The Rings of Saturn

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W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the SRB to help us maintain a vigorous program with no paywall. The Rings of Saturn is work of oblique mourning, encountering its object again and again in distorted forms. All of Sebald’s hobbyists and scholars, all the images of desolation and depopulation, are presented in a melancholic register, crisscrossing through space and history yet framed by the narrative’s beginning and end: the premature death of two colleagues, as ‘Sebald’ begins to write in 1994, and the Holocaust that marked him at birth, folding over and rearing its head as the narrator completes his chronicle on April 13, 1995. Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald – walking through history

Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand.”

And since the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature, Browne scrutinises that which escaped annihilation for any sign of the mysterious capacity for transmigration he has so often observed in caterpillars and moths. That purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patroclus—what does it mean? The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s claim that “Sebald is more like a new kind of historian than a new kind of novelist” might be too provocative for its own good, but it is an indication of the extent to which his work has yet to be placed within a secure canonical niche. The books are fascinating for the way they inhabit their own self-determined genre, but that’s not ultimately why they are essential reading. There is a moral magnitude and a weary, melancholy wisdom in Sebald’s writing that transcends the literary and attains something like an oracular register. Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream. He does away with the normal proceedings of narrative fiction—plot, characterization, events leading to other events—so that what we get is the unmediated expression of a pure and seemingly disembodied voice. That voice is an extraordinary presence in contemporary literature, and it may be another decade before the magnitude—and the precise nature—of its utterances are fully realized. 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.” 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 Rings of Sebald - The Paris Review The Paris Review - The Rings of Sebald - The Paris Review

Patt, Lise et al. (eds.). Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald. ICI Press, 2007. An anthology of essays on Sebald's use of images, with artist's projects inspired by Sebald. 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.”The effect of this quintessentially Sebaldian passage is like that of a dream in which a lecturer is speaking drily about sericulture but also, somehow, about Auschwitz. That place and what it has come to represent is a vast and blank presence at the periphery—and yet somehow at the center—of narrative vision in Sebald’s work. He was born in Bavaria in 1944, and so grew up in the immediate aftermath of the war. His father, he learned much later, had served in the Army and had been among the troops who invaded Poland in 1939. Like so many German men of his generation, Sebald’s father refused to speak about his war experiences, and this reticence, with that of post-war Germany as a whole, is what impels Sebald’s narratives of shame and historical occlusion.

The Rings of Saturn: W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse The Rings of Saturn: W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse

Cf. Carol Jacobs, Sebald's Vision. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 72 and passim. On the Natural History of Destruction. London: Hamish Hamilton. ( Luftkrieg und Literatur: Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch) English ed. 2003 While the narrator initially informs us, ‘I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast,’ this is not the impression we have of the narrator’s trek while reading The Rings of Saturn. What is published is far from carefree. Sebald writes: 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. Gutbrod, Hans (31 May 2023). "Sebald's Path in Wertach -- Commemorating the Commemorator". Cultures of History Forum. doi: 10.25626/0146 . Retrieved 6 June 2023.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. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.” I do not know how to read this except as the book disowning itself, observing, as best it can, the decencies of mourning with a gesture towards the renunciation not only of memory, but of experience itself. Africa, the Mediterranean, the Iberian peninsula, the Tuileries gardens, a suburb of Rouen, the Sahara. Sebald, W.G. (1995). Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8218-4448-0.