Austerlitz

“[I]t had been forgotten that the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive, so that in the end you might find yourself in a place fortified in every possible way, watching helplessly while the enemy troops, moving on to their own choice of terrain elsewhere, simply ignored their adversaries’ fortresses, which had become positive arsenals of weaponry, bristling with cannon and overcrowded with men.”

Austerlitz’s history of fortress architecture is not only a history but also a description of the runaway elaboration that characterizes people’s attempts to defend themselves. The perfected fortress symbolizes the crucial mistake of believing it is possible to design an infallible defense; because such designs are static, they are vulnerable to unforeseen variables.

“At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

Austerlitz comments on the awesome nature of monumental buildings. He believes such buildings are not actually grand, because they are built out of fear and a desire to conceal our greatest insecurities. They are spectacular and seem to transcend everyday human existence, yet this very transcendence is founded on the suffering involved in their construction; this dynamic appears in the fatal poisoning of those who built the mirrors in the Centraal Station.

“Even now, when I try to remember them, when I look back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk and read the words of the captions—Former Office, Printing Works, Huts, Jacques Ochs Hall, Solitary Confinement Cell, Mortuary, Relics Store, and Museum—the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”

The narrator notices the difficulty of rescuing the past from the inexorable pull of oblivion. He describes time as a constant process of erasure that “extinguish[es]” the vast majority of things without a trace. The narrator’s description conveys a sense of barren inhumanity.

“Where there had been nothing a moment ago but fathomless gloom, there now shone a little village with a few orchards, meadows, and fields, surrounded by black shadows but sparkling green like the Islands of the Blest, and as we walked down the road from the pass beside the pony and trap everything grew lighter and lighter, the mountainsides emerged from the darkness shining brightly, the fine grasses bending in the wind shimmered with light, the silvery willows gleamed down on the banks of the stream.”

While traveling with Emyr for his sermons, Austerlitz interprets the world in terms of Emyr’s Methodist eschatology. He sees forsakenness and blessedness manifest in the earth itself, making the veracity of Emyr’s beliefs immediately evident. Austerlitz remains in thrall to Emyr’s polarized worldview until he meets Evan the cobbler, the first person he meets whose beliefs contradict Emyr’s.

“At night, before I fell asleep in my cold room, I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water, and like the poor souls of Vyrnwy must keep my eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of light far above me, and see the reflection, broken by ripples, of the stone tower standing in such fearsome isolation on the wooded bank.”

The imagery of trying desperately to catch a glint of light while submerged in dark water conveys the emotional barrenness of the Eliases’ house in Bala. The constant chill in the house also connotes this barrenness, which, influenced by Emyr’s beliefs about divine justice, Austerlitz interprets as punishment for some unknown crime he committed.

“I couldn’t work out the spelling, and read the strange term which sounded to me like some password three or four times, syllable by syllable, before I looked up and said: Excuse me, sir, but what does it mean? To which Penrith-Smith replied: I think you will find it is a small place in Moravia, site of a famous battle, you know.”

The young Austerlitz receives an utter lack of assistance in understanding his mysterious past indicated by his unusual last name. The idea of a “password” suggests his belief in some magic key that will unlock the enigma. This belief betrays his self-defeating tendency to overanalyze. There is no password that will solve the riddle of his past.

“All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer boy, the infantryman shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse’s eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.”

Hilary’s thesis expresses one of Austerlitz’s themes: that the past is ultimately unknowable. Hilary takes pains to show that even his detailed descriptions of the Battle of Austerlitz fail to capture even one moment of the battle as it was. History is a narrative formulated from a remove, meaning that it is not a record of the actual past, but a story constructed from the few surviving traces.

“But on bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a luster lay over the whole of Barmouth Bay that the separate surfaces of sand and water, sea and land, earth and sky could no longer be distinguished. All forms and colors were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there were no contrasts, no shading anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely—I remember this well—it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity.”

In contrast to the elegiac tone of most of the novel, this passage is suffused with the feeling of transcendence found in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Both novels share themes of memory and the attempt to regain lost time, though the horror at the center of Austerlitz is absent in Proust’s novel. Austerlitz remarks here that eternity, the escape from the crush of time he yearns for, is found not in trying to regain the past but in the ephemeral passing moment. The softening luster suggests a freedom from his compulsion to analyze the world, a freedom from the boundaries that imposes.

“And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction?”

Austerlitz regards clock time as a construct unsuited to reality. The consistent flow of clock time doesn’t account for our varying perceptions of time, and it is consequently unfit for governing the world. Moreover, because the human experience of time involves a sense of eternity, the tyranny of purely linear clock time is inhuman.

“There was something fleeting, evanescent about those sparse patterns appearing in constant succession on the pale surface, something which never went beyond the moment of its generation, so to speak, yet here, in this intertwining of sunlight and shadow always forming and re-forming, you could see mountainous landscapes with glaciers and ice fields, high plateaux, steppes, deserts, fields full of flowers, islands in the sea, coral reefs, archipelagoes and atolls, forests bending to the storm, quaking grass and drifting smoke. And once, I remember, said Austerlitz, as we gazed together at this slowly fading world, [Gerald’s mother] leaned towards me and asked: Do you see the fronds of the palm trees, do you see the caravan coming through the dunes over there?”

Again, Austerlitz becomes attuned to the ever-changing moment during one of his visits to Andromeda Lodge. In contrast to the imagery in much of the book, the imagery here presents fantastical beauty and a sense of joy in unspoiled nature. Unlike in his description of Barmouth Bay, this description contains a wistful tone, suggesting Austerlitz didn’t experience this same sense of eternity in Barmouth Bay.

“I was increasingly overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz, at the mere thought of opening the bundles of papers and looking through the endless reams I had written in the course of the years.”

This passage signals the beginning of Austerlitz’s rejection of the life he has constructed to distract himself from his torment. His repressed self mounts an attack that manifests physically, indicating the power of these repressed feelings. His episodes of amnesia are periodic climaxes to these unconscious emotions’ rebellion.

“Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths.”

Austerlitz’s analogy expresses his disillusionment with language, stemming from his feeling that his words are lies that conceal reality. The draw of self-annihilation he describes results from his loss of study as a distraction from emotion. Suddenly, instead of feeling the security he constructed for himself in his quiet life, he feels exposed to the abyss that has been under him all along.

“I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world.”

This is one of Austerlitz’s moments of anagnorisis—his realization that he has made a life in a house of cards, thinking it would protect him. There is a sense of tragedy and fatalism in his words, both in that his crisis feels unavoidable and in that his predicament at large appears too great to tackle.

“All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”

Austerlitz despairingly realizes language does not describe the world as exactly as he’d thought. The analogy between his attempts to describe the world and the inability of some simple organisms to sense their own environments suggests that our own grasp on reality is insubstantial. This inability to express reality is profoundly distressing to Austerlitz because it makes him feel lost in the world again, as he was as an orphaned child.

“We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious”

Austerlitz’s description of his impulse to enter the closed waiting room in Liverpool Street Station—where he remembers he waited as a child—suggests a lack of control. He feels influenced by mysterious forces, a natural feeling considering how little of his history is explained to him after he arrives in England. This sentence expresses the novel’s pervasive sense of fatalism, which stems from not only Austerlitz’s beliefs but also the narrative’s structure; because the narrative sets so much in the protagonist’s past, the events that unfold feel like fait accomplis.

“I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my own early history.”

Austerlitz’s self-awareness in his conversation with the narrator makes his inability to see his quest—to uncover the full reality of his past in a futile attempt to alter fate—all the more tragic. Austerlitz’s description of his defense mechanisms resonates with his description of the history of fortress architecture, as a process of refinement culminating in a perfect fortress useless for defense.

“Vera had risen and opened both the inner and the outer windows to let me look down into the garden next door, where the lilac happened to be in flower, its blossoms so thick and white that in the gathering dusk it looked as if there had been a snowstorm in the middle of spring. And the sweet fragrance wafting up from the walled garden, the waxing moon already in the sky above the rooftops, the sound of church bells ringing down in the city, and the yellow façade of the tailor’s house with its green balcony where Moravec, who as Vera told me had died long ago, frequently used to be seen in his time, swinging his heavy iron filled with red-hot coals through the air, these and other images, said Austerlitz, ranged themselves side by side, so that deeply buried and locked away within me as they had been, they now came luminously back to my mind as I looked out of the window.”

In his bittersweet nostalgia for an idyllic time, Austerlitz’s fond reminiscence of his childhood in Prague again resembles Proust’s style in In Search of Lost Time. For all the novel’s emphasis on the fragility of the past and the oblivion of forgetting, Austerlitz’s reminiscence also attests to the resiliency of memory and the past: Even after years of repression, he remembers a time from his early childhood. This vivid memory reminds him he once lived a life free of misery.

“I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.”

When Vera shows Austerlitz the photo of him in ball costume (which appears on the cover of this edition of Austerlitz), he’s unable to recognize himself. That he doesn’t recognize himself suggests the severity of the split between his life before and after his evacuation from Prague. The little boy is so removed from the Austerlitz current life that self-identification with the photo seems impossible. At the same time, Austerlitz sees a presentiment of his coming misfortune in the boy’s expression, in an eerie distortion of time.

“I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it, for every detail that was revealed to me as I went through the museum from room to room and back again, ignorant as I feared I had been through my own fault, far exceeded my comprehension.”

After a lifetime of avoidance, Austerlitz visits the Theresienstadt Ghetto Museum and finally learns at the about the horror that haunts him: the Holocaust. Although he discovers the source of his torment, the Holocaust retains the same incomprehensible nature it had when it was still unidentified. This incomprehensibility reveals the Holocaust’s true nature; as Hilary argues about the Battle of Austerlitz, history reduces events to a false understanding, concealing the events’ full complexity. In his first encounter with records of the Holocaust, Austerlitz has so long avoided the history of the event that he senses this complexity; the Holocaust exceeds his comprehension.

“That evening in Marienbad, said Austerlitz, I could not admit to myself how right everything Marie said was, but today I know why I felt obliged to turn away when anyone came too close to me, I know that I thought this turning away made me safe, and that at the same time I saw myself transformed into a frightful and hideous creature, a man beyond the pale.”

Again, Austerlitz shows a capacity to analyze himself and diagnose his own problems. The way the surrounding passage is structured elides the fallout of Austerlitz’s withdrawal from Marie. Because Austerlitz merely implies rather than explicitly states their relationship’s failure, that failure becomes more tragic: It appears as if Austerlitz is avoiding the grief of that loss, too.

“The men and women employed in the workshops now looked as if they were toiling in their sleep, so long did it take them to draw needle and thread through the air as they stitched, so heavily did their eyelids sink, so slowly did their lips move as they looked wearily up at the camera. They seemed to be hovering rather than walking, as if their feet no longer quite touched the ground. The contours of their bodies were blurred and, particularly in the scenes shot out of doors in broad daylight, had dissolved at the edges, resembling, as it occurred to me, said Austerlitz, the frayed outlines of the human hand shown in the fluidal pictures and electrographs taken by Louis Draget in Paris around the turn of the century”

The propagandistic nature of the film about Theresienstadt—Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City)—is revealed when Austerlitz slows the tape. The description of how the slowing blurs the boundaries of the prisoner’s bodies echoes Evan the cobbler’s description of ghosts’ flickering outline. This connotation imbues the prisoners with a ghostliness, signaling their incipient fates.

“In the week I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications.”

During his student years in Paris, Austerlitz studies in a way that shuns the general and widely known in favor of the particular and obscure. In doing so, he revives these shelved facts, securing another refuge from oblivion for them in his mind.

“I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.”

The new, hostile Bibliothèque Nationale that replaces the old library inspires this idea, which reiterates Austerlitz’s idea about the futility of fortress architecture. The crux of this idea is that perfect things do not function well in reality, because in their perfection they cannot accommodate the ever-changing world. In contrast to the old library, which Austerlitz describes as a constantly evolving organism thanks to the work of its scholars, the new library is lifeless, lacking the community of readers and scholars needed to sustain a vast enterprise of remembrance.