Field Notes - ENGL 817AJ - Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

Every time I picked up Rings of Saturn (1995) to read it I would get drowsy to the point where I actually fell asleep a few times! I needed to read one chapter at a time to make it through. And I don't know if it was because the book has an aura of dreaminess about it the way it meanders through the English countryside, or ... Regardless, and despite thinking about it critically the whole read, I was not able to contextualize it within the realm of the course material until it was discussed in class. Then things started making much more sense.

One thing that was talked about in class is how Sebald uses a location anchor somewhere in Suffolk at the start of every section before he reminiscences off into historical vignettes. I picked up on how the table of contents sort of maps out what to expect from the book's structure, but that the structure is introduced to the reader in a subtle way. The historical vignettes are slowly introduced with ones that are more closely related to the English countryside, such as manor house at Somerleyton and the history of herring fishing, before they get more broad in scope by adding Amsterdam, China, and Africa. This slow repetitive structure building of introducing the location anchor and then the vignette makes it less jarring for the reader as the transitions get more abrupt.

My classmate's paper on the Anthropocene present in Rings of Saturn was fascinating. I absolutely did not pick up on that connection at all. But as we were discussing it in class, and the idea of nature trying to reclaim abandoned places was brought in, my professor mentioned nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll and that just got me thinking about the current series of Godzilla films. While the titans in the films are radioactive and consume radiation as nourishment, the films also have a sub-storyline that empathizes with the fate of the planet and the creatures because wherever the titans go, destruction or not, their radiation prompts a regrowth in nature at the site. It is wishful thinking for science fiction to depict radio activity this way because it is actually a large contributor to mankind's decimation of the earth environment in the real world.

Another thread of discussion in class was regarding how format, or genre can inform us about how the text is a map. It made me think of three things:

1. Romance Novel Tropes
   Tropes like slow burn, friends or enemies to lovers, and sharing a bed, all set out an expected plot-path the the book is going to take. When a book is touted as a slow burn, it means there is going to be significant tension building between characters for the vast majority of the novel until things finally start to come to fruition unnervingly close to the end of the text.
   
   
2. Choose Your Own Adventure Novels
   These are very cartographic in their structure because they literally have you choose between options and then tell you where to go: page 4 for this option or page 15 for the other. Read result. Choose next path from set given. Not only are these books not able to be read front to back, but a road map during the writing process needs to be maintained so that all the story paths eventually lead to a cohesive ending, or multiple endings. These multiple threads need to make sense, be mapped, when they are weaving in and out of themselves.
   
   
3. Translated Books
   Often books in other languages don't follow western publishing standards, even when they are translated and published as an English version. This means expected conventions like chapters, that allow for a purposeful break in the reading to help ups navigate a book, are not always present and it may be harder to follow along with changes in characters or locations.

I am also obsessed with the potential link there may be between Thomas Browne's Urn Burial that Sebald mentions throughout his ramblings and a sci-fi book of the same name by Robert Westall that I have read multiple times!

Sebald writes on Browne: 

"Curiously enough, Browne himself, in his famous part-archaeological and part-metaphysical treatise, Urn Burial, offers the most fitting commentary on the subsequent odyssey of his own skull when he writes that to be gnaw'd out of our graves is a tragical abomination." (pg. 11, emphasis mine)

In Westall's novel, a country boy finds an alien creature buried in an ancient cairn and proceeds to continually investigate the body and its artifacts. Browne writes about his skull being passed around, and this boy in Westall handles the alien's helmet numerous times triggering flashbacks of the creature's life and conflicts. The boy doesn't seem to desecrating the burial, but he also cannot leave it alone. Something about this triggers within me about what Sebald noted about Browne's treatise. I might have to dig into this WAY more and see if there is actually something there. I'm so intrigued!

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My whole semesters worth of field notes are due in next week for grading, but I had to playfully chastise my professor about having them due before the last book is set for discussion. So, now I'm trying to fast track reading through Peng Shephard's The Cartographers (2022) and so far: I am loving it! I blew through the first 90 pages in one sitting and I'm so curious about where its going. I've already drawn a comparison with some of my final paper research that I can't wait to write about in my final field notes!