charlatan's Full Review: W. G. Sebald - Rings of Saturn
Few books are able to chart the course of the mind.
In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald succeeds in a form of mental cartography. During a walk through the East Anglia countryside, the narrator explores more than just the terrain. He wades through a morass of memories and a forest of ideas. Thought is compounded upon thought, each relating to the other sequentially, yet with no determinable pattern of logic.
The Rings of Saturn is not just a progression of thought. It is an account of memories and retrospect, of a dark and secret subconscious activity that emerges with the onset of solitude. Each serves as the catalyst for the next. To be sure, the book could have taken an infinite number of directions, as there is no definitive path for contemplation and reminiscence. Sebald chose to write just one, a combination of haunting memories, schoolroom knowledge, and literary erudition.
The most difficult problem lies in the matter of defining Sebald’s work. It is not simple fiction, as there is more than conjecture or imagination. It is not, however, non-fiction; the characters and events are as real as if they actually existed and occurred. Historical fiction, perhaps, since there is an element of underlying truth to the entire novel. Sebald builds on actual facts and occurrences. He creates a fantasy world out of that which exists, a world where a fictional character has very real memories.
Born in Wertach im Allgäu in the Bavarian Alps, Sebald moved to East Anglia over two decades ago, and subsequently became a professor at the University of East Anglia in 1975. The Rings of Saturn is therefore not entirely fictitious, as East Anglia is his real-life home. The narrator’s walk through the country and his subsequent admission to a hospital could very well have been one of Sebald’s own experiences, thereby eliminating all possible categorisations as fiction. How then, could one classify it as mere fiction and not, at the very least, autobiographical?
The Emigrants, his 1996 novel that garnered awards from The Jewish Quarterly and countless other remarkable reviews, pioneered into this newly-established world of fiction. The novel follows the misty biographies of four people (Dr. Henry Selwyn, professor Paul Bereyter, uncle Ambros Adelworth, and painter Max Ferber) who managed to avoid the Holocaust through a series of circumstantial events. Cut off from their native country and familiar surroundings, their lives end in lunacy or suicide.
Told from the perspective of an omnipotent narrator, The Emigrants remains startlingly human. Just as The Rings of Saturn evolves through remembrance and memory, the characters in Sebald’s 1996 novel take on a three-dimensional quality that bestows a feeling of first-hand experience onto the reader.
Indeed, the description is so vivid that a reader-author relationship is no longer possible. The reader essentially becomes the narrator, the thoughts of the latter co-mingling with those of the former. The illogical continuities, the illuminations, the profound discoveries, are the reader’s own. Imagery is no longer description; it is a fantastic world that occurs in the reader’s mind. Imagination replaces prose. The Rings of Saturn becomes less of a book and more of an experience.
In order to grasp The Rings of Saturn in its entirety, one must have at least a working knowledge of Borges, Browne, Conrad, and Swineburne, among others. These authors are not mentioned indiscreetly, which eliminates the task of trying to extract inferences and subtleties out of the text itself, but it is necessary to understand why these authors are included so directly, and why they surface amid the drift of ideas and memories. One speculation describes them as “conductors between the past and present.”
For example, there is no small irony in the search for Sir Thomas Browne’s skull as we, the readers, embark on a three-hundred page journey of the mind. Browne sought to examine the religion of a doctor in his discourse Religio Medici (circa 1635), where scientific rationalisation met with spiritual revelation. Over three and one-half centuries later, W.G. Sebald mirrors Browne’s efforts, as he seeks to find the religion of a writer-philosopher in the same manner.
There is also the issue of Browne’s Urn-Burial, a treatise on the content of several urns and their relation to the dead. The resounding theme of death in both The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn makes it impossible to hypothesise that Browne’s work played little or no part in the whole, that Sebald’s novel stands by itself as a work of fiction.
Sebald’s genius lies in the simple fact that he writes just as one would think. He is, to say the least, overwhelming, just as an onslaught of thoughts overwhelms the thinker, but that is his chief attribute. There is one sure way to recognise genius; it lies loosely in the ability to perform something with amazing ease and simplicity, yet leave an audience slackjawed as to its most defining variable, the very X that classifies it as such. Sebald carries out this task with a complete and unmistakable thoroughness, which opens his literature to debate.
In one review, Eileen Battersby states that “Sebald makes no attempt to hide behind a narrative voice. The doubts, anxieties and fears are his own.” Another reviewer, Richard Eder maintains that Sebald and his narrator “are not the same, like the dreamer and his dream…”
The enigmatic photographs are also open to speculation. The chapters are littered with random snapshots that proffer the impression of thumbing through an old photo album, further dimming the any pre-established reader-author barrier. Sebald claims to use these photographs, some collected from antique stores, because it is the foundation for his writing.
“You often don't know who these people are and so you have to make up the subtext for them. I have always felt a great attachment to documents of this kind: stragglers and lost souls,” he stated. In addition, Sebald supports his prose and the characters and events contained therein with scrawled diary entries, newspaper clippings, and eerie lithographs.
The Rings of Saturn is a masterpiece. It is a novel that will determine a new direction for fiction writing, in the sense that our lives are affected through more than just events, but there is nothing terribly lighthearted about it. It is a novel immersed in thought, deeply profound, and somewhat disturbing. It is also a novel about decay. Sebald, who professes that we are “living towards the end of a civilisation,” constructs his story around this metaphor.
Sebald is the true inventor of a genre that combines true historical dates, names, and numbers, as well as accompanying photographs and journal excerpts. Above all, he mixes it well with a large portion of imagination and a substantial amount of emotion. The Rings of Saturn, therefore, does not just read. It envelops and consumes. Reader, beware: it is a chilling and mysterious world.
Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, summarises The Rings of Saturn as an exploration of “Britain's pastoral and imperial past.” Nothing could be more of an understatement. There is more to Sebald’s than writing than a political theme; it is about life, it is about human suffering, the toll of memory, and the inevitable procession of decay.
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W.G. Sebald has won the Berlin Literature, Literatur Nord, and Mörike Prizes, and the Johannes Bobrowski medal. His yet-untranslated Vertigo will be published by New Directions in 1999. The Rings of Saturn is published by New Directions Press and is available in hardcover for $23.95.
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