Yes, I think I understand what you are getting at here but what of the very evident sense of a consciousness throughout. One that I quite naturally located within Austerlitz as I read. I may not be quite onto your meaning (specific example from the text would help clarify) but my feeling is that, rather than the speaking subject dissolving into the text, which suggests dissolution of self/subjectivity, it concentrates itself as affect. As a subject struggling with an all pervasive suffering/stunted self and seeking to disinter/resolve its roots to overcome this in some way. This resulted in more, not less meaning, no? - an increase in subjectivity.
Mind you having said that, this ‘concentration of affect’ is also a generalizing-out into the world at large. Indeed, a dissolution into a/the general discourse - that of the book. There is no real outside or inside to Austerlitz as affect. All that we see and experience within the novel’s passage is at one with his pained subjectivity; the desolate brutalized landscapes, the repellently grandiose/decayed architecture, the patches of sun and light which do not last. Interior and exterior alike. Thus one could argue that while individual character dissolves, consciousness and meaning seep out and saturate the text at large.
Ok, I think I’ve just talked myself into some understanding of what you say. Ha. Let me know if I’m completely off track.
Yes, but. I’d like to go back and look again at the photographs. I was a little ambivalent as I read. At times I thought they worked well with the text - with or against - (eg pp 119-20, 125, 164, 203, 206, 272-273) and at others - particularly some of the grainy poor quality landscape images - I found there was too much of a contrast with the refinement of the writing. The difference in materiality was too much. (compare the cover image with page 258) It was jarring and effect was lost for me, not augmented. In a book of such sensuous ambient prose the materiality of the images matters, I feel. Moreover many of the images referring to some grand feature of the land/city scape were tiny. What was Herr Sebald thinking, I wonder. I didn’t come away feeling he had a particular talent for the admixture of image with text. I’d go so far to say that Austerlitz would have been equally wonderful without a single image. They were largely redundant, a bit of a pretence even. No doubt it could be argued the crap images were very much to the point.
That aside I think you’re quite right - there is considerable accord between Camera Lucida and Austerlitz. Not so much in the use of images but in the concept of ‘the impossible science of the unique being’ (p 71, CL) - the singularity- which Barthes sought so ardently to find in photographs of his mother. And which he finally found in the photograph of her as a child in the Winter Garden at Chennvieres-sur-Marne.
Surely Austerlitz is engaged in a very similar pursuit, only his pursuit is of himself and the truth/self he is pursuing is constructing itself along the way. Hence the search itself very much a fumbling in the dark towards the indistinct. Barthes’ search for his mother’s ‘unique being’ a much happier, more lucid enterprise by comparison, though still highly fraught.
Barthes notion of the punctum might also be another explanation of why the images in the book work in a less than stellar fashion for me, but brilliantly perhaps for you - as against them being just not that well crafted and/or redundant. The ‘punctum’, for those unaware, is that indefinable thing which affects you and you alone. Whether a piece of music, an aspect of an image, a fleeting look, a view, or a rock you accidentally kick on the way to work - anything at all that ‘wounds’ you in Barthes’ words. That reaches you powerfully by way of a highly specific intersection of stimuli and response that marks the radical singularity that is you. If that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense I suggest you get onto Camera Lucida. Its a great read.
I will say this about Austerlitz and the punctum. Much of the novel was dreary, much of it was beautiful and mesmerising, and a very very small part of it for me was extremely potent: One part of one page. There was my punctum. It made the book worthwhile, needless to say.
And thanks for this thread; I’d come to be a bit stuck on the novel as drear and lachrymose and best for the elderly looking back on their life. (which is to say I’ll read it again one day) A sort of - who’s that thin English woman who writes nice refined novels??? - for those inclined to morose reverie and grand concatenations of subjectivity, history, landscape, and architecture. I don’t know if I’ve really changed my mind but I’m enjoying having to think about it a little. And there’s always that punctum.
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