The Rings of Saturn

The Rings of Saturn (1995)

W.G. Sebald

            It’s rare to read a novel that is unlike any other book one has read before. Few things are completely new, and most novels have the elements one would consider essential to fiction: story, plot, voice, characters, plot, plot, plot. Such an ugly word, ‘plot’. Onomatopoetic: a turd dropping into an empty toilet bowl. The Rings of Saturn has none of those things, especially not a plot. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, part (global) history, part fiction and while it is all of those things it is also none of them. Rather, it’s something new, but whether it’s a new form of fiction or a new form of history, I can’t decide. I do know, however, that it is one of the most stunningly beautiful books I’ve ever read. Completely unique and singular. Sebald is a masterful writer, and if history textbooks were this moving and this poetically beautiful maybe the masses would not be so ignorant of their past and fearful regarding their future. At the very least I don't think it would hurt.

            The basic premise of the book is that Sebald, or a character named Sebald, after a stay in the hospital, goes on a walking tour of coastal East Anglia, which seems to be a particularly downtrodden, depressed, and shitty part of England; rural, depopulated, and completely abandoned by modernity. During his trek he sees a lot of things and meets a lot of people, and then he tells you what they remind him of, and why that is important.  But it’s not really about any of that. It’s not about the walking trip. It’s about a sad, meandering trip through a brutal and hideous memory (individual and cultural) and about how we can’t directly approach recent enormities (specifically the Holocaust) that still traumatize millions without appropriating or co-opting the pain and suffering of the surviving victims, so that the only way to tactfully handle the subject is to skirt around it, to address it through metaphor and likenesses. Have you ever seen The Clash of the Titans, the old one, when Perseus is battling the Medusa, and he can’t meet her gaze so he aims his strikes by her reflection in his golden shield? That’s sort of the tactic Sebald adopts. When one writes of the Holocaust, for example, especially as a middle-class German like Sebald, one is essentially signing a check with someone else’s blood, and as Sebald is a sensitive, considerate thinker and would prefer to avoid boorishness and moral compromise he instead expresses his feelings using metaphor.

            One of images that Sebald uses several times is the thought of thousands of men and women engaged in the cultivation and slaughter of millions upon millions of silkworms. Sericulture was, and is, a hideous industry: human beings were/are crippled, starved, and wasted solely so that power may drape itself in finery. For example, during the late 19^th Century the Dowager Empress Cixi, in the middle of a catastrophic drought that ravaged and mutilated and suffocated China, felt concern only for the fate of her precious silkworms: a billion hungry mouths that required a daily sacrifice of mulberry leaves watered with blood. Here’s a good quote from the end of the book: “The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is completed.”

            Sebald’s prose is exquisite, a truly rare and unique thing of beauty, very luxurious and impressionistic. This is writing on the scale I’ve always attributed to Borges, though I wouldn't know as I’ve never read Borges, being too timid and afraid of disappointment (and though I haven’t read Borges, Sebald has: Tlön and Uqbar make a brief appearance). Or if Italo Calvino if Calvino were human and gripping instead of shallow and boring. Or what I imagine the fictional books of Benno Von Archimboldi resemble: a moody, meandering trip through a tormented, sickening world, written in the most sublime language. The world that Sebald constructs is singular: a moldering Europe in a state of maximum entropy, where empty manor houses crumble to their foundations and the once meticulously manicured gardens are smothered by weeds and other forms of unchecked, chaotic growth. Everything is overtaken by decay, rot, mold, erosion, exposure, time, and the pitiless weight of a nauseating history. His language tumbles like an icy stream over moss-thick stones deep in some lost, fogbound forest where shivering fauna is only seen vaguely, from a distance, and in a hidden ring of stones a group of primitives sacrifice an infant in a Satanic conspiracy, pleading with the fates to deliver unto them power, strength, wealth, immortality. One of my favorite images comes when he is describing a brief detour he made to an uninhabited island where once there used to be a proving ground, a weapons testing facility, and he compares the abandoned bunkers, covered with sod and grass, to the burial mounds of ancient royalty (a famous example being the kurgans of the Scythian horselords) under which the deceased were interred with their gold, weapons, and slaves. I found that a moving image. If I recall Herodotus devoted thousands of words to the wars between the Scythians and the Persians, long bloody conflicts that spread across the Central Asian plains, but these wars were ultimately for nothing. Neither civilization exists anymore, and of the Scythians all that remains are bones planted under grassy tumuli.

            Sebald has the sort of digressive, twisting style that I adore, where he knows his destination and he’s going to get there, eventually, but not without making some stops along the way. My favorite digression takes place about halfway through the book when, upon viewing a small passenger train painted with a fading golden dragon and supposedly owned by the last Emperor of China, Sebald departs a long tangent about the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping Rebellion was, until the Second World War, the most costly and devastating conflict in the history of human civilization. Upwards of 20 million people died in a war that spread across vast China like a wildfire. The rebellion was started by a messianic movement led by a charismatic man (the Celestial King) who claimed to be the brother of Confucius and Jesus Christ, and who declared the ruling Qing Dynasty to be corrupt, decadent, and illegitimate. In Sebald’s words: “reeling with privation and poverty, the people—from starving peasants and soldiers at large after the Opium War to coolies, sailors, actors and prostitutes—flocked in undreamt-of numbers to the self-appointed Celestial King, Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, who in a feverish delirium beheld a glorious future in which justice prevailed.” The Celestial Realm of Eternal Peace was most certainly a cult but it was also an idealistic, proto-Marxist revolutionary state built upon the dream of forcing the Earth to more closely resemble Heaven. I am being perhaps far too generous to the Heavenly Kingdom. It was not a perfect place (in fact it was pretty awful) but they were trying harder than the Qing Dynasty, or most other governments have ever tried.  The Celestial Kingdom abolished landlords, serfdom, and feudalism, redistributed land for common use, outlawed footbinding, and strove for gender equality in the government and military, etc. The war simmered throughout the 1850s but the most violent and decisive battles came during the same years as the American Civil War: 1860 to1864. I knew nothing about the Taiping Rebellion before I read this (and did some of my own research) but I know a lot about the American Civil War and I thought it was very interesting to contrast the two conflicts: both were new forms of war fought with new technologies and strategies but on one side of the globe men and women rebelled and struggled to build the world of the future together whereas on the other hemisphere men (only) rebelled because they felt that owning human beings was their birthright. The Celestial Kingdom would possibly have prevailed against the teetering, disorganized Empire if it weren’t for the intervention of the Western powers, specifically a union between the French and British, both motivated by fear for the vast incomes they drew from the Opium trade. As the Taiping Rebels were anti-Opium (and anti-Western in general) the Europeans sided with the Qing Emperor and forced him into obedience through a strategy of burning and looting immeasurably precious architectural treasures while the Emperor, weak and powerless and stupid, watched in horror, paralyzed. It goes without saying that ancient China was, of course, the birthplace of silk.
            Today is the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War and as I write this the war criminals who planned and prosecuted the murderous Operation Iraqi Freedom are likely enjoying a lovely day in their fine homes, reading in their well-tended gardens, riding on their expansive grounds, comfortable, confident, and satisfied. The war has spanned the entirety of my adult life (and it has ended almost a million other lives) and the guilty will never, ever face judgement for their crimes. The Celestial King was right: justice is a thing that only appears in the feverish dreaming brought on by long periods of illness...

            I’ve read many books in my life but precious few that are quite like The Rings of Saturn. It’s the book that I imagine all writers wish they could produce. Sebald dispensed with characters, plot, dialogue, narrative, and instead produced a book that is about nothing and everything simultaneously, and managed to remain honest, artistic, and morally uncompromised while doing so. Few books manage to be as unstructured and all encompassing in such an effortless and organic manner. It’s as if only by disregarding the usual trappings of fiction that Sebald was able to produce something fresh and new: a new mathematics of suffering, a grand unified theory of iniquity.