Photographic Evocation of Time: Identity, Memory, and Modernity in Claude Simon’s The Wind and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

This article explores how photographic elements mediate representations of time in Claude Simon's The Wind (1959) and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001). Drawing on the philosophical frameworks of Paul Ricœur, it examines how both novels use photography to question linear time and to register the aftershocks of trauma. While both authors integrate photography into narrative form – metaphorically and directly – their approaches diverge significantly. Simon's prose emulates the mechanical stillness of the camera, reflecting a desire to freeze time and preserve fragmented memories. Sebald, by contrast, embeds images within the text to unsettle narrative coherence, inviting reflection on the instability of historical truth and the limits of memory. Through this comparative reading, the article argues that Simon and Sebald offer a literary poetics of belatedness, wherein time is experienced as recursive rather than progressive. Ultimately, photography in literature emerges as both a narrative strategy and a philosophical inquiry into the temporal dislocations of postwar subjectivity.