Words Without Borders

In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald cryptically alludes to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius”, which plays with the idea of an idealist world created by eighteenth-century encyclopedists to bedevil their empiricist heirs. The passage Sebald had in mind was this: “Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre”. In the preamble to this same strange tale Borges’s narrator recalls a dinner with a friend at which “we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality”. This is of course Sebald’s own fictional methodology, and I believe only a very few readers have grasped the atrocious and banal reality that he wishes us to perceive, despite the myriad clues that are scattered throughout his texts.