A Short Walk Through The Rings of Saturn

There are only a very few authors in my life as a reader whose work seemed so ar­resting to me that, upon encountering it, I felt compelled to try to read every word. It’s a peculiar relationship, this read-every-word relationship, and I don’t know if I can say uniformly that it is a beneficial relationship. Still, it’s a joyful and exciting thing when you’re in the midst of it, textual compulsion. For me, the work of W. G. Sebald is the most recent example of this textual compulsion, and my case of it dates back about five years. Other examples of the illness in me, from adolescence on, are, in chronological order: Kurt Vonnegut, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Bernhard, William Gaddis, Ryszard Kapu­´sci´nski, and Lydia Davis.

Obviously, there are other writers of whose work I have read all or most, i.e., James Joyce, Herman Mel­ville, Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Bruno Schulz, Thomas Pynchon, and so on. (No particular order to this list.) But with Sebald, and those mentioned above, there’s a difference. The difference with true textual compulsion is that there has to be that element of sacrifice. Are you foregoing food and social relations? Are your personal relationships suffering? Are you going to read these books more or less sequentially? In sophomore year of college, when I was enrolled in Angela Carter’s class in fiction writing, my discovery of Beckett was so overwhelming that for a semester I really did little else but read Beckett and go to class. Well, I also took drugs. That is, there were three things I did: went to writing workshop, took drugs, and read Beckett. I had a sort of Beckettian throne, a large revolving globus hystericus of a chair that I had stolen from the lounge of the graduate center of Brown University, that grim, unforgiving building de­signed in the eastern bloc style, in which I would also take more drugs and feebly attempt suicide in the following academic year. This globus hystericus was the perfect throne for reading Beckett. With textual compulsion, I would argue, you should always arrange an appropriate reading environment.

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These remarks will meander in the way that the book under discussion, The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, meanders, but having said so it is also true that I feel obliged to fulfill some of the responsibilities of the essayist, namely the relation of genuine factual material (Sebald does the same in his book), so let me note that The Rings of Saturn was the third work of “prose...