On re-reading The Rings of Saturn
It feels apt that the day I finished re-reading The Rings of Saturn was the day a new hard lockdown was announced. The Rings of Saturn, to the extent that it has a through-line at all, is about a walking trip through Suffolk, which preceded a mental breakdown that required a hospital stay. The breakdown happened to a narrator who is very much like Sebald, but this is not important. The narrator is telling us the story a year out from the hospital stay, and we never learn much about it, really. The window of his room, the two pleasant nurses. But the hospital stay hangs over the book like a menace, the knowledge that the story we are following tends towards entropy. The trip through Suffolk occurs in August, but it has that weirdly German quality of feeling perpetually grey and wintery. That Ultimate Gray shade that Pantone announced was the colour of 2021? That’s been the colour of Berlin skies for the last month, and it’s the colour palette of The Rings of Saturn, in atmosphere, and quite literally in the reproduced photographs strung throughout the text.
Which isn’t to say that the grey is bad. It is meandering and depressing, as are most things I care about and connect with (“meandering and depressing” is how somebody described my own book recently on the book aggregate website I’m not meant to look at for my own mental health). I’m making a hash of this, my point it to try and get across how revelatory and meaningful re-reading The Rings of Saturn has felt to me this week.
I read The Rings of Saturn when I was at university, over the summer, in preparation for a course that ended up being cancelled when semester started. I remember feeling it was important, but I really didn’t know what I was reading. I had no context for it. For a book without plot, without genre. Sebald exists within a genealogy of a particular kind of sentence, a sentence which follows the pattern and flow of human thought. This type of sentence, this type of writing, is in Proust and Woolf (neither of whom I’m particularly overwhelmed by, to be honest). It’s in James Baldwin, and Thomas Bernhard, and Javier Marias and it’s in the kind of sentences written by somebody like Garth Greenwell now, and the best of Philip Hoare and Rebecca Solnit (her best work ended circa the time she started using Facebook, imo).
The Rings of Saturn is about following the mind at work. It’s about nothing. It has no plot. And I wanted to re-read it because I wanted to be outside of plot, to study how he does it. I want to commit to plotlessness in my own writing, I suppose, to find some way of depicting time and consciousness in prose which would feel more in line with the way that I’ve experienced this horrible, fucking morass of a year. The collective year, and my personal year – both have been bad, and both defy any kind of narrative or prose-organizing structure I’ve ever been taught to be believe in.
Sebald tells you anecdotes from history, and stories from his friends, but he never quotes, only describes. He moves in an opiate haze from subject to subject (there’s a famous diagram Rick Moody made of The Rings of Saturn for The Believer in 2006). The movement from one thing to another feels opiate-like, yes, and to some extent you don’t know how he’s doing it, but it’s simple – he doesn’t use paragraph breaks to separate one thought from another. The entire book is a project interested in privileging the paratactic (the side-by-side arrangement of ideas), over the hypotactic (the arranging of ideas into dominant and subordinate constructs). Everything is equal, and everything is meaningful, and everything is meaningless. We don’t know what’s important to the story, because the story is nothing. It’s the sheer accumulation of detail.
Last week I went for a long bike ride into the woods around Flughafensee. It was the first lake V took me to swim, right after I arrived in Berlin in the summer. It was 36 degrees that night in August, it was exquisite, and the water on my skin felt like velvet, penetrable, and I could not believe that any place so beautiful could be available to me this year. Afterwards, I went swimming at Flughafensee as much as I could, even though I know it is not the most beautiful lake. It’s right by Tegel Airport, there are smoke stacks in the distance. I love it. But it’s December. Now the woods are leafless. The water was black and opaque last week, although some cold-water swimmers were preparing to enter from the sandy beach. I biked around the lake and into the trees until I had no idea where I was anymore, and no idea how to get back. I didn’t mind. I kept taking paths, going left, going right, it didn’t seem to matter how it turned out, only that I knew I’d find my way out eventually. I was listening to a recording of a lecture Sebald gave in New York before his death in 2001. That calm, sad voice resounding in my ears. I want to write about moments like that, the bike ride around the lake, and elevate it to the height of whatever it was I used to want from narrative. To disentangle the arc of narrative, and arrange every idea and fact and memory and anecdote the way that Sebald does, so that everything is equally meaningful and equally meaningless. To nod, to say yes, that you will meander with him wherever he wants you to go.
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald (US, UK, AU)
Real Life – Brandon Taylor (US, UK, AU)
Devil’s Knot – Mara Leveritt (US)
A Dance to the Music of Time, 1st Movement – Anthony Powell (US, UK)
Suppose A Sentence – Brian Dillon (US, UK)
Sonata – Charles Bowden (US)
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell – Brian Evenson (US)
Mill Town – Kerri Arsenault (US)
— from ‘A Question of Upbringing,’ Book One of Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell
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