Ke Huang
Rene J Boullet
English 200 E
November 18th, 2013
Qincunx Structure from The Rings of Saturn “A quincunx is a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross, with four of them forming a square or rectangle and a fifth at its center”- according to Wikipedia, it describes the quincunx as a geometric pattern. However, the narrator, W.G.Sebald, from Germen, applied this quincunx form into his writing style. The structure of Sebald’s The Ring of Saturn is quincunx, because wrote this book through tracing back the histories in every place he stepped on when he traveled along Suffolk. In a sentence, his writing followed his moves. Sebald explained his incentive of achieving this book is that he “encountered a series of events so intense during the trip that a year later he found himself was collapsed at a Norwich hospital” (Amazon Review). During the time in hospital, Sebald decided to begin to record his memories in those tours. The Ring of Saturn is a summary based on these travels and memories intermingled with his own personal emotions. Different places brought various background stories and astonishing thoughts to Sebald, which made this book fraught of desperation and hopes that is driven by the thoughts of motility.
Quincunx model appeared apparently in his every chapter. For example, Sebald wrote multiple themes in a chapter without a pause. He introduced his incentives of walking to Suffolk (“I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work”, “The Ring of Saturn”, 3) and the reasons why he was in hospital a year later; immediately, he began to talk the events he met and the people around him, Michael and Janine who died, in the hospital. Thomas Browne was mentioned when Sebald wrote his retrospect with Janine because it was Janine who recommended someone could help him when he was studying Thomas Browne’s work. In order to continue this topic, he began to state his enquiries about Thomas’s skull, which led to the biography of Thomas-thus, the anatomy lecture from a petty thief that Thomas has met was added into the book. According to this anatomy, Thomas explained the levitation that people would feel when their consciousness was veiled (“it was the white mist that rises from within a body opened presently after death, and which during our lifetime, so he adds, clouds our brain when asleep and dreaming”, “Ring of Saturn”, 17). Without a pause, Sebald immediately back to now and gave an example about himself when he was in hospital to support this “fog” feeling; he mentioned, “I felt, in my iron-framed bed, like a balloonist floating weightless amidst the mountainous clouds towering on every side. At times the billowing masses would part and I gazed out at the indigo vastness and down into the depths where I supposed the earth to be, a black and impenetrable maze. But in the firmament above were the stars, tiny points of gold speckling the barren wastes” (“The Ring of Saturn”, 17). This levitation-“the greater the distance, the clearer the view” can be described as quincunx, “the patterns which recur in the seemingly infinite diversity of forms” (“The Ring of Saturn”, 19), just as we discussed before that the structure of Sebald’s The Ring of Saturn. So far we can
