Lucienne Loh University of Wisconsin-Madison ________________________________________________________________________
‘The Past is a Foreign Country’: Buried Legacies of Empire in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
In the aftermath of the London bombings in July 2005 by British citizens with Middle Eastern and African backgrounds, Britons were forced in some ways to reckon with the racial anxieties formed by the enduring legacies of colonialism. In an effort to revitalize the temporarily thwarted spirit of integration, the British chancellor, Gordon Brown used his first speech of 2006 to urge the British to become more patriotic in order to promote a ‘new’ nationalism, based not in the traditional forms of patriotism and exclusion, but in terms of the more liberal spirits of pluralism and tolerance. Yet, this new nationalism – if it is to succeed — will require a radical revision in the ideas which have seemingly formed the bedrock of British identity for centuries. It will demand novel transformations of notions such as heritage and tradition, and its impact will no doubt be felt most deeply in rural Britain, where these sentiments are most passionately defended. Traditionally vested with preserving the most enduring of English traditions, rural Britain constructs in the popular national imagination what the historian Herbert Butterfield has termed an “inescapable heritage” forming “part of the landscape of English life, like our court lanes or our November mists or historic inns.” [1]
Against the backdrop of Britain’s current cultural climate, The Rings of Saturn, published in1998, by the German writer and émigré, W.G. Sebald, is a particularly salient text for complicating the place of such time-honored verities as those articulated by Butterfield. Often praised for “his strange capacity for merging and dissolving the present into the past,” [2] Sebald tests the terms on which the present is understood through alternative visions of the past. Indeed, whether the nation responds to Gordon Brown’s entreaties depends in part on rural England nurturing a more inclusive spirit and a more expansive understanding of how larger socio-political networks involving other countries have contributed to sustaining, paradoxically, the timeless spirit encapsulated by images of the English countryside. In Sebald’s memoir-like text, based around a walking tour of the Norfolk and Suffolk coast (an area considered “deep England),” Sebald reveals that despite its bucolic appearance, rural East Anglia was complicit in the violence of Britain’s imperial endeavors. As one influential review of the book claimed, Sebald’s text makes palpable “England’s imperial past and the nature of decline, of loss and decay,” [3]
Sebald also questions the means by which the legacy of colonialism is encapsulated within a national understanding of heritage. In his compelling study on heritage and memory, the British historian, Raphael Samuel has argued that since the 1960s, a historicist turn in British national culture manifested itself in the attention to material histories which included a vision of the country’s landscape as the grand subject of England’s history and the palimpsest upon which the national past in inscribed. Samuel argues that these approaches attempt to reveal “the genius of national life and character.” [4] Yet, as Samuel has also noted, overseas colonization and settlement hardly figure in this relatively novel approach to material investigations into England’s buried histories. Sebald is similarly invested in this ‘history on the ground,’ but is simultaneously interested in destabilizing the foundations for an aggrandized national past.
The turn away from the metropolis as the site for a meditation on the legacies of empire deserves some critical foregrounding. Post-colonial cities such as Lagos, Singapore and Bombay continue to display visible imprints of imperialism in terms of their architecture and the institutions which perpetuate the legacies of British colonialism. London, the seat of the erstwhile empire, similarly continues to boast an image of the powerful, prestigious and consuming capital – an image consolidated in the late nineteenth century during the apogee of imperialism. [5] Yet post-colonial critics offer scant attention to how the rural also constructs a narrative of British imperial legacy. By allowing some of these historical threads to surface in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald acknowledges the histories of imperialism suppressed by grand narratives couched in terms of rural traditions and heritage.
These suppressed histories however depend on preserving the countryside as authentically English while propagating a national amnesia about the profound influences on the countryside situated well beyond English shores. Paradoxically, these influences have often been absorbed within the national imaginary and reconfigured as British, garnering further sentiment for the countryside as repository for an authentic and exclusive England. Sebald’s text articulates this paradox. Through chronicling his personal recollections and historical excavations inspired by the rural landscape, he disrupts a seamless and stable national narrative based around the emotive power of rural England. However, this emotive power is by no means lost on Sebald. Through an attitude, which I term “ironic nostalgia,” Sebald both partakes in the sentimentality which contributes to the “enduring character” of the rural, but also brings into relief the oftentimes violent histories of the British empire’s economic and cultural legacy, which for Sebald constitutes the “paralyzing horror … [of] traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident in that remote place [East Anglia]” (3). In the chapter where Sebald visits Somerleyton Manor, he reveals that the countryside is imbricated within this legacy even while signs of these tenuous connections are obscure.
Sebald meditates on the halcyon days of the English manor house, and he prefaces the details of his visit to Somerleyton Manor with a lingering gaze upon the Suffolk landscape where “save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization” (30). Even while manor houses serve as one of the most visible material representations of the rural landscape, the natural environment is also an important aspect of “the enduring character of Britain.” Yet for Sebald, everywhere evident in this landscape are signs of a civilization on its decline. Surrounded by a pervasive air of decay, this backdrop frames Sebald’s exploration of the manor house and establishes the rural as a space of contradiction: it is both anachronistic and glorified as the persistent cornerstone of English identity.
In reflecting upon his visit to Somerleyton Hall – an old remodeled Victorian estate in Suffolk – Sebald exposes the circuits of lucre which sustained the height of the country-house system, an époque congruent with the peak of 19th Century British imperialism. Regarded as one of the most lavish manors in England – Somerleyton’s material resplendence fired the nation’s imagination, and was maintained, as Sebald informs us, by a certain Sir Morton Peto, whose shrewd financial investments in colonial railway building through his railway contracting firm, Messrs. Jackson, Brassey, Peto & Betts, [6] afforded Peto’s “ascent into the highest social spheres by establishing a country residence, the comfort and extravagance of which would eclipse everything the nation had hitherto seen” (33). The extensive railway networks which the British built were of course a key technology in Britain’s “colonizing” mission, providing a means to transport the spices, sugar, tea,
co
ffee, tobacco, gold and silver which fed the
mercantile profits that sustained an English social order. [7] These buried connections between Somerleyton Manor and the colonies only surface through Sebald’s own investigations into Peto, but they are subtly downplayed as the spontaneous recollections by a casual observer wandering Somerleyton’s grounds.
Sebald thus implicitly criticizes Britain’s colonial endeavors by undermining the class structure which depended on the economic exploitation of the colonies. Sebald asserts that “[M]en of middle-class background who had achieved great wealth through industrial enterprise, wanting to establish a legitimate position in higher society, acquired large country mansions and estates, where they abandoned the utilitarian principles they had always upheld in favour of hunting and shooting, which, although it was quite useless and bent only on destruction, was not considered by anyone as an aberration” (222). The unprecedented industrialization of nineteenth century England would have been impossible without colonial development, and industrialists, such as Peto, built their empires upon the backs of rural economies within the colonies. They vaunted their wealth through establishing manor homes, such as Somerleyton, which then became absorbed within the national imaginary as part of British inheritance. By exposing the nexus between the economies of these manor houses and the colonies, Sebald suggests that the social fabric of England, bound by an exclusive rural heritage, was dependent on elided links to colonialism.
While the manor house represented demonstrable success at the apex of Nineteenth century English society, and in time, came to represent English heritage, the interior of manor homes also came to represent national identity. Linda Colley argues that from the early nineteenth century, private treasures came to be seen as British national heritage, and “aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people’s property also.” [8] Indeed, Paul Gilroy has called the “country house and its tainted splendour an important signifier of the contemporary ruralist distillate of national life.” [9] Somerleyton Hall brims with a surreal mélange of objects culled from the corners of empire. Sebald observes that it is “full of bygone paraphernalia” and notices “[A] camphorwood chest which may have once accompanied a former occupant of the house on a tour of duty to Nigeria or Singapore” (35). Memories and objects of colonial exploits shroud the manor, and for Sebald, the camphorwood chest is redolent with colonial diplomats packed off to far flung reaches of the empire. In another one of these seemingly innocuous moments of spontaneous recollection, he underscores the possible material histories of the objects in the manor house. The walls of Somerleyton proudly display “hussar’s sabers, African masks, spears, safari trophies, hand-coloured engravings of Boer War battles” (35), which all boast the spoils of colonial triumphs. Yet, the leveled histories encompassed by the objects in Sebald’s list reflect the tourist’s gaze which only consumes these objects as part of Britain’s national heritage, often failing to acknowledge the histories of colonial engagement signified by each object. Sebald however, suggests that to view these objects as innocent national treasures occludes the unspeakable histories of violence undergirding these objects, echoing Walter Benjamin’s caveat for the historical materialist that “without exception, the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror […] .” [10]
Sebald thus undercuts the myth underlying the popular perception of “British national heritage.” David Lowenthal argues that “[H]eritage keeps outsiders at bay through claims of superiority that are unfathomable or offensive to others […] as hidden and enigmatic, yet irrefutable.”[11] Manor houses, such as Somerlyton are viewed as a vital part of Britain’s heritage, but as a relative outsider to this particular national sentiment, [12] Sebald is particularly well positioned to reveal the incongruous histories buried within Somerleyton which appear unfathomable to him. He comments that “one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s-land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent. Nor can one readily say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist […].” (36) By explicitly mentioning the “heart of the dark continent,” Sebald refers to Joseph Conrad’s infamous synecdoche for central Africa, [13] thus making the connection between Somerleyton and the colonies more explicit. But Sebald also disrupts the cohesive myth of national heritage which naturalizes the spoils of empire as part of British civilization. By drawing attention to the disjunctive and disparate histories represented by objects housed within Somerleyton, Sebald questions some of the foundations of British heritage.
Given this particular reading of Sebald’s presentation of the manor house, the tinge of nostalgia for the “good old days” which emerges at points in this chapter may be read quite ironically. When Sebald seems to rue the “unremittingly good taste,” (36) that Somerleyton once supported, he appears to mock the British sensibilities which would deem such a strange agglomeration of objects as “good taste”. He concludes furthermore that “Somerleyton strikes the visitor of today no longer as an oriental palace fairy tale,” (35) and while there certainly seems to be a tone of regret at the manor’s fallen splendour, the emphasis instead seems to be on the visitor’s disappointment at not being able to indulge in the grandeur which once bedazzled the Victorian public. A desire to indulge in this kind of “orientalism” suggests the public’s continued illusion of the manor house as a wholly British construct, and reaffirms Edward Said’s argument of “orientalism” as an occidental ideology constructed and naturalized as European cultural discourse. [14]
This “ironic nostalgia” coalesces around a particular passage where Sebald is at pains to list the extensive material objects he assumes were needed to sustain Somerleyton. Presented as yet another moment of spontaneous recollection, this piece of historiographical investigation reveals a recreation of the manor scene which Sebald seems to delight in. He imagines the “the Italian tiles and fittings for the bathrooms, the boiler and pipes for the hothouses, supplies from the market gardens, cases of hock and Bordeaux, lawn mowers and great boxes of whalebone corsets and crinolines from London (31).However, Sebald most notably foregrounds the circuit of trade and industry which lay at the heart of country manor living by providing the explicit detail of the “olive-green-liveried steam train” which delivered all these goods “from other parts of the country.” Instead of erasing the circuits of labour, Sebald foregrounds the interconnectedness between the social structures of the manor and the industrial and entrepreneurial networks which supported these structures. By implication, he once again draws attention to the vast imperial commercial networks which afforded the lavish lifestyles of Victorian elites.
Even while Sebald admits that for the country manor, all “[I]t takes [is] just one awful second […] and an entire epoch passes,” (31) his tone is not woeful. Instead the pensiveness about the passing of this particular historical moment as an “awful” one suggests an ironic perspective of the manor house, which has continued to prove so alluring to the national imaginary, but whose allure simultaneously belies multiple layers of violent histories. Sebald exposes the myth underlying an exclusive national heritage nurtured through such signifiers as the manor house, by per
sistently alluding to th
e legacies of empire entombed in the chambers of Somerleyton Hall.
_____________________________________
I have merely focused on one specific chapter in The Rings of Saturn, which is the key text for a longer dissertation chapter. I felt a focus on this particular chapter would prove particularly relevant, in part because the English manor house continues to serve as the talisman of Englishness projected worldwide by the global tourist industry. I would like to thank Victor Bascara, Rob Nixon and Rebecca Walkowitz for their generous feedback on the longer project.
Notes
[1] Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944) 2. [2] “Mourning has Broken,” The Economist 5 March 2005: 81. [3] Robert McCrum, in his review of The Rings of Saturn asserts that the text “is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline, of loss and decay.” The Observer 7 June, 1998: 15. [4] Raphael Samuel, The Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994) 158. [5] For the argument supporting the rise of the country house lifestyle as congruent with the ascendancy of British imperialism in Nineteenth century England, see Raymond Williams’ influential study, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) 279-88. [6] “Early Railways between New England and Canada.” Engineering News. 4 August 1892 [7] Williams, 280. [8] See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). [9] See Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). [10] Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations. (Harcourt Brace, 1968) 253-65. [11] Lowenthal 129. [12] Sebald, originally of German citizenship, migrated to England in 1966, and lived in East Anglia after 1970 until his untimely death in 2000. But despite his long-term residence in England, he mentioned in an interview with James Wood in 1998, when Rings of Saturn was published, that “[S]till, in England, I’m not at home. I consider myself a guest in that country.” [13] In the chapter on Roger Casement and the Congo in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald is uncompromising in his condemnation of Belgium’s brutal colonization and exploitation of Belgian Congo. [14] See Edward Said’s introduction in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 1-28.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. 1968. Trans. Hannah Arendt. Harcourt Brace, 1968. Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. McCrum, Robert. “McCrum on W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn.” The Observer 7 June 1998: 15. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.1994. Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London, New York: Verso, 1994. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Wood, James. Personal Interview. Brick 59 (1998): 29.
Lucienne Loh: On W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn
Lucienne Loh
University of Wisconsin-Madison
________________________________________________________________________
‘The Past is a Foreign Country’: Buried Legacies of Empire in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
In the aftermath of the London bombings in July 2005 by British citizens with Middle Eastern and African backgrounds, Britons were forced in some ways to reckon with the racial anxieties formed by the enduring legacies of colonialism. In an effort to revitalize the temporarily thwarted spirit of integration, the British chancellor, Gordon Brown used his first speech of 2006 to urge the British to become more patriotic in order to promote a ‘new’ nationalism, based not in the traditional forms of patriotism and exclusion, but in terms of the more liberal spirits of pluralism and tolerance. Yet, this new nationalism – if it is to succeed — will require a radical revision in the ideas which have seemingly formed the bedrock of British identity for centuries. It will demand novel transformations of notions such as heritage and tradition, and its impact will no doubt be felt most deeply in rural Britain, where these sentiments are most passionately defended. Traditionally vested with preserving the most enduring of English traditions, rural Britain constructs in the popular national imagination what the historian Herbert Butterfield has termed an “inescapable heritage” forming “part of the landscape of English life, like our court lanes or our November mists or historic inns.” [1]
Against the backdrop of Britain’s current cultural climate, The Rings of Saturn, published in1998, by the German writer and émigré, W.G. Sebald, is a particularly salient text for complicating the place of such time-honored verities as those articulated by Butterfield. Often praised for “his strange capacity for merging and dissolving the present into the past,” [2] Sebald tests the terms on which the present is understood through alternative visions of the past. Indeed, whether the nation responds to Gordon Brown’s entreaties depends in part on rural England nurturing a more inclusive spirit and a more expansive understanding of how larger socio-political networks involving other countries have contributed to sustaining, paradoxically, the timeless spirit encapsulated by images of the English countryside. In Sebald’s memoir-like text, based around a walking tour of the Norfolk and Suffolk coast (an area considered “deep England),” Sebald reveals that despite its bucolic appearance, rural East Anglia was complicit in the violence of Britain’s imperial endeavors. As one influential review of the book claimed, Sebald’s text makes palpable “England’s imperial past and the nature of decline, of loss and decay,” [3]
Sebald also questions the means by which the legacy of colonialism is encapsulated within a national understanding of heritage. In his compelling study on heritage and memory, the British historian, Raphael Samuel has argued that since the 1960s, a historicist turn in British national culture manifested itself in the attention to material histories which included a vision of the country’s landscape as the grand subject of England’s history and the palimpsest upon which the national past in inscribed. Samuel argues that these approaches attempt to reveal “the genius of national life and character.” [4] Yet, as Samuel has also noted, overseas colonization and settlement hardly figure in this relatively novel approach to material investigations into England’s buried histories. Sebald is similarly invested in this ‘history on the ground,’ but is simultaneously interested in destabilizing the foundations for an aggrandized national past.
The turn away from the metropolis as the site for a meditation on the legacies of empire deserves some critical foregrounding. Post-colonial cities such as Lagos, Singapore and Bombay continue to display visible imprints of imperialism in terms of their architecture and the institutions which perpetuate the legacies of British colonialism. London, the seat of the erstwhile empire, similarly continues to boast an image of the powerful, prestigious and consuming capital – an image consolidated in the late nineteenth century during the apogee of imperialism. [5] Yet post-colonial critics offer scant attention to how the rural also constructs a narrative of British imperial legacy. By allowing some of these historical threads to surface in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald acknowledges the histories of imperialism suppressed by grand narratives couched in terms of rural traditions and heritage.
These suppressed histories however depend on preserving the countryside as authentically English while propagating a national amnesia about the profound influences on the countryside situated well beyond English shores. Paradoxically, these influences have often been absorbed within the national imaginary and reconfigured as British, garnering further sentiment for the countryside as repository for an authentic and exclusive England. Sebald’s text articulates this paradox. Through chronicling his personal recollections and historical excavations inspired by the rural landscape, he disrupts a seamless and stable national narrative based around the emotive power of rural England. However, this emotive power is by no means lost on Sebald. Through an attitude, which I term “ironic nostalgia,” Sebald both partakes in the sentimentality which contributes to the “enduring character” of the rural, but also brings into relief the oftentimes violent histories of the British empire’s economic and cultural legacy, which for Sebald constitutes the “paralyzing horror … [of] traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident in that remote place [East Anglia]” (3). In the chapter where Sebald visits Somerleyton Manor, he reveals that the countryside is imbricated within this legacy even while signs of these tenuous connections are obscure.
Sebald meditates on the halcyon days of the English manor house, and he prefaces the details of his visit to Somerleyton Manor with a lingering gaze upon the Suffolk landscape where “save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization” (30). Even while manor houses serve as one of the most visible material representations of the rural landscape, the natural environment is also an important aspect of “the enduring character of Britain.” Yet for Sebald, everywhere evident in this landscape are signs of a civilization on its decline.
Surrounded by a pervasive air of decay, this backdrop frames Sebald’s exploration of the manor house and establishes the rural as a space of contradiction: it is both anachronistic and glorified as the persistent cornerstone of English identity.
In reflecting upon his visit to Somerleyton Hall – an old remodeled Victorian estate in Suffolk – Sebald exposes the circuits of lucre which sustained the height of the country-house system, an époque congruent with the peak of 19th Century British imperialism. Regarded as one of the most lavish manors in England – Somerleyton’s material resplendence fired the nation’s imagination, and was maintained, as Sebald informs us, by a certain Sir Morton Peto, whose shrewd financial investments in colonial railway building through his railway contracting firm, Messrs. Jackson, Brassey, Peto & Betts, [6] afforded Peto’s “ascent into the highest social spheres by establishing a country residence, the comfort and extravagance of which would eclipse everything the nation had hitherto seen” (33). The extensive railway networks which the British built were of course a key technology in Britain’s “colonizing” mission, providing a means to transport the spices, sugar, tea,
co
ffee, tobacco, gold and silver which fed the
mercantile profits that sustained an English social order. [7] These buried connections between Somerleyton Manor and the colonies only surface through Sebald’s own investigations into Peto, but they are subtly downplayed as the spontaneous recollections by a casual observer wandering Somerleyton’s grounds.
Sebald thus implicitly criticizes Britain’s colonial endeavors by undermining the class structure which depended on the economic exploitation of the colonies. Sebald asserts that “[M]en of middle-class background who had achieved great wealth through industrial enterprise, wanting to establish a legitimate position in higher society, acquired large country mansions and estates, where they abandoned the utilitarian principles they had always upheld in favour of hunting and shooting, which, although it was quite useless and bent only on destruction, was not considered by anyone as an aberration” (222). The unprecedented industrialization of nineteenth century England would have been impossible without colonial development, and industrialists, such as Peto, built their empires upon the backs of rural economies within the colonies. They vaunted their wealth through establishing manor homes, such as Somerleyton, which then became absorbed within the national imaginary as part of British inheritance. By exposing the nexus between the economies of these manor houses and the colonies, Sebald suggests that the social fabric of England, bound by an exclusive rural heritage, was dependent on elided links to colonialism.
While the manor house represented demonstrable success at the apex of Nineteenth century English society, and in time, came to represent English heritage, the interior of manor homes also came to represent national identity. Linda Colley argues that from the early nineteenth century, private treasures came to be seen as British national heritage, and “aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people’s property also.” [8] Indeed, Paul Gilroy has called the “country house and its tainted splendour an important signifier of the contemporary ruralist distillate of national life.” [9] Somerleyton Hall brims with a surreal mélange of objects culled from the corners of empire. Sebald observes that it is “full of bygone paraphernalia” and notices “[A] camphorwood chest which may have once accompanied a former occupant of the house on a tour of duty to Nigeria or Singapore” (35). Memories and objects of colonial exploits shroud the manor, and for Sebald, the camphorwood chest is redolent with colonial diplomats packed off to far flung reaches of the empire. In another one of these seemingly innocuous moments of spontaneous recollection, he underscores the possible material histories of the objects in the manor house. The walls of Somerleyton proudly display “hussar’s sabers, African masks, spears, safari trophies, hand-coloured engravings of Boer War battles” (35), which all boast the spoils of colonial triumphs. Yet, the leveled histories encompassed by the objects in Sebald’s list reflect the tourist’s gaze which only consumes these objects as part of Britain’s national heritage, often failing to acknowledge the histories of colonial engagement signified by each object. Sebald however, suggests that to view these objects as innocent national treasures occludes the unspeakable histories of violence undergirding these objects, echoing Walter Benjamin’s caveat for the historical materialist that “without exception, the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror […] .” [10]
Sebald thus undercuts the myth underlying the popular perception of “British national heritage.” David Lowenthal argues that “[H]eritage keeps outsiders at bay through claims of superiority that are unfathomable or offensive to others […] as hidden and enigmatic, yet irrefutable.”[11] Manor houses, such as Somerlyton are viewed as a vital part of Britain’s heritage, but as a relative outsider to this particular national sentiment, [12] Sebald is particularly well positioned to reveal the incongruous histories buried within Somerleyton which appear unfathomable to him. He comments that “one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s-land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent. Nor can one readily say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist […].” (36) By explicitly mentioning the “heart of the dark continent,” Sebald refers to Joseph Conrad’s infamous synecdoche for central Africa, [13] thus making the connection between Somerleyton and the colonies more explicit. But Sebald also disrupts the cohesive myth of national heritage which naturalizes the spoils of empire as part of British civilization. By drawing attention to the disjunctive and disparate histories represented by objects housed within Somerleyton, Sebald questions some of the foundations of British heritage.
Given this particular reading of Sebald’s presentation of the manor house, the tinge of nostalgia for the “good old days” which emerges at points in this chapter may be read quite ironically. When Sebald seems to rue the “unremittingly good taste,” (36) that Somerleyton once supported, he appears to mock the British sensibilities which would deem such a strange agglomeration of objects as “good taste”. He concludes furthermore that “Somerleyton strikes the visitor of today no longer as an oriental palace fairy tale,” (35) and while there certainly seems to be a tone of regret at the manor’s fallen splendour, the emphasis instead seems to be on the visitor’s disappointment at not being able to indulge in the grandeur which once bedazzled the Victorian public. A desire to indulge in this kind of “orientalism” suggests the public’s continued illusion of the manor house as a wholly British construct, and reaffirms Edward Said’s argument of “orientalism” as an occidental ideology constructed and naturalized as European cultural discourse. [14]
This “ironic nostalgia” coalesces around a particular passage where Sebald is at pains to list the extensive material objects he assumes were needed to sustain Somerleyton. Presented as yet another moment of spontaneous recollection, this piece of historiographical investigation reveals a recreation of the manor scene which Sebald seems to delight in. He imagines the “the Italian tiles and fittings for the bathrooms, the boiler and pipes for the hothouses, supplies from the market gardens, cases of hock and Bordeaux, lawn mowers and great boxes of whalebone corsets and crinolines from London (31).However, Sebald most notably foregrounds the circuit of trade and industry which lay at the heart of country manor living by providing the explicit detail of the “olive-green-liveried steam train” which delivered all these goods “from other parts of the country.” Instead of erasing the circuits of labour, Sebald foregrounds the interconnectedness between the social structures of the manor and the industrial and entrepreneurial networks which supported these structures. By implication, he once again draws attention to the vast imperial commercial networks which afforded the lavish lifestyles of Victorian elites.
Even while Sebald admits that for the country manor, all “[I]t takes [is] just one awful second […] and an entire epoch passes,” (31) his tone is not woeful. Instead the pensiveness about the passing of this particular historical moment as an “awful” one suggests an ironic perspective of the manor house, which has continued to prove so alluring to the national imaginary, but whose allure simultaneously belies multiple layers of violent histories. Sebald exposes the myth underlying an exclusive national heritage nurtured through such signifiers as the manor house, by per
sistently alluding to th
e legacies of empire entombed in the chambers of Somerleyton Hall.
_____________________________________
I have merely focused on one specific chapter in The Rings of Saturn, which is the key text for a longer dissertation chapter. I felt a focus on this particular chapter would prove particularly relevant, in part because the English manor house continues to serve as the talisman of Englishness projected worldwide by the global tourist industry. I would like to thank Victor Bascara, Rob Nixon and Rebecca Walkowitz for their generous feedback on the longer project.
Notes
[1] Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944) 2.
[2] “Mourning has Broken,” The Economist 5 March 2005: 81.
[3] Robert McCrum, in his review of The Rings of Saturn asserts that the text “is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline, of loss and decay.” The Observer 7 June, 1998: 15.
[4] Raphael Samuel, The Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994) 158.
[5] For the argument supporting the rise of the country house lifestyle as congruent with the ascendancy of British imperialism in Nineteenth century England, see Raymond Williams’ influential study, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) 279-88.
[6] “Early Railways between New England and Canada.” Engineering News. 4 August 1892
[7] Williams, 280.
[8] See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
[9] See Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
[10] Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations. (Harcourt Brace, 1968) 253-65.
[11] Lowenthal 129.
[12] Sebald, originally of German citizenship, migrated to England in 1966, and lived in East Anglia after 1970 until his untimely death in 2000. But despite his long-term residence in England, he mentioned in an interview with James Wood in 1998, when Rings of Saturn was published, that “[S]till, in England, I’m not at home. I consider myself a guest in that country.”
[13] In the chapter on Roger Casement and the Congo in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald is uncompromising in his condemnation of Belgium’s brutal colonization and exploitation of Belgian Congo.
[14] See Edward Said’s introduction in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)
1-28.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. 1968.
Trans. Hannah Arendt. Harcourt Brace, 1968.
Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1944.
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
McCrum, Robert. “McCrum on W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn.” The Observer
7 June 1998: 15.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.1994.
Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London, New York: Verso, 1994.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Wood, James. Personal Interview. Brick 59 (1998): 29.