On Sebald, Authorial Absence and Dreams

Generally, I'm not one to proclaim favourites. Of course, there are certain things, be it music, film or literature, that I value higher than others, but that is not to suggest that I feel any particular need to rank them. Rather, it is enough to know that I like these things more than those things. This wasn't necessarily always the case. For instance, when I was first "getting" into music, each new "discovery" had the potential to challenge the existing order. In many ways, I suppose this desire to classify and arrange is a very human endeavour, yet when it comes to subjectivity and personal preference, it can be as stifling as it is superfluous. After all, I always used to feel it imperative that I had a single favourite artist who stood above all others in my esteem; an artist whose work would set the benchmark against which I would judge everything else. Given my limited scope of music in general at that point, I guess this made sense, but as time passed and my tastes diversified this model no longer proved effective. And that is a very good thing for if it had been effective, I doubt I'd be listening to half the music that I do these days. As a result, I no longer have a favourite artist; I just let people think that Brian Eno is my favourite. Likewise, I don't have a favourite novel, but for the sake of this post I'm going to let you think that W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is my favourite.

I first read The Rings of Saturn just over a year ago for a module entitled "The Possibility of Fiction". After just a few pages, it's inclusion within the reading list became immediately apparent for it is a novel that constantly flirts with the reader's expectations of genre and form. At it's most basic level, it may be described as a piece of travel literature; a retrospective journal that documents a walk along the coast of East Anglia in the dwindling summer months of 1992. And yet the specificity of this journey is continually overshadowed by the narrator’s seemingly sporadic digressions of thought, which take the reader far beyond the apparent confines of the East Anglian countryside. As a result, what initially appears as the distinct apparatus of travel writing, that is to say, geographical information set to a journalistic tone, quickly begins to dissolve as the narrative drifts into divergent genre territories. At any one point in the novel, the reader is confronted by a tapestry of different styles of writing that alternate with the same calm ease and compliance that is wholly characteristic of the narrator’s train of thought; from meditative memoirs and fictional accounts of historical figures to meticulously crafted fragments of encyclopaedic knowledge. The effect of this relentless oscillation between genres is to bring the role of the author firmly in to question and so it is particularly ironic that, despite the autobiographical tone of the novel, the authorial voice remains somewhat obscured, and perhaps even absent, throughout the course of The Rings of Saturn. Certainly, if Sebald himself is the narrator, as one assumes to be the case, then his presence within the text would seem to be as tenuous and transient as the single grainy photo of the author that can be found in the latter half of the novel; a presence that only lasts as long as the turn of a page. 

In an essay entitled "The Possibility of Afterlife in The Rings of Saturn", I suggested that one possible reason for this authorial absence is that the narrator displays a tendency to sacrifice his own voice in order to resurrect the lives of the departed. Thus one might say that he appears to serve as little more than a soundboard through which the past is brought back in to some form of existence through the medium of voice. Although I still believe that this is a rather elegant notion, I cannot help but feel that such a conclusion seems to suggest that the importance of the narrator is in some way diminished when, in fact, I feel that quite the opposite is true. Sebald, himself, provides a more comprehensive and satisfying description of the function of the narrator in The Rings of Saturn than I could ever hope to formulate in a beautifully crafted meditation on the nature of dreams:

"I suppose it is submerged memories that give dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?"

It seems to me that this rumination perfectly captures not only the quintessence of both the narrator's role and Sebald's vision throughout the novel, but also the fundamental way in which the human mind works. And, for me, it is this quality that makes The Rings of Saturn such a wonderfully mysterious, complex and ultimately rewarding experience.