Some interesting thoughts on The Rings of Saturn
Within a few sentences, however, Sebald makes a most remarkable turn by likening the hard labor of the weavers with that of “scholars and writers with whom they had much in common.” . . . And so there, in a revealing metaphor drawn from silk weaving, Sebald has described the doubt that plagues writers, who weave with words that are infinitely more gossamer than silk. It’s not hard to imagine that Sebald is speaking personally here. Remember that at the very beginning of The Rings of Saturn the narrator is to be found lying in a hospital in a state of “almost total immobility” resulting from “the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” Perhaps this emptiness also encloses the fear that, as a writer, he might “have got hold of the wrong thread.”
It’s a reference to the myth of Philomel, who had her tongue cut our for being insolent and turned to the art of weaving to tell her story. Someone skipped their Ovid, apparently.