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The first W.G. Sebald book I heard of was The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Satrun, Eine englische Wallfahrt, 1995; tr. by Michael Hulse, 1998). Something in the tone of the recommendation and the title of the book made me start to imagine how the book would feel and how I would feel about it — you’ve been there too. I tried to avoid such imaginings, but with all of its positive criticism it was hard to hold back my expectations. About a year ago I began my Sebald project (to read all four of Sebald’s books of “fiction” in the order in which he wrote them), and Vertigo and, particularly, The Emigrants just made my anticipation for this book all the more acute.
When I began reading The Rings of Saturn I knew next to nothing about the book. Sure, I knew that it was structured as as walking tour around Norfolk, in eastern England. I knew from the other two books I’d read that this walking tour would be replete with ruminations on the past, complete with documentary photos. But the main theme? I didn’t know what this one would be about.
The title, with no context, did little to help. What do the rings of Saturn have to do with East Anglia or even with modern history in general? I see it now: a lot, in a very beautiful metaphorical sense. This is a book about the ravages of time, about destruction, particularly the destruction (self- or otherwise) of human endeavor. East Anglia was once the scene of thriving communities living off of some of the most important ports in Europe. Today, little of that remains. The fishermen Sebald encounters facing the east, sitting on the beach ”just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.” That line alone, and the orientation of the fishermen, nicely sums up the book. The rings of Saturn were once large moons in orbit, but through time and great destruction they’ve been reduced to an ephemeral dust — something tragic, something whose trace haunts the present with its reminder of the past — yet it’s beautiful.
And that’s one of the best ways I can think of to describe this book — tragic, yet beautiful. Sebald begins the book in his unassuming manner; he’s just finished a project that entailed a lot of work (I see many think he’s referring to his book The Emigrants), and he wants to relax and settle down again by taking a walking tour around Suffolk:
At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.
What follows would be very difficult for me to summarize in any decent way in the space I’m giving myself here. It’s a walking tour, so Sebald encounters many people, many sights, and many artifacts. During such encounters, he lets his mind roam through his own personal past as well as into the history of the region — and of the world (I particularly liked the segment on the silk worm’s migration). One of the firs things he encounters is the skull of Thomas Browne, a seventeenth-century physician (whose father was a silk merchant). As a doctor, Browne was very interested in the human body, but his other interests also brought in the natural world. Sebald briefly discusses Browne’s book Urn Burial. In this book, Browne describes an ancient Roman burial site found in Norfolk. Urn Burial becomes very melancholy when Browne discusses mortality and destruction. Browne’s view (which reminded me of Yeats’ view) is that “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.”
Over this burial ground, over the centuries, battles were fought and forgotten — or remembered with a slant, as this one Sebald describes from a painting:
This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. I requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?
As with the other two Sebalds I’ve read, The Rings of Saturn has no strong narrative. Sebald goes from topic to topic at will. Yet the book is held together wonderfully by melancholy and that central theme of destruction. It’s got a beautiful, respectful tone. And it is full of wonderfully rendered scenes, my favorite being that of a massively destructive storm that Sebald witnessed first-hand — fantastic writing (and translation). I think this may change at times through my life, but right now my favorite Sebald book is still The Emigrants, but I can see how The Rings of Saturn could swap positions — they are both marvelous works, full of insight and beauty as they force us into astonishment as we gaze at a great void.
Earlier this year I bought all of W.G. Sebald’s “fictions” and decided to read them in chronological order, starting with Vertigo. I was incredibly affected by that book, where the narrator seemed capable of making the past tangible as he roamed paths where Stendhal, Cassanova, and Kafka wandered. It was hauntingly real. However, having now read Sebald’s second book (the first published in English), The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten, 1993; tr. by Michael Hulse, 1996), I feel as though Vertigo were more of a tutorial, a primer, preparing me for the richer, even more tangible past in The Emigrants.
In The Emigrants time and space again contract as our narrator, whom I’ll call Sebald, traces the steps of the dead, going to their home, listening to or reading their stories, and — it’s beautiful — looking at their photographs, which are embedded in the text. And though in Vertigo Sebald managed to make everything very intimate, in The Emigrants the intimacy is much more intense. Yet still I’m reading about people I know nothing about; their experiences are not part of my heritage.
The Emigrants is divided into four accounts: that of (1) Dr. Henry Selwyn, whose family emigrated from Lithuania from England, a secret he kept from his wife for a while; (2) Paul Bereyter, a quarter-Jew, still discriminated against though he served in the Wehrmacth, who taught Sebald in school and, later in life, emigrated to France; (3) Ambros Adelwarth, Sebald’s great-uncle, who travelled the Near East with a great friend but who, when that friend was committed to a mental institution, then went to be the butler to that friend’s family in Long Island; and (4) Max Ferber, a painter in Manchester, who ended up in Manchester when his parents succeeded in sending him away from Germany on a plane in 1939 but then failed to get themselves out.
The book begins with a picture of a cemetery, the same one showed on the cover above. It is 1970, and Sebald is driving around the English countryside with his wife, taking everything in, apparently, though not fully understanding the weight of everything he sees. At least, he doesn’t know how much he will eventually be affected by Dr. Henry Selwyn, the husband of his new landlord. Dr. Selwyn is surprisingly open to Sebald, telling him about a past friend named Naegeli, with whom he climbed mountains:
I can still see him standing at the station at Meiringen, waving. But I may only be imagining it, Dr Selwyn went on in a lower tone, to himself, since Elli has come to seem a stranger to me over the years, whereas Naegeli seems closer whenever he comes to my mind, despite the fact that I never saw him again after that farewell in Meiringen.
Naegeli disappeared, and they think that he was buried in the snow. Dr. Selwyn doesn’t cease divulging to Sebald there. In a later visit, he tells more of his past, “prompted by his asking whether I was ever homesick,” Sebald says. Interestingly, the fact that Sebald himself is an emigrant stays underneath the narrative most of the time. Dr. Selwyn tells Sebald of his emigration to England (they thought they’d landed in New York, got off the boat, and, realizing their mistake, decided to stay). Henry Selwyn’s name was Hersch Seweryn. When Dr. Selwyn finally divulged this information to his wife, their relationship changed. Now, he thinks his secret is what made them drift apart. Sebald finds out later that Dr. Selwyn eventually took his own life. As shaking as this must have been, Sebald says, “I had no great difficulty in overcoming the initial shock.” Years pass.
But certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.
Many times throughout the book we find the past encroaching on the present, whether in the lives of the subjects or Sebald:
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
As he grows older, he begins to feel the weight of history. Or, perhaps more exact, he begins to understand the nature of time as it moves through people, and he begins to devote his time to finding the past these people left behind, the past they themselves have tried to forget. One of tales is told primarily by Mme Landau, and she talks about “the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget. . .”
But Sebald suggests they don’t forget. In fact, it’s all they can remember, and it follows them everywhere, to their death. This is a fantastic book, and while I’d love to keep paraphrasing the accounts and quoting Sebald, I think the best thing is to say you should read this book.
W.G. Sebald. I’ve finally entered his pages which, since (and maybe before) his tragic early death, have become somewhat hallowed. For good reason. His books are so incredibly unique that they resist classification—fiction? nonfiction? history? mystery? travelogue? biography? autobiography? Who knows? He wrote only four books of, to go with the general term, fiction: Vertigo (Schwindel, 1990; tr. from the German by Michael Hulse, 1999), The Emigrants (1992, German; 1996, English), The Rings of Saturn (1995, German; 1998, English), and Austerlitz (2001 in both languages; National Book Critics Circle Award). He also wrote three books of poetry and one massive essay, On the Natural History of Destruction(1997). But just as his work was gaining prominence and he was becoming accepted as a literary master, tipped by Horace Engdahl himself to be have been a deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize, he was killed in a car crash in December 2001, leaving behind these four ellusive yet intimate books.
I admit, I think 9/10s of this book went over my head. But before you jump to the conclusion that therefore I didn’t like it, I should say that that actually made the book very appealing. Let me explain: The book contains many many historical references to an area I know little about, namely, Northern Italy and Southern Germany. I’ve never travelled the route between Vienna and Verona. Vertigo also tracks the pathway of three historical figures whom I know relatively little about: Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka. But seeking to figure out just where I was and just who I was reading about was part of the fun. For example, I read the entire first short chapter about Henri-Marie Beyle before I stumbled onto the lead that that was Stendhal’s real name and that I’d been reading about Stendhal the whole time. Vertigo is rich with historical and geographical detail that, amazingly, didn’t inhibit my enjoyment of the book but further piqued my curiosity. It helps that Sebald’s prose, translated wonderfully by Michael Hulse (who worked closely with Sebald in the process), is unassuming yet mystical, plain yet poetic. Though I knew little about the place, Sebald evoked it in my mind.
The narrator is of this unusual book is Sebald himself, sort of. Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, perhaps from some other more sinister anxiety, this narrator has returned to the land between Verona and Vienna years after having left his hometown of W. in Bavaria (I have been to Bavaria), to live in England. However, the book deals particularly with two trips the narrator took to Northern Italy in 1980 and then again to the same region in 1987, ultimately leading him to revisit W. for the first time in thirty years. Interspersed in these travelogues are details about the narrator’s own hysteria, his own inability to get out and enjoy the scenery which so powerfully evokes memory and history. We also come to know the reason he cut his 1980 trip short. Also taking up substantial room are narrated accounts from the life of, as I said above, Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, all intertwining with the narrator’s account of his own journey which follows the footsteps of these writers. Indeed, the narrator makes a fool of himself on a bus by asking some parents for a picture of their twin boys because they look strikingly similar to the young Kafka. After the incident, Sebald tells of hiding himself in the open bus, looking forward to the shadows afforded by tunnels. The narrator’s character is an enigma because he is, in some ways, an anxious man, almost agorophobic at times (at least in this region of the world), but with a strong sensitivity to place and to people.
Besides the interest in the historical and geographical context, the book’s real intrigue is in its dealing with memory’s role in history and in our lives. This is why Sebald is now venerated. His elegiac style ties his characters together with the same strings he uses to capture us. He introduces the idea of memory on the second page when Stendhal is thinking back on his experiences during the Napoleonic war:
The notes in which the 53-year-old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection. At times his view of the past consists of nothing but grey patches, then at others images appear of such extraordinary clarity he feels he can scarce credit them—such as that of General Marmont, whom he believes he saw at Martigny to the left of the track along which the column was moving clad in royal- and sky-blue robes of a Councillor of State, an image which he still beholds precisely thus, Beyle assures us, whenever he closes his eyes and pictures that scene, although he is well aware that at this time Marmont must have been wearing his general’s uniform and not the blue robes of state.
So we see from the beginning that memory, while vivid, perhaps especially when vivid, is also faulty, yet it has the power to transform our perspective of the event itself. Along those same lines, but in the other direction, Sebald also offers up a case for memory being better than a picture:
This being so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.
This last statement in particular is quite ironic since Sebald has peppered his pages (in this book and in his others) with images—drawings, portraits, scenic views, ticket stubs, etc.—that, besides making the book feel more like a travelogue or history book, subvert the above statement as well as Sebald’s own prose depictions. The design of the book alongside with statements about the power and faults of images, particularly reproduced images, reminded me immediately of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Different in objective, these two massive essays of the twentieth century revolve around the phenomenon of the visual reproduction of images. Benjamin’s essay says that the visual reproduction of art emancipates the art from its aura—the mystical qualities art assumes based on its hierarchy of ownership, its limited display, its location of display, etc.—which allows it to become more fully subject to critique from even the lower rungs of society, effectively eliminating the aristrocratic hold on art up to the twentieth century. While I didn’t get a whiff of marxism in Sebald’s book, the concept of the aura is there. Baudrillard’s essay deals with the layering of images that effectively anihilates the original. This book definitely has layer upon layer and plays with that theme not just in its images but also in its narrative structure.
These fairly complex themes come together in a brilliant way when the narrator returns again to W.:
A good thirty years had gone by since I had last been in W. In the course of that time—by far the longest period of my life—many of the localities I associated with it, such has the Altachmoos, the parish woods, the tree-lined lane that led to Haslach, the pumping station, Petersthal cemetery where the plague dead lay, or the house in Schray where Dopfer the hunchback lived, had continually returned in my dreams and daydreams and had become more real to me than they had been then, yet the village itself, I reflected, as I arrived at that late hour, was more remote from me than any other place I could conceive of.
One doesn’t need an extensive understanding of twentieth-century aesthetic theory or of the historical context to enjoy Vertigo. Much of that only serves to show just how much this book holds, just how many times the reader could revisit this book and still glean more. At the same time, the book as its own discreet entity holds enough power to captivate the reader. As I said above, the prose is beautiful, and I felt myself taken away by the images Sebald creates with words. I can echo a statement made by one of the characters and apply it gratefully to Sebald’s book:
Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentence, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water.
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