Contingency and Coincidence as the Ruins of Time: Text, Image and Motion in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

Abstract

As a colleague, friend and compatriot of W. G. Sebald for some twenty years – from 1972 to 1992 – at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, I am often asked to give an opinion, to tell anecdotes or to offer an interpretation of the person and his work. Usually, I am reluctant to do so, because the “Sebald” known to his readers is not the “Max” that I knew: not least because he did not emerge as a writer until the mid-1990s, several years after I had left Britain for Amsterdam. – Yet I am, of course, also a reader of Sebald, and especially over the past decade, I have often thought about him: about the reasons for his quite exceptional fame and reputation especially outside Germany, but especially about the relation in his work between literature and images – still images and the cinema – a topic we had often discussed, and occasionally disagreed on. – Most intriguing for me is the role that coincidence and the chance encounter, as well as found or discarded objects, such as old postcards and newspaper clippings, play in his work. Their discontinuity contrasts with the promenade, the solitary walk, the railway journey: literary devices and motifs that structure Sebald’s prose and spin his fine narrative threads, but which also point to the cinema, to montage and the moving image, which move us, even as we sit still and without motion. – My paper considers The Rings of Saturn, one of his best-known books. Difficult to locate within the genres of literature (it is classified as fiction, biography, and travel-writing), the work is even more disorienting when considered at the intersection of photography, text and images in motion. Drawing on Grant Gee’s Patience, After Sebald, a 2012 film that tries to transpose the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Sebald’s persona and diction, I show how the many tropes of contingency help understand Sebald’s multi-modal depiction of a world in ruins, as evidenced in his strategic use of images, whose enigmatic plurality of meaning makes them the nodal points of intricately networked relationships in both space and time.