Sebald's Rings of Saturn is the book which
would have driven Aristotle nuts.
This is a novel whose animating force is not
plot but theme.
The reader is treated to a series of seemingly
meandering impressions on a wide variety of
topics.
What links all of them together?
The unifying theme can be found in the very
title of the novel.
The rings of Saturn are the product of violence
and failed cohesion.
As noted tellingly by the epigraph, "In
all likelihood these are fragments of a former
moon that was too close to the planet and
was destroyed by its tidal effect."
Yet despite their origin in chaos, the rings
evoke majesty
All of the novel's historical oddities
are linked by the central thought that decay
holds fascination for us.
Moreover, this is not a macabre fascination
but one which is expressive and joyful.
As such, Sebald's novel is an affirmation
that there is beauty in destruction; that
the end of things can be transmuted into splendor
more wonderful than any design.
The narrator relentlessly, almost obsessively,
focuses on this central insight, finding it
in man made objects as well as in man himself.
On visiting a decaying home: "How uninviting
Somerleyton must have been... when everything,
from the cellar to the attic from the cutlery
to the water closets, was brand new...
And how fine a place the house seemed to me
now that it was imperceptibly nearing the
brink of dissolution and silent oblivion."
On art, specifically Rembrandt's The Anatomy
Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp: "It is with
him, the victim, and not the Guild that gave
Rembrandt his commission, that the painter
identifies.
His gaze alone is free of Cartesian rigidity.
He alone sees that greenish annihilated body,
and he alone sees the shadow in the half-open
mouth and over the dead man's eyes."
On man himself, particularly the silk weavers
of England who: "spent their lives with
their wretched bodies strapped to looms made
of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights...
when we consider the weavers' mental illness
we should also bear in mind that many of the
materials produced in the factories of Norwich...
were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an
iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as
if they had been produced by nature itself,
like the plumage of birds."
From the limited excerpts discussed and Rings of Saturn links many more historical anecdotes,
places and people, it is readily apparent
that the novel's central conceit permeates
everything.
The same quality which makes the rings of
Saturn so majestic can also be found here
on Earth.
In Sebald’s work, entropy is ironically
the final ordering force for both beauty and
the universe.
I take my hat off to the author who presents
it all with knowledge and grace.
