In August 1992, the writer WG Sebald set off on the walking tour of Suffolk that he later immortalised in The Rings of Saturn. His journey took him through innumerable scenes of decline and decay—fading seaside towns, silted-up rivers, abandoned pleasure palaces, whole towns lost beneath the waves—and in the book those scenes prompt a series of meditations on human failure and folly.
Sebald’s melancholy East Anglian odyssey ends in Norwich, where he turns to consider the many silk-weaving workshops that once kept that city lit up until late into the night. Looking at the surviving 18th-century pattern books, lined with ‘marvellous strips of colour, the edges and gaps filled with mysterious figures and symbols’, he finds in them ‘an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty’. These pages , copies of which once travelled the trade-routes of Europe, ‘seem to be leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival’. In concluding his patchwork travelogue with this celebration of a silk sample-book, Sebald makes a connection that has deep roots in human cultures, between the textual and the textile.
This week (11 and 12 September at Jesus College), an ambitious interdisciplinary conference in Cambridge will unravel the fascinating interplay between words and fabrics. Run by the University’s Centre for Material Texts, the two-day conference is the latest in a series on ‘the material text in material culture’; last year’s meeting considered the interplay between reading, writing and eating. “After ‘Eating Words’, there was a certain inevitability about “Texts and Textiles’,” says the Centre’s director, Jason Scott-Warren. “You simply can’t get to grips with literature as a material phenomenon without thinking about its relationship with the physical fabrics that surround us.”
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Image: Quilt by Sara Impey titled Context, made in silk
Credit: Sara Impey
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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The needle and the pen
10 September 2012
A conference at Cambridge University will explore the ways in which words and fabrics are stitched together in language and literature – and celebrate the means by which textiles carry hidden narratives in their warp and weft.