Austerlitz

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 21-50

Pages 51-82

Pages 83-113

Pages 114-132

Pages 133-158

Pages 159-201

Pages 202-244

Pages 245-275

Pages 276-290

Pages 291-310

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Photography

The motif of photography illustrates the different ways in which characters perceive reality and remember the past; the photographs interwoven through the text serve a similar purpose. Austerlitz develops an interest in photography at Stower Grange, focusing on capturing the unique forms of everyday objects. This reveals the nature of his interest in the medium: He sees photographs as a means of capturing the existence of an object or a fleeting moment that would otherwise go unrecorded. His interest in photography is an interest in preserving the past, particularly the unremarkable details that would otherwise fade into oblivion.

He sees photography as something akin to remembrance and as an aid to memory: “the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them […]” (94). Austerlitz believes his own photographs will become the only record of his life, just as the photos of Llanwddyn became the only evidence of the drowned town.

From his first fascination with the Llanwddyn photo book, Austerlitz sees photographs as records of lost worlds. In presenting these lost worlds, photographs skirt the homogenized view of history; they don’t depict a world made familiar by a preformed visual vocabulary, but rather a world utterly different from the present. This is the meaning behind the memory game Austerlitz describes to the narrator, in which he lays photographs facedown before slowly flipping each of them, “pushing the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left […]” (134). This game is an attempt to reconstruct a lost reality from snapshots, to quilt a pattern of the past with a collection of disparate tiles.

Visions and Amnesia

Throughout his life, Austerlitz experiences hallucinations and bouts of amnesia, both of which indicate the extent to which his life is tied to the past. In his hallucinations, Austerlitz usually sees symbols of the things he has repressed or figures from the past. His bouts of amnesia, which are accompanied by an inability to think coherently, occur when the pressure of his repressed feelings and memories becomes too great. These episodes are also reactions to his obsessive pursuit of knowledge, whether architectural or autobiographical: They are a message from his unconscious that he will not find relief from his torment in facts alone.

Ghosts reoccur in Austerlitz’s visions. This motif contributes to the theme that time is nonlinear—things or people from the past can reappear in one way or another in the present. The ghosts come from the past but haunt the present, suggesting the lack of a defined boundary between past and present. Similarly, Evan, the cobbler in Bala, tells Austerlitz that the ghosts’ appearance evinces that “nothing but a piece of silk [...] separates us from the next world” (72). Sometimes, Austerlitz himself feels he exists between this fluid boundary between life and death, present and past. In Bala, he describes feeling haunted by a spectral doppelganger: “I never shook off the feeling that something very obvious, very manifest in itself was hidden from me [...] I felt as if an invisible twin brother were walking beside me” (73). Austerlitz later recalls that in Bala he was haunted by the image of a twin brother who had accompanied him on the kindertransport:

I knew nothing about him, not even his name, and I had never exchanged so much as a word with him, but whenever I thought of him I was tormented by the notion that towards the end of the journey he had died of consumption and was stowed in the baggage net with the rest of our belongings (241).

This nameless, mute doppelganger is Austerlitz’s vision of himself suffering a death, symbolizing his loss of identity. As with many of his visions, it involves a dissociation from his suffering: He didn’t die, his twin brother did. Austerlitz’s visions and amnesia indicate his repressed past trying to erupt into the proscribed self he has developed.

The Star-Shaped Fortress

The star-shaped fortress is a multifaceted motif throughout the text. Primarily, it represents the tendency for the best-laid plans to effect the opposite of their intention. Fortresses often accomplish the opposite of their protective function: “the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces, and [...] the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive” (36). The supposedly perfected concept, such as the dodecagonal fortress, fails in the real world.

Moreover, the concept of a given fortress is static and cannot adapt to an ever-changing environment. Austerlitz describes a fervor for fortress building over the past few centuries, despite countless examples of their failure against new technologies. This fixation illustrates a runaway desire for protection that becomes divorced from the realities of the natural world. Nature does not reward rigid adherence to immutable design, yet in such design people see order—a triumph over the natural world. In order, people see control, and in control they imagine safety.

Naturally, then, the star-shaped fortress also symbolizes Austerlitz’s own psychological defense mechanisms. As he pursued a detailed study of architectural history to avoid confronting his past, it is fitting that the culmination of a style of architecture with an extensive theoretical history symbolizes Austerlitz’s elaborate psychic structures of avoidance. This symbolism is clearest in Austerlitz’s nightmare, which he has after he discovers the waiting room in which he sat upon arriving in London as a child; the room gives him the first glimpse of his repressed history. He dreams that he’s trying to escape from the heart of a star-shaped building, whose passageways lead him through every building he’s ever studied. These passageways symbolize how he’s imprisoned himself in scholarship in an attempt to defend against traumatic childhood memories. The star-shaped fortress is a metaphor for the futility and destructiveness of entrenched defense mechanisms that continue even long since the danger has passed.