"I think maybe here Sebald yokes two ideas together here very well - in some ways he even provides a kind of explanation for the pictures that inhabit the text. It is the idea that these memories arrive unbidden but cannot be forced, that the elusive nature of finding out who exactly he is has to be done in a tangential and allusive manner. That the straightforward approach will lead to nothing other than a 'darkening'."
I think you're on it here. To me it's a whole novel, in one sense at least, about that feeling when something is "on the tip of your tongue" and, as everyone knows, the best way to remember that thing is to think about something else and yet somehow not forget that you were trying to remember something.
Yes, and at the risk of more 'name dropping', albeit, the same name, this is exactly the ground of Camera Lucida. Rationality gives out in the search for the 'truth' of another/history/love, yet nonetheless this 'truth' emerges. Hence the 'impossible science', whose object of enquiry is impossible to define and thus impossible to provide a reliable means to arrive at. Beyond some variant of the, 'think about something else while keeping in mind one's aim'. Barthes formulation of the 'punctum' is a recognition that fundamentally vital truths cannot be regularised according to science.
Speaking of which, way back when I had to study a little philosophy of science I remember being very struck by a study of the Apollo Moon scientists. In the study they found that the most successful science came not from those who painstakingly worked their way forward, discarding failed/dis-proved theories along the way, but from one team in particular whose leader simply would not give up on his ideas despite all evidence in the early stages being to the contrary. Cool, uh. Its all the same ball park: the limits of the strictly rational. Which is not to say there are not grounds for being/knowledge, just that finding/inhabiting those grounds might involve loosening hold of the strictly rational and allowing a different relationship to reality. And while I'm on the topic, fuck rational fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins. (Sorry that was my own 'loosening hold' moment)
"As you can probably tell I'm not someone who works with an obvious 'theoretical position' i find it interesting when people say that he obviously knew his Barthes or Benjamin. I can't say my thoughts have cohered into a anything like a shape, i just find it all quite interesting batting this stuff around. I'm not dismissive of a theory based approach - i'm quite envious that someone has managed to have a framework with which they channel their thoughts - a unified vision, so to speak. My training/background is much more an old fashioned Lit crit, very I.A. Richards, Empson kind of chap i suppose."
Gracefully said. I have only a hazy notion of what I A Richards, Empson et al are about but I like what you say in the first excerpt above. I think you're being just a little disingenuous, though, about these gentlemen. They had a framework and a coherent approach I'm sure ?
Back to the photos: I'm well aware of what you say regarding Sebald's inclusion of photographs. He's trying to be all allusive and poetic, wot, like. They work in a rather intermittent fashion for me, thats all. Or rather they don't integrate with the text in a way that I find really works. Perhaps the new improved reading I'm going to embark upon will help.
Here's a book on how architecture should work in which image and text work wonderfully together.
The text is sparse and allusive but very much towards a point. The images are suggestive/atmospheric/even opaque at times yet the paper stock is excellent. The result is a book that successfully carries as actual physical object the intended meanings of the text.
It might just be an issue of paper stock for me. It would be interesting to go and check out some different editions of Camera Lucida and/or Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. (the last is well worth reading) which both feature interplays of image and text. I recall the quality of the edition making a big difference.
