Anna Warbelow

Thought Paper

November 14, 2007

 

 

Morgan, Peter. “The Sign of Saturn: Melancholy, Homelessness and Apocalypse in W.G. Sebald's Prose Narratives” German Life and Letters 58.1 (January 2005), 75–92

 

Theisen, Bianca. “A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn”

MLN 121.3 (April 2006), 563-581

 

In “The Sign of Saturn: Melancholy, Homelessness and Apocalypse in W.G. Sebald’s Prose Narratives” Peter Morgan discusses Sebald’s narrative melancholy as a late manifestation of his generation’s (namely postwar West German intellectuals) ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ (or struggle to deal with the past).  He focuses on Sebald’s Die Audgewanderten and Die Ringe de Saturn in order to compare what he identifies as “melancholic empathy” in the first book to the “apocalyptic negativity” of the later book (77).  Morgan claims that Sebald is only able to talk about postwar German identity in terms of Auschwitz and The Rings of Saturn serves as his “apocalyptic rebellion” to the over-determination of history.

 

Morgan reads this text as Sebald’s pessimistic interpretation of the world’s inevitable dissent into disorder and destruction (86). He claims that for Sebald, Auschwitz becomes a mythical symbol (rather than a historical event) for this dissent as well as for the general meaninglessness of history. He explains that unlike in Die Audgewanderten, Sebald now embraces his ‘heimatlosigkeit’ as a pilgrim and voyeur of destruction.  This loss leads to Sebald’s “melancholy, narcissism, hypochondria and a sense of existential in authenticity” (88). Morgan’s main evidence for this is Sebald’s self-concealment through inter-textual references and the confusion of narrative voice and authorial presence. He claims that for Sebald, “After Auschwitz, literature is only possible as fraud” (88).  Sebald’s sense of ‘heimatlosigkeit’ and personal inatuthenticity, as well as his general negativity toward his place in the postwar order are, for Morgan, expressed through his apocalyptic musings and fantasies of destruction such as the many references to death (human, animal, and vegetal), the desolation of various landscapes, or his list of horrific events taken place on Maunday Thursday.

 

In the second section on Die Ringe de Saturn Morgan attempts to locate the text in “generational terms.” Here he expands on his claim that Sebald’s melancholy is an extreme expression of the shared melancholy of post war leftist intellectuals, which he refers to as “linke melancholie.” He relies on the writings of Wolf Lepenies and Günter Grass, which Sebald’s was familiar with. He defines Sebald’s melancholy as retreatist in Lepenie’s terms, explaining “he feels over-determined by the past and wants to rebel against the loss of ‘Heimat,’ but his conscience as a left-wing intellectual paralyzes him” (89).  Morgan links this to the self-referential melancholy of the student generation in their “turn from activism to passivity and retreatism” (91).  He claims Seblad escapes into destruction and disorder out of an extreme disappointment with the results of the enlightenment.  Sebald “seeks solace in disorder as a higher kind of order” (91).  Morgan ends the article by describing Sebald as a “traumatized member of his generation” who “falls into melancholy narcissism” (92).

 

In “A natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn” Bianca Theisen reads the novel primarily as a reaction against enlightenment values through the rediscovery of the sixteenth and seventeenth century artists and writers Sebald references.  Theisen’s rather long thesis reads:

 

“In his attempt to likewise eclipse the bleak light that rationalism has cast on reality, dissecting the anatomy of the world reduced to the schema and the grid, and to tone down the narrative of progress embraced by those who believed they left the age of darkness for enlightened analysis, Sebald reexamines the baroque awareness of human infirmity and transience in a world changing according to unknown designs and rediscovers allegorical indirection as perhaps the more appropriate, if also more fantastic and fallible approach to the labyrinthine truths of reality” (563)

 

Theisen argues that Sebald explores allegorical realism with a reference to codes and numbers as access to hidden reality. She works to prove this through several detailed analyses of texts referenced in the novel.  For example, the first portion of the article focuses on Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s character, Blanders, mentioned in Sebald’s first chapter. Theisen is particularly interested in Sebald’s mention of Blanders’ metamorphosis which she claims, for Sebald, speaks to the “mutability of out post-Edenic existence” (565). She also looks to Blander’s text, which Sebald reproduces, and describes it as “an enigmatic mix of words taken from German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic” and thus a kind of “secret language” (566).

 

Theisen Suggests that the humanist tradition of perceiving hermetic texts “in analogy to an allegorical understanding of the biblical scriptures” may have informed both Grimmelshausen and Browne’s fascination with numerology (567).  She then goes on to describe Browne’s use of number symbolism, particularly in The Gardern of Cyrus, which Sebald briefly points to in the first chapter of his text.  Theisen identifies this as Browne’s secret code and claims that by dividing his novel into ten Roman-numeral-labeled chapters, Sebald “lays out a spherical system of associations and encyclopedic links that openly flirt with the overwrought networks of Browne’s secret code” (569).  This is followed by an elaboration on Seblad’s apparent interest in numerology, which Theisen claims proves his interest in hidden signification.

 

Linked to the work of decoding for Theisen is the process of metamorphosis. Here she calls on Kafka, claiming that the beetle in his story The Metamorphosis informs Sebald’s “interest in mutable identities and metamorphic identifications” (573).  She claims that Sebald is “less interested in transformations of the soul or the psyche, in metamorphotic ascension in the tradition of Christian, Neoplatonic, and psychological thought, than in transformation in the larger context of natural history and evolution” (573).  According to Theisen, Die Ringe de Saturn, centers on a natural history of destruction, for which she identifies Kafka as the precedent.   The rest of the article works to demonstrate this focus on a self-destroying world. She claims Sebald “traces history as a process of decay” (578).