Refusing to be easily categorized, Winfried Georg “Max” Sebald’s intricate masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn, borrows a French quote from Joseph Conrad and a Brockhaus Encyclopedia entry on the Roche limit as epigraphs, contains a table of contents straight out of a travelogue, and features a black and white photograph of a netted window looking into a monotone blankness on the second page.
The eerie mood of the picture and its jarring inclusion in what is ostensibly a novel begin a feeling of melancholy that impregnates the book, described in the first sentence, “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” For Sebald, hope is not easily found, but must be clung to whenever it is unearthed.
Each chapter of The Rings of Saturn starts in the guise of a memoir; indeed, the reader follows the thoughts of Sebald himself. But soon, mimicking the imaginative leaps of the mind, observations about his travels through the British countryside morph into esoteric history lessons. Seeing a fisherman leads into a discussion of the European herring trade, and fish’s tendencies to school – and die – in great masses. A diminutive train supposedly built
for the Emperor of China gives rise to a series of musings on the Taiping Rebellion, imperial power, and the cruel Dowager Empress, who demanded daily blood sacrifices to appease her silk- worm colony. Even a simple walk to Oxford Castle provokes tales of British World War II scientists secretly devising nerve gas and a biological weapon that could boil the North Sea. Although these myths start from peaceful origins, they decay rapidly into destruction and death, which Sebald identifies as a recurrent motif in human history.
Sebald’s father served Germany in the 1939 invasion of Poland; these oppressive memories certainly inform the shadowy human horrors that haunt his sentences. Yet rather than concluding that “life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder,” as the narrator suggests, threads of hope weave mesmerisingly through The Rings of Saturn, popping up, like Thomas Browne’s quincunx, in the most unexpected places.The Roche limit, for example, is the smallest distance that a satellite can orbit a planet without being torn apart by tidal forces, a fate clearly shared by some of Saturn’s early moons. But unlike those rings, we have the power to resist our entropic predilections. Sebald gives us that power, and is therefore worthy of a place in the literary canon.
