The World After Progress:

The Thomas Browne of W. G. Sebald

Dawn Morgan
St Thomas University

The late twentieth-century prose fiction of the German writer

W. 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, par-
ticularly 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

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… 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 per-
haps 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 lan-
guage, 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).

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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 real-
ity 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 nar-
rative 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

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 insistence on melancholy, for keeping this up over long dis-
tances 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 con-
cerns (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 neces-
sary. 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 carni-
valesque 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

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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 com-
petition 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).

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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

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 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 con-
text, 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, authorita-
tive 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 fic-
tion 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.

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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 ) repa-
ration. 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 like-
wise 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 satiri-
cal 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 sub-
ject 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

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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 gener-
ally 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

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 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 mat-
ter. 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 cat-
egories 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 usu-
ally 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 an-
nounces, 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” nar-
rative 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 contem-
porary 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 sub-
jectivity 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 addi-
tion 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 adopt-
ing 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 domi-
nant 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 his-
torical 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 dis-
cussion “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 move-
ment 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 corre-
spondences 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 evi-
dence 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 des-
tination, 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 pos-
sibility 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 com-
plex 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 pro-
cesses 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 redemp-
tion 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 oth-
erwise 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 cat-
egorization 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 illus-
tration 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 histori-
cal 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 schol-
ars 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 anti-
quarian’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 appar-
ently disinterested academic perspective, diction, and tone and the spec-
tacle 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 hierar-
chy 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 nar-
rator comes to a silted-up part of a river spanned by an old narrow-gauge
railway bridge. Local historians—more miserable scholars, whose infor-
mation 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, impe-
rial 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 narra-
tor’s repeated reliance on the levity and fecundity of Borges’s fiction about
dragons unsettles the grim truth uttered by the Dowager-Empress, open-
ing 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 pres-
ent 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 tech-
nology. 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 recon-
stituting 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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