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

Notes From No Man's Land

Eula Biss begins with the telephone. In a series of facts and headlines she offers a brief history of Alexander Bell’s famous invention and the so-called “War on Telephones Poles” that ensued in America in its wake. But “Time and Distance Overcome” is not an essay about property rights. It is not an essay on telephone poles as symbols of urban blight, or the miracle of invention, because “Even now it is an impossible idea that we are all connected, all of us.” Instead, it is an essay on the dark lining of an alternative history. A history that has to do with a black man being hanged from a telephone pole, and then another, and another. And the list of facts and headlines turns to a litany of hate crimes and the invention of lynching.

In this manner, both artful and unexpected, Notes from No Man’s Land explores the intricacies of race relations and identity in America. “There is no biological basis for what once we call race,” Biss writes. “It is a social fiction. But it is also, for now at least, a social fact.”

Biss herself is a white woman, born to white parents, but she often identifies her family as mixed. “Mixed” in the sense that both her mother and her mother’s sister lived with or married black men, and that Biss grew up alongside black stepsisters and biracial cousins, an adopted sister Cherokee, another sister Chinese. Biss is a white woman, yet her cultural and familial experience colors her essays with a unique perspective on American diversity.

In her essays, Biss creates seemingly effortless connections, constantly infusing the past and the present, as she escorts her readers through the various corners of America. We see New York City, California, and points in between. When a storm hits Iowa City interrupting the drunken debauchery of the university neighborhood where Biss resides, she ruminates on the villains and victims of the hurricane in New Orleans, and, in a gestures subtle but sure, Biss turns the common dialogue of race relations on its head, challenging the role of diversity in higher education, questioning even, the nature of integration.

If Biss were merely an observer, then her historical references and careful musings about telephone poles, the gentrification of a lakeside neighborhood in Chicago, or reparations for slavery would be interesting, albeit yet another white perspective on the collective memory of race in America. Instead, Biss daringly and unapologetically inserts herself directly into her essays.

In “Relations,” a story hits newspapers about a Long Island woman who gave birth to twins—one white, one black. Though both the woman and her husband were white, the black baby was a result of an error at a fertility clinic in which a second embryo was accidentally implanted along with that of the couple’s biological son. The event led to a fierce custody battle, stirring public debate over to whom the black child rightfully belonged. Within the framework of such events, Biss explores relevant points in history—both her own history, and the country’s—including her personal reflection on how, as children, she and her sister played with one black doll and white one; the “doll studies” of 1939 conducted by a Woolworth store in Harlem, which monitored demand for a more multicultural selection of dolls; Mattel’s release of the classic white Barbie in 1959, and subsequently, the alternative black Francie doll in 1967.

In the same way Biss’s prose reflects the range of environments in which she has lived, she too utilizes the array of jobs she has held. In “Landmines,” she draws from her experience as a teacher in the New York City public school system. In “Black News” she writes of being a reporter in all black neighborhoods in San Diego.

In California, Biss considers the metaphor of urban spaces while weaving in the science of succulents, crafting a meditation on gardens and cities, and the lasting symbolism of the ancient tales of Babylon. “Babylon could stand for any city—” she writes, “for New York, for Oakland, for California, for the United States—for capitalism, for imperialism, or simply for excess.”

Though her writing is straightforward and direct, Biss manages to create starkly powerful images that pack a lingering impression: a black and white topsy-turvy doll in the antebellum South; the green streak across a fellow teacher’s face after his class hurled a round of open-capped magic markers at him as he fled the room; the sight of a used refrigerator on the front stoop of her Harlem apartment; a young black boy donning a pair of hillbilly teeth issued from a gumball machine.

Biss writes with other senses as well: of the aroma of Oakland, “where bougainvillea climbed the telephone poles and huge hibiscus flowers poured over the front yards of all the little houses;” of the sound of Don Henley’s “Hotel California” filtering through a sleepy bar in Mexico; of the soulful vocals of Nina Simone while Biss drives with her husband through southeast Chicago, contemplating the plight of the Irish Americans and the black Americans while they dream up names for their yet unborn children.

Notes From No Man’s Land is a collection that takes on human exodus in all its forms, that observes life on the boundaries, the borders, the boroughs, and between: between New York and California, between privilege and consequence, between white and black. Through this profound grouping of essays, Biss presents the American fabric as a woven synthesis of migrations that created the landscape into which she—into which most of us—were born.

In the endnotes to her collection, Eula Biss describes her first encounter with the concept of a No Man’s Land after learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wall had been surrounded by a stretch of gravel and anyone that entered that “no man’s land” would be shot. “What I learned from this lesson,” she writes, “was that it was not so much the wall that divided the city as it was the no man’s land around that wall.” This understanding guides many of Biss’s essays, because it is not so much the physical or cultural distinctions that keep us apart but the way we create our own perceptions of those differences and guard ourselves against them.

In her opening meditation on the telephone, Biss admittedly writes, “When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadway was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious… I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle.” And who wouldn’t? Yet one of the most striking aspects of Biss’s collection is the clarity she has gained as a woman about the American experience. At any point when the essays threaten to stray too far, at any point when she seems to draw forced or exaggerated connections, Biss regains an understated and graceful tone that marks her collection with an intuitive, visceral maturity.

“The children’s game of telephone,” she writes “depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.” It is the space we maintain around us that colors the world where the messages, the innocence of youth, and the question of identity, become lost in the vast No Man’s Land of our own perceptions.

~ Jericho Parms