Jane Sorensen

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Anamnesis in Austerlitz
In this novel, Austerlitz was the historic site of a battle, a train station repeatedly visited, and a character undergoing a transformation through anamnesis. In this essay I undertake to explore some philosophical concepts relating to anamnesis, or the particular kind that Austerlitz exemplified. [A]n agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thoughthas always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries they would have suggested to me. (Sebald 44) This is not how the protagonist begins his narration or how the book Austerlitz begins, but it is the beginning of his journey, the day he discovers, at age 15, his name is not Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz. He knew he had arrived and been adopted into a Welsh family at a young age, but could remember nothing of his childhood, not parents nor language, nor name. And yet this discovery not so much discovery, but instruction to use his real name on school exams doesnt spur him to begin the necessary investigation into his history. He continues, It hasnt been easy to make my way out of my own inhibitions. (Sebald 44) The story that ensues follows a certain meandering chronology, a disciplined and nuanced stream-of-consciousness offered to a good listener, the narrator. He carries the narrator/reader through his observations of rooms, buildings, streets, paintings, objects, moths, pigeons, stations, scenes and travels, people

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he knew, stories he was told, senses and emotions he felt (the latter with a sense of resistance or passivity at times), events that happened to him. Yet he also speaks with a singular remove, it seems, until he begins to speak of his frailties in later life. I realizedhow little practice I had in using my memory, and conversely how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past. (Sebald139) I have a hypothesis that the avoidance of memory of his personal history, the lack of pre-narration self-observation except in the present tense, the going forward without referral back to key people in his history as examples by which he should live his life, are all part of what made Austerlitz such an excellent student and perhaps professor of his subject (which we are led to believe was architectural history, as that was the context of so much of the book). The drive to avoid his past fueled his curiosity and ambition in intellectual matters instead, even as it crippled his ability to connect to others. And this may be no surprise after all, for you could substitute Austerlitzs architectural history for philosophy and come to the same conclusion as Heidegger, or, for that matter, an average Joe who is unimpressed with higher learning:
even if we have devoted many years to the intensive study of the treatises and writings of the great thinkers, that fact is still no guarantee that we ourselves are thinking, or even are ready to learn thinking. On the contrarypreoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly philosophizing. (Heidegger 5)

Austerlitz was twice in the hospital for dementia or episodic epilepsy connected to the trauma of remembering (or not-remembering) swathes of his life. One of the episodes of trauma was auto-induced upon retirement, a floundering of purpose that ended up having
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deep ramifications on his psyche at the time and resulted in spending the next period of his life pursuing the first. Incidentally, the first step of this endeavour occurred to him by chance while on a convalescent excursion to a bookstore, where he overheard a radio show about the children from occupied countries who were sent to England on a special transport in 1939. An earlier hospitalization occurred a few months after he met Marie at the manuscripts and records department at the Bibliothque Nationale, when on one of many weekends she was away, he had taken a trip to the outskirts of Paris and found himself at a museum in the cole Vtrinaire, where he saw many gruesome exhibits that he only remembered later after much work and Maries patient questioning. On the way back, he had the first of several fainting fits they called hysterical epilepsy, and when at last I began to improveI also recollected how once, while my mind was still quite submerged [that day], I had seen myself standing, filled with a painful sense that something within me was trying to surface from oblivion (Sebald 270) After the first episode of psychic breakdown, Austerlitz still preferred to remain ignorant of what caused his malaise, and may have not made or even avoided the connection between the malaise and his personal forgotten narrative. In so doing, he lost Marie, perhaps in Marienbad, where he felt they had been surrounded by portents trying to tell him about himself, he being unable to convey this feeling to her. She may have been the cause for his earlier psychic breakdown, her importance to him being the trigger for the importance of his past to him, a trigger inadequately dealt with for the current of present projects and for progressing beyond the past and forgetting is the general mode of life (and yet there was little of present and presence that Austerlitz forgot, with his finely
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detailed observations). Forgetting is thus designated as that against which the operation of recollecting is directed. The work of anamnesis moves against the current of the river Lethe. (Ricoeur27) Also, despite that the impetus is to move forward and concentrate on the matters of the day and of our future projects, we also fight remembrance because it is difficult, uncertain, and at times unrewarding. Direct and conscious recall, as any student studying for an exam will tell you, is hard work. Passive, involuntary recall is accidental. But anamnesis, or even any type of recollection at a distance, is risky work:
One searches from what one fears having forgotten temporarily or for good, without being able to decide, on the basis of the everyday experience of recollection, between two hypotheses concerning the origin of forgetting. Is it a definitive erasing of the traces of what was learned earlier, or is it a temporary obstacleeventually surmountablepreventing their reawakening? This uncertainty regarding the essential nature of forgetting gives the search its unsettling character. Searching is not necessarily finding. The effort to recall can succeed or fail. Successful recollection is one of the figures of what we term happy memory. (Ricoeur 27 28)

Our own thoughts do not cooperate with us any more than the thoughts and words of others: We said: man still does not think, and this because what must be thought about turns away from him; by no means only because man does not sufficiently reach out and turn to what is to be thought. (Heidegger 8) And yet our own unapproachable thoughts and memories, or need to supercede previous thoughts, define us: In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him. (Heidegger 9) Interaction with others, the prompting work of others, pales in comparison, and frustrates ourselves. Explicitly or implicitly, every human sentence is destined to someone or
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something. Some answer, some response, some link or follow-up is expected. (Lyotard The Others Rights p. 1) But this isnt often the end result: what we say ends up having the most meaning to ourselves. Interlocution is not an end in itself. It is legitimate only if, through others, the Other announces to me something which I hear but do not understand. (Lyotard 4) For if we hear it and do not understand, but take interest, it can become like one of Heideggers withdrawing thoughts: something for us to chase, and only by engaging with it are we engaging and interlocuting with the Other, and making meaning for our lives. Returning to Austerlitzs memory of present detail, perhaps he felt a certain freedom and a certain satisfaction of work in this capacity:
Anamnesisexplores the meanings of a given present, of an expression of the here and nowand does this by means of associations which are said to be freeThe apparent absence of constraints, this freedom to associate and be fearless of the incongruous, the absurd and the scandalous, is the opposite of a strong regulatory disposition, and can even be violent. It is a disposition to work through the current contextIt is a matter of working to reach the disposition one already has, of labouring to prepare oneself for the labour in process. (Lyotard Anamnesis, of the Visible 108)

If this is so, then Austerlitz also came well-prepared for the actual work of excavating the past, because with his ability to observe well, he had prepared himself without realizing it was a preparation. And this leads us to how anamnesis is related to optimal functioning or creative living. I have said that Austerlitz was a heavily observant man, as was the narrator. He had an amazing memory for architectural history; it was what he and the narrator had in common. Austerlitz also had quite the capacity for personal narration, giving fine details

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and capturing ephemeral senses and nuanced emotions. He took photographs and he spent his free time laying the photographs out, rearranging them, turning them upside down, and using them as memory cues by which he could start the films in his head. How many of us do this? We wait for moments of dj vu, accidental promptings, or necessity in order to begin sifting through the reels of our past; we prefer creation as optimal functioning to review, we often disdain those who spend their time in and on nostalgia. Yet there is no denying that nostalgia, and anamnesis as exemplified in Austerlitzs overt methods, are creative or living. They had to be, as he was searching for that which eluded him (hence it was anamnesis and not nostalgia, when we think we know of the past). To memory is tied an ambition, a claimthat of being faithful to the past. (Ricoeur 21) Yet much of what prompted Austerlitzs memory, anamnesis, was accidental. In the midst of a period when he had taken early retirement in 1991, partlybecause of the inexorable spread of ignorance even to the universities, and partly because I hoped to set out on paper my investigations into the history of architecture and civilizationhe experienced an inability to write, and then to read, which lead to a paralysis of thought and a progressive mental breakdown in his life.
It never occurred to me to wonder about my true origins, said Austerlitz, nor did I ever feel that I belonged to a certain social class, professional group, or religious confession. I was ill at ease among artists and intellectuals as in bourgeois life, and it was a very long time since I had felt able to make personal friendships. No sooner did I become acquainted with someone than I feared I had come too close, no sooner did someone turn towards me than I began to retreat. In the end I was linked to other people only by certain forms of courtesy which I took to extremes and which I know today, said Austerlitz, I observed not so much for the sake of their recipients as because they allowed me to ignore the fact that my life has always, for as far back as I can remember, been clouded by an unrelieved despair. (Sebald 125-126)

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Jane Sorensen

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He took to wandering from one end of London to the other at night to alleviate his insomnia and, allwould have remained buried in the depths of my mind had I not, through a series of coincidences, entered the old waiting room in Liverpool Street Station one Sunday morning, a few weeks at most before it vanished for ever in the rebuilding. (Sebald 138) There he observed a man sweeping the platform. He followed the man into the Ladies Waiting Room, and looked into an open space of construction, where, like a bizarre vision, all perspective was changed, where ghosts inhabited, he realized it was the waiting room where, at present in the third person he saw himself as a young child there to be collected by a strange family. And then became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years, and a terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death. (Sebald 137) However, in the normal course of things, I wouldnt declare Austerlitz the storyteller as perpetually suffering under the impact of trauma, despite the fact that he was removed from his natural family at a tender age. When he begins his search and returns to his city of origin, Prague, he meets his old nanny, and through her voice realizes he understands and can speak Czech, and memories of phrases come back to him. The floodgates are opened in a reverse of the stoppage that the trauma enacted. Normatlly, conditions may be strange by taking one outside of ones element such as Austerlitz, who spoke French and English, arriving in the country he was from, but where he must memorize phrases to get around but they are also navigable and inspiring. And even prior to the floodgates opening, Austerlitzs normal course of memory was unusual, but useful.
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Jane Sorensen

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Austerlitz often (and he is not alone in this) paid attention to apparitions and ghost stories, and had an imagination and conviction that the dead walk amongst us, that the veil between this world and the next was thin. This was a manifestation (or at least an example) of the following hypothesis: I believe that we humans construct strange and remarkable practices and beliefs in order to effect a transformation of disconnections into connections (Scott, The Time of Memory 21-22) Over and over, various philosophers on this topic have brought up Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and Mnemosyne, the mother of the creative muses, and I mention this only because it is the example given of this hypothesis: we will find such an effort, for example, in the Greek separation of Lethe from Mnemosyne and the transformation of Lethe into a powerful but overcomeable power of forgetful disconnection. (Scott 21-22) The fact is, we create art and music and stories, products of the muses, because language and thought fail in their attempts to say their own temporal events. (Scott 431) Exploration of ways to speak and think perceptively in memorys loss (as well as about it)requires us to be attentive to its occurrence, to carry out an unusual discipline of attention in order to be aware of a usual aspect of memory. (Scott 4) And art is the most accurate way to express what can never be, except historically, accurate. It is the imaginative connection between memory object and conceptual object from which meaning is derived, and perhaps is also the best way to describe how the normal recollection of a memory occurs. When we call up memories by imagining or by associations, when we look for the regions of mind that they seem to inhabit, something quite different from merely looking for mental objects occurs. (Scott 7)
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Jane Sorensen

Thursday, December 31, 2009

I cannot tell you whether Austerlitzs anamnesis, his delving into his past, made him a more creative being, considering the creativity his mind went to in absence of his past and in avoiding his past. However, I would posit that he ended the book, and probably carried on into the fictional future, as a freer being than in the times he described as part of his anamnetic narration. He would be freer as he would also belong to, and own, more than he had. So many of our authors written about the role of mourning in the process of anamnesis, simply because one mourns what is lost, most especially the loss of potential and the loss of belonging:
[W]ords we have miss what we sense and what the words seem to struggle in vain to say. This sense of forgetfulness and loss, however, on Heideggers account composes our access to a sense of being that exceeds our recollective grasp. This sense of forgetfulness seems to carry memory. In a continuous loss of speech that arises in encounters with the shining of what shines, we undergo a dim and fractured memory of what it might mean to live, as it were, in the light of the sun. (Scott 423)

By tracking down the facts of his parents existence after they had separated due to the war and when he was sent to Wales, Austerlitz was mourning his early childhood and his loss of memory of the time of belonging to a family. He was also mourning his missed opportunity to connect with Marie, as he figured her into his realization of Liverpool Street Station:
the scraps of memory beginning to drift through the outlying regions of my mind: images, for instance, like the recollection of a late November afternoon in 1968 when I stood with Marie de Verneuilwhom I had met in Paris, and of whom I shall have more to saywhen we stood in the nave of the wonderful church of Salle in Norfolk, which towers in isolation above the wide fields, and I could not bring out the words I should have spoken then. (Sebald 136)

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Jane Sorensen

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For after the drive to find meaning in our lives and memories (the sun of truth, knowledge and wisdom), we find the need to belong (the sun of warmth and growth and renewal).
The question or assertion that we address to others is invariably coupled with an entreaty: Deliver me from my abandonment, allow me to belong among you. This entreaty allows of a wide variety of modalities: friendship, hatred, love, and even indifference. (Lyotard 6)

At the end of the novel, after he has located all he could of his mother, he heads back to Paris to pursue the memory of his father, and also to reconnect with Marie, perhaps to explain to her what had frozen him over back when they were involved. So closely coupled with mourning as to be almost inextractible is forgiveness. There is no mention of it, but when he finds her, he will ask for forgiveness as well as provide an explanation for having disappointed her. However the concept of forgiveness as anamnesis is not an appropriate topic here (but for one overarching consideration), for we are without any infraction except the inability of Austerlitz to connect to Marie a disappointment for which anamnetic forgiveness is too strong a remedy. Anamnetic forgiveness is but one component of our ethical responsibility to engage in this mode of remembrance. It is also our responsibility to remember in as much as we have an ethical responsibility to be thoughtfully happy. And again, we truly incline only toward something that in turn inclines toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as the keeper who holds us in our essential being. (Heidegger 3)

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Jane Sorensen

Thursday, December 31, 2009

But in the particular overarching consideration of Austerlitz, Austerlitz assumed his anamnetic ethical responsibility because even for all the European history he had known in his career and life, he knew about much more than a salesgirl in a shop about the conquest of Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up, and nothing about the persecution I had escaped. (Sebald 139) This ethical responsibility was accidental one can hardly expect to have the unknown parts of their lives touch as great a significance worth pondering as the deleterious effects of war and social policy but to run away from learning about such an accidental confluence would be irresponsible to the greater victims of the accident such as ones parents, and to ponder its own meaning in ones life is an irresponsibility to oneself.
But there is a severity in these transformations that my nostalgic indulgence does not reach. The severity is found in the coming of memories as well as in their passage. Severity is found in the loss that invests their memorial return, in the loss of presence in the return of what was and now, transformed, is contemporary. It is like the severity of being in an accident, of being confronted by eminent and unavoidable danger, of losing the life of something important, of the futility of wanting now to last forever, or the severity of any other passing event. Events take place, make demands, and persist for a while. They are severe in the sense that they are quite singularly as they happen to pass, and in their occurrences they seem often to efface other bygone events whose meaning and images they carry. How are we to speak and think of them appropriately before the severity of their coming transformatively to pass? How do we measure the appropriateness of our response? (Scott 11)

The last sentence is italicized by me, as it is the yardstick by which ethics is measured. Though Austerlitz was never inappropriate in his behaviour, he lived a life largely malformed by the absence, and corrected by the action, of anamnesis. I hope that you as the reader will take away some meaning from this paper and apply it to your reading of this excellent book.

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Bibliography
Heidegger, Martin. 1968. What is called Thinking? New York: Harper & Row, Publishers Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 1993. The Others Rights. Pp. 135- 147 Shute, Stephen and Susan Hurely (eds.) On Human Rights, New York: BasicBooks http://www.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/issues/three/lyotard_text.html Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 2004. Anamnesis, of the Visible. Theory, Culture & Society 21(1):107-119 Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Scott, Charles E. 1999. The Time of Memory. State University of New York Press. Scott, Charles. 1999. Memory of time in the light of the flesh. Continental Philosophy Review 32:412432 Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

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