100 Books 33 - W.G. Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATURN

This book is categorized and shelved as fiction, but I cannot help wondering how different my experience of reading it might have been were it not. This is a weird thing to say, I know, but The Rings of Saturn is a weird book.

Ostensibly, The Rings of Saturn -- so named, supposedly, to denote its fragmentary nature, as the planet Saturn's rings are composed of innumberable fragments -- concerns German author W.G. Sebald's walking tour of the southeastern coast of England. We do get the odd description of his physical travels here and there, with some lovely scenery porn and enough detail to convince the reader that he did indeed make the journey, visit those places, even without the odd, strangely melancholy accompanying photographs strewn throughout.

But the physical journey isn't really the thing, here. What is the thing is a somewhat inner, somewhat imaginary, dreamlike wandering through the past lives of the places the narrator encounters, the buildings, the landscapes and the stories of the people who lived there or in other ways made them somewhat famous. It's all very convincing and the line between fact and fiction is -- is there a word out there that goes beyond what we mean when we say "blurred"? Because it's way more than blurred. Like an international border in the middle of a lonely, unpeopled landscape, the line, if there even is one, is imaginary and only an extreme and well-enforced collective belief that is there gives it any reality at all.

But there are no authorities here insisting on a division. Once the reader has let herself be immersed in the strangeness (and its so seductive, who can resist the urge to wade in up to the chin, if not all the way in?), though, the question fades away. There are reminders here and there that this is supposed to be fiction -- Sebald is a great admirer of Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, and evokes especially the weird wonders of the master's "Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" a story written in the form of an encyclopedia entry, purporting to tell the reader all she needs to know about a completely made-up country that the entry itself acknowledges was made up -- but these are rare and so subtle that they pass almost unnoticed, the reader just nodding and smiling and tripping gently along.

When the narrator comes to the English village of Lowestoft, where Joseph Conrad lived for many years at the beginning of his new life as an Englishman, this has the potential to become problematic. Conrad fans (and I am one) know a lot of factual material about how he spent his time there, who he met, what he knew... and suddenly our dream has brought us quite convincingly right into what feels very much like a good representation of Conrad's own experience, what he saw, what it looked and felt like, what it made him remember from his own past... On later reflection it becomes obvious that no one could ever know that but Conrad himself, who is of course no longer around to affirm or contradict this account, but at the time, while reading, one is hypnotized into believing and enjoying it all. Is that factual, the last freed part of her mind might ask, feebly trying to send an impulse to go check Joseph Conrad: A Biography shelved in the third bedroom she has converted into a dedicated library and reading room, but the rest of her mind says no, no need, this is fine, just go with it and enjoy...

The only thing that breaks the trance is Sebald's occasional maddening habit of being just a bit too opaque, too coy, as when the narrator riffs for pages and pages on the life and miraculous works of his namesake saint, without ever once actually naming the saint. Here I did break free, my curiosity piqued to the brink of madness, sure I could follow the clues to find the saint, even though I wasn't sure of the narrator's first name, whether or not it was meant to be understood as the same as the author's, and weirdly unable to discover, for certain, what the author's first name was. I gave up after a while, because I wanted to explore more fragments.

Perhaps, I think as I finish, all of this is true. Perhaps what is fictional about The Rings of Saturn is its perfection, its graceful ordering, its masterfully executed subtlety, its seamless transitions from idea to idea, locale to locale, memory to memory. It has the feel, this book, of a sublime stream of consciousness, but the consciousness is suspiciously artful and not like an ordinary human stream of consciousness at all (for we know that is messy and tenuously associative, idiosyncratic and impenetrable, cf James Joyce and Henry Miller especially, and, of course, the wanderings of your own imagination through an ordinary day).

I haven't finished The Rings of Saturn yet, and I don't want to. Although I have made it last for as long as I possibly could, having rationed myself to just four or five pages a day, I approach the end with profound sadness, even as I glory in the experience. I cling to it as one clings to the last tatters of the first, giddy rush of being in love, when the beloved's flaws and essential humanness are coming more clearly into view but one struggles to ignore them. Oh yes, there is life beyond this haze, and it's usually good to break the spell, but it's so very nice to be under it.