My second-hand book-buying habit having been curtailed by the lockdown, I have been going through my bookshelves taking the opportunity to re-read some of my favourites - such as WG Sebald’s The Rings Of Saturn. I first read it shortly after it came out in English in the late 1990s and was so intrigued that, having reached the last page, I went back to the beginning and read it all through again straight away. It’s a strange and melancholy novel. Ostensibly an account of the narrator’s walking tour of the East Anglian coast the narrative thread loops and wanders and doubles back and zigzags like a dream.
And the author uses photographs. He’s not the only one who has done that in fiction and there is much scholarly writing on the subject – both about him and other authors. What immediately struck me about the images in this novel though is how poorly reproduced they are. They are mostly nondescript and it’s hard to make out any detail at all. Maybe the originals were badly printed; or maybe there was a budgeting issue for the publisher; or maybe this aspect was intended. There are no credits: apparently they are a mixture of found images, archival ones and others taken by the author. There are no captions. The photos are held fast in the text simply by the words all around them, a bit like cobbles set in concrete.
Much significance is attached to all of this by scholars as though the book represents some kind of photographic watershed. Personally, I can’t see it. The best I can manage by way of interpretation is that the photographs are generally as inscrutable as the text. But I don’t really think that they serve any function beyond that and the book would have been just as remarkable, perhaps more so, without them. Text requires one kind of imagination and image requires another so narrative studded with image is a bit of an imaginative minefield.
My personal walk with the book doesn’t stop there though for on his journey the narrator visits Shingle Street. Yes, I can almost hear the sharp intake of breath from regular readers of this blog since I published a photo of mine of that very place in the blogpost Force Majeure in March (below). On holiday last summer in East Anglia I had noticed on an OS map this mysteriously named spot on the Suffolk coast and we cycled out there from our holiday campsite. It was a beautiful day – which does help – and the place seemed deserted. There is a short terrace of houses, a couple of Martello Towers, a long stretch of shingle beach and a lot of sky. Here’s one of the Martello Towers.
It was blissful - one of those places where there is such a sense of space that you sit down, look around, and the world seems to take on a slightly different, almost mythical, aspect.
That’s not how WG Sebald’s narrator saw it though. He recounts rumours of wartime biological weapon experiments there and describes it as “ just one wretched row of humble houses and cottages where I have never encountered a single human being….”
Unreliable narrator? Reliable holidaymaker? Or the other way round? Well, his narrator may not have spotted anyone but I eventually did. The distant figure below approached briefly then disappeared along the shoreline leaving us alone with the waves, the shingle and the sky.
Shingle Street, Suffolk; July 2019.