This is the story of a journey. A walk around East Anglia, to be specific. It is a gloomy landscape for a gloomy pilgrimage, at the end of which the author suffers a nervous collapse. But in any case, this is a book about melancholia.
From Biblioklept:
Renaissance medical texts identified Saturn with the bodily humor melancholy–black bile–indicated by sluggishness and moroseness, paradoxically paired with an eagerness for action (hence the modern word saturnine)). The melancholy of Rings pervades the whole text and even infiltrates each sentence. Like Dürer’s engraving, Sebald’s text is complexly and richly detailed, overflowing with allusion and symbolic registry that defies simple or easy interpretation. Just as Dürer situates the winged figure of genius at the (slightly off-) center of his image, contemplative yet dreamy, we find Sebald’s narrator to be a flighty genius made forlorn by the world he sees. And yet, just as Dürer’s figure is ultimately ambiguous (is he despondent or merely in the throes of absent fancy? Is he shirking his duty or contemplating a new grand work?) so too does Sebald’s narrator resist any simple interpretation. The narrative bulk of Rings consists of the narrator’s perspectives on history and memory, art and economics, literature and suffering. Like the myriad strange objects that surround the figure of genius in Dürer’s engraving, the connections between the subjects of the narrator’s lessons seem tenuous at first (indeed, several interpretations of Dürer’s piece have argued that it is simply a failed allegorical vision).
It is also a book about natural destructions--how civilizations rise and fall; a book about human cruelty; and a book about ruins. Some could argue that it is also a book about how art can save us.
It is in this aspect that Sebald, I think, shares so much with Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer, like Thomas Bernhard, has written eloquently of growing up amidst the ruins of war. Bernhard has written of his childhood in Salzburg in a really unforgettable way--of looking down on the ruins of the imperial stables from the Mönchsberg. These children grew up as small children playing in the ruins left by war. And Kiefer, in his art, creates works created from layers of dust (see this fantastic article by Tim Adams):
His studios tend to re-create his childhood on a vast scale. The raw materials of his art are bundles of wire, rolls of lead, uprooted trees, emulsion, shellac, ash, concrete, the fabric of children’s clothes, earth, bricks, seeds (these stand for hope and keep him going). In his sculpture and his painting he mingles the organic with the inorganic, in the way Bomber Harris and his squadrons managed so comprehensively in raids on the Rhineland.
Likewise, Sebald is drawn to austere place; cold landscapes and places that have seen a downtown, places in ruin--from castle and former country estates to seeing the hideous brutality of the Belgium Congo as he walks the city streets in Brussels.
And this on memory
The moral backbone of art is about that whole question of memory,” Sebald once observed in another context. “To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.” The task that Kiefer set himself when he started out painting in the forest 40 years ago was to ask if it was possible to create a German art that was all about memory, and that was as much about destruction as creation. He is still working on the answer.
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