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Below, the beginning of an essay on W.G. Sebald and Rings of Saturn,
which appeared in The Southwest Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, 2005.
 RINGS, PLANETS, POLES,
INFERNO, PARADISE: A POETICS FOR W.G. SEBALD
Our pilgrim storyteller, once again, is letting someone else do the
talking. His old friend Michael Hamburger, whose family fled Berlin
for Edinburgh in 1933, speaks of a postwar return to the building in
which he’d lived as a child. For Hamburger, the details of place
have an immanence, on the verge of a miracle: “like pictures in
a rebus that I simply had to puzzle out correctly in order to cancel
the monstrous events that had happened since we emigrated.” (Sebald,
The Rings of Saturn, 178).
Now, no fiction can equal the fact of Holocaust, we need no Cynthia
Ozick to tell us that, but few texts imaginary or otherwise pose quite
the riddle, rebus-like indeed in its combined transparency and opacity,
as the late W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Published in German
in 1995, in English in ’98, the very genre of the text can seem
a puzzle. It’s been designated a novel, a determination that must’ve
begun with Sebald himself, but no attempt to understand the book’s
power can overlook the problem of typology. I must get into that problem,
here, in time -- for I intend just such an attempt, a decoding of the
rebus, an explication of the book’s poetics. If the novel were
more ordinary, my subject would be termed narrative strategies, but
if discussion of Rings were limited to the usual principles of narrative,
the text would seem so impersonal, dreary, and tautological that its
reading could never provide the satisfying, indeed compelling, experience
it does.
Resolving that paradox, making sense of that impact, stands as the next
project before Sebald readers. While it’s going on five years
since the man’s untimely roadside death, the majority of critics
and reviewers, including such esteemed figures as Ozick, so far have
avoided the question of how, instead reiterating a ravished but unilluminating
wow. Among the shorter assessments made during the author’s lifetime,
the most valuable was Susan Sontag’s review of Vertigo (the German
edition appeared in 1990, but in America and England the book was Sebald’s
third to be published, in 2000). Writing in the Times Literary Supplement,
Sontag offered fine insights regarding Sebald’s overlapping roles
as narrator, protagonist, and author. But the reviewer’s role
also forced Sontag back onto frustrating vagaries of praise, like “extraordinary…
unclassifiable… bewitching;” reiterating the sort of puff
we’d already seen a number of times, for instance from Roberta
Silman of the New York Times Book Review, who claimed that Rings of
Saturn was “like a dream you want to last forever.”
Indeed yes. But even dreams can be analyzed -- and then too, a useful
interpretation need not be windy and abstruse. I mean that academic
studies of Sebald are now starting to proliferate, and these have tended,
predictably, to be clotted with theoretical backing and filling. Mark
McCulloh titled his 2003 book Understanding W.G. Sebald (on Univeristy
of South Carolina Press), but his exegesis, once you get past such bewildering
coinages as “literary monism," offers little more than an
introduction and a summary. Those who love Sebald’s work need
now to move towards true understanding, and not by means of a finicky
demonstration of how sometimes the novels fit one critical theory and
sometimes another. A more accessible elucidation is called for.
Not that Rings of Saturn doesn’t make a point of defying analysis,
in keeping with a thoroughly postmodern aesthetic. The jargon of theoreticians
indeed applies, as the text breaks down anything approaching a “metanarrative”
and allows plenty of echo-space for “heteroglossia.” Rather
than a unifying story of some personal-cum-social transformation (the
metanarrative of a conventional novel), Rings presents what seems a
meandering pastiche of literary and historical materials, repeatedly
abandoning personal detail for appropriated passages from older texts,
as well as for fragments from the correspondence and biographies of
those who wrote them (a heteroglossia, that is, of multiple voices and
effects). No worthwhile explanation of this author’s magic can
ignore how he chose to work at the developing fringes of his artform.
Elements of my own interpretation are drawn not from Aristotle, but
from whoever it was who thought up recycling.
Yet I must also note -- a last defining point before getting down to
cases -- that in Rings this surrogate narrative, up-to-the-minute as
its art may seem, has nonetheless a classic aspect. For throughout,
Sebald relies on what used to be called “masterpieces of Western
art,” the likes of Lear and Flaubert. The most recent such case
appears to be the Borges story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,”
written in the 1930s and generally acknowledged as a benchmark of the
past century’s literary development. Thus I’ll conclude
my explication by identifying one of the book’s subtler allusions,
to a very cornerstone of the European canon -- namely, an unstated yet
fundamental allegiance with Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Now, ordinarily, an author draws a correlation with the likes of the
Florentine for thematic ballast, ideological muscle. Let me exemplify
by means of another novel often termed “plotless,” like
Sebald’s, yet profoundly different: in The Catcher in The Rye,
J.D. Salinger invests adolescent pathology with gravitas by having his
protagonist speak of Hamlet. But the strolls around mid-Manhattan that
occupy most of Holden Cauldfield’s Christmas holiday have an purpose
poles apart from those of the narrator in Rings of Saturn, who claims
he’s assembling the “notes” he took after he “set
off to walk the county of Suffolk” (3) one August during the last
decade of the Twentieth Century.
To begin with, the latter perambulatory novel largely eschews its form’s
common function, in the famous phrase adapted from James’s prefaces,
as the record of sensibility. Rejecting the comforts of the conventional
long story, Rings never evokes an imaginary coming-of-age or other private
transition intended to illuminate larger forces at work; from the first,
rather, Sebald suggests that his own project comes too late for such
cathartic hijinks. His opening recalls a pair of university colleagues
who died more or less mysteriously (the first of many strange passings,
in Rings) before completing their fanatical studies (the first of many
obsessive cases). One of the deceased was at work on Flaubert, and yet
the author of Madame Bovary prompts thoughts not of marriage, nor even
le mot juste, but rather of inevitable destruction. Apropos of Flaubert’s
time in Egypt, the narrator takes a brief turn as Cassandra: “Sand
conquered all” (8).
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