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Phantom traces: exploring a hermeneutical approach to autobiography in curriculum studies Teresa Strong-Wilson Published online: 07 Sep 2015.
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J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2015.1049298
Phantom traces: exploring a hermeneutical approach to autobiography in curriculum studies
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TERESA STRONG-WILSON Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald’s writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII who wrestled with his difficult inheritance. The paper considers the ‘phantom traces’ of the author in Sebald’s creative writing, using the example of the story he tells of Paul Bereyter, Sebald’s elementary teacher. Paul committed suicide by laying himself on the railroad tracks of the town that first denied him the opportunity to teach during WWII yet accepted him back to the classroom after the war. Apparent in the telling of Paul’s story is Sebald’s interest in an ‘invisible subject’—the prolonged effect of the past, especially traumatic events, on thinking, feeling human beings. The paper draws on Sebald’s particular way of writing about his subject ‘at a slant’ so as to argue for a hermeneutical approach to currere, or autobiography in education.
Keywords: autobiography; currere; hermeneutics; subject; Sebald
The use of autobiography in education has been an embattled territory and at no time more than the present. Empirical approaches are on the ascendancy, promoting their ‘gold standard’ for research, their imperatives marching into curriculum discourses, policies and practices, most powerfully in the wake of the No Child Left Behind legislation, with its promotion of high-stakes standardized testing, scripted lessons and the consequent jeopardizing of teaching as an art and practice (Au, 2011; Block, 2014). This trend of tying curriculum to assessment, which stems back to the Tyler rationale and is ongoing, may be most visible in the USA but is by no means confined there (Pinar, 2011b; see Day & Gu, 2010; Potvin-Cumming, 2012). Curiously, though, despite a climate hostile to its existence, autobiography remains an ascendant, even an ascending, genre (Gilmore, 2001), ongoing evidence being that several of the books reviewed in any given New York Times Book Review are likely to fall into the category of memoir or its close companion, biography. William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet first drew sustained attention to the use of autobiography in education by developing a method that Pinar called currere (Pinar & Grumet, 1976, 2006), which is the critical and engaged study of subjectivity in education. Most often, it is the subject of trauma
Teresa Strong-Wilson is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, 3700 McTavish, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 1Y2; email:
[email protected]. Her interests and publications centre on literacy, curriculum, teachers, memory and social justice education. She is an editor-in-chief of the McGill Journal of Education. © 2015 Taylor & Francis
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that provides the backdrop for published memoirs: ‘extreme situations’ (Miller & Tougaw, 2002; see also Douglas, 2010; Gilmore, 2001). Teachers are currently facing their own ‘extreme situations’ in schools, with their careers increasingly being tied to student outcomes on standardized tests (Cochran-Smith, Piazza, & Power, 2013; Giroux, 2013). This is so especially if we understand ‘extreme’ in the way that WG Sebald did, in his study of the long-term effects of situations profoundly destructive of the human spirit. Sebald was born in 1944 in Germany near the Swiss Alps. Insulated from the war and its aftermath, he saw a film in high school on Bergen Belsen, which set in motion a series of events that provoked his exile from his native Germany. He spent most of his adult life at the University of East Anglia where he taught European literature and creative writing and came to focus on ‘the phenomenon of suicide in old age’ (Sebald in Kafatou, 1998, p. 33), or what he theorized as the weight of memory in survivors of trauma. As you get older, you forget more, he says, but what ‘survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density’ (Sebald in Wachtel, 2007, p. 54). He became profoundly interested in the effect of traumatic experiences on an individual’s life course. His turn to creative non-fiction was prompted by his reflections on his mother’s report of one of his favourite teachers having committed suicide, which became the story of Paul Bereyter in his book, The Emigrants (Sebald, 1996). Sebald’s story of Paul Bereyter has much to say in response to the challenges of teaching in ‘dark times’ (Ayers & Miller, 1998; Giroux, 2013). In 1989, Robert Graham could conclude that currere ‘still represents one of the best hopes for keeping the human factor alive in education, especially in a time of widespread political retrenchment’ (Graham, 1991, p. 139). This hope in currere is reiterated here, more than two decades later. If we attend closely to the complex threads linking details of Sebald’s life to his prose fiction, what might we learn from Sebald’s critical reflection on what acquires ‘density’ in lived experience? How might such an analysis inform our understanding of the place of autobiography in curriculum studies particularly under conditions of ‘retrenchment’? The problem of autobiography in education In the 1970s, William Pinar was a professor at Rochester University. Madeleine Grumet was one of his students. Pinar’s background is in the humanities. He had also taught English as a subject in secondary school. His dissertation explored the grounds for developing an autobiographical method of curriculum. Both he and Grumet were responding to their own and others’ dissatisfaction with the increasing rationalization of curriculum studies into a mechanics of teaching and learning, with its devaluation of the individual. Pinar published a reflective piece on his teaching practice, in which, drawing on the paintings and words of Jackson Pollock, he argued that the book of primary concern in his class of high school seniors was neither the textbook nor the lesson plan, but the life histories of those in the room. Following Pollock, Pinar characterized his pedagogical
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method as ‘work[ing] from within’ (1972/1994, p. 10). He refined the method into what he called currere (1975b/1994), a word that, in its etymological roots, represents a play on the noun, curriculum. Currere is the Latin infinitive, the verb form of the noun, and translated literally, it means: running the course. Key to the method was writing narratives about educational experience, where one’s most educational experiences could take place in school but just as, or more often, were likely to take place outside of school (Grumet, 2004). Chambers (1998) once remarked on the challenges of invoking memories of lived experience in curriculum pedagogy, an experience that her students found incredibly powerful yet frustrating at times. Applying this ‘love medicine’ to her own life, she likened the process to pulling up dandelions (Chambers, 1998, p. 14). Memories can often be difficult and painful or, simply, private. They may be perceived as too delicate, too ordinary or too contentious to be disclosed to others in the public space of the classroom. There is also the perception that memory is tied to the self, and that to risk disclosure is to expose this self, whether to others’ critical scrutiny or to one’s own critique, especially after having come into contact with others’ memories, which may appear so much happier or conversely, so much more traumatic. Also, an individual may have spent the better part of a lifetime constructing a ‘cover story’ to hide certain life events or his/her response to those events (Olson & Craig, 2005). A feeling may also be there that one has a right to one’s memories; that memory is a sequestered place to which only the owner should have access. By opening the doors to the particular and concrete details of lived experience, currere challenged the traditional lines between subject and object, in which we have been given to understand that we study something and not ourselves whereas what is the case is that we study something (a subject) and we study ourselves (as subjects) in it. In being asked to write about his/her life, the student might baulk and even choose to lie rather than risk writing ‘close to the bone’. Evasions can take many forms, though, some of which may lead back to truth by way of what Grumet has called ‘an elaborate detour’. She explains that autobiography ‘employs the past to reveal the present assumptions and future intentions of the story teller, an elaborate detour that travels through once upon a time in order to reach now. Its truth is provided in its fictions’ (Grumet, 1976, p. 73). She (along with William Pinar) advocated for an interpretive approach to autobiography informed by hermeneutics, or that awareness of the ‘limitations of human consciousness, always situated in spatial perspectives and temporal phases’ (Grumet, 1988, pp. 60–61). Sebald saw in a certain kind of approach to prose fiction a way to more consciously write ‘at a slant’ (i.e. by an elaborate detour) about difficult subjects that preoccupied the author as much as the ‘subjects’ in his biographical stories. Since the 1970s, we have been persistently inundated by autobiographical narratives produced in response to the call for the voicing of experiences previously suppressed or silenced but so much so that, as Grumet (‘Miss Subjectivity of 1978’ as she wryly calls herself), could recently reflect that, amid the glut of memoirs, she found her eyes moving ‘up and down the pages seeking that shibboleth of poststructural
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criticism, the generalization. What’s the point, I want to know. What can we make of this? What difference does it make to education?’ (Grumet, 2015, p. 233). As I will suggest, Sebald provides us in curriculum studies with a narrative exemplar of a hermeneutical approach to autobiography, where the purpose of such an approach is to respond to that question of the difference that this interpretive work can make for one another.
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Writing autobiographically Intuitively, we tend to conceive of a body of writing as connected to the person, even if the person is not the subject or object of the writing. ‘Somebody was in my office the other day asking me to write my autobiography. What I couldn’t tell them was that everything I write I consider autobiography although nobody else would’ (Northrop Frye cited in Graham, 1991, p. 1). Although we may not consciously write autobiographically, the impetus for writing about a subject often has its source in life events, either our own or those of people we know or have heard about and whose stories have touched us, leaving behind ‘phantom traces’ (Sebald, 2001, p. 93). Many have puzzled over the persistent presence of the autobiographical in Sebald’s fiction, which also appear as visual echoes, attributed to a nameless narrator but featuring Sebald, as in the following passport photo of Sebald, put in for the narrator in Sebald’s Vertigo (See figure 1). Smith and Watson (2010) wondered whether Sebald’s works merited inclusion in their tome on autobiography. Following in Lejeune’s footsteps on the ‘autobiographical pact’ between author and reader in which the narrator is the author (Lejeune, 1989), they chose to delimit the genre to an author’s conscious intention to produce a story about his or her life, a test that Sebald’s writings fail. This narrow approach to autobiography has not gone uncontested (see Gilmore, 2001; Kadar, 2005), including in curriculum studies (Yoder & Strong-Wilson, in press; Fowler, 2002; Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009). In hermeneutics, the notion of interest—of being interested by something—is recognized, etymologically (inter-esse), as that which lies between us and another. The theme or object is ‘constituted by the motivation of the inquiry’ (Gadamer, 1998, p. 298). ‘Questioning [then] opens up possibilities of meaning, and thus what is meaningful passes into one’s own thinking on the subject’ (Gadamer, 1998, p. 375). Sebald’s writing was marked by the circumstances of his birth. He was born in the little Bavarian village of Wertach im Algau nestled in the Alps, which he writes about ironically in a book-length poem called After Nature (Sebald, 2002, p. 86). Sebald once observed: ‘It’s the chronological contiguity that makes you think it is something to do with you’. He explained that May 1944 was the same month in which Kafka’s sister (among countless others) was deported to Auschwitz (Sebald in Jaggi, 2001). Autobiography thus provides its own site of trauma for Sebald: ‘It’s bizarre; you’re pushed in a pram through the
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Figure 1. ‘Narrator’s’ passport, in Vertigo, p. 114. By W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse, from VERTIGO, copyright ©1990 by Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag KG, English Translation © 1999 by Michael Hulse. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
flowering meadows, and a few hundred miles to the east these horrendous things are happening’ (Sebald in Jaggi, 2001). His prose fiction, as Sebald describes it, is a form in which ‘[e]verything is related round various corners in a periscopic sort of way’ (Sebald in Wachtel, 2007, p. 37). Contiguities are everywhere. It is up to us, as readers, to detect them. Sebald’s interest in writing about the lives of others began in earnest with learning about Paul Bereyter, who was his elementary teacher.
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That Paul was a teacher is a point of interest, since I am writing from the position of being a former elementary teacher and present professor and teacher educator in a faculty of education; moreover, one interested in the impact of memory and trauma on teachers and teacher practice. The figure of the teacher, from the point of view of currere, also provides its own point of contiguity to Sebald, whose daughter became a teacher and who was himself an elementary teacher, albeit very briefly (he alludes to his one year of teaching in ‘Max Feber’, one of the stories in The Emigrants). Mentions of teaching and teachers appear fleetingly in Sebald’s writings. For instance, Austerlitz (in Sebald’s book of the same name) is an architectural historian and informally instructs the narrator on the nature of buildings; the narrator suggests that Austerlitz is a very effective teacher, making evident matters unclear to him in school (Sebald, 2001). The character of Austerlitz was modelled in part on a gifted teacher that Sebald knew (Sebald in Cuomo, 2007, p. 110). Schools also occur in Sebald’s writings, though typically not in as positive a light, including in ‘Paul Bereyter’, where the school becomes a source of mental strain and emotional stress for Paul. The building bears the physical traces of the strict and unfeeling pedagogical approach used by the Nazi teacher who replaced Bereyter when he was forced to quit, traces that Bereyter tries (unsuccessfully) to erase. There is the school that is a source of traumatic memory for Clara who comes across a ‘gruesome’ ruined building with no roof (p. 43) in Sebald’s (2000) Vertigo and is overcome by painful memories of a teacher: ‘We returned to her grandmother’s flat in Ottakring, and neither on the way there nor that entire evening did she regain her composure following this unexpected encounter with her past’ (Sebald, 2000, p. 45). Similarly, Max Feber (in The Emigrants) associates adult memories of extremities of physical pain and mental suffering with a photograph his father took of him as a child at school, bent unnaturally close over his paper, as he wrote, in a ‘crooked position’ (Sebald, 1996, p. 172). The Ghetto museum in Terezin that Austerlitz visits to find out about his mother, who was interned in Therienstadt, used to be a school before the war and, in a bizarre twist, reverted to being one again in 1946 when Terezin’s residents returned to their town. The school was later turned into a museum: a memorial to the dead (the murdered) (Terezin, 2014). In short, schools and sometimes teachers as well present contested sites for remembering in Sebald’s writings. What was it about Paul Bereyter’s story that interested Sebald, and where interest is understand hermeneutically as that which lies between oneself and another (Gadamer, 1998)?
Sebald’s story/Paul Bereyter’s story At the University of East Anglia, where Sebald had been teaching since 1970 as a professor of German literature in the School of Modern Languages and History, profoundly felt changes were underway in the
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1980s and 1990s, as they were—and continue to be—at universities as part of cost-cutting measures. Sebald was moved to the School of English and American Studies and became director of the newly constituted School of Language, Linguistic and Translation Studies. Within this new arrangement, Sebald was increasingly asked to undertake teaching responsibilities that did not sit well with him. He became disaffected with what he saw as the ‘strapp[ing]’ of scholars into meaningless ‘networks’ where they ‘slave away’ while becoming less and less able to use their own language effectively (Sebald in Blackler, 2007, pp. 63–64). It was at this point, relatively late in his life and career (he was in his forties), that he turned to a different way of writing, shifting role from ‘academic critic’ to ‘creative writer’ (Blackler, 2007, pp. 64–65). Despite his ambiguous relationship with his country of origin, Sebald had always written in German. Whereas he had formerly critiqued German writers, he was now joining their ranks. The story of Paul is one of four stories told in the collection, The Emigrants (1996), which, as mentioned, was the first of Sebald’s works to be translated in English and published in North America. (The book was actually the fourth of his fictional works to be published in German.) Sebald used to make regular pilgrimages to his place of origin, the small town of Wertach im Algau (called ‘W’ in his writings). When his mother called him on the phone with some news from home, Sebald had been reading Jean Ame´ry, a German–Jewish writer who was part of the Resistance in Belgium during WWII, who was incarcerated and tortured in Breeddonk and then sent to Auschwitz. Of the literary figures whose work Sebald (2004a) analyses in his published lectures on German post-war writing called On the Natural History of Destruction, he singles out Ame´ry as ‘still the only one who denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and socially deformed society, and the outrage of supposing that history could proceed on its way afterwards almost undisturbed, as if nothing had happened’ (Sebald, 2004a, p. 154). Ame´ry’s (1980) essays in his At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, avoid narrative, which he called the hoax of a ‘merry-go-round of figurative speech’ (p. 33); his writing instead seeks an intellectual and a phenomenological understanding of his experience of torture: ‘Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world’ (p. 40). He sought to relive the past rather than mourn it, as Fareld (2011) has pointed out. Ame´ry committed suicide late in his life. Through his investigations into Ame´ry’s life, Sebald had further discovered that Ame´ry had grown up in a town not far from where Sebald himself was raised (Sebald in Wachtel, 2007). Sebald explained: ‘The Emigrants started from a phone call I got from my mother, telling me that my schoolteacher in Sonthofen had committed suicide’ (Sebald in Angier, 2007, p. 69). He then went on to explain how this phone call came not long after Ame´ry’s death and prompted thoughts that would preoccupy him:
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A sort of constellation emerged about this business of surviving and about the great time lag between the infliction of injustice and when it finally overwhelms you. I began to understand vaguely what this was all about, in the case of my schoolteacher. And that triggered all the other memories I had. (p. 70)
The story of Paul Bereyter represents a compilation of Sebald’s memories and those of a woman who was Paul’s friend. In brief, Paul’s story is as follows (summarized from the story of ‘Paul Bereyter’ in Sebald, 1996). Paul grew up in the small town of S. He decided to become a teacher. He abhorred the teacher training programme because of its Catholic rigidity and discipline. Paul had a different notion of a teacher, one who would take the students outside to observe the flora and fauna. In his youth, Paul had been part of the Wandervogel, which began in 1896 as a German back-to-nature movement to shake off the shackles of parochial society, an organization later appropriated by the Nazis. Its symbol was a migratory bird. Sebald’s telling of Paul’s story ends with the shadow of a hovering bird. By 1933, Paul finished his teacher training. He had also fallen deeply in love with a Jewish woman who he hoped to marry. The Nazis had gained power and the Nuremberg laws were being put into effect. Paul’s beginning teaching career in his hometown was all too brief, as was his relationship with Helen, who was sent to Thereinstadt. Because he was of ‘one quarter’ Jewish ancestry, Bereyter was exiled from the classroom. He fled to France, where he became a tutor to a family. In 1939, he returned to Germany, enlisting in the army, which had slackened its rules in order to gain needed recruits. At the end of the war, he returned to S to be the school’s elementary teacher. He taught for many years, until he retired. In 1984, he committed suicide by lying down on S’s railway tracks. Sebald’s family had moved from W to S when Sebald was eight years old. Here, he went to school until he was eighteen. Sebald has reiterated (in several interviews) how he only found out about the concentration camps when he was 17, when the class was shown a film about Bergen Belsen, without discussion, then all promptly filed outside to play football. Sebald noted how everyone in S knew. They knew of the concentration camps. They knew about Paul Bereyter’s history; how he had been persecuted and shunned during the war—how they had persecuted and shunned him—and yet this fact was never mentioned openly—nor did Bereyter mention it himself. That was the most puzzling thing to Sebald: Bereyter’s silence. Because Bereyter was one of the Sebald’s favourite teachers, he wanted to find out more about his life. Sebald likened the writing of the story to a piece of investigative journalism; the more difficult it was to find information, the more determined he became to unearth Bereyter’s story, which was also a story that belonged, in some sense, to Sebald, thus: Chambers’ dandelions. Of pressing interest to Sebald was the manner and timing of Bereyter’s death. Jean Ame´ry committed suicide late in his life; so did Paul Bereyter. Why?
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Reading ‘Paul Bereyter’ through a lens of Currere Sebald’s writings explore the phenomenon of time collapsing in on itself over the life course, with the past hovering over and inhabiting the present (to echo Pinar’s formulation; Pinar, 1975b/1994). Sebald’s prose has been likened to a ‘journey of the mind’ (Zisselsberger, 2010, p. 2), in which narrator and characters subsist in an inbetween characterized by loss and a feeling of unbelonging (unheimlich). Despite all of the wandering of Sebald’s characters, his travellers fail to arrive at any new destinations or insights, as Zilcosky (2006) has astutely pointed out; instead, there are only ‘a series of uncanny, intertextual returns’. Zisselsberger puts it thus: Sebald’s characters ‘discover the familiar in places where they had hoped to find an ‘undiscover’d country’ (p. 17). As conceptualized by Grumet in her earliest writings on the subject, currere is intended to interrupt habitual and well-travelled pathways. The first step is to tell a story of one’s self: ‘Autobiography is a story that I tell about my experience’ (Grumet, 1976, p. 73). Excavation consists in writing a series of narratives (Grumet, 1981); it is ‘a process of reflection that reveals self-as-object through reflective self-representations’ (Grumet, 1976, p. 69). Through their spatial juxtaposition, cracks may be seen through which light may shine through (Grumet, 1981). Autobiography’s relationship to the past is not a straightforward one of recording events; it is a journey. To reiterate: ‘It employs the past to reveal the present assumptions and future intentions of the story teller, an elaborate detour that travels through once upon a time in order to reach now. Its truth is provided in its fictions’ (Grumet, 1976, p. 73). William Pinar has written much on the subject of currere, two of the most seminal early papers being his ‘Currere: Toward Reconceptualization’ (1975a) and ‘The Method of Currere’ (1975b). The second, which has been reprinted several times, elaborates four moments: the regressive, the progressive, the analytical and the synthetical. The regressive moment consists of treating one’s past life as ‘data’ and pulling it forward by re-entering it; in effect, producing it as it ‘hovers’ over the present (1975b, p. 21). The progressive moment relates to the future: a consideration of what is ‘not yet’: possibilities. The analytical moment depends on analysis of past and present. Analysis is traced etymologically to a phenomenological bracketing (ana—up, and lysis, loosening) so as to be able to conceive of a ‘subjective space of freedom’ in the present (Pinar, 2004, p. 36). It is not self-scrutiny: a baring of the self as spectacle. Rather, its goal is to produce an intensified engagement with life so as to be able to perceive it better. The synthetical moment (syn = together; tithenai = to place) marks that moment of re-entering the lived present. It is a moment of intense interiority, a tapping of the person within who is the source of energy and momentum. Pinar’s more recent works (Pinar, 2011a, 2011b, 2012) iterate these phases in currere as allegory—understanding conceived as juxtaposition of various sources, of ‘facts and lived experience in creative tensionality’, the individual and the social, ‘directed to the present (including our fantasies of the future we experience in the present) as it is informed by the past’ (Pinar, 2011b, p. 7).
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In Sebald’s ‘Paul Bereyter’, Sebald is telling the story of another, not himself. But by way of that story, phantom traces of Sebald (and thus, of the autobiographical work of currere) can be detected, as will be discussed in the next section; key in this process are the narrator’s words. As Santer (2006) so nicely puts it, ‘W G Sebald’ (in scare quotes) is ‘the central narrator figure’ (p. 49). Here, four salient periods of Sebald’s narration of Paul’s life are mapped onto currere. They are first organized in terms of how the episodes in Paul’s life unfolded in time, chronologically. However, on currere’s terms, two of the episodes relate more to the temporal, which is emphasized in Pinar’s conceptualization of currere, and the two others to space or the geographical, towards which Grumet’s formulation of currere leans, as follows: (1) The destruction of the future: Bereyter’s loss of hope (time) (2) The act of turning back: Bereyter’s return to Germany, to S, to teaching (space) (3) The weight of memory on present and future: Bereyter as ‘desolation itself’ (time) (4) Travel as an ‘elaborate detour’: Bereyter ending as teacher ‘on the rails’ (space)
Destruction of the future: loss of hope Bereyter was filled with a feeling of promise upon finishing his teacher training and assuming his position in a school in W, which adjoined S, where Paul grew up and had (to all appearances) ‘a happy childhood’ (Sebald, 1996, p. 46). The narrator writes: ‘The summer of 1935, which followed his probation year, was one of the finest times of all … in the life of prospective primary school teacher Paul Bereyter’ (p. 47). He was also deeply in love with Helen Hollander who is depicted as independent, clever and spirited. Narrator: ‘her waters ran deep. And in those waters, Paul liked to see his own reflection’ (p. 48). The future was bright. When Bereyter is served notice that he could not remain as teacher of the students whose names he had just got to know, the narrator recounts: ‘[t] he wonderful future he had dreamt of that summer collapsed without a sound like the proverbial house of cards’ (pp. 48–49). In a photograph taken when he was house tutor to the family in France, the narrator notes that Bereyter ‘was so terribly thin that he seems almost to have reached a physical vanishing point’ (p. 49). The act of turning back: return to Germany, to S, and to teaching After the war, Bereyter takes up a position teaching in the very classroom in the town of S where he did his probation year. Narrator: In 1934–1935, Paul, then aged twenty-four, did his probation year at the primary school in S, teaching, as I learnt to my amazement, in the very classroom where a good fifteen years later he taught a pack of children
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scarcely distinguishable from those pictured here, a class that included myself. (p. 47)
After many years of teaching, Paul retires, keeping his dwelling in S while also having a home close by in Yverdon, Switzerland. Upon retiring, in his travels to a spa, Paul meets a Mme Landau, who becomes his friend and confidante, to whom he recounts his life story. Mme Landau posits that Bereyter returned to Germany because he was German and loved Germany; it was the place he knew and was attached to, even ‘that miserable place S’, which, she added, he must have also ‘loathed’ deep within himself (p. 57). For Mme Landau, Bereyter ‘was quite simply born to teach children’ (p. 56), a statement which is corroborated by the narrator’s fond memories of his teacher’s classroom methods and excursions. She suggests that all of Paul’s returns (to Germany; to S) are ‘aberration[s]’ (p. 56), with the possible exception of his return to teaching, a profession that he loved. Weight of memory; Bereyter as ‘desolation itself’ Interspersed among the fragments of Bereyter’s story are the narrator’s (‘Sebald’s’) memories of his teacher: times when Paul would be observed to stand by the classroom window and look out and away from the children, seeming to set himself apart from them, sometimes even as if he couldn’t abide them; Narrator: ‘as if he, who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself’ (p. 42). Travel as an elaborate detour: teacher on the rails In currere’s terms, the past exists as a place to which Bereyter cannot help but travel. The future (the dream of which Bereyter lost) rests in a past that never came to be. The present is experienced as desolation: an interval between ruination of the self and death. Death on the railways constitutes ‘a perfectly logical step’ (p. 61): Mme Landau laments that she ‘had no notion that Paul had found his fate already systematically laid out for him in the railways’ (p. 62). As Zilcosky (2004) has pointed out, the train symbolizes three forms of return: ‘lexical’ because Paul actualizes the pun that he would ‘end up on the railways’, a throwaway comment made by one of his relatives; ‘psychoanalytical’ in that the train signifies the dead (trains headed for death, a point poignantly brought out in Lanzmann’s (1985) documentary film, Shoah, which Sebald had seen and reflected on; Interview with Wachtel, 2007) and ‘historical’, in that the train stands in for German–Jewish history under Nazism, epitomizing trains to Auschwitz (Zilcosky, 2004, p. 113). Considering the overbearing political, social and historical life moment (biographic situation) in which Paul found himself, we might say that his entire teaching career constituted the detour. His childhood, his time as a young man (as part of the Wandervogel movement), and his teacher
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training and probation year led not to a teaching career but to desolation and death: his felt biographic situation. The end of his life was spent reading about the lives of German authors of Jewish background, all of whom had committed suicide. Paul read obsessively, even when his eyesight was worsening, and his doctor advised him to instead spend ‘peaceful spells’ in the garden (p. 58). As reported by Mme Landau, he would burn the midnight oil, often reading far into the night. She provided the narrator/Sebald with the books in which Bereyter wrote his notes; a reproduction of one of its pages appears in The Emigrants. She comments: it was ‘as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S’ (p. 59). His last act may have been, to him, the only sane course of action. Sebald’s Currere: his invisible subject For Grumet, currere is a ‘reflexive cycle in which thought bends back upon itself and thus recovers its volition’ (Grumet, 1976, pp. 130–131 cited in Pinar, 2004, p. 35). We turn to currere ‘for the roots of our theory, to recover our intentionality’ (Grumet, 1976, p. 69). By bending back to Bereyter’s life story, Sebald probed the wound of lived contiguity, in which he had grown up in silence, oblivious to Paul’s past and his family’s complicity in the events that shaped Paul’s life. Sebald’s family was among those that benefited from moving from the lower class to a comfortable middle class under National Socialism. A central piece in this upward mobility was his father’s position in the army; he was a captain. On several occasions, Sebald has talked about how, as a child, he pored through the family photograph albums, not realizing the import of the images, which depicted his father proudly standing in Polish villages razed to the ground by the German army, or captured gypsies in camps behind barbed wire (Sebald, 2004b). Graham (1991, 1992) was critical of currere for its apparent failure to address pedagogy. How do we (as educators) use autobiography to prompt thought, especially in the wake of the celebration of the death of the author, the narcissistic ‘I’? More profoundly, how do we ethically implicate students in others’ lives? Graham proposes reading autobiographies within the school curriculum, which may prompt us to ‘take up our pens, processors, and paint and ask our students to take up theirs and begin to construct our autobiographies together’ (Graham, 1991, p. 156). The purpose of currere was, and is, to accomplish a critical distancing that is at the same time an engagement with the self (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995, p. 415). Sebald’s example suggests, first of all, that writing about our own lives is implicated with learning about others’ lives. The burden of memory that we all carry (in one way or another) begins with identifying a problem that we have inherited and that we help perpetuate by not bearing witness to it. The trajectory of Sebald’s prose fiction can be traced to his search for a narrative method by which to explore the conflicted relationship
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between past and present stemming from his own ‘biographic situation’ (Pinar, 2004, p. 36). He says that:
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I think that in most of my texts it becomes at least obliquely obvious that the dark centre behind it all is the German past between 1925 and 1950 which I came out of … something that, even though I left Germany when I was twenty-one, I still have in my backpack and I just can’t put it down’ (Sebald in conversation with Gordon Turner, in Sebald & Turner, 2006. pp. 27–28).
He didn’t trust German post-war writing, which he saw as contributing to social amnesia and a nostalgic ‘will to reconstruction’ (Sebald, 2004a, ` quoi bon la litte´rature?’ (Sebald, p. 81). In response to his question, ‘A 2004b), he was of the conviction that writing needed to be rooted in real lives, ‘solidly grounded in the real world’ (Sebald in Angier, 2007, p. 74), requiring courage on the writer’s part to visit places of trauma. Literature could prompt people to think about connections between their own and others’ lives but only when these contiguities were experienced ‘obliquely, tangentially’ (Sebald in Silverblatt, 2007, p. 80). The reader, said Sebald, needs to be convinced that an ‘invisible subject’ is on the writer’s mind, the density of which comes through in the prose (p. 80). Sebald’s prose fiction is consumed by the subject of the Holocaust, yet the word is never mentioned and the trauma only alluded to elliptically (with the possible exception of Austerlitz), this on principle. Sebald didn’t believe that he was the one appointed to narrate trauma. He was also conscious of the economy of the consumption of pain and pleasure surrounding the proliferation of such stories. Treating this subject, Patricia Yaeger (2002) asks: ‘How do we speak to the dead? Or speak about them? What weight should they have in our texts? (p. 27) Sebald believed in the value of obliqueness. And yet, it was the kind of obliqueness that as ‘invisible subject’, builds, echoing within and across stories: ‘You just try and set up certain reverberations in a text and the whole acquires significance that it might not otherwise have’ (Sebald in Wachtel, 2007, p. 54). Contiguity gives rise to questions: Why does this happen while this is also going on? And why is no one talking about it? Sebald’s method may be recognized as a form of what Pinar (2001) also called social autobiography. Momentum is generated through the inescapability of the echoes, which become taxing. Can there be an autobiographical writing by indirection, in which the author’s identity is fully implicated but subsumed by the weight of an invisible subject? It seems quite a paradoxical notion. Within currere, writing a story involves travelling inside: exploring ‘the educational experience of the individual, as reported by the individual’ (Pinar et al., 1995, p. 414); more, as we have seen, it is ‘the text’s display of subjectivity making sense of the construction of subjectivity’ (Grumet, 2015, p. 237). ‘Sebald’s’ method of narrating Paul Bereyter might be usefully likened to the project of seeing Mrs Brown, which Pinar takes up in his 1973 essay, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown. The title to Pinar’s essay comes from a paper of Virginia Woolf’s in which she introduces a woman sitting in the carriage of a train. The woman is called Mrs Brown. Different passengers
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(men) enter the carriage where she is seated. We are asked to imagine how each construes Mrs Brown. What draws his gaze? What does he pay attention to? Conversely, what is missed or occluded? Woolf depicts each writer as jumping to potentially unwarranted conclusions based on the direction of their gaze, which focuses on minor details rather than on Mrs Brown herself. Pinar likens the hazy reflection of Mrs Brown (for most visitors do not look at her directly but at her image in the train window) to the problem at the heart of curriculum studies. He wrote: ‘Mrs Brown is ourselves, and to say we have lost track of her and spend our time looking elsewhere is to say that we have lost track of ourselves’ (Pinar, 1973/ 1994, p. 15). To do justice to Mrs Brown would be to go inside. This is what Sebald does with his teacher, at least up to a point. At a certain juncture, the subject resists full disclosure and the narrator/author does not impose. In Cathy Caruth’s (1995) terms, the traumatized become ‘the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess’ (p. 5). Latency belongs not just to Sebald/the narrator/the reader, who arrive (too) late but to the structure of the traumatic event itself (Caruth, 1995, p. 8). The narrator (‘Sebald’) explains that there was a common impression that Paul was like an older brother and thus had a place of belonging in the ‘family’ of his students and their families, but that he has realized this was merely a ‘fabrication of our minds’ (Sebald, 1996, p. 28); that Paul knew or understood them, but ‘we, for our part, had little idea of what he was or what went on inside him’ (pp. 28–29). The narrator belatedly tries to get closer to Paul; to imagine him in his apartment in S, to imagine him skating on the fish ponds; in short, to imagine him in all of the places also familiar to the author from his childhood. He admits that ‘such endeavours’ did not bring him any closer to Paul ‘except for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me’ (p. 29). The narrative that followed suggested that it constituted a different method and deeper level of narration, one that strove to move beyond impressions and further ‘within’ in order to better perceive Paul Bereyter and thus Sebald himself, to himself, thus following the hermeneutical principle that ‘[w]hen we try to understand a text, we do not try to transpose ourselves into the author’s mind but … we try to transpose ourselves into the perspective within which he has formed his views’ (Gadamer, 1998, p. 292). Sebald reiterates that ‘[i]t is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter’ (p. 29). The more ‘Sebald’ goes inside Paul Bereyter, the closer his narration travels to the bone: of addressing the subject that preoccupied Bereyter and that also comes to trouble Sebald. Phantom traces: a hermeneutical approach to autobiography in education This article has suggested that Sebald might be productively read through a lens of currere and that currere might be productively read through the lens of a Sebaldian narrator. The story of Sebald’s teacher, Paul Bereyter,
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has provided a means by which to explore these possibilities. In Sebald’s last novel, Austerlitz is fascinated by the afterglow left by moths. As they die, ‘trails of light’ appear ‘in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals’ (pp. 92–93). Austerlitz’s friend, Gerald, points out that these are ‘phantom traces’; they do not actually exist but come about through a lag in human perception (Sebald, 2001, p. 93). The presence of the autobiographical in Sebald’s fictional writing may be likened to ‘phantom traces’ in that they are intimated (i.e. they are oblique), they come about belatedly, with any truths being provisional and partial. Such phantom traces may form the basis for writing a decentred hermeneutic form of autobiographical narrative, that is, a narrative that focuses on the subject (i.e. the interest, the question, the difficulty) by way of narrating a subject or subjects (i.e. lived experience). Contiguity of lives would provide one strategy for further moving forward a notion of autobiography as relational, one that prompts destabilization of a narrator open to heterogeneous significances that appear as coincidences (see also Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009). Sebald uses the example of the behaviour of a dog in a field for the kind of wandering that can lead to coincidences. The dog will wander here and there, following its nose. He ‘invariably finds what he’s looking for’ but his trajectory is random; ‘unplottable’ (Sebald in Cuomo, 2007, p. 94). Sebald speaks to the role of coincidence. Only when apparently disparate and heterogeneous pieces are put side by side in non-instrumental ways might productive relationships become apparent. The distinctive aspect of a teacher story related to memory work is that, as Chambers (1998) points out, the teacher is positioned as the narrator, so as ‘to answer the question of who they are by telling their stories to others’ (p. 14). The danger with all such narration is that it can be trite (what Leah Fowler [2002] calls ‘naı¨ve’) but worse, that it falsifies the teacher’s effort at truth-telling by evading their responsibility to tell a story that matters to them. ‘What is the significance of inviting people to take up what really matters to them?’ Chambers asks (p. 17). One source of significance is that teachers feel compelled to identify the ‘backpack’ that they are carrying by virtue of who they are. An ethics of storytelling, which Fowler (2002) links to ‘a curriculum of difficulty’ would involve identifying that ‘wherever difficulty exists, there is a story behind it’ (p. 9). She associates the difficulty—and its narration—with temenos, the Greek word for crucible, ‘which holds dangerous, hot, or unstable substances’ (p. 6). Is the difficulty invariably in teaching, though? Or, as in Bereyter’s story, does difficulty point outwards, with inward implications for teaching? Autobiography has been gradually moving away from the notion that ‘re-membering is self work’: done ‘on’ and ‘by’ oneself (even if its benefits prove to be ‘collective’) (Chambers, 1998, p. 14). The idea behind writing like Sebald’s is that the subject is primary. As Chambers (2003) identifies, in her review of Canadian curriculum studies, certain ‘difficult’ subjects stand out as central to the field as it presently stands. Claudia Eppert, in her work on trauma, further suggests that we need to relocate the site of ethical engagement elsewhere than the relationship between the reader and the text. Instead, she proposes: ‘What if … we locate it in the
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relation between reader and the historical moment?’ (Eppert, 2002, p. 95). ‘On these alternate terms’, she explains, ‘it would be the past event rather than the author or text that assigns us to responsibility’ (pp. 95–96). I would suggest that this is what Sebald does, which is in keeping with a more hermeneutical approach to the work and place of autobiography in curriculum studies. Chambers (2003) has pointed to the place of phenomenology, on the one hand, and hermeneutics, on the other, in constituting the field of curriculum studies in Canada. A phenomenology of teacher narrative focuses on the element of ‘experience’. The contribution of hermeneutics, Chambers argues, is to historicize understanding, which is crucial, she maintains, for a country like Canada, a country that is both ‘colony’ and ‘colonizer’ (p. 227). A hermeneutical approach to curriculum accomplishes three goals. Through problematizing dominant culture, Chambers says, it resists foreclosure on any single (monocular) vision. Secondly, and in keeping with work like Fowler’s, hermeneutics returns us to the ‘original difficulty’ and invites us to stay with it (p. 228). And finally, playing with its etymological roots, Chambers suggests that hermeneutics is the work (and play) of the trickster (viz. Hermes), a figure that reminds us of our fallibility and partial understandings. A hermeneutical approach to autobiography in education, as informed by writing like Sebald’s, means that understanding becomes embedded as an aspect of the writing of the narrative rather than following on its composition. It is the notion, well-expressed by Gadamer, of applied understanding: of ‘assimilating what is said to the point that it becomes one’s own’ (p. 398). Writing the autobiographical subject at a slant Sebald experimented with various forms for writing at a slant. Vertigo, which was his first published prose fiction (in German), shifts back and forth between the autobiographical and the biographical. Like The Emigrants, it also contains four narratives. And like other of Sebald’s works, the book is tied together by the echo of its recurring imagery but also by the figure of the narrator. Much has been written about Sebald’s narrator, the particulars of whose life often overlap with Sebald’s yet who functions as a character as well as a narrative device. Events in the narrator’s life are clearly contiguous, in non-specified, ‘phantom-like’ ways, with events in the lives of those whose stories he narrates. And yet, his life episodes do not comprise the narrative detail of the stories. In The Emigrants, the narrator’s (viz. ‘Sebald’s’) exile has been said to constitute a fifth story, kept in abeyance (Aliaga-Buchenau, 2006). His life events are alluded to as very much on the narrator’s mind, evident first of all by the stories and persons to which he is drawn and, more fundamentally, by coincidence itself: by those whose lives cross his path. The narrator’s encounters with Austerlitz, for instance, are almost entirely coincidental yet occur over a 30-year period. Aliaga-Buchenau (2006) has looked at how the narrator (and his story) manage to exert both an absence and a presence in The Emigrants while Garloff (2006) remarks on
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how invested the narrator is in Austerlitz’s life story, such that we might be forgiven for thinking that it is the narrator’s interest in Austerlitz, rather than Austerlitz’s search for an amanuensis (someone to tell his story), that really drives the tale. As Garloff (2006) further points out, the narrator is often at a loss to explain why he finds himself in the places he does. He wanders. Very much on his mind are others’ stories, which seem to displace attention from his own. Aliaga–Buchenau has also commented on the unreliability of the narrator, how the narrator draws attention to his own unreliability, and continually points to the instability of his own memory. This becomes a nesting device, which functions within what Hutchinson (2006) has usefully called ‘egg boxes stacked in a crate’, with each ‘narrator’ likewise claiming to know the story only in part and even at that, incompletely. What is on the narrator’s mind is a subject, a subject painful to himself and to others and that links his story and theirs, as signalled in Sebald’s writings by the phantom of the author/narrator, apparent in the image of the author/narrator (Sebald) reflected in his visit to Terezin/Therensteinstadt in Sebald’s Austerlitz. Here, he stands outside of the bazaar window; but with his gaze manifest in the window’s reflection. Inside of the bazaar are depicted items that were or could have been confiscated from their Jewish owners. What may be most important for autobiography in education is the narrative presumption of a connection between the narrator’s life and the lives of those whose stories he/she tells. These connections are narrated obliquely, by way of coincidences that accumulate and echo, by way of phantom traces. While we may not know what it means to encounter Mrs Brown, in a train, we may begin with the presumption (which is just that; a presumption) that the encounter has something to do with us as well as with Mrs Brown—thus: what do we know of her story? And how might the telling of her story help to access and encompass a subject that draws us to her, and her to us? What is disclosed about the subject, by and through the subjects whose lives are being written? Exploring such questions would be the work of a hermeneutical approach to autobiography in curriculum studies wherein ‘[r]ather than parallel play, we must write narratives that pose a question about our experience in the world and invite our readers to join us in the exploration that results’ (Grumet, 2015, p. 239) Whereas phenomenology attends primarily to the experience and to narration of experience, hermeneutics attends to the subject: the problem, the question, the difficulty and the contiguity. It actively seeks a form by which to narrate the subject, and where, as Sebald suggests, this may be better done obliquely, so as to be confronted, not so much by the events themselves, but by their meaning: the ‘density’ of memory. Such an hermeneutical approach to autobiography in education and curriculum may be especially appropriate at the present time when, not unlike Paul Bereyter, teachers risk being occluded by the darkened reflection in the window, here of a curriculum concerned primarily with test outcomes, where the teacher is rendered a cipher: as instrumental to other ends. First, we need to see Mrs Brown. We then might discern the subject, and the traces of ourselves in it.
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Acknowledgements This article is based in part on scholarship done while a research fellow in McGill University’s Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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