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Austerlitz, cemeteries, East End of London, Karen Stuke, Literature, London, Paul Auster, photography, place, psychogeography, Stephen Watts, Tower Hamlets, W G Sebald, walking, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station
“The beautiful thing about Sebald’s writing is that it keeps us in a state of permanent disequilibrium…… his books are impossible to categorize. Are they novels? Are they autobiographies? Are they historical meditations?”
(Paul Auster, quoted in the frontispiece to Sebald’s Vertigo)
Although any worthwhile literature can stand in its own right it is natural for a reader to try to visualize a novel, for example. With any translation to another media, such as film, some things work and some don’t and different individuals react differently to someone else’s interpretation. Literary pilgrimage is just another version of this. I went to two linked events last weekend relating to W G Sebald‘s book Austerlitz. A walk around Sebald and Austerlitz’s East End with Sebald’s friend, the poet Stephen Watts (we are also following Iain Sinclair here), was followed by a discussion at the exhibition by German artist Karen Stuke, Stuke After Sebald’s Austerlitz, currently on show at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, home of The Wapping Project Gallery.
The Walk
“Alderney Street is quite a long way out in the East End of London. It is a remarkably quiet street running parallel to the main road not far from the Mile End junction, where there are always traffic jams…..the brick wall on the right about fifty yards long and tall as a man. At the end of it I found the house, where Austerlitz lived, the first in a row of six or seven.”
“And I should not omit, he (Austerlitz) added, to ring the bell at the gateway in the brick wall adjoining his house, for behind that wall, although he had never been able to see it from any of his windows, there was a plot where lime trees and lilacs grew and in which members of the Ashkenazi community had been buried ever since the eighteenth century.”
“You might have thought, Austerlitz told me, that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time.”
- Roque’s 1746 map showing Jewish cemeteries off Mile End Road
There is a cemetery hidden within Queen Mary College, just down the road from Alderney Road, used since the 17th century by Portuguese Jews, one of the several Jewish cemeteries in the area.
“The light was already fading when we left the house in Alderney Street together to walk a little way out of town, along the Mile End road to the large Tower Hamlets cemetery, which is surrounded by a tall dark brick wall and, like the adjoining complex of St Clement’s Hospital, according to a remark made by Austerlitz in passing, was one of the scenes of this phase of his story.”
“both desolate and weirdly contented I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain.”
“In the twilight slowly falling over London we walked slowly along the paths of the cemetery, past monuments erected by the Victorians to commemorate their dead, past mausoleums, marble crosses, stelae and obelisks, bulbous urns and statues of angels, many of them wingless or otherwise mutilated, turned to stone, so it seemed to me, at the very moment when they were about to take off from the earth. most of these memorials had long ago been tilted to one side or thrown over entirely by the roots of sycamores which were shooting up everywhere. The sarcophagi covered with pale-green, grey ochre and orange lichens were broken, some of the graves themselves had risen above the ground or sunk into it, so that you might think an earthquake had shaken the abode of the departed , or else that, summoned to the Last Judgement, they had upset, as they rose from their resting places, the neat and tidy order we impose on them.”
(all above quotes are from Austerlitz)
The Exhibition and Discussion
- London
“The installation, which includes monumental pinhole camera photographs taken in the book’s key locations, a metaphorical railway line and Jewish actors reading the novel is created by Stuke in collaboration with The Wapping Project’s curator Jules Wright. The commissioning of a German artist to respond to a work which deals with the Nazi oppression of Jews is not lost on Karen Stuke for whom the process has been often difficult and painful.”
(Quoted from information on Karen Stuke’s web site)
The exhibition continues until the 10th November and on the 2nd & 3rd November Austerlitz will be read in its entirety in the evocative setting of the exhibition.
Related articles
- W.G. Sebald Reads from His Novel Austerlitz at the 92nd Street Y (Video) (biblioklept.org)
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Fascinating post. Beautiful photography. I must read Austerlitz.
For purely selfish reasons, I suppose, I am quite taken with literary pilgrimage, especially when viewed through your camera. While I can appreciate the ambivalence regarding it, for me there is something about walking the very ground. Thus, to a certain extent neither the work nor the artist remains as they were but I have never found the pilgrimage to detract from either.
As for Austerlitz, I would like to listen to it and have actually found a moderately priced, unabridged, CD version. In these years, I find I am a much better listener, and Sebald is a fan of the longer sentence. On my list this one goes. Thanks, Diana!
Karen
I do agree about the literary pilgrimage, although I can see the idea gets taken too far sometimes, used as a commercial selling point. I hope you do enjoy the audio and hope the images help rather than hinder! Thank you, Karen.
Austerlitz has sat on my bookshelf unread for some years now. Why unread I am not sure – perhaps it is the more familair terrain of the Rings of Saturn that keeps drawing me back? Your post has prompted me to finally make a start on it.
Rings of Saturn always appeals to me because of its East Anglian setting, but Austerlitz is much more of a novel I think. I got more from it reading it again recently I must admit.
I too definitely have to re-read Austerlitz now! And try to recreate the walk on my own…
This is on the opposite side of London from Austerlitz’s haunts but your post reminded me of what appears to be a little Jewish cemetery just off Fulham Road that I keep passing on the bus and wondering about. Maybe this will finally spur me to do a bit of research!
Beautifully evocative post Diana. Also like the idea of the literary pilgrimage, Sebald’s words ‘grounded’ in the physical actuality underneath your feet and through your camera.
There is some ambivalence about the notion of literary pilgrimage – in fact Stephen Watts himself was rather dismissive of it, but I find it very rewarding.
Diana, that is so beautiful; your selected quotations and the pictures, especially the blurred ones of Prague(the stairway; ineffably haunting). Thanks for posting because the walk or exhibition are not things i could have done. Have u read “A Place in the Country” essays yet? To me they are possibly/probably the most quinessential Sebald, in their essayistic mix of literary analysis, (putatively-one is never fully sure with Max) personal anecdote and creative rhizomes on everything from a trajectory of the history of Germany from about 1800 onwards to gender androgyny and his usual, if occasional, dry , camp humour; and i recommend Helen Finch’s “Sebald’s Bachelors”, which is a refreshingly different take on the homosexual/queer/bachelor (large number of )characters and narrators in Max’s oevre. Take care, and thx for all your likes on my blog :)x Steve(“decayetude/TowardsUtopia”)
A Place in the Country is about the only piece of his work I haven’t seen yet, and I have not got hold of any of the biographical/critical work on him yet either – much more to pursue still! Thanks for the appreciation.
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Austerlitz is one of my favourite books. There’s such a strong sense of melancholy in the novel, almost overpowering. I remember something someone said about Sebald: that he had no ‘thick skin’ – it was as if all the pains of the world were borne down on his shoulders and threatened to destroy him (and perhaps they did in the end). But the very fact of this is redemptive – it gives us (readers) hope in the midst of the unbearable.
Beautiful description of Sebald’s work.
This surfaces some places and history I only had a very sketchy knowledge of, Diana. Such atmospheric resting places you have captured in your photographs.
An area for you to explore too maybe? i remember your graveyard photos from a while ago.
Yes, certainly. There is always something compelling about cemeteries and a certain mood to capture.
Your post, with its haunting photographs, has made me want to instantly re-read Austerlitz – and explore these lost and hidden places myself.
I’m glad it had that effect Gerry, Thanks.
The picture of the cemetery within St Mary’s College is fascinating. I’ve not read this book but your post has really intrigued me.
Well worth reading especially if you like the less obvious in life!
Ordered!