Abstract
A glimpse of a mosque, a near collision with a pedestrian, a visit to an art gallery and the sighting of a historical building: these seemingly mundane travel experiences prepare the ground for W. G. Sebald's literary treatise on the politics and ethics of guilt in The Rings of Saturn. Sebald's reflections on the ethical limitations of responding to guilt in accordance with a good conscience, which evaluates its own transgressions, challenge the contemporary appetite for public apologies, suggesting, moreover, that such apologies are not good enough. Using Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy as a theoretical framework, I argue that Sebald foregrounds the affective properties of ethical guilt, depicting a protagonist whose bad conscience does not emerge from his self-assessment of culpability. Instead, the protagonist's bad conscience originates in his subjection to the needs of the past. The Rings of Saturn conveys the ontologically destabilizing affects of guilt through its own enigmatic utterances. The novel performs thus its own ethical treatise that it is the past, and not the present generation's interpretation of the past, which writes itself as guilt-evoking traces on the surfaces of the physical, mental and temporal landscapes that we inhabit.