The Thomas Browne of WG Sebald

The World After Progress: The Thomas Browne of W. G. Sebald Dawn Morgan St Thomas University

he late twentieth-century prose fiction of the German writer TW. G. Sebald is noted for its novelty and strangeness, even, and perhaps especially, by readers of the English translations (Long 3–4). The work translated into English as The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage (1998) is doubly strange for the English reader because it is generated in part by reviving and recasting English genres of the seventeenth century, particularly those of natural history and anatomy, as formulated in English works by Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. To an interviewer from the Observer, Sebald described his astonishment at what he found in such works: It so happens that a friend of mine was in the process of translating into German—which is quite an impossible task— Aubrey’s Brief Lives [1693], and he did it in the most brilliant way by inventing an artificial seventeenth-century German, and so I got more and more into reading seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English authors, and the density of the miraculous achievements is staggering. (McCrum 17)

ESC 39.2–3 (June/September 2013): 217–249 Sebald’s reliance on and, in some instances, verbatim re-voicing of Browne’s prose in The Rings of Saturn seems to exploit generic potentials not suspected or detected by recent writers of English, or at least not with Dawn Morgan is the same breadth of cross-linguistic appeal. As well as a poet and fiction Associate Professor of writer, Sebald was a literary scholar with the linguistic means and critical English at St Thomas inclinations to take seriously and envision new relevance for what are University in Fredericton otherwise considered to be historically exhausted forms of writing. An where she teaches the examination here of the generic potentials that Sebald liberates from the history of the novel, English and develops for his own German works leads to an important comedy in the novel, reassessment of these old genres and texts and of those by Sir Thomas and eighteenth-century Browne in particular. Consideration of Browne’s genres and the uses to literature. She has which they are put in Sebald helps also to account for a difficult aspect of published on Laurence Sebald’s work—its laughter—and the ways in which that laughter is pro- Sterne’s Tristram Shandy duced in yoking seventeenth-century English to a sustained and entirely and on questions of genre earnest critique of progress. By progress, I mean the Whig view of the in the early modern past as inevitably leading to, and therefore legitimizing, present prevailing natural philosophy of conditions, which are by this means projected into the future (Butterfield Walter Charleton (1619 to v). But whereas Butterfield was addressing historians and what he takes 1707) and Joseph Glanvill to be volitional ideological practices of historiography, his definition is (1636 to 1680). augmented through the present reading with the assertion that the idea of progress is more or less seamlessly bound up with the historical process of secularization. I understand secularization as a displacement of the seventeenth-century Christian trajectory of history. Sebald’s critique of progress is a productive effect of his recuperation of texts and genres that are not themselves scientifically modern but that helped to make available the identity and displacement of redemption with progress as the justify- ing telos of scientific modernity. The Rings of Saturn instructs us in how Thomas Browne locates and refuses the trope of progress, providing Sebald with a model of the generic process by which to locate his own critique.

Genres, History, Laughter That a writer from outside the English language should recognize and activate Browne’s genres for new uses in the twentieth- and twenty-first century is as it should be, according to M. M. Bakhtin’s socio-historical theory of genre, which stresses the value of “outsideness,” of perspectives from outside a culture, and, in this case, outside the language, for recogniz- ing generic potentials. Like all meanings, the fullest capacities of a genre only become apparent “once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning” and “they engage in a kind of dialogue…. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself

218 | Morgan … and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths” (Speech Genres 7). “Outsideness” in Bakhtin’s formulation designates his embrace of otherness as constitutive of identi- ties and texts. It refers also to temporal positioning, which explains how novelty can be the effect produced when twentieth-century authors adopt perspectives afforded by such apparently outmoded, obsolete genres, for every “author is captive of his epoch…. Subsequent times liberate him from this captivity, and literary scholarship is called upon to assist in this liberation” through investigating and disclosing generic potential (5). Existing scholarship on Sebald is primarily by twentieth-century com- paratists who often can read his works in the original German as well as in English translation but who are not necessarily equipped to investi- gate in detail Sebald’s English sources, such as Thomas Browne or the seventeenth-century crisis of genres in which Browne’s works intervene.1 English literary historians, therefore, are uniquely positioned, and perhaps uniquely responsible, for helping to elucidate the formal innovations and narrative implications of both Sebald’s work and the now somewhat changed Thomas Browne, whom we meet through Sebald’s transcultural, transhistorical renewal.2 When Browne and his contemporaries adapted the ancient genre of natural history from the purposes it had served for Aristotle, Pliny, Lucretius, and others, and when they engaged the genre of anatomy from Lucian, Apuleius, and Petronius, they intuited potential uses, “both past and possible,” to which these crystallized perspectives

1 Deane Blackler, in her recent monograph, Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience, argues that Sebald authorizes a disobedient reader. While her analysis is fascinating and productive, it shows no more than passing acquain- tance with seventeenth-century English literature. Similarly, Browne’s writing is mentioned or discussed in just three of the fourteen essays in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (2004), edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Two of those articles are referenced below. Long’s more recent monograph, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, addresses the epistemic implications of Sebald’s use of Browne without specifically addressing its formulation in language, not even examining Browne’s writing in his section on Sebald’s “poetics of digression,” for example (32–35, 137–42). 2 Among the Browne scholars who have discussed Sebald’s appropriations of Browne are Peter N. Miller, who locates Browne in relation to seventeenth- century antiquarianism and interestingly places Sebald at “the end of this trad- ition” (313–15). Reid Barbour, Achsah Guibbory, and Claire Preston have, with distinct emphases, carried out the most recent and comprehensive historical contextualizations and analyses of Browne’s writing, to which my own analysis is indebted and from which it departs. Preston cites The Rings of Saturn in a brief survey of works in which Browne’s “literary remains have survived with extraordinary vigour in the imaginative universe of English letters” (4).

The World After Progress | 219 and ways of thinking could be put. Like his English precursors, Sebald may have now “planted more potentials for unexpected development in the future,” as Bakhtin scholars Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson describe this effect (297). In addition to his emphasis on the perspective of “outsideness,” Bakhtin conceives of genres as the “drive belts” that move between historical reality and the languages and literatures of its representation (Speech Genres 65). For Bakhtin, genres are forms for seeing and thinking about kinds of experience; they “enrich our repertoire of visions of the world” (281) by making aspects of reality visible and interpretable. For we see reality only with “the eyes of genres” (Medvedev 134; Morson and Emerson 276). To an extent, of course, all authors have outsideness with respect to genres. Novelty or newness is produced because in selecting a genre authors impose on themselves a partially alien vision of the world (Morson and Emerson 283). Genres are profoundly historical, however, because they are accumulations or accretions of forms of seeing and interpreting aspects of the world that both guide and constrain future utterances, behaviours, and literatures. Finally, genres are sites of contest and struggle. Authors may hold views at odds with the genre selected, in which case both must adapt or be adapted. There exists conflict between genres for adequacy or supremacy in representing reality. Contesting genres lose their naїveté and self-assurance; they become polemical, conjectural, and double-voiced (Bakhtin Problems 171; Morson 304). Such polemics are evident in Sebald, the grave tone of whose works could not be more pronounced. Yet the gravity often gives way, surprisingly, and coexists with a bizarre humour. Laughter is frequently precipitated for the reader, despite the text’s dogged pursuit and indulgence of melancholy, and such eruptions of laughter have been described in just these terms: bizarre, strange, and even as an undermining flaw. In the context of narrated events, which are preoccu- pied with the widespread destruction and loss wrought by the engines of progress, laughter is viewed by some scholars as involuntarily produced and therefore as unfortunate, inappropriate, and exposing a lack of narrative skill. Greg Bond, for example, points to a linkage between Sebald’s discovery of Browne’s writings and the preponderance, in Sebald, of “ideas on anatomy, dissection and decay.” He then attributes Sebald’s “involuntary comedy” to an inability to sustain that melancholy connection: The few negative critical opinions on Sebald have noted his use of obscure language … or his involuntary comedy. In fact, the latter amounts to the probably inevitable result of the author’s

220 | Morgan insistence on melancholy, for keeping this up over long distances requires a great amount of tact. The risk of running into platitudes or contrivance is high, as is the risk of ridiculous hyperbole, and Sebald is often too close for comfort. (39–40) Bond concurs with German scholar Armin Ayren and the English play- wright Alan Bennett in finding the comedy and “the contrivance” of Sebald’s prose an irritating distraction from its undeniably serious concerns (40). In discussing a particular Sebaldian episode, laced with grand Brownian archaism but landing the narrator in a bathetic mess, Bond insists that “If Sebald was aware of how incongruous language and subject are in this passage, and others, then the question would have to be asked as to the real function of the comedy. Rather I suspect that this kind of stylis- tic faux pas is what happens when the melancholic gaze has to be upheld at all costs, even when there is nothing to fix itself upon” (40–41). Here Bond identifies a mechanism of laughter in Sebald—the incongruity of language used to the event described—but is mistaken in backing away from inquir- ing into the question his own analysis raises (“as to the real function of the comedy”). Bond settles for his aesthetic judgment of Sebald’s humour as aberrant and out of place. But this is precisely why a historical reading of Browne is essential to understanding Sebald’s humour. Like Browne’s comedy, and like that of Browne’s contemporary, Robert Burton, I find the laughter to be productive and historically significant, if not indeed necessary. Its combination with melancholy registers a pronounced and self- dramatizing double-voicedness that arises from purposeful and productive generic conflict that, in turn, signifies epistemic uncertainty and crisis and the necessity of finding new principles of categorization. Laughter in Sebald puts the aspirations and monuments, including textual monuments, which mark historical progress in the pursuit of knowledge, into dialogue with the widespread evidence of its failure and ruin.

Sebald’s Browne The works by Browne specifically incorporated by Sebald are the carnivalesque pairing, Hydriotaphia, which I shall refer to by its English title, Urne Buriall, and The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Pseudodoxia Epidemica, known by the English title Vulgar Errors (1646, 1650, 1658, 1672), and Musaeum Clausum, or Bibliotheca Abscondita, which appears as Book xiii of Browne’s posthumously published Miscellany Tracts (1683, 1684).3 3 Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus are distinct texts that have always been published together, a pairing that Claire Preston views as not implying substan- tive companionship but a mere accident of timing and publication. According

The World After Progress | 221 I will refer also to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 to 1641), a work of breathtaking scope and bulk that enjoyed six editions during Burton’s life and a definitive posthumous edition. Progressive in its acceptance of the Galilean universe and digressive in its exhaustive consideration of authority on its topic of melancholy, Burton’s two-faced, multi-voiced Anatomy is the chief precursor, and perhaps chief inter- locutor, of Browne’s adoption of this genre. Reference to Burton’s work is necessary, too, as I attempt to maintain a focus on Sebald’s Browne, for in The Rings of Saturn Sebald finds his comic subject matter largely in the miseries of scholars, a subject directly available in Burton and perhaps as instantiated in the historical figure of Browne-as-antiquarian.4 In these and other English incarnations of the ancient genres, natural history and anatomy are often fully intertwined and sometimes at odds or in competition with each other. Their violations of genre boundaries and their cross-fertilizations are enormously productive in making conceivable the rearrangement of categorical boundaries, which was well underway in Browne’s time, giving both writers’ appropriations of these genres their particular seventeenth-century English character. As practised by Browne and others, both genres lose their naïveté and even thematize their aware- ness of viable alternatives for representing the subject matter at hand. Both genres register, as well, contemporary religious and political polemics with which I do not engage at length here, except to briefly indicate some of the ways in which seventeenth-century English writers were constrained, intentionally or structurally, to merge or adapt received generic resources partly in response to those conflicts. They were sifting through, juxtapos- ing, and recombining all possible perspectives, accessed through genres, in order to address, confront, and perhaps outwit those polemics. Achsah Guibbory shows how Urne Buriall, for example, investigates “obliquely and … anxiously the value of ceremony and ritual in human life” at a time when the Church of England “had been dismantled … its ceremonial worship outlawed … and the burial rites of the church” forbidden. Even Browne’s Norwich Cathedral had been “desecrated by iconoclasts” (131). Browne’s

to Preston, The Garden of Cyrus “seems unrelated to the saturnine humour of its partner” (174), and the pairing with Urne Buriall unfortunately “obscure[s] the individual design (and merit)” of The Garden of Cyrus (206) in particular. Whether or not the textual pairing was intentional, their diametrically opposed subject matter, death in the one and vegetal growth and generation in the other, renders them “carnivalesque,” in my designation of the resulting effect. 4 Miller outlines the devaluing of antiquarianism in the later professionalization of historiography (314–15).

222 | Morgan choice of an extended treatment of funerary ceremony in this context, even without mentioning specifically English burial or funerary customs, must be read as oppositional in some sense, perhaps even provocative, rather than as innocent. Guibbory does note “another voice” in Urne Buriall, which “speaks of the vanity and absurdity” of burial rites generally, and this double-voicedness marks the work, for Guibbory, as “representing the cultural conflicts of seventeenth century England” (132–33). Claire Preston traces what I understand to be more structural commercial forces that prompted Browne’s first published work, Religio Medici (1635, 1643), to develop a primitive precursor of the dramatic monologue in bringing together the early modern essay form and the epistle, with its convention of an implied dialogue. Browne announces these generic adaptations in his preface to the 1643 authorized publication, where he addresses the uncivil piracy and illicit publication of his work nearly ten years earlier. By the time of the double-voiced 1643 preface, of course, much else that was uncivil was taking place in the English civil wars, and Preston examines in detail the genre-shaping force of such historic events (47–49). Elsewhere, Preston attributes Browne’s adoption of descriptive, rather than analytical, natural history to his loyalty to the antiquarian collecting of specimens and his subsequent need to address both words and things, instead of privileg- ing one over the other in the suppressions of plain prose—effacement of the signifier (words) to give the appearance of precedence to the signified (things)—which I interpret as a constraint on generic form with epistemic implications (182 and 182 n29). In her treatment of Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus, however, Preston disputes the view that the text is any kind of a “comment on current events,” although she acknowledges that writing about gardens, like funeral practices, could hardly be construed as a “neu- tral act” in the years 1656 to 1658, when the trope of the Puritan activist horticulturalist (of God’s garden) was commonly activated in opposition to the “trope of [aristocratic] retirement” (179–81). “Browne’s Cyrus, like [Andrew] Marvell’s gardener” in Upon Appleton House, “leaves war for planting,” becoming “the answering opposite of Marvell’s Cromwell, who gave up planting bergamot to become God’s soldier” in “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (180). Preston ultimately assigns the peculiarity of Browne’s generically hybrid text not to direct engage- ment with such politics but, more generally, to his “inconvenient” strad- dling of the emergent epistemic divide “between art and science” (179 n23, 191–92, 220). Whatever the motivations or sources of their seventeenth-century adaptation, natural history and anatomy were adapted to the times and

The World After Progress | 223 were important genres of the new philosophy. Both were what we would call non-fiction genres, keeping in mind that the distinction we now make between fact and fiction was itself a central issue, another element of struc- Natural tural, epistemic constraint, for both Burton and Browne. Natural history is defined primarily by its subject matter of nature, the very boundaries of history is which had become untenable. Browne’s natural history is a generic prac- tice that carries out the historical-cultural work of helping to locate those defined boundaries in a way that, as Walter Benjamin has shown in another context, produces “nature” as distinct from “history” (Origin 177–78). Nature primarily by its is thereby rendered available as the object of study for modern science. Anatomy, by contrast, is defined by its approach to subject matter, the subject matter more or less metaphorical (and satirical) peeling away of layers, the “tis- sue,” of received opinion. Anatomy’s peeling away provides for the “piling of nature, the up of an enormous mass of erudition” and the dramatization of conflicts of ideas, to use Northrop Frye’s terms (310–11), all the while emphasiz- very ing the comic element of ideological conflict, as both Frye and Bakhtin point out, the latter in his extended treatment of “menippean satire” and boundaries its constitutive function in the modern, dialogic novel (Problems 112–37). Neither natural history nor anatomy remain genres of serious scien- of which had tific inquiry, and the reasons why are the marks of their alien status for Sebald and the twenty-first century reader.5 At least three features of the become seventeenth-century versions of these genres are prominently exploited in Sebald’s work. First, in Browne’s usage, neither natural history nor anatomy untenable. require or provide a continuous speaking position for a fixed, authoritative subject of knowledge. The speaking subject is, rather, non-singular, variable, and otherwise compromised, largely through disproportion- ate use of quotation and translation, a feature that betrays their reliance, too, as much on documentary as on material evidence and, crucially, on competition between the two.6 Second, neither genre relies on nor privi- leges relations of cause and effect, relying instead for narrative movement primarily on relations of association realized through correspondences

5 These genres remain productive primarily in the literary sphere, in both fiction and nonfiction. In addition to Sebald, Preston cites Susan Sontag, Allen Kurzweil, and Philipp Blom as using “curious and natural historical collecting as themes in recent works” (8). Anatomy, too, remains dynamic as a literary form. I would number Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity among successful recent literary anatomies. Differing from Sebald in the weight they give to plot and the comic element, they are similar in kind to Sebald’s prose works, especially The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. 6 Preston points to such competition in noting that “Browne is different from [his] contemporary antiquarians not only in allowing the artefactual as the equivalent

224 | Morgan and digression. Third, the genres of natural history and anatomy resist narrative closure, or the restitution of wholeness, in favour of sustaining fragmentariness and discontinuity through ambivalent laughter. Their encyclopedic tendencies to amass material, survey all possible principles of categorization, and, in the process, locate and make available new object(s) of inquiry, or at least delineate new categorical boundaries, make Browne and Burton, in particular, apparently recuperable to accounts of the pre- history of the modern scientific project and to characterization of that project as one of redemption. In Browne’s words in Pseudodoxia Epi- demica, “we must betake ourselves to wayes of reparation … for thus we may in some measure repaire our primarie ruins, and build our selves men againe” (30). Preston notes Browne’s increasing ambivalence about this project, finding that Urne Buriall “dismisses its own recollective project while enacting it; and Musaeum Clausum extends this with a collection which tells only of the failure to preserve it” (173). Yet she attributes to old age Browne’s inconsistency and pessimism about ever being able to make reparation (173). By contrast, I take Browne’s wavering commitment to reparation to be productive because it is precisely where his works open up to and make possible a critique of a key element in the formulation of scientific modernity. For when the Christian trajectory that ends in redemption (Innocence-Fall-Guilt-Redemption) is displaced by that of scientific modernity (Enchantment-Disillusion-Enlightenment-Progress), “progress” bears the burden of “redemption” in the peculiar, never-entirely- secular metaphysics of scientific modernity.7 So despite Browne’s own insistence on “reparation” as an accurate description of what he was up to, and therefore of his historical significance and consistency with Francis Bacon’s injunction to remediate “decayed knowledge” (Preston 55), Sebald emphasizes Browne’s works as a repository of linguistic and perspectival resources that can as readily be marshaled for its critique of the modern scientific project as for carrying it out. Sebald’s Browne is perhaps even suggestive of epistemological orderings other than the one that was his-

of the documentary into the realm of evidence, but also in accepting at times that objects outweigh texts in authority and authenticity” (145–46). Browne’s “loyalty to the world of things” is decisive not only for the form of subjectivity produced by his works—its relevance to my discussion here—but in his effective rejection of the trope of progress, which I discuss later in this essay. A “loyalty to the world of things” is the basis of the option to reject allegorical form in Benjamin’s analysis (Origin 157, 233). 7 This briefly sketched metaphysics of progress is based on my reading of Walter Benjamin’s critique of baroque allegory. Fuller elaboration is beyond my scope here but is the subject of an as yet incomplete work.

The World After Progress | 225 toricall realized. Browne’s great value for Sebald lies not in his professed religious theology or politics, or even in his explicit subject matter, but in his sustained loyalty to the fragmentations of matter and texts that constitute reality for any single perspective on it, then as now, a loyalty that constrains and enables Browne to resist (fictional narratives of) reparation. The generic resources that authorize Browne’s representation of non-singular speaking positions, movement by means other than cause and effect, and a fragmented, discontinuous, open-ended universe likewise enable Sebald to reconsider Browne’s achievement, and to explore his future possibilities, in an entirely new way.

Speaking Positions The received and normative speaking position of natural history is directly authorial and in Browne is generally established in prefatory material, in which the historical author comments on or describes his work in dedi- cating it. In the genre of anatomy, especially as derived from Burton, who fully exploits and naturalizes Lucian’s (second century) Menippean satirical development of the form, the speaker dons a mask or a succession of masks. In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, for example, there is no anchor- ing narratorial position. Instead, topics and issues are presented through characters, both historical and mythological, who are mere mouthpieces for ideological positions and points of view. Burton’s narrator initially adopts the mask of Democritus in claiming the identity of his son when he presents himself in the justly famous preface, “Democritus Junior to the Reader.” This mask in Burton is anything but consistently sustained, however. In fact, the identity of the speaker often changes with the subject matter, making these two narrative elements—speaking position and subject matter—merge. Aspects of melancholy arise, for example, that can only be presented by way of the mask of the weeping Heraclitus, the contrary of the laughing philosopher Democritus (iii.346; Colie 395). The narratorial masks repeatedly slip and shift; narrators undergo face changes, including, notably, in Burton, to the mask of Lucian’s “Icaromenippus,” a grotesquely aspiring and falling, laughing and weeping speaker who confounds his own heroic attempts to locate categorical boundaries of his subject matter—the air, in a “Digression of the Air”—as he proceeds through it (ii.34–69). In combining the seemingly unproblematic, directly authorial narrator of natural history, and the shape-changing, subject-sen- sitive masked narrators of anatomy, the speaking positions in Browne are multiplied and complicated. Singular authority is still further undermined through both genres’ use of quotation, paraphrase, and translation, with

226 | Morgan or without quotation marks or attribution. A fixed, authoritative narrative voice and perspective is compromised in the manner of incorporation of these quotes and translated materials and in their bulk and volume rela- tive to the authorial word. The topic of the variable shapes of the Walsingham urns, the discovery of which provides the occasion for Browne’s generically enriched archaeo- logical essay, Urne Buriall, and the materials and methods by which they were made, launches Browne’s narrator into a digressionary sequence beginning with Pliny’s instructions that bricks and tiles used to make the urns should be “of two years old” and that all funerary urns should be made in the spring (111). Immediately following is a typically labyrinthine mass of data from numerous sources, including the Psalms, Plato, and Petronius, informational accretions that comprise more than two pages and that arrive, finally, at the topic of the material of Noah’s Ark, to which the foregoing information is related only by association or analogy in “the Cypresse of the Ark … was the greatest vegetable of Antiquity, if Josephus were not deceived, by some fragments of it in his dayes” (113). This source, Josephus, does not require a full citation for Browne’s first readers, but such attributions permeate Browne’s sentences and preclude certainty of hearing a single authorial voice. From the less digressive Pseudodoxia, the entry “Of Frogges, Toades, and Toad-stone” states the problem to be addressed in that section and commences with quoted and untranslated authority: “That a Toad pisseth, and this way diffuseth its venome, is generally received, not onely with us, but also in other parts; for so hath Scaliger observed in his Comment, Aversum urinam reddere ob oculos persecutoris perniciosam ruricolis persuasum est; and Mathiolus hath also a passage, that a Toad communicates its venom, not onely by urine, but by the humid- ity and slaver of its mouth” (209). In The Garden of Cyrus, too, in the com- mingling of natural history and anatomy, sources tend to become subject matter rather than remain the silent or invisible means of perspective on a discrete topic. In this characteristic passage, the quincuncial pattern for planting is traced to “Latine plantations” on the authority of Quintilian and Virgil, but this attribution is quickly superceded by Browne’s own conjecture about even earlier, Biblical evidence: That the first Plantations not long after the Floud were dis- posed after this manner, the generality and antiquity of this order observed in Vineyards, and Wine plantations, affordeth some conjecture. And since from judicious enquiry, Saturn, who divided the world between his three sonnes, who beareth

The World After Progress | 227 a Sickle in his hand, who taught the plantations of the Vines, the setting, grafting of trees, and the best part of Agriculture, is discovered to be Noah, whether this early dispersed Hus- bandry in Vineyards had not its Originall in that Patriarch, is no such Paralogicall doubt. (178–79). The historical author appears here as an allegorist, whose sources have become subject matter. Note how the mythological authority of Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture, itself an accretion and displacement of the Greek Dionysius, and he of Demeter, is replaced by the scriptural, yet still allegorical, Noah. Throughout Urne Buriall, comments on the topical subject matter of the urns recently discovered are directly authorial. But even these lead frequently to listings of what ancient authority has to say about other urns—Frye’s “piling up of enormous erudition”—and this leads to long discussions of how the contents of those lists—the contents just described and discussed—will not be discussed, in a kind of extended paralipsis or feigned omission. Likewise, Browne piles it up negatively in declining to discuss, in The Garden of Cyrus, the Christian resonances of the quincunx, the shape created by five points arranged like the five on a die, which describes an X. Three long paragraphs each begin with a statement that what is discussed in that paragraph will not be discussed. “Where by the way we shall decline the old Theme, so traced by antiquity, of crosses and crucifixion” opens the paragraph that proceeds to trace the very theme (176). The next paragraph begins, “We will not revive the mysterious crosses of Egypt” and then goes on to discuss those crosses (176). And the next, “We shall not call in the Hebrew Tenupha” and so on (177). Sebald imitates such deadpan fun with this particular Brownian method of dispersing narratorial authority, so expanding his subject matter. In the final chapter of The Rings of Saturn, Browne’s learned jesting in Musaeum Clausum: or, Bibliotheca Abscondita, a catalogue of both plausible and preposterous imaginary books and curios, is introduced and the work’s contents listed over more than two pages, culminating in a Browne-like negation: All of these things are recorded by Browne the doctor and naturalist in his register of marvels, all of these and many more that I do not propose to list in this place, excepting perhaps the bamboo cane in which, at the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinianus, two Persian friars who had long been in China to discover the secrets of sericulture had brought the first eggs

228 | Morgan of the silkworm over the Empire’s borders into the Western world. (273–74) Sebald’s isolation of the legendary bamboo cane, retrieved from Browne’s absconded library with its cabinet of curios, serves to resume his own narrative’s delicate, unifying thread, the thread taken up from Browne and with which Sebald thoroughly interweaves his work with Browne’s. The cultivation and weaving of silk, the stories of which are Sebald’s means of developing the theme that resembles or is the recurrence of Browne’s —where are the boundaries of nature?—and which the reader comes to see as equally pressing for Sebald’s narrator in the historical present as it was for Browne.8 The dispersal of narrative authority develops this theme of the question of the boundaries of nature by representing, through Browne’s narrative material as well as the genres by which that material is perceived, the categorical or epistemic confusion that ensues once the historical conceit of a bounded and atomistic authorship and human subjectivity is relin- quished. Sebald’s work, like Browne’s, productively engages this seeming confusion as a positive value because it enables and indeed enforces the reconsideration of categories by which we know and act in the world. For the shape, or to use the seventeenth-century term, the physiognomy, of the knower necessarily shapes what can be known. In Sebald, received categories that demarcate the knower from what can be known are no longer tenable—nature/history, or since the nineteenth-century, nature/culture, subject/object, author/text, word/thing, fact/fiction—all the structuring binaries on which western European-derived, scientific modernity rests. Yet these categories have not been replaced by any that are better, such as those that might be inclusive of more of reality, with the result that the world they structure finds itself stranded and without a sense of direction.9 Sebald is explicit about what the genre of natural history in particular

8 Preston notes that “the bipartite division of natural and human history” in Pseudodoxia Epidemica “corresponds to Bacon’s partition of The Advancement of Learning into ‘Naturall’ and ‘Civile’ history. But it is equally clear,” Preston continues, “that Browne is following the characteristic division of the cabinets and cabinet-catalogues into ‘naturals’ and ‘artificials’ ” (117). Elsewhere, Preston lists the astonishing diversity of categories and kinds of categories available to Browne in organizing his collecting and classifications (104) and notes “how needy” seventeenth-century investigators were “of some organising principle” (189). 9 Eric Santner’s Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Ger- many asks, in this regard, “What would an alternative model for reconstituting cultural identity look like?” (151). Eluned Summers-Bremner’s Lacanian analysis

The World After Progress | 229 enables him to do in his not unrelated collection of essays, whose title is translated into English as The Natural History of Destruction. In the essays, Sebald launches a polemic about the failure of twentieth-century German literature to address the victimization of Germans, too, in the recent disastrous experiment with fascism. The Nazi period figures more or less obliquely throughout The Rings of Saturn. On the topic of silkworm cultivation and sericulture in the final chapter, for example, the Nazis are among those who, historically, have been enchanted by the difficult luxury of silk-making and who undertook it “with that peculiar thoroughness they brought to everything they touched” (291). The implications and capacities of natural history are most profoundly probed in this work, where, due to the blurring of categorical distinctions, the destructiveness of nature and that wrought by humans is presented and examined on a common representational plane, as though some kind of previously undetected pattern may emerge. In this generic situation, Nazism and the violence it generated appears not as an aberration of history but as fully continuous with what we know of human behaviour through history—the natural history of humanity—as well as with the most widely varying phenomena both natural and historical: the mysterious disappearances and periodic replenishments of herring stocks in the North Sea, which may or may not be entirely due to human greed and overfishing; the 1987 hurricane that destroyed more than fourteen million trees in England; the build- ing and then dereliction, within one or a few generations, of grandiose mansions and estates, at vast expense of money, materials, and labour; the mass killing, by gassing, of cocoons in the harvesting of silk; and the historical casting away of a hapless Anglo-Irish family—with the Urne Buriall-resonant name of Ashbury—found marooned in rural Ireland with no way to support themselves or project themselves into the future and, yet, with no other place to return to—all are eloquent of forces at work in nature and in history. Perceived by way of the combined genres of natural history and anatomy, with their relinquishing of the authoritative I who knows with clarity and who makes ethical and moral judgments through making categorical distinctions, there occurs a conflation of nature and history, one over which the twenty-first century reader is forced to hover and hesitate, confronted with the implications of an equivalence, an unde- niable recurrence and pattern of effects.

of Sebald offers an answer in the “post-traumatic reader,” which makes the subject of vision visible in objectifying it (324).

230 | Morgan Browne, in Browne’s own words, is perhaps the most consistently recurring character/co-narrator in The Rings of Saturn. The central action of this work is a walking tour of about thirty miles altogether, leaving from and returning to Norwich where Browne lived in the seventeenth cen- The variability tury and Sebald in the twentieth. The traveler-narrator is only minimally continuous throughout the journey, largely because he has the habit of and non-fixity slipping into the voices and words of characters he encounters on the road and in his digressive research. Transitions between digressions are often of speakers effected through direct quotation of Browne, but, while his words are usually scrupulously attributed, they are presented without quotation marks. in the genres The narrator builds Browne’s words into his sentence in the seventeenth- century style, as if, even for just that phrase, he were Browne: “The night of Sebald adopts time, wrote Thomas Browne in his treatise of 1658, The Garden of Cyrus, far surpasseth the day and who knows when was the Aequinox?” (154). In this and adapts from example, which I choose for its brevity, the crossing over of voices is more or less acceptable, and might be even in formal scholarship, but most of Browne make Sebald’s quotations are much longer. The narrating I becomes the I of the speaker quoted. The effect is to blur the distinction between speakers. The possible and narrator is increasingly indistinct from his so-called characters and they from him. The variability and non-fixity of speakers in the genres Sebald even necessary adopts and adapts from Browne make possible and even necessary this effacement of the narrator that is so striking and estranging in The Rings this effacement of Saturn. Rather than a defect, or deliberately off-putting difficulty, I read this effacement as the very feature that indicates the historical significance of the narrator of Sebald’s work in exploring and delineating the spaces, grounding, and genres by which we might know the world after progress.10 that is so In addition to Browne, The Rings of Saturn is replete, as are Browne’s works, with intertextual engagements. In Sebald, we encounter the figures, striking and biographies, or words—often all three—of Joseph Conrad, Roger Case- ment, Chateaubriand, Hölderlin, Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, Goethe, estranging in Walter Benjamin, and others. There is mutual generic contact between Sebald, Browne, and the Argentinian writer J. L. Borges in particular, which The Rings of has a bearing on the exponential multiplication of speakers and texts, Saturn. 10 There is critical awkwardness, if not controversy, over the indeterminacy of Se- bald’s genre, due largely to the coexistence of historical fact and flagrant fictional technique. Sebald’s own term is “prose work.” I read Sebald’s prose works as productive forms of the contemporary novel, because novels, as the name announces, by definition incorporate historical conditions and are always bearers of the new. I subscribe to Bakhtin’s view that the novel is without a fixed form, the ur-genre that operates to bring heterogeneous genres into contact in the never-ending struggle to adequately represent and address changing realities.

The World After Progress | 231 and addresses their status as translations. Sebald’s work is composed in German, but its lengthy quotation—marked and unmarked—of Browne’s Urne Buriall and Museum Clausum especially, means that readers of the German original also encounter sizable portions of The Rings of Saturn in translation, while readers of the English translation experience the naturalization of a curious “artificial seventeenth-century German” narrative through the verbatim reproduction of Browne’s elegantly antiquated English. This interaction is further linguistically complicated through the appearances, among many other languages and works, of Borges’s Libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings) and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In Sebald, the titles of both retain the Spanish and Latin forms that emphasize their foreignness. The second title by Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” is already a multilingual designation that defies and in fact has no need for translation. The imbrication of Borges with both Browne and Sebald is a rich topic of its own.11 Here, I can briefly point to how Borges also drew on Browne, as well as Browne’s Spanish contemporary Quevedo, in developing two central ideas (Borges, Tlön 35). The first is that of the “universal author,” in which intertextuality is presented as a more accurate model of the plurality or multiplicity of human subjectivity than the fiction of the singular and discrete author (Johnson 184). The second of the ideas that Borges owed to his reading of Browne is the closely related theory of translations as preferable to original texts because they are successively enriched by the linguistic resources of the languages, genres, and contexts through which they pass, as Borges expounds in his essay, “The Translators of the 1001 Nights,” on the superiority of Richard Burton’s richly annotated English translation, The Arabian Nights. For Borges, subjectivity and translation are interrelated through explicit and flaunted intertextuality and its resultant multi-vocality (Johnson 186–87). When Borges’s uses of Browne are drawn into The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s work novelistically engages its own preconditions as a translation, a text that simultaneously addresses the German, the English, and the Spanish reader and, through them, all the languages and genres from which these European languages and literatures derive. This is indeed Borges’s notion of the universal author, in which authorship is conceived as language itself, the idea exemplified by another Borges narrator, that of “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” who justifies his preference for the cloned Don

11 In addition to Johnson, cited below, see, for example, Rosenstein’s “Browne, Borges, and Back: Phantasmagories of Imaginative Learning” in Barbour and Preston (296–310).

232 | Morgan Quixote of Pierre Menard over Cervantes’s original precisely for the addition of the contexts of the intervening three hundred years.

Narrative Movement Before quoting Browne on the mysteries of human temporal location, Sebald’s narrator cites Borges’s “tract on Orbius [sic] Tertius” (153), which is treated as a factual scholarly authority reviewing the various philoso- phies of time existent on the fictional Tlön. There, the notions that space is continuous and that relations of cause and effect are real and can be traced through time are controversial (24–28). In Sebald’s narrative, the continuity of space and relations of cause and effect similarly become a problem. Indeed, Summers-Bremner aptly describes Sebald’s fictions as “versions of contemporary Gothic” because of the uncanny quality of space, which becomes animate and “phenomenal,” harbouring “dreads and anxious feelings and refuses to be flattened” out as mere backdrop (316). Whereas normative temporal ordering, such as the unfolding of causes and effects integral to the workings of progress, usually “domesticates” and “all but excludes” space in narrative (308, 316), in Sebald space is enlivened when cause-and-effect is reduced to just one fictional convention among possible alternatives for motivating and representing narrative movement. Both space and the means of movement through it, or even the possibility of movement, become objectified, and Sebald achieves distance from the conventionality of cause-and-effect, and all that follows from it, by adopting the alternative means of narrative movement that are dominant and available in Browne’s genres of natural history and anatomy. Medieval natural history was concerned primarily with allegorical and moral interpretation of physical phenomena and typically did not see or locate the biological or physiological creature or matter at all (McCulloch 15–16). The medieval genre focuses on previous textual considerations and enquires into the correspondences between physical features and their emblematic or symbolic significance. Correspondences, therefore, are the principal, internally motivated means of narrative movement within each entry in these compendia. Anatomy is a literary genre also freed from the constraints of causation or plot and, like pre-modern natural history, from conventions for representing normative physical reality. The dominant means of narrative movement is not the cause and effect required to develop plots, or the resemblances that suggest correspondences. Rather, the free- and wide-ranging digression becomes the internally- motivated means for narrative progression. In Browne, relationships of correspondence, that had been natural history’s means of narrative pro-

The World After Progress | 233 pulsion, become problematic and transform into subject matter. Likewise, in Burton’s Anatomy, the digression as the dominant means of narrative movement becomes subject matter as yet another symptom of melancholy. This tendency of the means of narrative movement to become subject matter is a constitutive element of the seventeenth-century form of both genres. Sebald uses both relations of correspondence and the digression as the chief means of narrative movement in The Rings of Saturn, and they have the effect of making strange the conventions of novelistic progress, with its presumption that effects follow from specifiable causes. In Sebald, therefore, the very notion and possibility of progress as a means of historical and narrative movement becomes central to his object of inquiry. Seventeenth-century natural history, including Browne’s, distinguishes itself from the medieval allegorical treatment of nature in its attempt to disaggregate, first, signification from cause and effect and, second, signs from the symbolic or allegorical meanings they have accrued. In his discussion “Of the Canicular or Dogdayes,” for example, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne notes the long-standing association of the seasonal appearance of the dog star with “the Physician’s vacation,” when “all medi- cation is to be declined, and the cure committed unto Nature” (352). He questions the underlying assumption that this star is the cause of “the heat of the season,” however, and cites the ancient authority of Geminus, who “plainly affirmeth, that common opinion made that a cause, which was at first observed but as a sign.” Browne continues, “the rising and setting both of this Star and others being observed by the Ancients, to denote and testifie certain points of mutation, rather then [sic] conceived to induce or effect the same” (353). Because systems of measuring the solar year varied so widely, seasonal change—Browne’s “points of mutation”—came to be marked by “known and invariable signes” such as “the rising and setting of the fixed Stars … not ascribing thereunto any part of causality, but notice and signification” only (353). The sign and significance of the dog star is disentangled further in its attribution to the ancient Egyptians, “the great admirers of dogs in earth and heaven.” Called “Sothis” by the Egyptians and “Siris” by the Ethiopians, the dog star was “looked upon, not with reference unto heat, but celestial influence upon the faculties of man, in order to religion [sic] and all sagacious invention” (354). As such, it was wrongly considered, in Browne’s view, as both the sign and the source of “the abundance and great fertility of Egypt, the overflow of the Nylus hap- pening about the ascent thereof” (354). The former condensation of the sign and its significance (as a cause of effects) produced the hieroglyphic Anubis, which Browne then digresses to describe in detail (354).

234 | Morgan Browne’s natural history is just such a record of the preoccupation with, yet dissolution of, the system of correspondences, which had formerly con- stituted knowledge, the profound and far-reaching significance of which dissolution has been established by Michel Foucault. The Pseudodoxia Browne’s is concerned to separate the complex accretions of signification (signs) from the function of signification in operations of cause and effect. The natural history natural history mode of narrative movement by way of correspondences, therefore, while figuring everywhere, is compromised by itself becoming is just such a the object of study. Elaborate alternative—and often very funny—parti- tioning of subject matter must be undertaken as a result. The suspension record of the or displacement of correspondences triggers the correlative encyclopedic drive to consider other ways of categorizing, and this produces a lack preoccupation of clarity or an obscurity as to what is the object of study. Laughter and generic revision are linked in the bodily sensation of the grounds of rep- with, yet resentation shifting beneath the feet. Sense becomes nonsense, and vice versa. When relations of correspondence become subject matter in Urne dissolution of, Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus, an alternative means of narrative movement is located in the digression. We see digression operating as well the system of even within the encyclopedic or bibliographic entries of the Pseudodoxia and the Musaeum Clausum, where it is frequently put in the service of correspon- anatomizing the theory and mode of correspondence. The first chapter of Urne Buriall winds around a long slow digressionary curve through the dences. topic of the two principal “contrivances of … corporall dissolution,” the burying and the burning of the dead, before arriving finally at the occasion of the present discussion, the discovery of burial urns at Walsingham and what they signify, only in the second chapter. Here the genres of natural history and anatomy exchange a “sideward glance” (Bakhtin, Problems 196). Both digression and correspondence become alternative means of narrative movement, and in this objectification they become available as subject matter. As the record of the narrator’s itinerary, The Rings of Saturn is nomi- nally organized in terms of the chronotope of the road, where events consist in whatever the traveler encounters on the way. Such encounters serve to internally motivate digressions on the physical traces found on the landscape, natural and built, or provoke associations in the traveler’s mind that often lead to the discovery of striking or unexpected correspondences between historical characters, places, objects, and events. The single element binding together the resulting wide-ranging material is the journey from Norwich and back. But just as correspondence becomes subject matter for Browne, and digression becomes subject matter for both

The World After Progress | 235 Burton and Browne, so progress along this or any road becomes Sebald’s subject matter that is increasingly pronounced in the failure to find evidence of progress anywhere along that road. Instead, the traveler-narrator finds correspondences in ruins, corruption, and decay that prompt or are produced by digressions, all of which tend to condense or collapse space and time and to raise anew the question of the relation of causes to effects. The reader follows this journey—as does the traveler-narrator in composing it—with the foreknowledge, provided in the opening chapter, that he will end up in an unexplained “state of almost total immobility” (3) and confined to the Norwich hospital, where the search for Browne’s skull (and what is in it) begins. Correspondence and digression repeatedly frustrate a third means of narrative movement, which also dates from antiquity and flourished in Browne’s time, but which does not look so odd to us now because it has been fully incorporated into modern narrative forms. The road story derives, in English at least, from the pilgrimage. The subtitle of the English translation of Sebald’s work is “An English Pilgrimage,” and the journey that minimally unifies The Rings of Saturn is a pilgrimage, although not in the seventeenth-century sense exemplified by John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Sebald, rather, it indicates only sequential and not ameliorative progress. Still, the normative expectations of novelististic progress, that things will improve, or that a task or growth will be completed, are elicited in order to thematize its fictionality, its frustration, and, in this particular case, its non-viability. When the traveler-narrator finally arrives at a destination, the existence of which is withheld until he arrives, it turns out to be the home of the historical poet and translator of a number of Sebald’s poems, Michael Hamburger. They sit down to tea in the garden near a water pump later referred to as the “Hölderlin pump”; they discuss writing and the many “imponderables that govern” one’s course through life (182). The narrator first wonders about an apparently flimsy correspondence between Hamburger and the German poet Hölderlin, whose poetry the historical Hamburger also translates. Nearly a page after an unobtrusive “said Michael,” indicating that Hamburger is the speaker but whose words do not otherwise bear quotation marks, the question appears: “Does one follow in Hölderlin’s footsteps simply because one’s birthday happened to follow two days after his?... Is it possible that later one would settle in this house in Suffolk because a water pump in the garden bears the date 1770, the year of Hölderlin’s birth?... [D]id Hölderlin not dedicate his Pat- mos hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, and was not Homburg also the maiden name of Mother? Across what distances in time,” the narration

236 | Morgan continues, in a pastiche of unmarked quotation—from Goethe and from Walter Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, to mention just the most obvious authors quoted but not cited in this passage—across what distances in time “do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?” (182). The correspondences broaden and deepen now to incorporate the narrator, too, into this magical web of origins, authorship, and migration when he reports reading Hamburger’s memoirs and finding, to his amazement, that the first person both men met when they arrived in England as immigrants from Germany was an unlikely character named Stanley Kerry: “[I]t seems incomprehensible that the paths of Michael’s life and mine should have intersected in the person of that extraordinarily shy man, and that at the time we met him, in 1944 and 1966 respectively, we were both twenty-two” (187). This is one of the most explicit and sustained instances of an investi- gated correspondence in Sebald’s work, but such connections, or the possibility of connections, are repeatedly pursued. They are lavishly described and probed, yet no claims are made about their significance, just as the relevance of the digressions is never explicitly stated; otherwise, of course, they would not be digressions at all. The narrator remarks that he is “losing the ground” from under his feet (188), while the correspondences between precariously connected passages hang suspended in the grasping mind: they mean something, they mean nothing. Digressions trail off.

Laughter, Resistance to Narrative Closure, Progress Reluctance to determine the significance of the correspondences, and sup- pression of the destinations and relevance of the digressions, is enabled through the genres of natural history and anatomy that by definition have no need of narrative closure. As encyclopedic compendia, they extend themselves infinitely; all entries are subject to correction, amendment, and addition by successive inquirers. Thus generically enabled, Sebald’s traveler-narrator digresses, as if compulsively, not past milestones mark- ing forward motion, or improvement, or a diminishing distance toward some ultimate destination, but past and among ruins that correspond to all that has commenced under the sign of progress, with the effect that progress itself becomes objectified and available for examination, rela- tivization, and critique. The very lack of narrative progress in The Rings of Saturn instantiates the world after progress, in which that previously intelligible path now seems fantastic, and there remain only fragmented, oddly juxtaposed relics that invite, and even demand, some other prin-

The World After Progress | 237 ciple of intelligibility and recomposition. Speakers provide access to the perspectives by which objects and landscapes have been seen in the past, becoming confounded with each other and with things themselves, just as narrative movement lacks direction and momentum, casting about as if seeking roads not taken, lost threads, previously indiscernible or newly conceivable patterns, as in the narrator’s identification with eighteenth- century Norwich silk weavers and their struggle to attend, at the same time, to the single threads with which they are concerned at any single moment and the overall fabric they are making: That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understand- able given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283) The Brownean thread that Sebald has got hold of enables his prose work to resist the tying up of loose ends in imposing what could only amount to a fictional coherence or teleology on phenomena, events, or his own narrative form. Without an end in sight, and thus generically excused from having anything better to do or anywhere else to go, in this instance, he pores over the rich variety of the silk weavers’ fabrics, glimpsed in out- of-the-way museum pattern books, “the pages of which,” he says, “seem to me to be leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival” (286). Such hesitation over the remnants of a vanished world motivates re-evaluation of things left behind, encountered now as valuable in themselves, as repositories of material and labour precisely because they are detached from the industrial processes that previously explained and made them necessary, processes that transformed them into commodities, making their cash and symbolic redemption possible.12 The admixture and juxtaposition of the narrator’s despair and dreams, melancholy and delight in producing the very text we are reading out of such reclaimed materials and labour is one of the most fertile of generic resources that Sebald taps into through the works of 12 What I describe is the elaboration in linguistic and literary terms of what Marx referred to as the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” on which the modern commodity form depends (41).

238 | Morgan Burton and Browne. Just as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy generates its opposite, laughter and sanguine good humour, in its obsessive focus on the myriad ways melancholy has been addressed by past writers, so Browne’s sombre Urne Buriall becomes satirical in confronting the ruinous ends in death of all inquiry. Typically, such mixed melancholy and laughter productively coexists in the most serious of Browne’s prose. “Narratorial chicanery” is comically “at odds with the gravity of his subjects” in Religio Medici (Preston 47). The Vulgar Errors has been characterized as “con- sciously a vast comedy” by F. R. Huntley, who isolates several exemplary passages, such as “the story of a woman who got pregnant from taking a bath,” a phenomenon described by Browne as “a new and unseconded way in History to fornicate at a distance” (170–71). Urne Buriall, as noted above, resolves into “a kind of satire on antiquarianism” in its conclusion (Preston 161). And Musaeum Clausum is a send-up of a genre referred to as “the curiosity-spoof” that flourished especially in the 1670s to cari- cature the virtuoso’s “fanciful catalogue of absurd collections” (163, 155).13 Significantly, like the satire of Urne Buriall, the comic spoof of Musaeum Clausum is directed toward its own “attempted reparation and restora- tion” of the world encountered in fragments and ruins (165). In contrast to Preston, however, who takes at face value Browne’s claims that his project is redemptive, I stress how laughter and comedy in Browne mark precisely those spots where his works, quite ethically, accept the inability to “repaire our primarie ruins.” For such reconstitution of a whole requires fabrica- tion of a narrative that can only be fanciful in departing from the realm of physical material. Instead of a fictional redemption that would result from insistence on a single story in which each fragment of the world of things could be completed and understood to make sense that generates its value, Browne can be said to “faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones,” as Benjamin indirectly describes the position of refusing to settle for redemption.14 In so doing, Browne refuses to embrace the allegory of redemption that succeeded him historically in its secular form as the narrative of progress. But why would Browne, an avowed Christian, not embrace the trope of redemption? Because of his loyalty to things. On the one hand, Browne

13 Preston cites Huntley on the dating of the “specifically scientific spoofs” to the 1670s, and she dates Browne’s composition of Museum Clausum to the “mid- 1670s” on internal evidence (156 n2, 165). 14 The baroque melancholic intention “does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection” (Benjamin, Origin 233).

The World After Progress | 239 and his contemporaries experienced the lifting of medieval sanctions on the investigation and manipulation of matter and material processes as historically imperative and the enabling condition of the new philosophy. But why does On the other hand, as a Christian, Browne would understand redemption as an actual transaction involving two values. One, the theological Browne’s or metaphysical, overcomes the other, the material, by way of a necessary denigration of the latter. For this transaction to make sense—and it did to refusal of the many, but not to Browne and others—the new philosophers had to make an absolute categorical distinction between nature, the object of study, redemptive and God’s world, by which all intervention and experimentation with natural, physical processes is justified in serving the higher purpose. But transaction take such a transaction has the effect of de-valuing the object of study (nature and its processes), and this Browne would not do, as evidenced by his the textual form languishing on the nether side of scientific modernity. But why, we might ask further, does Browne’s refusal of the redemptive transaction take the of laughter? textual form of laughter? Because he encounters the demarcation between nature and the Christian creation as a confounding contradiction, which it is. He refuses or declines the productive expedient for its resolution which was embraced by many other of his contemporaries, such as Robert Boyle, who is more comprehensible as scientifically modern for having embraced these new metaphysics of progress.15 Browne, like Walter Char- leton, Joseph Glanvill, and others, remains on the other side of scientific modernity for having refused it, and this is the very reason that Browne’s works are interesting and useful for Sebald. His historical imperative is to address the destructiveness of the scientifically modern formulation and devaluation of nature, its constitutive betrayal of the world of material things and labour. Laughter in Sebald and Browne, therefore, is the tropo- logical register of the breakdown of comprehensibility of the metaphysical basis of scientific modernity, of an incongruity that appears to Browne and certainly to Sebald as a colossal category, indeed vulgar, error. In documenting the ruins he comes across, Sebald’s narrator is prompted to carry out research that elicits and frustrates the expectation that a meaning will become clear, including the destination and destiny of the narrator, if he can just gather enough information. This scientifically

15 Boyle overcame the medieval controversy about plenum versus vacuum—the question of whether or not nature abhors a vacuum—by sealing off, so to speak, both “nature” and his practical air pump experiments from the metaphysical realm and debate, effectively making the categorical demarcation that makes the redemption of nature both possible and necessary. My interpretation derives from Shapin and Schaffer generally, but see especially 202–24.

240 | Morgan modern presumption of progressive clarity is rendered laughable by the “rigorous” display of attempting to carry it out, amounting to “a kind of counter-enlightenment joke” (Beck 82). In tracking down and following up every last thread, The Rings of Saturn, like its precursors by Burton and Browne, necessarily and productively combines melancholy and laughter. The traveler-narrator generates his narrative through piling up enormous erudition that anatomizes the historical traces left on the Suffolk landscape. As much a scholar as a traveler, his “piling it on” includes representations of many other scholars, like Hamburger, some of whom succumb, just as the narrator succumbs at the culmination of his pilgrimage, to states “of almost total immobility” and rigidity that is nowhere diagnosed or otherwise explained but that seems related to the bewildering entanglement of threads and to the weight of the facts collected, facts which themselves, of course, explain nothing and which instead call for alternatives of categorization and review (3). The combined pathos and laughter in Sebald has been otherwise critically unaccounted for, partly because the potent combination is drawn from Browne’s seventeenth-century world (the world before the dominance of the narrative of progress) and is unfa- miliar, even incomprehensible, to ours, as the complaints of Bond and others demonstrate. The herring material, or episode (53–59) is another site in The Rings of Saturn found to be “baffling” for Mark McCulloh, whose Understanding W. G. Sebald is an otherwise productive work of scholarship (65). Summers-Bremner usefully recognizes Sebald’s extended digressive discussion of the North Sea herring fishery as a displacement of the Nazi Holocaust, with the herring as a species corresponding with and standing in for “non-Aryan people” misrecognized and targeted by the Nazis (312). So much is clear enough, but that effective correspondence does not account for many strangely amusing details of the episode, such as the illustration of a fish inserted at that place in the text (57). The illustration does not depict a herring at all, but what appears to be a cod fish, and this fact, or error, which has yet to be recognized, to my knowledge, by any Sebald commentator, mischievously transfers the error to the reader and is paradigmatic of Sebald’s wry Browne-like humour. The cod-that- is-not-a-herring reproduces the failure of recognition in a harmless and humorous context that serves the serious matter of what and how we see. The misleading illustration also repeats the point of an earlier analysis of Rembrandt’s painting, “The Anatomy Lesson,” which depicts an historical medical anatomy the narrator imagines Browne may have attended (12–17). On viewing the painting where it now hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the narrator locates a “crass misrepresentation at the exact

The World After Progress | 241 centre point of its meaning” in the magnitude and grotesque positioning of the “offending hand” of the petty thief whose corpse is under the knife (16). The historical misrepresentation is interpreted by Sebald’s narrator as deliberate on Rembrandt’s part to signify the painter’s identification with the victim of “The Anatomy Lesson” (17); thus instructed, I read the misrepresentation of the herring as a cod to be deliberate and productive. It points both to the Nazi’s catastrophic misrecognition of the Jews and to the general human proclivity for misrecognition, the point made by satirical indirection that compromises and thereby involves the reader in the very error The Rings of Saturn is concerned to expose. What McCulloh finds baffling is exemplary of Sebald’s disquieting mixture of melancholy and laughter that profoundly disturbs perspectives and trajectories of the pursuit and progress of knowledge. In addition to the narrator’s adoption of the mask of error, as in the herring episode, the location and emphasis on comic elements in even the most serious subject matter is also characteristic of the genre of anatomy, as is the organic combination of philosophical and even metaphysical concerns with representations of “low life” (Bakhtin, Problems 114–15). In Sebald, as in Burton, and perhaps as exemplified by the historical figure of Browne-as-antiquarian, low life takes the form of the miseries and shabby conditions of scholars, the kind with scruples about their diction as well as their research, who struggle against always eroding working and language conditions in a world that apparently requires more and more rigorous scholarship in the making of intellectual and scientific progress but that, at the same time, renders the sustained effort and dedication of scholars hopelessly antiquarian, self-indulgent, and eccentric.16 Browne engages in learned jesting, where he himself lampoons scholarship through his catalogue of an imaginary arcane library and even in the dead-serious Urne Buriall, where he jokingly presents and discusses all those things that will not be discussed. Burton directly addresses the miseries of scholars in his Anatomy’s “Digression” on that very species: “How many poor scholars have lost their wits … to gain knowledge,” he asks in one particularly frothy passage, “for which, after all their pains, in this world’s esteem they are accounted ridiculous and silly fools, idiots, asses, and (as oft they are) rejected, contemned, derided, doting, and mad! … Go to Bedlam and

16 Miller reads Browne as demonstrating “some of the ways in which [the antiquarian’s] fascination with the broken remains of the past was mobilized for cultural action” and Sebald as exemplary of the “afterlife of the antiquarian,” a perspective on history “now firmly located in the domain of imaginative literature” (315).

242 | Morgan ask” (i.303). All three of these generic conventions—adoption of the mask of error, emphasis on the comic elements of serious subject matter, and the miseries and pretensions of scholars as a form of low life—combine in the fitting recurrent image of the world after progress, the train, the nineteenth-century emblem and the very vehicle of progress. Two notable trains appear in The Rings of Saturn. Together they well summarize the two poles of perspective on the historical dilemma that is Sebald’s ter- rain of exploration. The traveler-narrator begins his journey by taking an old diesel train, one that coasts unsteadily rather than moves by its own combustion, down to the sea through a desolate, postindustrial landscape (29). He rides from Norwich out to a country house of faded grandeur called Somerleyton Hall that is no longer lived in but is opened to tour- ists in summer. Commenting on the current absence of a train station at Somerleyton, the narrator muses that people now arrive there only by car. He himself clambers over a wall because his train stops, just for him, far from the present automobile entrance. Once inside the grounds, he confronts the new function and destiny of trains: It seemed to me like a curious object lesson from the history of evolution, which at times repeats its earlier conceits with a certain sense of irony, that when I emerged from the trees I beheld a miniature train puffing through the fields with a number of people sitting on it. They reminded me of dressed- up circus dogs or seals; and at the front of the train, a ticket satchel slung about him, sat the engine driver, conductor and controller of all the animals, the present Lord Somerleyton, Her Majesty The Queen’s Master of the Horse. (32)

In this first train, laughter is generated in the contrast between the apparently disinterested academic perspective, diction, and tone and the spectacle described. Biological evolution is personified and invested with a capacity for irony. From the point of view of evolution, the train’s human passengers appear as the dressed-up animals that humans actually are, marvelously obedient creatures keeping their places in a social hierarchy that is fixed by the uni-directional structure of the vehicle and the tracks of its progress. The driver at the front is identified as the suitably solemn metonymy of the Queen, who presides at the apex of hierarchy. The once-productive technology now rules out actual progress by the cir- cumscription of the tracks within fenced grounds and their disarticulation from the present road by which its historical spectator-passengers have arrived. The shock of recognition prompts the reader to view the ruins of

The World After Progress | 243 Somerleyton Hall, like the riders on the little train, as an emblem of the absurd social rigidity and excess material investment that makes possible and at the same time obstructs actual progress, especially for the lowly social forces, the consumers, whose admission to the tourist site is now the sole source of its funding. The second, sad train appears farther down the coast, where the narrator comes to a silted-up part of a river spanned by an old narrow-gauge railway bridge. Local historians—more miserable scholars, whose information is, as always, fragmented and incomplete—inform him “the train that ran on it had originally been built for the Emperor of China,” but after “lengthy research” he cannot find out why the “diminutive imperial train” was never delivered or how it “ended up in service on a branch line” in East Anglia (138). It is the very lack of comprehensive authoritative information that then allows the narrator to spin out an increasingly far-flung associa- tive web of factual and legendary material linked by the most enduringly tenuous of threads, beginning with the heraldic dragon, “the only thing the uncertain sources” agree was undoubtedly visible on the (absent) train’s carriages. This single historical fact is referred to in Borges’s fictional but “fairly complete taxonomy and description of oriental dragons” (138–39) and from this scholarly buffoonery to the dragon’s function in rituals of Chinese imperial power, to fact-based accounts of the Taiping rebellion in the 1850s and 1860s, the British provocation of the Opium Wars and its sponsorship of Christian evangelism in China, Confucianism, imperial silk production, the biography of Charles George Gordon, and so on, through to the prolonged death-throes of the last Chinese dynasty. These seemingly labyrinthine paths—for which the word digression seems inadequate, but which perhaps model alternatives to a pilgrim’s prog- ress17—lead back, finally, to the entry point of “the little court train with the image of the Chinese dragon,” which the narrator only imagines was destined for the last emperor, who slowly perished in banishment while the Dowager-Empress, responsible for his destruction, dictated her own farewell to phantasms, imperial or otherwise, of progress: “Looking back, she said, she realized that history consists of nothing but misfortune and the troubles that afflict us, so that in all our days on earth we never know one single moment that is genuinely free of fear” (153). Except, the reader of Browne and now Sebald must add, when we laugh in beholding the oxymoronic spectacle of progress gone astray. The two trains in The Rings 17 Blackler refers to Sebald’s “rhizomatic digressions,” adopting the term from Gilles Deleuze (12). Summers-Bremner describes a “pilgrimage of sorts over unmarked paths” and a “reworking as a rewalking of German history” (323).

244 | Morgan of Saturn are associated with and generate both laughter and melancholy and are inextricably linked in running on outmoded, narrow-gauge dead- end tracks, the dilemma of progress objectified. The earlier ridiculous train and the repeated criss-crossing, in the account of the second train, between historical fact and fictional conjecture (or legend) in the narrator’s repeated reliance on the levity and fecundity of Borges’s fiction about dragons unsettles the grim truth uttered by the Dowager-Empress, opening Sebald’s melancholy to the rejuvenating energies of laughter. It models, apparently incidentally, how the trains in The Rings of Saturn transform thermodynamic entropy—the nightmare of nineteenth-century physics and engineering precipitated by the progressive development of steam engine technology—into informational entropy for Sebald’s work, making the two trains engines now of new perception and thought in the world after train technology and the historical progress it both promised and exemplified.18 Sebald’s text is woven out of contemplation of those sites where that progress ground to a halt and turned into its opposite: in the overreaching of empires, in Nazi Germany, in environmental degradation, and, yes, in the miseries of scholars who tirelessly document the failures and non-viability of the narrative of progress, who are at once tragically and comically entangled in it, and all but crushed under the weight of the evidence that the narrative of progress has outlived its usefulness, yet who are dismissed as obsessive cranks by its persistent defenders, those social forces for whom it serves as a useful alibi in private appropriations of the wealth of the world. Sebald’s use of Browne as the model and authority for productively compromising speakers and sources, thematizing and interrogating his own text’s means of narrative movement, and opening to fragmentation and laughter that counters rigidity and paralysis in confronting the present apparent lack of alternatives to the historical dead end of progress, unveils a Browne whose works we can now read as themselves unfinished, open-ended, and as sources of ongoing productivity. The same features of Browne’s writing that enable Sebald’s critique of progress—perhaps espe-

18 Thermodynamic entropy versus information is theorized by Claude Shannon, who was concerned with overcoming noise in early radio transmission technology. Subsequent theorists, including scholars of literature and electronic media, reversed Shannon’s values, so that entropy, viewed by Shannon as noise or the static that interrupts signals (information), becomes the condition of overcoming redundancy in the generation of new meaning. Connor provides a useful summary and models the application of Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication” to a literary context in an essay on radio and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

The World After Progress | 245 cially Browne’s despair and resort to satire in the hopelessness of reconstituting God’s world—paradoxically ensures both writers’ indulgence and promotion of laughter, not as frivolous or as textual excess but as the sorely needed means of imagining the re-composition of perspectives on the world, of narrative per se, and of the particular narrative of progress. Browne’s famously compelling style, responsible for attracting a readership for over three hundred years, despite his works’ resistances to scientific modernity or politically egalitarian alignments, constitutes a repository of English genres and other linguistic resources for exploring ways to categorize and narrativize the world before, and now after, progress.

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