| Chapter 1: | Postimperial Rural Histories and “Ironic Nostalgia” in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn |
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with the same widespread praise as Sebald’s first prose-fiction text published in English, The Emigrants (1996).3 The Emigrants predominantly explores the memories of displaced European Jews, whose stories—from the perspectives of narrators who are at once Sebald and not—established the tone of melancholic rumination so characteristic of Sebald’s work. Indeed, an overwhelming sense of desolation weighted with the burden of historical consciousness pervades all of Sebald’s texts.
Critics of The Rings of Saturn have, in general, failed to comment on the backdrop for Sebald’s hybrid text, tending to neglect the relationship between the highly descriptive passages of the natural landscape and narratives of European imperialism.4 In a signal review, however, Boyd Tonkin asserts that “[b]ehind Suffolk’s bucolic façades, [Sebald] uncovers tales of imperial cruelty and natural calamity that explode the soft-focus delusions of our Heritage History” (Tonkin 96). Tonkin suggests that both the image of an idyllic countryside and a sense of heritage are mutually constitutive in creating false impressions that obscure a collective national amnesia shrouding the violent realities of Britain’s imperial past.
Sebald attempts to address this historical elision by revealing that rural Suffolk’s innocuous landscape is pitted with persistent histories of cultural contact and conflict a world away from the seemingly halcyon image of East Anglia. This central paradox of The Rings of Saturn thus reveals a fundamental gap in the way Britain conceives of its imperial history. Adiscrepancy exists between the apparently benign and restorative rural landscape, dotted with country homes and stirring ruins, and the traces of the colonial violence that once supported British—and more broadly, European—imperialism. But this central paradox also implies other wider, if far less evident, contemporary social paradoxes. These concern Britain’s collective attempt to address not only the aftermath of imperial decline following the 1960s but also, imbricated within this, the legacies of empire’s triumphs in the form of the waves of immigrants who have transformed the nation’s landscape. Yet, even though Britain’s conurbations maintain a degree of racial tolerance and integration, large swathes of the country, predominantly rural in nature, continue to be