Linear Victimization

Quick Precis: Austerlitz

 

   So often are we conflicted when dealing with trauma: The crushing magnitude of the “event without a witness" (Laub 66) makes it impossible to tell (Laub 62), yet the “survivors … not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also need to tell their stories in order to survive." (Laub 63) Jacques Austerlitz of Austerlitz similarly struggles to deal with his post-generational, or intragenerational trauma (Hirsch 103) as a child survivor of the Holocaust. Austerlitz is a seemingly ordinary middle-aged architectural historian working in England, assumed to be a Czech Jew. However, melancholic narration of his life through the unnamed non-Jewish German author reveals Austerlitz as a vulnerable, repressed, and traumatized individual with no childhood memory as an orphan and an insatiable desire for fathoming and confirming his own identity and coherence with life. 

 

   The trope of linear and inseparable space and time, including past, present, and future, are important ones throughout the novel. It breaks with the “traditional realism (White, 18),” a literary style most seen within Western film culture, in which there exists a precise beginning, middle, end, and a sympathetic victim versus an evil perpetrator. In fact, the narrative prose digresses onto arbitrary yet chronological, distant, dryly academic, and excessively visual descriptions and pictures of military fortifications, railways, flora and faunas, and architecture. Such accounts parallels how our fragmented memories are morphed into questionable video segments, and we can only thereafter replay or taint parts of these films. It further proves ironic in that Austerlitz’s meticulous details for fine architecture seem to seek for perfect remembrance and even disclose a subconscious search for a structured life, yet none are achieved. Even when he attempts to work through the previous trauma, he is bombarded with panic attacks and schizophrenic delusions of his dead parents. Thus, Austerlitz’s linear time and space leads to a destruction of present and future by the past, ultimately to annihilate his existence. The anticlimactic and depressing ending leaves us to wonder: if time, space, facts and identities are always converging, is Austerlitz just an alter-ego of the unnamed narrator? In other words, whether Jewish or German, do all populations become equal victims of the event? And finally, is annihilation the only possible ending for the linearly traumatized individuals? 

Note to self: Explain more on how converging time and space relates to Austerlitz