Études Britanniques Contemporaines (Dec 2012)
The Ruin as Kairos in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
Abstract
Beyond the obvious semiotic heterogeneity of linguistic signs and visual images, which accounts for the disruptive force of the inserted visual material in Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn, the text and image relation in this novel is a particular site of poetic tension because of the unexpectedness and untimeliness of the irruption of the visual into the text, an untimeliness that designates the photographs as ruptures rather than as continuities, which open up the linguistic text to its semiotic other, thus allowing for time dilation and a specific relation to the past to be installed. As they induce a change of gears in the reading process, the various images inserted in the text produce a shift in the temporal mode of the narrative which is perceived by the reader as a moment of kairos, or of the possibility of being present to the past in its residual form, thanks to the irruption of the ruin as a moment of truth about that past. In Being and Event, Alain Badiou underlines the fact that we can never be fully present to the event in its eventfulness: we can only name it in retrospect, because the event, ‘what happens’, is subtracted from the general determinations of ‘what is’, which dictate our determination and identification of ‘what is’. Thus, we can only have access to the event when it is passed, as we attempt to name or materialise its traces. Sebald’s insertion of visual material in his text pertains to this desire to materialise the traces of the past in the form of its remnants, remains or ruins. This paper envisages Sebald’s textual insertion of the visual remnants of the past as an ‘apparatus’ in the Agambenian sense of the term, that is to say as a network of significance involving ideology, the reader’s reception, the cultural and social apprehension of text and image relation and its insertion in the institution, so as to understand the specificity of the kairos that Sebald’s photographed ruins introduce in his text.
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