In the ‘tortured position of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time’, Sebald’s protagonist crawls from his hospital bed on the eighth floor of the Norfolk General Hospital, and attempts to peer out the window1. Sebald includes a grainy black and white image of which the reader is expected to assume is the window in question. The window is fitted with Georgian Wired Glass, a style of glass fortified with a checkered wire mesh which gives the glass the impression of a net or a veil.
The 17th century writer and polymath Sir Thomas Browne acts as an intellectual anchor for the narrator - his scholarship ranging from medicine, science, religion, and antiquarianism – which parallels the texts digressive style. We learn early on that the hospital where our protagonist lay is coincidentally where Mr Browne’s skull is also kept. In Hydriotaphia (Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk), we are informed that Browne expressed a keen appreciation for moths, for their ability to entomb themselves within a silken tapestry of their own making. The moth represented the ‘rites we enact when one from our midst sets out on his last journey’. At the first and only point in the text where the reader is directly asked a question: ‘that purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patroclus— what does it mean’?'
The window bears an uncanny likeness to Browne’s Quincunx which was discussed in his work The Garden of Cyrus, which is briefly mentioned by Sebald only a page or so later but remains ambiguous to the likeness. Browne identifies the pattern as the precursor to all forms of matter, animate and inanimate. In the crosswire prints left by quadrupeds, in the root of the water fern, in the creations of mankind and, of course, in ‘silkworms and moths’. This pattern was evidence of ‘the wisdom of God’ whose pristine design was ad infimum and everywhere. As it is here, so it is in heaven. As above, so below. Is our narrator dreaming? The guise with which he moves from one area of interest to another is saturated with the logic of dreams: surreal connections, the bending of time and space, shifting identities, and an uncertainty in cause and effect.
In the essay Dream Textures2, Sebald recalls an opening passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory. Nabokov tells the story of a young man struck with panic upon viewing an old recording of his family which was taken before his birth. The young man was frightened by the sight of an empty baby carriage that awaited his arrival. The vessel had ‘the encroaching air of a coffin’. And since, according to Nabokov, man ‘views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for – life being ‘brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’ – Sebald located the mans trauma as stemming from an ‘anticipation of death held in the memory of a time before life’. The man had become a ghost in his own family and saw the world unchanged and indifferent to his absence.
Strangely, Sebald concluded that Nabokov had an obsession with spirits, from which his preoccupation with nature and art was just an offshoot. As well as being an acclaimed novelist and professor of Russian literature at Cornell University, Nabokov was also a distinguished lepidopterist who had made considerable contributions to the field - erecting an impressive seven new genera of butterfly – and later became head curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Both the study of art and the study of nature gave Nabokov an indistinguishable sense of ‘aesthetic bliss’. He had discovered in nature the ‘nonutilitarian delights’ that he sought out in art. Both were a ‘form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception’. This synaesthetic3 awareness was expressed most masterfully in Lolita; where he used an actual road trip across American with his wife Vera collecting butterflies as the blueprint for road trip in the novel. Humbert Humbert’s obsession with young Dolores Haze was analogous with Nabokov’s love for butterflies and nature. Lolita was Humbert’s little nymphet - adapted from the word ‘nymph’ which is the biological term for a juvenile butterfly - a ‘nymph’ also being the young female personification of nature in Greek mythology. The intention is obvious.
But the acuity of the naturalist’s eye in which Nabokov brought to his literature was ironically what gave it an impression of what Sebald said was like ‘our worldly doings are being observed by some other species’. The prose itself felt sentient. It lingered over its subjects with a taxonomical gaze of indifferent curiosity. It felt almost extraterrestrial. Christopher Hitchens has also praised the writing of Nabokov as feeling like it was written by an alien. The eerie sensation which comes facing an agency or force that operates outside our comprehension is one of my favourite qualities in a writer and usually best perfected in the Gothic. Sebald also adopts this style narration but shaped it to his own melancholic ends. The Rings of Saturn also has the same style of disclosed narration and also exhibits a keen lepidopteristic pathology. Only the shift from butterflies to moths serves Sebald’s macabre temperament, of which Nabokov’s sun blossomed butterflies would find their doppelganger. The Rings of Saturn is devoid of libido, while Lolita is full of lust.
Sebald contextualised Virginia Woolfe’s The Death of the Moth as occurring ‘chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots’. The innocuous observation of a moth’s struggle on a windowpane in Sussex operated as a metaphor for channelling the centuries unspoken horrors. Sebald too had a lifelong interest in invertebrates. And particularly moths. He noted:
They are infinitely more numerous than butterflies, more various, and often more beautiful. They exemplify the so called biodiversity which is now being lost. A thing that appeals to me particularly in the moth is its secretiveness. Butterflies flit about in daylight, moths hide in darkness. You see them when, for instance, they get into a house. They sit absolutely still in a fold of curtain or on a whitewashed wall, for days on end, until all life has gone out of them and they fall to the floor. Suppose you had lost your way back out to the garden, to anything living and green! What the moth does in that case is simply to hold still until it keels over. Perhaps that is what we should do, instead of bustling about going to see the doctor and causing trouble to everyone around us. The idea of transformation, metamorphosis, in terms of turning from pupa into a beautiful winged thing, doesn’t particularly appeal to me. It strikes me as rather trite. To me the really wonderful thing about these insects is the way they perish.
Literary critic Michael Silverblatt commented on the ‘invisible subject’ always present in Sebald’s work and which orientates the reflections in his writing. It was a ‘metaphor with no statement of its ground, only of its vehicle’, from which all subsequent images and musings within the text refer back into by way of conjecture or coincidence. By omitting the actual terror, its absence precludes within it a tendency to speculate and to sense the connections between one subject to the next has almost been hallucinated.
Writing in those connections and transferring them from one subject to another requires a literary ‘sleight of hand’. The antiquated prose of The Rings of Saturn allows for such dynamic interactions between the text and subtext. But the kinds of sentence constructed in the novel are not of this time and have all but vanished from modern literature. Such hypotactical forms of syntax are typically found in the discursive writings of the 18th and 19th century naturalists, whose approach to nature was phenomenological and often anchored by way of the walk, and The Rings of Saturn very much engages in this tradition.
Early on in his career Sebald was reluctant to admit the obvious influence the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard had upon his work, mostly out of fear of being pigeonholed as just another of his stylistic emissaries. Bernhard invented, according to Sebald, a new kind of narration in the novel, what he branded as ‘periscopic’ – always sure that ‘what he tells you is related, at one remove, at two removes, at two or three’ from its original source. My own opinion is that Sebald also gets his maniacal compulsion to reference from his career as an academic, from which I’d also argue is where he gets the tendency to photocopy the photographs in his novels4. But this periscopic style allowed Sebald to weave together the fragments of travelogue, memoir, and history with a singular motif.
Seemingly innocuous details about sericulture and silk are introduced in the novel within minor subplots or passing observations. These associations then fan out into related subjects and digressions, only to recur and revisit the original concept in a more complex and nuanced way – like a fractal. The title The Rings of Saturn is also allegorical; broken fragments trapped within the orbit of a melancholic sun. And it must be by chance that the scientific name given to the genus of moth present in the novel is a Saturniidae. The way things perish under the sign of Saturn is intimately linked with moths. The phrase ‘moth eaten’ means something is decayed, decrepit, or outdated as if eaten by moths. The moth is a delicate animal covered in minute hairs so small they coat the fingers in fine powder when touched. It appears as if the moth is made entirely of this dust, coaxed into its structure by some invisible force, formed like lead shavings under a magnet.
Sebald has said he’s ‘very taken with the whole business of ashes and dust’ and quotes the Swiss writer Robert Walser: “The very last product of combustion, with no resistance in it. Not like a twig, which you can feel through the sole of your shoe. The borderline between being and nothingness”. Silk is the crystalised remains from previous lives and signifies a threshold between life and death. ‘Behind all of us living are the dead’ stated Sebald, ‘in fact they are here coexisting with us’. The temporality of the Sebaldian is cyclical and symbolises the same damned condition of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Such transmigrations can only leave a trail of dead matter which in turn becomes the material life constructs itself yet again. But still, the question: ‘that purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patroclus— what does it mean?’
And what does it really mean, this tapestry of silk woven into the text? The golden pheasants and of paradise depicted on the walls of Somerleyton Hall are embroidered with silk. (p. 23). The trailer nets used for catching herring are also made out of a ‘coarse Persian silk’ (p. 38). Black silk also covers the mourning faces of those attending the funeral of Evelina Korzeniowska, the mother of author Joseph Conrad (p. 74), whose father, following the the death of his beloved wife, burnt all his manuscripts in a fire and the fragments were like a ‘weightless flake of soot ash like a scrap of black silk’ as they drifted across the room (p. 75). In China, where sericulture was created, the Celestial King of Nanking was found face down with his bloated body ‘only held together by silken robes’ (p. 98) after commiting suicide in the face of loosing his empite. Successor to the throne, five year old T'ung-Chih, had his mourning face hidden from the gathering crowds by screens of Nanking silk (p. 127) at the king’s burial service. The princes appointed as viceroys where accused of being traitors, and narrowing escaping the punishment of dismemberment, where handed ‘a silken rope’ to hang themselves as an act of mercy (p. 102). A glass case containing the relics from the suppressed horrors of King Leopold II's personal fiefdom in the Congo Free State contained ‘colourful silk bows’ (p. 102). The instances of silk are too plentiful to list. But it even ends up in dreams.
At the end of the novel the narrator slips into a deep sleep and finds himself back at his grandparents flat in Berlin. He finds his grandmother laying silent, quietly dying, with ‘a grey silk handkerchief over her face’. Seems like our narrator is on the same kind of journey.
The Rings of Saturn. From here I’ll provide page numbers whenever I reference the actual text.
Can be found in his essay collection Campo Santo
Nabokov was diagnosed with synethesia. He noted how he assocaited the letter ‘a’ with the colour of weathered wood, and the letter ‘m’ with a fold of pink flannel. No doubt this mode of sensory blending influenced his writing.
This also acts as a stylistic device to add granular texture to the images. And also creates a sense of distance by coating the images in a haze of passing time which highlights the unreliability of memory.