Ye Shall Bear Witness: An Ethics of Survival in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn

Abstract:In Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald uses the concept of the Roche limit—the nearest a satellite can come to the object it orbits without being consumed by that object’s gravity— to draw a boundary around human suffering so that in bearing witness, we shall not be destroyed.By using lists to create literary fractals—geometric designs that are self-similar at a fractional dimension—Sebald dramatizes that limit as an equilibrium that art must hold between distance from and proximity to human suffering. He asks readers not merely to bear witness but to find the proximity at which we can hold a steady gaze, unflinching, without being consumed by that suffering. At the Roche limit, we are bound by what we see but not consumed.