'In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric!'

James Wood | Fun Stuff 

Just this evening, I was rummaging through an entire collection of photographs of my college days, days when we had been to inter-collegiate events and won prizes by the dozens, crystallised in snapshots of various hues, letters preserved for posterity, that bear testimony to time past – letters written by near and dear, from the early 1990s on, when I was deposited in a hostel, to learn life in all its vitality, to learn for myself, firsthand, communal traits for life! 

Nay! This post ain't gonna do the leg-pulling to my heart's content on all ye dynamic day- scholars on this count though!

Still, life lived in a hostel has its share of fun and frolic!

There’s a lot you have to bear!

And a lot you’ve gotta do!

There’d be a guy who’d always pry around

To somehow

rummage through your cubicle!

That’s so ‘tidy and neat!’

A guy who waits

for the snacks to pop up

To finish them all at one go!

And then go to sleep!

There’d be another

who would quick catch a lizard

And throw it straight

into your mosquito net

When you’re busy on your dream mode!

And another imp!

who always makes it his hobby

to flick with glee - 
Your toothpaste,

Your towel and your soap even!

And make you

search and search for 'em all - 

Till you give up! 
And get late

to your first hour’s class!

And sometimes even your second!!!

Living those past days in your memory add such fun and joy to your present days in every way!

Added, looking up those memory-days on your treasured photographs, paper records, picture postcards etc., are real joys galore in double measure!

Exactly what German writer and academic W. G. Sebald has done in his swan song of a novel! His last one before he passed away, a novel that was also published in the same year when he died - in 2001!

A student of German and English literature, in Germany and in Switzerland respectively, Sebald was touted to be a forerunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature before death plucked him away at 57!

His works deal predominantly with memory and loss of memory with specific reference to the Holocaust, and also with the horrors and the trauma of the Second World War on the German people!

And his novels are witness to these reflections in abundance! In fact, his novels are made up of reflections, recollections and observations from around his European travels!

Sample the opening lines to this, his last novel Austerlitz –

Sebald speaks -

In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer’s day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name.  

And of the significance of Antwerp to the Holocaust is anybody’s guess!

And why pray, did I stumble upon this intriguing read? You may ask!

For a reason though!

Flashback-o-back to November 2018!

When I was gifted a wonderful book by a lovely-o-lovelyyy chella friend of mine, which is titled, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays!

It’s by New Yorker fame James Wood!

Now, guess what happens when one of the foremost literary critics of the present era, James Wood, doubles up as an essayist and a novelist as well?

We are all eyes! Ain’t we?

And so it was, when I browsed through the collection of essays on Fun Stuff, the very first essay totally hooked me on! 

It’s titled, W G Sebald’s Austerlitz.

It looked a very arresting read by all means! So before I ploughed my way into the essay, I wanted to get a copy of Sebald’s Austerlitz on me to read it full throttle, to be worthy enough to plunge headlong into Wood’s take on the same!

To my surprise, when I opened the novel, I saw the mighty James Wood popping up on the prefatory, and the same, selfsame essay that i'd read on Fun Stuff, sitting pretty over here, added as a kinda introduction to the latest edition of the novel! A highly appreciative, laudable marketing strategy! Kudos to y'all for that!

Thanking heavens and the angels, I started reading James Wood now, with a sense of great satisfaction, that I had read through Austerlitz at last!

And yesss! James Wood is at his literary best, in his take on Austerlitz!

Says he –

This book is like the antiques shop seen by Jacques in Terezín; it is full of old things, many of them reproduced in the photographs in the text: buildings, an old rucksack, books and paper records, a desk, a staircase, a messy office, a porcelain statue, gravestones, the roots of trees, a stamp, the drawing of a fortification.

The photographs of these old things are themselves old things—the kind of shabby, discarded picture-postcards you might find at a weekend flea market, and which Sebald greatly enjoyed collecting.

If the photograph is itself an old, dead thing, then what of the people caught—frozen—by the photograph? (Flickering slightly at the edges, as Evan the cobbler describes the dead.) Aren’t they also old, dead things? That is why Sebald forces together animate and inanimate objects in his books, and it is why the inanimate objects greatly overwhelm the animate ones in Austerlitz. Amid the photographs of buildings and gravestones, it is a shock to come upon a close-up of Wittgenstein’s eyes, or a photograph of the rugby team at Jacques’s school.  

On the one hand, these photographs sear us with the promise of their accuracy—as Barthes says, photographs are astonishing because they “attest that what I see has existed … in Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric.” We are lulled into staring at these photographs, and saying to ourselves: “There is Jacques Austerlitz, dressed in his cape. And there is his mother!”

So there, you saw it! James Wood at his natural eloquent best!

A literariness that so prompted me to read through the novel at one go!

Thanks to James Wood and his Fun Stuff by the millions! 

And to the amazing, lovely heart who thoughtfully gifted me this lovely read, who's then, the real spur behind this post!!!

More on Austerlitz follows…