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Means of reproducing the individual past in W. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz

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Megela I.

Pomiędzy. Polonistyczno-Ukrainoznawcze Studia Naukowe

2022

issue 4(1)

81-86

The article is devoted to the coverage of the problem of bricolage as a method of memory reconstruction in the novel “Austerlitz” by the greatest German writer Winfried Sebald. The article notes that “Austerlitz” marks the transition from trauma to conscious identity as part of the historical memory of the Holocaust. It shows how the hero of the work, Jacques Austerlitz, acquires his identity by assembling from scattered information his personal history, reflecting a significant part of the collective tragedy. The genre feature of the work as a travelogue, memoir, investigation, as literature bordering on documentary and artistic experience, where the real is combined with the fictional, is highlighted. The article describes in detail the content of the technique of bricolage as a form of “wild”, “pre-rational” way of thinking, as a technique of fitting auxiliary materials (old photographs, newspaper clippings), a montage of disparate episodes, the technique of collage. The structure of the work’s storytelling is analyzed when the narrator does not tell the story but describes what he hears from Jacques Austerlitz. It is as if it is not a text, but the story itself, which someone tells, and also shows pictures for authenticity. The functions of the hero in the novel gradually shift from people to things, documents, bearers of the memory of individual and collective civilizational catastrophe. These indescribable witnesses break the blockade of traumatic silence around the childhood of Austerlitz, embodied in images of blindness, dumbness, oblivion. Before the protagonist of the work, the “man without a past,” the history of his family, the ghostly happy childhood that was rudely cut short by the separation from his biological parents, is suddenly revealed. Sebald demonstrates a contemporary form of novel narrative in which the truthfulness of the Holocaust narrative is revealed by incorporating the exile’s personal authorial biography, pain, and guilt into the memory of this tragedy. The role of photographs and descriptions of architectural structures in revealing the immanent semantic content of the subject, not manifested verbally, is analyzed. The latter is the key document that unites and structures the important for the writer themes of memories, memory, indifference, oblivion, return to the ghostly past, overcoming of the psychological trauma. Based on the analysis the author concludes that the attitude to the reader as a co-author brings Sebald’s novel closer to the tradition of the European intellectual novel and postmodern hypertexts, in which meaningful units are not presented in a traditional linear sequence, but as a multiplicity of links and transitions. The author notes that the acute experience of humanitarian catastrophe, the multilayered text, the density of meaningful meanings make this work a notable phenomenon in the context of artistic comprehension of traumatic memory.

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1 Pomiędzy. Polonistyczno-Ukrainoznawcze Studia Naukowe

1 2022

1 Megela I.

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Means of reproducing the individual past in W. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz