The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
"The Rings of Saturn" by W. G. Sebald is a reflective narrative that intertwines a walking tour of eastern England with profound themes of memory, identity, and transformation. The story is presented in a stream-of-consciousness style, where the narrator, who may echo Sebald himself, delves into his thoughts as he wanders through the countryside of Suffolk. Initially embarking on this journey to overcome feelings of emptiness, the narrator experiences both joy and horror as he confronts the remnants of destruction and the inevitability of death.
Central to the narrative is the quest for the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century physician and writer, whose meditations on life and death resonate with the narrator's internal struggles. The book is rich with imagery of dust, ashes, and the cycles of life, reflecting on the transient nature of human civilization and the transformations that accompany existence. As the narrator contemplates his surroundings and the legacies of those who traveled before him, he grapples with the idea that life is a continuous metamorphosis, ultimately leading to a meditation on the meaning of human connection and the haunting echoes of the past. The overarching theme of the journey serves as a metaphor for self-discovery and the exploration of the human condition.
On this Page
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:Die Ringe des Saturn, 1995 (English translation, 1998)
Type of work: Novel
The Work
Much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1783), James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), and the letters between William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, about his walking tour of the British Highlands, Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is a journal of a walking tour of eastern England in which the narrator—who at times appears to be Sebald himself—records his impressions and his dreams. Like much of Sebald’s other work, the borders between illusion and reality, fact and fiction, and dreams and life are porous and permeable. The novel does not contain a specific plot that can be followed from beginning to end. Much like Joyce’s Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), The Rings of Saturn records the narrator’s thoughts in stream-of-consciousness-like fashion as he moves from one topic to another, with various images or events sending him into associative reveries.
As the novel opens, the narrator sets out to walk the county of Suffolk in order to overcome the emptiness he feels after he has completed a long period of work. He feels a joyous sense of freedom while he is traversing the countryside, even as he feels a disabling sense of horror when he encounters past events of destruction there. One year after he begins his walk, he finds himself in a state of complete immobility and must be taken to the hospital. There he looks out on the world from a small window and finds it difficult to judge reality from illusion; he thinks of himself as Gregor Samsa, the young man in Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936), who wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect and who is no longer accepted by his family. More than a year after his discharge from the hospital, the narrator begins to assemble the recollections of his journey and of his hospitalization.
Chief among his recollections is his search for the skull of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a physician whose best known work is Religio Medici (wr. 1635; pb. 1642; authorized version, 1643), a collection of his opinions on religion. Browne also wrote several treatises on medicine, and his Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall (1658) is a meditation on various means of disposing of the dead that had been practiced in Britain. Browne’s skull itself is an image of the interiority of one’s self and the tendency of all individuals to look inward in order to discover personal identity. Many of the themes and images in Sebald’s novel arise from the narrator’s fascination with Browne and his work. Browne, like the narrator, was born under the sign of Saturn. Moreover, both the narrator and Browne are fascinated with death, especially the idea that nothing of the human being endures after death. Life, for the narrator, is a continuing process of transformation (metamorphosis) from one form into another. Death is simply a transformation into the iniquity of oblivion, and ceremonies of burial are attempts by the living to mark this transformation from life into death.
Images of dust, sand, ashes, fog, and mist pervade The Rings of Saturn. The ashes contained in the burial urn are much like the particles of sand on a beach or the dust particles that ring Saturn; they are particles of matter that remain after some form of destruction or transformation of organic matter. One of the epigraphs to the novel recalls that the rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and meteorite particles that are fragments of a former moon that was destroyed. The narrator concludes that human civilization, from its earliest times, is little more than a strange luminescence whose waning and fading no one can predict.
The most pervasive theme of The Rings of Saturn is journey or quest. Like a modern pilgrim, the narrator sets off on his walk to discover himself and to attempt to assuage the feeling of despair that has overcome him. As he walks into the countryside, the organic unity of all life—with its disorder as well as its order—is revealed to him. Images of ferries, ferrymen (the classical image of the journey from the living to the realm of the dead), and airplanes also pervade the book. As he observes schools of herring and the fisherman who catch them at work, he begins to understand the destructive as well as the transformative power of nature. Along his journey, the narrator lives with his thoughts and his memories, but he also reflects on others who have made similar journeys. He devotes one set of reflections to writer Joseph Conrad, for example, who took his own footsteps into a heart of darkness in order to understand the human psyche and the interior life. Through his journey, the narrator learns that hundreds of fellow travelers—like Browne and Conrad—have preceded him and he cannot quiet the ghosts of repetition that haunt him.
Sources for Further Study
Artforum. XXXVI, Summer, 1998, p. 29B.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 28, 1998, p. 2.
The New Republic. CCXIX, July 6, 1998, p. 38.
The New York Review of Books. XLV, December 3, 1998, p. 44.
The New York Times Book Review. CIII, July 26, 1998, p. 5.
Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, April 6, 1998, p. 60.
Quadrant. XLII, November, 1998, p. 76.
Review of Contemporary Fiction. XVIII, Fall, 1998, p. 241.
The Times Literary Supplement. July 31, 1998, p. 11.
The Wall Street Journal. October 28, 1998, p. A20.