The Rings of Saturn

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It’s at this point I have to confess that the past 12 months have been a year of my own miserable thinking. Take this passage, which comes at the very end of the oneiric history of sadness and futility that he presents in “The Rings of Saturn.

Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust

The scene to which Thomas Browne here refers is the one that, in Mimesis, the refugee German Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach uses as an exemplum of the tantalizingly opaque style of biblical narrative (which, like life itself, leaves many details “in obscurity”)—a style that Auerbach favorably contrasts to the Greek technique of ring composition, whose elaborate digressions, meandering away from the primary narrative but always circling back to it in the end, work to floodlight, as it were, every aspect of a story, leaving nothing in obscurity. But here was a book which didn't seem to care where it went in pursuit of its narrative - whatever that narrative was.In The Emigrantsmemory has been compromised, destroyed in a sense, by being turned into a condition of unappeasable remorse; there is no right way either to turn away from or to acknowledge the horror of what has gone before. The archaic diction, complex syntax and Proustian expansiveness of Sebald’s sentences imbues them with the power to produce varying perspectives — bogged down by gravity or rising to dizzying heights. Dyer’s work—part essay, part travelogue, part fiction—sometimes reads like a less melancholy, more comic (and more English) variant of Sebald’s peregrinatory prose.

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald | Goodreads

But by the time Sebald’s novel takes place he has spent the past twenty years working obsessively on one model, a model of a single building that, when you consider its maker’s résumé, is a most likely subject.

But because of its peculiar history and the bad dive that history took in this century or, to be more precise, from about 1870 onwards, because of that, I feel you can’t simply abdicate and say, well, it’s nothing to do with me. It was Sebald’s conviction that the recent history of his country could not be written about directly, could not be approached head-on, as it were, because the enormity of its horrors paralyzed our ability to think about them morally and rationally. There is something else for which Sebald’s story about the doomed model-maker—the story that, for reasons that will be obvious by now, has a special hold over me—may be the ideal symbol. The irretrievability of the past turns out to be the main subject of the long conversation that takes place during the narrator’s visit to Michael Hamburger. Along a line that seemed to have been drawn with a ruler a tractor crawled toward a field of stubble, dividing it into one lighter and one darker half.