W.G. Sebald’s ambulatory, postmodern fiction The Rings of Saturn is obsessed with historical representation and the hermeneutics of memory. The novel follows a nameless, foreign narrator (who is a thinly veiled representation of the author himself) as he wanders through Suffolk county in England: observing the landscape, interacting with locals, and remembering historical phenomenon. Quotation marks are noticeably absent from The Rings of Saturn: readers oftentimes forget from whose perspective a story is from—the narrator or another character. Monochromatic photographs also riddle the text, moments of historical clairvoyance breaking through the ubiquitous ambiguity of the narrative. The Rings of Saturn insubordinately refuses genre, all the while remaining deeply invested in historical accuracy. Despite Sebald’s interest and obsession with history, the novel is a work of fiction. The postmodern narrative structures prevent the text from realizing itself as historically indisputable. The epistemological legitimacy of the photograph in The Rings of Saturn will be challenged through the photograph that accompanies the narrator’s interaction with Thomas Abrams, a man reconstructing the Temple of Jerusalem.

At the crux of The Rings of Saturn is a queasy temporality: “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk” (Sebald 3). The temporal stability offered at the beginning of the text is immediately compromised: “Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into the hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages” (Sebald 4). The Rings of Saturn is a retrospective, written about a journey that happened a year earlier. The narrator’s voice is “archaic, that of a specter” (McCulloh 2). The distance from the journey is reflected the narrator’s emotional detachment that resonates in the novel’s prose. The novel is riddled with allusions to other images, authors, artists and works of art. Within the story, the narrator examines Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, deconstructs the legitimacy of maritime battle paintings, reflects upon Sir Thomas Brown’s Urn Burial, thoroughly investigates the author Joseph Conrad’s biography, and considers the ethics of mass death from herring fishing and Dutch Elm disease, as well as from colonization. The Rings of Saturn is clearly an act of fanatical remembrance, a desperate attempt to describe the almost labyrinthine consciousness of a man walking through the countryside. Sebald has written, as it were, a travel narrative—i.e. a modern travel novel. And what do modern people do when they travel? Yes, they take photographs.

Photography “[developed] in tandem with one of the most characteristic activities of modern activities: tourism” (Sontag 9). The “reproduction of photographic images” is the “most conspicuous surface feature” of the text (Long 46). They are emblematic of the historical tourism and voyeurism within Sebald’s novel. These photographs are mnemonic souvenirs from the narrator’s journey. The images are monuments to the narrator’s travel. There is an “authenticating function of images” that epistemologically validates the narrative (Long 47). Furthermore, photography “assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel” (Sontag 9-10). The reproductions of photographs are diametrically opposed to the profound instability of the novel’s ambulatory consciousness. The photograph becomes the apex of historical representation in The Rings of Saturn; they “suggest a totality—the totality of life’s experiences—that would otherwise have been lost” (McCulloh 7). The image provides the epistemological validity and narrative stability intrinsically absent in the modern activity of travel and the narrator’s spectral non-presence. Whereas the narrator’s account of his travel disobeys traditional forms of dramatic realism, the photograph’s are unequivocally realistic, insofar as they are actual photographs.

Sebald’s prose is incredibly reverential towards history and the mystical aspects of life. The Rings of Saturn could be therefore considered a pilgrimage. Any good pilgrimage typically concludes in a visit to a shrine (or similar location of spiritual significance). The Sebaldian narrator visits Thomas Abrams, a retired farmer who has spent the better part of three decades meticulously reconstructing a model of the Temple of Jerusalem. What was once considered a manic obsession by his peers—he was “[immersing] himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world”—has gradually evolved into an act of intense scholarship and academic research (Sebald 244). Thomas Abrams is a pseudonym for Alec Garrard, who is obsessed with the idealization of historical representation. He is actively engaged in a religiously utopian project. If The Rings of Saturn concluded with Abrams’ model of The Temple of Jerusalem, as it nearly does, the novel would agree with his utopian vision, substantiating The Rings of Saturn as a historical pilgrimage. However, Sebald is careful in his subordination, seemingly rejecting the supremacy of any form of historical representation.

The pilgrimage is therefore darkly comic. Instead of visiting an actual shrine, which the narrator wishes to do (“I wished that the short drive would… go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem”), the narrator visits a simulacrum (Sebald 249). It is merely an incomplete representation of the Temple of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, there is a spiritual palpability in Abrams’ reverence towards his activity: “After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffers on the ceiling, every one of the hundreds of columns” (Sebald 245). Abrams’ devotion towards historical representation can only create an “impression”. Abrams is not completely sure of his project’s utopian design: “Now as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time” (Sebald 245). However, Abrams’ emotional shift with regards to his utopian project shifts at the exact moment the photograph of his model of the Temple appears in the text.

At the moment when Abrams’ doubt paradigmatically shifts towards conviction, a photograph of his model appears, covering the entirety of a two-page spread. In the faded photograph, the columns of Abrams’ model are receding into the distance, towards a vanishing point. The image captures Abrams’ sentiment of his project: “as if everything were already completed and as if I were gazing into eternity” (248). The columns are stretching towards eternity, echoing the endlessness of the Abrams’ artistic process. Just as the narrator is assuaged by his mnemonic souvenirs, the photograph of the model reaffirms Abrams faith. His faith is simultaneously challenged and restored by the ongoing-ness, the eternity, of his utopian ideal of historical representation. Although Abrams’ model will always exist as a simulacrum of the actual Temple, in a perpetual state of becoming, the photograph legitimizes Abrams’ utopian vision of representing history.

If The Rings of Saturn was an ideal pilgrimage the novel would’ve ended with this interaction, possibly with the photo of the temple. Yet the novel leaves Abrams behind with his obsession and goes on for another chapter. The departure from Abrams’ utopian exercise forces readers to return to the interaction. The entire interaction with Abrams’ is mediated through the narrator’s consciousness. The narrator is literally putting words into Abrams’ mouth. The narrator’s eloquence would be unexpected, if not incongruous, with the language of a retired farmer. Furthermore, Thomas Abrams is a pseudonym for Alec Garrard. The absence of quotation marks guarantees that Alec Garrard is not given any narratological space in the novel. If nothing is in quotation marks, then everything is mediated through the consciousness of the narrator—including the photographs.

Aesthetically, this makes sense. The photographs are all monochromatic and faded, as if they were retrieved from a shoebox labeled “Memories”. The images do not possess the aesthetic quality, which we associate with epistemological legitimacy, that would be expected of photographs in a history textbook. They are photographs that belong in a family photo album. While the content of the photograph buttresses Abrams’ utopian form of historical representation, the aesthetics of the photograph problematize his design. The camera is awkwardly close to the model. The edges of the photograph are blurred like Abrams’ vision, questioning the meaningfulness of his venture. The endless columns do not beget eternity. It is tunnel vision. The columns are awe-inspiring and crippling. The reproduction of the photographs, the narrator’s form of documentation, is “used, paradoxically, to evoke that which cannot be documented” (McCulloh 9). The photograph is an irreconcilable form of representation within the postmodern fiction.

The photograph also provides a dark comedy in The Rings of Saturn. At no point does the novel confirm that this is in fact a photograph of Alec Garrard’s Temple of Jerusalem. Maybe this is a photo of the actual Temple of Jerusalem? Or, maybe—just maybe—this is a photo of a random temple with columns that readers in, say, Williamstown, MA would neither be able to confirm or deny. The Rings of Saturn investment in historical accuracy beguiles a trust from the reader which is completely unfounded. The postmodern literary techniques should be enough to warrant skepticism from the readers, yet the interpretive diligence the book demands exhausts them. It is quite easy to forget that this narrative is a work of fiction—especially when many people have attempted to recreate Sebald’s walking tour of Suffolk. Readers blindly assume that this is a photograph of a simulacrum, when the photograph itself is only “a semblance of knowledge” (Sontag 24). Is this image merely a representation of a representation? Additionally, there is a small, blurred silhouette of a person within the hall. It is impossible to determine whether this spectral presence is a figurine or an actual individual. Any possible epistemological validity left in the photograph is ultimately annihilated by the tactility of the novel itself.

The photograph of the columns is spread across two pages. The image is bifurcated by the crease of the novel. The crease functions as an imperfect mirror; the photograph is almost perfectly reflected across the book’s meridian. The vanishing point within the photograph is lost within the crease. The eternity towards which Abrams is looking becomes invisible. The reader knows that the vanishing point must be there, but the undulation of the page destroys the perspective. The book consumes the photograph. The photograph’s epistemological legitimacy in The Rings of Saturn is destabilized by the aesthetics of the image and the postmodern narrator’s mediation, yet it is ultimately devoured by the book itself.

But does any of this matter? Why should readers be concerned with historical representation in a book that need not have any bearing in reality? After all, The Rings of Saturn is fiction. Thomas Abrams is not a real person. All of the photographs in the text are aestheticized abstractions. But Alec Garrard is an actual individual who has devoted a significant portion of his life to the reproduction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Even though he is rendered invisible through the violence of artistic representation, The Rings of Saturn goes to great lengths to evocatively describe his faith in representation. Sebald might be neurotically skeptical of fiction as a valid form of historical representation, but he is still fanatically obsessed with humanity’s need to organize knowledge and understand history.

Works Cited:

Long, J.J. W.G. Sebald: Image Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Print.

McCulloh, Mark R. Understanding W.G. Sebald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Print.

Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. London: The Harvill Press, 1998. Print.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Print.

I’d like to thank Rob for reading my essay and to apologize for the same reason.