The rings of Saturn (Sebald)

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The rings of Saturn. An English Pilgrimage is a prose work by the German-British author WG Sebald from 1995. The theme is a 6-day hike in August 1992 through a stretch of land on the east coast of England, which deals with historical events and biographical developments not only in England in various ways connected is. One year after the trip, the first-person narrator begins to complete his notes and to merge the research done before and after the trip. The result is a travel report that also follows tourist, but above all historical and biographical connections that link the marshland of Suffolk with "calamities" in world history on almost every continent on earth.

The rings of Saturn connect the visible with the almost invisible, with the repressed, forgotten and sunk under the weight of the present. Together with Sebald's novel Austerlitz , who pursues a similar concern, this work is one of the main works by the author, who died in 2001. In them the literary figure of the journey and the research connected with it have become the “generative principle”.

title

The information in the title ( rings of Saturn ... pilgrimage ), which at first glance appears puzzling, can be interpreted through several text references. First, a preceding Brockhaus quote explains the astronomical rings of Saturn as fragments of an earlier and now destroyed moon, as well as smaller constellations have been largely absorbed by others over time - the phenomenon of the rings is to be read as news of an earlier catastrophe. Elsewhere, the narrator associates one evening with the nightshade advancing over the horizon “an endless churchyard for epilepsy mankind”, stretched out “by the scythe of Saturn ”, the Roman god of agriculture devouring man, who for the narrator has mutated into a monster personified a protagonist of permanent destruction. By escaping, one of the “basic movements of human life”, this monster can only be temporarily escaped, which with its multifaceted shapes continues the work of destruction as if on a predetermined path of fate.

As a rule, pilgrimages do not offer the pilgrim a surprise of the destination, but a consolidation of the existing faith. According to the narrator's conviction, “the whole of human civilization” is a “Glosen that becomes more intense from hour to hour”, which repeatedly discharges into catastrophes. The narrator confirms this worldview through his travel observations and the portrayal of the lines of suffering associated with Suffolk - he finds what he is looking for. The metaphor of the pilgrimage describes, perhaps with a trace of self-irony, this concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy .

subjects

As you would expect from a travelogue, the landscape, towns and villages, mansions and their gardens are described. But more space is given to fishing in the North Sea, cane sugar cultivation in India and silk production in China, France and Germany. And far beyond that, dreams and hallucinations as well as family fates and individual biographies are described - the last two topics even cover more than a third of the text. Biographically deepened are e.g. B. the life stories of Thomas Browne , the doctor and philosopher who died in Norwich in 1682, and those of the diplomat and Irish freedom fighter Roger Casement , who was executed in 1916 . These explanations are supplemented by biographical sketches by the writers Joseph Conrad , Algernon Swinburne , Michael Hamburger and Edward Fitz-Gerald .

The extent of the non-touristy or anti-touristy explanations reduces the narrator's wandering to a mere occasion or a suggestion , these crossings in Suffolk, East England, to Poland and Russia, the Congo and China, to South and North America to pursue to India, Ireland, Greece and the Balkans. The embedding of the landscape description in the space of memory and imagination underlines the fictional character of this travelogue. The narrator himself mentions that he has already visited places on his hike several times, so that the waypoints of the hike from previous visits could have been inserted here appropriately.

The narrative copes with the abundance of places and events through a strict economy of detail that keeps the ten parts in an approximate balance, an in-depth, multi-level nesting of the main and secondary topics and an often extremely complex sentence structure. The reader's path from the outer to the inner building blocks along the meandering narrative thus becomes the allegorical practice of a private archeology , the representation of the migration as overcoming dead ends and step-by-step discovery the mimesis of research. This is also condensed pictorially in those moments in which the first-person narrator, on behalf of the reader, laboriously frees himself from labyrinths , these life-pervading institutions that confuse all knowledge.

Texture of the motifs

The first and the last of the ten sections reflect the keynote of the narrative, both a supposed freedom of movement during the journey and the horror of the acts of destruction associated with this remote area. The narrator strikes the arc of affirmation of the misfortune from the mention of the investigations into burial rituals in the first section to the description of black mourning clothing from a Norwich silk weaving mill on the last page of the text.

In the construction of the negative world, the shadows become guiding metaphors that repeatedly herald a sinking, decaying, perishing and destroying: “The only thing certain is that the night lasts much longer than the day,” the narrator quotes from a text by Thomas Browne . The darkness stretches both over the gardens, which are described several times as the only positive creations, as well as over the biotopes of the herring of the North Sea and the silkworms, which are after all gifted with the ability to change shape and thus to re-create, as well as the elms, ash trees and beeches, all of which face their annihilation.

He recognizes an elective affinity not only with regard to his methods in the doctor and philosopher Thomas Browne from the 17th century, but also in his colleague Michael Hamburger and the former village school teacher Alec Garrard, who had similar doubts about the meaning of his model replica of the Jerusalem temple and feels the feasibility of his project like the first-person narrator.

The narrator draws his knowledge of the stories associated with the Suffolk marshland from a travel guide accompanying him on the hike, but essentially from the material he himself found and the gaps filled with fantasy. 72 illustrations attest to the arrangement of the narrative and its anti-romantic, disastrous essence; as they often only reveal their motifs in a shadowy and enigmatic manner, the reader is drawn into the search movement gesturally.

In the first section, the narrator reports in detail about Thomas Browne, the 17th century soulmate researcher who also looked for repetitive structures in inanimate and animate nature. For him, destruction and darkness are the signature of human history, just as the first-person narrator traces the historical lines, which for him mostly end in negative. In an essay on Robert Walser , Sebald asks: “Is it just a question of puzzles of memory, of self or sensory delusions or of the schemata of an order that we cannot understand, programmed into the chaos of human relationships and extending over both the living and the dead?” Browne described e.g. B. the so-called quincunx as a recurring pattern in the world. If you now connect the places of the hike named in the rings of Saturn in the order listed, topographically an approximate X or a quincunx with the corner points Ditchingham and Lowestoft in the north, Woodbridge and Orford in the south and the intersection of the diagonals emerges from the travel route at Yoxford or Middleton, for example - perhaps another bow from Sebald to Thomas Browne.

Point of view of criticism and melancholy

To combine the Suffolk marshland, repeatedly described as a great void, with the worldwide horror of our history, with the murders in the Congo and in Amritsar , in the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Jasenovac , that requires a point of view with a historical overview outside the immediate geographical and social Surroundings. The narrator finds it allegorically in the topographical elevations of the surrounding landscape, in the solidarity with the human creature, as it is shown in Rembrandt's Anatomy of Dr. Tulp discovered, or in a distant view of his own class of origin, which the narrator z. B. connects two of his protagonists with the sideline position caused by homosexuality. No matter how hard they tried, pictorial representations would not have easier access to historical truth per se, which is why the narrator rejects the tourist panorama on the battlefield of Waterloo and the painting of the sea battle off Southwold as trivializing suffering.

The marshland of Suffolk as the intersection of world-historical lines of suffering is a counter-concept to a purely touristic positivism or a positive historiography. Reconstructing something that has been means creating a second time or world, which is still effectively connected to the first: The first world becomes only a current surface, but this unrealizes the past into something only uncertain. The narrator therefore repeatedly describes his uncertainties about the reality of what he or others have experienced and suffered. These difficulties of historical knowledge remind him of the story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges : In that story, a present hijacks the history of its creation, first turning it into a memory with no consequences, then into a repressed and finally into a memory that can be erased to transform; Philosophical schools, which differ only in minor matters, support this hostile project of gutting historical consciousness with their idealistic approaches.

The rings of Saturn are told against this loss of history and the efforts associated with this counter-concept lead the narrator so deeply into physical and psychological exhaustion that one year later he is admitted to the Norwich hospital "in a state of almost complete immobility" and from da dated a rift "that has been going through my life ever since," a disease of mind and body associated with constant reflection.

literature

  • Andrea Köhler: WG Sebald's faces, in: Akzente . Zeitschrift für Literatur, Issue 1 / February 2003, ISSN  0002-3957 , p. 15 ff.
  • Uwe Schütte: A teacher. In memoriam WG Sebald, in: Akzente . Zeitschrift für Literatur, Issue 1 / February 2003, ISSN  0002-3957 , p. 56 ff.

Web links

  • Patrick Bahners: Cold heart. WG Sebalds "The Rings of Saturn", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 1995 [1]
  • Dirk Knipphals: Excruciatingly elegant. Writing in the burning house of history: WG Sebald is dead, taz 2001 [2]
  • Andrea Köhler: Meeting in the past, Neue Zürcher Zeitung 2001 [3]
  • Franz Loquai: Farewell to Max. In memory of WG Sebald, in: Literaturkritik.de , Rezensionsforum [4]
  • Thomas Neuner: The reader as a wanderer. WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. An English pilgrimage, in: Media Observations [5]
  • Uwe Schütte: The wrong book, Friday 20/2019 (May 2019) [6]
  • Martin Siefkes: The landscape of characters. A semiotic analysis of WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, in: Philologie im Netz [7]
  • Jelena Spreicer: The space of the past and the past of space. Travel report and temporal-local merger at WG Sebald, in: Zagreber Germanistische Posts 21 (2012), p. 109 ff. [8]

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ WG Sebald: The rings of Saturn. An English pilgrimage . In: Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ed.): The other library . Eichborn, Frankfurt a. M 1995, ISBN 3-8218-4130-3 .
  2. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 366 .
  3. ↑ Uwe Schütte considers the rings of Saturn to be the more successful work compared to Sebald's last, sensational work Austerlitz . (Schütte, The False Book)
  4. ↑ So Susan Sontag about the works of Sebald, quoted from Jelena Spreicer, Der Raum der Geschichte, pp. 109, 118
  5. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 5, 34 .
  6. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 88, 90, 101 .
  7. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 33 f., 199; 271 f., 292 .
  8. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 213, 282; 33 f .
  9. ↑ Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995, p. 200, describes the ruins of Dunwich as "a kind of place of pilgrimage for melancholy writers" - their worldview is the motif of the journey and the cause of the impressions that confirm them. Thomas Neuner, The Reader as Wanderer, describes this concept of knowledge: "All travel experiences of the narrator ultimately arise from his reading experience and inevitably flow into the same again. This creates a circular argument ad infinitum ."
  10. ^ Andrea Köhler, WG Sebald's Faces, p. 16; Uwe Schütte, a teacher. In memoriam WG Sebald, p. 60
  11. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 79 ff., 110 ff., 131 ff., 160 ff., 200 ff., 230 ff., 243 ff., 259 ff., 279 ff., 311 ff .
  12. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 17th ff., 337 ff., 367 .
  13. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 131 f., 160 ff .
  14. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 133 ff., 200 ff., 218 ff., 243 ff .
  15. ↑ Jelena Spreicer, The space of the past, p. 114
  16. ↑ Jelena Spreicer, The space of the past, p. 110. Likewise Martin Siefkes, The landscape of signs, p. 58. For Dirk Knipphals the parts of the rings of Saturn are even as little connected to each other as an "collection of essays".
  17. ↑ Jelena Spreicer, The space of the past, p. 110. Thomas Neuner, The reader as a wanderer, speaks of a "fictional travelogue".
  18. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 119, 300 .
  19. ↑ Thomas Neuner, The Reader as Wanderer: "Writing is the path of the journey, it imitates the pilgrim's perception in the field of tension between chance and plan." And: There is "a correspondence relationship between labyrinthine migration and labyrinthine text."
  20. ↑ Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995, pp. 51 f., 216 f. Thomas Neuner, The Reader as Wanderer, headlines a section "The Labyrinth of the World". See also Martin Siefkes, The Landscape of Signs, p. 72 ff. And Jelena Spreicer, The Space of the Past, p. 115 f.
  21. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 9, 366 .
  22. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 35 f., 366 .
  23. ↑ According to Uwe Schütte, A teacher. In memoriam WG Sebald, p. 62, Sebald's worldview was shaped by a “negative gradient”. Patrick Bahners sees a “negative theology of history” and Thomas Neuner, The Reader as Wanderer, a “negative eschatology”.
  24. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 28, 33, 98, 101 f., 126, 136, 150, 185, 189, 194, 227, 252, 275 .
  25. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 194 .
  26. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 51 ff., 63 f., 182 f .
  27. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 71 ff .; 36, 190, 340 ff .; 327 ff .
  28. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 27 ff., 226 f., 304 f .
  29. ↑ Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995, pp. 118, 191. Uwe Schütte, A teacher. In memoriam WG Sebald, p. 61, mentions that Sebald "(was) a passionate reader of the Norwich Provincial Gazette, because he kept coming across bizarre incidents and stories there (...) Some of them went into The Rings of Saturn ."
  30. ↑ Andrea Köhler writes in the NZZ: "WG Sebald's books are search images." This is also the case with Martin Siefkes, The Landscape of Signs, pp. 58 and 74.
  31. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 33 .
  32. ↑ Quoted from Andrea Köhler, WG Sebald's Faces, p. 19
  33. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 28 ff., 33 .
  34. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 150 f., 160 f .; 365 .
  35. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 80 f., 124 .
  36. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 107, 214, 216, 286 .
  37. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 20th ff .
  38. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 165 ff., 252 .
  39. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 99 f., 157 ff .
  40. ↑ "And if I don't remember now, is it real?" Asks Marie Cresspahl in Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries (Volume I, 2nd edition, p. 216, Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 2017) and speaks with it one of the main common themes of the two authors.
  41. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 91 ff., 102 f., 194, 221, 224, 226 ff .
  42. ↑ Sebald: The rings of Saturn . 1995, p. 92 f., 193 f .
  43. ↑ Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995, p. 193. In addition to the Christian creation myth , influences from Plato's theory of ideas and from George Berkeley's theory of knowledge can be distinguished.
  44. ↑ Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995, p. 9 f., 27. Multiple mentions of melancholy ibid p. 17, 37, 256, 350 f., 364 ff. Jelena Spreicer, Der Raum der Geschichte, p. 115, sees melancholy as an effect of exhaustion: "It is precisely the narrator's incompetence to enjoy a landscape without having to interpret it historically, which leads to the narrator's final collapse in the form of paralysis of his motor skills."