An Uncanny Pilgrimage through the Wastescapes of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Synchronic Time and Revenant Metaphorical Thinking
The waste-ridden novels, The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald 1995) and The Road (Cormac McCarthy 2006), stage nightmarish spaces. In Sebald’s world, synchronic time – a sign of the disconcerting linkage of present with past – creepily implicates the reader for atrocities committed long ago. A mysterious apocalypse of grey ash burnishes McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic biosphere, eerily emptied of anything organic. Building on the work of waste theorist Véronique Bragard, I argue that each novel imagines how the very vibrancy and agency of matter with which characters are enmeshed sustains the world metaphorically. Revenant metaphors and similes – such as that of pilgrimage – yoke sacralised memory with a profaned present, stirring the imagination in often-weird pairings, both disturbing and animating. Revenant metaphorical thinking conjures forth synchronic links between past and present to gesture ambiguously to a reanimated future.