ABSTRACT
Sebald’s critical writing may be saturated in sexuality, but his poetic writing at times shrinks fastidiously from sex, as from something dark or grotesque. Die Ringe des Saturn presents an explicit condemnation of sexual intercourse in an intertextual quote from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’:
Bioy Casares erinnerte demzufolge, einer der Häresiarchen von Uqbar habe erklärt, das Grauenerregende an den Spiegeln, und im übrigen auch an dem Akt der Paarung, bestünde darin, daß sie die Zahl der Menschen vervielfachen.
[Bioy Casares then recalled the observation of one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar, that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of mankind.] (RS, 90; RSe, 70)
In Die Ringe des Saturn, the Sebaldian narrator calls up this intertextual reference while remembering a walk on the cliffs of Covehithe, where he sees ‘ein Mann, ausgestreckt über dem Körper eines andren Wesens, von dem nichts sichtbar war als die angewinkelten, nach außen gekehrten Beine’ [a man stretched full length over another body of which nothing was visible but the legs, spread and angled] (RS, 88; RSe, 68). This ghastly, seemingly cannibalistic vision reveals itself as something almost as uncanny, the beast with two backs:Ungestalt gleich einer großen, ans Land geworfenen Molluske lagen sie da, scheinbar ein Leib, ein von weit draußen hereingetriebenes, vielgliedriges, doppelköpfiges Seeungeheuer, letztes Exemplar einer monströsen Art, das mit flach den Nüstern entströmendem Atem seinem Ende entgegendämmert.
[Misshapen, like some great mollusc washed ashore, they lay there, to all appear ances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils.]
The monstrous and Thanatic dimensions that this simple act of heterosexual intercourse takes on in Die Ringe des Saturn can be explained when we consider Sebald’s critical attacks on reproductive sexuality. Indeed, copulation has also been associated with the monstrous earlier in the book, when the Sebaldian narrator complains that in today’s ‘nature’ television programmes, one is more likely to see some monster 43at the bottom of Lake Baikal coupling than a normal blackbird (RS, 33; RSe, 22). Sebald also alludes to this monstrous aspect of human reproduction in his essay on Elias Canetti, where he notes that the metabolism of nature is just as monstrous a force of oppression as human systems of power. Both procreation and fatherhood, Sebald argues, play their part in this universal system of repression, to which victims of power such as Canetti are particularly sensitive. ‘Die natürliche Prokreation, die Liebe, ist ihnen ein illusionärer Trost’ [natural procreation, love, is an illusory consolation for them], Sebald claims. 1 Far from offering consolation, procreation is part of the natural machinery of oppression, as it occurs in the interior of nature’s all-encompassing, monstrous digestive system. Human reproduction is therefore linked not to any beautiful natural order, in this essay, but to a destructive, Thanatic one. Sebald argues that this view leads Canetti to hope for redemption rather than reform in his political writings, and to maintain an implacable opposition to death. If a sexuality that leads to redemptive hope is possible, it does not encompass heterosexual copulation.