Abstract

The prevalence of W.G. Sebald in studies of fictional narratives that incorporate images has led to a lack of theorization of other practices that operate within this terrain. Sebald’s practice is generally to anchor the image in its surrounding text in such a way that the reader is led up to, into and past the image with minimal interruption in the flow of reading. In that way his narratives can explore continuous paths of memory on which images are passing waystations. It is also possible to permit images to slow the narrative, or to draw readers repeatedly back to the images or to use images to cast doubt on the narrator or the narration. I compare Sebald’s practices to what can be found in Georges Rodenbach, André Breton, Tan Lin, Anne Carson, Christian Bök, Fernandez Mallo, Philipp Weiss, and others, in order to suggest that Sebald is only one example in a long discontinuous history of writing on images. This brief chapter, I’ve arranged into a schematic chronology. First, I’ll make a couple of observations on fiction with included photographs before Sebald; then I’ll propose some possibly characteristic qualities of his own practice; and last, I’ll ask some questions about how we might understand his influence on recent fiction that uses photographs.

Keywords: Remembrance and Narrative, Absorption, Interruptions, Observations, Surrealism