The Rings of Saturn

Having recently finished W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, I was pleased to stumble upon a full-page spread titled “Rambling With W.G. Sebald in East Anglia.” in the travel section of the Sunday New York Times. The article, which loosely charts the late author’s tour through the coastal villages and port towns of Suffolk County offers a resourceful guide to the same lyrically archaic castles and charming local pubs featured in Sebald’s book—a hybrid of memoir, novel, and personal travelogue—but nowhere is there a guide to the stunning observations and poetic sensibility of Sebald’s prose.

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First and foremost from the epitaph, we learn of the rings of Saturn—that the great circle orbiting the planet’s midriff equator is composed of little more than ice crystals, meteor crumbs—dust, really—the fragments of a former moon.

Like the rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s book of the same name is a striking and melancholy journey, infused with fragments that compose to reveal a beautifully ephemeral journey through England’s Suffolk County. Exploring the profound effects of a rich imperial past on the pastoral landscape, it is a story both thought provoking and emotionally devastating. Though the book was first published in German in 1995, then translated for English editions in 1998, its reflection on the current economic downturn is all the more relevant now “for it is one thing to read about unemployment blackspots in the newspapers,” Sebald writes, “and quite another to walk on a cheerless evening, past rows of run-down houses with mean little front gardens; and, having reached the town centre, to find nothing but amusement arcades, bingo halls, betting shops, video stores, pubs that emit a sour reek of beer.”

Told in ten chapters with photographs and archived memorabilia interspersed, The Rings of Saturn has the feel of an old travel album, or an encyclopedia, as we follow the narrator’s journey, sharing his observations and encounters along the way, as he meanders into his own memory and reflection, his own retelling of stories past. So that while we are trekking the eastern countryside of England, we are also amidst the cities of Germany in flames, with Joseph Conrad in the upper reaches of the Congo, with the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi of China, in a replicated Temple of Jerusalem.

To step into Sebald’s stream of conscious narrative is to release oneself from sequential order. “It just takes one awful second,” he writes, “and an entire epoch passes.” Like a literary time machine, Sebald seems to suggest experience as a simultaneous mosaic of past and present, then and now. We enter the labyrinth of his dreams. We visit the house of a friend, in which the narrator believes he has lived once. Things left stacked in a corner, he writes, “seemed as if they were still lifes created by my own hand.” But while time may be knotted and coiled in a serpentine stream of events and reflection, it is not without consequence—Sebald takes a profound measure of before and after—the past and present—of the places he visits.

The Rings of Saturn is at once beautiful in its telling, and unsettling in its concept. Sebald exhibits deep concern for the economic impacts on cities and towns and the vacancies left in the wake of production. The result is a story of wreckage—a catalogue of destruction. Sebald’s sense of loss is evident when he glimpses the bird’s eye view from a plane en route to Norwich from Schiphol Airport, describing one of the most densely populated areas where over the centuries, “the whole region was transformed into a geometrical pattern. The roads, water channels and railway tracks ran in straight lines and gentle curves past fields and plantations, basins and reservoirs. Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity.” Or the countless near-mystical passages depicting the past, a time when railway carriages brought eloquent supplies—“cases of hock and Bordeaux… whalebone corsets and crinolines from London”—to manor houses like Somerleyton Hall that, now crumbling, once “had the illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured.” Or the once vibrant city of Dunwich, now sunken, “quite literally… beneath alluvial sand and gravel, over an area of two or three square miles.” But is it also a story of relativity, of what remains amidst the rubble—the mystery of observation and the magic of what once was in the forlorn harbors, ghostly fishing villages, and dilapidated forests.

Sebald exhibits a touching ability to pay homage to the natural world and the life therein as the narrator himself becomes lost amid a field of heatheror finds poetry in a heard of swine and a solitary mallard. He explores the history of the North Sea and the rise and fall of the herring, their “myriads of scales floating on the surface of water, shimmering like tiny silver tiles by day and sometimes at dusk resembling ashes or snow.” He considers a batch of swallows circling as if “the world was held together by the course they flew through the air.” He writes odes and elegies to the trees. He empathizes with a Chinese quail. He mourns the beauty of the silk moth, “pale, almost transparent creatures, which would presently give their lives for the fine thread they were spinning.”

In the end Sebald masterfully joins all the seemingly disparate parts of his story to form a mysterious and heartbreaking unity that leaves his reader wondering where we have just been, where we are going, even where we are right now. It is the strange exquisite art of a writer, blending fiction and history, to craft a story that reads like a scientific dream, an encyclopedic serenade, a soft plea for an ounce of poetic justice braided into the silken threads of the world’s endless stream of calamity. Sebald’s journey is an expedition on the rings of Saturn themselves, sustained by mere crystal fragments of a distant moon.

~Jericho Parms