Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination by Estok Simon C. White Jonathan Wang I-Chun & I-Chun Wang & Jonathan White

Author:Estok, Simon C.,White, Jonathan,Wang, I-Chun & I-Chun Wang & Jonathan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2016-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

As Benjamin wrote these lines, Nazism was rolling across Europe and seemed unstoppable. Wherever Nazism was, there were ruins and deaths. Benjamin put forth his critique of modernity with a strong sense of pessimism: so-called progress was to be found in ruin and debris, and history was but another name for suffering and catastrophe. These words can also be read as Benjamin’s melancholic meditation on history and as his mourning for the ruin of his country and the vast scope of human suffering.

The Rings of Saturn is a book about mourning, specifically Sebald’s mourning of destruction. This may explain why the book is interspersed with images of barrenness, wretchedness, forlornness, death, and desertion—lonely streets, run-down hotels, forsaken forts, ruinous graveyards, empty beaches, and bleak wilderness. One of the epithets of the book is taken from the popular Brockhaus Encyclopaedia, with the obvious purpose of providing a clue to the meaning of the book: “The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.” The major concern of Sebald’s text is indeed the fragments left behind, the debris or derelict matter of destruction. To piece together these fragments, to search among rubble for the meanings of history, means to refuse to forget. The Rings of Saturn is thus a text that resists oblivion. To forget means to fail to mourn. Hence, to mourn is to detest forgetfulness. So far as The Rings of Saturn is concerned, I fully agree with the following remarks of Gray Kochhar-Lindgren: “[E]ven as the dust of forgetfulness begins to cover everything, Sebald’s art withstands, at least momentarily, that oblivion” (368).

The Rings of Saturn is divided into 10 chapters. Sebald begins his narrative with an analysis of the skull of Thomas Browne, who practiced medicine in Norwich in the seventeenth century. That analysis winds its way to Rembrandt’s painting, The Anatomy Lesson. On his way from Norwich on an old, diesel train to the coastal town of Lowestoft, Sebald stops over at the small village of Somerleyton to visit the Somerleyton Hall:

Somerleyton strikes the visitor of today no longer as an oriental palace in a fairy tale. The glass-covered walks and the palm house, whose lofty dome used once to light up the nights, were burnt out in 1913 after a gas explosion and subsequently demolished. The servants who kept all in good order, the butlers, coachmen, chauffeurs, gardeners, cooks, sempstresses and chambermaids, have long since gone. The suites of rooms now make a somewhat disused, dispirited impression. The velvet curtains and crimson blinds are faded, the settees and armchairs sag, the stairways and corridors which the guided tour takes one through are full of bygone paraphernalia. A camphorwood chest which may once have accompanied a former occupant of the house on a tour of duty to Nigeria or Singapore now contains old croquet,

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