Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in W. G. Sebald's Die Ringe des Saturn

"Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos, aus der eine Welt entspringen kann." - Friedrich Schlegel, "Ideen" No. 71 In an essay entitled "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," Hayden White makes the claim that the modernist sensibility represents a response to a new sense of history, one that emerges from the confrontation with a radically transformed reality and a new perception of the unimaginable capacities and limitations of human reason and its implementation. This modernist sensibility comes into being, according to White, as an anticipation of a new form of historical reality, a reality that included, among its supposedly unimaginable, unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects, the phenomenon of Hitlerism, the Final Solution, total war, nuclear contamination, mass starvation, and ecological suicide; a profound sense of the incapacity of our sciences to explain, let alone control or contain these; and a growing awareness of the incapacity of our traditional modes of representation even to describe them adequately. (52) What White describes here might be termed the multifold crisis of human self-understanding under the conditions of technological modernity. It turns on an acknowledgment of the incomprehensible destructiveness of the human species, its capacity not merely to wage "total" war and develop rational strategies for the extermination of an entire people, but also its unfathomable ability to eliminate the very conditions that make its own existence possible, either in the form of catastrophic nuclear obliteration or of the systematic ecological degradation of the life world. What makes this sensibility unique, according to White, is the manner in which it escapes both the explanatory power of traditional scientific thinking and the representational models with which we commonly comprehend and digest historical reality. W G. Sebald is one of the most eloquent recent spokespeople of this modernist sensibility as described by White. His literary works are not simply seismographic records of these human-induced catastrophes, but also attempts to fashion new representational tools for the purpose of acknowledging and coming to terms with the realities of modern human history. In this sense, Sebald's literary project might be understood as an attempt to make manifest in the more sensuous form of literary discourse those aspects of the modernist sensibility that, according to White, escape the grasp of theoretical explanation. In an interview with Uwe Pralle conducted in August 2001, just four months prior to his untimely death, Sebald responded to a question regarding his obsession with a "Universalgeschichte der Katastrophen" by insisting that this focus reflects what he views as an aberration of the human species. "Letzten Endes handelt es sich," Sebald remarks in this context, "um so etwas wie eine Beschreibung der Aberration einer Species," and he goes on to highlight the relevance of this strategy for one of his works in particular, the 1995 "travelogue" Die Ringe des Saturn, which bears the subtitle "Eine englische Wallfahrt": "Man kann - und das ist unter anderem eine der Ideen gewesen hinter der Strukturierung in den Ringen des Saturn - in konzentrischen Kreisen immer weiter nach ausen gehen, und die auseren Kreise determinieren immer die inneren" (Pralle 16). As an example of this process by which one moves from micro- to macro-levels of mutual determination, Sebald maintains that the psychic economy of individuals living in interwar Germany was shaped by the larger circle of family history, which in turn was influenced by the history of the petty bourgeoisie in the 1920s and 1930s, while this class was molded by the economic conditions of that period and the history of industrialization. One can pursue this trajectory, Sebald asserts, until one ultimately arrives at the outermost circles of natural history and the larger history of the human species (Sebald, "Mit einem kleinen Strandspaten" 16). …