The Politics of Postimperial Melancholia and Rural Heritage in the 1980s: W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

Abstract

In the opening of The Rings of Saturn, the British-based German writer, W.G. Sebald, reveals that in 1992, following a period of intense work, he is left wracked with fatigue and shattered nerves; to recover his spirits, he sets off on an extended walk across the East Anglian countryside. Amidst the manor homes, country cottages and local ruins he visits, he gathers together a range of obscure historical facts and lore while further assiduous research he undertakes reveals that the material histories of rural Norfolk and Suffolk betray broad links to colonialism. Drawing on this collective experience, Sebald assembles a retrospective narrative tracing his journey and a host of digressive histories that intersect with the history of East Anglia, leading to the eventual publication of Die Ringe Saturnis in 1995. An English version, admirably translated by Michael Hulse and titled The Rings of Saturn followed three years later and was the second of four books Sebald published before his tragic death in December 2001 from a car accident.¹ A beguiling mosaic of fiction, history, travelogue, biography, autobiography, myth and memoir, The Rings of Saturn was much lauded by literary critics such as Robert McCrum, James Wood and Susan Sontag, continuing the wide-spread critical acclaim Sebald gained upon publication of The Emigrants, his first ‘prose-fiction’ text published in English in 1996 (McCrum, 1998; Wood, 1998; Sontag, 2000).

Like bees the country English gathered honey from the flowers of their history. The combs in which they stored it were the manifold institutions in which they expressed their social life.

(Arthur Bryant, Spirit of England, 1982)