Introduction

This chapter explores these two aspects of desire and digression, making reference to the psychoanalytically inflected narratology of Peter Brooks in the first instance, and to Ross Chambers in the second. Sarah Atkin offers a robust defence of digression as a textual feature that possesses considerable ideological force. It illustrates these two models with reference to two contrasting recent narrative texts, Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club and W. G. Sebald's Die Ringe des Saturn. The Rings of Saturn is a text that consists almost entirely of digressions. Its subtitle is 'An English Pilgrimage', and it is ostensibly the story of the narrator's walking tour down the coast of Suffolk from Somerleyton to Ditchingham. The notable thing here is that in this act of trespass, the narrator deviates from both the physical path of his journey and the narration thereof, as though re-literalizing the etymology of 'digression', which derives from the Latin 'dis-gradi', a 'stepping aside'.