W. G. Sebald’s revisions of Roland Barthes

Abstract

W. G. Sebald's work has frequently been compared to that of Roland Barthes; James Wood is typical in speculating that Austerlitz is 'in deep dialogue' with Camera Lucida. Evidence from Sebald's archive both supports and complicates such claims. Sebald first read Barthes in the early 1990s, engaging with him in his art criticism, yet Sebald's compositional practice in The Emigrants, which involved erasing an image's indexical relationship to its referent, shows a rejection of the central ontological claim of Camera Lucida. Sebald returned to Barthes in the late 1990s while composing Austerlitz and revised the draft manuscript so that the published version directly references Sebald's reading of Camera Lucida. Through an extended engagement with Barthes, Sebald contested the indexical nature of photography in order to reflect upon the desires that led to the figuration of trauma and history as an indexical trace at the end of the twentieth century.