Lateness, Asymmetricity, and Ecological Uncertainty in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

Abstract

This paper analyzes W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn as a literary exploration of ecology and post-historicity. By examining Sebald’s narrative through Timothy Morton’s revision of Hegelian art history as “Asymmetricity,” a prolonged period of post-human Romanticism, Sebald’s vision of history is positioned after the end of a sense of historical progress, a period of ruin and decline where nature begins to reclaim the landscape and history itself. This condition, I argue, is one instance in an ever-repeating cycle of historical and ecological “ends,” whose foil is the concept of ecological melancholy. Ultimately this analysis is a case study in how literature of the Anthropocene so preoccupied with the notion of the “end” encourages narrative estrangement from the world, an estrangement I seek to suture – though not entirely heal – through the recognition of a new historical teleology of engagement with the ecological melancholy’s potential for rebuilding.