Herring Fisheries, Fish-Eating and Natural History in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

This essay argues that W. G. Sebald develops literary strategies which call into question the politics of fish-eating. To do this, I closely read a passage from The Rings of Saturn in which Sebald’s narrator melancholically reflects on over two hundred years of herring fishing in the North Sea, and on the long-term consequences of the economic commodification and scientific instrumentalization of herring. I argue that this passage challenges anthropocentric and extractive logics which normalize overfishing, oceanic acidification and ecosystem collapse. By drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s dialectical formulation of “Natural-History”, which thinks of nature and history as mutually constitutive, as well as the recent ocean turn in popular and critical discourses, I analyze how Sebald’s narrative strategies—humour, historical analysis and the placing of in-text images—develop a critique of flesh-eating and aquaculture. Sebald’s natural history of the herring both mourns and ultimately resists the practices of industrialized aquaculture.