ENIGMA AND RESOLUTION: THE NOVELISTIC STRUCTURE OF AUSTERLITZ

W. G. Sebald's last completed prose text, Austerlitz, contains the author's most extensive exploration of the archive. We have seen in previous chapters how zoos, entomological collections, libraries, maps and various forms of photography are extensively thematised in the text. We have also seen that Sebald is interested in the ‘archival consciousness’ of the modern subject, and he pursues this investigation to its probable extreme in Austerlitz.

On the face of it, Austerlitz is a far more conventional text than Sebald's earlier prose works. Reviewers noted that for the first time Sebald had actually written a novel. John Zilcosky argues that Austerlitz is more like a ‘real novel’ because it de-emphasises the confusion of memoir and fiction that had characterised Sebald's earlier prose. Zilcosky reaches this conclusion partly on the basis of the photographs. While these had been mostly authentic in The Emigrants, only half of the images in Austerlitz testify to the real-life models on whom Austerlitz is based. Furthermore, Zilcosky continues, they are neatly integrated into the novel's fictional framework through the device of having Jacques Austerlitz carry a camera with him, which robs them of their capacity to alienate the reader (2006: 687). This, however, could equally be seen as a profoundly disorientating technique: the photographs, which must have been taken by somebody in the ‘real world’, are deemed to have been produced by a character who is fictional.