonso collected moths, which die in their own time. The moths, the manse, the coast are given at length and in the same grief as everything else.
Around the childhood and the discovery the book sets the London years and the long study of buildings, a meditation on time at the Greenwich observatory, and a journey to Marienbad with Marie de Verneuil, drawn out at length. The book’s method is to approach the life from outside, through every structure but the one at its centre, until the centre can no longer be avoided. When it comes, it comes all at once, and it breaks him.
Movement III
The narrator and Austerlitz meet again in 1996, and Austerlitz tells him what happened in the years between. In the Ladies’ Waiting Room at Liverpool Street station he saw himself as a small boy, sitting there and waiting for the couple who would take him to Wales. The memory came out of the building, as if the room had kept it for him. The scholar of stations had arrived at the station where his own life in Britain began.
He had come to Britain in 1939, a small child on the Kindertransport, and been given to foster parents and a new name. Everything before that had been lost, not only to him but in him: he had lived a whole career on top of an absence without knowing it was there. The book’s disclosure is in that shape. The destruction of the European Jews destroyed the memory of them in those who survived, and a man could be built over the gap and never see it.
Knowing does not heal him. Austerlitz breaks down as the memory returns; he loses his reason. The narrator, who shares some of his symptoms, listens and records. Whether the narrator is his double the book does not say. It gives the breakdown in the same low level voice it gives the moths and the fortresses, and the evenness is the measure of what cannot be raised.
Movement IV
He goes to Prague and finds, in a flat in Šporkova street, his nanny, Věra. She tells him about the child he was and the mother he had. She gives him a photograph of a boy in a page’s costume, which is and is not him: he looks at it and does not know the child. The reader looks at it on the page, uncaptioned, and is put where he is, before an image that will not speak.
From Věra he learns that his mother was sent to Terezín. He goes there, and walks through the town’s empty streets, and stands before the window of its antique shop. Then the book gives the ghetto as its administration gave it: one sentence running on for many pages, an inventory without end and without a stop.
In Terezín the book’s law meets its subject. Terezín is the architecture of order made into an instrument of destruction, and the long sentence is the inventory as a form of killing. Nothing in the present action enters a camp or shows a death. What is shown is a man in an empty street, a shop window, a list, and the absence they hold.
Movement V
Austerlitz obtains a copy of the film the Nazis made of Theresienstadt, and has it slowed, to search it for his mother’s face. Slowed, the film changes, and the voices drop into a growl. He finds a woman’s face that may be hers. There is also a photograph from a theatre, of a woman who may be her. The book does not settle either.
Of his father the trace runs to Gurs and is lost there. In Paris Austerlitz is told that the new national library, vast and empty of readers, was built on the site where goods taken from Jews were stored. The building is the book’s figure for the whole: a grand institution of memory raised over the depot of a theft, and the theft forgotten under it. His name, a battle and a Paris station, is another such building.
The narrator closes the book alone. He goes to Breendonk, descends into its casemates, and ends beside its moat. The book began among the fortresses of Antwerp and ends at another, and between them it has told a life it never claims to know, at two removes, in images that will not say what they are of. The search is not finished. The father is not found.
Act III · The Twelve
The book is made of digressions, and the test is whether they are required. Most are, though not by plot: the star-shaped fortresses of Antwerp, which grew more vulnerable the more they were fortified; the nocturnal animals in the Antwerp zoo with their watching eyes; the waiting room of the city’s station; Austerlitz’s lifelong study of the architecture of the capitalist age. Each is the same knowledge, that the structures of order hold their own catastrophe, approached from outside before the life itself is approached, and the life is the one subject the man has spent his career avoiding. Remove them and the repression has no form. What holds the axis lower is a share that is permitted: the moths and Uncle Alphonso at Andromeda Lodge run longer than their part in the design, the journey to Marienbad with Marie de Verneuil is drawn out, and the meditation on time at the Greenwich observatory could be shorter without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the destruction of the European Jews destroyed not only lives but the memory of them in the survivors, so that a man can be built over an absence and live a whole career on top of it without knowing, as the new national library in Paris was built, he is told, on the site where goods taken from Jews were stored. The second disclosure is that the architecture of order, stations, fortresses, archives, a ghetto’s administration, is continuous with destruction. One action carries both: a man in middle age finds his name, his nanny in Prague, the Terezín to which his mother was sent, and loses his reason as he does. Held well below the top because much of what the book uncovers is mood, a melancholy over time and loss that colours the whole, and mood ranks below meaning; and because the historical disclosure was not new in 2001, though the manner of its bearing on a single life was.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is cold and frequent. The Ladies’ Waiting Room at Liverpool Street, where Austerlitz sees himself as a small boy waiting for his foster parents. Věra’s flat in Šporkova street, and her account of the child and his mother. The walk through the empty streets of Terezín and the window of its antique shop. The slowed copy of the Nazi film of Theresienstadt, in which he searches a woman’s face for his mother’s while the voices drop into a growl. The national library in Paris, vast and empty of readers. The narrator at Breendonk, descending into the casemates, and the close beside its moat. Held below the higher reaches because the register is one, a low steady grief, and its heights are reached by accumulation more than by a rise: the book rarely changes key, and transport needs a change.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The archetypes are present: the foundling raised under another name who learns his true one, the son’s search for the lost mother and father, the descent into an underworld whose gates are railway stations, the Welsh Calvinist manse as a house of the dead. The name itself carries a battle and the Paris station named for it. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that the myths are evoked more than built. The search is not structured as a quest with its ordeals; the father is not found; the mother is a face in a slowed film; and the book’s own skepticism of pattern keeps the archetype at the level of resonance. The particular is everything here, which is the book’s ethic, and the ethic costs the axis: the deep pattern is present as atmosphere and correspondence, and load-bearing only in the foundling’s discovery of his name.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the novel of the Holocaust and its survivors, and the long German prose of Stifter and Thomas Bernhard, whose nested reported speech Sebald adopts. The departure: a novel of the Holocaust that never enters a camp in its present action and never depicts a killing, told at two and three removes, with uncaptioned photographs whose standing as evidence the reader cannot settle, and a protagonist whose story is the failure to remember it. The stake was real: a book of near-plotless digression, presenting images that may or may not be what they seem, risked being received as a mannered essay, or as the appropriation of a history not the author’s. Held lower because the instrument, the photo-text and the walking narrator, had been made in Sebald’s earlier books, Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn; this book turns it toward the novel.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The removes, the clauses ending in “said Austerlitz”, are not a mannerism but the shape of how a destroyed past reaches anyone at all: never directly, always as told by someone who was told. The near absence of paragraph breaks makes the telling one breath, a memory that cannot stop once it has begun. The photographs, uncaptioned, are at once evidence and its failure: the boy in the page’s costume, whose photograph Věra gives him, is and is not Austerlitz, and the reader is put where he is, before an image that will not speak. The long sentence through Terezín enacts the ghetto’s administration as an inventory without end. Held below the top because some of the images are illustration, a plan or a building the text has already described, and there the form becomes a container.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Twenty-five years of reading, and the evidence is real: a large critical literature in English and German on the photographs, on memory and testimony, on the ethics of a German author who was not Jewish narrating a Jewish life, and on the book’s sources. The text keeps its questions open. Is the woman in the film, or in the theatre photograph, his mother? What became of his father after Gurs? Is the narrator, who shares symptoms with Austerlitz, his double? What are the images of, and whose are they? Formal depth yields on return: the echoes between fortress, station, library and ghetto reorganise each time. Held well below the top because a quarter century is a short test, and some of the yield is the attraction of the unresolved more than depth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is German-language fiction of its decade and, as the book was received chiefly in English, European fiction. The force: the book showed that a novel could carry the Holocaust by indirection, through architecture, documents and the failure of memory, and that the essay, the photograph and the novel could be one form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the best known of Sebald’s books; “Sebaldian” entered English critical vocabulary; and the photo-text novel and the walking, digressive narrator of memory are visible in the fiction written after him. Held lower because the reach is largely the reach of Sebald’s whole manner, made before this book, and because twenty-five years is too short to know whether the redirection holds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Twenty-five years, and survival of decades, not centuries. The text survives whole, images included, in print in German and in Bell’s English since 2001, and the images are reproduced in the editions known here. Its presence is continuous in reading and teaching, chiefly at university level, and it is the object of a steady scholarly literature. It is not fixed to a surface of its moment: its matter is history, and its manner is archaic by design. Not credited the widest presence, because its general readership is narrower than its critical name and its presence is strongest in English, not in its own language. Not charged, because no contest bears on it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on the German as far as Bell’s English carries it; the music of the German sentence is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The command is of the long period and of the frame: three levels of telling held without confusion across the whole book, and a construction that delays Austerlitz’s discovery of his own name for a third of the book and the return to Prague for half, so that the reader’s ignorance matches his. The placing of images against the text is exact where it works. Three charges hold it below the top: every voice, Věra’s, Gerald’s, the narrator’s, speaks in one register, Sebald’s, which the method permits but which flattens persons; the archaic cadence hardens at times into manner; and some images are placed as illustration, adding nothing the text has not said.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the moths at Andromeda Lodge on the Welsh coast, collected by Gerald’s uncle and dying in their own time, and the inventory of Terezín. One law governs them: everything made or living falls into the time that consumes it, and the orders human beings impose, collections, fortifications, timetables, ghettos, both resist that and serve it. The law holds from the opening in the Antwerp zoo to the close at Breendonk. The range of matter is wide: natural history, military architecture, astronomy and time, theatre, a Calvinist childhood, the Holocaust. Charged: the tonal range is narrow, one grief throughout, and narrowness is not coherence; and the equivalence the law implies between a moth’s death and a deportation is one the book does not always earn.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Several orders, held by one consciousness and its removes. Consciousness, in Austerlitz’s breakdown and recovery of memory. The family, lost and searched for: mother, father, foster parents, nanny. History: the European nineteenth century of stations and fortifications, through the war and the camps, to the 1990s. The state and its administration, in the ghetto’s bureaucracy and the library’s grandeur. The natural order: moths, nocturnal animals, the Welsh landscape. The sacred, in the Calvinist manse and its emptying. They are integrated by one law, of order and its undoing. Held below the higher reaches because labour, class and community scarcely appear, and everything reaches the book through two solitary men talking; the orders are present as subjects of study and memory more than as lives.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9, then The Sublime and The Inner Law at 8.8. A form whose removes are the shape of how a destroyed past reaches anyone, its uncaptioned photographs at once evidence and its failure; a command of the long period and of three levels of telling held without confusion; heights cold and frequent, from the Ladies’ Waiting Room to the slowed film; and one law, of order and its undoing, from the moths to Terezín.
Limiting Dimension
The Archetypal Deep at 8.3: the foundling, the search for the mother and father and the underworld of stations are evoked more than built, the father never found and the mother a face in a slowed film, load-bearing only in the discovery of the name. Next above it, at 8.5, The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Encompassed: a departure whose instrument was made in Sebald’s earlier books, a reach that is largely his manner’s, twenty-five years of survival, and orders held as subjects of study more than as lives.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Unconcealment at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, published in German by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, in 2001. It is scored as one work, the text and its photographs, plans, documents and film stills together, since the images are set into the text without captions and the book cannot be read without them. Every axis is judged on the novel in Sebald’s German, which was not in hand; no German is quoted, and its sense is given in plain words. The long hypotactic period and the deliberate nineteenth-century cast of the German are known; the rhythm and diction of the German sentence beyond them are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Translation · Anthea Bell’s (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2001), read beside the German for sense and quoted for two words only, the attribution that ends so many of its clauses; it was used because it is the translation known best here and the one through which the book was chiefly received. Its English is not charged to the novel. No text of either was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count, the length in pages of the sentence through Terezín, the paragraph count, the part Sebald took in the translation, the number of translations, the real persons behind Austerlitz, what Austerlitz seeks at the Paris station named for the battle, the writers since who are said to follow the book, and the book’s reception in German, are not given. Citations are by episode.