Writing to Wilhelm Fleiss in November 1900 and expressing his doubts about the reception of psychoanalytic theory a year after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes:

[W]ho is interested in it? Who is asking for it? Cui bono should I undertake this work? I have already resigned myself to living like someone who speaks a foreign language or like Humboldt’s parrot. Being the last of one’s tribe – or the first and perhaps the only one – these are quite similar situations.

Readers aware of the richly allusive writing of W.G. Sebald will not be surprised to find a conflation of natural history and oneiric anxiety in the novel Austerlitz – particularly in that episode in which the image of Humboldt’s ‘ancient perroquet’ appears to the protagonist in a dream on the night before his encounter with the state archives in Prague. As borrowed from Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, a parrot is the sign of the literal destruction of an indigenous people; alluding to Freud, the parrot marks the difficulty of bringing the disappeared back into language – and the fear that in doing so one is alone, either the sole survivor or the single originator of one’s kind. In the telling of the untellable - the trauma - that is Austerlitz, Sebald configures both these problems as a specific function of the archive. What is the nature of that space between primary event and present trace? What is the status of language as it follows that trace back to its unspeakable, unappeasable origin? Or analogously, how might the subject give an ‘account of its own ruin’?

In this paper, I use Austerlitz’s dream of the parrot to explore the ways that the archive, at a certain moment in history, names that condition of the human, hovering between the having and not having of speech, and of the past as it consumes thought and compels silence.