The Rings of Saturn

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There seem to be lessons in these passages about misdirection, mutability, shifting perceptions, fiction and reality. They strike me as a useful guide to reading The Rings of Saturn. But I’m wary of pushing things too far – I expect that as we fall deeper into the book, plenty of other ways of reading and seeing the book will suggest themselves. True to its origin, the book is rambling affair. Sebald recounts the rise and fall of great houses and communities; he considers the lives of a variety of literary figures at one time or another resident in East Anglia, among them Browne, Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Michael Hamburger, and Chateaubriand. He speaks of such historical figures as Roger Casement and the terrible Dowager Empress of nineteenth-century China. Economic growth and decline fascinates Sebald, and so he discourses on the changing fortunes of the herring industry, once a mainstay of England's North Sea communities, and turns at various points in the book to the subject of the international silk industry. He visits a man who has devoted years of his life to constructing a perfect replica of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (an episode that, like much else in the book, echoes The Emigrants, where the painter Max Ferber describes a childhood meeting with a Jewish itinerant who went from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting such a model: "And I, said Ferber, bent down over the diminutive temple and realized, for the first time in my life, what a true work of art looks like.") Silman, Roberta (26 July 1998). "In the Company of Ghosts A novel uses a walking tour in East Anglia to meditate on links between past and present, East and West". The New York Times . Retrieved 9 June 2013. Sebald’s model-maker is in fact based on a real person, an Englishman named Alec Garrard who spent thirty years working on a 1:100 scale model of the Temple. But it is hard not to think that if Garrard hadn’t existed, Sebald would have had to make him up. The unfinishable model of the Temple is the perfect symbol of Sebald’s manner as well as of his subject, both of which are aligned with the pessimistic model of narrative, Erich Auerbach’s “Hebrew” style, which derives its uncanny power and devastating realism precisely from that which cannot be represented.

W. G. Sebald - Wikipedia W. G. Sebald - Wikipedia

Sericulture is encouraged as a method for illustrating the manner with which humans are like, and can and should be treated like, insects. The ‘extermination to pre-empt racial degeneration’ is one of the least disguised references to the Holocaust in Sebald’s novel, and the fact that silk and sericulture leads us down into the gas chambers at last seems the primary thematic connection between silk and ash in the text. The year is 2005. We have met to discuss my proposal for postgraduate study, and the prospect of writing a cross-disciplinary thesis on pre-war German literature in translation. You drive fast,’ Engelhard says. His face is windswept and slightly burnt. The afternoon is hot but the air is fresh. I shrug. ‘But you look well,’ he adds, grabbing my hand. I follow as he lumbers along the thin path to the small stone cottage, aware for the first time of the fragility of his gait. ‘We have planted all of these just this summer,’ he says, making a circular gesture. ‘They are all native. This is why I need to be here so often lately – to water the new plants.’ He breathes labouriously as we walk, but there is something playful in his expression. He seems keen to show me around.In the grounds of the University of East Anglia in Norwich a round wooden bench encircles a copper beech tree, planted in 2003 by the family of W.G.Sebald in memory of the writer. Together with other trees donated by former students of the writer, the area is called the "Sebald Copse". The bench, whose form echoes The Rings of Saturn, carries an inscription from the penultimate poem of Unerzählt ("Unrecounted"): "Unerzählt bleibt die Geschichte der abgewandten Gesichter" ("Unrecounted always it will remain the story of the averted faces" [33]) But the labyrinth is not without its pleasures: otherworldly beauty, strangely stimulating coincidence, and of course, magnificently evocative prose are abundant in The Rings of Saturn and provide necessary contrast. As Sebald explained to Silverblatt: The Rings of Saturn ( German: Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt - An English Pilgrimage) is a 1995 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. Its first-person narrative arc is the account by a nameless narrator (who resembles the author in typical Sebaldian fashion [1]) on a walking tour of Suffolk. In addition to describing the places he sees and people he encounters, including translator Michael Hamburger, Sebald discusses various episodes of history and literature, including the introduction of silkworm cultivation to Europe, and the writings of Thomas Browne, which attach in some way to the larger text. The book was published in English in 1998. Third, when I mention “Sebald” as a person, I may be deceiving you. The narrator of this book appears to be its author – most of the time. But there are enough odd references and fantastical descriptions to make the reader suspect that the person telling these stories may be part-fiction. This modest, immensely enjoyable documentary is about one of my favourite books, The Rings of Saturn by the German poet and critic WG Sebald, who was born in 1944, taught for much of his adult life in this country, mainly at the University of East Anglia, and was killed in a motor accident in 2001. It was first published in German in 1995, translated into English three years later and is an account of a walking tour of Suffolk, the people he meets, the places he visits, and the historical and literary reflections prompted by what he sees and senses, taking his mind around the world. Suffolk becomes a sort of palimpsest for his eloquent, precise, lugubrious, often drily witty meditations about war, death, destruction and decay, about memories and continuities and the feeling that nothing entirely disappears.

Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (z-lib.org The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (z-lib.org

Jo Catling; Richard Hibbitt, eds. (2011). Saturn's Moons, W.G.Sebald - A Handbook. Translated by Hamburger, Michael. Legenda. p.659. ISBN 978-1-906540-0-29. What begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.It seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost to Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.” Among Kafka's Sons: Sebald, Roth, Coetzee", 22 January 2013; review of Three Sons by Daniel L. Medin, ISBN 978-0810125681

Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust

Sebald could be describing his own peculiar nineteenth-century German prose style when he writes in Rings of Thomas Browne: But then, given the impossibility of any uncompromised or just view of history, withdrawal is in a sense the only option. To that extent the frozen planet of melancholy, whose rings, as Sebald's epigraph notes, are composed of the rubble of a destroyed moon, becomes a kind of haven from earthly terror. At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!” And yet for all that The Rings of Saturnalso displays a frightening, almost inhuman, conviction. Sir Thomas Browne, Sebald notes at the beginning of the book, remarks on the fabled survival, over the centuries, of a piece of silk in the urn of Patroclus, for Browne a "symbol of the indestructibility of the human soul as assured by scripture." Silk and its manufacture, as I have said, is an ongoing preoccupation throughout the book. Echoing Browne, this symbolizes the curious inter-relation of the corrupt and the incorruptible; equally it is a metaphor for how the book itself weaves separate threads into its singular substance. At the end, however, the theme is simply funereal. it is not difficult to burn a human body: a piece of an old boat burnt Pompey, and the King of Castile burnt large numbers of Saracens with next to no fuel, the fire being visible far and wide. Indeed … if the burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust, a man may carry his own pyre.Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York, NY/London/Melbourne/Toronto 2007, p. 162.

Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald | The New Yorker Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald | The New Yorker

From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of those lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.” Africa, the Mediterranean, the Iberian peninsula, the Tuileries gardens, a suburb of Rouen, the Sahara. Sebald detaches us from reality, even as he feeds increasing amounts of earthy and apparently true material into the book. He makes us feel like there is far more in the Suffolk landscape than we could ever have imagined – and also that he’s imagining plenty of it. Or rather, the imaginary version of him is imagining it. This is where they landed,’ he says, pointing to another spot on the map. ‘Just a small walk from where we are standing. I’ll show you later on.’

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I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?” This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?”