MUSEUMS AND MODERNITY

Collections of various kinds are everywhere in Sebald's work: zoos, menageries and aviaries; museums and exhibitions; archives and libraries; cabinets of curiosities, and a whole host of ad hoc, less formal modes of collecting, from the entomological, ornithological and botanical specimens in Andromeda Lodge in Austerlitz to the piles of used envelopes clogging Michael Hamburger's house in The Rings of Saturn.

Anthropologist James Clifford notes that some form of collecting or gathering ‘around the self and the group – the assemblage of a material “world”, the marking-off of a subjective domain that is not “other” – is probably universal’ (1988: 218). He also notes, however, that gathering as an accumulation of possessions and the related idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience) is a predominantly Western phenomenon. In particular, it is linked to the political theory of possessive individualism, according to which the seventeenth century saw the emergence of an ideal of selfhood that was conceptualised in terms of ownership: ‘the individual surrounded by accumulated property and goods’ (217). The history of wide-spread and systematic collecting in Europe extends beyond the seventeenth century to the dawn of the early modern era, with a series of developments that facilitated accelerated and increasingly efficient exchange of goods. Among these were improvements in ship-building and navigation, the expansion of trading empires (notably the Dutch and Venetian), and an appreciably more sophisticated European banking system (Blom 2003: 20–1).