Austin Herring ENGL 360 Literature of Exile Dr. Gabriella Ibieta 8 December 2016 An Examination of Image and Text, Fact and Fiction Heidt, Todd. "Image and Text, Fact and Fiction: Narrating W. G. Sebald's the Emigrants in the First Person." Image (&) Narrative, vol. 22, 2008. ProQuest, search.proquest.com/docview/814466389. Accessed 14 November 2016. W.G. Sebald's the Emigrants, a collection of four long stories in each of which the lives' of various Jewish people affected, in some way, by the Holocaust are related by a firstperson narrator, is notable for its inclusion of photographs throughout the text. In the article presented here, Image and Text, Fact and Fiction, Todd Heidt explores how the use of the firstperson, I-narrators and the photographs in the stories, along with their interactions with each other, affect the reader and his perceptions of what reality and history are and what they mean. Overall, Heidt presents compelling ideas about the intertextuality of the series of photographs in the Emigrants and the actual stories and what it means for the reader's perceptions, with this borne out through even more examples in the book that Heidt does not give, though an occasional lack of focus makes the overall impression less effective than it might be otherwise. The main portion of Heidt's article begins by examining the several different kinds of photographs that Sebald uses throughout the narratives. The first type is photographs of events happening as the I-narrators in the story collect, document, and write their stories, though, of course, the actual photographs were taken by Sebald himself. Heidt argues that the use of these
Herring 2 photographs acts as a certification and gives the text something of an authority, by asserting, with evidence, that a research process did occur. The second major class of photographs are what Heidt describes as found photographs. These are historical photographs that the I-narrators, and Sebald in reality, have collected and, perhaps, doctored but which are presented as true historical documents in the text. With these two major classes of photographs, Heidt describes how the reader is tossed back and forth from the past to the present in his reading and how this creates two realities in the text, one in the past and one in the present. After discussing the photographs, Heidt continues to work towards discussing the role of the I-narrator in the work. Heidt describes how while the Emigrants is ostensibly a work of fiction, with the improbable circumstances and unlikely events of the stories within supporting this fact, the photographs are real, of actual historical people, which lends the work a feeling of non-fictional memoir or autobiography, reinforced by the use of the narrator writing in the firstperson. He continues on to summarize how Sebald's life bears extreme resemblance to the I- narrators within the stories. Again, doing this, Heidt argues, Sebald is blurring the line between fiction and truth, by offering, with the I-narrators and their link to Sebald, an anchor in reality. Next, Heidt begins to connect the Emigrants to the work of post-colonial critic Homi Bhabha, who treats time lag, the interval between when an event occurs and when it is narrated, as important in post-colonial literature. Heidt argues that something similar happens in various ways with the Emigrants. Particularly, in the work, the I-narrators write about what they themselves do, they write about writing itself, they present testimonies, such as from Mme Landua, and they present direct sources, such as Adelwarth's journal, all from different time periods, and, then, ultimately, the reader reads this material covering a wide span of time in the
Herring 3 present. After doing this, the author continues by providing numerous examples of the photographs and the text undercutting one another, such as the author naming some people in a photograph but not all of them, and of the photographs having escaped control of the narrator, by appearing pages away from where they are mentioned. Finally, the author concludes, in part, by relating all of this disorientation, between reality and fiction, between the present and the various pasts, between the text's claims and the photographs, to the displacement of the characters in the stories by the Holocaust, by placing the reader in the same confused position without a clear stasis for home. With his points about the shifting time frames and the contradictions between the pictures and the text and the appearance of realism in a supposedly fictitious work, Heidt seems correct in his assessment of their unsettling nature. The various time jumps, both in the photographs and in the narration of the story, can make it difficult to tell exactly when any particular event is occurring, and each of the provided examples of textual and pictorial contradiction that Heidt provides lead to confusion on the part of the reader. Finally, because of the authentic looking pictures but supposedly fictitious work, it can be difficult to ascertain where the pictures did actually come from and whether the book really is fictitious, as Heidt argues. All of these contradictory elements of the work lead to confusion and disorientation on the reader's part. However, not only is Heidt correct in his assessment of what he does present, there are numerous other examples of disorientation being caused in the work than what even he presents. The first class of these are pictures that do not match up with the text, of which Heidt did already give numerous examples, such as the narrator presenting a photograph of schoolboys, of which he is one, without specifying which or presenting a photograph and leaving out the identities of
Herring 4 the other people in a photo with the particular character Paul's father. Another of these is the picture on page 89 in the Emigrants. Here, the narrator is with his uncle alone on the beach, and he relates that his uncle took out his camera and took a picture. This is the presented picture, and it contains a person that almost certainly must be the narrator, but the narrator does not mention that there is a person in the picture at all, let alone that the person is himself. This is disorienting because one would normally expect someone to acknowledge themselves in a photo they are presenting to others. Another similar example is on page 75. Here, the narrator's mother is supposedly in the picture on this page under a cross, but the cross is near-impossible to identify, as it is white against a white-looking sky in the background of the black and white photograph. Again, this is completely disorienting because the reader is directly informed that there should be a cross in the image, but, because it is nearly hidden, he will be unlikely to find it, confusing and unsettling him. Overall, with his numerous own examples and the numerous other examples that still exist in the text, clearly Heidt is correct about the unsettling nature of intertextuality between the photographs and stories in the work. In addition, though, one much larger area over which Heidt glossed may have been in the various storytellers that appear in the stories and their contribution to the disorientation. As previously alluded to, Heidt does briefly discuss how Mme Landau's story is imbricated and blended into the story, competing for enunciation. However, Heidt does not spend significant time indicating just how many such storytellers like Mme Landua there are and just how imbracted and blended they are. In particular, most of the information about each of the book's first three sections' characters is relayed through these other storytellers, from Mme Landau in the second story to the narrator's aunts and uncles in the third. These stories are included as direct
Herring 5 quotations within the text, but without the use of quotation marks to delimit them. This means that stories slip in and out, at random and at will, of the voice of the true narrators of the story and of the voice of the speaker who is relaying the story. This can be extremely disorienting at times, because, without closely following along in the text, it can be difficult to determine exactly who is speaking what at any given point, and it happens often throughout the stories in the Emigrants. Though Heidt does address this idea briefly, its prevalence throughout the stories and its level of disorientation means Heidt should have worked it more deeply into his piece. Beyond that, the piece's only issues seem to be with focus. For example, on the fourth page of the article, Heidt goes into a digression on Sebald's other works. This does not directly contribute to any of the arguments in the article that are made elsewhere, so this serves only to confuse and detract from the coherency of the article's overall argument. There are several places in the piece where it seems it goes off into a digression without tying back to the main arguments directly, but none of them detract from the quality of the article. Having discussed these three relatively minor ways in which the article could have been improved, the rest of Todd Heidt's article discussing the mixture of fact and fiction and reality and fantasy in the Emigrants, by examining interactions between text and photographs; the relation between Sebald's life and the memoir-like I-narrators ; and the various time jumps and nature of the photographs, is able to explain how the stories within unsettle and displace the reader, just like the characters in the stories have been displaced from their homes due to the Holocaust. Though it could have used more examples, either of photographs or of the various narrative voices in the work, the examples that Heidt does present exemplify perfectly the idea that the Emigrants is meant to unsettle, displace, and discomfort the reader.