The Rings of Saturn.

By W.G. Sebald. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions. 256 pp. $23.95.

Lisa Cohen 

How to fathom the human propensity for destruction? And how to write in the face of it? In The Emigrants, the first of W.G. Sebald's books translated into English, he presented four discrete portraits of men exiled from Germany, which composed an extraordinary document about the lethal quality of historical amnesia and the intricacies of German and Jewish identification and dis-identification. Now, in The Rings of Saturn, he turns to England, where he has lived for over twenty-five years, to record the devastations he sees as he walks around the eastern coast of that country, and to take stock of his own despair.

I say "he": if the metonymic, associative structure of a walking tour (the German edition was subtitled "An English Pilgrimage") is one of this book's conceits, then another, as in The Emigrants, is that this narrator and the author are the same man. Sebald is producing something hybrid and fluid that is at once essay, novel, memoir, and biography. Like The Emigrants, too, this book is populated by a host of displaced persons - men who are not at home in their country, era, or class; this time, many of them, including Conrad, Chateaubriand, Swinburne, Stendhal, Edward FitzGerald, and Sebald's friend Michael Hamburger, are writers and translators. And once again, the text is punctuated by photographs, many of them taken by Sebald himself.

We see deserted, watery landscapes; old hotels; the Lowestoft train station; even a photo of the author. We also see a row of dead bodies hanging from a long gallows somewhere in Bosnia; a reproduction of what looks like a nineteenth-century postcard, called "A Morning Catch of Herring, Lowestoft," displaying vast quantities of dead fish; and a couple of pages later, under spindly trees, dead bodies piled on the ground at Bergen Belsen. All of these images feel like pure condensations of distance and loss. They also comment on the act of documentation: the extent to which we still trust photographs to tell us the truth, despite their utterly mute, mysterious quality; and the way they always seem to refer to what is already "lost for ever," even if we are only looking at a snapshot from a couple of years ago.

The Rings of Saturn is a melancholic's, not a rake's, progress, and what Sebald is passing through is a blighted late twentieth-century, and not a potentially abundant eighteenth-century, terrain. But walking around Norfolk and Suffolk, he is also buried deep in the archive; he is like the colleague he describes who lived in a "paper universe" so layered that it resembled a natural landscape. In fact, the book is a kind of guided tour through the paper universe of literature and history - an attempt "to reconstruct from the sources," in the least melodramatic way imaginable, the catastrophic quality of human imagination and power. History "is but a long account of calamities," Sebald writes at the end of the book. Recalling a visit to the Waterloo Panorama, a "horrific three-dimensional scene," which depicts the whole bloody battle, he observes: "This then . . . is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was."

The book often seems to be driven by the randomness evident in the table of contents (the heading for chapter three reads: "Fishermen on the beach - The natural history of the herring - George Wyndham Le Strange - A great herd of swine - The reduplication of man - Orbis Tertius"). "I could not help thinking," Sebald writes again and again, as he turns from various odd and whimsical stories to the destruction wrought by a hurricane, to the culture of silk in China and Europe (including its promotion by the Third Reich), to the deadly exploitation of the indigenous people of the Congo, to a book cataloguing "all conceivable forms of violent death" during the First World War, to the story of Conrad's early life, which included work as a sailor on a ship that sailed regularly between Lowestoft and Newcastle.

Lowestoft is one of the first stops on Sebald's own tour; by the time we encounter Conrad, Sebald has already detailed the former coastal resort's prosperous history and disastrous decline. In its way, this apparent coincidence is almost as shocking as the descriptions of carnage that fill The Rings of Saturn - and it is, equally, Sebald's subject. Like Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century doctor and writer whose textual presence suffuses the book, he is fascinated by singular phenomena, but he is also obsessed by uncanny doublings. "No matter how often I tell myself that chance happenings of this kind occur far more often than we suspect," he writes of the strange parallels between his life and Hamburger's, "my rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency."

Of course, what haunts him is not just repetition, but his own inadequacy. In the midst of a long discourse on silk weavers, he writes, "It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread." Nevertheless, The Rings of Saturn is structured as intricately as the labyrinth in which Sebald finds himself caught one afternoon on Dunwich Heath. Months later, in a dream, he finds himself looking down at that labyrinth, and realizes that it "represented a cross-section of my brain."

At the memorial to the battle of Waterloo, Sebald wonders: "Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point?" Whether mapping his own rigorously ethical, saturnine mind, convulsed by coincidence, onto the landscape or weaving it into world history, he makes it clear that art and violence have long-standing, concrete affiliations. Conrad was irrevocably shaped by what he witnessed in the Belgian Congo; European museums are filled with paintings bought with capital accumulated from the slave labor that produced sugar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sebald's insistence that we write from this grim position is what makes his project both expansively precise and frighteningly lyrical.

Lisa Cohen has contributed to the Lingua Franca Book Review and the VLS.