A book to drive Aristotle nuts -W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn
Channel: Shut Your (Plot) Hole
Date: 2018-03-13

Sebald's Rings of Saturn is the book which would have driven Aristotle nuts. 

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This is a novel whose animating force is not plot but theme. 

The reader is treated to a series of seemingly meandering impressions on a wide variety of topics. What links all of them together?

The unifying theme can be found in the very title of the novel. 

The rings of Saturn are the product of violence and failed cohesion. As noted tellingly by the epigraph, "In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect."

Yet despite their origin in chaos, the rings evoke majesty. 

Similarly, all of the novel's historical oddities are linked by the central thought that decay holds fascination for us. Moreover, this is not a macabre fascination but one which is expressive and joyful.

As such, Sebald's novel is an affirmation that there is beauty in destruction; that the end of things can be transmuted into splendor more wonderful than any design. 

The narrator relentlessly, almost obsessively, focuses on this central insight, finding it in man made objects as well as in man himself.

On visiting a decaying home: "How uninviting Somerleyton must have been... when everything, from the cellar to the attic from the cutlery to the water closets, was brand new... And how fine a place the house seemed to me now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion."

On art, specifically Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp: "It is with him, the victim, and not the Guild that gave Rembrandt his commission, that the painter identifies. His gaze alone is free of Cartesian rigidity. He alone sees that greenish annihilated body, and he alone sees the shadow in the half-open mouth and over the dead man's eyes."

On man himself, particularly the silk weavers of England who: "spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights... when we consider the weavers' mental illness we should also bear in mind that many of the materials produced in the factories of Norwich... were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by nature itself, like the plumage of birds."

From the limited excerpts discussed (Rings of Saturn links many more historical anecdotes, places and people) it is readily apparent that the novel's central conceit permeates everything. 

The same quality which makes the rings of Saturn so majestic can also be found here on Earth.
In Sebald’s work, entropy is ironically the final ordering force for both beauty and the universe.

I take my hat off to the author who presents it all with knowledge and grace.

Episode 2x18x2
Law Stuff
Copyright remains with their respective owners.
Copyrighted works were used for educational purposes and/or criticism.

Video clips:
Astronaut tripping on the moon: For All Mankind (1989)
Apollo 11 Launch: Nasa 
Casini space prob animation: Nasa

Space Images: NASA
Still Images from old books: The British Library
Paintings by: Munch and Rembrandt
Games: Grim Fandango (1998)
Movies: Coco (2017)
Annoying intro sound: http://www.noiseforfun.com/