The Ruined Archives of W. G. Sebald

Abstract This article examines the relationship between debris and memory in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (2001; originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn ) to argue that mnemonic practices, including acts of autobiographical anamnesis, are shaped by material forms of decay and their textual presence. A corporeal entanglement with debris – either through modes of traveling in and a corresponding literary ethnography of damaged topographies – generates an excremental poetics in which claims to epistemic coherence and univocity are undermined by the twinned assertion of the fragmentary metaphysics of detritus, on the one hand, and the contingent structure of private retrospection and public memorialization, on the other. Material indices of destruction constitute an extensive reliquary in the text. They serve as a primary trope through which multiple sites of violence in their varied but interrelated geological, climatic, cultural, and geopolitical registers are brought into overlapping intertextual and intermedial encounters. Memory, especially in its close conjunction with place, becomes a tool of narrative cartography that deviates (from) the path of linear history and brings other worlds and times into potential cosmopolitical exchanges. This article analyzes Sebald’s articulation of such memorial cosmopolitics through his charting of an extinction imaginary. By focusing on the specific configurations of memory afforded by ruination, and the engendering of historical records through spectral and speculative modalities of absence, amnesia, illness, and disability, I argue that The Rings of Saturn destabilizes both the sanitized notion of bounded personhood as the epistemic center of historical knowledge, as well as the anthropocentric lens through which narrative production is predominantly construed. Correspondingly, focusing on the status of ruination as material phenomena, and epistemological and narrative resource, I read Sebald’s textual politics of ruins as a productive conceptual intervention into the terrain of private and public memory in the context of the Anthropocene’s multiple entanglements with trajectories of extraction, depletion, and extinction. 1