Austerlitz

These pages center largely on Austerlitz’s view that it is unnatural to govern the world according to the arbitrary construct of linear time. This view reflects both his historical awareness (people didn’t organize their lives around clock time until the Industrial Revolution) and his grief over his lost past. He speculates he’s avoided clocks his entire life out of hope of regaining this past, a hope “that I can turn back and go behind [time …], and there I shall find everything as it once was” (116).

This motif—that the past is still accessible in the present—also appears in Ashman’s story about reentering his childhood nursery. He recounted becoming enraged upon seeing his toy version of Noah’s Ark and the carved notches on his dresser, and firing his rifle at the clock tower. The symbolism is clear: Ashman was angry that time had passed, that even though a piece of his past was preserved in the nursery, everything else had been changed by time. Seeing the notches also evoked his unprocessed fury for that time, and he was angry that time hadn’t healed that childhood wound. The toy ark symbolizes this unfulfilled promise: What he may have then seen as a symbol of salvation—the ark that saves Noah from catastrophe—he now saw as a child’s false hope. His fortune had worsened and he could no longer afford to maintain his childhood home as anything more than a granary.

There is also a motif of a kind of synchronicity, in that the painter J. M. W. Turner visited and later painted the Mawddach Estuary at the same age Austerlitz was there for the Fitzpatricks’ funeral. In Austerlitz’s nonlinear conception of time, the fact of being able to reenter the past means that every moment exists simultaneously (116). This suggests he imagines Turner’s 1798 landscape painting was inspired by the 1957 funeral procession for the Fitzpatricks. Because Austerlitz recognizes his own life and experiences in Turner’s watercolor, it raises the question of whether Austerlitz is remembering the funeral procession itself or augmenting it with Turner’s image, just as Hilary argued historians do with history and preformed images.

Pigeons appear as a metaphor for Austerlitz’s journey to find his home—to uncover the mystery of his past. Austerlitz identifies with Gerald’s description of pigeons’ infallible homing ability, hoping that he, too, can have the courage to navigate home as pigeons do through “so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, [as they] make straight for their place of origin” (129). Versions of this homing ability appear later in the novel as Austerlitz is inexplicably drawn to places that hide clues to his past.