Little Jessie's undergraduate writings on language and literature
A lengthy and somewhat laborious read. I've cut it down significantly so it might not always make complete sense - watch out for the '...'s.
Nonetheless, I was very interested in Barthes ideas on form as paramount over subject matter at the time, and it's a topic worth revisiting for me.
Read the bold bits for highlights.
W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and the Formation of Disquiet
In his novel The Emigrants, W.G Sebald uses form as a tool in which to place the reader in a particularly uncomfortable position. He does this carefully, in a controlled manner, so that the reader has to work at understanding what is going on beneath the veil of distance and light-hearted play. As this effect is compounding and expertly practiced over the course of the novel, it is difficult to pin down and examine exactly where and how Sebald manages to create a sense of uncertainly in the reader. What makes the text difficult to process and criticize is what points to the subtly used form that works to create the illusion of everything being manageable, while the content, emotional severity and questions posed in the story creep up on you, and stay with you long after the process of reading has been completed.
Introducing the story of Paul Bereyter is a black and white photograph; an old stretch of railway winding away from the low camera position through cleared countryside, before snaking out of view. The foreground of the photograph, an over-exposed and out of focus rail track, draws the onlooker into following this enticing and winding path, which ultimately ends somewhere inside the photo itself, out of our line of sight. We are aware that it continues, only we don’t have the whole picture. Three sentences into the story, this photo is given further meaning, as the reader learns, ‘a short distance from S, where the railway track curves out of a willow copse into the open fields, he had lain himself down in front of a train’ (Sebald 27). Written plainly and without a hint of sentimentality, Sebald manufactures an emotional separation between the reader and the act of suicide. The photo lends itself to this distance, as it seems tainted by an air of dubious authenticity. We’re not really expected to understand it as the very place, the scene of the suicide. It acts more like a reference to something else, much in the way a word references something else without being that other thing.
Critic Tess Lewis argues that Sebald’s use of photos throughout his writing ‘simultaneously reinforce(s) and undermine(s) the narrator’s credibility’, disrupting expectations of both the photo as a document of history, as well as calling into question our supposed suspension of disbelief, or confidence in the authority of the narrator (Lewis 85). The reader is comforted in much the same way a young child is comforted after the loss of a loved one or family member, with the underlying ‘truth’ of the story being deferred for them, kept at a safe distance, but none-the-less very much there; written in the furrows of their mother’s brow, muffled whispers and sympathetic looks in their direction. The simple understanding or gaining of truth is problematic in the novel. Zwart explains that ‘Sebald insists that truth comes in only two varieties: the provisional and the deferred. The provisional truths of the novel he flags by inviting doubt, and the deferred Truth he signals by figuring art as the never-adequate product of severe correction’ (Zwart, 243).
It is therefore not only the direct subject matter of the writing that has its effect on the reader, but the way in which the form of the writing acts to slip behind the reader’s defenses, having an ultimately compounded effect of disquiet and uncertainty. In the roots of Structuralism we can find a methodical and quasi-scientific approach to language and texts. With semiotics being at the base of language, Saussure believed language to be a concrete form, a way in which humans translate chaotic thought into order (Saussure 967). Saussure defines a linguistic system as ‘a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas… a complex equilibrium of terms that mutually condition each other’ (Saussure 974). While this system of understanding language and discourse can prove useful, it falls short in determining spaces and gaps where language falls short, the limits to what language can represent and the plurality of meanings and understanding of language based on an individual reader's historical/social context and personal experiences.
Roland Barthes deviates from absolute signifiers and truths in his later writings, focusing instead on what can be done with language in order to make it new, to disrupt normal patterns of representation and to contribute to positive social change as a process, rather than a radical act or catalyst for revolution. Barthes defines the text in its relation to ‘its subversive force in respect to the old classifications… if a text raises problems of classification (which is furthermore part of its ‘social’ functions), this is because it always involves a certain experience of limits’ (Barthes, 1471). The complexity of The Emigrants can be noted in Lewis’s attempted classification, who explains that Sebald has ‘effectively created a new genre by combining travelogue, biography, memoir, speculation, literary criticism and erudite detail into an elaborate structure founded on the restless sensibility of a melancholic aesthete’ (Lewis 85). Defining the genre Sebald works within does not help us to understand his writing any more clearly, but Lewis’ attempt highlights the difficulty of doing so, and thus the complex nature of his work.
In possibilities of transgression, Barthes places the emphasis on the form of a text, rather than the content itself. Following this line of thinking, a realist novel, no matter how radical the content, could not truly express something new, but would tend to reinforce existing understandings of the subject matter. Writing, therefore, is a process in which one can use the language that you know and is implicit in your understanding, but find creativity and agency in formulating this language in new ways. Writing becomes a practice and a process, as what is read becomes engulfed by what is known and therefore no longer entirely new. The writer must constantly seek to find new ways in which to use form to challenge social norms and socially constructed truths. Barthes theory is enacted in his very writing, as he seeks to find new modes of representation. His theories and ideas are often not explicit or stated plainly, but written in the very structure of the text. In A Lovers Discourse Barthes uses the subject of the lover and a collection of words that he elaborates upon to describe the discourse and experience of love. In his introduction to the work, Barthes describes the process of referencing in the discourse which follows,
In order to compose this amorous subject, pieces of various origin have been “put together.” Some come from an ordinary reading, that of Goethe’s Werther. Some come from insistent readings (Plato’s Symposium, Zen, psychoanalysis, certain Mystics, Nietzsche, German lieder). Some come from occasional readings. Some come from conversations with friends. And there are some which come from my own life (Barthes 8).
While discussing the notion of complex influence, Barthes draws attention away from the content itself, and towards the process, or ‘putting together’ of ideas, or language. Judith Butler argues similarly in reference to particular representations and the language of gender that ‘precisely because such terms have been produced and constrained within such regimes, they ought to be repeated in directions that reverse and displace their originating aims’ (Butler, 123). ...
As well as the light-hearted tone and humour which acts as a buffer for the experienced intensity of the story, the literal distance which is placed between the reader and the character of Paul Bereyter works in conjunction with the tone to further alienate the reader from the emotional severity of the tale. We are delivered the story through the narrator, who begins to tell the story of the Paul Bereyter who he knew as a young child looking up to his teacher, a man of eccentricities and passion. The narrator himself seems of little interest to the reader and while the story is positioned from the ‘I’ perspective, the focus is almost entirely on Paul. If we learn something of the narrator’s own character it tends to serve other purposes.
The experience of displacement, ambiguous moral positions, ‘race’ and ‘history’ are spoken about, yet not spoken about. Touched on, alluded to, or experienced indirectly. Jane Zwart argues, for example, that ‘ethical contingency, and its contingent loose ends, appear perhaps most starkly in the narrative of Paul Bereyter’ (Zwart 245). Paul’s time in the military, ‘service, if that is the word, for six years, in the morotized artillery’, is touched on for but a moment. Mme Landau remarks that he ‘doubtless saw more than any heart or eye could bear’, but what is not said in this scenario, what is implied or hinted at, unsettles the reader far more acutely than if every moral ambiguity had been spelt out (Sebald 55). An idealistic photo representation of Paul’s happiness, his first love Helen Hollander, ‘(sitting) on one hip, legs pulled beneath her, her sublime gaze upheld by her forward slanting torso and locked arms, her palms pitched on the ground before her’ is harshly juxtaposed against her own unfortunate end on a train to a concentration camp, along with the indirect implication of Paul being instrumental in the force which sends Helen to her death (Zwart 245).
Instead of explicitly describing the correlation between these events, Sebald leaves it up to the reader to find these fragmented connections. The reader is placed into a position of writing the story within the story, rather than believing in a solid truth of the narrative. The meaning lies within the gaps, what remains unsaid but is signified by spaces and uncertainty, leaving the text open to differing interpretations, but none-the-less insisting on the a conscious understanding of the construction or the voice of the text, and the inevitability of subjectivity.
These ideas tie in directly with those of Post Structuralism. James Williams negotiates this complex subject through what he deems as five of the key figures: Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Fouccault, and Kristeva. Poststructuralism is an understanding, Williams argues, of the limit being the core, not defined in opposition to the core but as a positive thing in its own right (Williams 2). In these terms, ‘the limit is an ungraspable thing that can only be approached through its function of disruption and change in the core… you cannot identify the limit, but you can trace its effect. Poststructuralists trace the effects of a limit defined as difference’ (Williams 3). The role of this limit is to open up the core and reconfigure the understanding of its role as a centre for truth (Williams 3). These writers fall away from defining their beliefs in absolutes, and are open to shifting and changing of their own perceptions, and do not believe in external truths. In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault relates,
What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if it were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move in my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again (Foucault 19).
Foucault acknowledges and even revels in the gaps, disparities, contradictions or difficulties in his writing, for the form itself is a representation of the questions he poses.
The Emigrants houses these post-structuralist tendencies in many regards. Though this text is not one that might necessarily strike the reader as transgressive as it skips and plays and wanders its way through the ‘facts’ and recollections of a story. It leaves out particulars of violence or sex, and describes any passion or emotion from a point of comic distance so that the reader cannot experience direct emotional reactions to the events portrayed. Historical events and war are expressed from a great distance, and retrospectively. Mme Landau describes Paul’s interest in reconstructing the events in S in the last decade of his life.
‘…he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Guzehausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets’ (Sebald 54).
The subjectivity and focus of these facts then shifts as we learn,
‘what horrified Paul was not only the coarse violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Guzenhausen, not only the death of seventy-five-year-old Ahron Rosenfeld, who was stabbed, or thirty-year-old Siegfried Rosenau, who was hanged from a railing; it was not only these things, said Mme Landau, that horrified Paul, but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schadenfreude that the schoolchildren of Guzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazaar in the town the following morning, taking several weeks’ supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops (Sebald 55).
While the actions described are terrible, the reader is instantly guided to Paul’s reaction to the events so that the severity and intensity of the atrocities become something tied into Paul’s own disposition. The perspective locates the events in the past, actions that have happened but are no longer happening. Further, they are actions in the past that are being explained through the narrator’s experience of listening to Lucy Landau explaining Paul’s reactions to these events. They take on the emotional value of a history book, distressing yet factual and, thankfully, over. The emphasis of this account is in referencing these events rather than explaining them, while the emphasis remains on Paul and his unique reaction to them.
It is the motion towards something unseen that works to unsettle the reader and create a feeling of unease. Sebald looks briefly in a direction, but then pulls away instantaneously, so the reader is given a flash of an image, a possibility, but no clarity or solid base to stand upon. What seems understandable in the straight forward historical tone of the novel is undermined. The concept of history is undermined, images as a representation of life is undermined as everything we read is a perception of the author who is describing a character’s perception of a character, a construction for our amusement and ultimate understanding (or lack thereof). We are reading, and what it is we are reading isn’t clear to us. We can feel at once humoured, encouraged, and yet suspicious of this story and what it seems to be doing. It doesn’t all fall into place, and leaves gaps and holes in its construction through which we can wander at our own leisure. Sebald does not attempt to outline his ideas through a clearly defined form which the reader can understand, as this could undermine an intention he may have had in writing. Judith Butler argues that,
‘the citing of the dominant norm does not, in this instance, displace the norm; rather, it becomes the means by which that dominant norm is most painfully reiterated as the very desire and the performance of those subjects’ (Butler 133).
Though her analysis is specific, it can be connected to a more generalised criticism of realism. Attempting to make a point about the subjectivity and the enigmatic nature of historical events, but doing so through a construction of directly naming and describing this point as ‘the other’ has the potential to reinstate the existing understandings of our social understanding of ‘truth’ and ‘history’. Language itself restricts the possibilities of openly communicating in this way. Judith Butler questions the possibility of language to name a body part in Gender is Burning, relating, ‘the name fails to sustain the identity of the body within the terms of cultural intelligibility; body parts disengage from any common centre, pull away from each other, lead separate lives, become sites of phantasmic investments that refuse to reduce to single sexualities’ (Butler 140).
Sebald, then, does not name his ‘other’ but tracks its affect on a core referenced individual. The ‘truth’ in The Emigrants becomes ever-recessing, ever-deferred. It remains in the gaps in which the reader can see inadequacies or spaces, without being able to reach a place of clarity... Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse,
To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is, in essence, made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at once and the same time it must be known and not known (…) I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask on my passion. But with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask’ (Barthes 42).
It is the form of the text which enables this ever-deferred, pointed to ‘truth’ within the story to effect the reader and create, not only a feeling of disquiet, but also a vivid, yet distorted glimpse of something beneath the light-hearted tone of the novel, beneath the distant glimpses of a personal experience and of history, to something subaqueous yet accessible in the recollections and perspectives of Sebald’s characters. The story of Paul Bereyter, and of The Emigrants, works in effecting in the reader an experience not being able to see clearly. In this experience, Sebald draws attention to the inadequacies of language or of history to adequately represent. By drawing the attention of the reader to these issues, a number of questions are posed, and the reader is ultimately left with a sense of lasting disquiet and perhaps a rattling of foundations (as part of a process of re-evaluation or ongoing shifting) of socially constructed understandings or certainties. Madame Landau reflects on hearing Paul’s childhood story of his uncle shaking his head at his nephew’s obsession with trains, commenting that ‘he would end up on the railways’ (Sebald 62). In reflecting on this double-edged phrase, Lucy reflects on her experience in hearing these words, not dissimilar to the experience of reading The Emigrants:
The disquiet I experienced because of that momentary failure to see what was meant – I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death – lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight (Sebald 63).
