3.2 The books of memories: Sebald as a ghost hunter164 In the hybrid accounts characteristic of Sebald's prose – a kind of arrangement produced from fictionalized memories, travel journals, inventories of natural curiosities and meditations around the work of art165 –, a notion prevails: the idea that his entire work, just as the author refers to the writing of Peter Weiss, is "conceived as a visit to the dead”166. Amongst the variety of sources that compose his catalog of references, it is possible to affirm that the books of memories namely, the diaries kept by writers - have an essential character. It is in this perspective that the narrative of The Rings of Saturn directs itself: firstly, through Sebald's quotations of Joseph Conrad's diary [1857-1924]. From a trigger of the pilgrimage - the narrator's passage through the city of Southwold and the documentary seen on Roger Casement, as mentioned above - the writer takes a considerable glimpse of Conrad's personal history and, in effect, seeks to reconstruct the narrative about the encounter between Casement and the then Belgian steam captain in Congo167. The procedure is crucial to understand Sebald's logic and explains the author's creative process. There are a number of themes that define Sebald's affinity around the figure of Conrad: the interest in pilgrimage and life at sea168, the scale of destruction 164
Asked, in an interview, about the possibility of seeing himself as a ghost hunter, Sebald replies: “I think it’s pretty precise. It’s nothing ghoulish at all, just an odd sense that in some way the lives of people who are perhaps no longer here – and these can be relatives or people I vaguely knew, or writer colleagues from the past, or painters who worked in the sixteenth century – have an odd presence for me, simply through the fact that I may get interested in them.” (SEBALD, 2007b, page 42) 165 “[…] critics have puzzled over what to call his works, with their mélange of fictionalized memoir, travel journals, inventories of natural and man-made curiosities, impressionistic musings on paintings, entomology, architecture, […] and more.” (SCHWARTZ, 2007, page 16) 166 “All of his work [by Peter Weiss] is conceived as a visit to the dead.” (SEBALD, 2014c, page 97, own translation) 167 “As I had lost, except for those few words [from Conrad’s diary] and some somber images of Conrad and Casement, […], I have since tried to reconstruct in some way, from the sources, the story from which sleep deprived me that night (unforgivingly, I imagine) in Southwold.” (Id., 2010, page 110, own translation) 168 “[Joseph Conrad] Korzeniowski, who in the meantime had acquired British citizenship and the rank of captain had been in the most remote regions of the globe […].” (Ibid., page 120)
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