Remembering and Forgetting as a Narrative Mode in W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz”

The relationship between memory and literature is a complex and curious one. While memory implies a relation with the past, with the factual, literature’s realm is the fictional. They, nevertheless, implicate each other: while re-membering the past which is what is gone and not there anymore always entails mediation and a degree of fictionality, we can consider literary language as acting out psychic processes through metaphor, concealment and temporal dislocation. The novel that I deal with in this paper is Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald which recounts the story of a series of chance encounters between two travelers – the narrator and Austerlitz – in a time span of thirty years. As they traverse Europe, conceived in the text as a landscape in which cultural, natural and personal history intermingle, their paths converge several times and it is in their lengthy talks that Austerlitz’s traumatic past gradually emerges. Sent to England by his parents on a kindertransport just before the beginning of the Second World War and raised in Wales by foster parents, Austerlitz pursues a life unaware of his real identity. In this paper, focusing on the relationship of forgetting and remembering with storytelling, I explore how the mnemonic processes are represented in the text with an emphasis on the effect of the mechanisms of repression on the way the narrative is told.